Little House = libertarian fable

Little Libertarians on the prairie

Was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved children’s series written as an anti-New Deal fable? The Wilder family papers suggest yes.

By Christine WoodsideFrom the publication of the first book in 1932, the series was immediately popular. And, at a time when President Franklin D. Roosevelt was introducing the major federal initiatives of the New Deal and Social Security as a way out of the Depression, the Little House books lulled children to sleep with the opposite message. The books placed self-reliance at the heart of the American myth: If the pioneers wanted a farm, they found one; if they needed food, they killed it or grew it; if they needed shelter, they built it.

Although Wilder and Lane hid their partnership, preferring to keep Wilder in the spotlight as the homegrown author and heroine, scholars of children’s literature have long known that two women, not one, produced the Little House books. But less well understood has been how exactly they reshaped Wilder’s original story, and why. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, as the Little House fans clamored for more, Wilder and Lane transformed the unpredictable hardships of the American frontier experience into a testament to the virtues of independence and courage. In Wilder’s original drafts, the family withstood the frontier with their jaws set. After Lane revised them, the Ingallses managed the land and made it theirs, without leaning on anybody.

A close examination of the Wilder family papers suggests that Wilder’s daughter did far more than transcribe her mother’s pioneer tales: She shaped them and turned them from recollections into American fables, changing details where necessary to suit her version of the story. And if those fables sound like a perfect expression of Libertarian ideas—maximum personal freedom and limited need for the government—that’s no accident. Lane, and to an extent her mother, were affronted by taxes, the New Deal, and what they saw as Americans’ growing reliance on Washington. Eventually, as Lane became increasingly antigovernment, she would pursue her politics more openly, writing a strident political treatise and playing an important if little-known role inspiring the movement that eventually coalesced into the Libertarian Party.Comment:  The article doesn't say much about Indians, but they're the "elephant in the room." Pioneers like the Wilders didn't just "find" farms. They moved onto Indian land illegally; the government took the land and gave it to them illegally. Thus the stolen Indian land became the farms they "found."

As perhaps the biggest government handout in US history, it's the opposite of the libertarian fairy tale of self-reliance. The Wilders might've been homeless refugees if not for the the government's charity.

For more on the subject, see Little House Celebrates Land Theft and Wilder the Typical Conservative.

Childhood stress causes adult problems

The Psych Approach

By David BrooksIn Paul Tough’s essential book, “How Children Succeed,” he describes what’s going on. Childhood stress can have long lasting neural effects, making it harder to exercise self-control, focus attention, delay gratification and do many of the other things that contribute to a happy life.

Tough interviewed a young lady named Monisha, who was pulled out of class by a social worker, taken to a strange foster home and forbidden from seeing her father for months. “I remember the first day like it was yesterday. Every detail. I still have dreams about it. I feel like I’m going to be damaged forever.”

Monisha’s anxiety sensors are still going full blast. “If a plane flies over me, I think they’re going to drop a bomb. I think about my dad dying,” she told Tough. “When I get scared, I start shaking. My heart starts beating. I start sweating. You know how people say ‘I was scared to death’? I get scared that that’s really going to happen to me one day.”

Tough’s book is part of what you might call the psychologizing of domestic policy. In the past several decades, policy makers have focused on the material and bureaucratic things that correlate to school failure, like poor neighborhoods, bad nutrition, schools that are too big or too small. But, more recently, attention has shifted to the psychological reactions that impede learning—the ones that flow from insecure relationships, constant movement and economic anxiety.Cuddle Your Kid!

By Nicholas D. KristofOne University of Minnesota study that began in the 1970s followed 267 children of first-time low-income mothers for nearly four decades. It found that whether a child received supportive parenting in the first few years of life was at least as good a predictor as I.Q. of whether he or she would graduate from high school.

This may illuminate one way that poverty replicates itself from generation to generation. Children in poor households grow up under constant stress, disproportionately raised by young, single mothers also under tremendous stress, and the result may be brain architecture that makes it harder for the children to thrive at school or succeed in the work force.

Yet the cycle can be broken, and the implication is that the most cost-effective way to address poverty isn’t necessarily housing vouchers or welfare initiatives or prison-building. Rather, it may be early childhood education and parenting programs.

Scholars like James Heckman of the University of Chicago and Dr. Jack Shonkoff of Harvard have pioneered this field, and decades of fascinating research is now wonderfully assembled in Paul Tough’s important new book, “How Children Succeed.” Long may this book dwell on the best-seller lists!

As Tough suggests, the evidence is mounting that conservatives are right about some fundamental issues relating to poverty. For starters, we can’t talk just about welfare or tax policy but must also consider culture and character.

“There is no antipoverty tool we can provide for disadvantaged young people that will be more valuable,” Tough writes, than grit, resilience, perseverance and optimism.

Yet conservatives sometimes mistakenly see that as the end of the conversation.

“This science suggests a very different reality,” Tough writes. “It says that the character strengths that matter so much to young people’s success are not innate; they don’t appear in us magically, as a result of good luck or good genes. And they are not simply a choice. They are rooted in brain chemistry, and they are molded, in measurable and predictable ways, by the environment in which kids grow up. That means the rest of us—society as a whole—can do an enormous amount to influence their development.”The following study provides evidence for this position:

New Version of Classic Marshmallow Experiment Upends Original Conclusions

In it, a marshmallow was placed before young children, who were told to wait for it. The original experiment concluded that those who waited longer succeeded later in life. In shorthand:

Character => success

But in the revised experiment, the researchers withheld art supplies from one group of children before testing them with the marshmallow. Those who had been frustrated this way were much quicker to take the marshmallow. In shorthand:

Environment => character => stress

Conclusion

The implications of this study are obvious. As in Tough's book, kids in an unstable or unpredictable environment are more likely to avoid stress and seek comfort. That means dropping out of school or a job and pursuing sex, drugs, or gang affiliation. Which leads to a criminal record, a disease, or an unwanted pregnancy. The kids aren't "weak" because of their race or culture. They simply lack the mental maturity most of us take for granted. Any person raised in that environment would come out roughly the same.

This must be the 10th or 20th item I've posted on the subject of why poverty happens. Again, it's not because people are lazy and don't work hard enough. It's because environmental factors rob people of their ability to focus, learn, and apply themselves.

These people are victims of circumstance, which is why we denounce those who blame the victim. They often can't overcome their handicaps by themselves, but they can with our help. As Kristof says, we can and should do whatever we can to influence their development.

For more on the subject, see:

GOP America:  strivers vs. parasites
Social factors affect intelligence
Romney:  47% are moochers
America's "bootstrap theology"
Conservatives admit welfare-bashing is racial

Little House celebrates land theft

“Little House on the Prairie”: Tea Party manifesto

The far right has adopted the beloved children's books as an instrument for teaching the virtues of "lived liberty"

By Caroline FraserThe Little House books, eight novels published between 1932 and 1943, are Laura Ingalls Wilder’s tribute to the great plains and her homesteading family. “I realized that I had seen and lived it all,” she wrote later, “all the successive phases of the frontier […] a whole period of American history.” Written during the depression, when the author was in her sixties and seventies, these autobiographical narratives of enduring wildfire, drought, locusts, tornadoes, and blizzards have sold tens of millions of copies.

Beloved though they may be, however, the books are in danger of being politicized, having already acquired a certain conservative aura. Much of it emanated from the 1970s-era television caricature, “Little House on the Prairie,” which leached the books of their rich specificity while displaying an often shirtless Michael Landon, chest shaved, addressing concerns never mentioned in the originals, including drug addiction, rape, and menopause. Ronald Reagan reportedly called it his favorite television show (Landon campaigned for him), watching it in the White House while he and his wife dined off TV trays. In a 2008 profile of the Republican vice-presidential nominee, the New York Times cited one of Sarah Palin’s sisters remembering that her sibling read “a lot” as a child. The only specific title she could recall was Little House on the Prairie.

The impression has lately been reinforced by the books’ adoption into Tea Party circles as ideal teachers of “lived liberty.” That’s a phrase that occurs in “Lessons in Liberty from Laura Ingalls Wilder,” an essay in the summer issue of National Affairs, the reboot of Irving Kristol’s quarterly The Public Interest. Dedicated to helping Americans “rise a little more ably to the challenge of self-government,” National Affairs features the work of Charles Murray, George Will, and David Brooks, who hailed it as “the bloody crossroads where social science and public policy meet matters of morality, culture and virtue.”

Wilder is now detained at those crossroads by Meghan Clyne, managing editor of National Affairs, former speechwriter for Laura and George W. Bush and contributor to the New York Post (where she worried that an Obama nominee might introduce sharia law). Clyne calls for building an “historical-appreciation movement” around Wilder, who is to model self-reliance for millions of less worthy Americans currently receiving Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and “food stamps or other nutrition benefits.” Citing Jefferson, Clyne warns against “degeneracy” in the dependent, commending Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 paper for its depiction of “the conquest of this last unsettled frontier,” without remarking on the removal of natives that made it possible, paid for by the federal government and intended as the type of benefit she condemns. She takes no notice of the fact that Indians occupy a great deal of real estate in Little House on the Prairie, with its references to the 1862 “Minnesota massacre,” when Sioux warriors angered by treaty violations killed hundreds of soldiers and settlers and were then captured, tried, and hung in the largest mass execution in our history. Or that the little house in question was built illegally on an Osage reserve, which may explain why the Ingallses relinquished it.

Condemning “welfare-state redistribution,” Clyne embraces the 1862 Homestead Act, central to the later Little House books. Yet it was one of the biggest federal handouts in American history. Clyne praises it as policy that “encouraged habits of self-reliance rather than undermining them,” but it sought to give away a trillion acres of “free land,” as it was called, in 160-acre parcels to those over twenty-one if they could live on it and improve it over five years. Homesteading was no picnic, as Wilder makes clear, but everyone at the time knew it was a giveaway. Wilder remembers her father singing, “Uncle Sam is rich enough / To give us all a farm!” a popular ditty that hardly comports with Clyne’s contempt for “the crutch of government support.” The Homestead Act was not a particularly successful incubator of self-reliance, as only a fifth of the land went to small farmers, and less than half of all homesteaders managed to make the necessary improvements to keep it. The Act was also undermined by fraud and land speculation: Much of the property was acquired by railroads and large ranching interests.Comment:  Cline's views are classic American myth-making. Celebrate land theft under the rubric of "pioneering." Ignore the Indians and our immoral acts against them. Relabel government handouts as "self-reliance."

In short, refashion America as a great white bastion of Euro-Christian triumphalism. Shout "USA is no. 1!" for people with fragile egos who can't handle the complex truth. Hold the hands of weak-kneed Americans so they won't bawl like babies.

For more on this conservative rewriting of history, see GOP America = Strivers vs. Parasites and America's "Bootstrap Theocracy." For more on Little House on the Prairie, see Wilder the Typical Conservative and Little House on the Reservation.

America's "bootstrap theocracy"

Mitt’s grotesque gamble

All Americans rely on government. But Romney knows that many of the "takers" don't see themselves that way

By David SirotaIndeed, as Romney surely calculates, many Americans, no matter how much they rely on their government, categorically refuse to acknowledge their own dependence.

That’s not altogether surprising. Living in a Bootstraps Theocracy, we are subjected to a constant barrage of Randian mythology about self-reliance—a mythology that pretends success comes only from the individual, and is inhibited by the common. This has been the reigning American religion since at least the 1980s, if not before, and its dominance explains why when a president today dares tout our obvious reliance on each other, he is summarily attacked. It also explains Cornell University’s recent study on the so-called “submerged state” that shows that many Americans who receive direct cash benefits from the government nonetheless insist they have “not used a government social program.” As I wrote in a column last year about that problem:Certainly, some of that comes from the same ignoramuses who tell their congressional representatives to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” And some of it represents the willful dishonesty of self-professed conservatives who are too embarrassed to admit they utilize the government programs they purport to detest. However, the data also suggest that because so many submerged-state policies are successful and inconspicuous, many have come to reflexively define “government” as only those spectacular failures that fill the evening news.Taken together, Romney’s statements can be seen not as a gaffe, but as a careful—if grotesque—calculation. He understands that when he uses ugly makers-versus-takers rhetoric to portray all of our dependence on government as something horrible, many dependents will excitedly cheer him on. He knows that as they applaud, they will be convincing themselves into believing that they aren’t one of the “takers,” when, in fact, they—and all of us—are in some form. He knows, in short, that while he is directly insulting 47 percent of Americans, many of those 47 percent, plus many of the other 53 percent, will (wrongly) see it as an attack not on them, but on their supposed oppressors.

This is why for all the gleeful Democratic Party declarations since Romney’s speech leaked, the political ramifications of the Republican nominee’s comments aren’t so cut and dried. Sure, such a revealingly divisive and resentful comment should doom a presidential candidacy—especially one by a guy who already embodies the top-hat-and-monocle crowd. But the difference between “should” and “will” is the difference between a nation that understands how dependent it is on government and how such dependence is a hallmark of civilized society, and one that deludes itself into believing the makers-versus-takers fantasy that was first canonized in “Atlas Shrugged” and that now dominates American politics.Comment:  Even more than blacks, Indians are the butt of the American myth of self-reliance. You've heard how it goes a thousand times: brave white Euro-Christians tamed the wilderness--and the wild Indians--through hard work and perseverance.

In reality, we took the land and gave it away to settlers--possibly the biggest government handout in US history. Indians bargained for treaty payments in exchange for this land--payments that often never came.

But most Americans think Indians are moochers: receiving free government health, education, and welfare payments while not paying any taxes. Meanwhile, the same Americans grow rich off the free land the government gave to their ancestors.

As the article notes, these Americans are blind to their own hypocritical dependence on government charity. All those blacks, Latinos, and Indians are getting handouts, they claim, but real Americans like Mitt Romney earned every cent they own.

What a delusional crock of excrement.

For more on Indians as welfare recipients, see "Why Do They Hate Us?" 2012 and Conservative Admits Welfare-Bashing Is Racial.

Conservative admits welfare-bashing is racial

A Kick in the Gut(feld): Racism, Welfare Dependence, and FOX’s Clown Prince of Prejudice

By Tim WiseWhile fawning over black conservative Mia Love, a congressional candidate from Utah, Gutfeld argued that Love was the best chance to “remind America that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican” (as if modern political parties resemble in the least their mid-1800s equivalents), and that “all the policies from the Democrats have done nothing but infantilize an entire race and made them addicted to crappy programs.”

First, let us on the one hand thank Greg Gutfeld for brutally eviscerating the veil of disingenuous denial placed over the welfare discussion heretofore by the Republican Party and conservatives of all stripes in this election cycle. Up to now, whenever those of us on the left would point out the inherent racial subtext of their welfare-bashing, folks like Gutfeld would scream and bellow that we were playing the race card, and that welfare had nothing to do with race. We were, according to them, hearing things.

But now Gutfeld has said it quite plainly. In a discussion of black conservatives, contrasted with blacks generally, he talks specifically about “infantilizing an entire race” and making them addicted to crappy programs, by which it is doubtful he means Democratic programs like the GI Bill, or FHA loans, or Social Security, but rather, so-called welfare programs, and those that are generally derided as being of the “handout” variety. Memo to Greg Gutfeld: when speaking in code about black people, it really helps if you don’t actually mention black people. But ya know, thanks.

Why Yes, That Is a Racist Argument Actually: Following the Anti-Black Logic of Gutfeld’s Thinking

However, not only does Gutfeld’s statement prove that the right is indeed thinking about black people when they bash welfare programs and recipients, it is actually far more pernicious than that. It does more than simply suggest an implicit, dog-whistle kind of appeal to racial resentment. The argument he is making here is actually entirely racist in and of itself, because it casts negative and judgmental aspersions upon African Americans as a group, and it does this in multiple ways.

First, to believe that black folk are so weak that they can be infantilized by a political party or various programs supported (sometimes) by members of that party, is to think precious little of those same black persons. It is to suggest that a people who are strong enough to survive the Middle Passage (go ahead Greg, look it up, it’s OK), enslavement, debt peonage, convict-leasing, Jim Crow and lynching, can somehow be brought to their knees, and turned into dysfunctional children, by virtue of an EBT card or a health insurance policy that happens to cover their kids’ pre-existing asthma. To think black people so weak as to be rendered virtually inoperative as functioning adults by various social programs, while white folks in European nations who receive much larger safety net benefits of all kinds seem to have no similar problems, is to believe black people somehow less resilient, even inferior to those Europeans. If safety nets trap blacks in a so-called “hammock” of dependency as the right is fond of saying, and contribute to so many of the social problems that conservatives would like to lay at the feet of that dependency, why haven’t the much more generous safety nets of every other industrialized nation on the planet with which we like to compare ourselves, absolutely wrecked their people? How are Scandinavians still able to remember how to bathe themselves, let alone get up and go to work? Why do social programs cripple black people but not Nordic types? I wait with baited breath for an answer to this question that won’t be by definition racist. So, ya know, good luck with that Greg. Be sure to let us know what you come up with. And try and make it more than 140 characters of snark.

Gutfeld’s argument is also racist in that it relies on a belief that black people are too stupid to realize the harm that liberals and Democrats and so-called welfare are doing to them. It presumes that black people are so sheeplike they’ll vote for anyone with a (D) in front of their name, just to get that couple-hundred dollars a month in food stamp (or what are called SNAP) benefits, even though such things are so clearly and obviously turning them into children, or even, as some would have it, slaves. But to believe that black people as a group are that unintelligent, that craven, that easily manipulated, is to cleave to an intrinsically racist assumption about them. Whether you believe—as they did in the old days, and as some modern conservatives like John Derbyshire still do—that black people are biologically less intelligent, or whether you reject that argument (as Gutfeld surely would), and think merely that there is something about them culturally that causes them to be collectively stupid, the outcome is the same: you believe African Americans lack the basic intelligence necessary to realize when they are being destroyed. And if you believe that, you are a racist. End of story.Wise continues by lambasting the claim that white Americans "built it" with no help. He provides several historical examples of whites relying on others:Who’s Dependent? The Irony of White Conservative Stereotypes

But putting the current political context and the actual data aside for a minute, what’s perhaps most infuriating about the dependence argument offered endlessly by the right in regard to black people and so-called welfare, is what an utter inversion of racial reality it truly represents. After all, no group has been more dependent on others in this nation’s history than we white folks.

We depended on the forced labor of black people to produce the wealth that financed the American revolution, and without which labor the nation could never have been built.

We depended on the stolen land of indigenous peoples and the theft of half of Mexico in a war of aggression that we started on false pretense, to then grow the nation beyond its initial geographic area and add even further to the national wealth.

Indeed, the high school from which Greg Gutfeld graduated is named for a European Friar, Junipero Serra of Spain, who depended on the forced labor of Native Californians to support the spread of Catholic missions throughout the territory, and who viewed them as children in need of harsh fatherly discipline and forced conversion from their presumably heathen faiths.

And whites depended on forced Chinese labor to build the transcontinental railroads without which the growth of the industrial economy would have been stifled.

We depended on segregation to elevate us as white people beyond the level of wealth and power that we would have otherwise obtained, by protecting us from competition with millions of persons of color.Comment:  Ignoring the fact that the Spanish came first, let's talk about our Anglo-American ancestors. In addition to being illegal immigrants, they were among the first welfare moochers. The colonists at Jamestown and Plymouth wouldn't have survived without the Indians' help. Only after receiving free handouts did the feeble Euro-babies manage to stand on their own feet.

We can sum up this conservative race-mongering and welfare-bashing pretty simply. The GOP's fundamental racial message in this year's election is: white male Christians built it, others tear it down. White male Christians are hard-working and self-reliant. Others are needy and greedy.

If you agree, vote for Romney, who's practically the epitome of Western civilization and its so-called Manifest Destiny to dominate and rule. You know, the basic belief that white = might = right. If you disagree, vote for Obama.

For more on conservative racism, see:

Republicans:  White people own America
Racists deny playing race card
White Americans fear a black president
Conservatives lie about welfare
Women and Indians as "welfare queens"
Republicans want to "Keep America America"

Republicans: White people own America

A roundup of postings about the Republican convention shows it's all about keeping white male Christians in power.

Republicans want to build a time machine

But don't be fooled: Republicans aren't just nostalgic for 1950s-style social barriers. They want to rebuild them

By Rebecca TraisterRepublicans are panting for a tricked-out DeLorean that can take them back! Back in time! To a period when the power structure was fixed and comfortable, when there were no black first ladies or black camerawomen, when loud Jewish ladies were not in charge of national political parties, back to a time when only a select few—the white, the male, the straight, the Protestant—could reasonably expect to exert political or financial or social or sexual power.

The desire to chronologically reverse our nation’s history has been the undercurrent of the 2012 election cycle and its primary debates; it’s barely been disguised in the agenda of John Boehner’s House or in state legislatures around the country.

The mission to drastically curtail women’s reproductive rights, taking aim not just at abortion but at birth control; the blocking of the Paycheck Fairness Act; objections to expanding the Violence Against Women Act; crazed locutions about rape and sluts: In word and deed, conservatives have been telegraphing their hope to return us to a moment not just before Roe, but before the birth-control pill, before the sexual revolution, before second-wave feminism hammered pesky terms like “harassment” and “equal pay” into our lexicon, to a moment when women’s bodies and sexuality and identities were men’s to define, patrol and violate at will.

The state-by-state assault on voting rights, a dizzying array of propositions designed to keep brown and black people, poor people and young people from the polls? This too is an attempt to turn back time, to return the country to a moment before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped ensure safe enfranchisement for African-Americans.

For many months, we have been watching a lengthy, multi-tentacled attempt to shut tight doors that were opened by the social movements of the mid-20th century, to push back those who have apparently gotten their hands on a little too much power, by aiming back toward a time when men were white, women were long-suffering vessels, and black men were definitely not president.

But if time travel has been an understated drumbeat of the past two years of Republican machination, in Tampa, it was conveyed with all the subtlety of an AC/DC riff from Paul Ryan’s iPod.

First there was the swooning over the Greatest Generation, the fetishistic shout-outs to hard-laboring forebears, Welsh coal-mining grandfathers and Breyer’s Plant employee dads. Speakers were presenting us with visions of men who lived in an earlier America and the women who sacrificed their own passions (as Mitt Romney recalled of his mother, who gave up Hollywood) to marry them, move to Detroit and raise their babies while the men embraced success and made money.

None of the stories of ye olde American achievement actually jibed with the convention’s “We Built It” theme. The tales were of white men whose class mobility and moon-walks were boosted by G.I. Bills, state-school educations, government-funded space programs and unions. These guys and their unconditionally loving wives were part of a white American middle class that was able to expand thanks to the kinds of post-Depression financial regulations and government-goosed infrastructure and housing programs that modern Republicans are keen to obliterate.

But the incoherence of message didn’t matter, because what all these stories were really flicking at wasn’t the size of the government, but the whiteness and the maleness of those who were helped along with their businesses and wealth and broods of straight-parented families. Just listen to Romney’s assertions about this “nation of immigrants” who came here seeking freedom, a sentiment that is both disingenuous from someone who wants this nation’s current immigrant population to self-deport, and that does not even bother to acknowledge those Americans whose forebears were brought here against their will in an exercise of freedom’s opposite. Romney didn’t include those people because they don’t exist—in a meaningful, threatening way—in the America Romney and his party are trying to bring back.

The keening desire to be back there, to be back then, was responsible for the presence of Clint Eastwood, an actor who came to prominence as a star of the cowboy show “Rawhide,” which aired from 1959 to 1965. People may disagree about whether Eastwood’s vertiginously awful appearance at the RNC on Thursday was intentionally aggressive or just loopy, but there’s no question that his creepy intonation of the phrase “We own this country” came off like a segregationist-era, George Wallace-inspired catchphrase—one the crowd went wild for.Stop talking about your grandpa!

Republicans like to talk about their "humble roots" in order to disguise their true upper-class ideology

By Andrew Burstein and Nancy IsenbergRepublicans hype the “Greatest Generation” when doing so fits their narrative that anyone who tries hard enough can make it in America. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose blowhard manner has made him the idol of the party, bellowed before the Tampa crowd that his father was part of the World War II generation, and that he is the beneficiary of his old man’s positive values. “He grew up in poverty,” Christie intoned. Paul Ryan and Rick Santorum similarly tout their humble connections in assuring voters that they come by their conservative values honestly.

This is the new Republican playbook. They are running away, as fast as they can, from the upper-class ideology to which they really subscribe. Romney “loves” his Costco shirts; and, his wife says, they began married life in a basement apartment with a “fold-down ironing board for a dining room table.” We are now supposed to believe that theirs is not the party of wealthy businessmen on one end of the scale, and on the other, angry, spellcheck-resistant Tea Party sign wavers who hate the deadbeats that are bilking the government out of hard-earned tax dollars. No, the new Republican Party is the party of self-made men with loving wives and mothers, “real Americans” who embrace educational opportunity and the American dream for all.

The “new” Republicans owe more than they will acknowledge to a federal government that dispensed a long list of subsidies from World War II forward. The GI Bill made higher education possible for millions, just as New Deal legislation before that helped secure federally backed loans for businesses and homeownership for the first time in our history. The growth of suburbia was financed by big government. Businessmen did not accomplish this change in class structure on their own. Not nearly. The federal government created the middle class of the 1950s. Surely, the Republicans can admit this much. But doing so is risky; it might lead them down the slippery slope from “Greed is good” to “Government is good.”And:Labor Day should make us think more about class distinctions. Romney is a good husband, but it doesn’t diminish his life of privilege. Ann Romney is not a typical housewife either; her hobby is dressage, not knitting. Contrary to the Republicans’ wished-for America, it is not just the hardworking, honest American who gets ahead: so do mobsters and Hollywood blondes without talent, Enron executives, corporate raiders and members of the patrician class who never worked a day in their lives.

Let’s talk about labor in honest terms. Thomas Jefferson may have designed Monticello, but his slaves mixed the lime and baked the brick and erected the mansion. Slaves built much of early America, long-despised Irishmen dug the Erie Canal, and Chinese peasants were conscripted to lay railroad tracks all the livelong day. Businessmen need a vast array of workers to build any corporate enterprise; employers need employees. White-collar workers, manual laborers, electricians and carpenters make businesses run. Why must Republicans these days take such joy and displaced pride in suggesting that business leaders do it all, building the country brick by brick, by themselves, our precious job creators? A football team needs blockers as well as a quarterback.

Casablanca’s Rick is saying that the pursuit of wealth often gets in the way of virtue as well as justice. If you listen to Chris Christie, public school teachers aren’t accountable enough, and unions are a selfish perk for a coddled generation. Why does the same accountability not extend to big businessmen? No prosecutions on Wall Street? This is where the Republicans’ moralizing platform sinks in quicksand. One standard for ordinary folks, and another for the rich and powerful?

Mitt Romney doesn’t think he should be subject to the same accountability as others. He won’t provide tax returns so that citizens can judge the man and be certain that he puts his country before personal gain. Before the unpropertied were allowed to vote, Jefferson held that those who served in the militia and paid their taxes should be granted that right. It was the Dream Act prequel. The tough stand on undocumented workers taken by Romney and the Republicans reflects the “American value” that Spanish-speaking people can’t be trusted to … love America? Work hard? Pay their taxes? Whose American dream are we focused on?The implications for Indians

Why don't Republicans say anything about the Indians killed and the Africans enslaved so their white ancestors could prosper? Because that would contradict their misleading message of self-reliance. A Native columnist hits the message home:

Deconstructing Chris Christie’s Speech at the GOP Convention

By Laura Waterman WittstockIndian viewers who tuned in and listened to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie give his keynote speech on August 28 at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, would have heard him tell stories of his immigrant family.

As he talked, it became clear this was a man who knew nothing about the country his family came to. To him, this was the land of the free where people of any class could walk out of their muddy fields and onto a boat and onto land they could take from others without recrimination. They simply took and closed the door behind them. And not all could come. Europeans kept out the Africans, the Asians, and Hispanics. These people were only accepted as slaves, servants, and laborers. In Christie’s generation, all he knew was that hard work brought reward.

The people in Christie’s family that inform his memories today knew only of Indians from what they might have read somewhere. Indians were distant, fading curiosities. There was never a tinge, a pinprick, a nudge, to tell them they had landed on what had been someone else’s land. It was after all “the land of the free.” All of the conspiratorial tales and songs and banners worked to erase the immigrant’s memories of the blood on their hands.

Christie said, “We are the great grandchildren of men and women who broke their backs in the name of American ingenuity; the grandchildren of the Greatest Generation; the sons and daughters of immigrants…” Christie said his parents were poor but worked hard. “….the brothers and sisters of everyday heroes; the neighbors of entrepreneurs and firefighters, teachers and farmers, veterans and factory workers and everyone in-between who shows up not just on the big days or the good days, but on the bad days and on the hard days.” This is an ideal population—free of crime, health needs, and old age that other communities encounter—the proverbial world where everyone is “above average.”And:Christie should know about American Indian history and the land on which he lives. New Jersey has a Commission on American Indian Affairs. ... So why is Christie so ignorant of history and of the Indians who live in his own state? The answer seems to lie in the unwillingness of the Republican Party to pay the country’s debts to the Indian people. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Indian Health Service, and the specifics of categories of aid due to Indian people are not just niceties. They are part of agreements and understanding—land for services, set down in treaties.Wittstock's conclusion:A national Indian policy, if there is one to be stated under a Romney/Ryan administration, will cut into Indian funds as deeply as possible, no question about it.Comment:  Chris Christie said, "We are the great grandchildren of men and women who broke their backs in the name of American ingenuity; the grandchildren of the Greatest Generation; the sons and daughters of immigrants…." Note how he excludes the Indians, Latinos, and blacks who have been here much longer than our great-grandparents' generation. This is a dog-whistle to whites who think they've done most of the work while lazy minorities were lollygagging.

Clint Eastwood said, "We own this country." Whom do you think he was talking about? Who is this "we" who owns the country? And who are the ones who don't own the country? The answer to that question is obvious: the women, minorities, gays, and non-Christians who make up the Democratic Party.

Together, their message is that Americans are white. And the GOP is the party of white people. White Americans like them deserve to rule the country.

The Republican appeal to white Americans doesn't get much more blatant than this. Why else would Romney and Christie fail to mention blacks, Latinos, Asians, or Indians? Republicans don't consider minorities "real Americans" like them and their ancestors. Brown people merely reside in America; white people own it.

For more on conservative racism, see Racists Deny Playing Race Card and White Americans Fear a Black President.

Lumbees prove government doesn't work?!

John Stossel and my pleasure jolts

By Barry FarberNow here comes John Stossel, fellow WND columnist, over the weekend of March 26 with one of the best pieces in television history: "Freeloaders," a Fox News special delivering stomp-down proof that Indian tribes that are not recognized as tribes by the government and get no federal handouts are more successful than those on the federal dole. Stossel visited the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina, whose members get nothing from the government. They're generally successful in business. Many live in luxury mansions. In contrast, the Indians embraced by the feds live in what look like tar-paper shacks.

In boxing, John Stossel's interview with Elizabeth Homer, who used to be the government nanny of the recognized tribes, would have been canceled as a mismatch or halted on a TKO early in Round 1. She was pitifully unable to defend government stewardship over Native Americans as anything but the failure of socialism.Comment:  Too bad Homer (whom I've interviewed before) isn't a kick-butt debater like me. Here's what she should've said:

1) One example of anything is statistically meaningless. Compared to 565 federally recognized tribes, the Lumbee case is irrelevant. It's an anecdote, not a fact.

2) I'm guessing Stossel didn't do more than talk to one or two Lumbees and drive through one or two Lumbee neighborhoods. There's zero evidence that he examined the lives of 55,000 Lumbees in any meaningful way.

3) Stossel provide no context for his claims. The important context is this: Many unrecognized tribes in rural locations are as poor as recognized tribes. And many recognized tribes in urban locations (the Mashantucket Pequots, Mohegans, Seminoles, Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux, San Manuel, Morongo, Agua Caliente, Pechanga, Viejas, Chumash, et al.) are as rich as their non-Indian neighbors.

What's the key information in this paragraph? Tribes in rural locations are poor because no jobs are nearby. Tribes in urban locations are (relatively) rich because jobs are nearby. The Lumbees are well-off because they live in North Carolina's booming Triangle region (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill), not because self-reliance has made them strong.

For more on the subject, see Trahant Agrees About Termination Agenda, Fox Special on Indian "Freeloaders," and Stossel:  Indians Are Biggest Moochers.

Roger: Let Indians commit suicide

Another day, another entry in the Rand/Stossel termination agenda for Indians:

American Indians Putting Faith in Government 'Help'?

By Chuck RogerIn New Mexico's state capitol, a local newspaper reports that Santa Fe Indian School students are "watching with bated breath" for Governor Susana Martinez to sign a bill that would create "culturally sensitive programs" designed "to help Native American communities deal with teen suicides."

The situation is tragic on two levels.

First, the high suicide rate attests to social problems endemic in Indian communities. But the second tragedy is even worse, for it compounds the first. No one, especially American Indians, should put faith in government to "deal with" anything, much less something as horrible as suicide. Government has consistently worsened the plight of the Indians with poverty-perpetuating, will-weakening, assimilation-discouraging "help."

The bill in question, sponsored by a Democrat state senator, would also provide resources to address general mental health issues of New Mexico's Indians. The effort would typify the emotional liberal response to problems like the ills that afflict Indian communities.

It doesn't seem to occur to liberals that the solution to social problems in isolated communities could be to end the isolation. Psychologists have understood for decades that increased self-reliance, encouraged by the rewards earned by self-reliant people, has the power to eliminate depression. Yet big-government liberals incessantly fall back on feel-good but ineffective "interventions" orchestrated by governmental central planners.Comment:  No doubt you recognize the key codewords here: End the isolation. Stop discouraging assimilation. In other words, Indians should give up their land, their reservations, and their sovereignty. They should forget about the treaty rights that guarantee them certain benefits.

It doesn't matter what the Constitution and various court decisions say. We stripped them of their land, cultures, languages, and religions. Now let's strip them of the money that was supposed to compensate them. They're only "dirty redskins," so who cares if we rob them twice? We'll rob them as many times as it takes until they shrivel up and die.

Pay close attention to what this Jolly Roger is saying. Indians are suffering high rates of suicide, but let's do nothing to help them. Maybe they'll help themselves and maybe they won't. If they don't, problem solved. Once they're dead we can take their remaining land and resources without listening to them whine about their "rights."

This is pure social Darwinism: survival of the fittest. Those that overcome depression on their own deserve to live; those that don't deserve to die. Roger is more concerned about his free-market ideology than saving actual lives. If self-reliance isn't the cure-all he thinks it is...oh, well, they're only savages. No big loss to humanity.

Rugged individualists kill themselves

Roger reguritates his free-market propaganda without a shred of evidence except a vague reference to psychologists. This is anti-intellectual, asinine nonsense for several reasons.

1) We could point to many, many government programs that work for all Americans. The military. Water and electricity provision. Homeland security. The highway system. Food inspections. The air-traffic system. Public universities. National, state, and local parks. Public libraries. Home mortgage deductions. Student loans. Etc., etc., etc.

Roger says we shouldn't put faith in government to "deal with" anything. Does he really think we should privatize our troops, our highways, and our libraries? Or is he too stupid to realize that government does many things well? (Social Security has lower costs than comparable private programs, for instance.)

2) Roger obviously knows nothing about suicide. Guess which states have the highest suicide rates?

Ranking America's Mental Health:  An Analysis of Depression Across the StatesIn terms of 2004 suicide rates, the District of Columbia was the lowest, followed by New York and Massachusetts. Alaska had the highest suicide rate, followed by Nevada and New Mexico.Here are the ten most suicidal states:

West Virginia
Arizona
Colorado
Utah
Idaho
Wyoming
Montana
New Mexico
Nevada
Alaska

Colorado and New Mexico are arguably swing states, but every other state on the list is solidly conservative. These are exactly the states where people are supposedly rugged individualists. Where people supposedly hate the nanny state--when they're not receiving subsidies for their water, grazing, or mineral rights, that is--and rely on themselves. To put it bluntly, self-reliant people have the highest suicide rates in America.

It's not hard to understand why. Struggling to survive on your own is tough. The cure for feelings of loneliness and isolation isn't more loneliness and isolation. It's a caring web of social connections--the kind memorialized in the phrase "It takes a village."

Not everyone can live up to America's cowboy standard: the "virtue" embodied in John Wayne and Ronald Reagan. If you lived in a conservative state where they preached God and family while people lied and cheated, you'd feel whipsawed by the hypocrisy also. If it was bad enough, you might become depressed or suicidal too.

Suicide prevention works

3) Roger obviously knows nothing about suicide prevention programs, either. An article appearing the same day outlines the facts Roger is ignorant of:

Response plan needed on suicide epidemicMontanans may never know exactly what caused the spike in suicides among the youth of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation--but we have a good idea of how to stop it.

The first step is to urge the U.S. Public Health Service to return to the reservation and provide much-needed counseling and mental health care. The next step is to see to it that these services are available to Fort Peck families on a long-term basis as part of a comprehensive safety net that catches these kids well before they fall through the cracks.

The heartbreaking spate of suicides by Native American children in Montana reached horrendous levels last school year, when five Poplar Middle School children killed themselves and 20 more students attempted suicide on the Fort Peck reservation.

Assiniboine and Sioux leaders recognized the situation for what it is--a crisis--and in response to their crisis declaration, federal emergency teams came to the reservation to shore up mental health services, study the situation and make some recommendations.

And for 90 days, there were no suicides.Duhhh. Unless you're a stupid twit, you know that mental health problems aren't solved with "self-reliance." They're solved with mental health services that require money. These services help military veterans with PTSD and they help others the same way.

If you think they don't work, let's throw our traumatized soldiers out on their asses and let them fend for themselves. If this treatment is good enough for Indians, it's good enough for everyone.

Sheesh.

For conservatives like Roger who are ignorant of American history, we've tried allocating the Indians' land...forcing them to assimilate...and terminating their tribes. None of these policies worked. Don't take my word for it, dumbasses, look it up in the historical record. Stop pontificating about your ivory-tower theories and start dealing with reality.

There's no proven connection between government services for military veterans, the elderly, or women with children and suicide rates. There's no proven connection between government services for Indians and suicide rates, either. If "unearned" money made people weak and helpless, millions of trust-fund babies would be committing suicide. That's obviously not the case.

For more on the subject, see

Didier:  Stop protecting the weak
Tea Party leader posts racist "satire"
Why Americans hate welfare
Capitalism gets comeuppance
Westerners = freeloaders

Below:  Cowboy Bush grows weak and helpless living off government handouts (his presidential pension).

Name America's golden year

Following up on my "nanny state" posting, I posted the following note on Facebook:

Conservatives, I'm waiting for someone to identify a particular year when government was small, markets were free, and life was good. Maybe you can name the golden year of this imagined golden era so we can debate reality, not fantasy.

This lead to a brief discussion:I think that was Oct 11, 1492.

1491?Someone suggested 1820. So basically when women and minorities had no rights and white male property owners ruled? When the US seriously began destroying Indian cultures west of the Appalachians? Yes, that may have been a golden era for a small minority of white males. The majority probably thought otherwise.Silly Rob!!!! The majority aren't allowed to think.So we're still waiting for a serious suggestion. Pick a year since 1776 and we'll discuss whether people--all people--were better off than they are today under the so-called "nanny state."

For more on the subject, see Didier:  Stop "Protecting the Weak," Westerners = Freeloaders, and The Myth of American Self-Reliance.

Below:  1868...a good year for land-hungry white men who counted on the US Army to clear "dirty redskins" out of the way.

Is the "nanny state" bad?

Someone on Facebook declared that the rise of the "nanny state" (i.e., a government regulated for the safety of the majority) has coincided with an increase in violence and other social ills. I posted this response:

Is the "nanny state" bad? One could argue just the opposite: that the lack of "protections" gave the US a Wild West mentality that allowed and encouraged worker exploitation, slavery, Civil War, and genocide. That these things have become less thinkable precisely because of increased government oversight.

All in all, I'm happier to live now, with a life expectancy of 80 or whatever, than then, when 50 was considered old. People died from disease, hardship, or violence that we've reduced through regulation.

This led to the following discussion with FB friend John:I think you will find that stronger, self reliant individuals usually do prefer the freedom from the nanny state in spite of the hardships of the wild west.I think you'll find that stronger, self-reliant individuals like to impose exploitation, slavery, war, and genocide on others. As US history demonstrates.I disagree.Andrew Jackson: strong, self-reliant embodiment of the rugged individualist? Or slave-owner, warmonger, and genocidal maniac? Or both? Discuss.



FB friend JRey chimed in:Hmm....Tempting at first glance to say both, but--I think being a slave owner or otherwise usurping the fruits of the labor of others without just compensation precludes one from being a rugged individualist. Truly 'self made' people do not rely on unearned privilege.Do self-made people move into Indian territory and declare it their own with the backing of the US Army? I.e., take land as a free government handout? Because that would eliminate most Americans from about 1800 to 1900.

Including my immigrant Schmidt ancestors. Oops!

FB friend Paul also chimed in:The nanny state has not eliminated the following: worker exploitation, slavery, and genocide.It's reduced these things significantly in the US.

This is a classic case of white men like John arguing from their position of white privilege. How many women or minorities would argue that America's unregulated past was better than its regulated present? Let's ask blacks if they want to go back to the days of slavery, lynchings, and Jim Crow laws. Or ask Indians if they want to go back to the days of subjugation, assimilation, and termination? I'm betting most of them will say no.

For more on the subject, see Didier:  Stop "Protecting the Weak," Westerners = Freeloaders, and The Myth of American Self-Reliance.

Below:  Americans head west for government-granted freebies.

Women and Indians as peacemakers

The Key to Sustainable Peace:  Women

By Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jonas Gahr StorePeace agreements typically fall apart when they fail to resolve the issues that caused the conflict in the first place—including ethnic tensions, inequality, and injustice. But women are the ones who face these problems every day, and so they’re the ones who will bring the issues to the negotiating table and make sure they have practical solutions.

Ten years ago this week, the United Nations took a historic step in this direction by recognizing that women are not merely victims of war, they are also indispensable agents of peace. Yet progress in including women in the peacemaking process has lagged. On this anniversary of the unanimous passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, we must redouble our efforts to ensure that women are at last seated at the negotiating table--and in meaningful roles.

It is indisputable that women and children suffer disproportionately from war, including as targets of rape. We must do more to protect them. But relegating them to the role of passive victims keeps them powerless. When the “victims” organize, they are potent advocates for change, as they were in Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Liberia.

Women can be effective peacemakers because they have a broad view of security. To them, it is more than the absence of armed fighters. It means their sons and daughters can go to school safely. It means they can get medical attention when they give birth, and have their children vaccinated. It means returning refugees can find land, water and jobs. Broadening our definition of security in this way helps prevent simmering grievances from recurring and escalating.

Of course, including women does not guarantee that peace talks will succeed. But recent history shows that agreements that exclude women and ignore their concerns usually fail.Comment:  I usually don't emphasize gender in my analyses, but it's often implicit. This time I'll make the implicit explicit.

I often criticize America as a macho, violent, cowboy, warrior country. I've said our national anthem should be Be a Victor or Be a Victim. I've said our literary heroes are modeled on Hercules. And so forth.

We're quick to engage in fistfights, shootouts, and wars because that lets us prove our manhood. We build ourselves up as the toughest guy on the block, able to lick anyone in the house. Our national self-image is rugged individualism.

If people like the French aren't as eager to fight, we call them sissies and wimps at best, cowards and traitors at worst. We question their manhood. We suggest they're gay--perhaps the ultimate insult to a red-blooded American.

We build up our enemies to be even more macho than we are. We call them savages, barbarians, or Huns. That way, we can congratulate ourselves when we defeat them. "They thought they were tough but we proved we were tougher."

What about Indians?

When we look back at foes such as Indians, we're of two minds. If it's in a warlike setting--e.g., the military or sports--we emphasize their warrior qualities. We still want to reward ourselves for beating them.

It's like wearing a bearskin cloak or necklace made of claws. An Indian name or image is like a trophy from a successful hunt. We came, we saw, we conquered, and here's the proof.

But if it's not a warlike setting, we emphasize their "inferior" cultural and spiritual qualities. We say they're lazy, ignorant wastrels who can't hold a job and drink too much. We think they can't learn or change, can't cope with the modern world. We say they're like children: immature, mercurial, and ungovernable. Or like spirits: strange, dark, and mysterious.

All this is similar to what we've said about women through the ages. For instance:

Female hysteriaFemale hysteria was a once-common medical diagnosis, made exclusively in women, which is today no longer recognized by modern medical authorities as a medical disorder. Its diagnosis and treatment were routine for many hundreds of years in Western Europe. Hysteria was widely discussed in the medical literature of the Victorian era. Women considered to be suffering from it exhibited a wide array of symptoms including faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and "a tendency to cause trouble."

The history of hysteria can be traced to ancient times; in ancient Greece it was described in the gynecological treatises of the Hippocratic corpus, which date from the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Plato's dialogue Timaeus tells of the uterus wandering throughout a woman’s body, strangling the victim as it reaches the chest and causing disease. This theory is the source of the name, which stems from the Greek word for uterus, hystera (ὑστέρα).In short, we think a wild Indian is like a hysterical women. Neither is a rational, civilized (white) man.

Shared values

But the Indians who were warlike gave up their "wild" ways when they settled on reservations. What's left are the core values that I talk about frequently: caring for the community, stewarding the environment, thinking seven generations ahead. Indians don't boast and dominate a room; they stay quiet and listen. They don't impose their religions on others; they let everyone worship in their own way. They don't send people to jail; they resolve conflicts through talking circles.

All these are generalizations, of course, but I think they're generally true. There's a large overlap between female values and indigenous values. Men want quick, tough, focused solutions. If someone hits you, fight back. Women and Natives take the long view, make webs of connections, and focus on healing and nurturing. If someone hits you, talk to him and learn what's wrong. Find a permanent solution, not a temporary Band-Aid.

Americans obviously favor the male way of thinking. They'd rather fight than switch. Our purpose here is to suggest an alternative perspective. Both women and Natives provide that. They offer a different way of looking at the world.

Hence the Clinton/Store thesis that women are or should be peacemakers. If the world adopted more of the female or Native perspective, it would be a better place.

For more on this clash of values, see:

Columbus the cannibal
National Day of the American Cowboy
Arizona laws = manifest insanity
Conservative worldview = fear of cooties
Why Americans keep killing

For more the female/Native nexus of values, see:

Indians inspired feminism
A Latin view of American-style violence
Diplomacy works, violence doesn't
Winning Through nonviolence
Hercules vs. Coyote:  Native and Euro-American beliefs

Below:  The Western/male way of dealing with conflicts and...



...the Native/female way.

Didier: Stop "protecting the weak"

'Self-made' myth divides us

By Danny WestneatClint Didier—farmer, footballer, tamer of sagebrush—told why he's running for U.S. Senate. In short, to preserve the America of "rugged individualism" from socialism's creep.

People can take care of their own, he explained. So the entire system of support we've constructed, from medical aid for the elderly to financial boosts for public schools, should be slashed. Not only to save money. But so we don't become a society of flabby collectivists jonesing for the next handout.

"We've got to get rid of this 'protecting the weak,'" Didier said. "If we keep the weak alive all the time, it eats up the strong."

Of all stories we tell ourselves, the one about how we're a merit-based nation of lone wolves has got to be the most enduring. The most intoxicating. And the most baloney.

Nowhere is the myth as confused with reality as in rock-ribbed Eastern Washington. The place depends utterly on the government and communal resources for its existence, from the New Deal irrigation system still being paid for by taxpayers elsewhere, to farming subsidies and crop price supports. Yet in their own minds, they are mavericks living off the land.

"We don't need the government to come in and try to prop things up," a Lincoln County grain buyer told me as the economy was collapsing in the fall of 2008. As if the local economy weren't already propped up.Comment:  Thanks for summing up the Sarah Palin/teabagger view of things, Didier. Real Americans pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Socialists, America haters, and terrorists--i.e., anyone who voted for Obama--take the hard-earned money of white people and redistribute it to the brown-skins. These parasites leech off society because they're corrupt, immoral, and inferior.

We know this because we conquered them and might makes right. To the victors go the spoils. Giving away something you've "earned," like apologizing for your mistakes, is for women and other weaklings.

Back in the real world, "protecting the weak" means helping the poor, huddled masses. You know, minorities, elders, the sick and disabled, et al. I gather Didier is some sort of libertarian/social Darwinist. "Let 'em die so that strong white Christians can live comfortably in their middle-class suburbs."

We see examples of this explicitly or implicitly racist viewpoint several times a week. For instance:

Ron Hart is a racist
Tea Party leader posts racist "satire"
Native children = unsafe community?
New Hampshire Republican = racist

It's basically what the healthcare debate was about and what the immigration debate is about. "Why should we suffer one iota of inconvenience to help someone other than friends and family? They can help themselves or die trying. Either way, I don't care."

In other words, "I hate anyone who isn't white like me. I won't say it because it's socially unacceptable, but I'm racist."

How ironic that protecting the weak is a central tenet of Jesus's teaching. Perhaps Didier is an atheist who doesn't believe in Christianity. Or perhaps he's a goddamned hypocrite.

For more on the subject, see Why Americans Hate Welfare and The Myth of American Self-Reliance.

Below:  Oklahomans rush for free government land taken from Indians so they can be rugged individualists.

Tea Party leader posts racist "satire"

A Final ThoughtHere is former head and current spokesperson for the Tea Party Express Mark Williams satirically responding to the NAACP:

Dear Mr. Lincoln

We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!

In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in Kansas City this week. We voted to condemn a political revival of that old abolitionist spirit called the 'tea party movement'.

The tea party position to "end the bailouts" for example is just silly. Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn't that what we want all Coloreds to strive for? What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare? What they need to do is start handing the bail outs directly to us coloreds! Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the only responsible party that should be granted the right to disperse the funds.

And the ridiculous idea of "reduce[ing] the size and intrusiveness of government." What kind of massa would ever not want to control my life? As Coloreds we must have somebody care for us otherwise we would be on our own, have to think for ourselves and make decisions!

The racist tea parties also demand that the government "stop the out of control spending." Again, they directly target coloreds. That means we Coloreds would have to compete for jobs like everybody else and that is just not right.

Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government "stop raising our taxes." That is outrageous! How will we coloreds ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?

Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Sincerely

Precious Ben Jealous, Tom's Nephew
NAACP Head Colored Person

Williams has since taken the original down and posted a half-hearted justification. Mark Williams is the same man who has denounced Barack Obama as "Indonesian Muslim" and a "welfare thug." If Mark Williams is not a racist, then there are no racists in American society--a position which many, some liberals among them, no doubt find plausible.Tea Partier's posting slammed as 'feeble,' 'offensive'

Comment:  Here we see a teabagger revealing what teabaggers in general think. "Coloreds" don't want to "work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards." They want government to take care of them, to give them free handouts.

"Coloreds" might as well refer to anyone who's nonwhite. This is what conservatives think about blacks, Latinos, Indians, and anyone else with brown skin. They're all lazy, shiftless bums who are leeching off the hard work of white, Christian Euro-Americans.

If there's any doubt this is what many conservatives believe, here's more evidence:

It's Unanimous!  GOP Says No To Unemployment Benefits, Yes To Tax Cuts For The Rich

Republicans To Unemployed:  Why Won't You All Just Get Some Jobs Already?South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer compared the unemployed to stray animals back in January, saying that unemployment insurance is a lot like helping out strays. One is "facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply," he said. "They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better." Though he later backtracked, saying this probably "wasn't the best metaphor," he has since said that "flat-out lazy" people "would rather sit home and do nothing than do these jobs."

Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV) said in February that he thinks that though "there should be a federal safety net," extending unemployment benefits yet again raises the question: "Is the government now creating hobos?""Satire" = real beliefs

And let's not waste a minute on Williams's pathetic "satire" defense. He wasn't satirizing the NAACP, he was "satirizing" blacks. In other words, he was savagely attacking blacks under the guise of satire. He was venting his ugly beliefs and hoping the "satire" label would excuse his blatant racism.

If you need any other evidence, look at his "Indonesian Muslim" and "welfare thug" remarks. Were those "satirical" too, or were they his actual beliefs? The latter, obviously. Whether Williams is saying what he means or pretending to be joking, he's bigoted against blacks. Like New Hampshire's Ryan Murdough, he's a racist.

Again, Williams is a leader of the Tea Party movement. He posted his "satire" precisely because he knew his followers would agree with it. If this wasn't a common belief within the Tea Party, he wouldn't have dared to post it. And other party leaders would've expelled him rather than defend and excuse his racism.

For more on teabagger racism, see Poll Proves Teabaggers Are Racists and The Evidence for Teabagger Racism. For more on conservative attitudes toward minorities, see Why Americans Hate Welfare and White Conservatives "Angry About Racism."

Below:  An earlier "satire" about lazy blacks.

Why Americans hate welfare

In the same essay I quoted in Miner's Canary = Broken Window, Tim Wise explains why Americans hate welfare:

Of Collateral Damage and Roosting Chickens:  Reflections on Racism, the Economy and the High Cost of White Ambivalence[A]ccording to research by Martin Gilens, in his classic book Why Americans Hate Welfare, it was only after media imagery of the poor switched from mostly white to mostly black and brown (beginning in the early 1970s) that public anger about social spending began to explode. Prior to that time, most people understood the importance of safety nets, and had been highly supportive of assistance to the poor, from the period of the Great Depression well into the 1960s. But once the public came to view aid recipients as people of color, that support waned.

Likewise, Jill Quadagno points out in The Color of Welfare, that the nation's most promising anti-poverty initiatives and programs have been routinely undermined by racism aimed at those perceived to be the disproportionate beneficiaries. Indeed, racist opposition to the empowerment of blacks was among the principal reasons that President Nixon's proposal for a guaranteed minimum national income was rejected. Kenneth Neubeck and Noel Cazenave demonstrate similar scholarship in their book Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card Against America's Poor. Neubeck and Cazenave document the way that politicians have used racial resentment and racism to limit public assistance of all kinds, and have been more focused on using welfare policy to control black and brown labor mobility and even reproduction, than to provide real opportunity and support. Again, the irony should be clear: because of the racialization of social policy, whites who are struggling, like Jeremy, will now have less of a safety net to catch them.

In fact, a comprehensive comparison of various social programs in the U.S. and Europe found that racial hostility to people of color better explains opposition to high levels of social spending here than any other economic or political variable. To the extent the public--especially the white public--perceives blacks as lazy and too dependent on public assistance, they come to oppose additional spending on programs of social uplift. Then, when they find themselves in need of the same assistance it isn't there for them. Jeremy is hurting, at least in part, because lawmakers have been insufficiently committed to addressing poverty and economic hardship. And this flagging commitment has been caused by the way in which the poor and struggling have been racialized, and the way this racialization has led to a collapse of empathy among large segments of the American public.Comment:  Let's repeat the key fact here: Racial hostility is the no. 1 reason for opposing social spending. Conservatives who oppose such spending are likely to be prejudiced.

These authors may have done it already, but we could trace "welfare racism" back to Columbus and the Pilgrims. It goes like this:

Columbus discovered a "new world" while Indians frolicked like children. The Pilgrims worked themselves to death while Indians sat around and watched. White men are rugged individualists, relying only on themselves, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Blacks are lazy, Latinos take siestas, and Indians get government handouts while not paying taxes.

This explains the Tea Party movement's dislike of government programs and healthcare reform, which they see as welfare for minorities. It explains Arizona's dislike of illegal immigrants, who supposedly cost the government money. And it explains America's dislike of modern-day Indians, which manifests itself as mascots, Dudesons, whitewashed movies, Zazzle t-shirts, hipster headdresses, and so forth and so on.

These aren't honors, people. They're unconscious attempts to keep Indians in their place by denying America's long history of racism, injustice, and genocide. If Americans truly loved Indians, they'd be passing bills and challenging stereotypes by the truckload.

I probably could post a hundred links on this and related subjects. For a selection of them, see:

Rand Paul's pro-racist libertarian
Send minorities "back where they came from"?
Conservative worldview = fear of cooties
Paper-checkers = birthers = teabaggers
Klansmen, militias, and teabaggers

P.S. This is one of those topics that we're not debating. <g>

Below: "Oh, no! The witch doctor is giving away our money to the tar-babies and jungle bunnies!"

Capitalism gets comeuppance

Greenspan's blind spot

The former Fed chief didn't bank on human nature.Alan Greenspan is surprised ... by human nature.

There was a kind of lion-in-winter quality to the testimony the former Federal Reserve Board chairman delivered to Congress on Thursday. Summoned before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is investigating the Wall Street meltdown, the onetime oracle of the global financial system told Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills):

"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms."

Greenspan, 82, who relinquished leadership of the Fed just two years ago, said the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage industry--and the vast, mostly hidden trade in derivative financial instruments it spawned--exposed a "flaw" in his categorical reliance on free markets.

Over the last two decades, fortunes have been made and lost parsing Greenspan's Delphic declarations, but there's a breathtaking example of ideological blindness embedded in that first sentence. Does Greenspan really believe that banks, brokerages, rating agencies and insurance companies act of their own accord? Even he has to understand that the people who run them decide how they respond, even to market forces.

There are no autonomic reflexes in finance. Did Greenspan really believe that the people in power, presented with a chance to make a killing, would put the interests of their institutions and stockholders ahead of their own?

Put aside for a second the fact that the former Fed chairman spent more than 20 years of his life as a disciple of the novelist-turned-barely-baked-philosopher Ayn Rand, whose concepts of "rational egoism" and "individualism" put the "R" in ruthless and have provided generations of gullible undergraduates an intellectual rationale for their lingering adolescent self-absorption. Has Greenspan lived through the same times the rest of America has recently experienced?

The idea of loyalty--or of just a sort of reciprocal obligation, for that matter--simply doesn't operate on Wall Street or much of anywhere in American business any more. The notion that CEOs and other executives would forgo a chance to enrich themselves to keep their institutions solvent or their stockholders' investment whole seems quaint in today's environment.Comment:  Needless to say, the greedy, selfish, "individualist" ethos of capitalism is the opposite of the ethos in traditional Indian societies. These societies didn't exhort their weak or struggling members to get a job or pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They took care of these people, shared their resources, "spread the wealth."

Of course, today's tribes sometimes don't live up to their own ideals. They're subject to human nature too. But the ideals are there for people to aim for nonetheless.

For more on the subject, see America's Cultural Mindset.

Below:  The god of many Americans.

Westerners = freeloaders

Continental Divide:  A Western State of Mind“The West was another name for opportunity,” Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893, in his famous essay that declared an end to the frontier, which in his definition meant the end of free land. More than a century later, the dreams and myths about the West persist. So do fantasies and outright misperceptions. Some originated in the East, with its vision of the frontier as being at once a majestic playground and a site of commercial depredation, of strip mines and strip malls. (“The East,” Turner wrote, “has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it.”)

Other simplifications flourish in the West, with its self-regarding belief in an untamed wilderness brought to heel by fiercely independent souls.

The truth has always been more ambiguous, not least because of the region’s tangled relationship with the federal government, which had cleared the land of Indians and offered the handout of the Homestead Act in 1862, itself adopted after some 70 years of debate about the rightful disposition of public lands.

In the 20th century, accounts of the West often centered on this paradox. The inhabitants boasted of their autonomy, even as the government did the dirty work, took the risks and offered sweet deals to settlers, so they could expand the borders of the United States. Without this help, as many writers have noted, the waves of Western pioneers wouldn’t have had the luxury of hating Washington bureaucrats.

This attitude, of wanting it both ways, was neatly summed up a half-century ago by the historian Bernard DeVoto as: “Get out and give us more money.” The novelist Wallace Stegner was just as unsparing when he observed, in 1986: “Westerners who would like to return to the old days of free grab, people of the kind described as having made America great by their initiative and energy in committing mass trespass on the minerals, grass, timber and water of the Public Domain, complain that no Western state is master in its own house.”Comment:  For more on the subject, see The Myth of American Self-Reliance.

Below:  A typical Westerner who was born on third base and thought he hit a triple.