It is hard to redress the damage from 400 hundred years of racism without policies that address the victims by their group identities. It is hypocritical for whites to now insist on strict adherence to a color blind policy when they were elevated in the social order for so long based on such an arbitrary factor as the color of one's skin. We need to back off from identity politics, it hasn't served us well, especially in its most vile forms, racism, nationalism and xenophobia. But to now compound the racism by not going the extra effort to try to mitigate some of the damage inflicted on generations of people, to now say that we don't want to resort to racism, is cruel and heartless.
It is never bad to say we don't want to resort to racism. Racism is a category error that results in unjust treatment of individuals. It is a confusion of what one person is because of what others who look like her are have gone through. It is robbing her of her individuality and painting her as one of these or one of those. I am have Japanese blood, but I did not suffer internment in USA's Japanese internment camps during the 2nd world war. I have Chinese blood but I did not suffer in the building of the trans-Canada railway. A poor white refugee just arrived in America didn't do anything to Obama's children that justifies preferential treatment of the latter over the former. The white kids in the trailer park didn't either. Is it any surprise that they grow up resentful of black people if you insist that it is wrong for them to be racist against black people, but black people "can't be racist" against them, even if their mayor and chief of police is black?
No, racism is never justified, no matter who is doing it or who it is being done to. Neither is sexism or other forms of negative prejudice. You can't judge from the colour of my skin how much hardship or privilege I have had in my life. Doing so is wrong. Period.
As for affirmative action, we need to stop being lazy. Affirmative action is usually justified by pointing out that this group or that group is poverty struck or not given the same opportunities as that other group. But groups are not given opportunities. Individuals are. You can help the poor by helping the poor without being racist about it. That white kid who grew up dirt poor int he trailer park is no less worthy of your help than that black kid who grew up dirt poor in the ghetto. If you want to compare to legacy admissions, then again you can do so without race. Legacy admissions are no more justifiable if they are Obama's kids than if they are Bush's kids.
And if you are poor because your parents didn't have wealth to pass on to you because your grandparents or great grandparents were robbed of their wealth because of a racist policy back then, why is that any more unfair TO YOU (not to your ancestors it happened to) than if another person is poor because her parents didn't have wealth to pass on to her because her grandparents or great grandparents gambled the money away or lost it?
And by making an excuse for racism in one case, for the "underprivileged group", you encourage others to make excuses for racism in other cases, for the "privileged group". Racism is either wrong or it isn't. I say it is.
What is needed is for us to attack poverty. To establish that no one who is willing to work should be poor. Inherent in the divide and conquer strategy is the falsehood that for one to advance another has to be pushed back. That the economy is a zero sum game. This is not true. The economy expands to accommodate people who spend money on consumption. The more money that people have and the more that they spend the larger the economy expands. People who are higher paid have more money to spend. People who are better educated and better trained make more money and have more money to spend. When people are better educated and better trained it doesn't mean that someone else loses their education and training. That would be absurd. And yet that is what the divide and conquer strategy depends on.
Here we agree. Universal basic income needs to happen, and inheritance needs to be either done away with or much more heavily taxed. We should have equal opportunities as much as possible, and that should be looked at on an INDIVIDUAL level rather than by lumping people into groups, racial or otherwise, and assuming that each person lumped into that group not related to wealth level should be treated alike.
We need to stop dividing people by arbitrary or irrelevant traits such as race, gender, sexual orientation, etc and instead create empathy between people as individuals. Identity politics divides, and yes, I agree, it distracts from the massive wealth inequality we are facing.
I agree with most of this. I don't support affirmative action, it hasn't worked. I support raising up all of the underprivileged by raising their wages. I believe that racism is the ultimate sin, used to divide people arbitrary for hundreds of years. Unfortunately racism is so ingrained in our culture that it won't disappear until the very concept of race disappears. Fortunately the kids are handling this now. In Atlanta where I live about one in four young couples would be considered interracial in the past, if the part of town that I live in is any indication. It is hard to hate black people when your grandchildren are black.
If you believe that conservatives treat blacks as individuals and not as a group I need you to explain Mr. "Blacks deserve to be poor because of genetics." Is he treating blacks as individuals or is he tempering his support for ending racism with whatever he needs to say to support the discussion of the moment? And exposing his deep seeded racism in the process.
You have to agree that it is highly disingenuous that the political sector, the conservatives, who embraced legal racism for hundreds of years now are the loudest for getting rid of racism in such a strict sense only when there are the least attempts to help blacks. It is hard to believe that they have become so altruistic and that they aren't still responding to the fear of being overtaken if blacks are elevated in any minor way.
Once again, I point to the sole outrage in affirmative action left for the right is apparently over professional and elite university admissions, where in most cases the universities admission policies are justified. It is just a minor portion of what has been going on in these universities since they were founded. These highly selective universities reserve the right to make up their student bodies any way that they want for any reason that they want.
As long as the concept of race has such a hold on our society the professional universities believe that each race deserves to have doctors, lawyers, etc. from their own race. This is not unreasonable. Remember that an extremely conservative Supreme Court found that this is justifiable, as well as the idea that the universities should have control over who they admit. Note that this is now only the case for private universities, public universities have for the most part, strict color blind policies imposed by conservative state legislatures, except in the professional schools as I pointed out. No one is being denied an education by these admission requirements. Not like blacks were denied an education in the era of legalized racism.
Racism is still rampant in hiring in the private sector. This results in blacks being over represented in the public sector. And predictably, disingenuous conservatives see this as further evidence of inverse racism.
Racism is still rampant in education. Blacks are still over represented in the underprivileged. The schools that serve the underprivileged are poorly supported, a result of the uneven funding created by the reliance on property taxes. The solution is a more even funding of the schools, but this is opposed because it would mean sending our money to help others, a strict redline of redistribution for conservatives. The intentional redistribution of money is required in a capitalistic system where the system over rewards capital and rentiers and under rewards labor and invention.
The idea that this should be ignored results in large degree of pain to the poor and disproportionately then to blacks. This is racism from specious economics, fully supported by the grateful sponsors and beneficiaries of movement conservatism, the already wealthy. The redistribution of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the already wealthy, supported by conservatives largely because of its appeal to their residual racism and sexism. How else can you explain the singular most striking racial imbalance in this support, the large number of white middle and lower class men who support the wealthy against the men's own economic interests?
The belief in the fantasy of the self-regulating free market is a symptom of the delusion, not an explanation. There is no reason from history or from economic theory to believe that the free market can exist or that it would provide better economic results than we have right now.
Are there any other reasons for this level of support for
laissez faire economics among white middle class and poor men?
What I don't support is the national basic income. It will always be derided by the right as welfare (or an entitlement) even if everyone receives it. You don't have to look any further than long time the Republican targets of Medicare and Social Security to see the truth of this. Most people would see most or all of their national income taken away in the higher taxes needed to pay for it. And it would subsidize lower wages. We will get more of anything that the government subsidizes. Just look at the example of tax cuts for the rich.
All that we need to do is to stop intentionally suppressing wages to increase profits. This is the way that we built up the income and wealth inequality over forty years. Start doing those things that we know boost wages, raise the minimum wage, encourage unions, discourage globalization and capital and IP flight, etc. This will take a long time to work but won't be as abrupt of a change as the universal income.
Raising incomes does risk inflation if done too quickly. This is because of the immediate effect of wage increases, above inflation, on the economy. You have to allow for production to catch up with the new demand. Unlike raising profits and the incomes of the already rich which doesn't produce inflation because it for the most part doesn't impact the economy, only the cost of real estate, the stock market and niche sectors of luxury goods like expensive and collectible automobiles, the so-called good inflation of capital gains, considered to be good apparently because it is inflation that benefits the wealthy.
A good start would be to pass a law that the sole purpose of a corporation isn't just to make profits for the owners but that they have an equal responsibility to the well being of their employees and to society in general. There doesn't have to be any ratios set or any punishment attached, only that this is how we expect corporations to be run from here on. Their annual reports should then detail how they have discharged their three coequal responsibilities and how the management is being rewarded for balancing them. In other words instead of using their excess profits for the economic masterbation of buying back their own stock to drive the stock price higher, to inflate its value, they would be encouraged to raise wages with a portion. This would be secretly be met with some relief by management. An ever increasing stock price puts pressure on management to increase profits higher and higher. In my experience with the German system in which the corporate responsibilities are split as I have proposed, the management and the labor are much more in tune with one another both working toward success for the corporation.
I also would be interested in the idea of the corporation being able to own themselves, to buy their own stock on the open market to the point that they own themselves. Under current accounting rules if a corporation owns more than 50% of the outstanding shares it is bankrupt because the outstanding shares are a liability of the corporation, not an asset. Therefore they would be converting assets, the excess profits above what is needed for reinvestment, into buying back the stock that remains a liability. The corporation has to retire the stock making it disappear to maintain the 50% of the outstanding shares available to the market in order to be a public corporation.
But if the corporation could own itself it could be operated for the dual purpose of supporting the employees and serving the customers, without the complications that an employee owned cooperative has with the dual nature of the employee/owner.
My wife is an employee/owner of a closely held private, professional corporation. The only stockholders are the licensed professional engineers employed by the company. When a shareholder retires or goes to another company they must sell their stock to another licensed engineer who is employed by the company. My wife owns the largest portion of the stock and she now wants to retire, but she can't sell all of her stock, largely because she bought so much of the stock to allow others to retire without having to lower the stock price. We are now caught in a legal nightmare. She is working just 24 hours a week, drawing a reduced salary. (And because she had to keep her health care insurance because she had breast cancer last year.)
We are now meeting with our lawyers to work out what to do, we probably will allow non-licensed engineers to buy stock, with the promise that they will become licensed when they can, to preserve the nature of the professional corporation. This nature is required by our errors and omissions insurer. A professional engineer is personally responsible for their errors and those of the non-licensed engineers and designers that work for them. The form of the corporation can't absolve them of this responsibility, unlike the executives of corporations, where the corporation is a sentient being, responsible for the mistakes of its management, who bear no personal responsibility for their own mistakes or their crimes.
Sorry that I continue to go on so long. I am not disagreeing with you. I don't normally. But it is a chance for me to put down my thoughts to see if they make any sense, I know that you will give them a read and point out any blemishes, without repeating the worn out, barely understood stock arguments.
