SimpleDon
Veteran Member
You are all mostly wrong. You are all a little bit right. You are fighting racial skirmishes in a class war. Neither conservatives nor liberals can win because you all have no idea of the nature of the war. You all have no idea of who the enemy is and no idea of the degree to which you are being played for fools.
Race is being used as it always has been, to divert attention away from the real conflict and to divide and conquer. Successfully, judging by the responses in this and most of the other threads here.
Race is a reliable way of separating people who otherwise share common interests. Instead of coming together to demand a more reasonable share of the surplus produced by the economy, race pits two groups of the disadvantaged against one another fighting over relative scraps being dropped from a table overflowing with plenty.
Conservatives believe that blacks are being boosted above whites by the federal government, into positions that they aren't qualified for or that others are more qualified for. That this is the single greatest problem that we face as a society in the sphere of race relations, the problem of reverse racism which is racism against whites because of affirmative action. That the most obvious symptom of this reverse racism visible today is the Black Lives Matters movement because all lives matter, not just black lives.
This beyond delusional. Yes, of course, the gains of blacks and women will come at the cost of the white males, but only if you accept the zero sum, low growth economy of the maximum profits at the cost of wages, of GDP labor share and of reduced demand. Which conservatives are being conned into voting for in election after election.
Liberals are still fighting the racial battles that were won forty years ago. Probably because they don't have the stomach for fighting the real war, the class war that by conceding they are losing by default. Or because they have given up their connection to the workers perhaps they believe that they benefit from the ever growing income inequality. In either case they are wrong.
Yes, systemic racism still exists, the residual of 400 years of legal racism of the worse sort. Yes, there is, as a result, a minor amount of residual white privilege. But it isn't there because of the racists who still walk among us. It is ridiculous to believe that they have any power or control anymore, they have willingly given it up. Largely so that they can maintain the racism that they still cling to, racism that serves only one group, the already rich.
It is in the interests of all of the 99% of lower earners to end poverty now by increasing wages and decreasing profits. It is the only solution that will simultaneously increase growth in the economy, reduce the dependence of people on the government, stabilize the financial markets by reducing the glut of financial capital available and to reduce the dangerous, escalating increases of private debt, the driver of the business cycle and the primary reason for periodic recessions.
What is standing in the way of this solution is more than sixty years of misinformation and conditioning by the neoliberals working consciously or unconsciously to increase income inequality, to increase the incomes of the already rich, without the support of any coherent body of economic theory, just a grab bag of disjointed memes with instructions on when to use them.
I don't know why I bother. I am no genius, I am an engineer who pursues reality devoid of any concessions to an ideology. These things are amazingly simple to understand and the mainstream economists are just beginning to realize this. I have repeated these things so often here with no measurable impact. We have almost daily racial skirmishes while conceding the larger war without a fight.
Race is being used as it always has been, to divert attention away from the real conflict and to divide and conquer. Successfully, judging by the responses in this and most of the other threads here.
Race is a reliable way of separating people who otherwise share common interests. Instead of coming together to demand a more reasonable share of the surplus produced by the economy, race pits two groups of the disadvantaged against one another fighting over relative scraps being dropped from a table overflowing with plenty.
Conservatives believe that blacks are being boosted above whites by the federal government, into positions that they aren't qualified for or that others are more qualified for. That this is the single greatest problem that we face as a society in the sphere of race relations, the problem of reverse racism which is racism against whites because of affirmative action. That the most obvious symptom of this reverse racism visible today is the Black Lives Matters movement because all lives matter, not just black lives.
This beyond delusional. Yes, of course, the gains of blacks and women will come at the cost of the white males, but only if you accept the zero sum, low growth economy of the maximum profits at the cost of wages, of GDP labor share and of reduced demand. Which conservatives are being conned into voting for in election after election.
Liberals are still fighting the racial battles that were won forty years ago. Probably because they don't have the stomach for fighting the real war, the class war that by conceding they are losing by default. Or because they have given up their connection to the workers perhaps they believe that they benefit from the ever growing income inequality. In either case they are wrong.
Yes, systemic racism still exists, the residual of 400 years of legal racism of the worse sort. Yes, there is, as a result, a minor amount of residual white privilege. But it isn't there because of the racists who still walk among us. It is ridiculous to believe that they have any power or control anymore, they have willingly given it up. Largely so that they can maintain the racism that they still cling to, racism that serves only one group, the already rich.
It is in the interests of all of the 99% of lower earners to end poverty now by increasing wages and decreasing profits. It is the only solution that will simultaneously increase growth in the economy, reduce the dependence of people on the government, stabilize the financial markets by reducing the glut of financial capital available and to reduce the dangerous, escalating increases of private debt, the driver of the business cycle and the primary reason for periodic recessions.
What is standing in the way of this solution is more than sixty years of misinformation and conditioning by the neoliberals working consciously or unconsciously to increase income inequality, to increase the incomes of the already rich, without the support of any coherent body of economic theory, just a grab bag of disjointed memes with instructions on when to use them.
I don't know why I bother. I am no genius, I am an engineer who pursues reality devoid of any concessions to an ideology. These things are amazingly simple to understand and the mainstream economists are just beginning to realize this. I have repeated these things so often here with no measurable impact. We have almost daily racial skirmishes while conceding the larger war without a fight.