Fight and Defeat Racism, Enough of 'Healing' Talk in Baraboo, Wisconsin

Baraboo, Wisconsin - We're white and proud of it.

Baraboo white boys deserve a medal

Madison, Wisconsin — The worst place to be black in the nation is Wisconsin.

That's because of, in part, the work of provincial, small-town bureaucrats exemplified in Baraboo, Wisconsin — home of the Nazi salute and white-power iconography.

Nothing to see here, just a bunch of crazy kids, is the current line of crap emitted by Baraboo Mayor Mike Palm and Baraboo School District Administrator Lori Mueller and other damage-control, say-nothing know-nothings, (Susan Endres, WISC-TV).

Baraboo is Wisconsin.
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I lived here all my life.

My first 19 years, I lived in Fond du Lac — where nigger jokes and Jew jokes were frequent, and black people, at least in 1970s-early 1980s, did not reside.

I never met or saw one black person in Fondy, and I was a runner at the time and from a news family. I knew or at least encountered the entire City north-to-south, east-to-west many-times over.
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Reporting from Baraboo on the first of three community meetings, Susan Endres, (WISC-TV), reveals some hope for an open acknowledgement of reality, as opposed to the bureaucratic blather of Baraboo School District Administrator Lori Mueller:

Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman said she doesn’t wish to condemn the boys, many of whom probably didn’t understand the meaning of the salute or intend to cause harm, but noted that the image must be viewed in the context of growing anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia.

'While seeing the image of a Nazi salute has a particular effect on Jews, this isn’t just about Jews. This about white supremacy,' she said, eliciting applause from the audience. 'There cannot be healing until we acknowledge and confront the political climate in which we live.' 

That's right.

For shining a light, however harsh, on the ongoing obscenity of Wisconsin, the kids deserve a medal.

Republican Party Base Is Racist, Anti-Semitic and Fundamentalist

Baraboo, Wisconsin youth offers display of community pride

Updated: See also Jonah Raskin: A California Jew in a Time of Anti-Semitism, in CounterPunch.

Madison, Wisconsin — News out of Baraboo High School that students gave a NAZI salute posing for a Prom picture should surprise noone.

The same racist minds can be found in DeForest, Wisconsin with a police force stacked with bigots.

Or, in Fitchburg, Wisconsin with City Hall similarly full of white malignant bureaucrats and too-many corrupt, racist cops.

They vote Republican. They're white and proud of it. And racists are everywhere here. See S. Ani Mukherji in the Boston Review.

Small-town Wisconsin and rural USA are the vanguard for the White Party, the Republican Party, and criminal, hateful and violent conduct is given a free pass.

If you are a racist, Christian fundamentalist who works against Jews, Muslims and atheists, Trump and the White Party have a home for you.

You can be attorney general.

Where America is going is unclear:

Matthew Whitaker said that non-Christians should not be judges?
That concept was embodied in Germany’s “Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” Law of 1933.
Whitaker needs to go — now!https://t.co/uwWEQh0F7n via @HolocaustMuseum

— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) November 13, 2018

Time to speak out.

Notes ThinkProgress this morning:

In the United States as in other countries, those old demons include Nazis and other variations of white nationalists, modern iterations of whom strongly support nationalist leaders like Trump and whom Trump has praised in return. When white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville last year, for instance — one of them even murdering a counter-protester by driving into a crowd with his car — Trump insisted there were 'very fine people' on both sides of the demonstration. 

We know where Baraboo, Wisconsin stands, where the Republican Party stands.
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A book to read for the Hitler youth of small-town America:

Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (University of Chicago Press. ©1955).

Mayer, an American Jewish writer who had gone to Germany in the 1930s, made friends with 10 people, all of whom were members of the NAZI Party. He found them courteous, funny, genuine human beings whom he called "friends."

They were also fools and certainly were guilty.
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From Milton Mayer:

But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time." ...

Fascist America Remains a Grave Danger, Giant Step Backwards Looms

Madison, Wisconsin—Fascism is here in the United States, and has been since our nation's birth.

In our country built upon slavery, social dominance, and enduring, widespread imbecilic conceptions of race, fascism is a defining feature of America, an exercise in domestic terror.

If you're a black person at, or past adolescence walking, driving, shopping or breathing, there remains an expectation of police harassment, perhaps prison, and death-by-cop is a distinct possibility. [Note to black readers: Avoid Fitchburg, Wisconsin, in Dane County.]

Carving out a career while advocating human rights risks jail time and death in America; ask colleagues and friends of the late Sandra Brand, driven to suicide by Texas police.

Occasional massacres and 1,000-plus annual police killings are the norm, not tragic anomalies, (Kantrowitz, Mal Contends). But as President* Donald Trump struts and fumbles about, fascism can become much worse, taking us back as the last 60 years have more-or-less seen forward strides in human rights.

So, when Trump makes sadistic public appeals as the chief executive, the terror that Trump strikes is a familiar experience to a lot of Americans.

It matters what a president says. It matters that Trump minimized the Holocaust in one of his first public statements.

This lunatic is dangerous and in virtually every policy sphere is a public menace.

Today, every American should be ready with a plan to support Robert Mueller.

America already is a police state in many municipalities with occupying forces politically aligned with Trump.

Consider what is the predictable reaction of Trump to a criminal indictment of any member of his family or Trump himself? A lunatic in the White House is capable of inflicting much damage to our country.

Democrats and proponents of the experiment that is America need to stand up for the values and standards that animate their popular movements.

This means actively supporting Robert Mueller. This means actively speaking against Roy Moore.

That means speaking up loudly against Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, to pass a tax cut that will greatly benefit the wealthiest corporations and individuals, as a prelude to devastating Social Security and Medicare.

Democrats are not adept at getting their messages across to the American people.

Sure, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and sometimes Joe Biden speak eloquently on the ideals that make America great.

But the messages of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump must resonant louder or at least hit more chords with a majority or Trump wouldn't be sitting in the Oval Office and Bannon would not be getting Republicans to support the child-molester, Roy Moore.

The lights are blinking red.

Romare Beardon's work on American lynching

Fascism Today

Hundreds marched for peace and children in Madison,
Wisconsin on August 26 2017. Marchers led by youth
questioned the necessity of police and criminals
shooting them, saying, "I want to live."
Photo by Paul McMahon, (Heartland Images)

Madison, Wisconsin — At some future point in American intellectual life, racism will be recognized as a deranged condition, indexed in psychopathology and the political annals of lunacy.

Putting aside the inherent problems in the psychiatric field working by metaphor and abstraction, a belief in race is delusional and is a dangerous pathology.

The abiding belief in race and the anti-human behavior this delusion causes is not dysfunctional in American society.

The resurgence of American racism led by Donald Trump today builds upon the ideological ground on which America was founded: Genocide, social dominance, enslavement and terror. Trump is in a sense the logical inheritor of American racism.

It behooves the reader to consider the foundational aspects of deadly and torturous racism when one reads the daily ravings emitted from the White House, because oppression and control of ethnic minorities is as American as the military-industrial state.

On the up side, Paul Krugman has his swing back for some time now.

His piece in today's New York Times is a joy:

As sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., Joe Arpaio engaged in blatant racial discrimination. His officers systematically targeted Latinos, often arresting them on spurious charges and at least sometimes beating them up when they questioned those charges. Read the report from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and prepare to be horrified.

Once Latinos were arrested, bad things happened to them. Many were sent to Tent City, which Arpaio himself proudly called a 'concentration camp,' where they lived under brutal conditions, with temperatures inside the tents sometimes rising to 145 degrees.

And when he received court orders to stop these practices, he simply ignored them, which led to his eventual conviction — after decades in office — for contempt of court. But he had friends in high places, indeed in the highest of places. We now know that Donald Trump tried to get the Justice Department to drop the case against Arpaio, a clear case of attempted obstruction of justice. And when that ploy failed, Trump, who had already suggested that Arpaio was 'convicted for doing his job,' pardoned him.

By the way, about 'doing his job,' it turns out that Arpaio’s officers were too busy rounding up brown-skinned people and investigating President Barack Obama’s birth certificate to do other things, like investigate cases of sexually abused children. Priorities!

Let’s call things by their proper names here. Arpaio is, of course, a white supremacist. But he’s more than that. There’s a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law: What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style.

Fascism has been here for some time.

Trump just targeted elite sectors of American society positioned and inclined to fight back.

Old Bigot McCain Rushes to Aid of White Supremacist Sessions

 Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III from Alabama
sees defending Donald Trump as mission of Justice Department

Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) heard enough of the uppity woman from California, Sen. Kamala Harris, pummeling Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III from Alabama and challenging his "honor."

Harris had the gall to disorder the racist, former senator now serving as United States Attorney General, making the southern man, "nervous."

At a hearing of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sessions was questioned by Sen. Harris who persisted in examining Sessions' "batter-fried nonsense," (Pierce, Esquire), that his refusal to answer questions about President Trump was justified by the long-standing, secret DoJ policy that the attorney general could not cite because it does not exist.

Sen. Harris was having none of Sessions' making up policy, and her questioning made Sessions look ridiculous.

But the old, bigoted Sen. McCain from Arizona who in 1983 voted against Martin Luther King, Jr. Day could not watch his racist, "I may have said something about the NAACP being un-American or Communist, but I meant no harm by it," friend fold on national television, certainly not under examination by a woman, (Mal Contends), (Washington Post).

Sessions was denied a federal judgeship in 1986 by the Republican-controlled Senate Committee on the Judiciary, which voted down Sessions 10-8 for being "unfit," (Phillips, Washington Post, New York Times).

No problem for McCain. McCain championed the Sessions nomination to attorney general this year, and is now running political interference for the old bastard as attorney general.

Notes Jonathan Chait, (New York Magazine):

Is the policy is written down, she asked? 'I think so,' replied Sessions — an answer lacking the level of legal precision one might hope to get from the federal government’s top attorney. Harris tried to drill down into just how Sessions learned about this policy. Sessions said he had followed a 'principle,' which apparently is more of an oral tradition or something. That’s when John McCain, off-camera, jumped in to complain about Harris’s questioning. 

It appears McCain is following his own long-standing, secret policy with respect to coming to the aid of racists.

2017 is not 1986. It's starting to look like 1956 when being a racist was not a disqualification for high government positions.

Wisconsin Republicans Coexist with Peninsula Paradise

Yoda has advice for white Wisconsinites voting Republican

Water and racist politics get around in the Wisconsin Peninsula

Updated - Nobody visiting Wisconsin likes cow shite in their beer and rightfully so.

But in their water, that's okay with a bare majority of folks who live here.

Consider the people living in Wisconsin's peninsula jutting out into Lake Michigan, offering a political culture approximating the Badger State as a whole.

Two overwhelmingly white, sparsely populated counties—Door and Kewaunee—comprise the beautiful peninsula with a combined voting population of some 28,000 people in the 2016 presidential election, (Wisconsin Elections Commission, County by County Report - President of the United States Recount).

And no matter how clear the value of fresh, safe water may appear with the massive Lake Michigan staring these folks in the face every day, there is roughly 50 percent of the voting population of the peninsula that will vote anti-water Republican and Scott Walker-and-Jesus-loves-polluters, (Wisconsin Elections Commission) as the state abandons water protection under Republicans' anti-water agenda.

Political strategists looking for an effective counter to the white, rural and small-town Republican lock look at water politics with hope. But right now at this moment, despite huge organizing successes for clean and safe water citizen groups, electorally, polluting the water past safety and decency plays okay.

A reader today can visit the Kewaunee County webpage and read about the stunning natural resources, a new Revamped Tourism website, alongside of new Well Water Testing Presentations by Dr. Mark Borchardt, and Dr. Maureen Muldoon on the danger of cow feces in your drinking and bath water from Republican-supported factory farms, how to test for fecal contamination in your water, and how water wells work in different geological regions. Kind of sciencey so Republicans are not too thrilled with the presentations.

To be Republican in Wisconisn is as well to cast your lot consonant with the constant racist appeals to white Wisconsin that goes back decades. [In 1983 for example, Wisconsin supplied a full three of the 90 House votes against the establishment of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: racists Reps Tom Petri, (R-Fond du Lac), Toby Roth, (R-Green Bay), and James Sensenbrenner (R-Whitefish Bay) (Gov Track), (Mal Contends)].

Racist politics are no problem as in no deal breaker. Northeastern and east-central Wisconsin remain white, racist and proud, for example.

Donald Trump could call for a final solution to the black and brown problem, and roughly 14,000 of the 28,000-voting gentle peninsula folk would go along.

This with, broadly speaking, heightened consciousness of the value of water and of Latino workers in the polluting factory dairy operations. Yep, Latino folks have a 'role to play' in Wisconsin, but this role has nothing to do with their humanity.

Two residents of the Wisconsin peninsula offer an analysis of Republican politics and the nascent destruction of safe water in northeastern Wisconsin: Don Freix, small business owner in Door County in the Door County Daily News, and Nancy Utesch, small farmer in Kewaunee County in the Capital Times. Both pieces are worth reading repeatedly.

Writes Utesch:

The Department of Natural Resources' recent low-key roll-out of help for Kewaunee County residents dealing with contamination so great that they cannot drink nor should they bathe in their water highlights the DNR’s continued failures, lack of integrity, and continued lack of urgency in responding to Kewaunee’s health and water crisis.

Lack of urgency, as in come to Wisconsin' peninsula but don't drink the water but at least there are plenty of white people and pretty leaves in the Fall.

James Sensenbrenner Remains One of Six in Congress Who Opposed Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Wisconsin U.S. House roll call vote in 1983 on establishment
of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a legal public holiday, (GovTrack)

Updated - The birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. is celebrated as a national holiday on the third Monday of January every year.

President Reagan signed the Rev. King Holiday bill (H.R. 3706 (1983)), into law on November 2, 1983. Only three people have a national holiday observed in their honor (Congress.Gov), (White House).

[Note: No links are made here to the The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change website, (funded by by J.P. Morgan Chase Co.), or The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr. because these groups see fit to copyright and privatize speeches, images and photos of King, profiting from a leader of the American civil rights movement.]

Getting Martin Luther King's birthday through congress as a legal national holiday was a difficult legislative process.

Wisconsin Republicans' Shameful Performance

If you are from Wisconsin, the Congressional record reveals familiar Republican names who were loyal members of the opposition to King: Reps Tom Petri, (R-Fond du Lac), Toby Roth, (R-Green Bay), and James Sensenbrenner (R-Whitefish Bay) (Gov Track).

These three Wisconsin congressmen represented overwhelming white districts in east-central and northeastern Wisconsin, and suburban Milwaukee. Petri, Roth and Sensenbrenner were among 90 House members who joined segregationists and white supremacists in opposing the King holiday in an August 2, 1983 vote that sent H.R. 3706 (1983) to the United States Senate (Gov Track) (Congress.Gov), (New York Times).

The years-long battle featured a fierce debate in 1979 in which the "strongest opposition came from lawmakers in the Deep South, such as Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, and Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina, who ran for president in 1948 on a segregationist platform," (Stack, New York Times). Still the deep south had nothing on the rural north with respect to racism. Reps. Petri, Roth and Sensenbrenner all played to their white rural and suburban constituencies.

Racism Lives

Six serving members of Congress— Senators Charles Grassley (R-Iowa); Richard Shelby (R-Alabama); John McCain (R-Arizona); Orrin Hatch (R-Utah); and United States Representatives Hal Rogers (R-Kentucky) and James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin)—remain what is left of the congressional opposition who worked against Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (Mal Contends), (Washington Post). All six were reelected in 2016, and all six represent very white and very safe Republican jurisdictions today.

If you live in Arkansas, Alabama, or Mississippi today you can jointly observe Robert E. Lee Day, to give some balance to this most-uppity of black men (Little, National Geographic).

Bill introduced by Rep. Katie Hall [D-IN1, 1981-1984] on July 29, 1983, H.R. 3706 (98th):
A bill to amend title 5, United States Code, to make the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
a legal public holiday. 98th Congress, Aug 2, 1983, (Congress.Gov)

It is more important than ever to observe Martin Luther King's birthday as a moment to celebrate the abolitionist and civil-rights movements that remain today a promise still unfulfilled.

Charleston Is an Act of Domestic Terrorism, by Definition

Update: " The murders of nine churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, is being investigated by the Justice Department as a possible case of domestic terrorism, a U.S Justice Department spokeswoman said on Friday." (Reuters)
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The Charleston Massacre (Grandin, The Nation, New York Times) is much worse than a hate crime from the American South.

It is an act of domestic terrorism by definition and should be treated as such.

18 U.S. Code § 2331 (5)
the term “domestic terrorism” means activities that—
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended—
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
(C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.

This is an easy call.

"Black churches suffered at the hands of thugs and terrorists throughout the Civil Rights era, as they had for a century before, but such attacks aren’t a matter of remote history. As recently as the 1990s, a wave of fire-bombings hit black churches," notes Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.

Perhaps the Republican Party can see its racial taunts, racist dog whistles and its war on black Americans should cease immediately.

Perhaps Scott Walker and Paul Ryan could begin the cease fire; I wouldn't count on it.

Hillary Gets Behind Brandi Grayson and We Win

Human beings

Hillary Clinton should champion minorities now

 Scott Walker has in his own words tried to "divide and conquer" the Wisconsin people.

Brandi Grayson of Young, Gifted and Black (Facebook) has a retort to Walker and the Republicans and their persistent message from our society: State violence and the attacks assaulting Ms. Grayson as less than human will be met with resistance.

Hillary Clinton listens to Grayson, and we all win.

Walker and the Republicans will continue to divide and try to conquer.

As for the police killing people, well more intellectuals and civil rights activists on the force would be a nice start.

Try love, put away your bullets.

Try peace, measure your success by the vacancies of jails and prisons.

Long live Tony Robinson.