Trump's Racist Shithole Comment Defines Modern Republicans

From Patrice Piard and a Hatian shithole comes art

A shithole is the home of the Republican Party

Madison, Wisconsin—In American politics, President* Trump's descent into racist vulgarity is as Republican as stopping women from deciding if they wish to bear children, a deliberation Republicans believe belongs to the state.

A deep pit of psychopathology is where modern Republican politics reside in the grand tradition of American white supremacy. Trump is simply less subtle and openly proud of the gutters in which he takes residence.

Variants of nigger jokes and rhetoric among self-loathing whites have always played well in Wisconsin for example, and without the specific support of the white supremacist vote, we would not have this lunatic in office today.

In 2018 Scott Walker seeks reelection.

Following the example of Gov. Tommy Thompson, (1987-2001), Walker may think himself a political savant in appealing to racist sentiment to get elected, but sounding racist dog whistles takes no more acuity than telling racist jokes and loudly musing those blacks should get a job and feed their own kids.

Shitholes?

A shithole is the home of the Republican Party.

The slow-motion pogrom led by Trump, Ryan and assorted
billionaires. Victims are black and brown and white.
Image: George Grosz, God of War, 1940

Signing Tom Steyer's Petition to Impeach Trump Is One Step, an Important Step

America's top dolt is targeting Wisconsin in its Lost Decade

'Spread the damn word'

Popular citizen action forced Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon from office.

Containing citizen action has been an objective of the two prominent political parties resulting in the steady degradation of working families to the spectacle of the 2016 election featuring a lunatic and the odious Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, the left-center bulk of the electorate has become so marginalized and confused, its support for President* Trump was partially composed of Trump as a perceived vanguard against black, brown and Muslim hoards who work with corporations against you somehow, (Mal Contends, McCrummen, Washington Post, Chris Hayes Show).

Each new generation comes of age learning to blame black, brown, immigrant, liberal, elite and the flavor of the month for whatever ails white people.

It is clear Trump, allies Scott Walker, Paul Ryan and the rest of the Republipukes with no exceptions are attempting a massive heist of the middle class to the corporate class.

Time to wake up, banana republics tend not to fare well.

One step, a thing to do, is to express popular sentiment to impeach Trump. One vehicle is to sign Tom Steyer's impeachment petition that has now drawn over 3,000,000 signatures.

Make opposing Republicans and Trump your civic duty in your community, in Alabama.

Tuesday is election day in Alabama. Protest this motherfucker where ever you are. Spread the damn word.
Get in the streets on Dec 12.
THIS NIGHTMARE MUST END.#NoMoore #nofascistusa #TrumpPenceMustGo https://t.co/jwrebJVmvD

— #TrumpPenceMustGo (@RefuseFascism) December 8, 2017

Wisconsin Is about Race

An IWW anti-Klan poster from the 1920s.
(Ruff, Facebook)

Madison, Wisconsin — In 2011, the eyes of the nation looked askance at Wisconsin as a racist Evangelical from Iowa bragged to a man believed to be David Koch that one Scott Walker would not back down on his secret designs to depress wages for working families.

Walker has not backed down.

And Walker has proven adept using the Republican Party playbook inflicting race and myriad others as the political tool for inflicting the Republican anti-democratic legislative project in Wisconsin, including ongoing programs against voting, and gerrymandering.

White supremacy and social dominance and terror are defining features of America.

In Wisconsin where progressives still have a powerful presence, it is instructive to consider the magnitude of labor and progressives' fight against white supremacy and white terror.

One problem facing forces fighting racists today is the German ancestors of the 21rst and 20th century have rejected the socialist and anarchist roots of the 19th century, substituting a racist and anti-Semitic ethos where in this writer's lifetime 'nigger' and 'Jew' jokes were told in public settings in east-central Wisconsin with the assurance the humor met an appreciative audience.

This horror of Wisconsin is the margin of Donald Trump's victory, and Scott Walker's gubernatorial runs.

How effectively the opposition performs against Walker and contemporary racists remains to be seen but the heart and soul of Wisconsin's work for equality resides in the cities and universities, which remain targets of fascists. 

Kiron and Kenosha—Dumb and Dumber

White and proud of it. Freedom ain't free. Jesus is watching.

Washington Post reporter, Stephanie McCrummen, penned a feature reporting from Kiron, Iowa revealing a defining characteristic of the white supremacist, Trump voters working to make America great again.

McCrummen paints a picture of people of this western Iowa town resembling a composite of Twilight Zone episodes, waking up to discover white supremacists reign in rural America, a psychopath has been elected to the presidency and a white-power party controls Congress.

Writes McCrummen:

Russell [Paulson] listened; he had known Walt [Miller]. At the age of 80, he knew almost everyone in Kiron, a town of 229 people, one of whom is U.S. Rep. Steve King, who has a house on the edge of town. Russell knew King, too, knew that he was the sort of person always stirring controversy, often by raging against what he called 'cultural suicide by demographic transformation.' More recently, King had said that 'we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,' a comment embraced by prominent white supremacists and widely condemned around the country as demonizing Latino and other non-European immigrants.

There was little controversy across King’s district, though, a swath of rural America made up of tiny towns with tiny, aging white populations that routinely elected King with more than 70 percent of the vote. In Kiron, people brushed it off as King being King, a man they all knew, expressing a plain truth they all understood: The white population was shrinking, and towns like theirs were vanishing, with the few exceptions being places such as Denison, a pork-processing town 20 minutes down the highway where population growth was being driven by immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

No, fretting about immigrants blocking restoration of civilization stirs little controversy in the Kirons of America.

Nor among the know-nothings in Kenosha, Kiron's cultural neighbor to the northeast.

Recall the Chris Hayes Show broadcast from Kenosha in December as Bernie Sanders patiently listened and took questions from confused Trump voters.

Reports Josh Feldaman in Mediaite from Dec. 2016:

During another part of the town hall, a Muslim woman spoke up about Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about a Muslims and immigrants on the campaign trail.

The reaction from the Trump voters to the Muslim ban was to say 1) they don’t want that to happen and 2) it won’t happen because either Trump didn’t mean it or Congress would never allow something like that.

Oops.

American political culture is going to have to come to grips with the fact that the Kirons and Kenoshas are full of people for whom bigotry, racism and hate are not disqualifying in candidates for public office, and the impolitic fact that Trump voters are kind-of stupid.

Each new generation comes of age, learning to blame black, brown, immigrant and the flavor of the month for whatever ails white people.

Trump is due in Kenosha today.

No doubt he'll offer dialogue with the natives as edifying as the conversations at the Quik Mart in Kiron, Iowa: What happened to America? Black, browns and Muslims did it.

Latent Criminals—Here They Come Again

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, The Making of
Mass Incarceration in America, (Harvard University Press)

What do you call three black men walking down the street?

Neighborhood destroyers, latent criminals. They're loud, black, brown, (some of them are really black). They're spoiling for a fight, disordering the peaceful citizens of white America.

Surly, the time has come to get behind Donald Trump who will take our country back. Republicans are amped-up. And the brown shirts are wearing blue and can be found in your local police departments, adjunct Republican Party units.

The paranoid escalation in the war on latent criminals means 'get them before they get us.'

This imbecilic posture toward people by racists is caught in the iconic shot of the 28-year-old nurse, Ieshia Evans, who was rushed by Louisiana riot police for walking in July 2016, (captured by Reuters photographer Jonathan Bachman).

Black man killed by American police in 2013

White America, under an openly racist banner, is off and running on a crash project in a few short weeks.

What do they want? To the extent one can discern coherency, Trumpians' views are "irrational, unscientific and demonstrably nonsensical," as Norman Cohn writes in Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, (1967).

Not so much desired policy, just reenactments of myths, some tangible way for pathological racists to feel good about themselves. The warrants are out. Time to wake up.

From Elizabeth Hinton and her From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, (Harvard University Press), 2016:

Johnson’s War on Poverty policies sought to foster equality and economic opportunity. But these initiatives were also rooted in widely shared assumptions about African Americans’ role in urban disorder, which prompted Johnson to call for a simultaneous War on Crime. The 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act empowered the national government to take a direct role in militarizing local police. Federal anticrime funding soon incentivized social service providers to ally with police departments, courts, and prisons. Under Richard Nixon and his successors, welfare programs fell by the wayside while investment in policing and punishment expanded. Anticipating future crime, policymakers urged states to build new prisons and introduced law enforcement measures into urban schools and public housing, turning neighborhoods into targets of police surveillance.

By the 1980s, crime control and incarceration dominated national responses to poverty and inequality. The initiatives of that decade were less a sharp departure than the full realization of the punitive transformation of urban policy implemented by Republicans and Democrats alike since the 1960s.

Lock them up, it's open season and happy hunting.

Ieshia Evans faces lunatics in Louisiana in July 2016. Get her, she's coming!

Republican Malignancy; Dolts and Boobs

Repellent persona of Scott Walker shoos away intellectual and
cultural talent from the progressive state. Walker is not alone.

The Republican effort to transform Wisconsin into a homeland resembling rural Iowa is a strategic mission, composed of many projects.

Republican politics employ excellent project management skill and strategic thinking with no equivalent force in Democratic-progressive efforts.

What's alarming is Republicans are not just building political infrastructure, usurping control of most every lever of regulatory and bureaucratic governmental function.

The dangers of the white party's enterprise lay in the concomitant demolition of civil society, institutions serving the public, and individual liberties—degrading Milwaukee, Madison, voting rights, public universities, public schools, labor unions, environmentalists, multi-generational families wedded to communities, small farmers, local democracy, all while appropriating public resources into the criminal justice system and prison-industrial complex.

One can go on, but suffice to note the Republican objectives are malignant and self-consciously destructive.

This social engineering project is nothing new in American politics, though the scope has been expanded as monied interests expend capital more freely.

It ought to be noted that repeated and ostentatious displays of xenophobia, ignorance, and the repellent persona of the dolt—as exhibited by the Evangelical Scott Walker—is functional to the Republican mission.

High-tech industry, gifted artists, social activists and young intellects are starting to turn away from Wisconsin, as the Republicans have hoped.

I caught the All In with Chris Hayes Show broadcast from Kenosha last night. Several Donald Trump voters explained their positions to Bernie Sanders and a small audience.

Brilliant show, and along with the election of November 2016, illustrates an inescapable conclusion.

White Wisconsin folk are utterly hopeless, and the ignorant, bigoted, irrational boobs emitting their nonsense from Kenosha portend a bleak future. But keep fighting.

Hate and American Domestic Terrorism

Today's Republican Party is so intimately tied to white supremacy as to be seamless, and there are plenty of bystanders.

African American church in South Carolina, Previously Burned Down by The KKK, Is on Fire, reads a headline (Legum, ThinkProgress). After Charleston, Black Churches Targeted by Arsonists Across the South (Covert, ThinkProgress) reads another. Police Investigating Fire at S.C. Black Church Once Burned Down by KKK (MacNeal, Talking Points Memo)

This is 2015 not 1958, but that's just chronology.

Hate lives on, the legacy of racial slavery lives on. "When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe," writes Ralph McGill 56 years ago.

"Let us face the facts. This is a harvest. It is the crop of things sown," observes McGill castigating the cowardly preachers and politicians of his day after temple, schools and churches were bombed and burned.

From the Fitchburg, Wisconsin Common Council to Scott Walker to the Republican Party presidential candidates: Stop preaching hate now; and to the bystanders [that would be Fitchburg]: Get off your ass.

A Church, A School
Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 13, 1958

By Ralph McGill

Dynamite in great quantity ripped a beautiful temple of worship in Atlanta. It followed hard on the heels of a like destruction of a handsome high school at Clinton, Tenn. The same rabid, mad-dog minds were, without question, behind both. They are also the source of previous bombings in Florida, Alabama, and South Carolina. The schoolhouse and the church were the targets of diseased, hate-filled minds.

Let us face the facts. This is a harvest. It is the crop of things sown.

It is the harvest of defiance of courts and the encouragement of citizens to defy law on the part of many Southern politicians. It will be the acme of irony, for example, if any one of four or five Southern governors deplore this bombing. It will be grimly humorous if certain attorneys general issue statements of regret. And it will be quite a job for some editors, columnists, and commentators, who have been saying that our courts have no jurisdiction and that the people should refuse to accept their authority, now to deplore.

It is not possible to preach lawlessness and restrict it.

To be sure, none said go bomb a Jewish temple or a school. But let it be understood that when leadership in high places in any degree fails to support constituted authority, it opens the gates to all those who wish to take law into their hands.

There will be, to be sure, the customary act of the careful drawing aside of skirts on the part of those in high places. "How awful!" they will exclaim. "How terrible. Something must be done."

But the record stands. The extremists of the citizens' councils, the political leaders who in terms violent and inflammatory have repudiated their oaths and stood against due process of law, have helped unloose this flood of hate and bombing.

This too is a harvest of those so-called Christian ministers who have chosen to preach hate instead of compassion. Let them now find pious words and raise their hands in deploring the bombing of a synagogue.

You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe.

Hate and lawlessness by those who lead release the yellow rats and encourage the crazed and neurotic who print and distribute the hate pamphlets - who shrieked that Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew - who denounce the Supreme Court as being Communist and controlled by Jewish influences.

This series of bombings is the harvest, too, of something else.

One of those connected with the bombing telephoned a news service early Sunday morning to say the job would be done. It was to be committed, he said, by the Confederate Underground.

The Confederacy and the men who led it are revered by millions. Its leaders returned to the Union and urged that the future be committed to building a stronger America. This was particularly true of General Robert E. Lee. Time after time he urged his students at Washington University to forget the War Between the States and to help build a greater and stronger union.

For too many years now we have seen the Confederate flag and the emotions of that great war become the property of men not fit to tie the shoes of those who fought it. Some of these have been merely childish and immature. Others have perverted and commercialized the flag by making the Stars and Bars, and the Confederacy itself, a symbol of hate and bombings.

For a long time now it has been needful for all Americans to stand up and be counted on the side of law and the due process of law - even when to do so goes against personal beliefs and emotions. It is late. But there is yet time.

America’s Long History of Racial Fear

By Stephen Kantrowitz

Calling [the June 17] shootings in Charleston a "tragedy" makes this explosion of murderous violence seem like an accident. It isn’t an accident. It is the legacy of an excruciating history that began with racial slavery and continued through the post-Civil War campaign to maintain white supremacy – a campaign that has persisted to the present day and which shapes how many white Americans think about and respond to black Americans.

At the heart of [the Charleston] violence is America’s history of chattel slavery, a labor system built on violence, in which all whites were effectively authorized to do violence to African Americans in order to keep them at work and prevent them from challenging their enslavement. But this brutal system also produced rebellions. Whites – even those who never owned a slave – lived with the fear that that racial order might be turned upside down, destroying everything that they held dear. In other words, whites attributed to blacks the same desire for domination that they themselves were exercising. It is no accident that the alleged shooter is reported to have said: “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country.”

The history of chattel slavery, upended in the Civil War, was followed by the history of Reconstruction, a moment during which America’s racial hierarchy was unsettled, and black people were able to claim a measure of political and civil equality. But the moment was a brief one. White conservatives all over the South, abetted by many white northerners, denounced the new interracial Southern governments as exactly the “world turned upside down” that they had feared during slavery. They overthrew those governments by force and fraud and set about reconstructing white supremacy as best they could without the law of slavery as a foundation.

The Reconstruction years thus gave way to another history: the continuing struggle by white supremacist activists to create and enforce Jim Crow’s exclusion, segregation, and lynching. This struggle took a lot of work, and it required that whites remain intensely fearful of blacks. One of the greatest victories of white supremacy in this era was to persuade whites that they confronted an epidemic of black men raping white women. Despite overwhelming evidence that this claim was unfounded (especially as revealed by Ida B. Wells-Barnett), the fantasy that predatory black men routinely victimized white women became the justification for lynching. Those fears may have run deepest in the South, where the great majority of the black population resided well into the twentieth century, but they found a home in the North and West as well.

As Jim Crow began to crack beneath the blows of the post-WWII black freedom movement, politicians drew on that history to sustain white racial domination. Scare campaigns against the Civil Rights Movement promised that civil and political equality would unleash black men’s alleged sexual ambitions and, once again, overturn a well-established racial hierarchy. The power and persuasiveness of those arguments helped explain the residential segregation and redlining across the North that lies at the heart of so many of today’s inequities. It lay behind the differential sentencing laws for powder and crack cocaine and undergirded the fearful discussion of “super-predators” in the 1980s and 1990s. It is still used to justify the overwhelmingly disproportionate police scrutiny, arrest, and conviction and incarceration of African Americans.

America’s long racial history of imagining blacks as fearsome, criminal, and bent on political and sexual domination has never gone away. This is not because the fantasy is real, but because it has played such a powerful role for hundreds of years. No wonder that it is so readily wielded as a weapon, whether through cynicism, ignorance, or ruthlessness. No wonder that its murderous version of history was so easy for Dylann Roof to find and embrace.

Dylan Roof’s murderous night is not simply a South Carolina tragedy. It is an expression and a consequence of American history – a history that the nation has hardly reckoned with, much less overcome.

--Stephen Kantrowitz is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of several books, including Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. (Chapter One, New York Times) (Book Review; Dew, New York Times)

[- Used with permission from author; from We're History -]

Color-Brave Approach on Race Is Color-Stupid

Police reformer/humanist David Couper has a talk out today by Mellody Hobson worth a listen because Hobson, as do many progressives, makes the mistake of failing to acknowledge that race is a "dangerous myth" (Ashley Montagu) and racists are—at best—foolish.

The pseudoscience of 'investigation' of race as a scientific concept is making a comeback as the Republican Party needs its Nicholas Wades and Jason Richwines to present their finding that not only is racial classification significant in analyzing the phenomena of "race," but the races have different intellectual capacities and character inclinations that ought inform public policy.

Ms. Hobson proffers that in fighting racism we should be "color-brave" instead of "color-blind" because this topic is apparently uncomfortable to the racists and other know-nothings.

Gee, why would the white party of segregation, dehumanization, racism and anti-immigration need Wade and Richwine ("a disciple of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray"), the Heritage Foundation and the resurgence of nineteenth century anthropology?

Ms. Hobson should consider the question; one hopes the answer is obvious.

Republican Racism: Full Speed Ahead

Labor Day weekend is for many reasons a mirth-filled holiday.

This particular weekend began with the American observance of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech.

To anyone with the slightest respect for civil rights and those who have given their lives, marking King's address was inspiring.

Republicans have a different view on civil rights; they're against them and racism remains as Republican as opposing a woman's choice.

While some Republicans cynically pay lip service to critical care for the Voting Rights Act, Republicans are reinvesting in racism, exclusion and disenfranchisement.

Locally in Wisconsin, the GOP's Christian Schneider dove deeper into the sewer, deciding that mocking MLK's address in a deplorable video posted by Schneider in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Purple Wisconsin is acceptable to his GOP audience.

I'm betting Republicans are wrong in calculating racism's politcal efficacy. Racist efforts will ultimately fail.

But it won't be for lack of trying.

The Voting Rights Act to be Argued in February before U.S. SC

Racism is gone from America?

The Voting Rights Act enacted in 1965 is set to be Argued in February before the United States Supreme Court in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder.

Few are optimistic that the Roberts Court will not take a sledgehammer to this pillar of the modern civil rights movement.

To no one's surprise the case pits those who are pro-voting and pro-democracy against the those who cannot stand the thought that black, brown and yellow Americans are hitting the voting polls at what they view as alarming rates.

Elections are for white Americans; proper, land-owning, white Americans.

Jeffrey Toobin sums up the case in The New Yorker.

No Republican, including those who voted for the Voting Rights Act's reauthorization in 2006, has spoken up and defended the Act against the judicial targeting by the Roberts Court.

Congress reauthorized the act by votes of 390 to 33 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate in 2006 for an additional 25 years.

In the 2009, the Roberts Court invited the challenge (Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder) now before the Court in another attack on non-Republican Americans.

As Toobin notes in 2009, "Even more than (Justice) Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."

Racism Is Bad for Business

Update: Paid a lunch-hour visit to the Chinese take-out joint (superb) at Meadowood. Numerous black men about, none of whom attacked me on sight. In the some 11 years I've lived in this area, I've made in the 100s of drop-ins to Meadowood and I'm batting a 1,000 in crime-free visits. Reading the description of the prospective Ace customers fearing for their safety, I'm guess I'm pushing my luck.
---
Three young black men joked and laughed outside Meadowood Barber Style Shop on Raymond Road and Whitney Way in Madison, Wisconsin early this morning.

Somebody call the police!

Better yet, don't call the police. More on that later.

These three young black men are doing nothing but being black and being young. Not a crime in this part of the country, and nothing to fear.

News that the Meadowood Ace Hardware on Madison's southwest side is closing (Adams. Wisconsin State Journal) has a lot of people talking in the Madison and Fitchburg neighborhoods around here.

The Ace owners on Raymond Road in a small shopping mall about 20 yards from the Meadowood Barber, point to declining sales, attributed to crime and a "troubled" neighborhood, the WSJ piece reports.

The evidence cited in the piece:

• A 2007 homicide in the neighborhood
• Gunfire from a passing car this last August
• More gunfire in an area northwest of the shopping center also this last August

Ace Hardware's owners are known as candid people.

No doubt their sales are down as they reluctantly close their doors here; but perhaps the worst drought in this area's recorded history and the economy might account for some of the drop in sales at the hardware store.

But another contributing factor is racism, fear of black people in the neighborhood driving away people who are not regular customers.

In fact, chatting with a local business neighbor of Ace's, word is that the regular Ace customers with Ace Hardware reward cards who live in the area are not dropping away as customers. Rather it is drive-by customers and other customers from out of the area who are not coming by as often.

This data is tracked by Ace reportedly, says a neighboring business man.

There's some black dudes; run away.

I pick up things at the Walgreen's in the shopping center, and regularly use the Meadowood Library and the barber as well. And I have never seen any crime, other than young black men being black.

As for these three black men in the lede. One of men is meeting with a U.S. military recruiter today and wanted to look sharp so he had a hair-cut at the barber's; and his two buddies were joking with the guy for wearing such short hair. Real threats to society, these guys.

Racism remains a pernicious pathology and social injustice. Racism is also plain ignorance and stupidity.

And it's bad for business. Ask the folks at the Meadowood Shopping Center.

The Lynching of Trayvon Martin

When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe

Update: Over 1,327,162 more signatures for justice.

Over nine hundred thousand people have signed a petition calling for the arrest of George Zimmerman who killed Trayvon Martin for being black.

But as imbecilic as Zimmerman is, let's call this murder what it is: A lynching.

Zimmerman felt entitled to hunt down, assault and then shoot to death Trayvon Martin while speaking to a 911 operator for one reason: Zimmerman is empowered to do so by the Florida statute and the political culture in which we live, one where a major political party constantly strokes racist sentiments among the population to get elected.

Culture does matter. So does political rhetoric.

We understand why President Obama cannot comment now, as press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday, "I note that the Justice Department has said that it’s looking into the matter, and I would refer you to the Justice Department. Obviously, our thoughts and prayers, as I said yesterday, are with Trayvon Martin’s family. But beyond that, not least because there is an investigation going on, I don't have anything else I can add."

But condemnation from Presidents Clinton and Carter, and the Bush family is called for. And that especially includes former Flordia Gov. Jeb Bush. Even Florida legislators who sponsored the Stand Your Ground law are speaking out. So where are the Republican candidates running for president? Not word one.

The family and folks such as Color for Change and the Congressional Black Caucus are driving this investigation for now.

If we cannot communicate a moral imperative for political leaders to speak up, consider the public safety imperative. A deadly riot broke out in 1991 after racist Los Angeles cops who beat Rodney King were acquitted.

Young Trayvon Martin was hunted down and lynched with the implicit approval of the Sanford, Florida police department, and a racist political culture.

So the next time the Republican Party plays their race card, like it is right now, consider the words of Ralph McGill in the Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 13, 1958, after the dynamiting of a Jewish Temple in Atlanta.

Let us face the facts. This is a harvest. It is the crop of things sown. It is the harvest of those so-called Christian ministers who have chosen to preach hate instead of compassion. Let them now find pious words and raise their hands in deploring the bombing of a synagogue. You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe.

Noam on Madison and the World

Wisconsin is still Ground Zero

By Noam Chomsky in TomGram

The democracy uprising in the Arab world has been a spectacular display of courage, dedication, and commitment by popular forces -- coinciding, fortuitously, with a remarkable uprising of tens of thousands in support of working people and democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, and other U.S. cities. If the trajectories of revolt in Cairo and Madison intersected, however, they were headed in opposite directions: in Cairo toward gaining elementary rights denied by the dictatorship, in Madison towards defending rights that had been won in long and hard struggles and are now under severe attack.

Each is a microcosm of tendencies in global society, following varied courses. There are sure to be far-reaching consequences of what is taking place both in the decaying industrial heartland of the richest and most powerful country in human history, and in what President Dwight Eisenhower called "the most strategically important area in the world" -- "a stupendous source of strategic power" and "probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment," in the words of the State Department in the 1940s, a prize that the U.S. intended to keep for itself and its allies in the unfolding New World Order of that day. ...

Those with a sense of irony may recall that Benjamin Franklin, one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment, warned that the newly liberated colonies should be wary of allowing Germans to immigrate, because they were too swarthy; Swedes as well. Into the twentieth century, ludicrous myths of Anglo-Saxon purity were common in the U.S., including among presidents and other leading figures. Racism in the literary culture has been a rank obscenity; far worse in practice, needless to say. It is much easier to eradicate polio than this horrifying plague, which regularly becomes more virulent in times of economic distress.

I do not want to end without mentioning another externality that is dismissed in market systems: the fate of the species. Systemic risk in the financial system can be remedied by the taxpayer, but no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed. That it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative. Business leaders who are conducting propaganda campaigns to convince the population that anthropogenic global warming is a liberal hoax understand full well how grave is the threat, but they must maximize short-term profit and market share. If they don't, someone else will.

This vicious cycle could well turn out to be lethal. To see how grave the danger is, simply have a look at the new Congress in the U.S., propelled into power by business funding and propaganda. Almost all are climate deniers. They have already begun to cut funding for measures that might mitigate environmental catastrophe. Worse, some are true believers; for example, the new head of a subcommittee on the environment who explained that global warming cannot be a problem because God promised Noah that there will not be another flood.

If such things were happening in some small and remote country, we might laugh. Not when they are happening in the richest and most powerful country in the world. And before we laugh, we might also bear in mind that the current economic crisis is traceable in no small measure to the fanatic faith in such dogmas as the efficient market hypothesis, and in general to what Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, 15 years ago, called the "religion" that markets know best -- which prevented the central bank and the economics profession from taking notice of an $8 trillion housing bubble that had no basis at all in economic fundamentals, and that devastated the economy when it burst.

All of this, and much more, can proceed as long as the Muashar doctrine prevails. As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

- Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are a new edition of Power and Terror, The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics and on language from the 1950s to the present, Gaza in Crisis, with Ilan Pappé, and Hopes and Prospects, also available as an audiobook. This piece is adapted from a talk given in Amsterdam in March.

Innocence Is No Defense

Update: See GOP Returns To "White Voter Strategy" for a look at why profiling and racism plays.

Oh yeah, Henry Louis Gates Jr is an innocent man. An insignificant detail not mentioned by those who cheerlead all the progress we have made in race relations and defend the cop who persecuted an innocent man.

Bob Herbert reminds us this morning of this minor detail of Prof Gates' innocence and the propensity of cops to target people of color.

No one is immune. Colin Powell told Larry King that he had been profiled many times. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke last week about how humiliated he felt as a college student when a cop made him stop his car and open the trunk so it could be searched for weapons.

Young, old, innocent as the day is long — it doesn’t matter. Your skin color can leave you perpetually vulnerable to a sudden and devastating criminal injustice.

Well, Gates like Colin Powell and Attorney General Eric Holder is black; so I guess he had it coming. We just need to ignore such distasteful facts like the man's innocence and understand the perpetrator because he wears a uniform and a badge.

'Any man's death diminishes me'

That headline above is from John Donne (1572-1631).

Donne's work intends such concerns to apply to life. Poetry instructs.

"When a man dies, it ought to be everybody's business."
- Disbelieving dude on Night Gallery, aired Sunday night in Milwaukee

"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;it tolls for thee."
- John Donne, Meditation XVII

I like black people and brown people. It's almost as though they are ... human. In the name of such humanity, it's seems a fine idea to challenge those who reject such sentiments professionally [like the ass Crawley who calls himself police], emphatically so when our society vests some fools as sworn law enforcement officers, keepers of the peace and protectors of the people. A man loses his liberty and outrage ought to follow.

Authority and Liberty

Update: "Blacks -- in particular, black men -- swap their experiences of police encounters like war stories." - Henry Louis Gates in the New Yorker (1995); from Liberal Cambridge Reflects on Racial Rift (Krissah Thompson and Cheryl W. Thompson) -

You, the reader—veteran, police, Marine, civilian, whatever—this moment are likely criminally responsible for breaking the law.

Be it federal, state, or municipal, you are criminally indictable for violating criminal statutes.

“With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone,” said Robert H. Jackson.

That was in 1941.

It’s fair to say the sphere of unlawful behavior has expanded immensely since then.

In this reality, we should expect police officers and prosecutors at all levels of government to exercise a measure of discretion, intelligence, and empathy in dealing their fellow citizens, their fellow human beings.

Recent events reconfirm that even approaching this imperative is elusive. The last thing we should do as a society is deprive another of liberty. Only when there is no other way should we resort to this drastic action.

As seen in the actions of Crawley of the Cambridge Police Department or Dalma of the Madison Police Dept [Cambridge and Madison are surely among America' most liberal places with a deep tradition of working for civil rights], too many police, prosecutors, and other politicians seem determined to reject the sage advice of Robert Jackson and are hostile to liberty.

Take Crawley. Does he really not understand why accosting a black man arriving back to his own home would illicit indignation and anger? Welcome home, Prof. Gates.

Apparently not, Crawley just needs to arrest somebody who challenges his imperial vision of himself.

I have a lot of dealings with real police and military veterans through family and friends. And this type of cop or military officer as Crawley is universally reviled; Crawley’s a scumbag seeking out ass-kissers.

Here’s an example of discretion.

A couple summers back, my girlfriend was driving to her sister’s house to dog-sit and house-sit for two weeks. Jackie told me being alone in the house scared her at night, even with the dogs and wonderful neighbors. There had been several break-ins in the vicinity, with one right next door just the week before.

Ten minutes after Jackie left our apartment, she called and said some man was following her in a large black truck as she serpentined through numerous turns to get to her sister’s house. Then as she pulled into the driveway, the guy parked right in front of the house, blocking the driveway.

Jackie was still in her car as she spoke, “Come over right NOW.” It was already dark out, and Jackie was too frightened to walk from her car to the front porch with the man sitting in his vehicle staring at her.

I understood. I drove over fast full of adrenaline and slowly came up behind the car, wrote down the license plate numbers, flipped my brights on and off, got out of my car and walked briskly over to ask the guy what he thought he was doing.

The guy took off, very fast for this neighborhood where 25 mph mean 25 mph because of the number of children usually around.

We called the cops, and this Marine veteran dude came and talked to Jackie and me. We explained the situation and gave the officer the guy’s plates. Jackie thought the guy might have been objecting to her “Out of Iraq Now” and “Peace” bumper stickers since this had happened quite a few times before, but usually not this aggressively. I thought that, 'maybe the guy was just pulling over to make a phone call or to smoke a joint,' and said so to the cop. He nodded and said he couldn't say that, but that I could as the boyfriend.

The cop came back later and asked if we knew the guy in the black truck – he gave us a name and general address. Neither of us recognized the name.

The cop told us the guy in the truck didn’t have any record, didn’t seem to be dangerous, and would not bother us any more. The officer also asked if there was anything Jackie could have done to provoke the man’s actions – like cutting him off in traffic or doing anything that could have been perceived as threatening. She didn’t think so and reiterated that she had had trouble with what some people perceived to be “unpatriotic” bumper stickers. [Shit doesn’t happen when I drive her car I feel the need to add.]

The police officer assured us that after he spoke to the guy, the last place the guy would go to is the address my girlfriend was staying. The officer also would his keep an eye out on the house during the next two weeks while on patrol.

With the police officer’s assurances that he didn’t think the fellow was dangerous, I left. No charges were filed, and more importantly, Jackie felt that the officer had listened to her complains, and she felt safer for his having been there. It was a good example of how police officers should protect and serve. Everyone’s happy, no arrests. End of story.

On Racism

A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last July asked: 'Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?' Sixty-six percent of black men said yes. Only 9 percent of white men said the same.
- Charles M. Blow

This reality is incomprehensible for the GOP in Wisconsin as represented by Mike Nichols and virtually the entire GOP delegation in the state legislature who strenuously objected to even collecting data on police pull-overs by race.

Rightwing Activists: Filibuster Sotomayor

Bring it on.

The White Party says filibuster the first Hispanic Supreme Court nominee. [In Wisconsin, the White Party says: Do not gather racial profiling data.]

The GOP did well in the deep south and Appalachia in the last election. But I think even the religious right might be getting tired of these guys.

From the Politico, Manu Raju reports:

Conservatives are demanding that Senate Republicans take a harder line on Sonia Sotomayor, with new signs of tension between the Hill GOP and elements of the Republican base over the direction the opposition should move in the Supreme Court fight.

In a letter to be delivered to Senate Republicans Tuesday, more than 145 conservatives – including Grover Norquist, Richard Viguerie and Gary Bauer — call for a filibuster of Sotomayor’s nomination if that’s what it takes to force a 'great debate' over judicial philosophy.

But as is clear, the the White Party hates a debate.

Nearly nine in ten (89 percent) Republicans are white with the vast majority of those people describing themselves as 'conservative' (63 percent). Just seven percent of Republicans are either Hispanic (five percent) or black (two percent).

The more the GOP listens to its base, the more it isolates itself.

I Love Black People! Even in Fitchburg

Don't know what your living situation is, but a black man moves in a couple doors up and watch the property taxes in the hood move right on down.

Black people [depicted above-right from Google Images] are like magic this way; no way white guys can do that.

Reprinted below is a short column from last month, and mal invites members of my neighborhood association's newsletter—the Jamestown Neighborhood Association of Fitchburg, Wisconsin (bordering Madison)—to explain why they ran a house and street number in the Spring issue and accused the people there of being "uninvited ... drug dealers" and printing a less-than-convincing evidential basis for their conclusion. Do please post a comment below.

I called the cops last month and they said they don't know anything about drug dealers at any specific house near where the Jamestown Neighborhood Association [is that whites-only] asserts "(t)here is suspicion of drug dealing".

But after I made several passive observations [that's sociology talk for a non-invasive looking at stuff] near the address the past several weeks, I did notice a few black people walking about. Yes. I see black people.

I do hope that if the people holding ongoing suspicions of drug dealing were to see my brother-in-law [he's a black man] and sister visiting from Milwaukee that they cut them some slack even though he is black as midnight, has a quasi-Afro and often gets downright cocky, taking on a disturbing air of arrogance after winning repeated games of Scrabble, for instance.

Shiiiiiiit, I'm going to go get myself some KFC and a big can of Mickey's.

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Neighborhood Association as Cop-Wanna-Be

Mar 20, 2009

Fitchburg, Wisconsin - The Jamestown Neighborhood Association of Fitchburg (bordering Madison) believes that it has seen the enemy in its midst: Drug dealers.

And in its Spring 2009 newsletter, the neighborhood association identifies a specific house number on a street named King James Way, writing that "There is suspicion of drug dealing at xxxx King James Way. ... If we don't let drug dealers know they're unwelcome, they'll come—uninvited," urging neighbors to call the police should they view suspicious activity and "this kind of behavior."

No doubt then, the newsletter is rigorous in supporting its accusation and compiles a compelling fact base before making this specific accusation in its widely distributed newsletter.

Wrong.

The sole piece of evidence in support of its singling out the address in question reads: "Cars have been pulling up and stopping for a very short time period leading to this suspicion."

That's it, a "suspicion". It's reckless to engage in this kind of public accusation without a compelling fact base.