Over the top and beneath contempt
By Roger Simon
Politico: 8/11/09
Today, we live in the age of rabid response.
Not rapid response. Rapid response was yesterday. Rapid response was the
political tactic of responding quickly to all attacks, no matter how
outrageous or unbelievable.
Those who did not respond rapidly, those who told themselves the public
would not believe outright lies, failed to win higher office. (Thus
Democrats still blame John Kerry for not responding rapidly enough in 2004
to the attacks of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.)
Rabid response is different.
The purpose of rabid response is to scorch the earth, to raise the stakes,
to go nuclear in the hope that your opponent will be so shellshocked he can
make no response at all. The purpose of rabid response is to grab the public
by the throat and not let go.
Have concerns over Barack Obama's health care plan? I don't doubt it. The
plan is very long and very complicated and still a work in progress.
But there is one thing we do know about it: It will establish "death
panels."
These death panels will determine whether you, your baby, your parents or
your grandparents will receive health care or be left to die. In the street.
Like a dog.
How will the death panels operate? Who will be on them? Will they validate
parking? We do not know. We know only that the death panels will judge each
individual's "level of productivity in society" and render a life or death
judgment.
So says Sarah Palin on her Facebook page.
In olden times, Palin might have made this claim at a speech or during a
news conference where reporters might have asked questions like: "What proof
do you have?" or "Aren't you just trying to scare people?"
But Palin does not risk that. She takes no questions. She has done her duty
as a rabid responder. She has rung the tocsin, sounded the alarm, lit the
signal fire.
Truth? Accuracy? Responsibility?
Not her territory.
Glenn Beck is a rabid responder on race. "This president, I think, he has
exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated
hatred for white people or the white culture," Beck says. "This guy is, I
believe, a racist."
Rush Limbaugh is a rabid responder on Nazis and swastikas. He knows a lot
about swastikas. He sees them everywhere. He looks at the Obama health care
logo - which incorporates the familiar medical symbol of twin serpents on a
staff - and sees it as being "damn close to a Nazi swastika logo."
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi muddied the waters - surprise! - by saying
those who oppose Obama's health care plan "are carrying swastikas and
symbols like that to a town meeting on health care."
But Limbaugh had a rabid response for that: "There are far more similarities
between Nancy Pelosi and Adolf Hitler than between these people showing up
at town halls to protest a Hitler-like policy that's being heralded by a
Hitler-like logo."
And then, out of left (or right) field, came this: "Ted Kennedy's dad, by
the way, Joe Kennedy, sympathetic to Hitler, sympathetic to the Nazis,"
Limbaugh said.
But Limbaugh was not done with the Nazis or Hitler. In the world of rabid
response, invoking the ultimate symbols of evil to describe one's political
opponents is routine.
It doesn't matter what you say, as long as it is over the top and beneath
contempt.
"Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate," Limbaugh said.
"Hitler said he didn't need to meet with his Cabinet; he represented the
will of the people. He was called the messiah. He said the people spoke
through him."
Which means, I guess, if Hitler were alive today, he would be a talk show
host.
Roger Simon is POLITICO's chief political columnist.
***
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-ehrenreich/the-destruction-of-the-bl_b_250828.html
The Destruction of the Black Middle Class
By Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammed
Huffington Post: August 4, 2009
To judge from most of the commentary on the Gates-Crowley affair, you would
think that a "black elite" has gotten dangerously out of hand. First Gates
(Cambridge, Yale, Harvard) showed insufficient deference to Crowley, then
Obama (Occidental, Harvard) piled on to accuse the police of having acted
"stupidly." Was this "the end of white America" which the Atlantic had
warned of in its January/February cover story? Or had the injuries of
class -- working class in Crowley's case -- finally trumped the grievances
of race?
Left out of the ensuing tangle of commentary on race and class has been the
increasing impoverishment -- or, we should say, re-impoverishment -- of
African Americans as a group. In fact, the most salient and lasting effect
of the current recession may turn out to be the decimation of the black
middle class. According to a study by Demos and the Institute for Assets and
Social Policy, 33 percent of the black middle class was already in danger of
falling out of the middle class at the start of the recession. Gates and
Obama, along with Oprah and Cosby, will no doubt remain in place, but
millions of the black equivalents of Officer Crowley -- from factory workers
to bank tellers and white collar managers -- are sliding down toward
destitution.
For African Americans -- and to a large extent, Latinos -- the recession is
over. It occurred between 2000 and 2007, as black employment decreased by
2.4 percent and incomes declined by 2.9 percent. During the seven-year long
black recession, one third of black children lived in poverty and black
unemployment -- even among college graduates -- consistently ran at about
twice the level of white unemployment. That was the black recession. What's
happening now is a depression.
Black unemployment is now at 14.7 percent, compared to 8.7 for whites. In
New York City, black unemployment has been rising four times as fast as that
of whites. Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute,
estimates that 40 percent of African Americans will have experienced
unemployment or underemployment by 2010, and this will increase child
poverty from one-third of African American children to slightly over half.
No one can entirely explain the extraordinary rate of job loss among African
Americans, though factors may include the relative concentration of blacks
in the hard-hit retail and manufacturing sectors, as well as the lesser
seniority of blacks in better-paying, white collar, positions.
But one thing is certain: The longstanding racial "wealth gap" makes African
Americans particularly vulnerable to poverty when job loss strikes. In 1998,
the net worth of white households on average was $100,700 higher than that
of African Americans. By 2007, this gap had increased to $142,600. The
Survey of Consumer Finances, which is supported by the Federal Reserve
Board, collects this data every three years -- and every time it has been
collected, the racial wealth gap has widened. To put it another way: in
2004, for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family, the
African American family had only one 12 cents. In 2007, it had exactly a
dime. So when an African American breadwinner loses a job, there are usually
no savings to fall back on, no well-heeled parents to hit up, no retirement
accounts to raid.
All this comes on top of the highly racially skewed subprime mortgage
calamity. After decades of being denied mortgages on racial grounds, African
Americans made a tempting market for bubble-crazed lenders like Countrywide,
with the result that high income blacks were almost twice as likely as low
income white to receive high interest subprime loans. According to the
Center for Responsible Lending, Latinos will end up losing between $75
billion and $98 billion in home-value wealth from subprime loans, while
blacks will lose between $71 billion and $92 billion. United for a Fair
Economy has called this family net-worth catastrophe the "greatest loss of
wealth for people of color in modern U.S. history."
Yet in the depths of this African American depression, some commentators,
black as well as white, are still obsessing about the supposed cultural
deficiencies of the black community. In a December op-ed in the Washington
Post, Kay Hymowitz blamed black economic woes on the fact that 70 percent of
black children are born to single mothers, not noticing that the white
two-parent family has actually declined at a faster rate than the black
two-parent family. The share of black children living in a single parent
home increased by 155 percent between 1960 to 2006, while the share of white
children living in single parent homes increased by a staggering 229
percent.
Just last month on NPR, commentator Juan Williams dismissed the NAACP by
saying that more up-to-date and relevant groups focus on "people who have
taken advantage of integration and opportunities for education, employment,
versus those who seem caught in generational cycles of poverty," which he
went on to characterize by drug use and crime. The fact that there is an
ongoing recession disproportionately affecting the African American middle
class -- and brought on by Wall Street greed rather than "ghetto" values --
seems to have eluded him.
We don't need any more moralizing or glib analyses of class and race that
could have just as well been made in the 70s. The recession is changing
everything. It's redrawing the class contours of America in ways that will
leave us more polarized than ever, and, yes, profoundly hurting the
erstwhile white middle and working classes. But the depression being
experienced by people of color threatens to do something on an entirely
different scale, and that is to eliminate the black middle class.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the president of United Professionals and author, most
recently, of This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation.
Dedrick Muhammad is a Senior Organizer and Research Associate of the
Institute for Policy Studies.
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