For podcasts see “NOW on Demand” bottom right; or for gen info on this show in the future use the search…for: “Election insight 2006″

This show’s transcripts (9/1) should be up around Thur
http://www.pbs.org/now/thisweek/archive.html

GA Representative Alisha Thomas Morgan (D – Atlanta) [Cobb County]
spoke very insightfully on this show…and very directly to the vote disenfranchisement issue. I’m going to check to see if her radio talk show will stream.

I am not convinced.

Since the last post up there ATC had two pastors on on one show, one from Atlanta one from Philly I think. IIRC it was the pastor from Philly who had crashed the NT all around the lamppost. Maybe there’ll be a reaction against the “abundant life” rs who try to justify cheap resource extraction for us and low, low wages for them. It’s a long road but they do continue to go with the program.

The other cause might be a reaction against scapegoating. The world seems full of it. Do I remember this correctly–does the Iranian prez deny the holocaust?

Also, as portrayed by NOW last night you have these guys like GA’s Senator Staton who have IMO come out with the weirdest justifications for obstacles to voting one can imagine. Perhaps there’ll be a reaction against this. In the long run, when you take away the vote…you’re subtracting attributes from a class you want to scapegoat.

Or there might be reaction against meritocracy.

Or maybe we’ll all learn how to patiently talk sense to the abundant lifers.

About the only thing they all have in common is disenfranchisement and that’s never been a sufficient a moral base for a revolution in the past.

But let’s suppose the poor somehow rally around some cause celebre and start marching in the streets. Is this country even capable of listening any more? Will we be marching with them or aiming our water cannons at them?

Over the last 10 years, I hear the same problems coming from the black community. Over and over again. Nothing changes. The same message. I never see a real unity in the community, willing to include those around them who support the cause, whatever the color of their skin. I see the spokesmen/person of the community Louis Farrakhan who, every one knows, hates white people. I see Jesse Jackson who counsels presidents on their extra love life who is doing the same thing himself. Then I see Barak Obama who seems to be a great man, leader and potential presidential candidate.

On the show I heard someone on the panel say that blacks need to dump the democratic party. I think that is exactly the comments that work in reverse, now you are alienating a group of people who do care. (I am not saying the leadership of that party acts the way the party members wish them.) The black community should be doing the exact oposite. The black community needs to change their leadership and strengthen their leadership role in a party with people that actually care and give them some opportunity.

I am a liberal and I care and I want the party to be inclusive to all and I want the country to be united and I want equal right to all regardless of race and I want this country to be safer. Don’t we want the same thing?

If a company hired a CEO and he/she increased profits by 1% over 20 years, she would be fired. It is time you fire your leadership. Look at how ‘W’ destroyed the unity in this country. That was the only way he could push through his agenda. I am not suggesting we lie to the country, we unite as a party instead of being so incredibly divided.

I we frame it in terms of our humanity, warts clay feet and all, we would be better off. Forty years ago this past summer I came home from working in Georgia with SCLC. I was clobbered by the Klan on the court house steps, arrested on a capital charge for inciting the incident, and had to replace the transmission of my car on the side of the highway on the way home because the mechanic who serviced my car drained the oil from it.

I am as appalled by the recent passage of Georgia House Bill 244, as I was when I view the events of March 7, 1965, two months before I would be able to vote—that led me to volunteer.

When I finally got home to San Diego, I was taken to meet with a group of business men who were going to buy and integrate an apartment building. The proposal was to call it the Bi-Ray. I saw that as focusing on divisions even though the purpose was to bring them together. I suggested Multi-Ray, Poly-Ray, better yet No-Ray—except Hope. No luck.

Differences are what we all have in common and respect for them all can bind us together.

I am an (upper) middle class white person with a lifestyle that allows me to take at least one vacation a year, live in a nice 3 bedroom home in a good but pricey neighborhood with good schools, and the luxury of not having to worry about unexpected expenses like car repairs wrecking my budget. It is a nice life, not unduly extravagant by American standards. There are plenty of things I still want, like new furniture, a cleaning person to come once a week, so I can spend less of my weekend cleaning, new plants for my yard, tickets for shows and perfomances that I don’t budget money for just yet. So what do I need to do to address the issues of race/poverty?

How about having people on the show who have suggestions for what to do? Like Geoffrey Canada.

You want to make the case for reparations? Great. How much does it cost and how does it work?

Lastly, I grew up in New York City, and anyone who wants to talk about race and class issues without acknowledging the self defeating actions and bad choices that are made every day by poor people – such as having children at a young age that they are unable to support financially or emotionally – is not of interest to me at all. Bill Cosby is 100% right. .

Possible guest?

“With no acceptable way to voice their resentment, and blocked from identifying with their own class interest (problem 2) they are easily exploited politically by the interest of the wealthy in reducing taxes and other restraints and regulations on capital. As a result, the political will for government solutions, and the means for funding them, are further eroded, and the cycle stays vicious.”

As a normal white American male I feel completely unattached from what we could call our political bourgeoisie. Right, left it makes no matter the middle class has become a pawn in the prize fight for the lucrative treasures that await our various echelons of government. As I spend 40-60 hours a week working my tail off to put food on my table, pay my rent, try to save money for a home I become more guilty of the apathy that strangles our country. How do I balance trying to do the things I need to do to eat, and fight the scourge of that is called our representatives in government?

Capitalism alone is an obvious failure, it creates such waste, and is so destructive to both humanity and mother earth that we must look to reformulate our mission as Americans, as humans. We must look for ways to lift everyone up in order to make our country and world an acceptable place to live.

Down deep though I do not believe we are so deviant as to be systematically racially motivated, I believe it boils down to a more selfish, and survivalistic mode that does not lend itself to social activism. The goverment and its members have siezed upon that. Until we take that opportunity away we will continue to succumb to their folly.

Rethinking race and poverty is rethinking two problems.

One is the disproportionate burden of poverty borne by blacks and Hispanics.
The other is our society’s inability to identify poverty, or even working class status, with whites. This inability is rooted in the false, socially constructed concept of black-white identity itself.

The traditional “Great Society� solutions to the first problem have been discredited politically, philosophically and economically, to an extent, in critiques from the left as well as the right. Yet there remains a strong emotional investment in them, especially within African-America.

The issue of the the second problem has been suppressed in our national political discussion since shortly after the Depression. In recent times, attempts to revive it are slapped down with the charge of inciting ‘class warfare’.

In times of race ‘crisis’—like after riots or a disaster like Katrina—everyone, even conservatives of various stripes, is ready to throw sympathy, money and other resources at relieving the ‘unjust’ misery of poor black people. The exact nature and perpetrators of the injustice are mercifully unspecified. Why? because it is much easier to apply a very visible band-aid when the symptoms of the ‘black problem’ flare up than to be ruthless about finding it’s cause and curing it.

Of course, the very visibility of the band aid that makes well-meaning, better off whites feel good about themselves breeds resentment among the less better off white majority, who are also increasingly socially and culturally insecure. With no acceptable way to voice their resentment, and blocked from identifying with their own class interest (problem 2) they are easily exploited politically by the interest of the wealthy in reducing taxes and other restraints and regulations on capital. As a result, the political will for government solutions, and the means for funding them, are further eroded, and the cycle stays vicious.

Rethinking race and poverty must be about breaking the cycle in the paragraph above at the point most vulnerable to attack. I’m not sure where it is, but it’s somewhere along this perimeter.

Ok