Topics
: Coronavirus, Moderates, Civil Rights
Quote
: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Letter from Birmingham Jail
(
Audio
)
Image
: Medical personnel inside one of the emergency structures that were set up outside a hospital in Brescia in Northern Italy -
The Intercept
Watch:
13Th -
Netflix
Soundtrack
:
Hiawatha Overture
- Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875 – 1912)
Shoutout:
Katie Porter for
forcing the CDC to pay for testing
In many ways, the sham of American normality is collapsing. The economy is shutting down, and not by enough, in an effort to slow down the progression of the virus. Current forecasts are conservatively expecting 1+ million casualties this year. Social Distancing is the only defense we have.
Right before the closing bell on Friday, Trump’s advertisement from the rose garden did put the market in a good mood. However, what he had to offer was more show than substance. Google wasn’t even aware of its new website, but it would be foolish to make the president a lier. Things like cutting student loan interest don’t really matter for those who are being laid off and can’t afford rent. These are at best middle-class “Consumer” solutions to the working-class [Producer] problems.
Nancy Pelosi celebrated a win as she worked with the Republicans to pass a sick leave bill that will only cover workers for companies with more than 50 but less than 500 employees. This, by adding a cost burden to mid-size companies, effectively adds to the moat around large companies and leaves 80 percent of the workforce unprotected.
Accepting this version of the bill isn’t just capitulation to the demands of the Republicans, it’s probably worst than nothing to call it a victory. Smaller companies, by virtue of social proximity, are already more likely to give workers sick leave. It’s not like Bezo is telling his personal assistant to come into the office sick, just “Team Members” he’s never met. The coming bailouts and hedge funds will focus on larger companies that will then buy up the smaller bleeding or bankrupt companies at a discounted. Over time as companies consolidate, workers will lose this protection.
Where others see a cult of pragmatism, I see a tradition of political moderatism that goes back hundreds of years. Regardless of how well-meaning or disingenuous it can be, this form of quiet deal-making has always been dangerous to the efforts of equality. To illustrate, I would like to tell you the story of how the Confederacy, from a position of military defeat, won the right of slavery that is still shaping our politics today.
The Reconstruction
Initially, the power in the United States was roughly divided between those own vast land in The North and those who owned people in The South. The South concerned that they wouldn’t get as much power as they felt was due, pushed during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to count slaves as part of the population for delegate allocation. It was the North trying to preserve their power, that argued this down to the compromise that a slave shall be considered three-fifths of a free [white] man.
Over the next Seventy-Four years leading up the civil war, the North industrialized and increasingly gained more economic power. This industrialization, combined with immigration, would shift class/race/social dynamics enough to trigger the creation of the current party namesakes.
Southern Democrats, with an eye towards the western expansion, wanted to expand their right of slavery into all territories. By this point, however, slavery had been abolished in places like New York. Black men had owned property and had been voting for at least a generation, living in integrated areas like Seneca Village.
Seneca Village, New York; Established 1825, Destroyed 1853 to make room for Central Park
Caught between these two ideologies, the [Moderate] Northern Democrats sought to maintain the status quo. Saying each territory should decide for itself, but that slavery could not expand to the west. They were, therefore, leaving the west open for their industrial expansion. It was over this divide that would cause the party to split the vote and lose the presidential election to the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln.
With the Southern Democrats being inconsolable, in an attempt to reclaim a fleeting sense of power, they would commit an act of treason, triggering the start of the civil war. From the position of a weaker economic standing, this war ultimately led to their militaristic defeat.
Under a [Federal | Union | Republican] occupation of the South, the Reconstruction would begin. Four million slaves would be freed and now able to demand the wages of skilled labor. The men would go on to acquire 15 million acres of land and register to vote in rates as high as 90%. Communities would self organize elect local officials and go on to send two black Republican representatives to congress within a few years. There were parades through the streets. Led by moral abolitionism, these seven years marked a true high point in racial equality within the United States.
The Deconstruction
Within a week after the end of the Civil War, President Lincoln was assassinated in a move that would foreshadow a new war for [states | slavers] rights. Under occupation, the fearful and outnumbered Democrats began to wage a gorilla war of terror against the newly freed mostly Republican so-called "black wave".
During the 1866 Louisiana Constitutional Convention, these former confederates would go on to kill every black man, woman, or child they could find in what is known as the New Orleans Massacre. This style of terrorism, and various groups like the Klan, would sweep through the South killing thousands of black voters and forcing out "black blood" representatives from office. All leading up to the up the election of 1876.
The Republicans, finding themselves widely in control of local voting machinery in the South on election day, could practice the time-honored techniques of fraud: stuffing the ballot boxes, sometimes to the point where the number of votes cast exceeded the local population; throwing out Democratic votes; and making things as easy as possible for Republican "repeaters." As for the Democrats, their favorite weapons were violence and intimidation... [Who] organized as rifle clubs and night riders, sometimes employed the most barbarous extremes imaginable. Most of their outrages, however, did not take the form of mayhem. Economic and social pressures were the more standard practice. - The Election That Got Away
It would be easy to leave this as an issue of racial party politics. In an action that I can only describe as class solidarity; The [White] Republican election board of Louisiana, just a year after their constituents had been massacred in the streets, offered to sell the popular vote at the Democratic National Convention for [$1,000,000 (1876) | $24,109,439.25 (2020)]. By either outright rejection, or possibly a lack of funding from the indebted South, the offer came to pass. So Republican boards of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina instead got to work fabricating the results of the popular vote for Republican Governor Rutherford B. Hayes.
The popular vote, with the highest turnout in history (81.8%), however, came in short with Democratic Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York leading by a margin of 264,292 to Hayes' 4,036,298 votes. This was enough, though, to contest the electoral votes leading to a certification issue that would drag on for months.
Finally, a bipartisan deal was brokered known as "The Bargain", in which Hayes would become the president in exchange for ending the Southern Occupation, giving rights back to in the form of Home Rule as long as they agreed to specifically worded Constitutional Amendments [13th, 14th, 15th]. Additionally for the South, the deal came with a cabinet position, the settlement of war debt, and a subsidy to help industrialize. Naturally, the Democrats agreed to the so-called Compromise of 1877.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. - 13th Amendment
And, like that, the civil rights of the Reconstruction were gone.
The Southern Democrat's systemically removed voting rights until they had a monopoly of control and ushered in the era of Jim Crow. Already underground organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, aka the Invisible Empire of the South, would purportedly wind down their violence with the Third [Federal] Enforcement Act. At just about the same time, with the black Republicans now out of the way, Southern Democrats would unanimously take offices across Dixie.
With the [State | Dixie | Confederate] power restored and new laws intended to criminalize black life, prisons would start "farming out" or even selling their incarcerated population to people like former Confederate General and Klan Founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. As the post-war economy bounced back, so would begin the establishment of Confederate monuments.
It took just one generation for white slaveholding families to regain their riches, and this rebound was not due to an inheritance of slavery profits. Much of that was devoured by the war, emancipation, and regressive crop productivity in the South after the war. Nor was the recovery owed to an inheritance of entrepreneurial skills, which the study ruled out because of the drastic transition of the economy from agricultural-based to industrial-based. - White Americans’ Hold on Wealth Is Old, Deep, and Nearly Unshakeable
While chattel slavery was expressly forbidden, the west was now unabatedly open to the expansion of industrial class warfare and prison labor exploitation. The Gilded Age was upon us.
Status Quo
Today, approximately 2.8 million people are taken away from their communities and placed in prisons, where they have their voting rights stripped and are then counted as part of the census transferring their delegated power to their guards; Who often charges them for such a privilege as working for $0.55 per hour. Of those African Americans who do own property, it accounts for only a million acres. All while unarmed black men are disproportionality gunned down by police.
So while we have a million fewer slaves than 150 years ago, the struggle for equality continues, all the same, on this side of the civil rights era. The culture of inequality is literally in the water we drink.
A new style of automation has replaced industrialization as the tool of monopolization, and it’s abuses of power once again run rampant. The identity of the parties may have flipped, but the roles and the values are very much the same.
It is within this context that when someone echos that people like Bernie aren’t Democrats, that we must ask what does it mean to be a democrat? Does it mean walking through the streets and murdering people? Does it mean looking the other way when that happens because aristocracy is a place of pragmatism and civility? The democratic party has been dragged kicking and screaming into the ideals of democracy, and it is of that fight in which we shouldn’t lose sight of.
It is only when a candidate speaks to the needs of the people shall people come to their aid. With just barely more than half of this country voting, at 55.7% (2016), we must do everything within our power to spread the ideals of democracy. Otherwise, we will forever continue, trapped by design and tradition, in a system of inequality, that was designed at the behest of a few.
Anything less is not progress, anything less is not progressive.
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