Tag: Slavery

2011 marks the sesquicentennial of the start of the American Civil War. On New Year’s Day 150 years ago, South Carolina had already seceded from the United States and the next months would see ten more states secede from the Union, the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, the formation of the Confederate States of America, and the start of the war.

Historian Susan Schulten wrote about the 1860 Census and map showing American slavery in The New York Times last month. The United States Coast Survey used the 1860 Census data, the last time the federal government counted the slave population, to produce two maps illustrating slave population – one of Virginia and the other of the entire South.

The map depicts each county’s slave population, with “the darker the shading, the higher the number of slaves”, which is a “visually arresting way to see the range of slavery across the South without having to read a single data point,” she writes. It was popular with President Lincoln and the American public after its publication. It was sold throughout the war “for the benefit of the sick and wounded soldiers.”

Oh, this is just turning out to be an all kinds of post electoral inspirational day for the Democratic Party.

  First we had this, the Pentagon’s version of the “4 more years!” cheer, and here’s my reaction to that. https://www.docudharma.com/diar…

And if you liked that, you are going to LOVE this.

  Debt Commission Report Targets Social Security and Medicare.  

The most direct assault on Social Security, however, may not be the increase of the retirement age, but rather an attempt to tilt the program toward a welfare model and away from the current, universal insurance model that has made it popular and enduring despite 75 years of attacks. The co-chairs propose to “increase [the] progressivity of [the] benefit formula by creating a new bendpoint at the 50th percentile.” Such a move would require means testing. In other words, the government would determine benefits based on a beneficiary’s assets and other sources of income. Currently, beneficiaries are paid benefits based on their contribution over their working life. Replacing the social insurance model with a welfare model would erode support, encourage fraud and ultimately undermine the program.

If you want to look at the original doc from the co – chairs of the Catfood, er, Fiscal commission, co chaired by ex Republican Senator Alan Simpson and ex COS of Pres. Clinton, Erksine Bowles, here’s the pagestart.  Remember President Obama appointed these clowns. http://www.fiscalcommission.go…

And here are more commissioners.  See anybody familiar on this list ?  Why look, it’s Southern California’s Rep. Xavier Becerra (D, CA 31) one of the Leadership “Liberal” Democrats who wouldn’t commit to signing on for a Public Option.   Bruce Reed, another Clintonite, is the Executive Director.

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT)

Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA 31)

Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI 4)

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK)

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND)

David Cote, Chairman and CEO, Honeywell International

Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID)

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL)

Ann Fudge, Former CEO, Young & Rubicam Brands

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH)

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX 5)

Alice Rivlin, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institute and former Director, Office of Management & Budget

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI 1)

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL 9)

Rep. John Spratt (D-SC 5)

Andrew Stern, President, Service Employees International Union

The White House is presumably tucked into bed in another Asian time zone, out of range of commenting and wondering if anyone is going to greet them at the airport tarmac on the way home next week other than John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Robert Gates.  Perpetual occupation of Afghanistan, secret drone wars, arms deals with India vs. Pakistan, and now the Cat Food commission turns loose the proposal to cut income taxes for the richest, and cut Medicare, and cut Social Security.   What’s not to like ?  

It is at this time I am going to relish my earlier assessment of Senator Kent Conrad (D, Fly Over State, North Dakota) as a duplicitous warmongering **** .

” We have now received a proposal from the bipartisan co-chairs of the President’s Fiscal Commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. This is not the conclusion of the commission’s work. This is the beginning.

I commend them for putting together a serious proposal. It reveals just how difficult it is to put the nation on a sound fiscal course. Some of it I agree with; some I strongly disagree with. We will have a chance to offer alternatives as we advance the process later today and next week.”

Paul Krugman thinks they can’t be serious.  http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c…

Because the good stuff ends up going to the very affluent.

I mean, what’s this about? There is no – zero – evidence that income taxes at current rates are an important drag on growth.

Oh, and they’re talking about raising the retirement age, because people live longer – except that the people who really depend on Social Security, those in the bottom half of the distribution, aren’t living much longer. So you’re going to tell janitors to work until they’re 70 because lawyers are living longer than ever.

It’s here. And it really is that bad. The idea that co-chairs of a commission whose charge is fiscal sustainability should take it upon themselves to (a) declare that federal revenue must not exceed 21 percent of GDP – that’s right, putting a cap on receipts and (b) call for reducing the top rate from 35 to 23 is just awesome.

Oh, Kruggie, since when do the Repukes and the Repuke wanna bees rely on evidence that excessively favoring the affluent might not be good for all of the rest of us ?

Dave Dayen went thru the thing –  hey, there’s cuts for the Veteran’s Administration, and TRICARE, too.

http://news.firedoglake.com/20…

Best comment-

ralphbon:

Splendid timing, given tomorrow’s Veteran’s Day.  

And the other good comment from “ottogrendal”

Indeed. The DoD still grows. Over $700 billion for the FY 2011 budget. http://comptroller.defense.gov…

Yay America !   We’re number 22nd now in life expectancy behind Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Japan, and Cyprus, and a lot of European countries like Switzerland and the United Kingdom.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

Americablog says we’re actually ranked at 49th worldwide now.

In 1950, the United States was fifth among the leading industrialized nations with respect to female life expectancy at birth, surpassed only by Sweden, Norway, Australia, and the Netherlands The last available measure of female life expectancy had the United States ranked at forty-sixth in the world. As of September 23, 2010, the United States ranked forty-ninth for both male and female life expectancy combined.

Meanwhile, per capita health spending in the United States increased at nearly twice the rate in other wealthy nations between 1970 and 2002. As a result, the United States now spends well over twice the median expenditure of industrialized nations on health care, and far more than any other country as a percentage of its gross domestic product (GDP).

Demographics can be a beautiful thing.

Raise the retirement age, get rid of health care,  and we won’t need that silly Social Security.  

Can you hear that? That’s me, howling. It’s not complicated why. Last night I started to write a blog post, in fact, this blog post. I had maybe 500 words typed into the box and then I moved the mouse and the next thing I knew, poof, there was nada, zilch, nothing. All gone. Totally vaporized. That’s when I started howling. I continue even now.

The blog post, well, this blog post is/was about state killing. There have been two horrendous, macabre executions in the last weeks. Let me briefly recall them for you before I move on to what I think might be my point.

How? That was always the question. How might the slaves rebel against their servitude and chains. How do people powerless and oppressed rise up against their Owners who have all manner of control available to them? The Owners had the power over access to food, water, shelter and safety. They had the Law established to protect them from the ambition of slaves to be free. Property was power and only owners could own. Slaves had to rent from the owners with the pittance of their slave wages. It wasn’t called Slavery, as it was a PR problem, so they called it Freedom.

But of course, it was the opposite of freedom. A society of owners and the owned.

[Slavery] amounts to much more than [Haley Barbour’s] “diddly” that so many Americans try hard to avoid coming to terms with the reality of slavery. It wasn’t just “a bad thing.” Littering is a bad thing. Slavery was this nation’s Original Sin, and yet many people will not look at it except through a gauze of Spanish moss.

The Atlantic slave trade was one of the last millennium’s greatest horrors. An estimated 17 million Africans, most of them teenagers, were snatched from their families, stuffed into the holds of ships and brought to the New World. As many as 7 million of them died en route, either on the high seas or at “seasoning” camps in the Caribbean where they were “broken” to the will of their masters.

Haley, Haley, Haley.

If he has never done so, Barbour should hold in his hands some of the leg irons, manacles and other restraints that were used to subdue the Africans. He should visit some of the plantations where slave cabins still stand — there are plenty in his state — to get a sense of how the Africans lived. He should spend a long, hot day picking cotton. He should read the accounts of plantation life written by former slaves, and then he should explain why there is any reason to “honor” soldiers who fought to perpetuate a system that could never have functioned without constant, deliberate, unflinching cruelty.

Amen.

Whoops, here’s Robinson’s link.

Those of you who regularly read my posts know that I do not routinely write about politics, although I usually make a short joke about silly wingnuts in my closing statements on Pique the Geek, the science post every Sunday at 9:00 PM Sunday evenings.

However, the antics of the newly elected Republican (of course) governor of Virginia just got me going.  Robert Francis McDonnell is the new governor of Virginia, just this year being sworn into the office.  In my opinion, he is a racist and a bigot.

I offer insights not often given by folks at progressive sites, but I think that my experiences might help to make sense of McDonnell’s antics.  Please read to the end before you hate me, or my ancestors.

Warning. This is Not P.C.

Did you ever read something so mind bogglingly bereft of compassion, and so full of the banality of the banana slugs, it slimed the inner surface of your computer screen as you scrolled thru it ?  

This much “advocacy” deserves a rewrite. This is the current apogee of argument for “reform.”  All I had to do was substitute a few words for other words, throughout the piece.   And this is what happens:

____________________________________________________________________________

“I’m For A Public Option. Just Not This Public Option ”

I see a ton of enthusiasm for the public flogging.  I understand it.  Emotionally, I agree. Intellectually, not so much.

A public flogging is attractive on paper, but has some serious and real pitfalls, in my view.  

I understand why people don’t want to let slaves escape on this, and also why they hate having commercial slave bearing ships, competing with their breeding operations.  But there are still some very practical, non procedural reasons to stop and think it all thru.

While we were all shopping and arguing over whether or not fruitcake is fit for human consumption, Obama decided to go to bat and fight for someone.   Who was he fighting for?   The torturers of the Bush administration, that’s who.   Oh, and anyone else in the United States government who wants to torture and violate the human rights of others.

As Chris Floyd reports, The United States is now legally free to torture whomever it wants, thanks to the Supreme Court of the land, and the political power weilded by Barrack Hussein Obama.

It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Here’s how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.”  They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

And people wonder what this “hatred” is towards Obama.   “I didn’t get my pony?” they ask?   Ha.  They have no idea.   I hate Obama for the same reasons I hate Bush.  Why?  Because Obama IS Bush.   His administration is one and the same as the Bush administration, and I mean that quite literally when it comes to justice, human rights, and the wars.    ALL THE SAME PEOPLE are running the show, and we know that Bush’s Justice Department is a bunch of corrupt, human rights-violating  flunkies recruited from the ranks of the “religious right”.    And they are still in office, fighting for their hatreds

Now Obama is not just passively letting these people continue the Bush/Cheney yearas, he is going out of his way to enable  them.  

He is putting his name to the most egregious violations of human rights in this nation’s history.  

What’s really pathological is that he is shitting on the very system that freed African American people, of which he is a gene-carrying member.  

More from antiwar.com:

US: Guantanamo Prisoners Not ‘Persons’

by William Fisher,

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that “torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use.”

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., had ruled that government officials were immune from suit because at that time it was unclear whether abusing prisoners at Guantanamo was illegal.

Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

Ironically, the first African American president is promoting a policy frighteningly familiar to the Dred Scott decision of yesteryear:

“Another set of claims are dismissed because Guantanamo detainees are not ‘persons’ within the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – an argument that was too close to Dred Scott v. Sanford for one of the judges on the court of appeals to swallow,” he added.

The Dred Scott case was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1857. It ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants – whether or not they were slaves – were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States.

Thanks, Obama.   Next time someone calls you an “Uncle Tom” I simply won’t cringe.  I might even nod.   I might even say “hell yeah.”