1986: Lawman's Legacy

Congress tried standing up to him occasionally, as in early 1986.

From Paul Slansky, The Clothes Have No Emperor—

3/13 Federal district judge nominee Jefferson B. Sessions is questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee about some derogatory comments he made about the NACCP and his statement that the Klan was "OK" until he found out that some were "pot smokers."

"I may have said something about the NACCP being un-American or Communist," he admits, "but I meant no harm by it." He is the first of President Reagan's judicial appointments to be denied confirmation.

5/6 Having prevented [Sessions'] confirmation... the Democrats try for two, taking on Reagan appeals court nominee Daniel A. Manion... whose career is closely tied to that of his John Bircher father, and whose legal writings are rife with what The New York Times describes as "non-standard spelling, grammar and syntax"... [Manion] is defended by Indiana senator Dan Quayle, who went to law school with him and therefore knows that he "epitomizes what we all like to see in jurisprudence."

Only a few weeks later—

6/17 Chief Justice Earl Warren gives up his lifetime seat on the Supreme Court to organize the hype for next year's Bicentennial of the Constitution. President Reagan promotes the court's most right-wing Justice, William Rehnquist, to the top spot, and names conservative Antonin Scalia to the vacancy, beginning the remaking of the court that his foes have long feared would be his lasting legacy.

7/30 At his confirmation hearing, William Rehnquist:

• Explains that a 1952 memo he wrote supporting the "separate but equal" doctrine represented not his views, but those of the justice he was clerking for

• Denies having challenged the credentials of minority voters in the early '60s

• Claims to have no recall that his Vermont vacation home came with an unlawful covenant prohibiting its sale to anyone of the "Hebrew race," though a 1974 letter from his lawyer informing him of this is soon discovered.

Senators are left to decide whether the Chief Justice should be a man who somehow forgot that the deed to his house was illegal.

9/17 William Rehnquist is confirmed as Chief Justice, 65-33—the highest negative vote ever received by a confirmed justice.

Then, having exhausted themselves, members debate for about five minutes before confirming the equally conservative Antonin Scalia, 98-0.

From a 1993 article here, on the Reagan crew's screening of potential judicial appointments for ideological correctness. Done because

... in view of its inability to push aspects of its so-called "social issues agenda" through Congress--for example, constitutional amendments overturning Roe and permitting official prayer in public schools--the Reagan administration put the highest priority on reshaping the federal judiciary into a force for, in turn, reshaping constitutional law. These concerted efforts contradicted conservatives' longstanding protest, in criticizing pro-human rights rulings of the Warren and Burger Courts, that the federal courts should not be "activist" policy-making institutions. This stringent ideological screening continued through the Bush [I] administration.

Recently published research--the first analyses of the rulings of Reagan-Bush federal court appointees--shows that the concerted efforts to pack the federal courts with conservative judges during the past twelve years had a marked impact in shifting these courts to the right... both Presidents Reagan and Bush made good on their promises to remold the federal bench into one that is less expansive in interpreting individual rights and less likely to rule in favor of civil rights claimants.

At all levels of the federal courts, Reagan's efforts live on. By late 1999, Stephen Pomper would write in Washington Monthly that

... in a series of dry, technically devastating opinions, Republican judges have engineered what former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger has referred to as "one of the three or four major shifts in constitutionalism we've seen in the last two centuries."

Of course, the ultra-partisan Rehnquist will be around long enough to preside over Bush v Gore—preparing the way for his own successor, and putting Bush Jr. in place to ensure, among so many other things, that an entrenched, politicized judiciary could wreak unlimited abuse.

Back in 1986, Daniel Manion was indeed confirmed for the court seat he occupied for over twenty years.

And a little rejection never stopped a Republican retread.

In this case, a retread who currently works his retribution in the Senate: against a Democratic president's judicial nominations, as well as against any interests other than those of wealth and racist privilege.

The "Eat Your Peas" Doctrine

It sounds so sensible, and well, adult.

Not a jarring phrase—as, say, "Shock Doctrine" might be.

The president's choice of "peas" is interesting, as poking around the Library of Congress FSA/OWI archive suggests.

That's where I found a series of 1939 photos by Dorothea Lange; among them— FSA caption:

Migrant agricultural worker's family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged thirty-two. Father is a native Californian. Destitute in pea picker's camp, Nipomo, California, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Of the twenty-five hundred people in this camp most of them were destitute.

It's a different view of a family more familiar here—
Digby posted this interview with Michael Hudson:"Guns, Finance and Butter - Finance Is the New Mode of Warfare" [transcipt here].

Regarding "negotiation" over the debt ceiling "crisis," Digby quotes Hudson—

It’s a good cop-bad cop charade. The Republicans are playing the role of the bad cop. Their script says: "You cannot raise taxes on anybody. No progressive income tax, no closing of tax loopholes for special interests, not even prosecutions for tax fraud. And we can get a lot of money back into the economy if we give a tax holiday to the companies and individuals that have been keeping their money offshore. Let's free the wealthy from taxes to help us recover."

Mr. Obama can turn around and pretend to be the good cop. "Hey, boys, let me at least do something. I'm willing to cut back Social Security. I'm willing to take over what was George Bush's program. I share your worries about the budget deficit. We have to balance it, and I've already appointed a Deficit Reduction Commission to prepare public opinion for my cutbacks in the most popular programs. But you have to let me get a little bit of revenue somewhere."

In the end the Republicans will make some small token concessions, but they'll get their basic program. Mr. Obama will have sold out his constituency.

"The problem is, how can Mr. Obama move to the right of where George Bush stood? The only way he can do this is for the Republicans to move even further to the right. So the Republicans are accommodating him by pushing the crazy wing of their party forward, the Tea Party. Michelle Bachman, Eric Cantor and their colleagues are coming with such an extremist, right-wing attitude that it gives Mr. Obama room to move way to the right as he triangulates, depicting himself a the less crazy alternative: "Look. I'm better than these guys are."

There's very much more, in Hudson's analysis of financial class warfare against all other segments of societies, and the havoc it has just begun to wreak internationally.

As to Hudson's domestic forecast:

... We're going into a depression that is unnecessary – except to drive down wage levels and strip away government obligations to pay for Social Security, Medicare and other public programs. This will enable the government to get rid of what remains of progressive taxation on the higher wealth and income brackets.

In other words: Republican policies, promoted by a nominally Democratic president elected with a mandate for change—
just not of this particular brand.

But, maybe Obama is on to something with those peas.

Eat 'em or pick 'em: it's been done before.

More photos from Lange in 1939, with FSA captions:

Pea picker camp. This family had been farm owners in Oklahoma, lost their farm and for the last three years "have been draggin' our children around California. We're a have-to case."
Calipatria, Imperial Valley, California.

Why should Americans become too soft, when they can experience a character-building return to the old days?

Migrant pea pickers on the road. California.

Like pea eating, pea picking is a healthy activity.

Just think of it: life in the open air, communing with nature...

Migrant pea pickers camp in the rain. California.

This could be a bracing lesson in Back to Basics...

Pea pickers in California. "Mam, I've picked peas from Calipatria to Ukiah. This life is simplicity boiled down." California.

And a big bonus: plenty of fresh air for the youngsters.

Children of migratory pea pickers in Brawley camp. California.

"Lone"...

But hardly alone: it's an ever-expanding crowd, the group of "lone nut" right-wingers wreaking as much violence as they can, against whomever they perceive as enemies.

In a world of ideologues and media eager to demonize Muslims: the horrifying scenes in Norway last weeks were acts of terrorism—until the moment it became known that their perpetrator looks like this, which transformed him into "lone nut."

Once relatively limited to lung power and street corners—
Alfred T. Palmer, 1941 or 1942
FSA/OWI caption:

The four freedoms. Freedom of speech is still the way of the land. Here is Columbus Circle, famous New York promenade, a "soap box" orator is giving forth his theories. A few steps away may be another unsung genius who, likely as not, will proceed to tear down everything his predecessor has said.

Now: very well-financed ravings are available everywhere, all the time.

But, it's not as if Breivik would have been influenced by U.S. propagandists.

Not by Andrew Breitbart...

Pamela Geller...

The climate change denial crowd...

Or any other part of the vast right-wing punditocracy.

In this country: Fox, Limbaugh and the rest blast out the daily barrage of blame and hatred of liberals. While messages vary in the degree to which they are overt, the underlying tone is always to suggest that the world would be better off without liberals.

In another corner of the global village: a liberal-hater poses as a policeman, to assassinate scores of teenagers—to prevent their growing up to be liberals.

To prove what Limbaugh, et. al., make their millions by mocking: liberal Norway responds to the massacre by vowing to uphold the country's democratic ideals.

The news from Norway was breaking just about the time this very powerful piece by Charles Pierce appeared.

Pierce writes about January 17 this year—of a narrowly averted bombing in Spokane's Centennial Park, targeting a Martin Luther King Day parade; of that planned act's connection to other politically-inspired acts of violence; of our society's unwillingness to make those connections—

Don't talk, then, about the wildness in our rhetoric today, and its undeniable roots in that deep strain of political violence that runs through our national DNA, on a gene that is not always recessive. Don't relate Centennial Park in Atlanta in 1996 to Oklahoma City to murdered doctors to Columbine, and then to Tucson and to the bag on the bench in Spokane. Ignore the patterns, deep and wide, that connect each event to the other like a slow-burning fuse to a charge. That there are among us rage-hardened, powerless people who resort to the gun and the bomb. That there are powerful people who deplore the gun and the bomb, but who do not hesitate to profit from their use. And when the gun goes off or the bomb explodes, the powerful will deplore the actions of the powerless, and they will reassure the rest of us that We are not like Them, who are violent and crazy and whose acts have no reason beyond unfathomable madness. But above all, they will say, Ignore the fact that there is still a horrible utility in political violence, the way there was during Reconstruction, or during the labor wars of the early twentieth century. If there were not, it wouldn't be so hard to get an abortion in Kansas, and assault weapons would not have been accessories of choice at recent rallies purportedly held to discuss changes in the way the country organizes its health-care system.

Or, as Driftglass observed at the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing: "First they came for the file clerks"...

Overreach?

At long last, things may be catching up with one crooked plutocrat...
... And his crooked media empire.

The corporation doth protest too much? Here's a 1977 ad I happened upon here.
Interesting that this company interpreted Thomas Nast's Boss Tweed image as anti-capitalist. But in those quaint pre-Reagan days, a fat cat image said, "business"—and "excessively rich and powerful business interest" still was negative, to many minds.

One thing can always be counted on from our media: the pack instinct.

As mighty and feared as Murdoch has been for so long, here's hoping the non-Murdoch owned outlets will have an ongoing extravaganza of kicking a man when he's down.

What's Not To Trust?

Bedford, Virginia.
John Vachon, 1941
Library of Congress FSA/OWI Archive

Negotiate with Republicans?

A-OK! We can always rest assured they are selling
Good *NOT* Bad used ideology.

Just as we can trust that what trickles down from windfalls for "job creators" will lead us to the prosperity that's just around the corner.

During the week, I just happened to look through this.

I was struck by how the author, in discussing painter George Grosz's politically formative years in Germany, notes—

"The German revolt of 1918," historian Sebastian Haffner has observed, "was a social democratic revolution that was suppressed by the social democrat leadership—an event unparalleled in world history."

After uprisings in Munich and Berlin, elected socialists heading the government—in league with right-wing forces—used military force to brutally suppress the revolt, murdering leaders and an estimated 700 participants.

It's the broadest kind of comparison, yet the model of a party leadership out to suppress its constituency certainly brings to mind the leader of our supposed Democrats.

"Hope and Change" were hardly meant to inspire revolution, itself hardly something a U.S. presidential election would ever bring about. Still, 2008 really was a mandate—and not one for Republican policies.

Yet Obama seems never to have met a Republican policy he didn't like; perhaps, in a slightly different, "moderate" form. And he always is willing to meet Republicans "half-way."

Beau Hodai has just published a detailed piece on the Republican state house trial runs in progress around the country. These are the onslaught of bills meant ultimately to end the "unfair competition" of public services over corporate-controlled services and infrastructure.

The bills may be before different legislatures, but they are all written by the very well-financed, secretive American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and they aim at

... privatizing public education, transportation and the regulation of public health, consumer safety and environmental quality including bringing in corporations to administer:

• Foster care, adoption services and child support payment processing.
• School support services such as cafeteria meals, custodial staff and transportation.
• Highway systems, with toll roads presented as a shining example.
• Surveiling and detaining convicted criminals.
• Ensuring the quality of wastewater treatment, drinking water, and solid waste services and facilities.

It's become too sickening to follow daily details of negotiations over a phony deficit scare steamroller that Obama did not have to jump aboard if he hadn't so chosen. In any case, the media pretty much covers this as a clash of personalities, not as the negotiation with terrorists that it is.

We certainly are not Germany in 1918. And our Democratic leadership will not have literal blood on its hands; it merely will be responsible for even more "sacrifice" by the poor and what's left of the middle class.

Sam Seder "attended" Obama's "eat your peas" press conference.

After that crack by the president, Sam's advice was: "'Eat your peas' now, before you end up eating cat food! Get as many peas in your system as you can!"

That was followed by an interview with Brian Beutler, who's been covering the "negotiations" for TPM.

Following the obvious conclusion about where "negotiations" will lead—and at exactly the moment I was thinking, "Thank You, Barack H. Hoover"—Sam suggested one bright side to full-scale economic depression: new productions of Annie.

While this may not be Brecht and Weil, it is catchy.

And the lyrics may not be completely out of date. As long as newspapers don't go away completely, they will come in handy for lining one's clothing in winter.

Possible Then; Unimaginable Now

With the passing of Betty Ford, Bag News posted this 1975 photo headed, Betty Ford: A Socialist By Today's Standards.

Women's rights in today's GOP? The party is quite occupied, thank you, with their state legislature testing grounds—as in assaults on abortion rights and their defunding of Planned Parenthood medical clinics around the country.

RIP to a decent human being, who today would be silenced by her party.

Reagan And Race: Equal Opportunity Insensitivity

"The Man," indeed...He shot to the top of his party by pitching to white racists.

In his two White House terms, there were the anti-civil rights words, actions, and inaction.

It wasn't just African-Americans: Reagan found chances to dismiss other Americans, too.

Quotes below from Paul Slansky.

5/31 [1988] In a speech to students at Moscow State University [during trip to the USSR], President Reagan explains the American Indian situation: the US has "provided millions of acres" for "preservations—or reservations, I should say," so the Indians could "maintain their way of life," though now he wonders, "Maybe we should not have humored them in that, wanting to stay in that kind of primitive lifestyle. Maybe we should have said, 'No, come join us. Be citizens along with the rest of us.'"

For the record, Indians have been citizens since 1924, and few would say they've been "humored" by being allowed to maintain the culture they created before their land was taken from them.

On a matter of concern to a rather large segment of the population—

7/28 [1982] Caught off-guard at his 12th press conference by Sarah McClendon's question about "sex harassment of women" working in government, President Reagan waggles his head and says, "Now, Sarah, just a minute here with the discussion or we'll be getting an R rating." Although many reporters find this inane quip amusing, Sarah definitely does not.

In a similar vein, in 1983—

3/24 President Reagan meets with a group of GOP congresswomen who urge him to stay out of the debate if the Equal Rights Amendment is revived.

"How would you like to trade?" he says. "I've got some amendments I'm very interested in too. What about trading for making abortion illegal?"

Says a witness, "You could hear people gasping all over the room."

Ah, yes, the quaint 1988 GOP: a party with members capable of gasping at the mentality of what was then considered its fringe...

Other 1983 variations on the theme—

7/26 At his 19th press conference, President Reagan is asked why there are no women on his 12-man commission on Central America. "Maybe," he suggests, "it's because we're doing so much and appointing so many that we're no longer seeking a token or something."

8/3 President Reagan tells a convention of women's clubs, "If it wasn't for women, us men would still be walking around in skin suits carrying clubs." The gals are not amused.

An an equal opportunity offender of non-Americans, as in 1982—

8/17 "Ladies and gentlemen, Chairman Moe of Liberia is our visitor here today, and we're very proud to have him."
—President Reagan, introducing Liberian head of state Samuel K. Doe

10/19 During a White House meeting with Arab leaders, President Reagan turns to the Lebanese foreign minister. "You know," he says,"your nose looks just like Danny Thomas'."

Well, he did get the correct country of family origin...

Also 1982, the slighting of that other "America"—

12/1 At a dinner welcoming him to Brazil, President Reagan calls for a toast to his host, President João Figeiredo, and "the people of Bolivia." In an effort to recover, he explains that Bolivia is "where we're going next," though Columbia is next on the itinerary, and no stops in Bolivia are planned.

12/4 President Reagan returns home from his five-day trip to Latin America. "Well, I learned a lot," he tells reporters. "You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries."

An aide is sent out to explain that the President certainly didn't mean to imply that he was surprised by this.

Some members of his administration were confident about their public statements.

5/12 [1984] The number two man of the Housing Department, Philip Abrams, expresses doubt that Hispanics live in crowded homes because of poverty. "I don't think so," he says. "I'm told that they don't mind and they prefer, some prefer doubling up... It's a cultural preference, I'm told."

And even more confident in private.

10/20 [1987] Galleys of former Education Secretary T. H. Bell's forthcoming White House memoirs reveal that, to President Reagan's "mid-level right-wing staffers," Martin Luther King, Jr., was "Martin Lucifer Coon," Arabs were "sand niggers," and a law prohibiting discrimination against women was "the lesbians' bill of rights."

This Week On NPR: Things I Learned (Or Not)

In a country saturated by Faux News, it's always comforting to know there is a Serious New source a liberal can trust.

WPA/Federal Art Project, Image: Posters for the People

Well, I try to tune it out, except for catching time and weather in the morning. But there are the stories that stand out too much to ignore, and I caught a few this particular week.

Why does this trial balloon make it feel like 2004 all over again?

Oh, it's not that I expect Obama to benefit from this. Not at all, and I somehow think it's other interests running "Terrorists ... To [surgically] Implant Bombs In Humans" up the flagpole—

"This is something we've been concerned about for quite some time," said J. Bennet Waters, a security consultant with the Washington, D.C.-based Chertoff Group and a former Transportation Security Administration official in the Bush administration.

Business is no doubt slow for the Chertoff Group.

There's the usual vagueness about no known threat; terrorists believed to be considering this tactic; yada, yada, yada.

So, this means we're about to trade airport colonoscopies for pre-flight surgery? I'm sure the Chertoff Group has some technology at the ready.

I can't find an NPR link to the story, but they most certainly were pushing this.

I know the talking point now is a supposed increase in longevity, even as the average actual resident of this country has less and less access to health care.

And so, the new conventional wisdom: pushed here by a blandly wonkish, bow-tie wearing "progressive."

So shape up, you lazy, elderly proles, and get a damn job! A 91-year old (born to wealth; previous Republican appointee to the nation's unelected branch of government) is feeling frisky, so what's your problem?

Among other stories that are surprising only if given coverage: "Medicaid Makes 'Big Difference' In Lives, Study Finds."

Shocking, the thought that having medical care is better for the poor than not having care.

But it seems a controlled, statistically significant study has proved the point. So: now it's science versus the Reaganesque anecdotes of the "president of the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis," who was told by "a Boston cabdriver" that her medicaid sucked.

To which, one might respond, "Why does someone who works for a living in this country need medicaid?" But that's a whole other (no matter how connected) issue.

We also get to hear from a doctor (and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute), who claims there are ever so many (unidentified) studies showing outcomes are worse for medicaid beneficiaries than for people with no coverage.

This morning, among the disgraceful bullshit that passes for coverage of the economy, was this.

"When we think about government cuts, you think of bureaucrats, you know, people sitting at desks where we just don't really need them. And yet the reality is, there's a lot of post office workers, mail deliverers, and policemen, firemen, teachers who are losing their jobs."

You mean, "government" includes firemen, teachers, et. al.? Why, who ever could have given people the idea that government is so horrid?

And who'd have imagined that substantial numbers of people with secure, middle-class jobs could be good for the economy?

Get over it! All good pundits agree: government employment is a thing of the past.

It's healthy for the populace to be reduced to fighting over whatever corporate scraps there are, at whatever wages and conditions the "market" will allow.

But, it's not as if these stories tell me anything I don't already know. Although, in classic Pravda fashion, they work well enough for listening between the lines.

Reagan And Race: Words From The White House

Racism in America? A thing of the past, said Ronald Reagan.

After all, he fought the KKK back in 1951, and it was in the script—the Klan only went after white people!

All quotes below, Paul Slansky, The Clothes Have No Emperor.

[1981]

6/12
President Reagan fails to recognize his only black Cabinet member, Housing Secretary Samuel Pierce, at a White House reception for big city mayors. "How are you, Mr. Mayor?" he greets him. "I'm glad to meet you. How are things in your city?"

6/29 "I regard voting as the most sacred right of free men and women."
—President Reagan who, mouthed pieties aside, refuses to commit to supporting an extension of the Voting Rights Act

[1982]

1/8 The White House announces that President Reagan—who often wonders why people think he's anti-civil rights—has signed off on Ed Meese's plan to grant tax-exempt status to South Carolina's Bob Jones University and other schools that practice racial discrimination.

1/12 President Reagan explains that there must have been some kind of "misunderstanding" regarding his efforts to grant tax exemptions to segregated schools, since he is "unalterably opposed to racial discrimination in any form."

1/15 President Reagan phones The Washington Post to explain that when his new policy toward segregated schools was announced, he "didn't know at the time that there was a case pending." CBS quickly obtains a memo in which intervention in the Bob Jones University case was specifically requested, and on which Reagan had written, "I think we should."

5/10 Taking questions from students at a Chicago high school, President Reagan explains why his revised tax exemption policy could not possibly have been intended to benefit segregated schools. "I didn't know there were any," he says. "Maybe I should have"—Maybe?—"but I didn't."

9/16 REAGAN ASSERTS BLACKS WERE HURT BY PROGRAMS OF THE GREAT SOCIETY
—The New York Times

[1983]

6/29 President Reagan suggests that one cause of the decline in public education is the schools' efforts to comply with court-ordered desegregation.

10/19 Asked at his 20th press conference if he believes that Martin Luther King, Jr., had Communist ties, President Reagan alludes to a court order sealing transcripts of phone taps until 2018, quipping, "We'll know in about 35 years, won't we?"

11/2 President Reagan signs a bill making Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. When the crowd sings "We Shall Overcome," the President does not join in.

Jules Feiffer, 1983 (click image for dialog)

During the 1984 re-election campaign, the Reagan team shows its faith that PR shall overcome:

"Your policies are not in the least anti-black or anti-poor. As a matter of fact, it's my opinion that your fight against inflation, your war on the drug traffic, your tough stand against street crime, your effort in revitalizing the nation's economy, are all of great importance to us poor people and us black people in America."
—Letter allegedly received by President Reagan from a 39-year-old black man whose identity, as is so often the case with these epistles of unsolicited support, goes unrevealed.

"I feel more patriotic towards my country. I feel more proud to be an American."
—Black youth in the [campaign] film

Reagan fantasy and obliviousness: not limited to US affairs—

8/24 [1985] President Reagan tells an interviewer that the "reformist administration" of South African president P. W. Botha has made significant progress on the racial front. "They have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country," says the President, "the type of thing where hotel and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated—that has all been eliminated."

7/22 [1986] Addressing the nation to explain his opposition to sanctions against South Africa, President Reagan refers to it as "South America." Says Bishop Desmond Tutu, "Your President is the pits as far as blacks are concerned ... I found the speech nauseating."

In 1988—

3/16 President Reagan—who still can't understand why he's perceived as insensitive to minorities—vetoes a major civil rights bill that would restore anti-discrimination laws removed by a Supreme Court decision. The veto is soundly overridden.

On January 15, 1989—a few days before departing the White House—

In a 60 Minutes interview airing on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, birthday, President Reagan—again citing his half-century-old support for desegregation of baseball as proof of his commitment to equality—suggests that many civil rights leaders are just using racism to promote themselves. "Sometimes I wonder if they really want what they say they want," he says, pointing out that they are "doing very well leading organizations based on keeping alive the feeling that they're victims of prejudice."

Reagan and Race: The Politics

Divide and conquer: it's American as apple pie and Fourth of July.

Ronald Reagan was a master, possibly without ever perceiving what he did; always sincere about the malarkey he peddled, the man believed there was no racism in his policies as long as he personally was not racist.

For a collection of essays, Deconstructing Reagan: Conservative Mythology And America's Fortieth President, Jeremy D. Mayer contributed "Reagan and Race: Prophet of Color Blindness, Baiter of the Backlash."

Seeing the world in anecdotes and movie plot synopses as he did, Reagan's perception of racial discrimination was no different. Whenever the topic was raised, writes Mayer, "Reagan repeated two anecdotes endlessly"—his Catholic father forbade him to see "Birth of a Nation"; his college football team would have been stranded on the road, but Reagan's parents reacted as he expected, by welcoming the two black teammates he brought home to stay overnight.

Thirty years later, Reagan entered national politics as what Mayer calls "The Sunny Salesman of White Backlash." Speaking on national television in October 1964

... Reagan electrified Goldwater supporters with his powerful, bold rhetoric and extraordinary ease in delivery; but something was missing from the speech... Goldwater's opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act was one of his major appeals for millions of Americans, [but] Reagan said not a word about race or civil rights.

This would be the pattern, with Reagan generally avoiding the subject. In the 1966 California governor's race, however, he used repeal of the state's law against housing discrimination as a property rights issue—after previously opposing national legislation on the grounds that housing was a state issue.

After that election, Reagan was a big enough star in the national party to be the pick of many to run for president by 1968. His chief rival was Nixon, and Mayer quotes a memo within the latter's organization—

"Reagan's strength derives from personal charisma, glamour, but primarily the ideological fervor of the Right and the emotional distress of those who fear or resent the Negro, and who expect Reagan somehow to keep him 'in his place' or at least to echo their own anger and frustration."

Mayer writes that

Ultimately, Nixon had to move far to the racial right to defeat the Reagan challenge. Although it is likely that Nixon would have adopted his southern strategy even if Reagan had never run for president, it might not have been such an anti-civil rights strategy had it not been for Reagan's pressure.

The Great Communicator: giving Richard Nixon lessons on the uses of race-baiting.

Reagan had only two years in politics by 1968, and Mayer asks:

How did Ronald Reagan, a Californian with no record of animosity toward blacks and no sustained cultural exposure to the American South, become so popular among racially conservative whites in such a brief period of time? In many ways, Reagan was the ideal face for racial conservatism. a movement desperately opposed to black progress but aware that open racism had become anathema to most Americans. Moreover, Reagan had traveled extensively in the South on behalf of General Electric, after his film career ended. Giving these speeches, as well as Republican party speeches throughout the South from 1964 to 1968, taught Reagan very well how to please a southern crowd without crossing lines of open racism. In addition, many of Reagan's other positions, on school prayer, taxes, foreign policy, federalism, and welfare, fit weIl with southern cultural conservatism. Reagan could allow many white southerners to believe that they had opposed the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act not because they hated or feared blacks, but because they believed in traditional American values... This plausible deniability on race was perhaps Reagan's greatest appeal to many racist whites.

Mayer suggests Reagan took advantage of a shift in political attitudes toward race:

Reagan was the first prophet of Republican color blindness on race. In the 1950s, the liberal line ... was that the government should step in to prevent official discrimination against blacks. The goal was a color-blind society. As the massive legacy of America's centuries of racism became ever clearer in the 1960s and 1970s, many liberals shifted to a policy of taking cognizance of race in an effort to eradicate racism and its powerful lingering effects. At the same time, many conservatives, gradually rejecting government tolerance of racism, adopted the color-blind rhetoric abandoned by the liberals. Reagan led this shift more than any other political figure. His faith that he lacked racial prejudice allowed him to take positions widely perceived as antiblack without any hesitation. A more introspective or ambivalent white politician might have retreated in the face of nearly unified black anger at his policy positions... such retreats were almost unknown in the campaigns and policies of Ronald Wilson Reagan.

In other words, Reagan showed the modern right-wing the path of psychological projection it has followed ever since, with its "you're the racist, for bringing up race!" line of attack.

Reagan sometimes made overt assertions—

In the midst of the rioting era, Reagan made this stunning statement: "The greatest proof of how far we've advanced in race relations is that the white community hasn't lifted a finger against the Negroes." In addition to being factually incorrect (many more blacks were killed by whites in the riots of the 1960s than the converse), praising whites for not taking vengeance against blacks as they had in the recent past was the kind of language that fed the moral legitimacy of the white backlash.

As Reagan later campaigned for the presidency against Gerald Ford—

Ford's campaign accurately perceived that Reagan's appeal was deeply related to his positions on race. Ford's pollster found that Reagan supporters were almost indistinguishable in attitude from [George] Wallace supporters...

... In his famous "welfare queen" anecdote, told repeatedly in the 1976 campaign, Reagan echoed Wallace in using welfare to court the white backlash. In Reagan's telling, a woman in the Midwest had used as many as nineteen identities to bilk the government of hundreds of thousands of tax dollars. While Reagan never identified the woman's race, the original story was well known, at least to many in the Midwest. The facts were also well known to many reporters, who pointed out to Reagan that he was greatly exaggerating the case. The actual woman had taken on just two identities, and the amount of money defrauded was exponentially less than Reagan claimed. Reagan continued to give his erroneous version, which was very popular with his audiences. In perhaps the most odious outreach to white racism of the 1976 campaign, Reagan supporters in North Carolina distributed a flyer alleging that Ford was going to put Senator Edward Brooke, a moderate black Republican, on the ticket as his vice president.

By 1980, when he began the primaries as front-runner, Reagan mainly kept quiet about civil rights issues, unless questioned directly.

In one "off-message" moment, Reagan blamed the VRA [Voting Rights Amendment] for the "humiliation" it brought the South. Others might have felt that the American South should have been embarrassed and humiliated by the decades of racist violence and systemic disenfranchisement that made the VRA so necessary, but for Reagan, it was the reporting requirements that were humiliating.

With his history of this kind of signaling, it may have been shocking for him to open his campaign with a states' rights speech in Neshoba County, Mississippi, but it should have been no surprise.

Not only did Reagan start his campaign in Neshoba, but his speech endorsed states' rights, the very principle advocated by those who murdered the three civil rights martyrs.

(More on that campaign opener.)

Following Reagan's first term, "the few black leaders who had supported him in 1980 were nowhere to be found in his reelection effort." Mayer adds—

Almost the only outreach Reagan's campaign had to black voters was a pathetic billboard campaign telling blacks that three black boxers (Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and Floyd Patterson) were behind Reagan.

In his two terms, the most public involvement with race was over legislation to observe the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., long demonized by the Right:

On the day [April 4, 1968] King was shot, Reagan called the assassination "a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they'd break." The comparison between nonviolent marches and boycotts against racial discrimination and the assassination of a black leader ... echoed tbe criticisms of King's segregationist opponents since his earliest campaigns against racism ... It was perhaps a historical irony that the long movement to honor King with a holiday would finally pass through Congress at a time when the man who had to sign the legislation was a lifelong opponent of government actions in defense of black civil rights.

President Reagan was against the legislation, and

Writing to a hard-core right-winger who opposed the King holiday because of King's sexual immorality and left-wing tendencies, Reagan wrote, "I have the reservations you have but there the perception of too many people is based on an image not reality. Indeed to them the perception is reality. We hope some modification might still take place in Congress."

Though his sympathies were with the conservative allies who pressed him to veto the legislation, he yielded to the political necessity of signing.

In the end, writes Mayer,

While Reagan did not leave much of a policy legacy on civil rights directly, his appointments to the judiciary have had and will continue to have a serious impact on race relations. Reagan appointed hundreds of federal judges who, like him, were either ambivalent about or hostile to the great achievements of the civil rights movement. In all the major cases trimming back Warren court decisions or affirmative action, Reagan appointees occupy a prominent position... while Reagan never succeeded in ending affirmative action or weakening the Voting Rights Act directly, his appointees went a long way toward his stated goals.

America, The Exceptional (II)

There are no adequate words for Japan's nuclear disaster, visible so far only in terms of physical destruction, not lasting impacts on health and the environment.

Dahr Jamail interviews a former nuclear industry executive on the horrific details of "the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind."

Michael Shaw, on "Fukushima: The Latest Personal Electronics"—

I was waiting for it to happen: Fukushima Prefecture kids get their own portable dosimeters.

... Any similarity to the iPod, I assume, is strictly coincidental.

Via TPM is this Reuters report on the Japanese nuclear industry's past and current use of "throwaway workers": foreigners (including Americans) and homeless day laborers.

This hits home, knowing how economic conditions and the shredding of safety nets create desperation.

And having lived near Osaka, I've heard the story that Kamagaski, the city's skid row, is omitted from official maps so it can be presumed not to exist.

The Reuters piece includes an eerie look at a dying consumer culture momentarily revived—

In Iwaki, a town south of the Fukushima plant once known for a splashy Hawaiian-themed resort, the souvenir stands and coffee shops are closed or losing money. The drinking spots known as "snacks" are starting to come back as workers far from home seek the company of bar girls.

"It's becoming like an army base," said Shukuko Kuzumi, 63, who runs a cake shop across from the main rail station. "There are workers who come here knowing what the work is like, but I think there are many who don't."

For years, Harry Shearer has done a Le Show segment—"Clean, Safe, Too Cheap to Meter"—where he reviews the past week's little nuclear mishaps around the world.

He's taken to abbreviating to the Japanese site as, "Fuk."

Exceptional as we are, we do have some potential Fuks in process, what with those Midwestern plants built on a flood plain.

And why worry about this, in an increasingly fire-prone Southwest desert.

Digby on our own nuclear industry's safety record—

I guess it's a good thing these Mississippi floods are happening slowly because it's giving this Nebraska nuclear plant some time to read their emergency manuals. No word on whether they are learning anything from it.

Meanwhile, an important climate change denier cancels travel to a deniers' conference: the record heat has him, he says, "under the weather."

America, The Exceptional (I)

Another week (and month) gone by, swallowed whole by the insatiable work monster.

I'd be as oblivious to the outer world as most of my fellow Amurkans, if it weren't for listening to audio. And listening is about all I can do to keep from climbing the (not so sturdy) cubicle wall, during 40 hours of (mostly) copy/pasting data.

I do try to get a quick glance at sites while waiting for database pages to load, and this was one of those weeks where I sent myself at least 20 links, for a closer look over the weekend.

While there's the potential for feeling as overwhelmed by all that information as by the office workload, the stories may be details from disparate places, but are never unrelated.

As we embark on an era of Shared Sacrifice—the rich will sacrifice paying taxes; everyone else will sacrifice public services (in many cases, a sole source of income or medical care)—a CBO report can't help but suggest how bogus the bi-partisan Establishment scam is.

The still-employed have already accepted being forced to work more for less. Now the Roberts thugs have decided (among other matters of corporate interest) the case of women workers who sought redress from Walmart.

Those women may earn only $8 an hour, but they certainly have the right to hire a lawyer—just individually, without the added strength of being able to act as a group.

Effective rights? That's for corporations. Or for a legacy Republican in need of office without the "irreparable harm" of votes being counted.

Another angle to power vs. its absence: Sam Seder, on this Advertising Age story about marketers and income disparity.

"Mass influence is over," says Sam, who concludes—

You wonder why the establishment in this country doesn't care about the middle class? Ad Age has given you the answer: "We don't need to sell to these people anymore. It's enough that they will buy food... gas; everything else we sell will be to the richest, because they're the only ones with the money."
...

They don't need you to be consumers anymore. So why in the world would they care if you've got a job? Why in the world would they care about your stagnant wages? The underclass—and by that, I mean 80% of us—no longer have the leverage to get the plutocrats to give a shit about us. And because those plutocrats also control our government, because they have more money to influence the electoral process and the legislative process, we have no leverage with these people any more.

It's certainly true that multinationals in no way need a domestic middle-class as consumers.

Political marketing is another story: that's directed at the (white) masses 24/7.

Typical result is this latest launch into uncritical media fawning over someone who is indeed what she once would have been considered by the same media: an insane and dangerous demagogue who should stay on the outer fringe of American discourse.

But, nope: as Matt Taibbi says of the real history of the media's new political star–

This background is significant considering Bachmann's leadership role in the Tea Party, a movement ostensibly founded on ideas of limited government. Bachmann says she believes in a limited state, but she was educated in an extremist Christian tradition that rejects the entire notion of a separate, secular legal authority and views earthly law as an instrument for interpreting biblical values. As a legislator, she not only worked to impose a ban on gay marriage, she also endorsed a report that proposed banning anyone who "espoused or supported Shariah law" from immigrating to the U.S. (Bachmann seems so unduly obsessed with Shariah law that, after listening to her frequent pronouncements on the subject, one begins to wonder if her crazed antipathy isn't born of professional jealousy.)

While Europeans may take to the streets, our exceptional country has only tip-of-the-iceberg reports from all over.

On our God-given right not to be oppressed by medical care, for example, there's this and this.

The right to elect psychopaths to screw the unemployed.

The political right of local Republicans to take down state economies, just as they aim to do on the national level.

And they have the right to a two-fer in their war on women: demonizing women plus jeopardizing their health, by passing crap like this latest.

Well, add "demonizing science"; it's really a three-fer.

Exceptional as it all was, some bits of news slipped through.

While Ohio Republicans were busy passing the country's most radical (so far) anti-abortion law, other Ohioans finished their signature drive for a vote on their governor's end to public employee collective bargaining rights. They needed 231,000 signatures; they got over a million more.

It's not that they won't try, but (fingers crossed): one million seems a trifle high for even Republicans to manage disqualifying them all from voting.

A little light about that boring/mean/both-sides-do-it/politics thing: shed by someone who keeps trying to make the most of his media access.

And in a country being pushed back to feudalism—where an ideologue like the wife of "Doctor" Bachmann can be foisted on the populace—there was one little piece of progress for equal rights.