Bill Moyers on the Dark Money Assault on Democracy and How Racism Stills Drives Our Politics

  Media  

Democracy Now / By Amy Goodman, Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers on the Dark Money Assault on Democracy and How Racism Stills Drives Our Politics

 

 

Moyers, "We should know who’s buying our government."

 

 

January 27, 2014  |  

 

 

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Bill Moyers, the legendary broadcaster and host of Moyers & Company. Earlier this month, his program, Moyers & Company, aired the documentary report,State of Conflict: North Carolina. He is the former host of Bill Moyers Journal. He has won more than 30 Emmy Awards. He’s also a founding organizer of the Peace Corps, press secretary for President Lyndon Johnson, publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS News. His most recent book is Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues, as I hope it continues right here. Quite a report, and it isn’t even the whole thing. You go on in this report on the state of conflict in North Carolina to talk about the whole issue of voting rights. [Watch the documentary here, with full transcript published on AlterNet earlier this month].

BILL MOYERS: Yes, North Carolina now, because of this new far-right government—and these are not your father’s Republicans, they are really right-wing Republicans adhering to the fundamentalism of the right—they went after voting rights. It was one of the first objectives they fulfilled when they took power. And they now have the most restrictive voting rights in the country—a very complicated process of getting IDs that you have to have. They’ve redistricted in a way that packs African Americans into three districts, so that it’s hard to argue "one man, one vote" is happening down there. And the Justice Department has challenged the North Carolina state voting laws. But they are very restrictive, and they’re designed to perpetuate the Republican rule and to make it harder for the elderly, for the young, for minorities to vote.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the things they realized very quickly was that a lot of the voters who were voting early were voting Democrat, so they’re cracking down on the number of days that you can take—the number of days you can vote.

BILL MOYERS: Yes, there—for a while, it looked as if Mitt Romney had won in 2012, but when the early votes were finally counted, the margin went to—victory went to Obama. So, they don’t like that, and they’re doing away with early voting.

AMY GOODMAN: So, why did you focus on North Carolina, of all the states? Is it really so singular, so unique?

BILL MOYERS: Well, it’s very compact, what’s happening down there, and it’s very recent. This has happened to a considerable extent in Wisconsin. These are battleground states, where the right wing and the conservatives and the business and wealthy communities are collaborating to make sure they don’t lose again. North Carolina is an interesting state in and of itself. It’s a blue state, it’s a red state, it’s a purple state. Obama carried it by a whisker in 2008, Romney by a whisker in 2012. It goes back and forth. Jesse Helms, the, to use your term, legendary right-wing senator from North Carolina, was simultaneously in office with a progressive United States senator. It’s a purple state, really, that goes this way. So the Republicans, the right wing, are focusing on it. The Democrats ought to be focusing on it, but they’ve had their problems down there with corruption and scandals that played into Art Pope’s hands.

But there are three reasons for this story. One, it’s very clear what’s happening in North Carolina. Second, it’s a paradigm, a harbinger of what’s happening in other states. And then, most important, it really reveals what dark money is doing to American politics. So much of this money that has flowed into North Carolina comes from untraceable and unaccountable sources. They don’t know in North Carolina who’s funding the redistricting. They don’t know who’s funding these campaigns against their opponents. It’s coming from national sources, from Republican sources in Washington, from very wealthy people around the country. And that is, of course, flying in the face of the fundamental tenet of democracy, which is, we should know who’s buying our government.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, there is a North Carolinian in this, and it is Art Pope himself, also close to the Koch brothers.

BILL MOYERS: Yes, he is a—he’s been called a kingmaker as well as a king, because he has used his money—he’s a smart man, very shrewd, very intelligent, and very ruthless in how he uses his money. And as Jane Mayer, The New Yorker reporter, terrific reporter, as you and I both know, says at the end of the broadcast, this is more than North Carolina; this shows what a wealthy individual can do in any state where he or she is willing to put their money into politics in this way. So it’s a harbinger, as I say, of how our democracy—you know, organized money is the greatest threat to democracy because it unbalances the equilibrium. Democracy is supposed to check the excesses of private power and private greed. And if money disestablishes that equilibrium, we’re in trouble.

And the only answer—as we’ve seen in this film, the only answer to organized money is organized people. And that’s what really at first drew me to North Carolina. I’ve had a history there. I was on the board of Wake Forest University for years. I was in—I have good, close friends there who teach and who write and who work there. And I know something about North Carolina. And when I saw what was happening on these Moral Mondays, I knew nothing about them until the press stories began to come out. These people were gathering, not spontaneously, because Reverend Barber, who is himself a shrewd cat, a cool cat, as they say—I knew what he was doing in organizing these. The first arrest came in the summer, and then the news started—the news media started paying attention. It was obvious that people were becoming alarmed, agitated and organized in response to the buyout of North Carolina. And that remains the most hopeful—whether you’re a progressive conservative—a progressive Republican or a progressive liberal Democrat, you have to know that the only way we’re going to preserve our democracy is to fight this organized money. And that’s what the Moral Monday protesters are doing.

AMY GOODMAN: And they’re trying to plan the largest protest ever yet, and that will be February 8th. But there is a distinction sometimes between the progressives who are out there on the streets, who are getting arrested—more than a thousand got arrested in 2013—and the Democratic Party of North Carolina.

BILL MOYERS: That’s true. And this, of course, has played into the hands of the right wing. Progressives, of course, are more progressive than partisan. Democrats want Democrats to be re-elected, even if they’re centrists or center-right Democrats. So, there’s resentment in North Carolina among some traditional Democrats to Art—to Reverend Barber. He has now emerged as the progressive leader—not the Democratic leader, because he’s not a partisan in this respect. And so, there’s conflict between progressives and Democrats who are not progressives in North Carolina. This is an old—an old story, as you know.

The right wing solved it by this enormous confomity that they brought to their movement 25 and 30 years ago. The tea party was together enough to take over the Republican Party. Progressives are not together enough to take over, step by step, precinct by precinct, the Democratic Party. And that’s a source of conflict. And, of course, as I say in the documentary and said a moment ago, Democrats had some corruption and some scandals a few years ago when several went to jail. And that’s been a problem. That played right into the right’s hands, and it’s created a further rift between progressives and Democrats.

AMY GOODMAN: Reproductive rights also very much under attack. Fascinating to see Governor McCrory saying—you know, very simple answer when asked if he would be supporting more restrictions against abortion, in one of the debates, and his answer was "None," very clearly stated, but that hasn’t been the case.

BILL MOYERS: He read the tea leaves and saw that when he got into office—he was elected with the help of these conservatives, and of course he has to appease them in order to be re-elected, if he runs again. And one of the first changes in his agenda was to go against what he had said earlier and sign the most restrictive abortion bill, reproductive rights bill—anti-reproductive-rights bill in the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Last year, as you also clip, make an excerpt of in this documentary, The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi spoke to a North Carolina county precinct Republican chair named Don Yelton about North Carolina passing one of the most restrictive voter suppression bills in the nation.

DON YELTON: The bottom line is the law is not racist.

AASIF MANDVI: Of course the law is not racist, and you are not racist.

DON YELTON: Well, I have been called a bigot before. Let me tell you something. You don’t look like me, but I think I’ve treated you the same as I would anybody else.

AASIF MANDVI: Right.

DON YELTON: Matter of fact, one of my best friends is black.

AASIF MANDVI: So, one of your best friends—

DON YELTON: One of my best friends.

AASIF MANDVI: —is black.

DON YELTON: Yes.

AASIF MANDVI: And there’s more.

DON YELTON: When I was a young man, you didn’t call a black a black; you called him a Negro. I had a picture one time of Obama sitting on a stump as a witch doctor, and I posted that on Facebook. For your information, I was making fun of my white half of Obama, not the black half. And now, you have a black person using the term nigger this, nigger that, and it’s OK for them to do it.

AASIF MANDVI: You know that we can hear you, right?

DON YELTON: Yeah.

AASIF MANDVI: OK, you know that, that you—you know that we can hear you.

DON YELTON: Yeah.

AASIF MANDVI: OK, all right.

Then I found out the real reason for the law.

DON YELTON: The law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt.

AASIF MANDVI: Wow! An executive GOP committee member just admitted that this law isn’t designed to hurt black people; it’s designed to hurt Democrats.

DON YELTON: If it hurts a bunch of college kids that’s too lazy to get up off their bohunkus and go get a photo ID, so be it.

AASIF MANDVI: Right, right.

DON YELTON: If it hurts the whites, so be it. If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that wants the government to give them everything, so be it.

AASIF MANDVI: And it just so happens that a lot of those people vote Democrat.

DON YELTON: Gee.

AMY GOODMAN: That was from Comedy Central, The Daily Show. Almost immediately after the interview aired on The Daily Show, Don Yelton was forced to resign his position in the Republican Party. Bill Moyers?

BILL MOYERS: It’s sad that there are so many people in this country who cannot escape the prison of the past, and race is very much at the heart of this—particularly in the old Confederate states, this right-wing resurgence that we’re facing now. There are very few who speak as openly and as blatantly and as honestly as Don Yelton. He’s telling the interviewer, "Yeah, this is why I did what I did." Many do without revealing their motives. And if you track the voting patterns, if you track what’s happening in the country, you see that unspoken racism is still driving a large segment of our politics.

And fortunately, he outed himself and reminded us that the Republican Party in the South is the party that took over after the signing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when President Johnson said to me, "I think we’ve just handed the South to the Republicans for my lifetime and yours," because the racists who had been Democrats all those years until this transformation in American politics through the civil rights legislation and the civil rights movement—until this transformation brought them over, the Democrats had been the racist party in the South. I grew up in the South, and I remember all my Democratic friends were essentially racist. So, it’s changed, and Yelton was speaking a truth that dare not be heard. But he did say it, and we know it.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, Bill, we just came from Sundance Film Festival in Park City. Freedom Summer was one of the documentaries, from the remarkable filmmaker Stanley Nelson, and it’s about—this summer coming up is the 50th anniversary of the summer of 1964, when the three civil rights activists, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, were killed. Of course, they were named; there were others who we don’t know who died. It was the summer of organizing in Mississippi, and it was the summer of the Freedom Democratic—the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. And you were the press secretary of Lyndon Johnson. What was it like to be there when Fannie Lou Hamer was taking Lyndon Johnson on at the 1964 Atlantic City Democratic convention? He did not want that voice, who wanted to integrate the Mississippi Democratic Party delegation to the convention, to be heard, and so he gave a speech at the same time, so the cameras would switch from her—as they did, reliably, giving voice to power—to President Johnson.

BILL MOYERS: What a dramatic and traumatic moment it was, a riveting moment. By the way, I didn’t become press secretary for two years. I was 30 that summer, and I was actually President Johnson’s domestic policy adviser, working on civil rights, voting rights and politics. And it was a—it was a dramatic moment. It was an unfortunate moment, too, because I wish, in retrospect, that we had embraced Fannie Lou Hamer and realized that’s where the future of the Democratic Party lay.

AMY GOODMAN: Could it kind of be like North Carolina Democrats today?

BILL MOYERS: Yes, exactly, exactly. But here was Johnson’s predicament. He wanted to carry as many Southern states as he could. He was from Texas. He wanted to bring progressive, moderate Democrats along with him in his campaign for ’64. And had he embraced Fannie Lou Hamer, the morally right thing to do, it would have been, he thought, politically costly. So he hammered out this compromise, which was not satisfactory to either side, in order to preserve his political prowess and his political opportunity to carry the South. And we did carry several states in the South in 1964 that I think probably he would have lost if he had not made this compromise. But in retrospect, of course—and not even in retrospect, at the time, the moral embrace would have been the right one to do, and that would have been to bring the Mississippi leadership, the Democratic—the black and civil rights leaders of Mississippi into the Democratic Party.

AMY GOODMAN: He almost resigned then, didn’t he? The pressure so enormous, at least that’s what comes out in Freedom Summer. He was saying—he was wondering if he would throw in the towel then.

BILL MOYERS: Yes, he was torn between winning and doing the right thing. Lyndon Johnson had never been an outstanding proponent of voting—of civil rights when he was a senator from Texas or the majority leader, but his heart was always in the right place, because as a young man he was a New Deal congressman from Texas, and that was trying to embrace a larger constituency.

AMY GOODMAN: He had just signed the Civil Rights Act earlier that summer.

BILL MOYERS: 1964, that’s right. And then suddenly he was faced with this moral-versus-political choice, and it really created a great tension in him. He was torn by what he had done at the same time. And he wasn’t sure that winning re-election was worth the moral price he had paid for it. But he got over that and ran a hearty campaign, and of course received the largest plurality in the country up until then in a presidential race.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Bill, before we end the show, I wanted to ask about what your plans are. This year you turn 80.

BILL MOYERS: Yep.

AMY GOODMAN: You announced in October that Bill Moyers & Company, you’re going to be ending it. You got an avalanche of response. People—the force more powerful than any one person, the people spoke, and they said, "You can’t end this show." Bill Moyers—

BILL MOYERS: Well, enough people spoke to make me think that I was leaving—I was going AWOLin the middle of the battle. And, you know, when you’ve been at it 40-some-odd years—I’ve been a broadcaster for 41 years—you do have somewhat loyal constituents. Many of them are aging out, dying off. I mean, young journalists have no idea of what’s happened in broadcasting over the last 40 years. They’re into the web and so forth. But there were enough loyal fans, constituents around the country. They wrote—4,000 or 5,000 letters came to us, emails. And I had to face myself shaving in the morning and saying, "Are you abandoning these people?" So we came back for one more year.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it’s great to see you coming back with documentaries like these. What’s your next?

BILL MOYERS: We’re working on a—we’re looking at Ayn Rand’s influence today. Ayn Rand was—is the libertarian, the famous writer, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, a libertarian who celebrates the virtue of money and says the—has had an enormous influence over American politics and is even popular today. I think Atlas Shrugged sells something like 150-200,000 copies. It’s being taught. Her philosophy is being taught in universities funded by Koch brother organizations and others. And so we’re looking at Rand Paul, for example, who’s a likely candidate for president in—I don’t know. They say not, but there’s some kind of a convergence there, because when he was 17, his father, Ron Paul, gave him a set of Ayn Rand’s novels. So we’re working on that.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we look forward to the commentary. Bill, thanks so much for joining us, legendary broadcaster, host of Moyers & Company. Earlier this month, his program Moyers & Company aired a documentary called State of Conflict: North Carolina, and we’ll link to the full documentary at democracynow.org.

  

Bill Moyers has received 35 Emmy awards, nine Peabody Awards, the National Academy of Television’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and an honorary doctor of fine arts from the American Film Institute over his 40 years in broadcast journalism.  He is currently host of the weekly public television series Moyers & Company and president of the Schumann Media Center, a non-profit organization which supports independent journalism.  He delivered these remarks (slightly adapted here) at the annual Legacy Awards dinner of the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan public policy institute in New York City that focuses on voting rights, money in politics, equal justice, and other seminal issues of democracy. This is his first TomDispatch piece.

The Infrastructure of American Democracy Is Dysfunctional

Published on Thursday, January 23, 2014 by The Nation

The Infrastructure of American Democracy Is Dysfunctional

by John Nichols

 

 

 

 "Instead of making reasoned choices with the purpose of expanding turnout and assuring equal protection, our system leaves democracy to chance," writes Nichols. (Fil) 



President Obama’s second inaugural address touched on the reality that the United States has a dysfunctional election system. Describing the nation’s progress, as well as the ways in which the nation needs to progress, the president declared, “Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.”

Obama drew knowing applause when he spoke that truth in January 2013, as he did in November 2012, when just hours after his re-election the president noted that millions of Americans had “waited in line for a very long time” to vote. Then, in an ad lib that got more attention that his prepared remark, the president added: “By the way we have to fix that.”

On Wednesday, the process of fixing the problem—and of moving America a few more steps toward democracy—accelerated. A little.

The bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration that Obama appointed last year released a report that recommends:

1. Modernization of the registration process through continued expansion of online voter registration and expanded state collaboration in improving the accuracy of voter lists.

2. Measures to improve access to the polls through multiple opportunities to vote before the traditional Election Day and the selection of suitable, well-equipped polling place facilities, such as schools.

3. State-of-the-art techniques to assure efficient management of polling places, including tools the Commission is publicizing and recommending for the efficient allocation of polling place resources.
4. Reforms of the standard-setting and certification process for new voting technology to address soon-to-be antiquated voting machines and to encourage innovation and the adoption of widely available off-the-shelf technologies.

These are relatively tepid proposals. But they move in the right direction on several fronts. It is important to make it easier to register and vote; modernizing registration procedures and expanding early and absentee voting programs, can help with this. So, too, can the improved allocation of resources and technology to assure that every voter in every state has a roughly equal chance to cast a ballot in a timely, respectful and efficient manner.

So the president was pleased with the report. He received it with much fanfare and described the recommendations as “eminently glittering.”

Obama says that he and his aides will “reach out to stakeholders all across the country to make sure that we can implement” the commission’s report.” The president brings to this work a sense of urgency that is appropriate, reminding Americans that “one of the troubling aspects of the work that they did was hearing from local officials indicating that we could have even more problems in the future if we don’t act now.”

But no one, including the president, should imagine that what the commission has produced is a cure for what ails American democracy.

The commission’s report relies on technical repairs, and a faith in newer technologies. That’s not a fresh approach. After the 2000 fiasco in Florida, and the resulting intervention of the United States Supreme Court to prevent a thorough recount—and a thorough review of the failures and abuses of voting systems in the state—there were reports, and recommendations and allocations of resources for new technologies.

But there was not a shift in the mindset of the country regarding voting and elections. Indeed, those who would restrict and restrain the franchise stepped up their activism. And after the 2010 elections put Republicans in charge of the statehouses sacross the country, we saw a wave of new initiatives—many, though not all, of them crafted by the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council—to impose restrictive Voter ID requirements, to limit early voting, to eliminate same-day registration.

The problems that inspired the president’s “we need to fix that” line were not necessarily technical or technological. They were often man-made. And the men who made them are still at work; in 2013, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, more than eighty bills restricting the right to vote were introduced in more than thirty states.

That figure serves as a reminder that the core challenges with regard to voting in America is not necessarily technological. Americans could vote on paper ballots quickly and efficiently, as do voters in many other countries. And if they did they might well be more confident in the count.

The core challenge has to do with an insufficient level of commitment on the part of local, state and federal agencies to creating the infrastructure and the mindset that fosters high-turnout elections.

The United States has an exceptionally low level of voter participation as compared with most developed democracies. In the parliamentary elections of European countries, it is not uncommon to see turnout levels surpass 70 percent, even 80 percent, of the voting-age population. In America, off-year congressional elections attract under 40 percent of the voting age population, and high-stakes presidential elections don’t get to 55 percent.

Why? Because the United States makes it hard to vote.

Unlike other countries that actually try to achieve maximum voter participation, the United States retains a separate-and-unequal electoral infrastructure that rests authority over voting and elections with individual states. Instead of making reasoned choices with the purpose of expanding turnout and assuring equal protection, our system leaves democracy to chance.
To wit:

1. This country schedules elections on Tuesdays, rather than weekends.

2. This country does not make Election Day a holiday.

3. This country does not have a universal system for registering every citizen before his or her eighteenth birthday.

4. This country does not have a universal system for alerting all eligible voters that an election is coming, or for letting them know where and how to vote.

5. This country does not have universal standards for whether those convicted of crimes can vote, or for when and how those who have served their sentences will have their voting rights restored.

6. This country does not have universal standards for who can vote in a primary election, or for whether a run-off election will be held, or for how recounts will be conducted, or for how inconclusive results are to be addressed.

7. This country does not have universal standards for ballot design, or for how to deal with mismarked ballots, or for how to assure that ballots that have been cast are protected against tampering.

8. This country does not have universal standards for the distance one must travel to vote, or for the hours polls are to remain open, or for the set-up and operation of polling places, or for the availability of voting machines and other equipment, or for verifying that votes have been accurately cast and will be accurately counted.

The list of gaps in the structures of American democracy is long.

The recommendations made by the president’s commission address some of those gaps. But they do not begin to address all of them.

That does not mean that the commission’s report should be neglected. The recommendations should be used to encourage a process of improving the voting systems of the United States.

Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center is right when she says, “The Commission’s recommendations are a significant step forward. They make clear that nationwide our voting systems have common problems, which can be fixed with common, national solutions. Especially important is the consensus that we need to modernize voter registration, make early voting available to all Americans, and put systems in place so no one waits longer than 30 minutes to vote. These will be the new benchmarks against which future elections will be judged.”

The recommendations of the commission ought not, however, be seen as the “end of the journey” to democracy.

If we are realistic about the challenge of remaking America as a nation with high-turnout elections and truly representative democracy, what the commission has produced is barely a beginning.

A report is not enough. Recommendations are not enough.

What’s required is a teaching moment, led by the president and serious members of Congress, by reformers and academics and media and citizens of good will. And it ought to have as its goal a reshaping of how the United States understands voting and voting rights.

The truth is that, on too many levels, the United States does not respect the right to vote, to have votes counted and to have the results of voting genuinely reflected in the governance of communities, states and the nation.

Too much is left to chance. That has been made obvious in recent years, not just by the myriad state-based battles over restrictive Voter ID laws but by the US Supreme Court’s mangling of the Voting Rights Act.

More than a report is needed, more even than a new version of the Voting Rights Act—although the proposal made recently by Congressman John Conyers, D-Michigan, and James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisconsin, and Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, is a reasonable and needed step in the right direction.

What is ultimately required is an absolute guarantee of the right to vote and the right to have that vote counted. That affirmation should be added to the United States Constitution, in an amendment along the lines of the one proposed last year by Congressman Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, and Congressman Mark Pocan, D-Wisconsin.

Supported by groups such as FairVote and Color of Change, the Ellison-Pocan “Right to Vote” amendment simply declares:

SECTION 1: Every citizen of the United States, who is of legal voting age, shall have the fundamental right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides.

SECTION 2: Congress shall have the power to enforce and implement this article by appropriate legislation.

These are proper benchmarks. When the right to vote is guaranteed, when it is constitutionally established as fundamental, that is a strong place of beginning for establishing the infrastructure of genuinely functional and genuinely representative democracy.

“The right to vote is too important to be left unprotected,” explains Pocan. “At a time when there are far too many efforts to disenfranchise Americans, a voting rights amendment would positively affirm our founding principle that our country is at its strongest when everyone participates.”

© 2014 The Nation

 

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. His most recent book, co-authored with Robert W. McChesney is, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America. Other books written with McChesney include: The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again and Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy. Nichols' other books include: The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition, Dick: The Man Who is President and The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

Look Closely and You'll See That America Remains a Deeply Racist Nation

The Guardian / By Chris Arnade

Look Closely and You'll See That America Remains a Deeply Racist Nation

 

Gone is the overt, violent, and legal racism of my childhood in the 1960s. It's been replaced by a subtler, still ugly version

 

 

January 13, 2014  |  

 

A week after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, I walked into my old hometown bar in central Florida to hear, "Well if a nigger can be president, then I can have another drink. Give me a whiskey straight up."

Only one day in the town and I thought, "Damn the south."

I had returned home to bury my father, who had spent much of the 1950s and '60s fighting for civil rights in the south. Consequently, my childhood was defined by race. It was why our car was shot at, why threats were made to burn our house down, why some neighbors forbid me to play on their lawn, why I was taunted at school as a "nigger lover".

It was nothing compared to what the blacks in town had to endure. I was just residing in the seam of something much uglier.

It is also why I left as soon as I could, exercising an option few others had. I eventually moved to New York City to work on Wall Street.

In the next 15 years I thought less about race. It is possible to live in the northeast as a white liberal and think little about it, to convince yourself that most of the crude past is behind. Outward signs suggest things are different now: I live in an integrated neighborhood, my kids have friends of all colors, and my old office is diverse compared to what I grew up with. As many point out, America even has a black man (technically bi-racial) as president.

Soon after my father passed away, I started to venture beyond my Wall Street life, to explore parts of New York that I had only previously passed through on the way to airports. I did this with my camera, initially as a hobby. I ended up spending three years documenting addiction in the New York's Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point. There I was slapped in the face by the past.

In my Florida hometown, there is a train track that splits the town into two colors. When we passed into the black section of town, even if I were lying in the back of the station wagon, I knew it. The gravel roads would wake me, and I could basically smell poverty through the windows.

Crossing into Hunts Point in New York is the same, complete with a train track. The roads are paved, but feel unpaved. The stench of poverty has not changed much (industrial waste rather than uncollected garbage), nor has its clamor or its destructive power.

Neither has the color of its residents: the poor side of town in New York is still almost entirely dark skinned.

It took me a few months of slow recognition, fighting a thought I did not want to believe: we are still a deeply racist country. The laws on the books claim otherwise, but in Hunts Point (and similar neighborhoods across the country), those laws seem like far away idyllic words that clash with the daily reality: everything is stacked against those who are born black or brown.

We as a nation applaud ourselves for having moved beyond race. We find one or two self-made blacks or Hispanics who succeeded against terrible odds, and we elevate their stories to a higher position, and then we tell them over and over, so we can say, "See, we really are a color blind nation."

We tell their stories so we can forget about the others, the ones who couldn't overcome the long odds, the ones born into neighborhoods locked down by the absurd war on drugs, the ones born with almost even odds that their fathers will at some point be in jail, the ones born into neighborhoods that few want to teach in, neighborhoods scarce of resources.

We tell the stories of success and say: see anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, further denigrating those who can't escape poverty. It plays into the false and pernicious narrative that poverty is somehow a fault of desire, a fault of intelligence, a fault of skills. No, poverty is not a failing of the residents of Hunts Point who are just as decent and talented as anyone else. Rather it is a failing our broader society.

It took me seeing one black teen thrown against a bodega wall by cops, for no reason, to erase much of the image of seeing Obama elected. It took the unsolved murder of a 15-year-old Hunts Point girl, a girl my middle daughter's age, to make me viscerally understand how lucky my children are. It took watching as one smart child grew from dreaming of college to dealing drugs to viscerally understand how lucky everyone in my old office is.

The barriers between Hunts Point and the rest of New York are not as high as they were between the white and black section of my hometown in the 1960s. People can freely pass over them. Practically, however, they are almost insurmountable.

Gone is the overt, violent, and legal racism of my childhood. It has been replaced by a subtler version.

It is a racism that is easier to ignore, easier to deny, and consequently almost as dangerous.

See more stories tagged with:

racism

Why the Infatuation with Bullies Like Chris Christie?

  Media  

AlterNet / By Arun Gupta

Why the Infatuation with Bullies Like Chris Christie?

Christie reveals a dark side of our society -- a public enchanted by his tough guy antics and the press who encourages his sadism.

 

 

Photo Credit: AFP

 

 

January 11, 2014  |  

 

 

If the media had even a trace of independence, the instant Chris Christie declared like a dainty blossom trampled roughly, “I am not a bully,” the throng of reporters would have screamed, “Liar” in a single voice and hurled their cameras, pens, notepads, recorders, iPhones and shoes at him, burying his political career.

 

Then they would have exited the farce and switched to the tape for those at home, showing not the highlight reel of bullying moments compiled by his own staff to promote the Governor Smackdown brand, but the warm-up at a Jersey town-hall meeting in 2010 where he announced to the audience, with the salivating glee of a hound dog cornering a lame rabbit, that a bullying moment “could happen right here, ladies and gentlemen! … Get ready! If you have your own cameras, start rolling!”

 

No, Christie would vanish without the browbeating and thuggery that are as indelibly linked to his tenure as the Shore is to Jersey. The real question is not why the press is so sycophantic. It’s why does the public revere a bully as savior? Why do we no longer pine for the knight-in-shining-armor, itself a fairytale version of democracy, but the leather-masked Quasimodo executing justice with cracking bones and spurting blood, or in Christie’s case, cracking insults and spurting bile at those swept up in his spectacle of torment?

 

It’s because these days Americans have as much familiarity with democracy as they do with homesteading on the frontier. We like to imagine ourselves as pioneering statesmen, hewing a sturdy nation from the simple tools democracy has bequeathed us – messaging, voting, debates, elections, law-making – but we are lost in the wilderness when it comes to discovering the essence of democracy.

 

Democracy is not the same as the perpetual-motion electoral machine. It’s both a means and end built on dialogue, respect, relationships and reason, and it’s everything Christie pummels into submission. But don’t blame the public for this sorry state of affairs. Our lives are bereft of democracy. Virtually all schools are authoritarian, as are churches. Families teeter between parental authority and youthful insubordination. Few believe consumerism is democratic (but our democracy is consumeristic). Say “workplace democracy” to anyone at the office and blank stares is the best reaction you can hope for.

 

Few people know how to engage in democratic discussion and dialogue. I’ve heard the same story from food-justice organizers in Brooklyn, anti-fracking activists in Ohio, warehouse workers in Chicago, and home-foreclosure defenders in Oakland. It’s back to basics. Organizing now means first building community through socializing such as potlucks, block parties and softball games, and teaching people how to collectively listen to and discuss ideas with mutual respect.

 

We’re at ground zero when it comes to democracy. We feel powerless to stop oil companies from frying the planet, nuke plants radiating countries, stripping oceans of life and dumping them full of garbage, and are unable to help the homeless lying beside foreclosed housing, the sick dying in the shadow of world-class hospitals, and unemployed millions desperate for jobs, even shit ones. With government hijacked by the wealthy, it’s easier to hope an iron-fisted leader can wipe the slate clean. One who scapegoats teachers as the cause of high taxes and low-achieving children, and enjoys humiliating them publicly.

 

The harsh reality of Christie is not his vile political persona, but the public enchanted by his bullying and the press who encourages his sadism by casting him as “a tough-talking, problem-solving pragmatist.” Christie may have muscled Democratic politicians into supporting his re-election bid last fall, but he won strong backing from Democratic voters, allowing him to pursue policies attacking the poor and public education, and coddling the wealthy and corporations.

 

Christie taps into something dark in the American political soul – a desire not just for order or efficiency, but pleasure in humiliating the weak. Is it surprising women are a frequent target of his abuse, who are pathologized in our society as weak?

 

Like every bully, Christie crossed the line, or a bridge in his instance. The silver lining is his presidential ambitions may drown in the brewing scandal so the whole nation doesn’t have to suffer him degrading women with blow-job jokes. But others like Christie will follow in his wake until we realize our society does not suffer from a lack of authoritarian bullies but a deficit of grassroots democracy.

Arun Gupta is a co-founder of The Indypendent and the Occupied Wall Street Journal. He is writing a book on the decline of America empire for Haymarket books.

See more stories tagged with:

chris christie,

bully

Why Americans Are So Ignorant -- It's Not Only Fox News, There Are Some Understandable Reasons for it

  Tea Party and the Right  

Consortium News / By Lawrence Davidson

Why Americans Are So Ignorant -- It's Not Only Fox News, There Are Some Understandable Reasons for it

 

Sure propaganda, government secrecy and Fox News have a lot to do with it. But there are broader societal pressures as well.

 

 

 

 

April 8, 2013  |  

 

In 2008, Rick Shenkman, the Editor-in-Chief of the History News Network, published a book entitled Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter. In it he demonstrated, among other things, that most Americans were: (1) ignorant about major international events, (2) knew little about how their own government runs and who runs it, (3) were nonetheless willing to accept government positions and policies even though a moderate amount of critical thought suggested they were bad for the country, and (4) were readily swayed by stereotyping, simplistic solutions, irrational fears and public relations babble.

Shenkman spent 256 pages documenting these claims, using a great number of polls and surveys from very reputable sources. Indeed, in the end it is hard to argue with his data. So, what can we say about this?
One thing that can be said is that this is not an abnormal state of affairs. As has been suggested in prior analyses, ignorance of non-local affairs (often leading to inaccurate assumptions, passive acceptance of authority, and illogical actions) is, in fact, a default position for any population.

To put it another way, the majority of any population will pay little or no attention to news stories or government actions that do not appear to impact their lives or the lives of close associates. If something non-local happens that is brought to their attention by the media, they will passively accept government explanations and simplistic solutions.

The primary issue is “does it impact my life?” If it does, people will pay attention. If it appears not to, they won’t pay attention. For instance, in Shenkman’s book unfavorable comparisons are sometimes made between Americans and Europeans. Americans often are said to be much more ignorant about world geography than are Europeans.

This might be, but it is, ironically, due to an accident of geography. Americans occupy a large subcontinent isolated by two oceans. Europeans are crowded into small contiguous countries that, until recently, repeatedly invaded each other as well as possessed overseas colonies.

Under these circumstances, a knowledge of geography, as well as paying attention to what is happening on the other side of the border, has more immediate relevance to the lives of those in Toulouse or Amsterdam than is the case for someone in Pittsburgh or Topeka. If conditions were reversed, Europeans would know less geography and Americans more.

Ideology and Bureaucracy

The localism referenced above is not the only reason for widespread ignorance. The strong adherence to ideology and work within a bureaucratic setting can also greatly narrow one’s worldview and cripple one’s critical abilities.

In effect, a closely adhered to ideology becomes a mental locality with limits and borders just as real as those of geography. In fact, if we consider nationalism a pervasive modern ideology, there is a direct connection between the boundaries induced in the mind and those on the ground.

Furthermore, it does not matter if the ideology is politically left or right, or for that matter, whether it is secular or religious. One’s critical abilities will be suppressed in favor of standardized, formulaic answers provided by the ideology. Just so work done within a bureaucratic setting.

Bureaucracies position the worker within closely supervised departments where success equates with doing a specific job according to specific rules. Within this limited world, one learns not to think outside the box, and so, except as applied to one’s task, critical thinking is discouraged and one’s worldview comes to conform to that of the bureaucracy. That is why bureaucrats are so often referred to as cogs in a machine.

That American ignorance is explainable does not make it any less distressing. At the very least it often leads to embarrassment for the minority who are not ignorant. Take for example the facts that polls show over half of American adults don’t know which country dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or that 30 percent don’t know what the Holocaust was.

We might explain this as the result of faulty education; however, there are other, just as embarrassing, moments involving the well educated. Take, for instance, the employees of Fox News. Lou Dobbs (who graduated from Harvard University) is host of the Fox Business Network talk show Lou Dobbs Tonight. Speaking on March 23 about gun control, he and Fox political analyst Angela McGlowan (a graduate of the University of Mississippi) had the following exchange:

McGlowan: “What scares the hell out of me is that we have a president . . . that wants to take our guns, but yet he wants to attack Iran and Syria. So if they come and attack us here, we don’t have the right to bear arms under this Obama administration.”

Dobbs: “We’re told by Homeland Security that there are already agents of Al Qaeda here working in this country. Why in the world would you not want to make certain that all American citizens were armed and prepared?”

Despite education, ignorance plus ideology leading to stupidity doesn’t come in any starker form than this. Suffice it to say that nothing the President has proposed in the way of gun control takes away the vast majority of weapons owned by Americans, that the President’s actions point to the fact that he does not want to attack Syria or Iran, and that neither country has the capacity to “come and attack us here.”
Finally, while there may be a handful of Americans who sympathize with Al Qaeda, they cannot accurately be described as “agents” of some central organization that dictates their actions.

Did the fact that Dobbs and McGlowan were speaking nonsense make any difference to the majority of those listening to them? Probably not. Their regular listeners may well be too ignorant to know that this surreal episode has no basis in reality. Their ignorance will cause them not to fact-check Dobbs’s and McGlowan’s remarks. They might very well rationalize away countervailing facts if they happen to come across them. And, by doing so, keep everything comfortably simple, which counts for more than the messy, often complicated truth.

Unfortunately, one can multiply this scenario many times. There are millions of Americans, most of whom are quite literate, who believe the United Nations is an evil organization bent on destroying U.S. sovereignty. Indeed, in 2005, George W. Bush actually appointed one of them, John Bolton (a graduate of Yale University), as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Likewise, so paranoid are gun enthusiasts (whose level of education varies widely) that any really effective government supervision of the U.S. gun trade would be seen as a giant step toward dictatorship. Therefore, the National Rifle Association, working its influence on Congress, has for years successfully restricted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from using computers to create a central database of gun transactions.

And, last but certainly not least, there is the unending war against teaching evolution in U.S. schools. This Christian fundamentalist effort often enjoys temporary success in large sections of the country and is ultimately held at bay only by court decisions reflecting (to date) a solid sense of reality on this subject. By the way, evolution is a scientific theory that has as much evidence to back it up as does gravity.

Teaching Critical Thinking?

As troubling as this apparently perennial problem of ignorance is, it is equally frustrating to listen to repeated schemes to teach critical thinking through the public schools. Of course, the habit of asking critical questions can be taught. However, if you do not have a knowledge base from which to consider a situation, it is hard think critically about it.

So ignorance often precludes effective critical thinking even if the technique is acquired. In any case, public school systems have always had two primary purposes and critical thinking is not one of them. The schools are designed to prepare students for the marketplace and to make them loyal citizens.

The marketplace is most often a top-down, authoritarian world and loyalty comes from myth-making and emotional bonds. In both cases, really effective critical thinking might well be incompatible with the desired end.

Recently, a suggestion has been made to forget about the schools as a place to learn critical thinking. According to Dennis Bartels’s article “Critical Thinking Is Best Taught Outside the Classroom” appearing in Scientific Americanonline, schools can’t teach critical thinking because they are too busy teaching to standardized tests.

Of course, there was a time when schools were not so strongly mandated to teach this way and there is no evidence that at that time they taught critical thinking. In any case, Bartels believes that people learn critical thinking in informal settings such as museums and by watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. 

He concludes that “people must acquire this skill somewhere. Our society depends on them being able to make critical decisions.” If that were only true it would make this an easier problem to solve.

It may very well be that (consciously or unconsciously) societies organize themselves to hold critical thinking to a minimum. That means to tolerate it to the point needed to get through day-to-day existence and to tackle those aspects of one’s profession that might require narrowly focused critical thought.

But beyond that, we get into dangerous, de-stabilizing waters. Societies, be they democratic or not, are not going to encourage critical thinking about prevailing ideologies or government policies. And, if it is the case that most people don’t think of anything critically unless it falls into that local arena in which their lives are lived out, all the better.
Under such conditions people can be relied upon to stay passive about events outside their local venue until the government decides it is time to rouse them up in some propagandistic manner.

The truth is that people who are consistently active as critical thinkers are not going to be popular, either with the government or their neighbors. They are called gadflies. You know, people like Socrates, who is probably the best-known critical thinker in Western history. And, at least the well educated among us know what happened to him.

See more stories tagged with:

 

ignorance,

usa

You will be shocked at how ignorant Americans are

SALON

Wednesday, Nov 6, 2013 1:29 PM UTC

You will be shocked at how ignorant Americans are

What Americans don't know and don't understand is an obstacle to progress

 
Marty Kaplan, Alternet

Topics: AlterNet, Inequality, U.S. Economy, Housing, Finance, News, Politics News

 

 

 

(Credit: Wikipedia)

 

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

If you think the widening chasm between the rich and the rest spells trouble for American democracy, have a look at the growing gulf between the information-rich and-poor.

Earlier this year, a Harvard economist’s jaw-dropping study of American’s beliefs about the distribution of American wealth became a viral video.  Now a new Pew study of the distribution of American news consumption is just as flabbergasting.

According to the Harvard study, most people believe that the top 20 percent of the country owns about half the nation’s wealth, and that the lower 60 percent combined, including the 20 percent in the middle, have only about 20 percent of the wealth.  A whopping 92 percent of Americans think this is out of whack; in the ideal distribution, they said, the lower 60 percent would have about half of the wealth, with the middle 20 percent of the people owning 20 percent of the wealth.What’s astonishing about this is how wrong Americans are about reality.  In fact, the bottom 80 percent owns only 7 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the top 1 percent hold more of the country’s wealth – 40 percent – than 9 out of 10 people think the top 20 percent should have.  The top 10 percent of earners take home half the income of the country; in 2012, the top 1 percent earned more than a fifth of U.S. income – the highest share since the government began collecting the data a century ago.
But America’s information inequality is at least as shocking as its economic inequality.

Pew sliced the TV news audience into thirds: heavy, medium and light.  In my Jeffersonian fantasy, that distribution would look like a bell curve; in fact, it looks like a cliff.  Heavy viewers watch a little over two hours of TV news a day, but medium viewers barely watch a quarter of an hour and light viewers average only two minutes a day.  The top third of the country does 88 percent of the day’s TV news viewing; the middle third watches only 10 percent of the total time; the bottom third sees just 2 percent of the minutes of news consumed.  Two-thirds of Americans live in an information underclass as journalistically impoverished as the minuscule bazillionaire class is triumphant.This month, the Pew Research Journalism Project reported how Americans get their news at home.  If you think it’s from the Internet, you’ll be surprised that the 38 percent of us who access news at home on a desktop or laptop spend an average of only 90 seconds a day getting news online.  America’s dominant news source is television, and the disparity between heavy viewers of TV news and everyone else is as startling as the gap between the plutocrats and the people.

As for those heavy news viewers, says Pew, “There is no news junkie like a cable junkie.”  A heavy local news viewer watches about 22 minutes of it a day at home, and a heavy network news viewer watches about 32 minutes a day.  But a heavy cable news consumer averages 72 minutes of it a day. The gap between heavy, medium and light cable news viewers is especially stark.  If you’re reading this, you’re probably in that 72-minutes-of-cable-news-a-day class.  But medium cable news viewers see barely more than three minutes of it a day, and light cable news viewers see about 12 seconds of it a day.  In other words, either you live in the country that watches more than an hour of Blitzer, O’Reilly, Maddow, et al, a day – or in the country that watches virtually none of them at all.

If you want to know where this is heading, consider another cheery piece of Pew research.  Americans 67 to 84 years old spend 84 minutes a day watching, reading or listening to the news.  Boomers (48 to 66) are close behind, at 77 minutes a day.  But Gen Xers (33 to 47) spend 66 minutes, and Millennials (18 to 31) spend only 46 minutes a day.  The kids are tuning out.  I love it that 43 percent of “The Colbert Report” audience, and 39 percent of “The Daily Show” viewers, are 18 to 29 years old; the young audiences of those fake news shows get real news from them.  But fewer than a million and a half Americans under 50 are watching them.

Much has been made of the ideological news bubbles we live in, where we see the world exclusively through Fox-colored lenses, or filters manufactured only by MSNBC or CNN.  The Pew study upends this belief.  It’s true that about one-quarter of American adults watch only Fox News, another quarter watch only CNN and 15 percent watch only MSNBC.  But 28 percent of Fox News viewers also watch MSNBC, and 34 percent of MSNBC viewers watch Fox.  More than half of MSNBC viewers, and nearly half of Fox viewers, watch CNN, and of CNN’s viewers, about 4 out of 10 also watch Fox, and 4 out of 10 also watch MSNBC.

It’s encouraging that our self-segregation into polarized news ghettos is a bit of a myth.  But whatever joy there is in that finding is blunted by the disparity between people who watch a lot of news and people who watch almost none of it, and by the trend toward an even deeper division ahead.  The danger democracy faces isn’t so much that different segments of our country inhabit alternative realities constructed from different data delivered by different news sources.  It’s that a minority of the country watches a fair amount of news, and a majority may as well be living on the moon.