This is a great piece in which Coates simply assembles a chronology of quotes and speeches by leading Southerners from before, during and after the civil war making it explicitly clear that their cause was the perpetuation and expansion of the institution of slavery. His conclusion is stark and true:
The Confederate flag should not come down because it is offensive to African Americans. The Confederate flag should come down because it is embarrassing to all Americans. The embarrassment is not limited to the flag, itself. The fact that it still flies, that one must debate its meaning in 2015, reflects an incredible ignorance. A century and a half after Lincoln was killed, after 750,000 of our ancestors died, Americans still aren’t quite sure why.
I would guess that while many Americans aren’t sure why, which is indeed embarrassing, the ones who are most vociferous in their defense of that flag aren’t among them. They do know why.
People like this:
@CharlieDaniels The rewriting of history continues. Slavery, which is NOT a race issue, was only a small factor in the civil war.
The slow tedious progress that’s been made has brought us only to the point at which they have to pretend that slavery wasn’t an issue. And that’s not good enough anymore.
This is an emotional time and we all need to think through these issues with a care that recognizes the need for change but also respects the complicated history of the Civil War. The Confederate Battle Flag has wrongly been used for racist and other purposes in recent decades. It should not be used in any way as a political symbol that divides us.
But we should also remember that honorable Americans fought on both sides in the Civil War, including slave holders in the Union Army from states such as Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware, and that many non-slave holders fought for the South. It was in recognition of the character of soldiers on both sides that the federal government authorized the construction of the Confederate Memorial 100 years ago, on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.
This is a time for us to come together, and to recognize once more that our complex multicultural society is founded on the principle of mutual respect.
It’s not really complicated at all. People like Webb just want to pretend it is. The flag is, and always has been, a “political symbol that divides us.” It has no place in public in a decent society in 2015 — it is a historical artifact that should be studied for what it has represented — and not a damn bit of it was good. By 1860, after most of the rest of the world had long outlawed slavery, there was nothing honorable in being a slaveholder or fighting for slaveholders. I’m sure these people had good qualities. I’m not saying they were all evil. But there were plenty of people in this world at the time who understood slavery to be an abomination and they were not among them. In fact, they were willing o die for it and many of them did. And as for the “principle of mutual respect” I’m afraid that was sadly lacking toward our African American citizens in the South during slavery, during the war for more than a century after that war was over. The effects of their unwillingness to acknowledge that are obviously still with us today.
The South is America. It’s filled with wonderful people and a rich and interesting history just as the rest of the country is. This particular part of it is not a source of pride.
Democratic Elites Don’t Want to Hear It, But “Hillary Clinton’s In Trouble”
by Gaius Publius
The famous “Yes We Can” campaign theme, just before its post-electoral conversion to “But No I Won’t.” Why is this painful to watch? Six years of broken promises and a party-wide TPP cave by its leaders have rebranded Democrats for a generation.
TPP may be closing down the show and heading home. We may (or may not) know its fate very soon. After all, one lost Fast Track battle is not a lost TPP war. So while we’re considering mainstream Democratic trade policy, let’s go broader this time.
Ever since Bill Clinton, Al From and the DLC remade the Democratic Party into the “other party of money,” there’s been a train wreck just waiting to happen. It’s taken a long time for voters, the people who keep Democrats in elected office, to start to figure out the betrayal that always awaits them. I think the 2008 burst of “Yes We Can” enthusiasm — genuine, heartfelt, a true Children’s Crusade of newfound innocence — was that last golden opportunity for the Party to rescue itself from the grip of leaders who only pretend to have its voters’ interests at heart. Yes, they care about some issues, but even then, only when forced, and only when the polls are running in their favor.
That “Children’s Crusade of newfound innocence” I mentioned was not the innocence of children who believe that impossible unicorns exist. It’s the adult suspension of belief that all Democrats would ultimately sell them out; it’s one last hope (to coin a phrase) that at least one Democratic leader would actually act in their interests, just this once.
But Nancy Pelosi’s 2006 “impeachment is off the table” was a harbinger. Then came Candidate Obama’s 2008 betrayal of his FISA promise; his appointment of Robert Rubin–Wall Street regulars to his cabinet; his calculated and deliberate sellout of the ACA public option, using his friends in the Senate to screw his enemies in the House, meaning progressives; his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s contempt for those same progressives — and we’re not even out of year one.
And now, TPP, the largest “trade” deal in a generation, the “largest in the history of commerce” as one writer put it — and the leaders of the Democratic Party, even Nancy Pelosi, are dialing for donor dollars while dancing to fool the base.
This is what I mean by “going broader.” This moment connects not just to the Fast Track votes, the TPP votes, the TISA votes (which could change labor and wages in this country forever). It connects to the Democratic Party “brand,” to the 2016 races (all up and down the ticket) and … Hillary Clinton.
There’s no better person to help us along than Bill Curry, writing at Salon. Trade and TPP is not his starting point, but it can be ours. Just prior to the Senate Fast Track filibuster vote, Curry writes (my emphasis throughout):
Politicians have always ducked tough issues, but today’s Democrats
are the worst. When the TPP came before the House, enough Democrats
played it cute to leave the outcome in doubt till the very end. Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi didn’t tip her hand until just before the vote.
Many who voted no never said exactly why. Some want to curb currency
manipulation. Some oppose the fast track process, others the secret
tribunals or the intellectual property rules that actually restrain
competition. If the caucus as a whole has a bottom line, no one knows
what it is.
The TPP is a mystery because our leaders wish it so.
We don’t know what’s in it because our president won’t let us read it,
and not out of respect for precedent or protocol. George W. Bush showed
us drafts of his trade agreements. We’re negotiating one right now with
Europe, and Europeans get to read those drafts. If a comma gets cut from
the TPP, hundreds of corporate lobbyists know in an instant. The only
people who don’t know are the American people — and that’s only because
our president thinks our knowing would ruin everything.
The
process by which Congress considers the TPP is confusing in itself. The
pact is still being negotiated by the 12 nations who’d be parties to it.
The fight now is over legislation meant to grease the skids for it when
it finally arrives. At issue are trade promotion authority or TPA — the
‘fast track’ by which Congress vows not to amend or filibuster a trade
agreement it hasn’t even read – and trade adjustment assistance or TAA,
which gives benefits (money, health insurance, job training) to workers
who can prove to the federal government that they lost their jobs due to
trade. Signed into law by John Kennedy, expanded by Bill Clinton and
extended by George W. Bush, the half-century old program is set to
expire in September. The bills now before Congress would keep it alive
another six years.
But the Senate had passed a united bill that yoked Fast Track and Trade Assistance (TPA + TAA) as a single bill; the House split the bills and passed only half, resulting in temporary defeat for the pro-corporatists.
The press called the June 12 votes a huge win for labor and a
“humiliating defeat” (the Washington Post) for Obama. Reading such
stories one might think fast track or even the TPP itself had suffered a
crushing blow. Some on the left even called it historic. …
[But] I wouldn’t pop any corks quite yet. For the first time ever Congress
hit the pause button on globalization, but that’s all it did. House Dems
didn’t suddenly lurch left; they just did what they always do. In 1993
they voted no on NAFTA. In 2002 they voted against the Iraq War. In 2010
they passed an Obamacare bill with a public option. But they can’t
ignore their president or their donors forever. In 2008 they resisted
Bush’s bailout but finally gave in to Obama and Wall Street. Republicans
held firm, thus setting in motion the Tea Party and the sad, sorry
debacle of 2010.
On Thursday the Republicans did what any fool
could have predicted: they passed a new rule and sent the TPA to the
Senate sans worker assistance. We don’t know what will happen next, but
we do know fast track has already passed both houses of Congress once. In the end, Obama, Boehner, McConnell and their global capital partners
will likely get their way, but June 12 may yet prove historic.
Democrats just “did what they always do” — they attempted the right thing, then surrendered to party leadership. Which brings us to the party split, a chasm really, and open rebellion, this time by the voters.
The Peasants Are Rebelling and the Leaders Aren’t Listening
Curry on how all this plays with the base:
Krugman’s right: there’s a rumbling out there, but most Democrats are
a long way from hearing it, let alone joining in. If House Dems stand
firm, they too may plant the seeds of a grass-roots movement. Much of
their party will resist. Every political party is really many parties.
The Democrats’ presidential, Senate, governors’ and donors’ parties all
line up with global capital. Even in the House, Minority Whip Steny
Hoyer is a staunch ‘free trader’ and Pelosi herself spent the week
before the vote quietly imploring her caucus to swallow the poison pill.
No
one knows where scores of Democrats really stand. Both parties are
caught in a crossfire between their donors and their base. Republican
voters are suspicious of the TPP and hate fast track, mostly because
they hate Obama. Democratic voters hate fast track but accept the TPP,
mostly because they love Obama. Republicans in Congress are civil
because they can’t bash Democrats for doing what their base wishes they
would do. Democrats in Congress are quiet because they don’t want their
donors to think they mean what they say — and don’t know when someone
may offer them something to take one for the team by switching sides.
As a party, the Democrats are obviously lost, and their leaders are swimming in donor-funded obfuscation:
This week I told two liberal friends that Pelosi is trying to find “a
path to yes on fast track.” (Her words) Both said Pelosi and Clinton had
broken with Obama, are moving left and now oppose the deal. In terms of
strategy and message it was true — all except the part about Clinton
and Pelosi opposing the deal.
There’s much about Clinton and Pelosi pretending to care about workers, when all they want is for the deal to be done without their fingerprints on it. That obviously applies to Pelosi. Curry says that’s equally true of Clinton.
Clinton Is Trying to Run Obama-2008
In a fine catch, Curry says this:
Clinton’s trade talk is of a piece with her entire 2016 campaign.
It’s also of a piece with Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Clinton
insiders make no secret of her desire to emulate him. Obama’s 2008
campaign had three hallmarks. One was its fundraising. Obama was the
first Democratic presidential campaign to outraise a Republican on Wall
Street and the first of either party to crack the code of Internet
fundraising. The second was its massive, web-driven, volunteer effort,
probably the biggest of any presidential campaign in history.
The third was its message, at once
fiercely populist and reassuringly centrist — and vague. Much of it came
from chief strategist David Axelrod who opined that for too long
Democrats had been mired down in issues. His campaigns were famous for
selling personalities rather than platforms, for finding ways to
reconcile our conflicts in the biographies of his candidates. It worked
for Obama. “Yes we can,” audiences called out. “Do what?” few bothered to ask, or thought they had to.
For Curry, that won’t work twice. He makes a fine case, but the reasoning is obvious as well. Can she make a Larry Summers, say, her Secretary of Treasury and claim the Piketty mantle of “Yes I Care” about wealth and inequality? Obviously not.
Hillary Clinton “Is in Trouble”
Which brings us to 2016 and the Democratic candidate for president:
Democratic elites don’t want to hear it but Hillary Clinton’s in
trouble. It isn’t in all the data yet though you can find it if you
look. In a straw poll taken in early June at a Wisconsin Democratic
convention she edged out Bernie Sanders by just 8 points, 49% to 41%. In
a poll of N.H. primary voters this week she beat Sanders by 41% to 31%.
An Ohio poll had her in a dead heat with the likes of Ted Cruz and Rand
Paul. If Sanders can poll 40% in a Wisconsin straw poll in June he can
do it [in] an Iowa caucus in January. Imagine a Hillary Clinton who just
lost Iowa and New Hampshire to Bernie Sanders. It’s still hard to
picture but it gets easier every day.
Which brings me back to my point — this is the most important election in a generation, 1968-important in its possibilities. One battle at a time, starting with the Democratic primary. Yes We Can put a real progressive in the White House, if one will run. Sanders is running. And if he gets the big chair, he won’t be Mr. “No I Won’t” but Mr. “You Bet I Will.”
I have written about how his best efforts to placate the religious right (with whom he has a longstanding affiliation) have still left him with a credibility problem among the faithful, since he has made a few stray comments over the years that have left them doubting his sincerity. He has since gone out of his way to prove his Akin-Mourdock kinship by making bizarre statements about forced ultrasounds, while asserting that an abortion ban without exception for rape or incest is no big deal since it’s “in the initial months” when women are “most concerned about it.”
Interestingly, in the case of Wisconsin’s proposed 20 week abortion ban (based, by the way, on junk science about alleged fetal pain) Walker made it seem as if he was simply following the legislature’s lead, going along with whatever they chose to send him. According to yesterday’s New York Times, that wasn’t exactly right. Not only did he request the 20 week ban, he specifically asked that it contain no exceptions for rape and incest:
Mr. Walker repeatedly refused to say if he favored such a ban during his close re-election last year, when polls showed him unpopular among women. In March, as doubts about his anti-abortion credentials were raised by national conservatives, he pledged to sign a 20-week ban that was “likely to come to my desk.”
What he did not explain was that he had asked Wisconsin lawmakers to send him just such a bill, during a meeting in his office with Mr. Fitzgerald and Robin Vos, the speaker of the State Assembly, also a Republican.
“Walker weighed in and said the 20-week abortion ban is something he would like to see hit his desk,” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “It sent a message to us.”
The governor specified that the bill should include no exceptions for rape or incest, according to Mr. Fitzgerald.
That’s the allegedly “mainstream” candidate the political establishment thinks has a real chance to win over the broad middle of the country, someone who is pandering to the most retrograde social conservatives in America. (For the record: 75percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in cases of rape and incest.) Just last week he appeared at the Faith and Freedom Coalition confab and bragged about his work at so-called “crisis pregnancy” centers, institutions which manipulate vulnerable young women with lies about abortion causing breast cancer and leading to sterility, and birth-control pills causing abortion.
And Walker is still working hard at insulting women in other ways, too. Just last week on a conservative radio show he complained once again about pay equity, saying that it’s just another example of President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s desire to “pit one group against another.” Evidently he thinks paying women the same as men is a form of combat in which one side must lose. That’s absurd, of course. Men and women are very often allies in an organizational concept we call “families.” When women in those families make more money men benefit as well. It’s the ultimate win-win. Not to mention that, to most decent people, equal pay for women is a matter of simple fairness.
Read on. He seems to be demonstrating his independence from the huge pack of candidates by continuing the Republican’s “war on women” strategy.
The hole the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling blew in the Voting Rights Act will get patched this session if Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Georgia’s Congressman John Lewis have anything to say about it. They plan to introduce legislation today to repair the damage. Ari Berman has this scoop at The Nation:
… The Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015 would compel states with a well-documented history of recent voting discrimination to clear future voting changes with the federal government, require federal approval for voter ID laws, and outlaw new efforts to suppress the growing minority vote.
The bill is the latest in what has been an ongoing effort to restore the preclearence provision of the Voting Rights Act, which required many southern states to have any change to voting laws cleared by federal officials. The Supreme Court, in its 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision, tossed the formula used to determine which states need preclearence, effectively ending the federal government’s role as a monitor to state voting changes until a new formula is approved by Congress.
A new federal preclearance regime for changes to election procedures or laws would apply initially to New York, California, Arkansas, Arizona, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. A previous bill filed after the Shelby ruling received neither a hearing nor a vote from Republican leaders.
Rick Hasen sees possible constitutional issues with the bill, but notes approvingly that this legislation is not the compromise the earlier Voting Rights Amendment Act was. The new bill includes voter ID laws in its scope of violations. Half the states have adopted measures making it harder to vote since 2011.
The legislation faces an uphill road in Congress. Few Republicans were willing to support the more modest VRAA, even after the historic 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma. Leahy could not find a GOP co-sponsor in the Senate for the old bill or the new one. That’s a sad development, given that the VRA has always had strong bipartisan support, and the 2006 reauthorization of the law was approved 390-33 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate and signed by George W. Bush. “A decision has been made within the Republican Party that we’re not going to do anything,” Leahy said.
Even if the law requiring preclearance for future voting restrictions were to pass, a lot of damage has already been done by the bills passed in the wake of Shelby. Measures put in place by the states since 2011 are a conservative, rearguard effort against the future as well as an effort to undo the past. Changing demographics? Can’t win under the current rules? Rewrite the rules. And not just for federal elections. Having lost a string of state Supreme Court elections in 2014, North Carolina Republicans have since changed those rules in what the director of North Carolina Voters for Clean Elections calls “merely the latest attempt to change voting rules to conservative benefit.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren believes the economy is rigged. GOP-controlled legislatures are working hard to ensure elections are too.
He’s dismissed by the political professionals, but there is no denying that the appetite for Donald Trump among Republican primary voters is real.
The New York developer and reality television star is second among 2016 presidential candidates in a new Suffolk University poll of New Hampshire Republicans – behind only former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
Go home before midnight, and don’t come back before 7am. Goldman Sachs – one of Wall Street’s toughest firms – has told interns they have got to work hard, but not too hard.
The new rules, introduced for this summer’s crop of investment banking interns, have been introduced “to improve the overall work experience of our interns”, a Goldman Sachs spokesman said. All of its summer interns across the world were informed of the new working hours rule on their first day in the office earlier this month.
Wall Street’s shift to caring capitalism comes in the wake of the death of a 21-year-old Bank of America Merrill Lynch intern who had regularly pulled all-nighters in a desperate bid to impress his bosses.
Moritz Erhardt was found dead in the shower at his London accommodation after working 72 hours straight. An inquest found he died of an epileptic seizure that could have been a triggered by his long working hours.
Shortly after Erhardt’s death, Goldman Sach’s chief executive Lloyd Blankfein told his interns that they shouldn’t give over their whole lives to the firm.
They should just give over 17 hours day to it. Hell, they can sleep when they’re dead. Which may be sooner than they think!
These young people choose to do this stupid thing for the reward of big money at the end of the rainbow. And, in fairness, they do have lots of money waiting for them at the end of that rainbow. This is supposed to separate the slackers from those who are willing to do anything to get their hands on it. But that ethos naturally dehumanizes anyone, even rich people. If you’re the type of person who is willing to submit yourself to this sort of hazing or bootcamp in order to become part of that elite club you may already be half the way there.
Lloyd Blankfein said, “you have to be interesting, you have to have interests away from the narrow thing of what you do, you have to be somebody who somebody else wants to talk to,” but he didn’t offer any reason why that would be so. Sure, if you want to have an interesting life full of love and adventure and intellectual enrichment then that would be true. But if you’re just chasing as much money as you can get your hands on it’s hard to see why being somebody someone else wants to talk to is particularly valuable unless he’s saying you need it for sales purposes. Which is, of course, the only reason any good capitalist would ever think anything like that would be necessary.
I hope we will see something more next Sunday for the TV audience. But credit where credit is due, in the meantime this is simple, straightforward and to the point.
When you do something like this, it’s really the only thing you can say.
This tick-tock in Politico explains how the South Carolina Republican leadership came around to removing the rebel flag. As you can see, it was entirely a moral issue for all of them:
Haley, an Indian-American just starting her second term, and Tim Scott, the first African-American Republican senator from a Southern state since the 1880s who she appointed in 2013, have emerged as the faces of South Carolina’s new Republican Party.
While they point to their electoral success as evidence of a changing state, they’ve still been torn between competing interests — party stalwarts who cling to the Confederate flag as an important symbol of their heritage and pro-business critics who say the flag’s shadow is holding the state back.
Those critics have argued that the new South Carolina, where Boeing decided in 2009 to locate a new assembly line for the 787 Dreamliner that created some 4,000 new jobs, could grow at a faster pace if they could find a way to remove the flag from the Statehouse.
“We were missing out on some great opportunities to showcase our state,” said Glenn McCall, an RNC committeeman who stood with Haley on Monday. “We’ve lost some NCAA tournaments, some big companies looking to relocate because of that flag.”
[…]
There was a sense among South Carolina Republican leaders, including Graham, that they couldn’t come out too forcefully against the flag until they were certain there would be enough support across the state to follow through. A source familiar with Graham’s thinking noted that in addition to the sensitivities around the families of those killed, there were economic considerations in play.
“If the senior senator rushed out right in front of the cameras, and the flag had not come down, you just handed the competing states a huge weapon to use against you,” said the source, noting that other states would try to attract business based on the state failing to follow through on a moral call from a senior leader…
I’m very moved by this great epiphany about their history of celebrating white supremacy. And the possibility of making more money.
Whatever it takes, I guess. Maybe they could make an effort to see that some of the profits from all this new business they anticipate getting goes into recruiting African Americans for good paying jobs. Of course that would infringe on their freedom so …
And it’s as lame as ever. In my Salon piece this morning I wrote about the good news of Republicans calling for the flag to come down on the grounds of the South Carolina state house. And then:
The bad news is that they are now back in full “I know you are but what am I” mode, vacuously mirroring liberal arguments in ways that make no sense, and then high-fiving each other as if they’ve just won the national debate championship.
First, there was the “n-word” flap. Yes, all day yesterday, they ostentatiously clutched their pearls over the fact that President Obama used the actual word in an interview. No, he didn’t call anyone the n-word and he didn’t refer to anyone as an n-word. Obviously. He used the word to explain that just because you don’t use it, it doesn’t mean you aren’t a racist. This was very upsetting to people who are convinced they can’t possibly be racist since they don’t use the word.
Fox News’ commentator Elizabeth Hassleback said that she feared he’d gone completely NWA on us and was going to start throwing the word around at the next State of the Union speech. All of these fine conservative folks who decry political correctness every single day, who weep for our lost First Amendment right to free speech, were suddenly shocked, I tell you, shocked by this horrific use of a terrible word. Perhaps they would have pulled it off, had it not been for the smug, self-satisfied expressions on their faces as they pretended to be offended.
These folks really hate being deprived of their own victimhood, so the second farcical call for the smelling salts came when the AP published a photo of Sen. Ted Cruz at a gun-appreciation event over the weekend that appeared to show a huge handgun pointed at Cruz’s head.
It was a strange optical illusion to be sure, and weirdly unnerving. But it was taken as an article of faith on the right that it was done on purpose as some sort of threat against the senator. At the very least, these hardcore gun rights supporters were outraged at the inappropriateness of such an image. Now this might be a reasonable reaction if it didn’t come from people who were outraged that anyone would criticize Sarah Palin’s use of crosshairs on a map in the wake of the Gabby Giffords mass shooting. Howard Kurtz even brought it up in yesterday’s unctuous screed about (mostly liberal) politicians and pundits allegedly “politicizing” the Charleston massacre.
He even went back to Bill Clinton’s famous speech after Oklahoma City, using it as a terrible example of a politician politicizing political terrorism. Indeed, he could undoubtedly have listed dozens of examples liberals decrying gun violence and right-wing extremism after mass murders and acts of domestic terrorism. Those liberals are just terrible. Terrible!
If there one person who certainly wasn’t going to put up with any of it, it was Ted Cruz, who had given reporters a piece of his mind on Friday:
“It’s sad to see the Democrats take a horrific crime and try to use it as an excuse, not to go after people with serious mental illness or people who are repeat felons or criminals, but instead try to use it as an excuse to take away Second Amendment rights of law abiding citizens. I’ll tell you, it’s reminiscent of Rahm Emanuel who said you can never let a good crisis go to waste.”
If there’s one thing he cannot abide it’s inappropriate commentary in the wake of a tragedy.
Maybe we’re about to finally put an end the reverence for the confederacy, and the insanely provocative celebration of the KKK in the United States:
The bust of a Confederate general and leading figure in the early days of the Ku Klux Klan should be removed from the Tennessee statehouse, top Tennessee Democrats and the state Republican Party chairman said Monday.
U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., and state House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh, D-Ripley, said the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest has no place in the Tennessee statehouse.
“Symbols of hate should not be promoted by government. South Carolina should remove the Confederate battle flag from its Capitol, and Tennessee should remove the bust of Forrest inside our Capitol,” Cooper said in a statement to The Tennessean.
Fitzhugh said he believes the bust should be displayed in a museum.
“In general, our Capitol should be representative of the people of Tennessee. Right now if you’re a young girl, like my granddaughter, Marley Mac, for instance, and you visit the Capitol, there are no busts in the building that look like you,” Fitzhugh said.
“For African-Americans, there’s only one — a fairly recent addition. So I think, generally speaking, we need to revisit what we have displayed in the Capitol so that it better represents a Tennessee for all of us.”
This stuff is all symbolic but these are very important symbols. This is meaningful.