RebKell's Junkie Boards

[jammerbirdi]

Okay, let's start here and work our way backwards to older stuff that's out there.

I got a spamish email from the NYTimes last week. It was a link to a 'special' piece devoted ONLY to the best of the comments that one piece in their paper received. You see, the article saw such an immediate blowback response in the comments section that they were now emailing people just the highlights of the comments section from this one article.

I have to admit that I'd missed the article itself when it was posted. Probably because it was a David Brooks piece and I despise David Brooks, as I'm sure most here do, as I know so many of the Times' loyal left-leaning readers do. So no surprise that I didn't see his piece or much of anything else that he ever publishes.

But I was intrigued by the comments that I read so I followed a link to the original article which is titled the same as this thread. How We Are Ruining America

First thoughts that came to mind in after reading the initial paragraphs was... OH yeah... this certainly would not have been taken well by readers of the New York Times. I could hear the charges of hypocrisy and everything else knowing people were going to FREAK at what he was writing, especially considering the source and David Brooks's, as many would put it, long time boosting of inequality through his support of Republican economic principles.

But none of that mattered to me. The truth is something that is rarely spoken in America and probably in every advanced society where some people are doing much better economically than others. So I suddenly didn't care about any and everything that David Brooks had ever written in his life. He was now the person who had finally, in the newspaper of record, written and published what I've been haranguing my family with for years. He was now the guy who had written these words and sentences.

"Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.

How they’ve managed to do the first task — giving their own children a leg up — is pretty obvious. It’s the pediacracy, stupid. Over the past few decades, upper-middle-class Americans have embraced behavior codes that put cultivating successful children at the center of life. As soon as they get money, they turn it into investments in their kids.

Upper-middle-class moms have the means and the maternity leaves to breast-feed their babies at much higher rates than high school-educated moms, and for much longer periods.

Upper-middle-class parents have the means to spend two to three times more time with their preschool children than less affluent parents. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.

As life has gotten worse for the rest in the middle class, upper-middle-class parents have become fanatical about making sure their children never sink back to those levels, and of course there’s nothing wrong in devoting yourself to your own progeny.

It’s when we turn to the next task — excluding other people’s children from the same opportunities — that things become morally dicey. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution recently published a book called “Dream Hoarders” detailing some of the structural ways the well educated rig the system.

The most important is residential zoning restrictions. Well-educated people tend to live in places like Portland, New York and San Francisco that have housing and construction rules that keep the poor and less educated away from places with good schools and good job opportunities.

These rules have a devastating effect on economic growth nationwide. Research by economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti suggests that zoning restrictions in the nation’s 220 top metro areas lowered aggregate U.S. growth by more than 50 percent from 1964 to 2009. The restrictions also have a crucial role in widening inequality. An analysis by Jonathan Rothwell finds that if the most restrictive cities became like the least restrictive, the inequality between different neighborhoods would be cut in half."

So I don't know anything about these zoning restrictions of which he speaks. We were going to order the book, Dream Hoarders. But I dread reading it. You guys know me. I'm already all over this and have been for a long long time.

I can't say I wish this piece had been published by anyone else, any where else. This was perfect. Right in the faces of the very people who have both taken over liberal politics in this country and who have abandoned, with extreme prejudice to their own, any concern or commitment to all manner of working class, poor, blacks, lower middle class, etc. The bullshit is out in the open now.

[pilight]

Zoning ordinances in the US have always been racially motivated. They didn't exist at all until after the Civil War. Once newly freed blacks started moving to the urban North, the Yanks had to find a way to keep them away from the white people (women). Thus zoning was born. Explicit racial zoning was found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1917 (Buchanan v Warley), but the ordinances have continued to be de facto tools of segregation. Zoning ordinances themselves were declared constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1926 (Euclid v Ambler).

_________________
I'm a lonely frog
I ain't got a home

[jammerbirdi]

[jammerbirdi]

The day before the recent special election in GA, the NYTimes' Nate Cohn published a piece linking the decision facing voters there to their education level and that as it relates, or doesn't, to voters' feelings about Trump.

But I could barely get past the table the piece starts with listing the 15 BEST educated congressional districts in the US. For me, uh, and you can call me whatever, but I link the 15 best educated congressional districts with, just maybe, some of the 15 most AFFLUENT congressional districts in the US. Like I said, it's probably just me.

1 N.Y. 12 - Manhattan and Queens
2 Calif. 33 - Santa Monica, Malibu, Beverly Hills
3 Calif. 18 - Silicon Valley: Palo Alto
4 Va. 8 - Northern Virginia: Pentagon
5 N.Y. 10 - Manhattan and Brooklyn
6 Ga. 6 - Northern suburbs of Atlanta
7 Wash. 7 - Seattle
8 Calif. 12 - San Francisco
9 Mass. 5 - Northwestern Boston
10 Calif. 52 - San Diego
11 Calif. 17 - Silicon Valley: Cupertino
12 Va. 10 - Northern Virginia: CIA
13 Md. 8 - Washington D.C.
14 Va. 11 - Northern Virginia
15 Ill. 5 - Northern Chicago

13 of those 15 most highly educated (I would suggest most affluent) districts are represented in the House by a Democrat. So take this as a memo to all of the good progressives here. We simply can no longer claim that the Republicans are the party of the rich and the Democrats are the party of the working and middle class and the poor.

Because they just aren't. And if there's one thing that most people who I would count as having a benevolent political heart should take away from the modern political era it is this: the Democratic Party IS the PARTY OF THE RICH and, specifically, it is the political party of the super-rich individual. A lot of them. If anyone here really thinks that these people who fund the Democratic Party and its candidates are not engaged in the same dark quid pro quo that has plagued politics since the Greeks you really should wake up.

Curiously, in the rhetoric of the left and the Democratic Party, the "liberal press" for the last many decades, there is hardly a mention of the power of the wealthy individual. Unless it is the Koch brothers and they are never presented as the behind the scenes goons that they are without a linkage being made to their many big business corporate interests. It's the angle on the Kochs. You have to trace the politics of the individual to their business holdings. Got that.

But that's largely where any dialogue about the influence of the wealthy private citizen on the American political system ends. Oh. I'm sorry, then there's the guy from Las Vegas who is a, welp... here you go, a casino magnate.

My point is that IF you really haven't considered this, or haven't considered it a problem, or, if you, like ME for a long time, might have considered it as BALANCE in the system, wealthy benevolent souls whose money acts as a counter weight to the giant conglomerates that make up the banking, energy, insurance, and pharmaceutical sectors, then please wake up from that fantasy, as I slowly did. It's excusable for anyone to have not given much thought to this because, as I've said, there has been painfully little presented to the American public that highlights who and how the power of the wealthy individual in America is acquired and wielded.

But here in this table showing the linking of the 15 most well-off congressional districts with a 13-2 shellacking of the Republican Party there is a message that I suggest no one of good political conscience can ignore OR afford to not factor into their political world-view. The Democratic Party is the Party of the Rich.

And I would add this, and I'm sorry, it's dark. Do you really think these people are good people? I'm not saying they're not preferable to the oil-guzzling, environment-stomping, tax-dodging, regulation-crushing racist Republican shadow players.

But give them a closer look. They are simply crocodiles to the Republican's alligators.

Look at where they live. They live far more privileged lives, haunt far more exclusive circles, and they have without conscience taken the Democratic Party away from the American people. Oh you may VOTE Democrat. And you may, if you're reasonably privileged enough to not be laser-focused on keeping a roof over your head, food on the table, gas in the car, hell, a CAR, some kind of health coverage, etc. for you and your family, if that doesn't describe you, then you may be MORE concerned with social issue politics yourself and be getting exactly what YOU want as well from the identity politics Democrats, but you really can not, if you are at all a decent left-leaning human being, be okay with the fact that the Democratic Party is now the party of the rich.

This information proves that as a cold hard fact. The Democratic Party is the party of the rich. The Republican Party is also the party of the rich. There is no party representing the economic interests of the rest of America.

So many of us have used the phrase, voting against their own best interests to describe all the under-educated working poor who, as far as we're concerned, inexplicably, vote for Republican candidates. Of course, we know that they've taken their information from the most effective propaganda one-two punch maybe in history, right wing radio and Fox News.

But what about all of us who look down on those people? You know who you are. lol. Are you really getting this politics thing yourselves? Sorry, but I don't think so.

[cthskzfn]

[jammerbirdi]

[cthskzfn]

[Ay Mate]

The country is already ruined. The United States is now considered o joke all around the world. Everything the US stood for has been or is being destroyed by the diarrhea living in the White House.

[jammerbirdi]

[mercfan3]

All right, I'll come out to play Jammer. (And I'll make a Jammer size post to go with it..)

Of course the Democratic Party is the party of the rich. It always was. . Just like every powerful political party in existence. They're fucking politicians. That doesn't make them "the same."

The Democratic party is also the party of the educated. So, your list is not entirely surprising.


It doesn't matter though. It seriously doesn't matter. Legislation matters. That's how politicians can make a difference, so the right side is the side with the better policy. That's why I know I'm on the right side.


Listen, I work with kids (okay, teenagers) in a small but lower socio-economic status town. One student I have is one of the brightest people I've ever met. I once taught him an entire math unit in ten minutes. (The next day, he proceeded to get every single question he bothered to answer on his test correct). He read every classic novel available to him prior to entering high school, and is capable of having graduate level discussions about them. He's also been dealt more trauma than most people are capable of dreaming up (we're talking multiple front row seats to watching his mother OD on heroin as a tip of the iceberg of trauma he's dealt with.). He only gets grades good enough to pass because his father wants him to graduate. He doesn't care much about the education system because every societal structure meant to help him has failed him, and he's smart enough to know it. Whether he has a productive life or literally ends up in jail will depend on his ability to learn to deal with authority.

Another student has a father that doesn't want him, a mother who recently passed away (heroin), and a Grandfather who recently passed away (his caretaker). He now resides with his ex girlfriend (and her parents). He's so kind and so pure hearted, and I have no idea how he is the way he is.

I have another student whose mother died recently because prior to the ACA, she didn't have insurance..and therefore didn't go to the doctor..and cancer wasn't caught in time. Policies matter.

Students with hurt or broken homes have similar traits to them. You can pick them out, and not because the kid is "bad." A lot of times, the kid is looking for validation, attention. They tend to take a while to warm up to you, but once they do, they're extremely loyal and can get very attached. I had a student who didn't appear to be that way. Who immediately listened and understood boundaries and what was expected of him. You literally can't have a conversation with him for longer than ten minutes without him bringing his mother into the conversation, so I assumed he didn't have the painful background a lot of students had, until he opened up to me about his father. Apparently, dad left when the kid was two because drugs and partying is more fun than raising a child. Ironically, he doesn't get the attention he probably needs because his mother did an excellent job raising him, he's quiet, and his attention seeking behavior doesn't work particularly well (again, because he understands boundaries so well he won't break them in order to get that attention.) Also, because adult decisions affect their children, he has a ton of anxiety that he internalizes, and he has a strong tendency to assume adult men won't like him.


So yes, fair wages that rise with inflation are necessary for economic justice. Regulating corporations, and taxing the very wealthy is absolutely important, but..

But, you can not have economic justice without equal access to birth control, abortion, and child care. You can't have it until healthcare (with drug rehabilitation) is affordable and available to everyone. You can't have economic justice until it doesn't cost more to be a woman. You can't have economic justice until the gender wage gap is closed. You can't have economic justice until women have equal career opportunities, and harassment in the workplace ends.

And you certainly can't have economic justice until we fix our education system, from children being unprepared in grade school to the theft that is waiting for them at college. (I have college ability students who won't go because they can't afford it, and they aren't starting their life in debt. I also have students that might not get to go because it costs money to apply to college, and their family can't even afford that).


There are also kids that live in nearby cities that attend the school. These kids behave a little differently when there are problems at home. They don't go looking for attention and affection in quite the same way. First, they put up a wall. It's a survival instinct, but it also means they get labeled as having "an attitude" and therefore have a harder time creating positive relationships with teachers, bonds that may help them in the future. One very bright girl would put up those walls, she might snap at teachers as well. She also spent all of her day in the "bad" classrooms, and was frustrated at her lack of learning. (The behavior in said classrooms are rough.) I used to let her visit my honors classroom during her off period, hoping that she would form relationships with students in those classes and perhaps learn what she should have learned in her class. I stand by that being one of the best decisions I've made as a educator because the difference in culture for her made a significant difference in all aspects of her growth. It's amazing that the simple decision to make a little actual change can have such a profound effect on someone who would go home to gang violence and drug use in her neighborhood. I had another student, a very sweet boy, who struggled the last month of school because his father was shot. An eleven year old told me last week that his friend was shot. Eleven.

Economic justice goes even further then a few of the issues I mentioned earlier..the kids in town that I mentioned..they won't be shot walking to a friend's house. Gun policy laws are an economic (and life saving) policy for people living in the inner city. The townie kids won't be pulled over for no reason (and suffer whatever consequences comes with that.) Court fees, traffic tickets, a possible criminal record..all affects people's ability to get a job. It's an economic justice issue. They won't suffer from the race wage gap. They have an easier time getting access to birth control. Their job application won't be thrown out because they have a black name. Unlike students from the city, the environment in which they grew up has clean air, saving them from health issues in the future.The city students bussed to this school are lucky, many from their area won't receive the quality of education they are receiving.

And it's not to say it's a competition, but rather what needs to be a necessary acknowledgement from the "economic justice" side of the Democratic Party. These issues aren't "cultural" issues or "identity" issues (Doesn't affect white men, so lesser?). They aren't just fighting for equal rights (be it gender, race, or sexuality...and btw...there's plenty of LGBT issues that are economic issues as well that I didn't touch), but are necessary and important policies in attaining economic justice. These stories..these stories are of real people. Real kids. And it's what poverty, working poor, and working class looks like. It's short cited to just focus on Wall Street and corporate regulation and making a bogeyman of the wealthy, if we want to help people. Particularly when Democrats continuously support policies that regulate wall street and tax the wealthy anyway.

Democrats also support policies that address all of the issues that I mentioned. And they have grown into a party that puts an emphases on intersectionality. That's important to me, it's important in it's effectiveness to change things. (They aren't perfect. They compromise too much on a Woman's right to choose). The US has the most women and children living in poverty of any industrialized country. White women are about 3 percent more likely to live in poverty than white men. Black women are about 15% more likely to live in poverty than white men. The trend for both subgroups will only continue. So policy that helps in the many different areas that need mending, like those Democrats who push "identity politics" or "culture wars" all the time offer.

The Democratic party never left "the working class" in policy. The White Working Class left the Democratic Party when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Acts. And the WWC hasn't been back despite the fact that, yes, policy wise, they are certainly voting against their interest. The past two times Democrats were in control of policy, they fixed/improved the economy significantly and passed major healthcare acts. That's positive change created by policy.

Again, legislation matters. That's the difference between parties. That's what makes non wealthy men voting for the current form of the GOP "voting against their own interest." Policies are the entire point of politics, so you can pat yourself on the back with your "all sides are the same" rhetoric, or you can pick the imperfect side that helps people. (acknowledging that all politicians are imperfect. Even Sanders, whom I'm not touching in this post because I'll just make enemies.)

BTW: The premise Trump won because of economics is incorrect. Evidence suggests the contrary, actually.

In Wisconsin, the only subset of white people that Trump lost were those who ranked the economy as their greatest concern. That held true nationally. http://edition.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls/national/president

Who were Trump voters? Those worried about terrorism and crime. Donald Trump ran and won on racism.

It's time to wake up about this. Seriously.

And you know what, some Trump supporters do deserve criticism for it. All outspoken racism and sexism deserves criticism.

On the other hand, I'm much more likely to blame media propaganda for a lot of these problems than actual citizens. As St. Jon Stewart said "People in middle America are told that 'they're coming. They're coming to take your jobs and rape your daughters. They are coming to kill your family' ad nauseum. Of course 'Build a Wall' makes sense." They are uneducated voters, most of which don't have the time and resources to become educated. That's what the media is supposed to be for.

My stance hasn't changed. Trump has supporters because of racism. However, I'm not angry at the people who were told that they had a reason to be afraid repeatedly, any longer. I'm angry at the message and messenger. Americans need to be corrected. The media needs to do the job we need them to do.

_________________
“Anyone point out that a Donald Trump anagram is ‘Lord Dampnut’”- Colin Mochrie

[jammerbirdi]

WTF.


I'm going to have to schedule some free time to read through this. See if I can pencil you in somewhere between me rereading my own long reads here.

[cthskzfn]

[norwester]

I tend to agree with mercfan regarding policy being the important point that distinguishes the parties. And also on WWC leaving the party over Civil Rights (to a degree).

Of course powerful political parties are made up of the rich. Of course wealthy and upper-middle class folks are going to take actions in their own interest. This is nothing new in human history or politics. This doesn't mean it isn't a problem, particularly one to point out to those who don't recognize that they are part of the problem. It is a big problem.

But conflating the parties (i.e. Republican and Democratic) because they're both made up of the elite in the country isn't addressing that problem. We're doomed to using imperfect tools to execute solutions. I can't turn my back on the Democratic Party despite its flaws (which I guess we all acknowledge are numerous) or even equate the two parties because at least they're doing some things that I agree with.

Has equating our economic system with the way we as a society should make decisions on what's important caused extreme resource imbalance? Yes. When we boil everything's "worth" down to "profit" there's a big problem with how priorities are set generally across the country. And you can "blame" both parties for supporting that system. But it really transcends political parties.

_________________
Don't you know the plural of "anecdote" is "data"?

[norwester]

PS I basically blame white women for Trump winning. Because of course white dudes are going to vote for the white dude that blames all their ills on non-white dudes.

_________________
Don't you know the plural of "anecdote" is "data"?