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U.S. Politics: Impoverished In Squalor


lokisnow

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I am always curious to see how the hamsters in the cages in the WH basement are going to write responses to the latest obnoxious conduct of Trump.

Last night on Cuomo’s show on CNN the Republicans actually put on a black guy (I think his name was Innis) who explained Trump has not called out white nationalists as a technique to diffuse and reduce their rhetoric. And he actually went on to say Trump ‘pretended’ not to know who David Duke was in order to cool things off as well.

This morning the Republicans were saying over and over that Trump always calls out terrorists.

”snorts”

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Guess what? Pete Buttigieg speak SEVEN (7) languages! 

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Anand Giridharadas on Twitter 
“A true story about @PeteButtigieg.”

https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/1106955561248149510

Guess then this guy doesn't stand a chance to be elected. The most recent candidate to get elected can't speak even one language, much less read, write, or comprehend one.

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8 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Days old news, I planned but forgot to bring up in the previous thread:https://www.businessinsider.com/julian-castro-blasts-bernie-sanders-slavery-reparations-2019-3

I genuinely don’t see why Castro would think it wise to attack Sanders’ on his very  explanation for he’s not in favor of reparations.

Castro says he'd set up a committee to investigate reparations and come up with some options.  I agree that he's more or less in the same category as Bernie on the issue - he admits as much in your link, but says he'd look into other options.  The article title is pretty click baity - didn't Tapper bring up Sanders?   Then Castro wonders why this is the one time where Bernie's answer isn't "to write a big check".  It's hardly an attack, I think it's a stretch for Business Insider to say Castro "blasts" Sanders.  

Read your link again, or watch the original clip.  It isn't what you think it is. 

That'd being said, there's a large field of candidates and they will start to highlight their differences when given the opportunity to do so, why not point out some hypocrisy when you can?

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Werent the emancipated promised 40 acres originally in the 19th century, or is that a myth? If its true and this government didnt keep its promise I propose that the U.S. hand over Texas to be parceled out to all Americans that trace their lineage back to slavery, they certainly couldnt make the place any worse.

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9 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

Werent the emancipated promised 40 acres originally in the 19th century, or is that a myth? If its true and this government didnt keep its promise I propose that the U.S. hand over Texas to be parceled out to all Americans that trace their lineage back to slavery, they certainly couldnt make the place any worse.

Before Appomattox there were proposals that the best manner to deal with the aftermath of the War of the Rebellion was to break up the big plantations and provide each previously enslaved family head or adult male 40 acres and a mule to get started with a life of freedom.  It would also allow for resumption of the cotton trade with the great mills of Europe.  But the sacredness of private property principles was never going to allow this (anymore than it did at the end of the War of Independence).

Then, with the battle between Andrew Johnson, who wanted the rebelling states and their power players readmitted to the union and the congress and senate as if nothing had happened at all in the intervening four years, and essentially reinstate the state-that-was for African Americans, and the opposition to this, a segment of which wanted some real punishment for the secessionists -- it never happened.  And by the time Grant assumed the presidency, he was so busy defending Reconstruction, and fighting the KKK,  and other lynchers, etc., it was no longer in play.

 

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3 hours ago, Triskele said:

Pete is so oriented towards the youth vote, and I just can't see him getting much traction overall, but in terms of being sharp and knowing policy he's tough to beat.  

And Beto was an early hacker -- a Dead Cow, in fact.  I remember Bruce Sterling talking about them a lot back in the day.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/15/18267468/beto-orourke-2020-cult-of-the-dead-cow-psychedelic-warlord

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3 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

Werent the emancipated promised 40 acres originally in the 19th century, or is that a myth? If its true and this government didnt keep its promise I propose that the U.S. hand over Texas to be parceled out to all Americans that trace their lineage back to slavery, they certainly couldnt make the place any worse.

It's not a myth, but it was a field order by general Sherman, who had the backing of the most radical Republicans at the time (like Sumner and Stevens). Congress as a whole however proved more than reluctant to make this an official policy. The Freedmen's Bureau did take a few steps in that direction, but ultimately politics, the challenges of Reconstruction, and the ardent desire for reconciliation with the South made this impossible. Not to mention, as Zorral said, the sacredness of private property, Johnson, and the many obstacles faced by Grant,

There's no denying that land redistribution would have helped the freedmen a great deal, since historian Foner proved that economics was ultimately what kept them in some sort of slavery or the other. OTOH, one has to wonder what could be done in the South after the end of the Civil War, since racism proved so intense well into the 20th century and up to this day. Generally speaking -and I'm still basing this on my reading of Foner and other great experts of the period- the problem was that abolitionists were rather naive as to the economic aspects of abolition. Their basic idea was apparently that abolition would force the South to industrialize and the freedmen would become factory workers ; when the industrialization largely failed to materialize, the freedmen were left to their own devices, with some abolitionists even blaming them for some of their woes.

It's interesting stuff because the main lesson that may be drawn from this period is that individual liberty is really dependent on economic liberty. The idea that abolition would magically transform the South proved -again- remarkably naive. In actuality, without any kind of economic power, the freedmen ended up largely depending on their former masters for subsistance, which of course had terrible consequences.
And yet, the mistake has been made since then, again and again. A few counter-examples notwithstanding, the idea that individual liberty is paramount and that everything else will spontaneously follow if the individuals are hard-working enough is still very much alive today, especially in the US. It's an unconvenient truth, because what it really means is that liberalism -in its literal sense, i.e. more liberty for individuals- is not enough. In order for individuals to be free, there needs to be a socio-economic structure that *allows* them to be free ; and such socio-economic structures are rarely seen as "liberal." To be clear: land redistribution has generally proved remarkably efficient where it has occurred, but such measures were more often than not implemented by regimes that are *not* described as liberal. So the problem in the end is that while pretty much everyone on both sides of the political spectrum agrees that liberalism is fundamentally desirable, one still needs to think about what must be done to get there, and this is where everyone disagrees.

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23 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

“Jexodus,” the fake departure of American Jews from the Democratic Party, explained
It’s not happening, but it’s fun to pretend.

https://www.vox.com/2019/3/15/18267129/jexodus-trump-jews-democrats-israel

There are trolls or bots promoting this on Jewish social media, but people have been mocking them and most Jews I know who vote Democratic would not consider voting Republican, though if the Democratic Party becomes like the U.K. Labour Party in terms of antisemitism I'm not sure what would happen.

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7 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

Castro says he'd set up a committee to investigate reparations and come up with some options.  I agree that he's more or less in the same category as Bernie on the issue - he admits as much in your link, but says he'd look into other options.

I think there’s a misunderstanding here; I don’t think Sanders is in anywhere close to same category as Castro. Sanders has shown he’s not in favor of the core idea of reparations.  Castro at the very least is really open to it. I think you understand this, so I’m not sure what you mean by them being close to the same category.

7 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

The article title is pretty click baity - didn't Tapper bring up Sanders?   Then Castro wonders why this is the one time where Bernie's answer isn't "to write a big check".  It's hardly an attack, I think it's a stretch for Business Insider to say Castro "blasts" Sanders.  

 Castro is basically insinuating  Sanders is being a hypocrite for not supporting reparations. It is clearly an attack.

7 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

That'd being said, there's a large field of candidates and they will start to highlight their differences when given the opportunity to do so, why not point out some hypocrisy when you can?

The differences each candidate should choose to highlight should be one where they have a chance of looking good.

Castro’s highlighting of Sanders not being in favor of a really unpopular, and divisive  idea because it’d being impractica as opposed himself whose open to it, l isn’t in my mind particularly wise. 

And I really don’t see the hypocrisy here.

One doesn’t have to see the same solution for every single large-scale societal problem.

Actualy thinking the reverse is problematic.

That’s a critism that actually was is fair to lobby against Sanders in terms of addressing racism in this country.

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:
5 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

 

It's not a myth, but it was a field order by general Sherman, who had the backing of the most radical Republicans at the time (like Sumner and Stevens).

From my understanding Sherman wasn’t the most progressive guy to say the least. He was simply a patriot. So why do this?

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1 hour ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

From my understanding Sherman wasn’t the most progressive guy to say the least. He was simply a patriot. So why do this?

There were tens of thousands of former slaves following Sherman's Army and the order was to deal with short term settlement of these refugees so the Army will no longer need to deal with them. The long term nature of this has been disputed.

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Senator Gillibrand has entered the presidential primary:

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Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand officially jumped in the 2020 presidential race on Sunday by declaring her Democratic candidacy with a campaign video titled "Brave Wins."

"Brave doesn't pit people against one another. Brave doesn't put money over lives. Brave doesn't spread hate, cloud truth, build a wall. That's what fear does," Gillibrand says over news footage, including of President Donald Trump.

Gillibrand, 52, is one of six women seeking the Democratic nomination and one of six senators running for president.

 

At the rate this is going, there won't be even a moderately well known Democrat who isn't running for President.

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13 hours ago, TheKitttenGuard said:

There were tens of thousands of former slaves following Sherman's Army and the order was to deal with short term settlement of these refugees so the Army will no longer need to deal with them. The long term nature of this has been disputed.

Not of all of what has been posted here is entirely correct.  A concise, readable source of the origins and fate of 'forty acres and a mule" can be found here:

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/

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.... Here’s how this radical proposal — which must have completely blown the minds of the rebel Confederates — actually came about. The abolitionists Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens and other Radical Republicans had been actively advocating land redistribution “to break the back of Southern slaveholders’ power,” as Myers observed. But Sherman’s plan only took shape after the meeting that he and Stanton held with those black ministers, at 8:00 p.m., Jan. 12, on the second floor of Charles Green’s mansion on Savannah’s Macon Street. In its broadest strokes, “40 acres and a mule” was their idea.

Stanton, aware of the great historical significance of the meeting, presented Henry Ward Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous brother) a verbatim transcript of the discussion, which Beecher read to his congregation at New York’s Plymouth Church and which the New York Daily Tribune printed in full in its Feb. 13, 1865, edition. Stanton told Beecher that “for the first time in the history of this nation, the representatives of the government had gone to these poor debased people to ask them what they wanted for themselves.” Stanton had suggested to Sherman that they gather “the leaders of the local Negro community” and ask them something no one else had apparently thought to ask: “What do you want for your own people” following the war? And what they wanted astonishes us even today.

Who were these 20 thoughtful leaders who exhibited such foresight? They were all ministers, mostly Baptist and Methodist. Most curious of all to me is that 11 of the 20 had been born free in slave states, of which 10 had lived as free men in the Confederacy during the course of the Civil War. (The other one, a man named James Lynch, was born free in Maryland, a slave state, and had only moved to the South two years before.) The other nine ministers had been slaves in the South who became “contraband,” and hence free, only because of the Emancipation Proclamation, when Union forces liberated them....

 

It also provides a lot of the context of the knock-down, drag-out war between the Congress and Andrew Johnson that was to come about very soon after this meeting in Savannah.

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13 hours ago, TheKitttenGuard said:

There were tens of thousands of former slaves following Sherman's Army and the order was to deal with short term settlement of these refugees so the Army will no longer need to deal with them. The long term nature of this has been disputed.

It is still contentious whether Sherman intended the distribution to be permanent.  That's why it is important to remember he was dealing with ~ ten thousand former slaves that followed his march to the sea because they had nowhere else to go - and they were dealing with starvation and disease, so...

33 minutes ago, Zorral said:

A concise, readable source of the origins and fate of 'forty acres and a mule" can be found here:

Sherman, on the advice of Secretary of War Stanton, had a novel approach to figure out what to do refugees - ask them.  Picking up from where Zorral left off in the above link:

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Their chosen leader and spokesman was a Baptist minister named Garrison Frazier, aged 67, who had been born in Granville, N.C., and was a slave until 1857, “when he purchased freedom for himself and wife for $1000 in gold and silver,” as the New York Daily Tribune reported. Rev. Frazier had been “in the ministry for thirty-five years,” and it was he who bore the responsibility of answering the 12 questions that Sherman and Stanton put to the group. The stakes for the future of the Negro people were high.

And Frazier and his brothers did not disappoint. What did they tell Sherman and Stanton that the Negro most wanted? Land! “The way we can best take care of ourselves,” Rev. Frazier began his answer to the crucial third question, “is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor … and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare … We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” And when asked next where the freed slaves “would rather live — whether scattered among the whites or in colonies by themselves,” without missing a beat, Brother Frazier (as the transcript calls him) replied that “I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over … ” When polled individually around the table, all but one — James Lynch, 26, the man who had moved south from Baltimore — said that they agreed with Frazier. Four days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, after President Lincoln approved it.

Ultimately, it does not matter whether Sherman thought the order should be permanent.  He should and would have known that wasn't going to be up to him once the war officially ended - and certainly was going to be insanely contentious once the Confederates were reintegrated into the union with (most of) their rights restored.  And while it's also easy to blame Johnson for the federal government not codifying the order, it never had support beyond the Radical Republicans. 

Moreover, there's no indication I'm aware of that Lincoln would have supported making the order permanent if he survived, and indeed his public proclamation  on reconstruction pretty explicitly contradicts such redistribution.  The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 was a solution to this that didn't dispossess landowners.  But, of course, southern whites used extralegal means to deny freed slaves land even then, and it was repealed 10 years later.

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Uncle Joe announces his candidacy in the most Uncle Joe way possible, by gaffe:

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In a keynote speech at a dinner for the Delaware Democratic Party, Biden boasted Saturday that he has “the most progressive record of anybody running.” The only problem is that Biden hasn’t announced whether he will launch a third run for the White House, despite repeatedly teasing the possibility.

He quickly corrected himself, clarifying that he meant to say “anybody who would run,” then adding “I didn’t mean it” while a cheering crowd in his home state nearly drowned him out.

 

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