“In a sense, Romney
deserves the Swift-boating he’s
now getting from the Obama campaign and the president himself. He has
repeatedly cited his business experience as making him almost unbearably
qualified for the presidency when, as history shows, no businessman has made a
great or even decent president. The truth is that Romney is the ugly face of
the free enterprise system. Job creation is a byproduct of wealth creation.
When Romney said he liked “being able to fire people,” he was not confessing to
sadism, just to efficiency. To the workers, being fired probably felt the same
either way”
“The
nation has the jitters. An awful lot of sound and knowledgeable people fear an
economic calamity, a movement by the financial markets to impose financial
probity. Europe and the euro teeter, China’s economy is slowing (and its
politics are corrupt, opaque and repressive), and the United States cannot
fashion a deal to raise revenue and cut spending. The lack of political
leadership has gone from appalling to frightening.
In the meantime, our great and protracted political debate is
concerned with when Romney ran Bain and this matter of outsourcing. The
underlying reason for the loss of jobs and for outsourcing is almost never
mentioned — an education system that ill-prepares young people for the job
market. We turn out unskilled people who can’t work as cheaply as someone in
India or as skillfully as some robot. Worse yet, we extol a culture that
denigrates hard work and study and that insists, as virtually the entire
Republican Party does, that somehow the font of all education wisdom is the
local school board. It always knows best...”
Cassi Creek: Gloria
and I are early “Boomers” who came of age in the 50s - 60s. We are old enough to recall the humiliation
and indignities visited upon black Americans by white Americans as the Jim Crow
laws and customs of the old South gradually fell to the resistance waged by
brave, common men and women who recognized the face of evil in this nation and
found that they could not support it.
Both of us
recall toilets and water fountains labeled, “Colored.” We recall when those movie theaters that
allowed blacks to attend with whites required blacks to sit in the balcony or
in the very back rows. I recall Jim Crow
train cars and Jim Crow busses as the rule in the capital city of
Missouri. I remember, while in my middle
teens traveling by car to a Boy Scout event.
We stopped along the way to eat and one of our group was not welcome to
sit and eat with the rest of us. To our
credit, we all left to find another place that would serve us all. I was
taught, growing up, that such behaviors and practices were wrong, unequivocally
wrong. That speaks highly of the people
who taught me and who imparted as much civilization as I could absorb. Missouri was a pro-slavery border state that
still clings to the past and lionizes the men who fought to retain slavery.
What does
this have to do with outsourcing and a political campaign?
Mitt Romney
is a Mormon. The LDS church has, since
inception, considered Blacks, all Blacks, not just Afro-Americans, as inferior
and unable to fully participate in the customs and practices of the LDS church. Politically correct statements have been
issued by the LDS hierarchy over the years.
However, we have all seen companies with two sets of books and two sets
of rules.
Romney, the
GOP/teavangelists, and large numbers of their voter base are quite eager to
limit access to the voting booth, blocking large portions of the electorate from
voting. I helped register Black voters
in 1966. It should not now be necessary
to block the use of new Jim Crow laws.
Slavery was
an extreme example of outsourcing.
Africans were imported into regions where climate and geology made
farming difficult. The forced labor of
generations of African-Americans made fortunes for some families of the old
South. The social gap between
African-Americans and the less well-to-do whites became increasingly broad as
the Civil War did away with slavery. The
animosity directed toward African-Americans in the Jim Crow days has not vanished
just as whites tried to block voting rights in the old South; the
GOP/teavangelists are making every effort to prevent minorities voting
now. Just as in the 1960s when
minorities voted for the Democratic Party, today, many minority voters have
figured out that they are ill served to vote for any GOP/teavangelists.
In the days
of segregated plumbing, one bitter truth was that the poor black and the poor
white were often so similar that only a labeled toilet distinguished them. If we give Mitch McConnell and Jim Dement
toilets with their names inscribed, will they go away and leave America alone?
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