Politics Plus

This has been an injustice that has continued far too long.

When all is said and done, and the record of the Obama administration is written, one big accomplishment is likely to be attributed to the president’s race.

The first black president seems determined to make the U.S. government finally settle the claims of an estimated 70,000 black farmers, people whose hopes were crushed by government racism. Obama has championed a $1.25 billion settlement that would put these claims to rest.

Termed by some "the last plantation," the Department of Agriculture for decades systematically denied loans, crop subsidies and other aid to black farmers, at one point bringing them to near extinction.

In the 1920, blacks operated one of every seven U.S. farms. By 1992, the number had sunk to one in 100.

Meanwhile, many of their white neighbors’ farms prospered. But it wasn’t always because white farmers were harder workers, smarter with agriculture or luckier with the weather. They got help that was denied to blacks. That’s racism.

I rarely use that term, but none other fits so well. Racism is spinning hatred into economic harm. It’s using racial spite to take away people’s ability to provide for their families, to accumulate wealth, to prosper. Everything else is just prejudice. And that, people can get over.

The Department of Agriculture is guilty of setting up a system to let racism flourish. Farmer applications for government loans and other programs were approved, denied or stifled through committees of elected county commissioners. The commissions became a bastion for white male power, with little federal oversight.

A favored tactic was to grant the black farmer’s loan — after planting season. Or to approve part of it, say for seeds, but then deny the money for the equipment to harvest it. Or encourage foreclosures, or press the black farmers to plant less-profitable crops.

This isn’t just ancient history. In 1996, only 37 county commissioners in the nation were African-American. That’s out of 8,147.

Yes, people complained. For years they complained. They filed grievances and lawsuits. Federal officials fessed up to the system’s being racist as early as 1965.

By 1982 things got so dire that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights decreed that by 2000, black farmers simply wouldn’t exist anymore.

And a year later, in 1983, the civil rights division of the Agriculture Department was dismantled. Complaints in some cases were literally tossed into the trash.

Through the Reagan, Clinton and Bush administrations hearings were held and government assessments written. Promises to fix the system were given and then broken.

A class action lawsuit filed in 1997 filtered its way through the courts and allowed settlements to about 16,000 black farmers. But the government bungled even that settlement. Farmers with complaints weren’t notified in time; claims were filed late; others were unfairly dismissed on technicalities.

Obama’s settlement will need congressional approval, something that hasn’t been easy to come by in his first year in office… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <McClatchy DC>

Jimmy Carter started needed reform in the late 1970s.  To defeat that reform that Reagan dismantled the USDA  Civil Rights Division.  There was no progress under GHW Bush.  If memory serves, Clinton tried to reform the system, but it died in committee in the GOP dominated House.  Crawford Caligula moved in the direction of racial equity, but his plan was to throw all poor farmers under the bus to provide welfare for huge corporate conglomerates.  So it falls to Obama and the Democrats to clean up another GOP injustice.

We need to watch this as it moves forward.  Watch for GOP Senators to mask their racism in concern for the deficit and filibuster.  Watch for the GOP top-down ‘grass roots’ to teabugger this as reverse racism.

It’s not often that we get the kind of honesty displayed by a high-profile New York Times reported in an interview with Michael Moore.

In his film Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore squares off with the free-market system for its role in leveraging the United States’s wealth into the hands of a few.

But in one clip cut from the documentary — which Moore provided exclusively to RAW STORY — he interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, who explains how capitalism is actually contributing to the very downfall of the human race and the "degradation of the planet."

"All sorts of people who have spent their lives studying climate change, from Bill McKibben on down, have warned us that we don’t have a lot of time left," Hedges said. "So it’s not just that capitalism has destroyed our economic system and hijacked our political system, but it literally is extinguishing the system that sustains life. If that’s not thwarted soon…then we will begin to see massive dislocations, environmental refugees, further depleting of natural resources. Overpopulation is also an issue. The UN estimates that by 2050 the size of the planet will double."

The very concept of capitalism, Moore declares in the film, is the problem because it inevitably leads to a system where the richest few control the means of production as well as the levers of power — leading to a "plutonomy," a term used in a leaked Citigroup memo from 2005, in which the finance juggernaut concluded that the United States is no longer a democracy.

In the interview, Hedges decries America’s turn toward supply-side economics over the last three decades as the cause of stagnating middle class incomes, contrasting it with the increasingly lavish fortunes of the wealthy and the aid they often receive from the government at the expense of working people… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Raw Story>

What can I add to this?  Very little, I think.  The one hair I would split is that our corporate plutocracy has nothing in common with Capitalism as envisioned by its creator, Adam Smith.  In his concept, monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels were not allowed.  He never considered the notion of a corporation.  They came after his time.

I believe that a free market system is preferable to a planned economy, but in order for it to function long term, it must be heavily regulated to protect consumers against corporate predators, to protect the planet from corporate attempts to externalize the cost of their damage to the environment, and to ensure that wealth produced is distributed equitably.

Just three days ago I posted an article about the potential for right wing violence.  It did not take long to come true.

John Patrick Bedell, whom authorities identified as the gunman in the Pentagon shooting on Thursday, appears to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent antigovernment feelings.

If so, that would make the Pentagon shooting the second violent extremist attack on a federal building within the past month. On Feb. 18, Joseph Stack flew a small aircraft into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. Mr. Stack left behind a disjointed screed in which, among other things, he expressed his hatred of the government. (For more on this incident, click here.)

Details of Mr. Bedell’s case are still emerging. But writings by someone with his same name and birth date, posted on the Internet, express ill will toward the government and the armed forces and question whether Washington itself might have been behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

However, law enforcement officials have yet to publicly state their theories as to Bedell’s motives.

“I have no idea what his intentions were,” said the chief of Pentagon police, Richard Keevill, in a Friday press conference…

…According to the Associated Press, an Internet posting made by someone using the name JpatrickBedell expressed a determination to see justice served in the case of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in his California home in 1991. Authorities have ruled this case a suicide, but it has become a cause célèbre among extremists who consider that ruling a coverup by the government.

The posting expressed general hatred of Washington and added that exposing the Sabow case would be “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolition,” according to the AP.

The Pentagon attack and the destruction at the IRS building in Austin, Texas, come at a time of explosive growth in extremist-group activism across the United States, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks such organizations.

The number of US extremist paramilitary militias grew from 42 in 2008 to 127 in 2009, according to a just-released SPLC annual report.

So-called “Patriot” groups, steeped in antigovernment conspiracy theories, grew from 149 in 2008 to 512 in 2009 – an increase that the SPLC report judges as “astonishing.” [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Christian Science Monitor>

In addition to this, Think Progress has revealed that Bedell posted a request for collaborators from an email address from Ludwig Von Mises Institute, a right wing group with ties to Ron Paul.

I have long claimed that the GOP love of violence as expressed by Michelle Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and too many more to mention would take root in the hearts of wing nuts and blossom in violence and death.  That does not make me a prophet.  That call was a sure bet.  Because of them, two police officers have been wounded.

Many have called on the GOP and their Teabagger accomplices to end their violent rhetoric.  They have refused.  If the GOP still refuses to change, their party must go the way of the dinosaurs into extinction.