Category: General

The following column by my friend Marshall Ward of Murray, Ky, succinctly describes what is the most important problem in the United States today, one that we must solve to remain both a democracy and a livable planet, IMHO.

Monday is Labor Day, the traditional end of summer, but for the American worker it should be a reminder that we still have a long way to go for our workers to be fully compensated for the vital work that they do.

We still have a serious question facing the middle and working classes in America.

Why is there no-lose socialism for the rich and cutthroat hyper-capitalism for everyone else?

Labor laws, pension laws, corporate laws, and tax laws dramatically favor those at the top, who have an army of lawyers and lobbyists who work for them in Washington, D.C. and state capitals.

Most American companies are still locked in the old cutthroat hyper-capitalist model that views workers as costs to be cut rather than as partners to share in success which is viewed as “socialism” by dim-witted Republicans. 

You may have heard Republicans in legislatures all over the country rail about how the Democrats’ agenda is chocked-full of scary “socialist” policies. 

And Kentuckians like Comer, McConnell, and Rand Paul protect their rich donors who have benefited big time from these Republican no-lose socialist policies for the rich.

How?

American corporations rake in billions each year in government subsidies, bailouts, and tax loopholes – all funded by you and me, and all contributing to higher stock prices for the richest ONE percent who own HALF of the stock market, as well as CEOs and other executives who are paid largely in shares of stock while the worker hasn’t had a real meaningful raise for decades. 

These corporations and their trade groups spend hundreds of millions each year on lobbying and campaign contributions. Their influence-peddling pays off. The return on these political investments is huge. For all practical purposes, it’s institutionalized bribery – a quid pro quo. 

An even more insidious example is corporations that don’t pay their workers a living wage. As a result, their workers must rely on programs like Medicaid, public housing, food stamps and other safety nets. That means you and I and other taxpayers subsidize these corporations, allowing them to enjoy even higher profits and share prices for their wealthy investors and executives.

Not only does corporate welfare take money away from us taxpayers. It also harms small business that has a harder time competing with big business that gets these subsidies. Everyone loses except those at the top.

So the real socialism is the Republican no-lose socialism for Big Tech, Big Oil, Big Pharma, defense contractors, and big banks who are the benefiting from these no-lose socialist schemes for the rich.

But something is afoot; CEO Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and CEO of Chobani yogurt, announced he’s giving all his full-time workers shares of stock worth up to 10 percent of the privately held company’s worth.

“If the company ends up being valued at $3 billion, for example, the average employee payout could be $150,000. Some long-tenured employees could get more than $1 million,” explains Ulukaya.

Ulukaya’s decision is just good business. Employees who are partners become more dedicated to increasing a company’s value.

Ulukaya just increased the odds that Chobani will be valued much higher when it’s sold, or its shares of stock are available to the public. That will make him, as well as his employees, far wealthier.

As Ulukaya wrote to his workers, the award is “a mutual promise to work together with a shared purpose and responsibility.”

Forbes magazine called it one of “the most selfless corporate moves in memory.”

Additionally, Apple has decided to award shares not just to executives or engineers but to hourly workers as well. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is giving a third of his Twitter stock (about 1 percent of the company) “to our employee equity pool to reinvest directly in our people.”

Employee stock ownership plans, which have been around for years, are making a comeback.

Research shows that employee-owned companies tend to outperform the competition. Two Kentucky companies that are employee owned are Murray’s Paschall Truck Lines and Bowling Green’s Houchens in retail grocery and convenience stores.

But sadly on this Labor Day, it’s still mainly no-lose socialism for the rich, cutthroat hyper- capitalism for the rest of us.

Given the continued obsession of my Republican colleagues with critical race theory, using an attack on Critical Race Theory to distract attention from the real issues of systemic or institutional racism in our society, we need to look at some of the facts that confirm the inequality that still exists in America.

In a recent Murray Ledger column on CRT, friend Winfield made a correct distinction between correlation and causation. We historians are fond of telling our students that just because World War II followed only twenty years after World War I, the first world war was not the cause of the second.  The fact that something comes after something else does not prove that it was caused by the first event (the “fallacy of the false cause”)

Dr. Rose then adds that one cannot prove that “laws and institutions of our country” actually caused “social, political and economic inequalities between white and non-white people.”  He suggests that inequality could be caused by other factors as well.  I agree. 

We do need, however, to think further about the objective reality of racism in America by looking at possible causes well beyond the existence of discriminatory laws, most of which have been repealed.

First, we need to go beyond the notion that race is essentially a matter of biology.  Race is profoundly cultural. It is learned behavior.  It is in our attitudes more than in our DNA.  My former colleague, Ken Mason, the first African-America hired in the History Department convinced me that all the racial categories devised by scholars over the past three centuries, such as Caucasian, Mongoloid, Negroid, were largely European ways of codifying appearance, especially our color consciousness. 

We are all humans, and, although some biological differences do exist, it is mainly skin color that matters, Professor Mason believed.  White people don’t discriminate against African-Americans because the latter are more likely to get sickle cell anemia, nor do we express hostility to Asian-Americans because their eyes look different than those of Caucasians.

We discriminate mainly based upon skin color, because it is an easy identifier that allows us to look negatively upon a person whom we want to believe to be different. When we make such comparisons in social matters, we are always judging one person or group superior to another.

Judgmental comparisons (aren’t most comparisons really judgments?) are not found in “pure” science or mathematics, but only in the “cultural” studies called social sciences or humanities in our universities. 

And that is why systemic or institutional racism is a cultural rather than a biological issue. This would be true whether or not critical race theory ever existed—and well before Republicans used it as a catch-phrase.

In 1968 the Kerner Commission, established by President Johnson to study unrest in American cities in the 1960s, wrote that “white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

And that is a definition of institutional racism, not a new thing.        

Dr. Rose calls CRT “a pernicious ideology which attacks the core principles of our civilization,” by which I assume he means American ideas of unity, “e pluribus unam” (from many one) and other values we link to democracy.  However, his statement better describes our continuing embrace of racism, not necessarily in our laws, but certainly in our society and a powerful reality in the lives of our black citizens. 

Biological differences do not explain why African-American per capita income averages $24,700 annually and white income averaging $42,700 (Census bureau, 2018).  This is not due to decisions made by individual racist employers as much as by institutional practices endorsed or tolerated by many white Americans.

It is not nasty neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, or academic CRT promoters who created a world in which black home ownership is 44% while white home ownership is 73%.  It is all of us white folks who tolerated centuries of black people being considered first property and then second-class citizens in America, the country on which we ask God to shed his grace.

Shame on those who attack CRT instead of joining the rest of us in seeking justice for all—something which can only be secured if we work together to end systemic racism.

            Well, my Republican friends and opponents are at it again.

            Their newest distracting cry of “ain’t it awful” is their attack on critical race theory “the latest malignancy unleashed on our society and political system by predatory nihilists of the left,” according to friend Winfield’s mild language in his July 21 Murray Ledger and Times column.

            Earlier, in a July 9 column, Republican District Chair Greg Delancey criticized the National Education Association (NEA) for “declaring war on those looking to keep critical race theory out of the schools,” (New York Post editorial). He then praised Republicans for pre-filing bills in Kentucky to “ban critical race theory from public schools and post-secondary education curriculum.”

            Critical race theory, says Wikipedia, is a “body of legal scholarship” challenging the notion that laws against prejudice could end racism.  Scholars in the 1970s and 1980s suggested that civil rights laws of the 1960s did not end discrimination because “race can intersect with other things (such as gender and class) to produce complex combinations of power and disadvantage.”

            The fact that some of the critics of these civil rights laws were Marxists does not negate the existence of systemic racism in our society. Calling something Socialist or Marxist is an emotional tactic used by many Republicans to scare their base into voting “correctly.” 

These are labels, not arguments.

            And the same is true of the constant repetition of the phrase “critical race theory.”  It is a “red herring,” a political term “intended to distract from the main issue.”  Critical race theory is not taught in any public school—it is generally studied in graduate school programs.

            What is taught in some public secondary schools (and should be in all) is the history and presence of systemic racism in America, the existence of cultural attitudes and practices that did and still do prevent many Americans from being treated justly. Slavery ended but was replaced by segregation and Jim Crow laws and customs that kept black Americans from gaining wealth, voting, securing good jobs, and feeling safe in their homes and streets. 

            Teaching this can promote racial healing, not “hatred,” as many Republicans want us to believe. (See my June 23 column “Creating Fear instead of Solutions.”)

            Racism is not primarily caused by individuals who discriminate.  It is embedded in American culture, despite laws against it.  It is not merely “an obvious biological concept,” as Dr. Rose proclaimed.  

Whatever the biological differences among humans, the concept of race has been used for centuries as a way of justifying and explaining our color consciousness. It helped light-skinned Europeans justify their belief that they were not only superior in power and material wealth to those with various shades of non-white skin but were also morally and intellectually superior.  

So here are some of the ways systemic or institutional racism has affected many African Americans past and present:

1. Social Security originally excluded domestic and agricultural workers, many of whom were black. This was done to get the act approved by southern Democrats;
2. After World War II, the G.I. Bill helped white Americans veterans secure mortgages but “federal policy said that the very presence of a black resident in a neighborhood reduced the value of homes there.” This made it difficult for blacks to get mortgages. This is a classic example of institutional racism. Those who enforced this policy were not themselves personally prejudiced against blacks;
3. The “War on Drugs” for decades targeted “one type of cocaine” used by poor blacks but not another used by wealthier white people. Hence more African Americans were imprisoned.  As recently as 2018, blacks arrested for marijuana possession numbered 567 per 100,000 residents while similar arrests of whites were only 156 per 100,000. (Time, June 2020 & Health & Human Services cabinet).

Some of these laws and practices were changed, but the lives of many black families have been diminished for generations affecting their ability to create wealth and pass it on to their children. 

            These examples of racism should be studied, not because all whites are personally racist, but because disturbing inequality is part of our history and our present life.  

            We need justice for all. Truth instead of scary lies will help us provide this. 

(to be continued)

We Americans think and talk big.

It is not unusual to see the word “myriad” used as an adjective, as in “today we have myriad ways to address climate change.”  During the final decade of my university teaching career, I also encountered the word “plethora” in many (but not a myriad of) student essays.

As a noun, myriad technically refers to the product of ten and one thousand or ten thousand. In its most common appearance as an adjective, however, it means “too numerous to be counted.”  The noun “plethora” can refer, according to my dictionary, to “a disease caused by an excess of blood cells.” The adjective, again it most common use in popular writing, is defined as “extreme excess” or “a state of being full.”

What does it say that these words are now being used in our everyday writing to describe something like unlimited expansion?  Does that say something about our current culture? 

Despite or perhaps because of the limitations we have/are experiencing in Coronaville, and in a nation whose legislators in Congress are either unable or unwilling to pass laws, we love to describe things as expansive, or unlimited.  Bigger is better, from our economic system—unregulated capitalism that relies on continuous growth—to our expectations of the future and our recent fascination with trips to Mars.

Even when we back away from words like plethora and myriad, we like to call things “mega,” “grand,” or “humongous”—all words that suggest large or unlimited size.

Why are we using such words of excess now, when simpler words like “more” or “many” or even “much more” served as adequate expressions of largeness for so many decades in the past history of the United States?

Susan, my friend the linguist, assures me that language is always in a state of change—and that this is normal, not a sign of degeneration as some of my grade school teachers thought.  I remember being told by one teacher: “They are children, not kids! Kids are baby goats!”

Yet I cannot help but wonder if changes in language do, at least partly, reflect a hardening or loss of respect in our culture.  Why, for example, has the “F-bomb” become so common in recent years?  And what about even simple acknowledgements like “thank you.”

 Some years ago, I came close to embarrassing members of my family when it first became common for servers in restaurants to say “no problem” instead of “thank you”, “don’t mention it”, or even “sure.”  I almost told a young server: “If I thought I would be a problem, I would not have come into your restaurant.”  I thought it but didn’t say it.

Political language has been part of this linguistic downturn.  Newt Gingrich, Republican majority leader during the Clinton presidency, instructed members of his caucus to think of Democrats as “enemies” rather than “opponents,” a term in long use in Congress. This contributed to the growing political polarization that we now see in Washington, D.C.

Changes in language like that do have an effect.  Words do matter. They can help us feel good or bad about ourselves and about others with whom we differ.  They can bring us together or spread us further apart.

 When progressives use phrases like “defund the police,” they reduce the chances that their opponents will be willing to work with them to change policing by turning some current police responsibilities over to social workers and others who are better equipped to handle them.  

Similarly, when conservatives continue to refer to all of the 2020 protesters as terrorists instead of distinguishing peaceful protest from those who engage in violence, they make it more difficult to deal with the real threat of domestic terrorism, which the FBI tells us is largely found on the right wing of the political spectrum.   

We use language which distorts the truth because we think it will “energize our base,” another use of language to normalize polarization when we should be deploring it and seeking to end it.         

Democracy can thrive only if we replace polemics with problem-solving.

But we would first have to want to solve our problems rather than using them to get re-elected.

I was fascinated by conservative political philosophy as a  teenager. My parents voted Republican, but my youthful rebellion against their views didn’t begin until I went to college.

In my Catholic high school from 1957-1961, almost all my teachers and peers were Democrats, so as a way of establishing my identity, I rebelled against them by reading Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative and William Buckley’s Up From Liberalism.  When I was 16, I even wrote a letter to Buckley praising his sensible views but suggesting that he could reach more readers by adopting a less intimidating vocabulary.  I even (shudder) supported Nixon in 1960.

As a cerebral type, I found conservative ideas of personal responsibility, fiscal prudence, and individual freedom very rational. They were based, after all, on the liberating ideas of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment we studied in history classes. Even my liberal priest teachers valued the principle of subsidiarity which asserted that problems should be solved from the bottom up rather than the top down. Local or state solutions to problems were preferable to national ones.

Our first year in Coronaville is coming to an end. The virus has affected all major holidays since March, so why should Christmas be any different?  We weren’t even able to squeeze in St. Patricks’s Day because Governor Beshear shut down the bars and restaurants on March 16.

Then, when we did try to celebrate Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day, we just created new surges and “super spreader events.” Halloween was mostly cancelled  and then Thanksgiving travel really caused an uptick in COVID cases.

So by now, most of us have learned our lesson. Most folks I know will be “home alone” this holiday, but that will not keep us from celebrating and gift-giving to mark the birth of Jesus and his later-day capitalist companion Santa Claus.

Like many other things in today’s polarized climate, “diversity” has become an attack word used by those on the political right. This demonization of people unlike us is one key reason why we cannot unite on the greatest threat facing us—global warming that may destroy our beautiful planet.

Current wealth and income disparity in our country has placed millions in great danger; one in eight families struggles to buy food each day. The pandemic and loss of jobs means that many Americans face exhausted savings and fear eviction for non-payment of rent or mortgages. For the first time in US history, a majority of Americans fear their children will not do as well as they have.

This is why many of us and some of our European neighbors have lost confidence in their government’s ability to help them and turned to far-right nationalist populist parties. What these parties promise is not a real solution to their problems but rather the emotionally comforting assurance that they are the truly worthy people who must unite against them. Them are the feared “others”—ethnic, religious, or gender minorities who are blamed for taking their jobs and causing them to lose status and respect.