Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[jjbrr]

kenberg, re: reparations

 

I've never put much thought into reparations in this context. I suspect I won't put much more additional thought into it now that it's on my radar, unless media starts ramming it down our throats and I need to do my own research. It's a contributing factor to conflict, it is not the root cause. I understand both sides of the argument. I find myself agreeing with some points on both sides. It's a delicate situation.

 

Rather than calling it reparation, what if we called it investment in our collective future? Education reform, infrastructure improvement, equal rights? Are you still opposed to paying for it if they slap a different label on it? Before we start talking about reparations, why don't we talk about giving all Americans a fair roll of the dice? Let's talk about root cause.

 

I'll argue that your generation is a major contributor to the root cause, for a lot of reasons.

[kenberg]

kenberg, re: reparations

 

I've never put much thought into reparations in this context. I suspect I won't put much more additional thought into it now that it's on my radar, unless media starts ramming it down our throats and I need to do my own research. It's a contributing factor to conflict, it is not the root cause. I understand both sides of the argument. I find myself agreeing with some points on both sides. It's a delicate situation.

 

Rather than calling it reparation, what if we called it investment in our collective future? Education reform, infrastructure improvement, equal rights? Are you still opposed to paying for it if they slap a different label on it? Before we start talking about reparations, why don't we talk about giving all Americans a fair roll of the dice? Let's talk about root cause.

 

I'll argue that your generation is a major contributor to the root cause, for a lot of reasons.

 

 

 

Changing the words that are used would not help. I favor "investment in our collective future", I very much favor it, but that leaves open the question of how this investment in our collective future is to take place. I very much favor education for example, and we no doubt need some investment in infrastructure. Presumably just about everyone favors equal rights even if they disagree whther some particular course of action does or does not promote equal rights. So: Yes to investment in our collective future. I favor it, I believe it would have broad support. No to reparations, I believe it will not have broad support.

 

It's not about phrasing, it's about how the money will be used. I am guessing that when you say "what if we called it..." you are not really suggesting that it is all about which words we use to describe one approach or the other. It's about what we choose to do.

 

As to generational arguments, I try to avoid them. It's true that I was born white and male, a citizen of the USA, and in 1939. Acknowledging that, I still favor investment in our collective future and I still oppose reparations.

 

[y66]

I have a different point of view which is that the core issue isn't money or labels, it's about recognizing that equal justice under the law and equal opportunity to get a decent education and a decent job have never applied to way too many black people and that this is unacceptable and must stop. You can legislate some things -- this is happening and a lot more is needed -- but you can't legislate away hate. In practical terms, this comes down to voting in PTA, local, state and national elections.

[y66]

From How a Bizarre Massachusetts Election Explains the Brexit Chaos by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub at NYT:

 

In order to give you our best sense of this week’s Brexit chaos and where it’s headed, we want to first tell you about an absolutely whackadoo election this week in little Massachusetts town called Fall River.

 

We promise this will make sense.

 

Fall River’s saga began in October, when its 26-year-old mayor, Jasiel Correia, was arrested on charges of defrauding investors and falsifying tax returns. He had raised funding to develop a marketing app called SnoOwl but, according to prosecutors, instead spent $230,000 of investors’ money on jewelry, clothes, a Mercedes and his successful mayoral campaign.

 

Mr. Correia contested the charges and refused to step down. So some citizens of Fall River got enough signatures to force a recall election, which was held on Tuesday.

 

Mr. Correia received an absolute walloping in the recall election. About 61 percent voted to remove him from office. Only 4,911 people, or 38 percent of turnout, voted to keep him in office. It was a clear popular mandate.

 

But there was a twist in the results. The ballot had two questions: one on whether to recall Mr. Correia and another on whom to replace him with. Five people ran to fill the mayor’s seat — but Mr. Correia was one of them.

 

It might seem like the height of youthful hubris that a 20-something mayor under federal indictment would run for re-election amid a recall vote.

 

It turned out that, whether he knew it or not, Mr. Correia was onto something. He received 4,808 votes in the mayoral race, almost the exact same number he’d gotten in the recall. But the other four candidates split the remaining vote. His 38 percent support was enough to put him in first.

 

Yes, that’s right: The same election that removed Mr. Correia by a nearly two-to-one margin also returned him to office.

Democracy — there’s no easy way to say this — can be a ridiculous system sometimes.

 

Which brings us back to Brexit.

 

Part of what’s confounding Britain’s many votes this week over how or when to leave the European Union is that, as in Fall River, British governance is shaped by two different elections that produced two different results.

 

The first of those elections, the 2016 referendum on whether to leave the European Union, recorded a slight majority of voters choosing to leave and a slight minority choosing to stay.

 

The second, a general election held in 2017, muddied that mandate and deepened divisions over what sort of Brexit to have.

 

The ruling Conservative party lost some seats, which undercut perceptions that the party had a mandate to follow the vision of its leader, Prime Minister Theresa May. The opposition Labour party gained seats, but did not win a majority and did not have a clear Brexit position.

 

So, on the one hand, British lawmakers believe that, because of the 2016 vote, they have a mandate to make Brexit happen. But the 2017 vote left the Conservatives too weak and disunited to actually do that because there is no clear mandate for a specific plan or for following or rejecting the prime minister’s leadership.

 

That muddle is coming through in this week’s series of Parliamentary votes.

 

Just as British voters did not express a clear majority for any specific vision in the 2017 general election, British lawmakers cannot form a clear majority for any specific plan. Mrs. May’s plan failed by a triple-digit margin when it was put to a vote. A “no-deal” Brexit, favored by hard-liners, is also expected to fail, as of the time of this writing. And there is not enough of a majority to push through other options, like a second referendum or simply revoking Brexit.

 

Capturing public sentiment and converting it into governance is a messy, imperfect science. The way that you design an election can shape the outcome just as much as the actual choices made by voters, and sometimes more.

[kenberg]

From How a Bizarre Massachusetts Election Explains the Brexit Chaos by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub at NYT:

 

 

 

Possibly there is a way forward. The problem is that "stay or go" seemed like a binary choice but it isn't since leaving requires negotiation so the "go" is ill-defined.. Perhaps the EU could be asked for more time, but with a very specific plan to bring it to a conclusion. There would be a new referendum, and the choice would be truly binary: Accept the deal that May negotiated with the EU and get out, or reject the deal that May negotiated and stay in.

 

Probably things are now such that thiswon't fly. it's a lesson for us all.I realize I know to little of all of this to suggest anything that has not already been suggested somewhere else.

[barmar]

Well, this latest college admissions bribery scandal is probably new and unrelated to anything that happened 50+ years ago (or 20+ years ago in the case of children Ivanka and Dumb and Dumber). But, make no mistake. Things like this have been going on ever since there were more applicants for a school than openings.

 

Dennison had such mediocre grades and test scores that he had Michael Cohen threaten to sue anybody with access to them to prevent them from leaking. How did he get into an Ivy league college with mediocre or even below average grades and test scores? Hmmm, Daddy Fred Trump paid Dennison the equivalent of a million dollars a year as a kid. A few million well placed donation dollars would certainly be enough to get even a dotard into a distinguished University.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were donations involved in getting DT into college.

 

But there's a big difference between giving preferential treatment to large donors and legacies, and committing fraud and bribery. Maybe the former isn't fair, but at least it's done in the open. A donation benefits all students and faculty, it doesn't go into an individual's bank account.

 

When I mentioned Trump's possible involvement, I didn't wasn't thinking about getting him or his children into colleges, I meant he might be on the receiving end of the current scam, or maybe involved in hooking celebrities up with the scammer, etc. Similar to his relationship to the massage parlor where Robert Kraft was getting sex.

[johnu]

I wouldn't be surprised if there were donations involved in getting DT into college.

 

But there's a big difference between giving preferential treatment to large donors and legacies, and committing fraud and bribery. Maybe the former isn't fair, but at least it's done in the open. A donation benefits all students and faculty, it doesn't go into an individual's bank account.

 

When I mentioned Trump's possible involvement, I didn't wasn't thinking about getting him or his children into colleges, I meant he might be on the receiving end of the current scam, or maybe involved in hooking celebrities up with the scammer, etc. Similar to his relationship to the massage parlor where Robert Kraft was getting sex.

 

About the Manchurian President's children admissions to Penn, he donated at least $1.48 Million to Penn around the time his children were admitted to Penn.

 

Donald Trump may have donated over $1.4 million to Penn

 

Yet, an exhaustive search by The Daily Pennsylvanian found that Trump may have cumulatively donated at least $1,480,500 to Penn, based on University reports, his foundation’s tax filings and other sources.

I am strongly against any pay for admission schemes, whether in the open or not.

[kenberg]

This cheating scandal could be an occasion for some serious re-thinking about elite colleges. If lazy spoiled brat kids with who need to cheat to score in the 1400s on SATs can survive even one semester at an elite college, we should ask just what is elite about it. Of course a kid that wants to learn is presented with great opportunity, but I went to the University of Minnesota and that was very definitely true there as well. So a kid that wants to learn can do so at a state run university, and apparently a kid who wants to party can survive at an elite college, possibly more easily than at a state run university. It seems that what the elite colleges are offering is the word "elite". If someone wants to pay 500K for that, maybe we should let them.

[johnu]

The despicable Manchurian President knows no national boundaries:

 

Trump Uses Same Rhetoric As New Zealand Shooting Suspect After Condemning His Actions

 

The suspect decided to launch the attack, he said, “to show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands.”

 

But the president has played a part in stoking xenophobia, including by framing illegal immigration as an “invasion,” enforcing a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries and referring to some undocumented immigrants as “animals.”

 

And then there was this:

 

Trump Encourages Violence From His Supporters. They’re Listening.

 

President Donald Trump this week issued a thinly veiled threat of violence against his opponents, saying that members of the police, military and biker gangs could “play it tough” if they “reach a certain point.”

 

It was a disturbing remark, but even more disturbing is the fact that it’s part of a long history of Trump encouraging his supporters to engage in violence. Largely unchecked by his party’s leadership, Trump’s rhetoric has become normalized despite its real-world ramifications.

Grand Wizard Dennison has abandoned any pretense of respect for the rule of law.

 

Hmmm, Dennison's mirror must have been broken when he had this to say:

 

‘I Don’t Really’ See A Rise In White Nationalism

 

According to a pool report, one reporter asked the president if he saw a rise in white nationalism around the world.

 

“I don’t really,” Trump responded. “I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, I guess. If you look what happened in New Zealand, perhaps that’s the case. I don’t know enough about it yet. … But it’s certainly a terrible thing.”

Of course, there are good people on both sides B-) The Racist in Chief has almost singlehandedly increased racism and hate crimes in the US to levels not seen in generations.

[y66]

I wonder why Trump keeps using white nationalist rhetoric?

[barmar]

I am strongly against any pay for admission schemes, whether in the open or not.

That's certainly a reasonable opinion to hold, as well as arguing against legacy preference.

 

But I still think there's a qualitative difference between preferential treatment for donors/legacies and bribery/fraud. There's also a quantitative difference: you have to donate millions of dollars to get your name on a building, the people involved in this scandal did it with just thousands.

[johnu]

More of the Christopher Steele Dossier on the Manchurian President has been confirmed as true:

 

Unsealed documents shed new light on efforts to verify Trump-Russia dossier

 

The controversial dossier had accused Russian hackers of using those companies, Webzilla and its parent company XBT, as part of their scheme to meddle in the presidential election. The memos, written by a retired British spy, Christopher Steele, also claimed that Russian entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev assisted the cyberattacks "under duress" from Russian intelligence.

 

The most salacious allegations in the dossier remain unverified to this day. But the claims that form the bulk of the memos have held up over time, or at least proved to be partially true.

This notably includes Steele's claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw an effort to interfere in the 2016 election. It also includes allegations of secret contacts between Trump's team and the Russians during the campaign. Steele gathered this stunning information months before the Russian meddling campaign was publicly confirmed by US intelligence agencies and in court filings from special counsel Robert Mueller.

 

Das Vedanya Comrade Puppet Dennsison...

[johnu]

rential treatment for donors/legacies and bribery/fraud. There's also a quantitative difference: you have to donate millions of dollars to get your name on a building, the people involved in this scandal did it with just thousands.

 

In the latest scandal, parents paid bribes of $100,000 to $6.5 million to guarantee their children got into top schools, including Yale, Stanford, the University of Southern California and Georgetown.

 

It would seem that getting your name on a building might have been cheaper than what some of those parents illegally paid.

[barmar]

In the latest scandal, parents paid bribes of $100,000 to $6.5 million to guarantee their children got into top schools, including Yale, Stanford, the University of Southern California and Georgetown.

 

It would seem that getting your name on a building might have been cheaper than what some of those parents illegally paid.

When I heard the report earlier in the week, I thought they said the bribes were mostly 5 figures, not 6-7.

[y66]

From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

 

David Leonhardt has an excellent column up about how, to put it bluntly, President Donald Trump incites violence by bigots:

 

It isn’t very complicated: The man with the world’s largest bully pulpit keeps encouraging violence and white nationalism. Lo and behold, white-nationalist violence is on the rise. You have to work pretty hard to persuade yourself that’s just a big coincidence.

As Leonhardt points out, it’s impossible to draw a straight causal line between Trump and any specific episode of violence. But it’s also not necessary. And, at any rate, it’s not unusual that we can’t make those kinds of specific causal connections. We can’t know, for example, if the government shutdown or the vacancy at the top of the Federal Aviation Administration directly caused the 737 Max disaster. Nor can we say with any certainty, to pick a positive example, that President Bill Clinton’s aggressive management of the bureaucracy in 1999 prevented the millennium plot from succeeding. In many cases, all we can do is tell if a president or a public policy made an outcome more likely or less likely. In this particular case, it’s not hard to determine which direction Trump is pushing things.

 

I’d add one more thing: Harmful rhetoric of this kind is, by itself, not really a justification for a legitimate impeachment and removal of a president. But it’s absolutely reasonable — indeed, necessary — for Congress to take it into account when assessing whether to move forward with an otherwise legitimate impeachment.

 

The president has sworn an oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Giving comfort — and, even worse, encouragement — to political violence is a direct violation of that oath. After all, one of the core principles of the Constitution of the United States is that of the republican rule of law; one of the reasons a republic exists is to banish violence from domestic politics.

 

And this is true of another of Trump’s frequent themes: his attacks on the media. Some criticism of the press is perfectly normal, of course. But Trump’s rhetoric, from calling the media an “enemy of the people” to questioning whether government agencies should “look into” TV comedians attacking him, is not. It’s not necessarily an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment if Trump restricts himself to talk. It can, nevertheless, be an abuse of power and a violation of his oath to defend the Constitution.

 

Impeachment is always going to be a political decision, and even more so when the evidence of presidential misconduct is in the gray area where removal would be legitimate but the evidence doesn’t absolutely demand it. Indeed, many criminal indictments are, in a sense, the political choices of prosecutors faced with that same gray area, and it’s only going to be more political when the prosecutors and the grand jury are the House of Representatives, and the jury is the Senate. We don’t know where the facts will come out on (other) abuses of power and of obstruction of justice. But it sure seems to me that Trump’s repeated and ongoing attacks on democratic norms and constitutional principles should, if it’s a close call at all, push Congress toward impeachment and removal.

[y66]

Good story here about problems with the 737 Max by the aerospace reporter at The Seattle Times.

[Winstonm]

Russian President Donald Putin Vladimir Trump and Individual-1's favorite guy signed a law Monday that imposes strict fines for publishing “fake news” and online comments that show “blatant disrespect” for the state, Reuters reports. Individuals who disseminate information that officials determine to be false will be forced to pay up to $6,100 if the information sparks a “mass violation of public order.” If the information shows “blatant disrespect“ for Russia, the Kremlin, the public, or the flag, individuals can be fined up to $1,525—and can be jailed on repeat offenses. The law also allows officials to block websites that refuse to remove allegedly false information. Opponents of the law fear that it opens the door for state censorship; advocates say that it’s necessary to stem misinformation and online abuse.

 

What a grand idea - no doubt in the near future we will hear from Individual-1 playing to his religious base while singing Vlad's praise with How Great Thou Art. B-)

[Winstonm]

Good story here about problems with the 737 Max by the aerospace reporter at The Seattle Times.

 

Then there is this:

 

Federal authorities launched a criminal probe into how the Boeing 737 Max was “certified to fly passengers” before the plane's latest crash occurred in Ethiopia, Bloomberg reports, citing sources. The probe by the Transportation Department’s Inspector General’s office was reportedly prompted by a 737 Max crash in Indonesia in late 2017, but has since taken on a “new urgency” after the Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed shortly after take off earlier this month and killed 157 people. The Transportation Department's audits and criminal probe are reportedly working in conjunction with the Justice Department—which is also reportedly collecting information about the “development of the 737 Max” through a “grand jury subpoena.” The Transportation Dept., DOJ, and Boeing reportedly declined to comment to Bloomberg. On Sunday, the Federal Aviation Administration stated that the plane's certification “followed the FAA’s standard certification process” and the agency's process “consistently produced safe aircraft designs.”

[y66]

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic candidate, called for ending the Electoral College.

 

Birch Bayh, the one-man constitutional reform machine, almost succeeded in doing this 50 years ago:

 

But the amendment that would have had the biggest impact of all was the one he could not get passed.

 

Between 1966 and 1970, Senator Bayh led a vigorous national campaign to abolish the Electoral College and elect the president by a direct popular vote.

 

He was far from the first to try. Our system of presidential electors — an antidemocratic relic of the late 18th century — has been targeted for reform or abolition roughly 700 times, more than any other part of the Constitution. No one has ever come as close to eliminating it as Mr. Bayh.

 

Abolition wasn’t even part of his original plan. He thought, as many people did at the time, that the Electoral College needed only a few tweaks. As chairman of the Senate’s subcommittee on constitutional amendments, Mr. Bayh arranged for hearings on various reform proposals. On the first day of hearings, he rejected the idea of a national popular vote out of hand. The smaller states, which believed they benefited from their disproportionate number of electoral votes, would never go for it. “Putting it optimistically,” he said, the chances of Congress passing a popular-vote amendment were “extremely slim, if not hopeless.”

 

A few months later, he did a complete about-face.

 

In a remarkable speech on May 18, 1966, Mr. Bayh said the hearings had convinced him that the Electoral College was no longer compatible with the values of American democracy, if it had ever been. The founders who created it excluded everyone other than landowning white men from voting. But virtually every development in the two centuries since — giving the vote to African-Americans and women, switching to popular elections of senators and the establishment of the one-person-one-vote principle, to name a few — had moved the country in the opposite direction.

 

Adopting a direct vote for president was the “logical, realistic and proper continuation of this nation’s tradition and history — a tradition of continuous expansion of the franchise and equality in voting,” he said.

 

He then explained how the Electoral College was continuing to harm the country. The winner-take-all method of allocating electors — used by every state at the time, and by all but two today — doesn’t simply risk putting the popular-vote loser in the White House. It also encourages candidates to concentrate their campaigns in a small number of battleground states and ignore a vast majority of Americans. It was no way to run a modern democracy.

 

In short, Senator Bayh said, the president “should be elected directly by the people, for it is the people of the United States to whom he is responsible.”

 

The speech was galvanizing, and by 1968, his popular-vote campaign had won the support of 80 percent of the country, according to a Gallup poll — Republicans and Democrats, as well as organizations as varied as the Chamber of Commerce, the League of Women Voters and the American Bar Association.

 

Then came the chaotic election of 1968, when George Wallace, the former Alabama governor and arch-segregationist, nearly managed to deadlock the vote and force Congress to pick the winner. Most people were just beginning to understand how bizarre and dangerous the Electoral College was. The prospect of an unreconstructed racist determining the presidency rightly horrified them. As the best-selling author James Michener wrote in a book advocating a switch to the popular vote, the Electoral College was a “time bomb lodged near the heart of the nation.”

 

In September 1969, the House voted overwhelmingly to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a direct popular vote. President Richard Nixon got onboard, and polls of state legislatures suggested strong support throughout the country. All signs pointed to another successful amendment for Mr. Bayh and a radical change in the way Americans chose their presidents. All signs but one.

 

As soon as the amendment reached the Senate, it was blocked by Southern segregationists, led by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who were well aware that the Electoral College had been created to appease the slaveholding states. They were also aware that it continued to warp the nation’s politics in their favor, since millions of black voters throughout the South were effectively disenfranchised by restrictive registration and voting laws. Even those who were able to vote rarely saw their preferences reflected by a single elector. A popular vote would make their voices equal and their votes matter — and would encourage them to turn out at higher rates.

 

The Southerners delayed and filibustered the amendment until it died, finally, on Sept. 29, 1970. The last attempt to end the filibuster failed by five votes.

 

It was a devastating loss, but Mr. Bayh didn’t give up. He continued to push his popular-vote amendment throughout the 1970s, bringing it back every couple of years, not stopping until he was swept out of office in the Reagan revolution of 1980, when he lost his seat to a young Indiana congressman named Dan Quayle.

 

With Mr. Bayh’s departure, the Senate lost its most devoted advocate for a national popular vote. “No one was a better legislator than he was, and he couldn’t get it done,” Jay Berman, the senator’s former chief of staff, told me. “It’s just such an empty feeling because it was so right to do. And we couldn’t do it.”

 

Last fall I visited Mr. Bayh at his home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, to interview him for a book I’m writing about the Electoral College and the push for a popular vote. Mr. Bayh shuffled to the door to greet me, keeping one hand on his wife, Kitty, for balance. Even stooped over, he was tall, with a full head of white hair. His handshake was frail, but I could feel the memory of a lifelong politician’s confident grip. We sat around the kitchen table, drank iced tea and talked for hours.

 

The oldest memories were intact. “Nobody in my family background had ever been involved in politics,” he said, recalling a childhood spent working on his grandparents’ farm in Terre Haute. “When my father found out what I was doing, I think he wondered what he’d done wrong as a parent.”

 

On the topic of the popular vote, he struggled to reconstruct scenes from half a century ago. But the pain of the loss was still there. If anything, it was keener, now that the Electoral College has awarded the White House to two popular-vote losers in the past two decades.

 

“I don’t know,” Mr. Bayh said, shaking his head. “I like to think as a country, as we grow older, we learn. It just makes such good sense.”

 

When I asked about the familiar charge that eliminating the Electoral College would lead to “mob rule,” Mr. Bayh brushed it off. “That, to me, is the positive end of it. Why shouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t they be able to determine their own destiny?”

[y66]

From Supreme Court and appellate advocate Deepak Gupta:

 

Emoluments Clause litigation update: Last fall, I argued before the 2nd Circuit in NY on behalf of competitors of Trump's businesses. That appeal is still pending. This morning, we go before the 4th Circuit in Richmond as co-counsel to D.C. & Maryland AGs: All Eyes on Fourth Circuit Hearing in Emoluments Case

[y66]

From Vanity Fair's behind the scenes take on Annie Leibovitz's photo shoot of Beto:

 

I met him at the rally the next day, and was pretty much with their group through all of that. And we met again the next morning and did the cover. He was by himself. He didn’t have anyone there. I always admire that too. I was in a quandary about whether he should wear a blue shirt or something more relaxed. So when we went out there, I said, “Listen, if you’re going to run, wear the blue shirt. If you’re not going to run, let’s wear something else.” And he said, “Let’s put on the blue shirt.”

[barmar]

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic candidate, called for ending the Electoral College.

 

Birch Bayh, the one-man constitutional reform machine, almost succeeded in doing this 50 years ago:

There's been a movement for a few years to get around the need to amend the US Constitution for this, called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The Constitution leaves it up to each state to decide how to award their electors, it doesn't require them to do it based just on the vote in their state. The states that join this compact agree to award their electors based on the national majority, not the state majority. If states that total 270 electoral votes join, the Electoral College has effectively been abolished; it's currently up to 181 (Colorado joined last week).

 

But Nate Silver doesn't think it has any real prospects. Until Colorado, all the states that have joined have been blue, and there aren't enough electoral votes in all the blue states to achieve the goal. Amending the US Constitution would certainly face an even tougher challenge -- that requires a 2/3 vote of each house of Congress and ratification by 3/4 of the states.

[cherdano]

Going back to reparations, I wonder whether those in this thread who oppose it know what redlining is, and the role the federal government played in it. Or about the systemic racial bias in the GI bill.

[y66]

Going back to reparations, I wonder whether those in this thread who oppose it know what redlining is, and the role the federal government played in it. Or about the systemic racial bias in the GI bill.

Please stop trolling this thread. It's easy to make a compelling moral case for reparations based on what was taken from millions of black people before and after slavery was outlawed, including takings of life, liberty and opportunities to acquire wealth by acquiring and financing property. It's also easy to make a compelling case that this country was built on taking life, liberty and land from others and that reparations will never be supported by a majority of voters even if they are supported by David Brooks, to his credit as a moral person if not as a pragmatist. F**k pragmatists? No. F**k all of us if we let doomed discussions about reparations distract us from focusing on getting rid of Trump and his ilk ASAP and to whom these doomed discussions are tailor made for dividing Dems and motivating takers and haters to take and hate more.

[barmar]

If someone wants to have a serious discussion about reparations, let me know and I'll try to find all the messages here and extract them into a new thread. But it doesn't really seem to be very Trump-related (I know I was guilty of perpetuating the hijack).

 

I'm not sure it's worth it, it seems like the kind of topic that can be like a religious war.