Have you considered the fact that when the federal government ended Jim Crow in 1964 they opened the borders the following year? Have you considered that the Great Society destroyed the black family? Did you ever notice that when the government passed The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, it vastly expanded policing and incarceration the following year? Democrats were the majority party in Washington in all these instances (albeit it took Republicans to force the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through the Senate over a filibustering Democrats, and many Republicans resisted the 1994 Crime Bill).
Did you notice when, in 2018, Donald Trump pushed through Congress the First Step Act, which was the first major prison reform bill in history? You would have to have been paying attention. Even if you were paying attention, you probably missed the fact that Biden-Harris never put the First Step Act into practice. It wasn’t just because they didn’t want to give Trump a major win. It was because of what the previous paragraph more than suggests about the goal of Democrats. Joe Biden authored the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Serving as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden also backed NAFTA and helped rally support for it among his colleagues.
Take a longer view of history. Did you note in your history class that Democrats were the party of the slavocracy? It’s true, in the mid-nineteenth century, the Democratic Party represented the interests of Southern slaveholding states, where slavery was integral to the economy. It was the Republican Party that led the nation in abolishing slavery. After the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan was the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party. Where did lynching mostly occur and what was the party affiliation of those who perpetrated these atrocities? Yep, Democrats. Who established Jim Crow, of de jure segregation? Democrats. Who is the party of the black-majority ghetto? Democrats.
How is it possible that all this is true but that the perception of Democrats is that they are champions of minority rights while the Republicans are the racists? How did the Party of Lincoln come to be effectively portrayed as the party of fascism? Because the corporatocracy that arose from the ashes of slavocracy, and the party of the corporate state control the administrative apparatus, academia, culture, and the mass media, that’s the Democratic Party and its neoconservative and neoliberal allies in the Republican Party, has bamboozled millions of Americans into believing an inverted version of history.
To be sure, there are many people who are truly oblivious to the truth of history. But I am sure you ave noted how hard it is to awaken people who are only pretending to be asleep?
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This is one of the most cogent explanations of the current crisis with respect to working class conditions and wages that I have heard in a long time. Steve Bannon is the principal theorist of the populist-nationalist movement. Several minutes in, I turned to my wife and said, “This dude is a stealth Marxist.” I would show this press conference in my criminal justice classes but for the controversy it would generate and the grief I’d suffer on account of it; because Bannon is a partisan, and Trump hysteria is peaking, showing this in a university setting might very likely lead to another call to the principal’s office.
freedom and reason 