ye olde southern strategy

By “Don’t Forget How America Got Screwed Up…”

reprinted without permission from Addicting Info

History truly does repeat itself.  Sometimes in frighteningly similar ways.
We all know how the Republican Party started out as the Party of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator who took a political ‘states-rights’ issue and raised the ante to set America on the moral high ground with a bloody civil war that ended legalized slavery of African-Americans.  Blacks were forever indebted to Mr. Lincoln and his Republican Party for its commitment to their freedom.

But, that all changed with another Republican, Herbert Hoover.  In the 1920s, Hoover was the Secretary of Commerce under Republican Calvin Coolidge.  Hoover was to Coolidge as “Brownie” was to George W. Bush.  And just like the Bush Administration, Coolidge’s Admin had to handle a natural catastrophe similar in scope to Katrina.  Fortunately, Hoover was a smarter administrator than Brownie and managed the relief work admirably.  Unfortunately he was a lying, manipulative, power-hungry Republican that would have made Dick Cheney proud.

Here’s the story:

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 broke the banks and levees of the lower Mississippi River in early 1927, resulting in flooding of millions of acres and leaving one and a half million people displaced from their homes. Although such a disaster did not fall under the duties of the Commerce Department, the governors of six states along the Mississippi specifically asked for Herbert Hoover in the emergency. President Calvin Coolidge sent Hoover to mobilize state and local authorities, militia, army engineers, the Coast Guard, and the American Red Cross.

With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Hoover set up health units to work in the flooded regions for a year. These workers stamped out malaria, pellagra, and typhoid fever from many areas. His work during the flood brought Herbert Hoover to the front page of newspapers almost everywhere, and he gained new accolades as a humanitarian. The great victory of his relief work, he stressed, was not that the government rushed in and provided all assistance; it was that much of the assistance available was provided by private citizens and organizations in response to his appeals. “I suppose I could have called in the Army to help,” he said, “but why should I, when I only had to call upon Main Street.”

The horrible treatment of African Americans during the disaster, however, endangered Hoover’s reputation as a humanitarian. Local officials brutalized blacks and prevented them from leaving relief camps, aid meant for African-American sharecroppers was often given to the landowners instead, and many times black males were conscripted by locals into forced labor, sometimes at gun point.  Knowing the potential ramifications on his presidential aspirations if such knowledge became public, Hoover struck a deal with Robert Moton, the prominent African-American successor to Booker T. Washington as president of the Tuskegee Institute. In exchange for keeping the suffering of African Americans out of the public eye, Hoover promised unprecedented influence for African Americans if he was elected president. Moton agreed, and consistent with the accommodationist philosophy of Washington, worked actively to suppress information about mistreatment of blacks from being revealed to the media. Following election, Hoover broke his promises. This led to an African-American backlash in the 1932 election that shifted allegiance from the Republican party to the Democrats.  That was the year, of course, that American first elected Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Original Southern strategy

To gain Republican votes in Southern states, Hoover pioneered an electoral tactic later known as the “Southern Strategy”. Hoover ousted many African American leaders in the Republican party, and replaced them with whites. Hoover’s appeal to white voters yielded substantial results, including Republican victories in Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Texas. It marked the first time a Republican candidate for president carried Texas.

This outraged the black leadership, which largely broke from the Republican Party, and began seeking candidates who supported civil rights within the Democratic Party.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover

This “Southern Strategy” would be used again by Republicans in the 1950s & 1960s to drive a racial wedge between black and white Democrats during the struggle for civil rights and desegregation.   Republicans never unite….they ALWAYS divide to conquer.

thank you, god, for killing my enemy's children

The story at the roots of the Jewish holiday of Passover ... doesn’t sound quite like a fairy tale—unless perhaps one created by Stephen King. What exactly is celebrated during Passover?

 Our tale begins in Egypt over 3,000 years ago—or at least so we are told, since there is less historical evidence for the authenticity of this story than for the existence of the Yeti and the Loch Ness monster. No source for its truthfulness exists other than the Torah. For all we know, it could be all exactly true or it could just as well be entirely made up. But in any case, here’s what the Torah has to say about the origins of Passover. Over three millennia ago, times were not rosy for Jewish peoples (some things never change …). Being enslaved in ancient Egypt was not the epitome of fun, so Jews were desperately looking for a way out. The one and only God came to the rescue by empowering Moses to threaten the Pharaoh with a series of horrific plagues unless he freed his people. Nine consecutive plagues failed to sway the Pharaoh. So, for the tenth plague, God decided to pull out the big guns. He told good monotheistic Jews to mark their doorposts with the blood of sacrificial lambs. This was to make sure that the angel of death—who apparently could be a bit distracted sometimes—would not make mistakes. The blood on the door was the signal to the angel of death that he was not welcome to come in for a visit: the blood told him to “pass over” those homes and go carry out his murderous homework elsewhere. God’s orders, in fact, were pretty specific: all the firstborn children of the Egyptians were to be wiped out in a single night. And just in case that weren’t enough, all the firstborn calves were also to be killed (if you are wondering about that, sorry but the Torah doesn’t tell us exactly what evil sin Egyptian cows had committed to deserve such punishment).

Since this story was apparently not perverted enough, here’s the icing on the cake. It was God all along who had hardened the heart of the Pharaoh to make sure he wouldn’t release Jewish people before He had a chance to unleash all ten plagues. “Why?”—you may ask—“What kind of weird game was God playing?”

This whole drama was a publicity stunt set up by the one and only God, “… in order to show you My power and in order that My fame may resound throughout the world.” In other words, the killing of thousands of Egyptian kids was but a way for God to flex His muscles and gain some fame: bloodshed and terror tactics as a strategy to get attention.

Now, ancient Jews were clearly not overly fond of their enemies’ children. In Psalm 137, which begins as a moving lamentation over being exiled from their homelands, we are told with gleeful satisfaction about the joys of smashing the heads of the children of Babylon. During the march to the Promised Land, we are told in multiple occasions about Jewish armies hacking to death all enemy males, including those still suckling. 

But the lovely tale of the angel of death having a field day with Egyptian kids is the only massacre of babies to get its very own celebratory holiday.

And while we are at it, Happy Easter, too ... 

NOTE: The previous is an excerpt from the recent Disinformation title 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know: Religion, authored by Daniele Bolelli.] Reprinted here w/o permission.

red states are the parasites

Ayn Rand Worshippers Should Face Facts: Blue States Are the Providers, Red States Are the Parasites

Progressives believe in the redistribution of wealth, so we're not usually too upset by this state of affairs. That’s what it means to be one country. E pluribus unum, and all that. We’re happy to help, because we think we’ve got a stake in making sure kids in rural Alabama get educations and seniors in Arizona get healthcare. What’s good for them is good for all of us. We also like to think they’d help us out if our positions were reversed. It’s an investment in making America stronger, and we feel fine about that.

But maybe it's time to admit that we're being played for chumps, and that there are people in the rest of the country who are taking way too much advantage of our good nature. After all: it's now a stone fact that the blue states and cities are the country's real wealth creators. That's why we pay more taxes, and are able to send that money to the red states in the first place. We're working our butts off, being economically productive, going to college, raising good kids, supporting reality-based schools, keeping our marriages together, tending to our busy and diverse cities, and generally Playing ByThe Rules. And the fates have smiled on us in rough proportion to the degree that we’ve invested in our own common good.

So we've got every right to get good and angry about the fact that, by and large, the people who are getting our money are so damned ungrateful -- not to mention so ridiculously eager to spend it on stuff we don't approve of. We didn't ship them our hard-earned tax dollars to see them squandered on worse-than-useless abstinence-only education, textbooks that teach creationism, crisis-pregnancy misinformation centers, subsidies for GMO crops and oil companies, and so on. And we sure as hell didn't expect to be rewarded for our productivity and generosity with a rising tide of spittle-flecked insanity about how we’re just a bunch of immoral, godless, drug-soaked, sex-crazed, evil America-hating traitors who can’t wait to hand the country over to the Islamists and the Communists.

Ironically, the conservative movement's favorite philosopher had some very insightful things to say about this exact situation. Ayn Rand's novels divided the world into two groups. On one hand, she lionized "producers" -- noble, intelligent Übermenschen whose faith in their own ideas and willingness to take risks to achieve their dreams drives everything else in society. And she called out the evil of "parasites," the dull, unimaginative masses who attach themselves to producers and drain away their resources and thwart their dreams.

Conservatives love this story. They're eager to claim the gleaming mantle of the producers, insisting loudly that their tax money is going to support people (mostly in blue states and cities, it's darkly implied) who won't or can't work as hard as they do. If you want to arouse their class and race resentments, there are few narratives that can get them rolling like this producers-versus-parasites tale.

But the NYT story and that map up there prove beyond arguing that the conservative interpretation of events is 100 percent, 180-degrees, flat-out wrong. America's real producer class is overwhelmingly concentrated in the blue cities and states -- the regions full of smart, talented people who've harnessed technology and intellect to money, and made these regions the best, most forward-looking places in the country to live. 

 original post: http://www.alternet.org/story/154338/ayn_rand_worshippers_should_face_facts_blue_states_are_the_providers_red_state_are_the_parasites