Now, Mitt Romney is not as far right as some in the Republican Party, but he's on board here. In the Washington Post, he is quoted as saying
As with others in his party, he raised the issue of social mobility and the difficulty of those at the bottom from rising into the middle class. He cited former president Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty half a century ago. Johnson’s intentions were good, he said, but his policies had not worked. He argued that Republicans must persuade voters that conservative policies can “end the scourge of poverty” in America.Let's forget for a moment that just two years ago Romney's sympathies for the downtrodden were invisible -- moochers, he thought of them. Takers.
Mitt and I are the same age but have had different experiences. Mitt was a rich kid in the richest part of the Midwest, prep school and all that. I was a lower middle class kid in the Deep South. I suppose Romney may have passed by poor people, but he never saw them. I did. I lived and worked alongside them. I knew people -- adults -- who had little education raising families on minimum wage jobs (another rightwing lie -- minimum wage jobs were only for schoolkids).
And there were other people that I did not work alongside who were much worse off. They worked for far less than minimum wage, and not often, had next to no education. I could see them. I talked with them sometimes.
There are still people like that, but millions of their children escaped. Went to college. Got hired for good jobs that don't require college, like selling cars. The Great Society was a big success. It did not succeed everywhere with everyone, but all you have to do is walk through an airport terminal and look at the travelers and you can tell -- if you remember what that scene would have been like 50 years ago -- that the American economic success fable is now reality for many more people than it used to be.
It wasn't trickle down economics that did it. In fact, the residue of intractable poverty in our great cities is due mostly to the offshoring of the steppingstone jobs that launched generations of Americans -- native or immigrant -- toward the suburbs and (for rightwingers) self-satisfied narratives of their own superiority.
"One of the many things that rightwingers believe that isn't so is that the Great Society programs were a failure."
ReplyDeleteThat's just silly. Of course they were a failure to us and not a failure to you. That's because you want to oppressively control people and we like freedom from government control. You won, we lost, be happy, but don't expect us to not try to bring that which has failed us down by any means.
You don't want to oppressively control? Then explain why rightwingers imposed poll taxes until liberals put a stop to it.
ReplyDeleteThe fantasy that rightwingers don't want to oppressively control is another lie. We can start with vaginsl wanding.
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ReplyDeleteOne of the many things that rightwingers believe that isn't so is that the Great Society programs were a failure.
ReplyDeleteBusing.
Detroit. Washington, D.C. Teachers' Unions.
And as a bonus from the same sort of thinking that characterizes progressives:
Speech.
Busing did not start with the Great Society. It was a rightwing method of keeping black children from attending good schools. In that sense it was a huge success, which the reversal of direction in the routes helped to change.
ReplyDeleteIt was a rightwing method of keeping black children from attending good schools.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you can supply evidence that millions of black children were bused away from neighborhood schools.
(Never mind that you are, in typical progressive fashion, missing the entire point. Regardless of how much busing of black children out of their neighborhoods there might have been -- and searching on [black student busing] suggests not much -- the damage that busing did was monumental.
NB: the author of that article, and the place where it appeared, is somewhat to the left of the NYT.
I sure can, but you don' care. We went over this years ago.
ReplyDeleteI sure can, but you don' care. We went over this years ago.
ReplyDeleteWe did. You didn't provide any evidence then, just like you won't now.
In that thread I counted at least a half dozen instances were you were trafficking in nonsense, and you memholed each one.
Just as you are completely avoiding the article I linked.
Since I was there and saw the buses passing by me, I'll stick with my version.
ReplyDeleteSo, in other words, no evidence at all that doesn't reconfirm the saying that data isn't the plural of anecdote.
ReplyDelete(Never mind that you once again shifted the goal posts into outer space. Regardless of the general truth of your assertion -- extremely hard to believe, given the segregated housing patterns of the time -- the point is that the Great Society caused a great deal of damage. Start with busing, then AFDC, then lifetime entitlement to welfare. Collectively, they destroyed black communities. Of course, you probably disagree: but that would make you a racist.)
Ah, yes, black communities were doing so well when whites herded them off into jobless, service-less konzentrationslager..
ReplyDeleteYou do not understand how far whits were wiling to bus black kids to get them out of their schools. 50 miles in some cases.
Ah, yes, black communities were doing so well when whites herded them off into jobless, service-less konzentrationslager..
ReplyDeleteKeeping in mind that the opening sentence of your post is One of the many things that rightwingers believe that isn't so is that the Great Society programs were a failure, then the degree to which whites bused blacks away from schools closest to them before the Great Society disasters is kind of beside the point, isn't it?
But never mind that trivial detail, you demand that your soda-straw view of the world stand in for the world itself.
That link which you clearly haven't fussed yourself with (How do I know? Because I accidentally -- really, I'm not kidding; just now discovered it -- grabbed the wrong URL. Here is the right one) discusses the disaster that busing created. And it was created by hypocrites: people who wouldn't send their own kids to schools that they forced others to attend.
So to see just how much a failure that Great Society program was, why don't you take a look at an extensive article written by someone who spouts nearly as many rote catechisms as you?
Instead of moving the goal posts.
This ain't my first rodeo. I've read claims like that before and find them unpersuasive. I don't feel any need to read another one.
ReplyDeleteBut while you are entitled to your opinion, you are not entitled to your own set of facts. Let's examine your claim that residential patterns meant that busing was not happening prior to the attempted integration of public schools. We will look where most black students were and I will name names.
Norfolk, Virginia, largest city in the state. Because of the many creeks and rivers, it was common to find a street with waterfront mansions, occupied by whites, on one side and tumbledown shacks, occupied by blacks, on the other.
There were 3 high schools, Granby, Maury and Washington, 2 white, 1 black.
Raleigh, North Carolina: 2nd largest in the state. (and currently 18th largest in the nation) Residential patterns concentrated blacks in the east and whites in the west, although it was not uniform. 2 high schools, Broughton for whites, Sanderson for blacks.
So to get to the school for your color, you had to be bused. See here for reference to a black child who was bused although his "neighborhood" school was a block away:
http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/09/06/667066/school-integration-enters-its.html
These were among the larger cities in the South.In smaller cities and towns there were always 1 white, 1 black high school, and in the South neighborhoods were segregated but there were no neighborhood schools.
But while you are entitled to your opinion, you are not entitled to your own set of facts. Let's examine your claim that residential patterns meant that busing was not happening prior to the attempted integration of public schools.
ReplyDeleteHow about we examine your reading comprehension, and your continually mystifying insistence upon saying what people said, instead of quoting them.
So, to reiterate what I said above:
Regardless of the general truth of your assertion -- extremely hard to believe, given the segregated housing patterns of the time ...
I am sure you can come up with the odd anecdote otherwise; as a general matter, though, you assertion falls on its face. In fact, the link you provided provides as good a refutation of your heretofore substance-free claims as I could ever hope to find:
The slowly integrating system went on to adopt plans based on choice and neighborhood zones, both familiar terms to those following the current school board's plans. When federal officials rejected both approaches, Raleigh started busing for racial balance in 1971 and then began using families' economic background as a basis for balancing assignments in 2000.
Hint: schools were segregated because of the neighborhoods in which they were located.
Hint 2: you really should read your sources.
I've read claims like that before and find them unpersuasive. I don't feel any need to read another one.
Spoken with the hubris of fundamentalist progressive.
When you start a post with this: One of the many things that rightwingers believe that isn't so is that the Great Society programs were a failure, then your complete failure to address progressive criticisms of Great (sic) Society programs suggests a mind closed as tightly as Fort Knox.
Zones that, if you were the wrong color, meant nothing as far as which school you attended. You didn't read the story did you?
ReplyDeleteHere is a piece provided to me in a FB post on another context entirely. A horrible story, which you are free to ignore if you wish, but note the paragraph about high schools, and combine that with the remarks about population and the details of the man who was killed, where he went to school and who his neighbor was.
Hmmm.
Maybe conditions before the Great Society were not so all-fired great.
Zones that, if you were the wrong color, meant nothing as far as which school you attended. You didn't read the story did you?
ReplyDeleteI did read the story. (Note -- I provided a direct quote from the story that completely contradicts your point. And in response you have [crickets].)
This much is obvious, to anyone with even a glancing familiarity with American history endemic racism, in general, ghettoized blacks. And that, in general, neighborhood schools would reflect that.
No doubt, there were exceptions.
But the exceptions aren't the point. The Great Society took a problem that was already easily bad enough, and made it far worse: when widespread de facto segregation failed to yield the results demanded of de jure desegregation, then there were two options: time or force.
Collectivists chose force. The results have been an unmitigated disaster.
Let me repeat that: Great Society policies, collectivist to the core, made bad problems worse. Your assertion that [maybe] conditions before the Great Society were not so all-fired great is both a straw man (is anyone saying they were?) and rationalization turned up to 11.
By all means, unless you have a fundamentalist's certainty, read Slate article.
As a fundamentalist, though, I doubt you will.
(BTW ... whatever link you hoped to provide isn't there.)