The Stench of Slavery Lingers in the Contemporary GOP
Organic Lifestyle Comments Off on The Stench of Slavery Lingers in the Contemporary GOP
How is it that despite the fact that most Americans are peace-loving, hard-working, generous, tolerant people who believe in the ideals expressed in the Constitution, we have become a nation of almost constant warfare whose Congress is currently dominated by right-wing zealots, a nation that oppresses its minorities, devalues its women and LGTB communities, declares war on science, spies on its own citizens, fails to prosecute war criminals and bank fraud, destroys its environment by practicing ruthless agriculture and exploitative energy extraction, and gives enormous wealth to a handful of people while its middle class sinks beneath a tidal wave of debt and income inequality?
The answer, I think, is that our country’s original sin of slavery still corrupts us. Slavery in the antebellum South was anything but an expression of the American ideals of fair play, equality, and justice for all. It was a brutal system of repression where a handful of people had all the money and respect, while slaves did all the work and were treated like chattel.
Although the South lost the Civil War, it’s now come to pass that the ethos of the Old South has enjoyed a recrudescence and infected our society anew. The examples are everywhere. In Wisconsin, original home of American socialism, Republican Governor Scott Walker has effectively eliminated collective bargaining. Anti-science ignorance blooms within the so-called Christian community, where children are taught that the world was created 6,000 years ago and humans and dinosaurs lived together. Like ISIS in the Middle East, whose goal is to establish a caliphate across the Muslim world and pluralism is disallowed, fundamental Christian evangelicals believe that America is a Christian nation, despite the insistence of the Founding Fathers that it not only isn’t a sectarian nation, but church and state should remain forever separate. Our police forces have morphed into paramilitary and gun down unarmed minority children. There’s a war on women’s reproductive rights that’s essentially a re-establishment of male dominance over females. Ignorance reigns in the Republican legislator in Idaho would wondered at a hearing whether a woman could swallow a camera to facilitate a gynecological exam; in the Republican legislator who wanted to jail women who wear yoga pants; in the intolerance of those who would uproot families and deport them instead of offering them a way to citizenship. I could go on.
And how is all this attributable to slavery? I will now quote extensively from “How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America,” written by Sara Robinson on AlterNet about three years ago. It is as trenchant a piece of political and historical analysis into our current predicament as can be imagined. Here it is:
“It’s been said that the rich are different than you and me. What most Americans don’t know is that they’re also quite different from each other, and that which faction is currently running the show ultimately makes a vast difference in the kind of country we are.
“Right now, a lot of our problems stem directly from the fact that the wrong sort has finally gotten the upper hand; a particularly brutal and anti-democratic strain of American aristocrat that the other elites have mostly managed to keep away from the levers of power since the Revolution. Worse: this bunch has set a very ugly tone that’s corrupted how people with power and money behave in every corner of our culture. Here’s what happened, and how it happened, and what it means for America now.
“Much of American history has been characterized by a struggle between two historical factions among the American elite — and that the election of George W. Bush was a definitive sign that the wrong side is winning.
“For most of our history, American economics, culture and politics have been dominated by a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values, educated at the Ivies and marinated in an ethic of noblesse oblige (the conviction that those who possess wealth and power are morally bound to use it for the betterment of society). While they’ve done their share of damage to the notion of democracy in the name of profit (as all financial elites inevitably do), this group has, for the most part, tempered its predatory instincts with a code that valued mass education and human rights; held up public service as both a duty and an honor; and imbued them with the belief that once you made your nut, you had a moral duty to do something positive with it for the betterment of mankind. Your own legacy depended on this. Among the presidents, this strain gave us both Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Poppy Bush — nerdy, wonky intellectuals who, for all their faults, at least took the business of good government seriously. The core impulse to improve the world is a good one — and one that’s been conspicuously absent in other aristocratic cultures.
“Which brings us to that other great historical American nobility — the plantation aristocracy of the lowland South, which has been notable throughout its 400-year history for its utter lack of civic interest, its hostility to the very ideas of democracy and human rights, its love of hierarchy, its fear of technology and progress, its reliance on brutality and violence to maintain ‘order,’ and its outright celebration of inequality as an order divinely ordained by God.
“The elites of the Deep South are descended mainly from the owners of sugar, rum and cotton plantations from Barbados — the younger sons of the British nobility who’d farmed up the Caribbean islands, and then came ashore to the southern coasts seeking more land. The culture they created in the crescent stretching from Charleston, SC, around to New Orleans was a near-carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place notorious even then for its inhumanity. From the outset, Deep Southern culture was based on radical disparities in wealth and power, with a tiny elite commanding total obedience and enforcing it with state-sponsored terror. Its expansionist ambitions would put it on a collision course with its Yankee rivals, triggering military, social, and political conflicts that continue to plague the United States to this day.
“These elites have always feared and opposed universal literacy, public schools and libraries, and a free press. They have historically been profoundly anti-technology as well, far preferring solutions that involve finding more serfs and throwing them at a problem whenever possible. Why buy a bulldozer when 150 convicts on a chain gang can grade your road instead? Unlike the Puritan elites, who wore their wealth modestly and dedicated themselves to the common good, Southern elites sank their money into ostentatious homes and clothing and the pursuit of pleasure — including lavish parties, games of fortune, predatory sexual conquests, and blood sports involving ritualized animal abuse spectacles.
“But perhaps the most destructive piece of the Southern elites’ worldview is the extremely anti-democratic way it defined the very idea of liberty. In Yankee Puritan culture, both liberty and authority resided mostly with the community, and not so much with individuals. Individuals were expected to make sacrifices for the betterment of everyone. In return, the community had an inescapable moral duty to care for its sick, educate its young and provide for its needy — the kind of support that maximizes each person’s liberty to live in dignity and achieve his or her potential. A Yankee community that failed to provide such support brought shame upon itself. To this day, our progressive politics are deeply informed by this Puritan view of ordered liberty.
“In the old South, on the other hand, nobody had the authority to tell a Southern gentleman what to do with resources under his control. In this model, that’s what liberty is. If you don’t have the freedom to rape, beat, torture, kill, enslave, or exploit your underlings (including your wife and children) with impunity — or abuse the land, or enforce rules on others that you will never have to answer to yourself — then you can’t really call yourself a free man.
“When a Southern conservative talks about ‘losing his liberty,’ the loss of this absolute domination over the people and property under his control — and, worse, the loss of status and the resulting risk of being held accountable for laws that he was once exempt from — is what he’s really talking about. In this view, freedom is a zero-sum game. Anything that gives more freedom and rights to lower-status people can’t help but put serious limits on the freedom of the upper classes to use those people as they please. It cannot be any other way. So they find Yankee-style rights expansions absolutely intolerable, to the point where they’re willing to fight and die to preserve their divine right to rule.
“Once we understand the two different definitions of ‘liberty’ at work here, a lot of other things suddenly make much more sense. We can understand the traditional Southern antipathy to education, progress, public investment, unionization, equal opportunity, and civil rights. The fervent belief among these elites that they should completely escape any legal or social accountability for any harm they cause. Their obsessive attention to where they fall in the status hierarchies. And, most of all — the unremitting and unapologetic brutality with which they’ve defended these ‘liberties’ across the length of their history.
“The current conservative culture war is the Civil War still being re-fought by other means. After the Civil War, the rise of Northern industrialists and the dominance of Northern universities and media ensured that subsequent generations of the American power elite continued to subscribe to the Northern worldview — even when the individual leaders came from other parts of the country.
“Ironically, it was that old Yankee commitment to national betterment that ultimately gave the Southern aristocracy its big chance to break out and go national. It was easy for the Northeast to hold onto cultural, political and economic power as long as all the country’s major banks, businesses, universities, and industries were headquartered there. But the New Deal — and, especially, the post-war interstate highways, dams, power grids, and other infrastructure investments that gave rise to the Sun Belt — fatally loosened the Yankees’ stranglehold on national power. The gleaming new cities of the South and West shifted the American population centers, unleashing new political and economic forces with real power to challenge the Yankee consensus. And because a vast number of westward migrants came out of the South, the elites that rose along with these cities tended to hew to the old Southern code, and either tacitly or openly resist the moral imperatives of the Yankee canon. The soaring postwar fortunes of cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta fed that ancient Barbadian slaveholder model of power with plenty of room and resources to launch a fresh and unexpected 20th-century revival.
“These post-WWII Southerners and Westerners drew their power from the new wealth provided by the defense, energy, real estate, and other economic booms in their regions. They also had a profound evangelical conviction, brought with them out of the South, that God wanted them to take America back from the Yankee liberals — a conviction that expressed itself simultaneously in both the formation of the vast post-war evangelical churches (which were major disseminators of Southern culture around the country); and in their takeover of the GOP, starting with Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 and culminating with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.
“They countered Yankee hegemony by building their own universities, grooming their own leaders and creating their own media. By the 1990s, they were staging the RINO hunts that drove the last Republican moderates (almost all of them Yankees, by either geography or cultural background) and the meritocratic order they represented to total extinction within the GOP. A decade later, the Tea Party became the voice of the unleashed id of the old Southern order, bringing it forward into the 21st century with its full measure of selfishness, racism, superstition, and brutality intact.
“From its origins in the fever swamps of the lowland south, the worldview of the old Southern aristocracy can now be found nationwide. Buttressed by the arguments of Ayn Rand — who updated the ancient slaveholder ethic for the modern age — it has been exported to every corner of the culture, infected most of our other elite communities and killed off all but the very last vestiges of noblesse oblige.
“It’s not an overstatement to say that we’re now living in Plantation America.
“To the horror of his Yankee father, George W. Bush proceeded to run the country exactly like a Barbadian slavelord. And Barack Obama has done almost nothing to roll this victory back. We’re now living in an America where rampant inequality is accepted, and even celebrated.
“Torture and extrajudicial killing have been reinstated, with no due process required.
The wealthy and powerful are free to abuse employees, break laws, destroy the commons, and crash the economy — without ever being held to account.
The rich flaunt their ostentatious wealth without even the pretense of humility, modesty, generosity, or gratitude.
“The military — always a Southern-dominated institution — sucks down 60 percent of our federal discretionary spending, and is undergoing a rapid evangelical takeover as well.
“Our police are being given paramilitary training and powers that are completely out of line with their duty to serve and protect, but much more in keeping with a mission to subdue and suppress. Even liberal cities like Seattle are now home to the kind of local justice that used to be the hallmark of small-town Alabama sheriffs.
“Segregation is increasing everywhere. The rights of women and people of color are under assault. Violence against leaders who agitate for progressive change is up. Racist organizations are undergoing a renaissance nationwide.
“We are withdrawing government investments in public education, libraries, infrastructure, health care, and technological innovation — in many areas, to the point where we are falling behind the standards that prevail in every other developed country.
“Elites who dare to argue for increased investment in the common good, and believe that we should lay the groundwork for a better future, are regarded as not just silly and soft-headed, but also inviting underclass revolt. The Yankees thought that government’s job was to better the lot of the lower classes. The Southern aristocrats know that its real purpose is to deprive them of all possible means of rising up against their betters.
“The rich are different now because the elites who spent four centuries sucking the South dry and turning it into an economic and political backwater have now vanquished the more forward-thinking, democratic Northern elites. Their attitudes towards freedom, authority, community, government, and the social contract aren’t just confined to the country clubs of the Gulf Coast; they can now be found on the ground from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Wall Street. And because of that quiet coup, the entire US is now turning into the global equivalent of a Deep South state.
“As long as America runs according to the rules of Southern politics, economics and culture, we’re no longer free citizens exercising our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as we’ve always understood them. Instead, we’re being treated like serfs on Massa’s plantation — and increasingly, we’re being granted our liberties only at Massa’s pleasure.
“Welcome to Plantation America.”
I agree with Sara Robinson’s analysis, but remember we’re talking about elites and those Christian evangelical conservatives and Tea Party zealots who are married to the plantation worldview, not every person in the Sun Belt. I see much hope in the establishment of organic farms and gardens across this region. It’s hard to turn from protecting biodiversity and cherishing life on your organic farm or in your garden and then start de-valuing the lives of minorities, throwing up roadblocks to voting, and stripping women of their reproductive rights.
***
KRUGMAN ON CONQUERING INCOME INEQUALITY
Sara Robinson’s Plantation America piece does help illuminate current events. See how it throws light on what Paul Krugman wrote about income inequality in The New York Times on February 23, 2015: “As for wages and salaries, never mind college degrees — all the big gains are going to a tiny group of individuals holding strategic positions in corporate suites or astride the crossroads of finance. Rising inequality isn’t about who has the knowledge; it’s about who has the power.
“Now, there’s a lot we could do to redress this inequality of power. We could levy higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and invest the proceeds in programs that help working families. We could raise the minimum wage and make it easier for workers to organize. It’s not hard to imagine a truly serious effort to make America less unequal.”
Right—if the old Yankee values mean anything to you. But fat chance the right wing ideologues who run Congress will pass the laws that Krugman suggests.
***
CONSERVATIVE SCIENCE IS NOT REALLY SCIENCE AT ALL
For years, Republican politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.
One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.
But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests.
He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.
Now, The New York Times reports, Democratic lawmakers in Washington are demanding information about funding for other scientists who publicly dispute widely held views on the causes and risks of climate change.
Prominent members of the United States House of Representatives and the Senate have sent letters to universities, companies and trade groups asking for information about funding to the scientists.
In letters sent to seven universities, Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat who is the ranking member of the House committee on natural resources, sent detailed requests focused on funding sources to the academic employers of scientists who had testified before Congress about climate change.
In the letters, Representative Grijalva wrote, “My colleagues and I cannot perform our duties if research or testimony provided to us is influenced by undisclosed financial relationships.” He asked for each university’s policies on financial disclosure and the amount and sources of outside funding for each scholar, “communications regarding the funding” and “all drafts” of testimony.
Three Democratic members of the Senate sent 100 letters to fossil fuel companies, trade groups and other organizations asking about their funding of climate research and advocacy. The letters were signed by Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, Barbara Boxer of California and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. The senators asked for responses by April 3.
“Corporate special interests shouldn’t be able to secretly peddle the best junk science money can buy,” Senator Markey said, denouncing what he called “denial-for-hire operations.”
Buying junk science to support corporate chicanery is not confined to the issue of climate change. This is exactly how Big Ag, Big Chem, Big Biotech “prove” that conventional agriculture is harmless. Funding for those scientists who produce studies supporting the safety of pesticides and herbicides should also be examined. If the research is legitimate, and the findings are accurate—even if they support the safety of these chemicals—then all right. Nobody’s suggesting witch hunts. But if the funding comes from the companies like Monsanto that benefit from the sale of these chemicals, then there is obviously a conflict of interest. Academic freedom does not mean the right to game the pursuit of scientific truth in order to obtain funding for your research.
***
THE NETHERLANDS BANS SALE OF ROUNDUP
It’s official, the Netherlands beat Monsanto in a long-debated motion to ban the sale of glyphosate-based herbicides. The Dutch Parliament passed the law prohibiting private parties from buying Monsanto’s toxic herbicide, Roundup, and is expected to go into effect in late 2015. While the Dutch Lower House had initiated the law to ban glyphosate from non-agricultural use years ago, it seems Monsanto’s grip on the government was firm until just recently, when the evidence of the harm that Roundup causes became overwhelming.
***
HOUSE BILL PREVENTS EPA FROM GETTING EXPERT ADVICE
The GOP-dominated House has passed a bill that effectively prevents scientists who are peer-reviewed experts in their field from providing advice — directly or indirectly — to the EPA, while at the same time allowing industry representatives with financial interests in fossil fuels to have their say. Perversely, all this is being done in the name of “transparency.”
H.R. 1422, also known as the Science Advisory Board Reform Act, passed 229-191. It was sponsored by Representative Chris Stewart (R-UT). The bill changes the rules for appointing members to the Science Advisory Board (SAB), which provides scientific advice to the EPA Administrator. Among many other things, it states: “Board members may not participate in advisory activities that directly or indirectly involve review or evaluation of their own work.” This means that a scientist who had published a peer-reviewed paper on a particular topic would not be able to advise the EPA on the findings contained within that paper. That is, the very scientists who know the subject matter best would not be able to discuss it.
In response, the White House has issued a statement indicating it would veto the bill if it passed, noting: “H.R. 1422 would negatively affect the appointment of experts and would weaken the scientific independence and integrity of the SAB.” Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) was blunter, telling House Republicans on Tuesday: “I get it, you don’t like science. And you don’t like science that interferes with the interests of your corporate clients. But we need science to protect public health and the environment.”
Director of the Union of Concerned Scientists Andrew A. Rosenberg wrote a letter to House Representatives stating: “This [bill] effectively turns the idea of conflict of interest on its head, with the bizarre presumption that corporate experts with direct financial interests are not conflicted while academics who work on these issues are. Of course, a scientist with expertise on topics the Science Advisory Board addresses likely will have done peer-reviewed studies on that topic. That makes the scientist’s evaluation more valuable, not less.”
Two more bills relating to the EPA are set to go for a vote, bills that opponents argue are part of an unrelenting partisan attack on the EPA and that demonstrate more support for industrial polluters than the public health concerns of the American people.
***
PEACEFUL BELLY FARM PLANT SALE VIDEO GOES VIRAL
Oh, them organic hippies! God bless ‘em:
###
