Blacks want to retain their "Blackness"

(@2:45 on video) paraphrasing,

Dems responsible for resisting efforts by Republicans in Congress or by me when I was President, to put some standards and tighten up on Fannie and Freddie. Bill Clinton on ABC News 9/2008

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/09/bill-clinton-do.html


Watch the Dems at this late 2004 hearing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs

 

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Here is Obama running from responsibility
Obama: "The recession was years in the making, it didn't just start last month. That bank crisis didn't happen on my watch. Let's get the history straight," he said in a fiery and partisan speech reminiscent of his barnstorming 2008 election rhetoric.
08-07-09
www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hAAhDJ_IAwKglPuq8VnzLGW4Rblg

Yea, let's get the facts straight Obama. Greenspan told you under your watch as a Senator that failure was coming. You were too stupid to see it and now you blame others for your failure.

Greenspan, Snow Set to Testify in Fannie, Freddie Hearings
Posted by camara100 on 04/04/2005 - 19:00
Freddie Mac reported last week that its profits dropped by more than 40 percent last year.
The problems of larger rival Fannie Mae continue to mount. Not only is it in the process of restating about $11 billion in earnings going back to 2001, but the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Ofheo is looking into whether it incorrectly accounted for trusts it sets up to issue mortgage-backed securities.
Ofheo has already determined that Fannie Mae did not properly account for derivatives, financial instruments used to hedge against swings in interest rates. The regulator has ordered the company to boost its capital by 30 percent to cushion against risks, with a Sept. 30 deadline.
http://www.accountingweb.com/item/100747


Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan
Regulatory reform of the government-sponsored enterprises
Before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, U.S. Senate
April 6, 2005

Without changes in legislation, Fannie and Freddie will, at some point, again feel free to multiply profitability through the issuance of subsidized debt. To fend off possible future systemic difficulties, which we assess as likely if GSE expansion continues unabated, preventive actions are required sooner rather than later.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/testimony/2005/20050406/default.htm


Clearly, Obama had all the evidence necessary and he totally failed to understand the consequences.

He is doing the same thing today which is why we are in such a mess.

 

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Timeline shows Bush, McCain warning Dems of financial and housing crisis; meltdown

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEXNM&feature=related

Obama and the dems totally ignored the genius of Bush and now we have the most useless president in history and failure of our economy because of Obama and the dems.

 

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Let's watch more as we can see the most useless president in history killing our country.

Explosive Video, Fannie Mae CEO calling Obama and the Dems the "Family" and "Conscience" of Fannie Mae

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usvG-s_Ssb0&feature=related

 

Obama signs one-year extension of Patriot Act
President Barack Obama has signed a one-year extension of several provisions in the nation's main counterterrorism law, the Patriot Act.


http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100228/D9E4T02G0.html

The Patriot Act is the very heart of liberalism as we can see.

 

Why does the greatest leader in history smoke?

Seems like a weakness.

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama hasn't kicked the smoking habit, takes anti-inflammatory medication to relieve chronic tendinitis in his left knee and should eat better to lower his cholesterol, his team of doctors concluded Sunday after the 48-year-old's first medical checkup as commander in chief.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100228/D9E5CIDG1.html

 

The question is, what market?

This is the only context I omitted:

The statement is false. That is not why the housing market collapsed, in the US. I omitted it because it wasn't thread relevant, and the point I wanted to make was;

unlike all this Obama stuff from Jack - which has nothing to do with the thread topic, unless he really believes Obama is a different species and invented the US economy in January of 2009. He seems to be blaming Obama and the Dems for this mess, becasue they didn't stop W&Co from wrecking the place - which has a core of truth to it, as a complaint: modern Republicans like W&Co are simply assumed to be engaged in wrecking the place for their own gain in power and money, and everyone else is evaluated on whether they have done enough to stop them or repair their damage. That makes some sense, actually, except for Obama's role, which didn't begin in time.

Anyway: the stubborn tendency of people to retain those aspects of their culture that an oppressive power has attempted to beat out of them is predictable and in some sense reasonable - but unfortunate. The Irish are stuck with Catholicism for the near future, probably because the English tried to beat it out of them. There is method to the madness of Muslim clerics attempting to provoke, exaggerate, or invent anti-Islam abuses. And this pattern no doubt applies to aspects of black culture in the US. That is not something blacks should be blamed for.

 

Yet more attempts at misdirection because you have clearly lost here.

Tell me again what the word species means and how it applies to anything I've said.

Jack?

Why is it that everything you say sounds like self-description?

There's something wrong with your mind Jack.

 

You could say the same thing about dark haired white girls who die their hair blond. Or, heck: lets consider tanning for a moment. What's that about, if not a desire to change one's own ethnicity by a fraction?

The trouble with this whole "mulatto" thing is that it still leads to a one drop rule of its own. It's one drop of each color, but still one drop. Wouldn't it be simpler just to speak of "black" and then "pure black"? Of course, there's a problem with that too, because of all the slave raping that happened during the time when slavery was in effect. I doubt any black person alive today, with ancestors who experienced slavery, can say with certainty just how pure their bloodline is or is not.

So, the question is where do you want to draw the new line? How much blood from each side do you need to be "mulatto"? I don't think anyone is going to have the interest to want to know your entire genealogy. What happens to people who are 1/4,1/8, or 1/16 black? Do they get a name too?

Those loans were supposed to increase consumer spending, to stimulate the economy, but they ended up having exactly the opposite effect because people were using the lower rate to take out home loans to buy homes, which motivated them to be more frugal instead of more loose with their money (which is what creates consumer spending.)

The worst part is that, because everybody was jumping into the real estate market at once, the value of land massively inflated, until the lack of consumer spending started to eliminate peoples' jobs. Then all the resales from defaulted mortgages bottomed out the price to what we see today.

The lesson: Demand side economics only works if you can steer the consumers away from real estate.

 

I've yet to hear a rational explanation regarding the origins of the 'hate' that drives the modern plague of racism, I'm quite open to it though and white liberals like Doreen here assure me that it's true. It must be something to do with jealousy like Doreen suggests. Apparently, the repulsiveness that white European's felt at the physical nature of blacks and their cultures and which had them classed as sub-human animals was actually due to envy.

If that's the case, then cannot the same logic be applied to those we consider animals today? Any differences we feel exist between ourselves and, say, dogs, are the result of hate, a hate born of envy.

I mean, there was a documentary on a while ago about humans who have sexual relations with animals. I think Doreen could be onto something here.

Certainly, whatever this hatred is its existence wasn't discovered until the middle half of the twentieth century. This is where we find the first mention of the word 'racism'. That its 'discovery' parallels attempts by Western governments to integrate black, ex-slave populations into the white working class is only a coincidence and certainly the fact that anyone who resists this social indoctrination is stigmatized as a racist is also a coincidence.

The Iraq war is clearly an example of race hate. Consider, the argument that it is driven by money can also be applied to chattel slavery and colonialism, and they were clearly due to race hate, weren't they?

I'm just playing complicated mental games.

Doreen is a shining example of a modern liberal intellectual.

 

EmptySky,

'Hate' comes for the "us & them" mentality ingrain in all humans.

Long long ago somewhere in africa our simian ancestors lived in small groups best describe as tribes. These tribes were inbreed amongst them selves and represented localized genetic pools with only the occasional integration of a stranger or two. Now these tribes would move about in order to allocate resources and would invariably come in contact with other tribes in the hunt for food and water. Now caring about their own genetic relatives more so then less related people of the other tribe, each tribe would demand resources for its self and this would of course produce conflict. Tribes would attack and murder one another for resources, often these resources would even include women who would breed the victories tribes males's children. Evolutionary selection quickly choose the most hateful leaders of the tribes as they would rape and pillage the most. The evolutionary ingrained behavior would manifest as a "us and them" mentality: "we our good, they are the other, at best we can't trust them, at worse they must be destroyed!" Now of course people that look different are not related to you and thus automatically bring up this instinct. Humans have made modifications to these instinct in recent times with memes like nationalism and religion, creating new genetically irrelevant categories to form us and thems, we have kept increasing the size of "us" from tribes, to kingdoms, to states, to nations, we seem to be moving toward globalization and world peace and and gracilization of the human race, but we are doing so faster then our genes can adapt! So still ever time you see another person somewhere deep in your mind there is an ingrained "them" response.

If Doreen view on this topic is as you discribe it does seem like the mindless ramblings of a tripping hippy indeed. Not based on biological theory like selfish genetics and computer modeling like my explanation.

 

The whole reason those tribes ended up making contradicting claims for resources is because their populations were constantly growing. Hate is about choosing someone to die so that per capita wealth can remain constant.

The modern view is equally naive. We tell ourselves that, if we just work hard enough, there will be enough resources for everybody, but the food supply doesn't grow with the number of workers. It grows with the number of acres of arable land..... something we can't produce more of.

Globalization and World Peace will require us to find an alternative form of population control.

 

I'm utterly shocked that this discussion is still continuing.

 

I have no problem in people wanting to retain their racial, ethnic or cultural identity, be they black, white, Asian, Arab or anything else.

I do believe that immigrants have a duty to assimilate to the extent that they learn the language of their new country and respect the civic/philosophical values (for example, if you move from a religious dictatorship to a republic, it's not appropriate for you to demand that your new country become a religious dictatorship, things like "honor killings" aren't acceptable, etc.). Aside from that, I don't care how they live their lives. How they dress, what they eat and which languages they choose to speak at home are their own business.

 

Trying to make sense of it

What, in your opinion, is the difference between acknowledging a reality and reinforcing it?

That's one of the issues about the Reid quote that I haven't heard addressed while so many pretend to be shocked that a conservative Democrat and Mormon from Las Vegas might use the word "Negro".

Because in the abstract, something just doesn't add up. Think of it this way: two Democrats at least have gotten heat for suggesting that Barack Obama was electable in part because he didn't fit the fearful stereotype many whites think of when considering black people. Inasmuch as some worry that such comments might reinforce poor stereotypes of blacks, nobody seems to care much what those comments suggest about white people. We'll elect all sorts of stereotypes, including a white-bred cowboy yahoo from Texas. But that's because they're generally less afraid of stupid white people than, well, many or most black people.

Or, almost no matter how we construct it, these people are describing Americans very poorly.

I wouldn't easily dismiss your concern about reinforcement, but I'm also getting hung up about the idea of acknowledging a practical reality. There's a reason it was Barack Obama, and not Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. And part of that reason is that Obama sounded more like a white man than Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. He ducked the black-empowerment part of the social-justice dialogue, which Americans just don't like hearing about.

He is a dark-skinned face that sounds and behaves, in many ways, like a white person. This is not to his discredit, but, rather, reflective of the demands of the majority culture in America.

Was Reid reinforcing those demands, or acknowledging them? Is there, in your opinion, a difference?

I have this strange feeling we're arguing about which direction the wheels are turning because we're standing on opposite sides of the car. If we find that common place to stand, perhaps in front of or behind the car, so it doesn't run over us, we might stop arguing clockwise or counter, and agree that it is moving forward or backward.

You're delving into a valence of the psyche most people are either unaware of or attempt to suppress. I don't disagree, but for most Americans, who grew up with the one drop rule or amid its echoes, Barack Obama is black.

The superficial—his appearance—is the first barrier to overcome. After that it's one of those melting pot questions. And when you add the minority Ro-Tel to the majority Velveeta, you have something different from either.

To what degree is "black culture" cohesive? To what degree can any individual represent it?

Let us set aside black and white for a moment, and look at American culture. Some quick-hit impressions:

• Anti-war protests are ghastly, but the Tea Party is admirable.

• People in Seattle responded more to an abstraction—lost business projections—than they did to any cause-related issue, physical property damage, or institutional conduct regarding WTO '99.

• Twisted Sister in front of Congress; they once wrote a lyric that went, "I don't curse, well just a bit. Somehow, 'Gee whiz!' and 'Golly!' don't cut it."​

Just a few. Now, here's the thing. The majority culture has long had a "let them eat cake" attitude about people of lesser socioeconomic standing. As my Reagan Republican, and later, Perotnoiac father explained, "People won't revolt until their children are starving." I always wondered why people should wait that long.

The thing is that when one clears their throat and politely tries to interject, they are ignored. Or rebuked with some silly political rhetoric. So speak more loudly, and more loudly, and somewhere along the line they are dismissed for being rude.

Latter-day civil rights arguments bring the institutional majorities to trembling. The empowered don't want to deal with it. It's not that they really think we've achieved equality between ethnicities or genders, but that they're afraid to give up the last dregs of privilege and be—gasp!—equal to their neighbors.

More than black and white, or male and female, or straight and LGBT, it is about privilege and responsibility, authority and influence.

People can elect a black man like Barack Obama because (A) everyone knows it's overdue, (B) he was a strong candidate, and (C) he did everything he could to avoid sounding like a Rev. Jackson or Sharpton. He sounded more like the guys in the boardroom, or the bosses at work. Instead of asking people to reshuffle privilege and responsibility, he played the central political game.

Color, sex, and other superficial divisions are unfortunate surrogates for a deeper fight about wealth, privilege, and influence. Where the idea of "acting white" comes into it is that one should not upset the prevailing paradigm, and that happens to coincide through American history with white people.

I think Cornell West, for instance, would make an excellent president. But he is, to consider the superficial, far too black to ever be elected in his lifetime. Looking more deeply than color, though, he is far too divergent from the prevailing paradigm to ever be elected. Just his habit of referring to people as "brother" or "sister" is viewed as too black, even though I've seen him use the words to describe non-blacks, as well. It's a human thing, more than anything else. One would think his membership in the DSA would be enough of an issue to radicalize him in the public's eyes. Or his arrest for protesting apartheid. Or the fact that he's a Princeton PhD who teaches in the Ivy League would describe him as an elitist. All of it would feed the simmering culture war in our melting pot, and his blackness would be the easiest, most apparent thing for people to grab onto.

And that's where I think we are today. Whether that's still true in twenty years, or fifty, I can't predict. Electing Obama is a major step in untangling this issue.

The day that we become color-blind, we will face the question of what is the prevailing cultural paradigm into which people assimilate. As it is, look at Obama's presidency. It has been strikingly unremarkable for policy initiative. His policies in Pakistan and Afghanistan are brutal and uncreative. The health care initiative, even if it passes, is a wreck. He's taken an unpalatable approach to civil liberties in the War on Terror. At best, he's playing a close, long hand on civil rights and sexuality. Nothing about his presidency achieves that hope and change that people allegedly voted for.

And underlying all of those challenges and failures is the prevailing paradigm. There is money and influence in all of it. War is a capital venture. Health care is at least as much about helping the exceedingly influential and wealthy get even more money and influence. Civil liberties in the War on Terror threaten the profitable and influential positions of many in the defense business—both public and private. The Constitutional implications of sexuality and liberty can be tremendous; why isn't the constitutional scholar putting forth the obvious constitutional arguments to settle the issue?

Imagine we are standing on a hill beside a field, watching people play in the grass below. They run around beating each other up, and then bawling to one another about how much it hurts, and how unfair it all is.

They want a fair game, right? They want a good game, right? But if we, the outsiders, are to enter the game, we are to assimilate to the rules, and not say anything about the problems. So in order to make "progress", we must first dive blindly into the scrum, and lose credibility every time someone complains that something we do hurts.

So what do the people want? They say they want a good, fair game. But there are enough people who have scored a lot of points by the standing process—regardless of what rules are supposed to be in effect—that the last thing they want is a fair game. And just like a pyramid scheme, you can convince any of the players to be frightened at the idea of having their scores affected by a fair application of rules. They might not like how the current game hurts, or that it's not fair, but they're not going to stop and play according to the rules, because then they would be—gasp!—equal to the other players.

Not all facets of diverse African cultures are admirable. This is no different than European or Asian cultural diversity. But I've known, along with the so-called "wigger" sensaton, a fair number of undereducated mothers, who talk to their sons like black mothers in an Eddie Murphy comedy routine. And it's not like the Irish-American mother, or the Italian-American mother, or even the Yiddish mama are that much different.

With American cultural diversity, though, the prevailing cultural paradigm still coincides largely with the WASP heritage. What does cultural integration look like in a melting pot? Should the prevailing culture adopt admirable aspects of minority cultures? Why not? Should we simply presume the prevailing culture correct? Why?

All the rest is a complex of neuroses. To wit, EmptySky's proposition:

"I've yet to hear a rational explanation regarding the origins of the 'hate' that drives the modern plague of racism, I'm quite open to it though and white liberals like Doreen here assure me that it's true."​

Neurosis. That, as far as I can tell, is the basic origin. People know they are treating another person badly; they reach and grasp after straws of justification. Given centuries to fester, grow, mutate, divide, &c., it becomes an ugly mess, an infection ailing society's vital organs.

Perhaps we've had some difficulty communicating, but based on our discussion so far, I might suggest that people see you as a bridge because you will tell them what they want to hear.

This is a curious statement if for no other reason than its transfer from some to all blacks. Insofar as you might feel you've been misunderstood at various points in this discussion, I might suggest these sorts of reasons why.

(I'm striking this portion for further review. Second reading suggests quite persuasively that I missed something in interpreting the two sentences. As it is now, it's tough to see how the second is relevant to the first; I shouldn't have tried to force the two sentences to work together.)

You know, I had this moment that coincided with a race discussion a few weeks ago. My daughter was playing the Lego Star Wars video game, and asked about a certain character. I told her it was Lando Calrissian in disguise, from Return of the Jedi. She drew a blank. Who was Lando Calrissian?

It was entertaining trying to find a way to say something other than, "He's the black guy." What finally did it was, "He was the one wearing Han's clothes in Something, Something, Something, Dark Side. Mort played him."

There are legitimate concerns about the word "black" as regards human beings, but I think you're being a bit paranoid about the white supremacists. That is, you're giving them too much influence over your life and your decisions.

It's a curious mix in your own argument, too; perhaps both communities are tugging at you?

Or, perhaps communication is simply shaky here: Do you think that each group has the same reason for discomfort?

What an interesting perspective. What, because some folks don't find racist waffle box parodies funny, they're denying Obama's blackness?

And yet you still look down.

A bit of a non sequitur. But I'm glad you have a grandmother like that.

Don't disappoint her, though. Stop looking down in order to make the racists more comfortable.

I disagree. Trying to take away Obama's blackness, with which he has lived all his life, in order to defeat the white supremacists, is exactly that—throwing away history—and won't work, anyway.

I know what my excuses are. What about you?