"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger'... but by 1968 you can’t say 'nigger' anymore.... that hurts you.
Backfires.
So you say stuff like 'forced busing'.. 'states’ rights' and all that stuff.
You’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about 'cutting taxes', and all these things you’re talking about are totally 'economic' things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites."
~~ Lee Atwater, (explaining the republican "Southern Strategy").
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In 2009, the Wake County, N.C. School Board effectively desegregated the county’s schools. A prosperous area of North Carolina, it includes the capitol city of Raleigh.
They had, for years, enacted an income-related means to integrate which ensured that not more than 40% of any school’s enrollment was eligible for free lunches, textbooks, entitlement programs.
This worked perfectly.
From kindergarten through high school, the classrooms exposed local children to diversity as a norm, not an exception.
The kids thrived.
But in the 2009 School Board elections, "Americans for Prosperity" (a Koch front group) funded campaigns for the four determinative board seats up for grabs, a win that could and would change the ethos of the board in its entirety - if all four candidates shared the same goals, diametrically opposed to the previous mindset of the School Board.
Andy Kroll, writing in Mother Jones wrote;
"... elections were held for four of Wake County’s nine school board seats... enough seats to dictate the public school district’s agenda if all four board members wanted the same 'reforms'.
Americans for Prosperity swooped in to fund and organize on behalf of four candidates who sought to kill the district’s policy of busing to ensure diverse, desegregated public schools. The AFP-backed candidates ran against what they called “forced busing”—a phrase, the film points out, that dates back to George Wallace in the 1970s—and instead stressed that schools should educate only those who lived in the surrounding neighborhood."
“They’re definitely pushing an agenda to re-segregate these schools, but there’s also a real push toward privatization,” Sue Sturgis of the Institute for Southern Studies says in the film.
“Enforced busing,” as is pointed out, is a euphemism from the Wallace era of “Segregation then, segregation now, segregation forever.”
But there’s another one: “neighborhood schools,” which is the concept these people, aspiring to School Board positions, hoped to push.
As Robert Greenwald, the film’s producer emphasizes:
“The fact that millionaires can put hundreds of thousands of dollars into a local election and essentially deprive people of their rights, in many ways, and mess with their school system... it seems to us one of the strongest examples of the really incredible way money takes away our democracy.”
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Regarding education, the Kochs want what all real Libertarians want:
An end to the public school system as we know it.
Pure privatization, which means if you’ve got the money to pay for your child’s education from kindergarten onwards, you win.
If not, fuck you, because there’s nothing Libertarians like more than an uneducated or undereducated class of peasants to do poorly-paid gruntwork.
States that elected these shills have already talked of repealing child labor laws, which means all these kids can be put out to work, flipping burgers and other servile tasks when they’re as young as 12 years old.
And they actually have a "constituency"...
Frightening?
Yes.
A surprise?
Nope.
There are way too many people in this Country who seem all too willing to buy into the garbage constantly spewed out of the mouth’s of the myriad throwbacks who comprise the right-wing demagoguery ….
After all.... more than half of all American adults (including one in five of those who say they are not religious) believe that they have been protected by a “Guardian Angel” during their lifetime.
Less than 50% of all Americans believe in Evolution.
More than 20% of adult Americans actually believe in “Vampires".
20% believe that “spells” or “witchcraft” exists.
28% deny the Holocaust.
40% of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein attacked us on 9/11.
31% of adult Americans truly believe that President Obama is literally the ”AntiChrist” and the same percentage believes that he was not born in the United States..
Nearly 50% believe in Government “Death Panels”.
More than half in F.E.M.A. "indoctrination camps".
This is a troubling reflection of what is become a serious national illness.... the manipulation of fear… borne of ignorance, morphing into hatred... manifesting into violence.
It’s no real news that the GOP has used institutionalized racism, bigotry, misogyny and homophobia to further their political agenda (just google “southern strategy” and you’ll have enough reading to last you a lifetime) and they are directly responsible for the re-legitimization and “technological upgrades” of those very tactics that have come out of their ilk.. weeping pustules like Rove, Murdoch and Breitbart.
And it's no mistake that race hatred in the United States has gotten exponentially worse since the election of President Obama.
It is obviously not limited to the deep south by any means.... the only real differences being that bigots in the South seem to be more content to wear it on their sleeves, almost as a matter of 'pride'... a badge of honor.
The racism in the rest of the country is much more insidious. It's kept hidden, uses euphemistic language and "code words" cloaked in half-truths and obtuse ‘historical references’... and therefore it is far more dangerous.
The resurgence of all of the tried-and-true, established hate groups like the Klan and the Nazis.. not to mention the staggering growth in the number of new ones like the ‘militias’ and ‘Patriot Movements’ as well as the influx of white supremacists into the military and many State legislatures (see: Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, etc), the "Nativist" Organizations, the roving goon-squads such as the “Minutemen” and other vigilante groups...
All at a rate not seen since the Reconstruction…
And it is everywhere and it is out of control.
http://www.splcenter.org/...
In the early 1930s, the very same depressed conditions created the very same xenophobia, the very same bigotry... and eventually, the very same types of phony "populist" personalities the likes of Palin, Bachmann, Brewer, Walker, Kasich, Snyder, Peter King, Paul (BOTH of them) … Glenn Beck, O’Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, Malkin, Coulter, Buchannan, Savage, Robert Spencer, David Horowitz.... Pamela Geller, the list seems endless....
All of whom would ride the tide of this ignorance... the racism… the fear... and the hate that they themselves create out of whole-cloth and which gave rise to the likes of Hitler and Mussolini.
Cheered on by a depraved cadre of shills and dupes, all of whom insist on enabling their march back in time.. those all too willing to destroy all of the sacred protections that took centuries of sorrow and millions of lives to create and to protect will continue to try to spread their cancer.
Those on the right as well as those on the left can slough off these the comparisons all they want.. but if they genuinely think that "civilization" has really evolved so much since then..
... if they are aloof enough to opine that it "can't happen here"..
... blinded by a skepticism which invariably ferments and devolves into an intractable cynicism, it becomes more than just 'counterproductive'.. it raises our worst fears to a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Read more:
http://planetpov.com/....