Racism Review: The Newt
Commentary by Back Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Since the cornbread Cain campaign and minstrel show seems to have crumbled, it is time to set our sights on the latest surging challenger to Mittens. Dopper has a feature in today's Politics section reminding us of Gingrich's attacks on our communities. I'd like to do a brief racism review since it is also important that we don't forget what bigoted bullcrap gets spewed by those who would challenge the POTUS in 2012.
Funny that he is named Newt. In nature there are newts that have toxic skin.
In politics we have Newt known for toxic remarks.
One of the best places to find information tracking the things folks like Newt have to say in public is Media Matters:
Newt Gingrich's history of bigoted remarks
Gingrich: Obama is engaged in "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior." On September 12, Gingrich reportedly told National Review Online that Obama has pretended to be "normal" but actually seems to be engaged in "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior"
Kenyan anti-Colonial remarks
Maureen Dowd gets it right in the NYT
Gingrich made one of his classic outrageous overreaches last year when he praised a Dinesh D’Souza article in Forbes, saying you could only understand how “fundamentally out of touch” and “outside our comprehension” President Obama is “if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior.”
D’Souza’s absurd ad hominem theory tying Obama to his father goes like this: “This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”
This was a typical Newt mental six-car pileup. The man who espouses Christian values being un-Christian in visiting the alleged sins of the father upon the son; the man who reveres the anticolonialism of the founding fathers ranting against the anticolonialism of the father of America’s first African-American president. How do you rail against the Evil Empire and urge overthrowing Saddam and not celebrate liberation in Africa?
Media Matters continues with his racist views against the Islamic Center:
Gingrich compares Islamic center to Nazis erecting a sign near Holocaust Museum and to a Japanese site near Pearl Harbor. On the August 16 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, Newt Gingrich said, "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There's no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center."
Media Matters reminds us of his attack on Sonia Sotomayor:
Gingrich smears Sotomayor as a "racist." ABC's Jake Tapper and Huma Khan reported on May 27, 2009, that Gingrich had written on Twitter: "Imagine a judicial nominee said 'my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman' new racism is no better than old racism" and "White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw." Gingrich later said that he didn't know whether Sotomayor herself was a racist, but her quote about a wise Latina was "clearly racist."
and on bi-lingual education
Gingrich: Bilingual education teaches "the language of living in a ghetto." An April 1, 2007, Associated Press article reported that Gingrich described bilingual education as teaching "the language of living in a ghetto" and mocked requirements that ballots be printed in multiple languages.
Adam Serwer at Greg Sargent's Plum Line blog focused on Newt's "food stamp president" remarks:
Newt Gingrich’s clever race-mongering
Gingrich recently referred to Obama as “the first food stamp president,” and came out in favor of voting requirements that resemble Jim Crow-era poll tests. When asked by David Gregory about such remarks, Gingrich feigned ignorance about their implications
Joan Walsh at Salon covered this too:
Newt Gingrich and “the food stamp president”
Newt Gingrich doubled down on his clever new slur against President Obama as “the food stamp president.” He tried the line in a Friday speech to the Georgia Republican convention, and he used it again on “Meet the Press Sunday.” It’s a short hop from Gingrich’s slur to Ronald Reagan’s attacks on “strapping young bucks” buying “T-bone steaks” with food stamps. Blaming our first black president for the sharp rise in food-stamp reliance (which resulted from the economic crash that happened on the watch of our most recent white president) is just the latest version of Rush Limbaugh suggesting that Obama’s social policy amounts to “reparations” for black people.
But when host David Gregory suggested the term had racial overtones, Gingrich replied “That’s bizarre,” and added, “I have never said anything about President Obama which is racist.” That’s not quite as extreme or silly as Donald Trump declaring “I am the least racist person there is,” but it’s up there. He also told Georgia Republicans Friday that 2012 will be the most momentous election “since 1860,” which happens to be the year we elected the anti-slavery Abraham Lincoln president, and he suggested the U.S. bring back a “voting standard” that requires voters to prove they know American history — which sounds a lot like the “poll tests” outlawed by the Voting Rights Act.
Let's be clear - members of the bigot brigade paraded out for selection by Tea-publicans each have their own special brand or spin of racism and racial code-speak.
We need to make sure that we are prepared to use their own spews against them when the tea-publicans make their selection at the 2012 Republican National Convention which will be held in Tampa, Florida, starting on August 27, 2012.
I am not so sure Mittens is a shoo-in for the selection. But no matter who winds up in first place, and who gets the Veep pick - we need to keep educating potential voters from our communities about the history of who these folks really are- and why we must keep them out of the WH.
Racism is a policy position.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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But of course they still aren't being sent to jail. Think Progress: Former Chase Banker Admits His Bank Pushed Minorities Into Subprime Mortgage Loans
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Wells Fargo had perhaps the most horrifying practices in this department, calling the subprime loans that they pushed in poor, black neighborhoods “ghetto loans.”
This rampant predatory lending helped inflate the housing bubble; a Center for American Progress investigation actually found huge racial disparities in lending at the big banks that wound up getting bailed out, with minority borrowers far more likely to receive high-priced loans.
One former banker for Chase — James Theckston — told the New York Times’ Nick Kristof that not only did his bank push minority borrowers into higher-priced loans, but senior executives then tried to cover up the racial disparity in their banks’ lending:
One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.
These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.
“The bigwigs of the corporations knew this, but they figured we’re going to make billions out of it, so who cares? The government is going to bail us out. And the problem loans will be out of here, maybe even overseas,” Theckston explained.
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Pass the Mic. ColorLines: Transgender Women in Chocolate City Tell Their Stories
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his year was a bloody one for transgender women of color in Washington, D.C. In late July, Lashai McLean was shot to death 10 blocks away from the office of Transgender Health Empowerment in Northeast D.C. Just 11 days later—and one block away from the scene of McLean’s slaying—Tonya Harrell was shot at but escaped. And in April, Chloe Alexander Moore was physically assaulted by an off-duty police officer.
McLean, Harrell and Moore were just the most recent victims in a sustained pattern of anti-trans violence in the nation’s capitol. Coupled with the acute racial disparities detailed in the landmark national survey “Injustice at Every Turn,”, D.C.’s transgender women of color are carrying the heaviest of loads.
Because violence and terror and discrimination isn’t the sum total of people’s lives, I’ve asked a range of transgender women of color living in D.C. to tell their own stories. I wanted to know everything—the experiences they’ve had with employment, their families, men, housing, girlfriends, spirituality and dance floors. I wanted to hear about how they survive—and thrive. Below is the first in a series of as-told-tos. The first brave soul to answer my nosy questions and let me edit her responses into a narrative is Danielle King.
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The question is why can't every missing person have an equal opportunity to make TV?
Miami Herald: America’s obsession with missing white women
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For anyone who has a loved one missing, Godspeed the day of that person’s safe return. Or failing that, Godspeed the bitter satisfaction of knowing his or her fate. To have someone you love vanish is, one imagines, a special kind of hell.
That said, let the second word be one of exasperation.
Another white woman has turned up missing. And, as predictably happens in such cases, television news has gone into overdrive, CNN, ABC, NBC providing breathless updates of Michelle Parker’s disappearance, how she was last seen the day she appeared on The People’s Court, suing her former fiancé, who is now the prime suspect in her kidnapping.
This story unfolds in the wake of similar media fixations on Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, JonBenet Ramsey, Jennifer “Runaway Bride” Wilbanks, Chandra Levy, Lori Hacking, Robyn Gardner, Natalee Holloway, all of them young, female, white, pretty — and imperiled. There is, should it need saying, a naked bias in the media’s obsession with white women in danger to the exclusion of pretty much every other cohort of the American demographic.
If all you had to go by was NBC or CNN, you’d never know that over 335,000 men and boys went missing last year or about 230,000 African Americans. You will see no coverage of them on national news. Nor, for that matter, of older people or less attractive ones.
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Former Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo arrived at the International Criminal Court in the Hague on Wednesday to face four charges of crimes against humanity committed by supporters following elections last year. LA Times: Former Ivory Coast leader faces charges of crimes against humanity
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The charges relate to the violence that broke out after Gbagbo refused to cede power to his rival, Alassane Ouattara. At the time, pro-Ggagbo militias set up roadblocks in the capital Abidjan, burning people alive or beating them to death. Many of the atrocities were videotaped on cellphones.
Mass killings also occurred in the west of the country, some of which were committed by pro-Ouattara forces, according to rights organizations.
A statement by the court said Gbagbo was allegedly responsible, "as indirect co-perpetrator, for four counts of crimes against humanity, namely murder, rape and other forms of sexual violence, persecution and other inhuman acts, allegedly committed in the territory of Côte d’Ivoire between 16 December 2010 and 12 April 2011."
ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said the violence after last year's election was some of the worst the country had seen and was the result of deliberate policy.
"We have evidence that the violence did not happen by chance: widespread and systematic attacks against civilians perceived as supporting the other candidate were the result of a deliberate policy," he said in a statement. "Mr. Gbagbo is brought to account for his individual responsibility in the attacks against civilians committed by forces acting on his behalf."
The prosecutor said Gbagbo was only the first person to be charged and investigations were continuing. He said the court would bring others to trial regardless of political affiliation.
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Let's remember who this man is. ColorLines: Newt Gingrich’s Decades-Old Policy Attack on Communities of Color
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Though it was former President Bill Clinton who signed welfare reform into law in 1996—an act that limited the time Americans could access welfare benefits and generally weakened the benefits themselves—it was Newt Gingrich who introduced almost identical legislation two years earlier.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Americans being affected were largely poor black mothers, who former President Ronald Reagan had called “welfare queens” 20 years earlier. According to the Women of Color Policy Network, “It is not incidental—although it is rarely addressed—that the movement to weaken or eliminate welfare entitlements gained momentum as women of color were becoming the dominant share of women in the country’s largest cities and the largest number of welfare recipients.”
Gingrich’s version of welfare reform—The Personal Responsibility Act—was part of his 1994 “Contract With America,” a list of conservative policies that Republicans promised to bring to the House floor if they took the majority in Congress. Which they then did, in both House and Senate, for the first time in 40 years.
Consider the contrast between the Personal Responsibility Act—something today’s Tea Partiers and hard right conservatives would love (especially because it barred even documented immigrants from receiving welfare benefits, nevermind undocumented)—and another Contract With America bill, the Taking Back Our Streets Act.
The Taking Back Our Streets Act was a piece of legislation touted by Gingrich, and its job was to expand federal powers and add more federal dollars to state-level criminal prosecution. To this end, it provided $10 billion in grants to build prisons, another $10 billion for local law enforcement spending, created mandatory minimum sentences for people who had guns on them while committing a violent crime, and reduced the opportunities death penalty convicts would have had to appeal their sentences.
Mostly passed in 1995, these were all provisions that would disproportionately affect black citizens in the highest numbers.
Today, despite rising racial rhetoric on the hard right, it’s hard to imagine such expansionary prison legislation passing the way it did in the mid-90s. As Colorlines has reported earlier, in this economy, even conservatives are finding the effects of decades of an expanding prison system too much to stomach.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
We've all heard before, how researchers showed a copy of the Declaration of Independence to the "common man" on the street; and the tract was derided as some sort of communist manifesto. That was during the liberal administration of Eisenhower; and things have only gotten more reactionary.
I've invoked Gore Vidal's maxim about American Amnesia many times here; how folks can't remember what happened last week, so one cannot expect them to remember what happened twenty years ago, or more; and it remains a sad commentary, indeed.
But it is important to lift that fog off our neurons and see clearly what is before and behind us.
Because what is happening has happened before and the powers that be count on the electorate to be ignorant.
We've smelled that odious, pungent smell before. You smell it now; whenever Newt Gingrich or Grover Norquist or any PNAC flunky or any political aide of any TeaBircher Candidate enters the room or fills our media screens or utters a single word.
It is the odious, pungent smell of the smoking cross and it smells exactly like... Lee Atwater.
Shorter American Memory of the Declaration of Independence
We holler these trysts to be self-exiled that all manatees are credited equi- distant, that they are endured by their Creator with cervical unanswerable rims. that among these are lightning, lice, and the pushcart of harakiri. That to seduce these rims, graces are insulated among manatees, descanting their juvenile pragmatism from the consistency of the graced. That whenever any formula of grace becomes detained of these endives, it is the rim of the peppery to aluminize or to abominate it. and to insulate Newtonian grace. leaching its fountain pen on such printed matter and orienting its pragmatism in such formula, as to them shall seize most lilac to effuse their sage and harakiri.
-- Rosemarie Waldrop
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