This week Donald Trump and the right have decided that their path to the white house is paved over the backs off african-americans where his current level of support hovers between 0 and 1 percent. I suppose since he assumes he hasn’t yet called black people “rapists and criminals” as he has Mexicans and he hasn’t said they possibly support radical islam as he has Gold Star father Khazir Khan, and he hasn’t said they “look good down on their knees” as he has women, he and his campaign figures he might have a shot at getting their votes.
Yeah, he thinks wrong, but it is entertaining to watch his surrogates get slapped upside the head every time they attempt this particular appeal.
You had Sellers vs MacEnany on CNN as she argued the new mantra of the right that Democrats have taken African-American voters for granted and done nothing for decades to help them.
“I guarantee you if you go into the inner cities and ask the people who live there, ‘Are you better off today than you were eight years ago?’ the answer is absolutely not,” McEnany stated, causing Sellers to jump in.
“I’m going to throw this out there. I’m going to be pretty blunt” he began. “I’m African-American, we did know that? And so I live in these communities, I am part of this community. And what Donald Trump said today, his plea was that ‘You know what, what else do you have to lose?’ It was very naive, it was very insulting, because the fact of the matter is that Donald Trump has no comprehension of intersectionality. The fact is, you don’t have a comprehension of intersectionality.”
Sellers attempted to tick off the systemic problems facing black in the U.S. only to have McEnany jump in saying, “You’re making my point!”
“No, I’m actually not making your point,” Sellers shot back.
“Because of the simple fact that Donald Trump can’t comprehend that,” he then continued. “You cannot say that of someone who got sued twice by the Department of Justice for failure to rent to African-Americans. You can’t say that of someone who took out a pro-death penalty piece for the Central Park five. You can’t simply say that somebody who started the birther movement all of the sudden cares about intersectionality and African-Americans!”
Exactly, a man with a history of discriminating against African-americans in his property rentals, and saying he “doesn’t like black guys counting his money”, and called for the execution of innocent minors who had been coerced, threaten and beaten into confessing to a crime they didn’t commit is not exactly the best spokesperson for black outreach. Particularly not when he just hired a guy who regularly talks like a white supremacist to be his campaign CEO.
We’ve also heard this same argument from Fox’s favorite black-ish Sheriff, David Clarke, as he attempted to blame the recent riots in Milwaukee protesting yet another police shooting as being the fault of Democrats.
“What causes riots are failed liberal urban policies in these ghettos,” Clarke told Fox Business. “Milwaukee has inescapable poverty. We’re like the sixth poorest city in America. They have failing public schools… You have massive black unemployment… You have dysfunctional families, you have father-absent homes, you have questionable lifestyle choices.”
“Those are the ingredients for for a riot,” he insisted. “And then a police shooting comes along and just acts as an igniter to an already volatile situation.”
Clarke pointed to “tribal behavior” as the cause of chaos in the wake of the officer-involved shooting.
“I feel for these individuals,” he explained. “They might be unemployed but they’re good law-abiding people and they need help. But they’re not getting it from this Democrat [SIC] liberal class of politicians who have reigned over this thing for decades.”
“Like I said, the economic state in Milwaukee today wasn’t like this when I was growing up as a kid here,” the sheriff opined. “This happened over time under their watch, pushing the growth of the welfare state.”
The false narrative put forward by MacEnany and Clarke is that 30 or 40 years ago everything was just fine for African-Americans in America. That they now have families where the father’s have just simply fled for no good reason at all — certainly not the mass incarceration of black men — besides the fact that black father’s actually spend more quality time with their children when they can, that they are now plagued with gangs and drugs, and that the schools are somehow substandard without any relationship to the weakness of the local tax base. That they weren’t in the midst of being shuffled into poor neighborhoods by decades of red-lining, particularly in Milwaukee which is one of the most segregated major cities in the nation.
Racial segregation is a phenomenon with complex historical roots. The legacy of slavery, discriminatory housing policies, redlining, employment discrimination, tax inequity, racist covenants, and a wide variety of other practices swirled together to create a segregated Milwaukee.
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While Milwaukee’s history is unique, social forces and government policies created and fortified residential segregation throughout the country. So why is it worse in Milwaukee than most anywhere else?
INCOME DISPARITY AND HOUSING DISPARITY
On average, housing in the area’s suburbs is considerably more expensive than housing within the City of Milwaukee. In looking at the ten biggest municipalities in metro Milwaukee, the recent median selling price of housing in the City of Milwaukee was well below every other municipality.
That suburban housing is more expensive than city housing isn’t unique. What distinguishes metro Milwaukee from other areas is the incredible racial disparity in median household incomes in metro Milwaukee, which prevents many minorities from being able to afford suburban housing. According to the most recent American Community Survey, metro Milwaukee has the 2nd worst black/white household income ratio amongst the country’s 50 largest metro areas. The median white household earns $79,145 while the median black household earns $33,273. This amounts to black households earning 42 cents on the white dollar.
Neighborhoods like this don’t just happen. It’s not a natural phenomenon, this situation is manufactured first with racial red-lining, followed by white flight and business divestment. The end result is a jobs desert, a place where economic opportunity beyond basic service jobs are essentially nonexistent, and educational support is nearly as bad.
The income disparity reveals Milwaukee’s unique racial issues. One explanation for it is the education disparity. Just in the city alone, blacks are about twice as likely as whites to not have a high school diploma, and are almost three times less likely to have a college degree.
Worse yet, metro Milwaukee has the largest disparity between black and white unemployment in the country! This disparity can be partly explained by the spatial mismatch between black residents and jobs (which, in a circularity, is largely a result of racial segregation). Literally all of the net job growth in metro Milwaukee over the last several decades has taken place outside the City of Milwaukee. Meanwhile, black residents are concentrated in the city’s northside and are far less likely to own a car. This is especially important because public transportation in metro Milwaukee is sorely lacking. It’s hard to have a job when you can’t get to it.
And then after all this, you have the impact of the police who in communities such as these and others tend to be predators far more than protectors.
Here's an interesting factoid about contemporary policing: In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did. Martin Armstrong pointed this out at his blog, Armstrong Economics, last week.
Officers can take cash and property from people without convicting or even charging them with a crime — yes, really! — through the highly controversial practice known as civil asset forfeiture. Last year, according to the Institute for Justice, the Treasury and Justice departments deposited more than $5 billion into their respective asset forfeiture funds. That same year, the FBI reports that burglary losses topped out at $3.5 billion.
Now burglaries aren’t the only form of theft so if you include all forms from larceny to robbery (best $12 Billion) the total forfeiture rate does lag behind but still when you add the impact of fines generated by tickets and court fees the gap again begins to narrow.
The common thread in these cases, and scores more like them, is the jail time wasn't punishment for the crime, but for the failure to pay the increasing fines and fees associated with the criminal justice system.
A yearlong NPR investigation found that the costs of the criminal justice system in the United States are paid increasingly by the defendants and offenders. It's a practice that causes the poor to face harsher treatment than others who commit identical crimes and can afford to pay. Some judges and politicians fear the trend has gone too far.
A state-by-state survey conducted by NPR found that defendants are charged for many government services that were once free, including those that are constitutionally required. For example:
- In at least 43 states and the District of Columbia, defendants can be billed for a public defender.
- In at least 41 states, inmates can be charged room and board for jail and prison stays.
- In at least 44 states, offenders can get billed for their own probation and parole supervision.
- And in all states except Hawaii, and the District of Columbia, there's a fee for the electronic monitoring devices defendants and offenders are ordered to wear.
These fees — which can add up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars — get charged at every step of the system, from the courtroom, to jail, to probation. Defendants and offenders pay for their own arrest warrants, their court-ordered drug and alcohol-abuse treatment and to have their DNA samples collected. They are billed when courts need to modernize their computers. In Washington state, for example, they even get charged a fee for a jury trial — with a 12-person jury costing $250, twice the fee for a six-person jury.
Plus Milwaukee Police have had many additional problems with misconduct.
After the tragic in-custody deaths of Derek Williams and James Perry were caught on surveillance video, concerns regarding the Milwaukee Police Department were sparked. Then, four Milwaukee police offers were arrested in connection with alleged illegal strip and body cavity searches.
Those with the Justice Coalition say they want justice for all of those who have been mistreated. Their goal is for the U.S. Attorney's Office to perform a broad "Patterns and Practices" investigation into the Milwaukee Police Department -- patterns and practices they say have led to civil and human rights injustices involving the minority community.
On Tuesday, the group handed over a box of evidence collected to the U.S. Department of Justice, and U.S. Attorney's Office. They say this evidence backs up their accusations police misconduct targets members of the minority community -- even going so far as to say there are "gangs" within MPD serving as "Punishers." "I have pictures of police cars identifying the Punishers. I have pictures of the Number 7 District station. I have evidence that the Punishers do exist, along with 'The Jump Out Boys,' 'Night Train,' and many others with guns and badges who swore to serve this city," Tory Lowe with Occupy the Hood said.
And on top of all that you have the reality that despite the “lazy urban negro on welfare” myth, the fact is that most people on public assistance are already working, they just aren’t earning enough to make ends meet.
The study found that 56% of federal and state dollars spent between 2009 and 2011 on welfare programs — including Medicaid, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit — flowed to working families and individuals with jobs. In some industries, about half the workforce relies on welfare.
“When companies pay too little for workers to provide for their families, workers rely on public assistance programs to meet their basic needs,” said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the university’s Center for Labor Research and Education and one of the report’s authors.
More than half of front-line fast-food workers receive some form of government assistance.
Pay for those workers has received significant attention recently. Fast-food workers have held several protests and strikes over the past year. And earlier this month, McDonald’s said it would raise pay for 90,000 of its lowest-paid employees at company-operated stores.
In the end what you have in areas like urban Milwaukee is an open-air economic prison (h/t to Tracy “Ice T” Marrow) filled with people who are simply too poor to live elsewhere patrolled by thuggish gangs of police who are the gatekeepers whose primary duty is to keep these citizens poor with nuisance court fees, handle their periodic transfer from this virtual jail to the closed cell jails and prisons they manage, usually for a hefty profit, and to maintain their submission with humiliating searches, occasional beatings, shootings and in-custody deaths.
Not that surprisingly they occasionally act out in frustration mixed with blind rage and some shit gets burned down.
In contrast to Sheriff Clarke this is what former Baltimore PD Sgt. Michael Wood has to say about it.
Wood: This isn’t new, this has been in our song lyrics for a hundred years.
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Don’t believe me, research yourself. It is clearly a systemic issue. It comes down to very fabric of everything we do in law enforcement. So if you think it’s not wrong, just think about your metric — that your metric is arrests. So your goal is to go out there and arrest somebody, not help them, not solve a crime, not de-escalate a situation, it’s arrest them. So where do you go from there to say it’s not a systemic thing when you go back through time and you see we have ideas like criminal profiling where at one point in time we allowed the worst of our society to pick the weakest and put them into a system. And once their in that system we use the data of that system to justify putting them back into that system. We essentially end up taking these 16-24 year old black males and we arrest them based upon the idea that we arrested them before. Somehow that makes them more likely to be a criminal because you arrested them.
It doesn’t make any sense.
But what I can tell you is this neighborhood is the same as it was 13 years ago. It’s the same as it was 40 years ago, and we’ve been using the same tactics to address the situation and it stays the same or gets worse. It’s not working, we know it’s not working. But we keep doing it over and over. We’re not treating these people like human beings. Ultimately the drug war makes us treat people like they’re not human beings.
And this is all somehow the fault of Democrats?
Republicans plan to solve this how exactly? Certainly not with Police Reform or re-investment in these communities.
It was Republicans who blocked the President’s American Jobs Act.
On September 8, 2011 — one year ago tomorrow — President Obama laid out a series of policy proposals known collectively as the American Jobs Act. The plan included stimulus spending in the form of immediate infrastructure investments, tax credits for working Americans and employers to encourage consumer spending and job growth, and efforts to shore up state and local budgets to prevent further layoffs of teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other public safety officials.
The American Jobs Act never became law, however, because Republicans opposed it from the start, blasting it as another form of “failed stimulus” that wouldn’t help the economy. (They ignored the fact that the first “failed stimulus,” the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, wasn’t a failure at all.) One month later, the GOP blocked the bill in the Senate, preventing the creation of more than a million jobs and the added growth that multiple economists predicted would occur if the bill passed:
It was Republicans who blocked the President’s Infrastructure Bank.
It was another clear reminder of just how far apart the two parties are on any number of issues – including how to finance infrastructure spending.
Senate Republicans defeated a Democratic amendment to the proposed 2016 budget on Tuesday. It was aimed at kick-starting negotiations between the White House and Congress over a new multi-year program for funding highway, bridge and other infrastructure projects.
Related: Obama Says China’s Infrastructure Puts the U.S. to Shame
The amendment, offered by Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), called for $478 billion in new spending over six years but without increasing the deficit. The amendment went down 52 to 45 along party lines.
Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, had argued his plan was “deficit neutral.” Hundreds of billions in new spending would have been offset by closing a number of corporate tax breaks that allow some major companies to escape paying taxes or stash profits overseas. But Republicans objected and said a large tax increase on business was not the right economic plan. They want to create a new “deficit neutral reserve fund” to supplement federal infrastructure spending.
Republicans have opposed spending specifically in the neighborhoods where it’s most needed. They have used unelected emergency managers who have held a fire-sale to gut the resources and infrastructure of cities such as Flint and Detroit to disastrous effect.
Michigan is having a rough year, to put it mildly. Flint is reeling from the news that its water supply was contaminated with lead for 17 months. In Detroit, teacher "sick-outs" have been shutting down schools; 88 of the city's 104 schools were closed on January 21. These two seemingly unrelated episodes are joined by a common policy: Both Detroit's school system and Flint's water system have been under the control of emergency managers, unelected officials who are empowered to make sweeping decisions and override local policies in the name of balancing budgets.
What's an emergency manager? Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder was elected in 2010 on a platform of fiscal austerity. Snyder, the former head of Gateway computers and a darling of the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, promised to run the state like a company, complete with "outcomes" and "deliverables." In 2011, he introduced a signature piece of legislation, Public Act 4, which expanded the state's authority to take over financially troubled cities and school districts. Similar laws exist in about 20 states, but Michigan's is the most expansive: Emergency managers picked by the governor have the power to renegotiate or cancel city contracts, unilaterally draft policy, privatize public services, sell off city property, and even fire elected officials.
Since 2011, 17 municipalities or school districts in Michigan have been assigned emergency managers. The majority of them are in poor, predominantly African-American communities that have been hit hard by depressed economies and shrinking populations. Some EMs have worked with communities to generate local buy-in, but their outsider status, lack of accountability, and propensity for cutting public services to save money have generated harsh criticism. As Michael Steinberg, the legal director for the Michigan chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said a recent statement, "Flint is Exhibit A for what happens when a state suspends democracy and installs unaccountable bean counters to run a city.”
Meanwhile the President has been far from sitting on his hands during all this time with his Urban Policy Initiative.
For the first time in decades, the Federal Government has been taking a comprehensive look at how its policies impact the way urban and rural areas develop and how well those places support the people who live there. This “place-based” approach is a long overdue effort to help places work better for people. Last summer, President Obama directed the Office of Management and Budget, the Domestic Policy Council, the National Economic Council, and the Office of Urban Affairs to conduct a comprehensive review of federal programs impacting places, the first of its kind in thirty years. The review represented an important first step toward leveraging federal investments in an integrated way, on a regional scale, and in a particular place to have the most transformative impact. We are building upon the progress made last year by initiating the second annual place-based review of agency programs as part of the preparation of the President’s FY 2012 Budget. Our goal is to continue to apply placed-based principles to existing policies, potential reforms, and new and promising innovations with a particular focus on strengthening economic growth and achieving greater cost effectiveness.
The difficulties of job deserts and open-air economic prisons are not simple or easy to solve with a wave of your hand. Republicans are claiming that Democrats have failed to magically solve all these decades old problems in the midst of the largest recession the world has suffered in generations — while they stood directly in the way — particularly one which has also hit the African-American community harder than many others due the massive loss of public sector jobs spearheaded by Republican austerity,
The public sector has long served as an equalizer in American society, a place where minority workers could find stable employment that offered advancement and a reliable path to a middle-class life.
But the Great Recession wiped out many of those jobs, as tax revenues declined and anti-government sentiment added to a contraction that continued long after the recession ended in 2008. Those job cuts disproportionately hurt African-American workers and increased racial disparity in the public sector, a new study by University of Washington sociologist Jennifer Laird concludes.
“There’s a double disadvantage that black public-sector workers face, particularly black women,” said Laird, a doctoral student in sociology. “They’re concentrated in a shrinking sector of the economy, and they’re substantially more likely than other public sector employees to be without work.”
Nearly one in five black adults works for the government, in positions ranging from teaching to delivering mail, managing departments to investigating crimes. By comparison, 14 percent of whites and 10 percent of Hispanics hold public-sector jobs.
And also while Republians have staged more and more efforts to take their ability to vote away with unnecessary voter ID restrictions.
For years, researchers warned that laws requiring voters to show certain forms of photo identification at the poll would discriminate against racial minorities and other groups. Now, the first study has been released showing that the proliferation of voter ID laws in recent years has indeed driven down minority voter turnout, and by a significant amount.
In a new paper entitled “Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes”, researchers at the University of California, San Diego — Zoltan Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi — and Bucknell University — Lindsay Nielson — used data from the annual Cooperative Congressional Election Study to compare states with strict voter ID laws to those that allow voters without photo ID to cast a ballot. They found a clear and significant dampening effect on minority turnout in strict voter ID states.
A view that has been concurred with by the U.S. Court of Appeals.
A federal appeals court has ruled that a Texas voter ID law has a discriminatory effect on minority voters, and it has ordered a lower court to devise a remedy before the November elections.
A district court had found not only that the law discriminated, but that it was intentionally designed to do so. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saw some flaws in that conclusion and instructed the lower court to reconsider that element of the case and rule again — preferably after Election Day.
So with these facts on the ground, exactly how are African-Americans supposed to trust Trump and Republicans efforts to “reach out” especially when the head of Trump’s own effort says this whole thing is definitely not on fleek .
A leading black Republican in Florida says that the campaign to elect Donald Trump president has “failed” at reaching out to black voters in his state.
The Miami New Times said Friday that Sean P. Jackson — head of the Black Republican Caucus of South Florida — blames state campaign director Karen Giorno, who he says routinely disregarded his advice and froze him out of the party’s efforts to win over voters.
“Mr. Trump really does have a sincere, passionate interest in a black outreach, but his campaign staff has dropped the ball,” said Jackson to the New Times. “That all starts with Karen Giorno. She has repeatedly failed at embracing blacks across the state.”
BuzzFeed News reported Thursday that Giorno booted Jackson out of the backstage area at a recent Florida rally.
“The crazy part about it is that the Secret Service had already cleared me to be back there, and yet she made a scene claimed that she didn’t know who I was,” said Jackson.
“I have been saying repeatedly that you cannot go into black community in the 9th hour of a campaign and ask them to vote for a GOP candidate,” he said. “The party has done a piss poor job of courting the black vote over 50 years. So you have to have more vested interest in time and in your financial effort for the whole campaign, not just in the last 100 days.”
Yeah, that.