Hi Miriam,
Here's a somewhat simplistic answer. Perhaps it is that the majority of
Americans think it's normal for blacks to be treated badly while they believe
it to be abnormal for whites to be treated that way. Since whites hold power
over blacks, it is very unlikely that a racist black Trump such as, maybe a
member of the Black Panthers would ever have a chance in an election.
What gets me here is that many white folks believe that racism no-longer exists
here in America. I wonder how many Trump voters believe that racism has come to
an end in America?
Bob Hachey
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2017 3:39 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: ah ha, I found it...
Carl,
Thanks for the article.
Having just finished Coates' article in The Atlantic, The First White President
which, I think every leftist, white leftist that is, should read, I have a
rather specific response to this article.
Why is everyone feeling that they need to explain the frustration of
dispossessed white workers, to excuse their votes for Trump, to, in this case,
explain why an unfulfilled white man might murder 59 people and injur more than
500 when a majority of black people have been dispossessed and unfulfilled for
their whole lives and no one tries to understand them or explain why there may
be poverty and crime in their communities? Why didn't all those black people
vote for a crazy racist or rise up and murder white people? Why is the opioid
epidemic such a tragedy while drug addiction among black people is punishable
by prison terms? Why is everyone excusing all those people who voted for Trump
? Why is what Hillary Clinton said about them, "a basket of deplorables" so
terrible when they knowingly voted for a white supremacist and abuser of women?
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2017 12:44 PM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Matthew <mcblack@xxxxxxxxx>; Jennifer Ford <dandjford88@xxxxxxxx>; delores
selset <dselset@xxxxxxx>; jamesjarvis98 <jamesjarvis98@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] ah ha, I found it...
Here's the article I was looking for:
Carl
Palast's reflections go some way toward identifying the disease that has
infected America's disenfranchised people.
Carl Jarvis
Friday, October 13, 2017
By Greg Palast
Mobile home on tracks, Sun Valley CA, birthplace of the Vegas shooter.
From the film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
[Los Angeles] When we were at Francis Polytechnic High in Sun Valley, Steve
Paddock and I were required to take electrical shop class. At Poly and our
junior high, we were required to take metal shop so we could work the drill
presses at the GM plant. We took drafting. Drafting like in "blueprint drawing."
Paddock. Palast. We sat next to each other at those drafting tables with our
triangular rulers and #2 pencils so we could get jobs at Lockheed as draftsmen
drawing blueprints of fighter jets. Or do tool-and-dye cutting to make
refrigerator handles at GM where they assembled Frigidaire refrigerators and
Chevys.
But we weren’t going to fly the fighter jets. Somewhere at Phillips Andover
Academy, a dumbbell with an oil well for a daddy was going to go to Yale and
then fly our fighter jets over Texas. We weren’t going to go to Yale.
We were going to go to Vietnam. Then, when we came back, if we still had two
hands, we went to GM or Lockheed.
(It’s no coincidence that much of the student population at our school was
Hispanic.)
But if you went to "Bevvie" - Beverly Hills High - or Hollywood High, you
didn’t take metal shop. You took Advanced Placement French. You took Advanced
Placement Calculus. We didn’t have Advanced Placement French. We didn’t have
French anything. We weren’t Placed, and we didn’t Advance.
Steve was a math wizard. He should have gone to UCLA, to Stanford. But our
classes didn’t qualify him for anything other than LA Valley College and Cal
State Northridge. Any dumbbell could get in. And it was nearly free.
That’s where Steve was expected to go, and he went with his big math-whiz
brain. And then Steve went to Lockheed, like we were supposed to. Until
Lockheed shut down plants in 1988. Steve left, took the buy-out.
And after NAFTA, GM closed too.
Land of Opportunity? Well, tell me: who gets those opportunities?
Some of you can and some of you can’t imagine a life where you just weren’t
give a fair chance. Where the smarter you are, the more painful it gets,
because you have your face pressed against the window, watching THEM. THEY got
the connections to Stanford. THEY get the gold mine. WE get the shaft.
This is where Paddock and Palast were bred: Sun Valley, the anus of Los
Angeles. Literally. It’s where the sewerage plant is. It’s in a trench below
the Hollywood Hills, where the smog settles into a kind of puke yellow soup.
Here’s where LA dumps its urine and the losers they only remember when they
need cheap labor and cheap soldiers when the gusanos don’t supply enough from
Mexico.
I’ll take you to Sun Valley. It’s in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
In the movie, a kind of dream scene, the actress Shailene Woodley takes me back
to my family’s old busted home in the weeds and then down San Fernando Road,
near Steve's place. Take a look, America. Along the tracks that once led in to
the GM plant, you see a bunch of campers that the union men bought for
vacations. Now they live in them.
No, Steve’s brain was too big to end up on the tracks. He lived in empty
apartments in crappy buildings he bought, then in a barren tract house outside
Reno. I laugh when they say he was "rich." He wanted to be THEM, to have their
stuff. He got close.
It’s reported that Steve was a "professional gambler." That’s another laugh. He
was addicted to numbing his big brain by sitting 14 hours a day in the dark in
front of video poker machines. He was a loser. Have you ever met a gambler who
said they were a Professional Loser?
It’s fair to ask me: Why didn’t I end up in a hotel room with a bump-stock
AR-15 and 5,000 rounds of high velocity bullets?
Because I have a job, a career, an OBSESSION: to hunt down THEM, the
daddy-pampered pricks who did this to us, the grinning billionaire jackals that
make a profit off the slow decomposition of the lives I grew up with.
But I’m telling you, that I know it’s a very fine line, and lots of crazy luck,
that divided my path from Paddock’s.
Dear Reader: The publication that pulled this story at the last moment was
plain scared — that they’d be accused of approving murder.
Paddock slaughtered good people, coldly, with intense cruelty, destroying lives
and hundreds of families forever. If you think I’m making up some excuse for
him, then I give up.
But also this: The editor of the Beverly Hills-based publication, a Stanford
grad, could not understand that, just like veterans of the Vietnam war who
suffer from PTSD even today, so too, losers of the class war can be driven mad
by a PTSD that lingers, that gnaws away, their whole lives.
block quote
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it ...fester like a sore? Does it stink
like rotten meat? Sag...like a heavy load?
Or does it explode?
block quote end
Steve, you created more horrors than your cornered life could ever justify.
But, I just have to tell you, Steve: I get it.
*****Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The Guardian
and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud and racketeering
for governments and labor unions worldwide. His investigations have appeared in
Rolling Stone, Harper's and New Statesman. Known as the reporter who exposed
how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters from Florida
rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush. Palast has written four New
York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot
Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now out as major motion
non-fiction
movie:
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of the Stolen Election (the brand
new, updated, post-election edition).
