The Wrongologist

What’s Wrong Today:

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard testimony Tuesday about the potential use of military force in Syria. Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey all testified. The hearing lasted about 3½ hours. At the conclusion, the Committee said they were close to producing the text of a resolution to authorize Mr. Obama to bomb Syria.

Unfortunately, that was way too long for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) who, reported WaPo, decided to play poker and Japanese Casino online 2019 on his smart phone during the hearing: 

McCain tweeted:

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Of course Johnny Volcano lost, that’s what he does best. But he had his defenders in the press. Andrea Mitchell tweeted:

@SenJohnMcCain acknowledges getting caught on cam playing iphone poker at senate hearing on #Syria -can you blame him? 3 hrs +4:2p.m. Tue, Sep 3

Apparently, the hearing bored BOTH McCain and Mitchell. And yes, Andrea, we CAN blame him. The committee is talking about whether to authorize aggression against Syria that will certainly kill people, but the Senator couldn’t pay attention? These pols can’t even take a possible war seriously?

We can all agree that Secretary Kerry is repetitious and drones on and on, but when they are proposing bombing strikes on a country that is no threat to us, paying attention is a job requirement.  

Andrea Mitchell is defending poor old Senator dose and drool? Apparently her attention span isn’t all that good either. She proves right there that the main stream media are as disconnected from the public as are the politicians.

Despite what John and Andrea thought, there were reasons to listen carefully to what was said at the hearing. Below are extensive quotes from Empty Wheel, an indispensable blog on NSA, privacy and government overreach. Marcy Wheeler (empty wheel herself) outlined some important lessons learned from the testimony:

Lesson #1: We’re going to war so we don’t lose some friends

John Kerry twice said that if we don’t bomb Assad we’ll lose friends and/or allies. ”If we fail to act we’ll have fewer allies.”

That admitted something that has been acknowledged — usually not in print — in DC. We’re doing this not to retain our general credibility, but to retain “credibility” with Saudi Arabia and Israel. Credibility with Saudi Arabia is important, I presume, because they continue to sell oil in dollars and buy lots of military toys — including $640 million of cluster bombs that undermine everything the Administration says about humanity.

Credibility is important with Israel because if they don’t believe we’ll attack Iran if they need us to, they’ll just attack on their own. Here’s confirmation of something that had already been confirmed but somehow is getting trotted out again today: the US had to stop Israel from unilaterally attacking Iran last year. (Update: As Max Blumenthal notes, AIPAC’s statement in favor of war mentions Iran more than Syria.)

Lesson #2: The friends we do have don’t want anyone to know they are our friends

At one point, when Kerry was asked who in the region support[s] us, he deferred to closed session…This is likely about protecting Jordan, where we’re staging covert operations, which would make an easy target for Assad. Kerry implied Jordan supported this action, though was pretty coy about it. Still, back when we attacked Saddam in 1991, he still had WMD. His neighbors knew that. But they were willing to openly support our attack on him. Not this war.

/snip/

Lesson #5: Whatever comes out of this resolution is separate from effort to oust Assad

Kerry and Obama have both said these attacks will be limited and don’t aim to oust Assad. But it became clear over the course of the hearing (as witnesses tried to balance those like McCain and Ron Johnson, who wanted more war, and those like Tom Udall, who wanted limits) that in addition to this strike there’s the pre-existing policy of increasing our support to the rebels, effectively to oust Assad. So while this strike is not about regime change, it exists on top of a strategy that is about regime change.

/snip/

Lesson #7: The Administration claims it has evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” against Assad

Both [Sen] Menendez and Kerry both claimed we have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt against Assad. Kerry even noted that’s the standard we use to send people away to prison.

Neither one, of course, explained why we weren’t referring (nor trying to — it would take a Security Council referral) Assad’s crimes to the International Criminal Court. But as they did with Anwar al-Awlaki, they believe that declaring something “beyond a reasonable doubt”…is sufficient and they don’t need to wait for UN inspectors or real juries.

It seems likely that the Senate will pass a resolution empowering Mr. Obama. It sure is weird how our politicians can act all warm and bipartisan when there are either people to kill or rich people to throw money at.

When it comes to anything else, both political parties are sworn enemies! How do we rid ourselves of these tools? A pox on both their houses.

It’s quite amazing to witness this normally clandestine love affair between the Democrats and Republicans blossom in public view. This bursting into bloom only happens, though, when public opinion reveals the lovers’ hand, like with TARP or now, with Syria.

Please, somebody buy Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama World of Warcraft so we can go back to worrying about unemployment and not our “credibility” with Israel.

What’s
Wrong Today:

We
are marking the sixth Labor Day weekend since the onset of The Great Recession
and Congress has yet to pass a jobs bill, it has yet to put a halt to
anti-worker tactics of many businesses and state governments, it has yet to
make poverty and hunger and homelessness a priority on the national agenda.


The working class no longer has any voice in or influence on the US government.
President and Congress have been a profound disappointment to the middle class,
the poor and the elderly. If you doubt that, remember this chart that the Wrongologist
posts regularly. It is the ratio of employed to our total civilian population:

It
is down about 4 percentage points since the start of the Great Recession. Over
the past 40 years, the plutocracy and the Conservative movement have made
certain that working women and men no longer count for much in the United
States of America.

Corporate
profits after tax just hit a record high as a percentage of GDP, while wages
are at their lows as a percentage of GDP. Workers are clearly getting less and
less of the American economic pie, while corporate profits continue to soar.
 To illustrate how bad this is, the graph below shows wages and salaries
as a percentage of GDP in red, (scale on the right), against corporate profits
as a percentage of GDP, in blue, (scale on the left).  

Why
won’t DC do anything to change these trends? This is just terrible for America
and American workers.

The
US has 2.3 million American males in prison. It has six times the rate of
incarceration per capita as China. As prison guards earn salaries, so do
lawyers and entertainers who provide parallel coverage to trials which
second-guess the legal system. All of this adds to our GDP even though they actually
are indicators of social decline.


The symbols of progress now reside elsewhere. The world’s tallest building is
in Dubai, second tallest will soon be the Shanghiai Tower, part of a complex of
three new skyscrapers. China builds more autos now than the US.

The following Labor Day cartoons
are not meant for your enjoyment:

The Wrongologist visited the Mark Twain House in West Hartford
CT this week with grand kids. Few people who have read “Tom Sawyer” or “Huckleberry
Finn” realize that he was an abolitionist. He also took a dim view of
warfare. He wrote a book (really a pamphlet) called “The War Prayer” that was rejected for publication during his
lifetime. He also wrote “To the Heathen
Sitting Alone in Darkness”, a direct attack on US entry into the Spanish
American War and ultimately the Filipino “Insurrection.” That book was
published. It contains the quote on the Church Sign below, which was quite
popular during the Vietnam War. Think about Syria, and America’s other follies
in the Middle East, and create your homily for today:

Not everyone  has the same Dream:

More wisdom from MLK:

Johnny Volcano offers advice to Uncle Sam:

But Barack, what’s the mission?

Obama’s Syrian formula is a combustible mix:

People who live in Muslim countries
know that they have rarely been at peace for long periods of time. In addition
to fighting amongst themselves, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the
Persians, the Ottomans, the British and the French have all had their turns
trying to rule, without conspicuous success.

America must evolve from our need to
intervene.

What’s
Wrong Today:

What
should we do when our President wants war but says, “there are no good options”?
From Esquire’s Charlie Pierce:

Stars and Stripes, the newspaper of the US Army, reports
on the analysis of Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Zenko
has studied the results of “limited use of force” like what Mr. Obama is
considering in Syria. He has counted 36 such operations since 1991, which have
had varying levels of success. He says these operations typically use “stand-off”
weapons like cruise missiles or drones that put few if any service members at
direct risk.

Yet
the operations are not as effective as imagined, Zenko argues. In the 36
incidents he counts, military
objectives were achieved little more than half the time, he said, while the
political goals were realized in only 6 % of the attacks.

If
political goals are achieved in a mere 6% of the attacks, then Tomahawk
diplomacy in the form of a cruise missile attack against Syria without a realistic plan to achieve a
desired political goal might make some people feel good but will not do us any good. It may backfire into undesired and unintended
consequences that could do us harm.

If
you can’t raise the bridge, lower the river. No good option means that it’s
time to get out of the box and try something different.

The
Wrongologist suggests making Assad an offer he can’t refuse.

Let’s
accept that Assad’s regime committed the crime. Let’s further postulate that by
now, Mr. Assad knows who gave the order to arm the rockets with CW, and who
gave the orders to fire those weapons at civilian populations in the Damascus
suburb of Eastern Ghouta.

John
Kerry, Prince of Ketchup, seems to have detailed knowledge of the inner
communications of the Assad regime on the night of the attack and the regime’s
internal discussions about the event. If we know, then Assad knows. The
proposal is:

Tell Mr. Assad to publicly execute
the members of his government and military who bear direct responsibility for
the CW attack.

Give
Mr. Assad 10 days to conduct the executions and to make a statement about how
he will not tolerate further CW attacks.

Should
he fail to comply? Take out Mr. Assad. With Tomahawk missiles, or otherwise. Hit
all the targets that leave Mr. Obama with “no good options”. Hit them twice so Assad’s chances of winning the civil war are degraded. Tell Mr. Assad that this is
what we will do if he fails to execute the perpetrators of CW on his own
people.

This
will help America’s credibility. It gives Syrians more time to get out of harm’s
way if he does not. It gives Assad a way to preserve the status-quo in his
civil war.

It
avoids an attack that ultimately pleases al-Qaeda and Israel while angering the
rest of the Middle East.

What
do you think?

What’s
Wrong Today:

Despite
the UK Parliament’s vote against attacking Syria, Mr. Obama so far seems to
continue to want
to go it alone. The “senior officials” quoted by the NYT are probably from the National
Security Council. Mr. Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice is most
likely the one who is driving the bus, and it is looking like she is pointing
it at a wall.

The miss-management
of the Syria event ― a rush to war then retreat, an attempt to block the UN
observers, presenting dubious intelligence, bad management of potential allies ―
could end her career and take Mr. Obama with her.

Any claim
that the US would attack Syria in service of some “international community”
is now looking weak: We have the French on our side, proving they want to
demonstrate a muscular interventionist foreign policy, just like America. But let’s
count who is against bombing Syria: The UK, the UN Security Council, the UN
Secretary General, the US military,
the US intelligence
community, the public in the United States, Israel, and Turkey.

Obama is now in a catch 22. Speaker Boehner
(R-OH) demands
answers to detailed questions about the war Mr. Obama wants to wage. Today,
the scuttlebutt is that the WH will spend the day trying to answer them. Here
are some of the questions:

Imagine,
Mr. Boehner has managed to seize the high ground from Mr. Obama on Syria. That’s some principled leadership by Mr. Boehner. His
“demanding answers” on Syria isn’t particularly surprising, nor is the chutzpah
displayed by Boehner’s assumption that his political history gives him some leverage with which to
assume the moral high ground. But, he has the moral high ground, at least for
the moment.

Another quarter weighed
in: Javad Zarif, Iran’s Minister for Foreign Affairs posted on Facebook:  

It is a terrible inflection point when
John Boehner and the Iranian Foreign Minister make more sense than Susan Rice
and President Obama. (Ignore for the moment that Iranians domestically are blocked from Facebook.)

If the
president calls Congress back from vacation to vote on a war resolution he will
risk as Mr. Cameron did, public defeat. If he does not call back Congress and
proceeds with a strike he will face serious opposition from both Republicans
and many Democrats.

He can of
course stand down on the issue but, that has its own political fall-out: He may
be damaged goods in international politics.

This should be a matter for the Congress
to decide according to the Constitution.

And while
we’re talking about Congress, how many of our jolly statesmen remember what happened the last time Americans took on
the Syrian army?

It
happened in Lebanon when the US Air Force decided to bomb Syrian missiles in
the Bekaa Valley
on December 4, 1983 (Saint Ronnie was our president). An American A-6 fighter bomber
was hit by a Syrian ground-to-air missile and crash-landed in the Bekaa; its
pilot, Mark Lange, was killed, its co-pilot, Robert Goodman, taken prisoner and
jailed in Damascus.

Jesse Jackson
traveled to Syria to get him back, amid many clichés about
“ending the cycle of violence”. Another American plane – this time an A-7 – was
also hit by Syrian fire but the pilot managed to eject over the Mediterranean
where he was plucked from the water by a Lebanese fishing boat. His plane was
also destroyed.

While our planes are better, (the A-6 was retired in 1997), so are the Russian missiles that sold to Syria. We are told that Syria will be a short
mission, in and out, a couple of days. That’s what Mr. Obama likes to think.
But think Iran. Think Hezbollah. Think Russia.

Revolutions
started with people refusing to pay for the King’s wars: The English (in the 17th
century), the French (in the 18th century), the Russian revolution was started
by Russians tired of fighting in WW1.

Be
careful plutocracy, the people are watching.

What’s
Wrong Today:

The
most depressing thing heard yesterday was from Mr. Obama:

We must
teach Assad a lesson. After all, we have a Responsibility to
Protect, (R2P).

R2P is a UN initiative established in 2005. It is an aspirational set of
principles, based on the claim that sovereignty is not a right, but a
responsibility. R2P focuses on preventing and
halting four crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic
cleansing, which it places under the generic umbrella term of Mass Atrocity Crimes. R2P has three pillars:

1. A
   state has a responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war
   crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing;
2. The
   international community has a responsibility to assist the state to
   fulfill its primary responsibility;
3. If
   the state manifestly fails to protect its citizens from the four above
   mass atrocities and peaceful measures have failed, the international community has the responsibility to intervene
   through coercive measures such as economic sanctions. Military
   intervention is considered the last resort.

However,
it is not clear who makes this decision on behalf of the “international
community”. Nor is it clear who has the responsibility to protect, except the
UN, it doesn’t mention the US.

Conor
Freidersdorf in The Atlantic hits
the nail on the head:
(emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Why is the
Main Stream Media legitimizing pro-war
pressure? Why are they describing it as the prevailing story line,
despite the fact that the people who are applying the pressure represent a clear
minority position? Why does the MSM ignore the pressure against intervention, that
is to say, the majority position?

 “Legitimacy” in these circles is a matter of
social standing and institutional affiliations, not track record. Americans are
well aware of the disastrous mistakes made by these elites, having suffered from
their performance in Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, Beirut, Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Libya.

The MSM is
reporting about how Mr. Obama’s credibility depends on his deciding to strike
Syria. They say the president’s credibility hinges on him doing something just
9% of Americans want him to do. “Credibility” to them means his
credibility among the people who matter.
That is, the DC chicken hawks who
inflate their importance with glib answers to tough questions and by otherwise acting
tough.

Finally, from Moon
of Alabama, it is
looking like the effort to round up the usual suspects to form another
“coalition of the willing” is not progressing smoothly: 

Don’t
know about all of you, but the Wrongologist is not part of the “willing”. The
Syria discussion looks a lot like Iraq 2.0, Obama edition, just scarier because:

• It
  is taking very little time, effort (and so far, flimsy evidence) to sell it

• The
  American people are, if possible, even less skeptical now than they were in
  2001-2003 during the marketing of the intervention against Iraq

• The
  fact that this is Obama and not some Republican seems to be blinding a lot of
  liberals who would be screaming bloody murder if it were, say, Chris Christie in the
  White House

It
would be nice to trust Mr. Obama more than we trusted Mr. Bush, but a
politician is a politician. If he supports the use of “humanitarian
bombings” and it turns out that the allegations against Syria are false,
or just inconclusive, or a false flag operation by actors inside or even
outside Syria, what will THAT say about Mr. Obama’s “credibility”?

He
has to do more than consult with Congress. Congress needs to put their names
and reputations on the line with an up or down, roll call vote on intervention.

If Obama
fails to intervene in Syria, his credibility among the American people won’t
suffer at all. If the DC pundits want to intervene in Syria, let them be the
first Americans to hit the beach.

What’s
Wrong Today:

Nothing says “big cajones” like lobbing some bombs on
the people in a smaller country with a leader that the West doesn’t like and that
doesn’t have the military means to strike back directly.  

Remember in
2003, there were massive marches here and in Europe against the Iraq war.

Ten years
later there are no marches. Why? In part the “left”, united against the
Iraq war, is now in large part, lined up behind NATO. It is certainly not
defending Syrians as it was ready to defend, at least via demonstrating, the
Iraqi people.

What makes the current situation more
puzzling is that the lessons of Iraq clearly indicated that the anti-war side was 100% right.
The US and the pro-US governments in Europe were lying about WMD. The
casualties were horrendous, amounting to hundreds of thousands dead, wounded
and driven into refugee status. The net result was chaos, a continuing and bloody civil
strife, disease, poverty and waste.

The Coalition of the Willing led to the Four
Horsemen.

In the
past decade, the global economy has collapsed. It may collapse again; living
standards are falling everywhere. By any rational accounting, the governments
of Obama, Cameron and Hollande should be slouching towards political oblivion.
Instead they propose, even as they do nothing to spur employment while they cut unemployment benefits and pensions,
to splurge more billions on more killings, this time of Syrian civilians.

Everyone knows what is going on here: Kerry reprises Powell,
Rice reprises Rice and Obama reprises George 47.

We just can’t get enough of it. And in National News: Miley
Cyrus?

 

“Conquest
after conquest, deeper and deeper into molasses…Flies conquer the flypaper. Flies
capture two hundred miles of new flypaper.” (Lt. Tonder in The
Moon is Down) – John Steinbeck

What’s
Wrong Today:

50 years after the
March on Washington, we are proposing yet again to spend $billions to bomb another distant country, but
we still can’t muster the will to lift a third of our own nation out of
destitution and despair.

So the US MUST attack Syria because the
administration says that it has “credible evidence” that the Syrian government
used chemical weapons. The reasoning is that using chemical weapons is so wrong, and we need to protect
the Syrian people.

Don’t ask
Congress to authorize it, because this is a dire emergency! Our politicians and
media prefer fake reasons for war, reasons that they can change to fit the
needs of the moment.

The media
spends more time scripting than reporting. It’s insulting that our leaders
can’t be bothered to offer facts for their justification for war anymore. It’s all
so predictable.

From Andrew
Bracevich:

Bracevich suggests
that before ordering any such action, President Obama should answer three
questions, and share his answers with the American people, before, not after,
pulling the trigger. Here are Bracevich’s questions:

First, why does this
particular heinous act rise to the level of justifying a military response? Why
did a similarly heinous act by the Egyptian army elicit from Washington only
the mildest response? Why the double standard?

Second, once US
military action against Syria begins, when will it end? What is the political
objective? What exactly does the United States intend to achieve and how much
is President Obama willing to spend in lives and treasure to get there?

Third, what is the
legal basis for military action? Neither Russia nor China is likely to agree to
an attack on Syria, so authorization by the UN Security Council won’t be
forthcoming. Will Obama ask Congress for the authority to act? Or will he, as
so many of his recent predecessors have done, employ some dodge to circumvent
the Constitution? What is his justification for that?

Booman describes the flawed strategy
of what he calls the “Do Something Caucus”:

He goes on:

The Obama administration
seems to be making a bad choice between two poker strategies: the “Know when to
fold ‘em” strategy seems to have lost out to the “all-in” strategy.

Mr. Obama started
with a bad mistake with his “Red Line” comments. You don’t want to get involved
in a civil war that will harm our national interests, but you don’t want people
to be killed with chemical weapons, either. So, you talk tough to try to
prevent the use of chemical weapons. It didn’t work.

Also talking
tough was your Senator from the Green Room, (John McCain R-AZ) appearing yet
again on the Sunday shows, who said:

But the world
understands that at best, we hold a pair of deuces in Syria. We are also holding
a pair of deuces with regard to Iran’s nuclear program.  One is a problem we can’t fix, and the other
we might still be able to work on, provided we don’t get in the middle of their relationship with Syria’s al-Assad.  

First, we
need to admit that as of today, there
is no outcome that we want in Syria, so success is an impossibility. Second, once we start
bombing, we will be sucked into choosing an outcome that we don’t want and then
pursuing it until the American public punishes the Obama administration for simply
being idiots.  

When the
best the administration can come up with is “This won’t work, it will
probably make things worse, but we have to do it because…” it doesn’t
really matter how you end that sentence. The administration is choosing to end
it with “we have to maintain the taboo on chemical weapons”. 

Fine. But
you could end it with any other conceivable phrase and the logic does not
improve.  

If the United States enters this civil war on the
side of the opposition in Syria, the
United States will be blamed for the opposition’s crimes, and they have already committed
many. Most people in the greater middle east hate al Qaeda and other
terrorists. They are also coming to hate the United States and its drones,
missiles, bases, night raids, lies, and hypocrisy. 

Imagine
the levels of hatred that will be reached when al Qaeda and the United States
team up to overthrow the government of Syria and create an Iraq-like hell in its
place.

An unpopular rebellion put into power by an outside force
(US) does not usually result in a stable government. In fact, there is not yet on record
a case of US humanitarian war benefiting humanity or of nation-building
actually building a nation, and don’t bring up Croatia as the model for Syria. 

Why would Syria, which looks
even less auspicious than other potential targets, be the exception to the
rule?

There had been
earlier marches, but the 1963 March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom was on a scale so much larger than
anything that had come before that it is rightly thought of as a singular moment: An event so significant that the history of the civil rights movement can be
measured in terms of before the March, and after the March.

The day is
remembered almost exclusively for MLK’s “Dream” speech, famously delivered to
the throngs from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

And as Rick Interlope writes in The Nation, in a country that
ignores its history, the march is remembered, and mostly, it is remembered
clearly. The day before the march, white America was very nervous about what
would happen if hundreds of thousands marched in DC. The day after, many in
America had bough into the dream.

(far left) Bayard Rustin, march organizer

Life Magazine reports that “I Have a Dream” had
been used before by MLK. He had delivered a speech to 25,000 people in Detroit
several months before that included several sections and phrases that he would
include, verbatim, in his address on August 28, 1963.

 

A. Phillip Randolph was the nominal head of
the March on Washington, but it was really
organized and managed by Bayard Rustin. Randolph led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly
black labor union. In the early civil-rights
movement,
Randolph led the March on Washington Movement, which convinced President
Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive
Order 8802
in 1941, banning discrimination in the defense industries during World War II.  After the war, Randolph pressured President Harry
S. Truman to issue Executive
Order 9981
in 1948, ending segregation in the armed services.

Dr. King
became a leader of the movement post-march.

At the
core of MLK’s speech was a simple, radical, but compelling argument. King
explains that the demonstrators have come “to cash a check.” America’s
constitution and declaration of independence were:

His
argument was that the demonstrators were asking merely for the rights
guaranteed to all Americans by the country’s founding documents. Segregationists,
therefore, were not just bullies and bigots; they were failures as Americans,
because they misunderstood or ignored
the country’s fundamental premise.

King presented
his “dream” as the American dream. Dr. King’s speech laid out four major
grievances:

• Discrimination
  by private businesses and local government

• Barriers
  that kept black Americans from voting

• Unfair
  treatment by police

• Lack
  of social mobility and economic opportunity

Dr. King
said:

The Civil
Rights Act of 1964 directly addressed the first grievance. Signed by Lyndon
Johnson 10 months after the march, it banned businesses from refusing to serve members of
the public on the basis of race; it prohibited the denial of access to public
facilities on the basis of race; it authorized the attorney-general to sue
local authorities to force school desegregation; it banned discrimination by
the recipients of federal funds and it outlawed discrimination by businesses
employing more than 25 people, creating the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC) to respond to such complaints.

The Voting
Rights Act of 1965 addressed King’s second grievance. It outlawed poll taxes,
literacy tests and other practices designed to prevent blacks from voting. Until
key sections were struck down by the SCOTUS in June 2013, it gave the Justice
Department and federal courts the power to veto proposed changes to voting
procedures in jurisdictions with a history of discrimination.

The acts
had lasting political effects: In 1963, Congress had five black members, all
representatives from northern and western cities. Today, roughly one in ten
members (40) of the House is black; they come from 25 states and territories. In
the 2012 presidential election, black voter turnout exceeded that of any other
racial category.

Little at
the time was done politically to address the economic issues raised at the march,
which included a call for a minimum wage, an end to discrimination in federally
funded housing and that “…every person be given training and work with
dignity to defeat unemployment and automation”.  

Measured
against conditions at the time of Dr. King’s speech, black American have made
real progress:

• In
  1966, the earliest year for which comparable data is available, 42% of
  African-Americans lived in poverty; in 2011, 28% did, while the national poverty rate for all races was 15%

• The median family income for blacks
  was $22,266 in 1963. It was $40,495 in 2012

• In 1963, 25.7% of blacks age 25 and older had completed at least four years of
  high school, while in 2012, 85.0% of blacks age 25 and older
  had completed at least four years of high school

• In 1963, 365,000 blacks had at least a bachelor’s degree. In 2012, that number
  had grown to 5.1 million

But, measured
against the progress of whites in America, black progress looks less
impressive. Pew Research reports several
areas where the gaps have widened: 

The
bursting housing bubble took a far greater toll on black families than whites,
reducing their median wealth, according to the Pew Research study, by 53%
between 2005 and 2009 (adjusted for inflation). Over the same period white
median wealth fell by just 16%. In 2009 more than one-third of black households
had zero or negative net worth, compared with 15% of white households. In 2011
the median household wealth (comprising cash, investments, homes, cars and
other assets) for America’s white families was $110,500. For blacks it was $6,314.

PBS’ Report on Race reminds us that the
American government provided low-interest loans to returning veterans and other
white Americans after World War II. This created a boom in home ownership and
helped suburbanize America; but blacks, 125,000 of whom served
overseas in WWII, were excluded from participating. At the same time,
the government was building high-rise public housing for minorities in inner
cities. The segregation in America between a largely dark inner city and a
largely white suburban community is not something that just magically happened
from market forces. It was part of government policy in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The
chart below shows that less has changed in population above the poverty line or
in home ownership:

The chart
below shows that the gaps have narrowed in life expectancy and high school
completion. Interestingly, black voter turnout exceeds that of whites:

The
civil-rights era has not ended: Blacks remain likelier than whites to lack
jobs, be poor, get arrested and serve time in prison. Residential segregation
of blacks from other races still persists. After years of narrowing, the gap
between black and white median incomes has widened since 2000, and the gap in
household wealth is enormous.

But the job
of fixing what remains may now fall to different hands. For the past 75 years, the responsibility for
ending segregation and repealing racist laws was mainly the federal government’s.
But with a divided government, with a conservative Supreme Court, the ability
of the federal government to make a difference is much less today.

On the other hand, the federal government’s attack on the
Bill of Rights impacts all races and blunting that attack may become our next
“dream”. We sheep must again become wolves, or as 73 years old Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) said at a rally
yesterday:

He is one
man, he is speaking of only one of the Bill of Rights.

There is so
far to go, just to get back to where we were. The fight is never over.

The
Wrongologist believes it will take another non-violent era, a mass effort by
the people to take this country back from the plutocrats and corporatists.

50th anniversary of MLK’s “I have a dream” speech, civil
forfeitures, proliferation of militarized police, Manning is sentenced.  Build your own homily from the quote below from
Bertrand de Jouvenel. As you pull it
together, remember that you are speaking to a nation of sheep who think they
are wolves…

On the 50th anniversary of MLK’s speech, not everyone shares his aspiration for better wages and the right of all citizens to vote:

Former Egyptian president Mubarak has been released from prison and placed under house arrest. If he could run in the next presidential election, how many votes would he get?

Does democracy have ANY chance in Egypt?

Why Obamacare rage is driving some in Congress to risk a government shutdown:

Teahadists make their presence felt to establishment Republicans:

Morality and Proportionality ought to let us be a nation that can differentiate between crimes: