Intolerance over the Ages

It is time for me to take a sabbatical again as the preparation and timing of these posts take an inordinate amount of time away from other projects that interest me.

But before I do so, I feel I need to do at least one more post on the subject, which forms the title of this post.

What particularly prompts me to focus on this subject now, is that I watched, for at least the second time, the movie “Gentlemen’s Agreement”. For those who are not privy to the movie, or have long since forgotten it, it was released in 1947, or some 67 years ago. At the time it was considered a groundbreaker, for it dealt with a taboo subject – Anti-Semitism. Those who are much younger than I will not be aware just how rampant it was, and those who are old enough, may no longer remember. But for example, Representative John Rankin (Dem–Miss.) on June 5, 1941 rose on the floor of the House of Representatives and declared “Wall Street bankers and international Jews”  were dragging the country into war. 

Long after the film was released, five years later to be exact, as late as 1952, Rankin said on the House floor:

“They whine about discrimination. Do you know who is being discriminated against? The white Christian people of America, the ones who created this nation… I am talking about the white Christian people of the North as well as the South.” 

Doesn’t that sound familiar - only now it is African-Americans. And it is no longer the Democratic Party; Now it is the Republican Party. After all these years, Jews still have very little prominence in the Republican Party.

Strangely, the producer of the film Darryl Zanuck, who was not Jewish, was prompted to produce the film after being refused membership in the Los Angeles Country Club, because it was assumed incorrectly that he was Jewish. Equally interesting “Before filming commenced, Samuel Goldwyn and other Jewish film executives approached Darryl Zanuck and asked him not to make the film, fearing it would "stir up trouble". 

But the above is merely background material for my reaction to the film, for from my vantage point, almost 70 years later, what I noted was its inherent prejudices.

One couldn’t miss its sexism, as when, for example, the female lead, after having accepted a marriage proposal exclaims: “I want to feel how it sounds to be Mrs. Phillip Green”. Now looking at the movie from a vantage point more than 60 years later, when so many women, including my daughter, decline to take their husbands' last names, it seems almost incredible that a women would so completely give up her identity as to surrender, not only her last name, but her first name as well.

But much more striking is the total absence in the movie of a face of color. When I say absence I mean we don’t even see a face of color in the role of a maid. They simply don’t exist. There is also the element of class, for we look in vain for even a small glimpse of people who are not part of “polite society”.

But possibly what comes across to me most of all is the change of the face of the parties. Rankin, was a Democrat, as were the many Southern segregationists of the time. Governor Wallace the outspoken segregationist from Alabama, who later ran for President, was a Democrat. Strom Thurmond, the racist Senator from South Carolina, who also later ran for President was a Democrat.

We don’t find people like that in the Democratic Party any more. The first African-American to occupy the White House is a Democrat.

The first women to occupy the White House is also, more likely than not, to be a Democrat.

To be sure we have one prominent African-American Republican as a Presidential candidate, Ben Carson. But it is interesting to note the make-up of the Congressional delegations of the two parties when it comes to Jews, African Americans and women.

Here is the scorecard:

There are a total of 10 (ten) Jews in the US Senate. They are all Democrats. See here.

There are a total of 19 (nineteen) Jews in the House of Representatives. One (1) is a Republican; 18 (eighteen) are Democrats.

There is only one Jewish Governor in the US. He is a Democrat.

There are 9 (nine) Jewish mayors of major cities in the USA. None are Republican. Eight (8) of them are Democrats and one is an Independent. 

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There are a total of 43 (forty-three) African-Americans in the House of Representatives. 43 are Democrats and none are Republicans.

There are two African-Americansin the US Senate. They are Tim Scott of South Carolina and Cory Booker of New Jersey. One is a Republican and one a Democrat. 

There is only one African-American Governor in the US. He is Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. He is a Democrat.

The hoopla about Carson is window-dressing.

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There are 20 women in the US Senate. 14 are Democrats; 6 are Republican.

There are 84 women in the House of Representatives. 62 are Democrats; 22 are Republican. 

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There are Twenty-Nine (29) Latino-Americans in the House of Representatives. Seven (7) are Republican; 22 are Democrats.

How many of these Hispanic House member are Cuban it is not possible to tell. This is crucially important because there is a vast ethnic and political difference between the “Hispanics” from South of the border and from Puerto Rico, and Spanish speaking peoples who hailed from Cuba or from Spain.

There are three (3) Hispanics in the Senate. Two are Republican; One is a Democrat. All are of Cuban descent.

All the so called Republican “Hispanics” vying for the Republican Presidential nomination are of Cuban descent. The media distorts and misrepresents when they put such disparate groups into the same definition on the basis of a common language.

I think that these statistics tell us a great deal.

Neither Jews, nor African-Americans, nor women, have a home in the Republican party of today. It is for good reason that the Republican Party of today has been described as the party of old, Christian, White men.

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Even though it is unrelated, I have to share with my readers a letter I wrote to the New York Times, which I have no doubt will not be published.

To the Editor:

 As a long time reader and subscriber to the NY Times I am appalled at the discriminatory coverage by the Times of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

 Clinton launched her Presidential campaign yesterday, on June 13, 2015, in New York, on Roosevelt Island.

 The TV networks and web outlets gave it prominent and instant coverage. The NJ Newspaper, the Record, covered it on its front page in its Sunday edition.

 The Washington Post gave it gave it front page coverage with the headline: Democracy not ‘just for billionaires,’ Hillary Clinton tells crowd in N.Y. Even the Times of Israel ran the headline: “At first major rally, Clinton touts foreign policy chops”

 But the New York newspaper, The NY Times relegates it to page 14 of its Sunday edition.

 What does that tell us about the paper?

Comments, questions, or corrections are welcome, and will be responded to and distributed with attribution, unless the writer requests that he/she not be identified. However, please give your full name and the town and state in which you reside or have an office.

The Vanishing Middle in America

I am increasingly disturbed by what I perceive as the vanishing middle in America. Of course, many will differ as to what constitutes the middle. The media, that institution so vital to our Democracy, increasingly caters to popular opinion, and too often fails in its responsibility to inform. Too often they seek to reinforce what might be called “the conventional wisdom” without questioning its validity or even its basis in fact.

Thus the conventional wisdom on the “middle” might be those many, who proudly claim to be independents, affiliate with no party and claim they vote on the merits of individual candidates, but when we examine their philosophical orientation we find they have none, and that too often they vote on the basis of the candidates charisma, charm, or whether they once met him and found him a “fellow well met”. It was this kind of thinking that brought many voters into the camp of George W. Bush because as was said at the time of his first election, by Chris Mathews of MSNBC among others, that he was a person one would feel more comfortable drinking beer with. Is this a sound criterion for choosing our President?

As can be seen from the positions of the political parties in the Congress they are now so far apart that the filibuster has become a matter of Republican Party policy and compromise has become a dirty word. The “conventional wisdom” is that the filibuster has always been used and that it protects the rights of the minority. But like so many concepts falling into the category of conventional wisdom it is a myth. To be sure the filibuster was at one time used by devoted segregationists and defenders of the right of states to in effect legalize lynching, but it was never used by any political party as a tool of party policy. Thus in 1957 Senator Strom Thurmond, at that time a segregationist Southern Democrat (later the candidate for President on the Dixiecrat slate and finally a Republican) conducted a one man filibuster, talking against a 1957 civil rights bill for 24 hours and 18 minutes.

But while that was dramatic it was also unusual, and Thurmond was unsuccessful. It was so unusual that there was only an average of one filibuster per Congress during the 1950s. But when the Republicans lost control of the Senate in the 110th Congress of 2007-2008, and even though they still had a Republican President who could veto legislation, they used a record 112 filibusters, and so far in this Congress they have already used this tactic over 40 times and we still have eight months to go.

See also this article in US News & World Report.

Republican voters are so unforgiving of compromise that George H.W. Bush was defeated for agreeing to a compromise with Democrats in order to reduce a looming budget deficit which called for both spending cuts and tax increases, thus violating the party’s commitment to never increasing taxes.

Thus with no middle ground between the parties those who claim to straddle between two irreconcilable philosophies can only be compared to a person with one foot on land and the other in a boat well away from the shore and moving further away. They can only drown. They may swing elections, but they will never bring about a positive legislative agenda for they lack a political philosophy.

There is a great misunderstanding about how much things have changed. I keep hearing about how President Lyndon Johnson was able to get Medicare passed with 68 votes, but bills that have the votes to pass attract more votes than they would otherwise get. That is still true today as can be seen from the passage of the jobs bill where only five Republican Senators voted to end the filibuster but eleven voted for the bill on final passage, the idea being to stop the bill if possible, but record a positive vote for a popular bill if it is going to pass anyway.

The fact is that Johnson only had 55 votes for Medicare that he could count on or to quote from a letter written at the time “Thus if all our supporters are present and voting we would win by a vote of 55 to 45.”

At that time it would have taken 67 votes to stop a filibuster, but the Republican Party never contemplated using that unsavory device. How times have changed!

And how has the media and this so called middle greeted this outrage. They have accepted Republican claims that it is the intent of the founders that it should take 60 votes to pass anything, or even to confirm a Presidential appointment, and that attempts to circumvent such obstructionism, whether by reconciliation, or any other means is in some way unsavory.

And some are even trying to pass of the Tea Partiers as a grass roots movement. Thus Dick Armey, a former Republican majority leader, who more than anyone else founded and is leading the movement tries to pass them off as, “These are folks who don't care about politics and don't like politics and don't like politicians. They're skeptical and cynical about all of them…” but ignores that these are the same people, or at least the political heirs to the John Birch Society or as one article described them, they are “white, male, older, less educated, Southern and religious…”.

But even now the movement is already the subject of a power struggle between Armey, who resists its nativists impulses as led by Tom Tancredo, or in Armey’s words, “… bungling the issue in a way that would alienate much of the electorate, by failing to keep a lid on such anti-immigrant crusaders as Tom Tancredo, a former Colorado congressman.” And Armey has good reason to be concerned about this for as George Will, one of the so-called intellectual spokesmen of the Right has pointed out, “Demography often is political destiny, and 47 percent of children under 5 are minorities. Hispanics are the largest and fastest-growing minority.”

So where do we find the true middle?

It may or may not surprise the reader to hear that I put a claim on that designation. For if the middle is to be found somewhere between FOX and MSNBC, I fit that description. But in order not to burden the reader with too much verbiage in one post, I will defer an exposition on this claim for a few days. In the meantime I hope the readers will take the time to read at least some of my source material.

John Corzine for Governor of New Jersey.

I am going to vote for John Corzine for governor of NJ on Tuesday November 3 for many reasons, but the most important is that he is not a Republican, and that a vote for him is the only vote that will prevent the election of the Republican candidate.

There was a time when I might have voted for a Republican. There was a time when there were some decent Republicans around, like Senator Case of New Jersey, or Senator Javits of New York, or Senator Morse of Oregon. But the big tent Republican Party is no more. They have systematically purged all who do not fit the ideological bent of the party.

To be sure the Republican Party had its genesis in the election of Lincoln and the abolition of slavery, but by 1877 less than a dozen years after the martyrdom of Lincoln, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes sold out the newly freed slaves in order to gain the Presidency. The website Travel and History put it this way: “To the four million former slaves in the South, the Compromise of 1877 was the ‘Great Betrayal.’ Republican efforts to assure civil rights for the blacks were totally abandoned. The white population of the country was anxious to get on with making money. No serious move to restore the rights of black citizens would surface again until the 1950s.”

 Thereafter, Republicans and their big business allies dominated the political landscape with such “luminaries” as Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover representing a dominant Republican Party. Lincoln must have been revolving in his grave. This sorry lot were were interrupted only by the ascendancy of Teddy Roosevelt, who became the only distinguished Republican during this whole era leading up to the Great Depression, and he was never the choice of the Republican establishment. After being elected governor of New York, he was kicked up to the Vice-Presidency to get him out of the way, and much to the dismay of the Republican establishment became President upon the death of McKinley. The Great Depression was not the sole fault of Herbert Hoover. It became inevitable through the policies of three Republican Presidents from 1921 to 1929, eight years, which in many ways resembled the eight years of the Bush Administration. Fortunately for the US and indeed the world, Bush who was only the head of the monster, realized in the last year of his Administration that we were facing a potential repeat of 1929 and took drastic steps to avert disaster, which true to form were opposed by the majority of his party. Also happily, while it took four years between the onset of the Depression in 1929 and the inaugural of FDR, it took only one year between the beginning of the recession of 2008 and the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009.

To be sure the Democratic Party for most of the years after the Civil War was identified as the party of racism and the Republican party continued to bask in the image of Lincoln, but this was the result of the Democratic Party being a House divided against itself, with the part from the old South hanging on to the vestiges of slavery, and the Northern part becoming increasingly the party of emancipation and Civil Rights. Such Democratic Senators as Bilbo and Eastland of Mississippi, and Richard Russell of Georgia along with Strom Thurmond of South Carolina were determined to hold onto the quasi slavery that continued in the Unreconstructed South while northern Democrats like Lehman of New York and Humphrey of Minnesota worked for reform. Thurmond even ran for President in 1948 on the Dixiecrat Party. But the Nixon Administration’s Southern strategy changed that and invited such segregationists into the Republican fold. Thurmond became a Republican in 1964, and as late as 2002 the Republican about to become majority leader of the Senate, Trent Lott, hailed Thurmond with these remarks, “I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either." See The Nation for more background on Lott.

The Republican Party gave us McCarthyism in the 1950’s and torture in this century and even the relatively benign Eisenhower ordered the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected President of Iran, Mohammed Mosedegh, and installed the hated Shah, which was directly responsible for the ascendancy of the present theocracy in that poor country.

   But what of New Jersey? The Star Ledger endorsed the 3rd party candidate, Chris Daggett, but the latest poll shows Daggatt garnering 9% of the vote, so a vote for Daggett is a wasted vote. The Republican candidate, Chris Christie, stands for all the Bromides of the National Republican party. He would be a disaster for the state and his election would be interpreted as a repudiation of Obama. His main attack on Corzine is that NJ has the highest property taxes in the nation, but he forgets to tell us that neither the governor nor the State legislature has any control over property taxes, which are levied by the many towns and villages that dot New Jersey, and that New Jersey had the highest property taxes long before Corzine became governor. He tells us about the high unemployment rate of New Jersey, but he forgets to tell us that it is no higher than the National average and is the product of the Republican induced recession. He also forgets to tell us that New Jersey has the 2nd highest personal income per capita in the nation. As for the income tax, which is under State jurisdiction, New Jersey is 23rd in tax revenue as a % of personal income.

There are only two ways to reduce property taxes. One, with which I fully agree, was suggested by the NJ Chamber of Commerce in a Letter to the Editor in August of 2006. They wrote, “Property tax reform will only happen when there is consolidation of some of the more than 1,000 layers of government that currently have taxing authority” but only Governor Corzine of the three candidates has made any proposal that would further this objective. He has suggested that money should be put into a fund to incentivize municipal and school consolidations. This is the only sound idea on the table.

The other is to raise the income tax and finance our schools with those taxes. Since the main purpose for local property taxes is to fund local schools, changing the funding formula so that schools are funded by state taxes would lower property taxes and remove a major inequity in school funding.

But the biggest problem that New Jersey faces is its huge deficit, which is the direct result of the popular but shortsighted Republican penchant for tax cuts. When Republican Christie Whitman became governor in 1994, she cut the income tax by 1/3 but never found the savings that would offset this loss of revenue. The result, NJ is saddled with huge debt, the interest that goes with it, and no end in sight. Christie promises more of the same, but like all Republicans will not say what programs he will cut, or how he will finance the debt. If Christie is elected NJ will not long continue to be second in per capita income.