jonathan lundell
Research 2000 for Daily Kos:
QUESTION: Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the country of France?
FAV UNFAV NO OPINION ALL 61 32 7 DEM 66 29 5 REP 56 37 7 IND 60 32 8 OTH/REF 58 35 7 NORTHEAST 71 21 8 SOUTH 43 51 6 MIDWEST 67 26 7 WEST 69 24 7
Read the whole thing for San Francisco, New York and Europe.
John Quiggin, restating the obvious.
Rawls, Cohen and the Laffer hypothesis
… There’s very little reason to believe the Laffer hypothesis or equivalent claims about the banks. The reason tax rates aren’t higher and bankers are getting bailed out on hugely generous terms isn’t because Rawlsians have outvoted Cohenites behind the veil of ignorance, or even because lots of economists believe the Laffer hypothesis. It’s because the rich and powerful are, well, rich and powerful. Not only can they promote ideas, however dubious, that serve their cause, they can bring powerful force to bear against any government or political movement that threatens their interest. All of this is obvious enough, but after thirty years in which any mention of these facts has been shouted down as the “politics of envy” or “class hatred”, it may be necessary to restate the obvious. …
Here’s a meta-quandry: I categorized this post (and a couple of other recent posts) under Politics as well as Economics. I’ve been debating the wisdom of doing so, though. In the past, I’ve tended to omit the Politics category on the grounds of redundancy, at least within the context of this blog. What to do…
This is the first in a new series of articles in the Sacramento Bee. This is, of course, nothing new, but it can’t hurt to keep pointing it out.
Lobbyists spend millions — and rarely lose in Legislature
… The oil industry spent more than $10.5 million to influence the Legislature and state agencies. A 2007 industry association report touted that even in a Democratic-controlled Legislature, “of the 52 bills identified as priorities (in 2007), only three that we opposed were approved by the Legislature.”
Of those three, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed two.
A Bee analysis of this past two-year session found the 10 highest-spending employers of private lobbyists shelled out a total of more than $70 million working the halls of state government. They rarely lost. …
… The corps of lobbyists truly is California’s third house – and a bigger one at that. Registered lobbyists outnumber lawmakers in Sacramento 8-to-1.
That ratio allows the richest interests the luxury of swarming the Legislature for key policy battles.
The California Teachers Association, the No. 4 lobbying spender, and the California Chamber of Commerce, ranked No. 8, each deployed nine full-time lobbyists last session.
AT&T had three staff lobbyists – and contracts with nine outside firms.
Frustrated lawmakers taking on a moneyed interest often describe the lobbying ranks aligned against them in military terms.
“I was outgunned,” said Sen. Ellen Corbett, D-San Leandro, who estimated that 30 lobbyists were working against her 2008 bill to ban perfluorinated compounds, or PFCs, from food packaging.
Her bill passed the Legislature, but Schwarzenegger vetoed it.
“I would see them in the hallways meeting, outside the chambers, at committee hearings,” said Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, D-San Francisco, recalling her 2007 fight with the chemical industry. “They were all over the place.”
Ma’s bill – banning phthalates in plastic toys – became law. But it was the only successful chemical ban of a dozen attempted over two years. …
… Legislators and interest groups alike insist the gifts have no impact on lawmaking.
But Don Palmer, a professor who studies ethics and social responsibility, said human nature suggests otherwise.
“Sociologists call it the ‘generalized norm or reciprocity,’ ” said Palmer, associate dean at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management. “We all learned it in kindergarten: When someone is nice to you or generous to you, then you feel obligated to be nice to them.”
AT&T racked up $250,000 in such giveaways to lawmakers, staff and their families in the past two years. The company declined to be interviewed.
“(AT&T) will support everybody,” said former Senate Republican leader Dick Ackerman. “They will invite everybody to their boxes, both Reeps and Dems, because they just want to try and have relationships with everybody.” …
And a sidebar: how AT&T spreads the wealth.
A note on budget deficits from Dean Baker. FIrst put out the fire; then mow the lawn.
Budget Deficits and Blow Up Dolls: It’s the Economy Stupid!
In the movie Lars and the Real Girl, the main character imagines that a female blow-up doll is his fiancée. To humor Lars, his brother and sister-in-law go along with the charade. Over the course of the movie, more people are drawn into the circle, until eventually the whole town is treating Bianca the blow-up doll as one of its leading citizens. …
People are losing their homes through foreclosures at the rate of more than 100,000 a month. The default rates on credit cards, car loans and other debt is at record levels. Most of our major banks are effectively insolvent.
Home and stock prices have plummeted, destroying most of the wealth of the baby boom cohort as they stand on the edge of retirement. The economy is shedding almost 700,000 jobs a month, with the unemployment rate rapidly approaching the highest level since the Great Depression.
In this context we are supposed to be up in arms over the deficit projections for 2013 or 2019? This is a bit like someone complaining about the lawn not being mowed at a time when the house is on fire, it’s just not the first priority. And the media all seem to go along with the charade — yes, they are very concerned about the projected deficit for 2013, just as the characters in the movie expressed concern about the health of Bianca the blow-up doll. …
Stephen Labaton, NY Times, 1999, via Sam Smith.
Congress approved landmark legislation today that opens the door for a new era on Wall Street in which commercial banks, securities houses and insurers will find it easier and cheaper to enter one another’s businesses.
The measure, considered by many the most important banking legislation in 66 years, was approved in the Senate by a vote of 90 to 8 and in the House tonight by 362 to 57. The bill will now be sent to the president, who is expected to sign it, aides said. It would become one of the most significant achievements this year by the White House and the Republicans leading the 106th Congress.
“Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,” Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. “This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.”
The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation’s financial system. The original idea behind Glass-Steagall was that separation between bankers and brokers would reduce the potential conflicts of interest that were thought to have contributed to the speculative stock frenzy before the Depression…
Administration officials and many Republicans and Democrats said the measure would save consumers billions of dollars and was necessary to keep up with trends in both domestic and international banking. Some institutions, like Citigroup, already have banking, insurance and securities arms but could have been forced to divest their insurance underwriting under existing law. Many foreign banks already enjoy the ability to enter the securities and insurance industries…
Consumer groups and civil rights advocates criticized the legislation for being a sop to the nation’s biggest financial institutions. They say that it fails to protect the privacy interests of consumers and community lending standards for the disadvantaged and that it will create more problems than it solves.
The opponents of the measure gloomily predicted that by unshackling banks and enabling them to move more freely into new kinds of financial activities, the new law could lead to an economic crisis down the road when the marketplace is no longer growing briskly.
“I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930’s is true in 2010,” said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. “I wasn’t around during the 1930’s or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980’s when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.”
Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat of Minnesota, said that Congress had “seemed determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes.”
“Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,” Mr. Wellstone said. “Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.”
Others said the legislation was essential for the future leadership of the American banking system.
“If we don’t pass this bill, we could find London or Frankfurt or years down the road Shanghai becoming the financial capital of the world,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. “There are many reasons for this bill, but first and foremost is to ensure that U.S. financial firms remain competitive.”…
One Republican Senator, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, voted against the legislation. He was joined by seven Democrats: Barbara Boxer of California, Richard H. Bryan of Nevada, Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland, Mr. Dorgan and Mr. Wellstone.
In the House, 155 Democrats and 207 Republicans voted for the measure, while 51 Democrats, 5 Republicans and 1 independent opposed it. Fifteen members did not vote…
OK, a bitter joke, but that’s the way we like ’em these days.
Why Is “Buy America” Okay for Banks, but Not Steel?
Those damn protectionists in the Obama administration obviously don’t know anything about economics. How else can we explain the decision to require that the fund managers in their bank bailout plan must be headquartered in the United States.
I can’t wait to see the outraged and condescending editorials in the Washington Post and elsewhere explaining how protectionism is not the way to promote jobs and growth.
(Credit for the protectionism detection goes to my former colleague Heather Boushey, who can now be found at the Center for American Progress.)
—-Dean Baker
Golly. Blasphemy laws are actively (if somewhat capriciously) being enforced in Iran Pennsylvania. And they’re still on the books in Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wyoming.
(The instant offense? Attempting to incorporate “I Choose Hell Productions, LLC” in Pennsylvania.)
To cite just one example, Oklahoma’s statute authorizes as much as one year in prison and a $500 fine for anyone convicted of blasphemy.
The AIG bonus flap is an unwelcome distraction from the main event, for more than one reason, not least because, if the “bonuses” are clawed back, somebody might be deluded into thinking that something has actually been accomplished.
First Hilzoy:
Even though I am furious at the people who brought down AIG, along with all the other Masters of the Universe, I do not support the House bill that passed yesterday — the one that would tax bonuses at 90%. For starters, it’s badly targeted. On the one hand, it leaves out the incredibly troubling Merrill Lynch bonuses, along with any other bonuses paid before Jan. 1 of this year. On the other hand, it hits people who were just writing life insurance policies at AIG. Moreover, it also hits anyone AIG hires now. Suppose, for instance, that AIG were to hire Paul Krugman to supervise the liquidation of its Financial Products Division. And suppose AIG wanted to pay him a bonus if he did his job quickly and well. His bonus would be taxed under this bill, even though he had nothing to do with the financial crisis (which is why I picked him), and is being given a bonus for helping to solve it.
The bill would also allow firms receiving TARP funds to avoid the tax by simply paying their employees exorbitant salaries. Bonuses are bad, but exactly the same amount of money paid to exactly the same employee in the form of a salary is apparently fine. This seems exactly backwards to me. Part of the problem with the AIG bonuses was precisely that they were not tied to performance in any way: the people at AIG-FP, who had gotten enormous amounts of money when times were good, supposedly on the basis of their performance, locked down the same level of compensation when it looked as though their trades were about to go bad. Now, apparently, we want to give people an enormous incentive to decouple their compensation from performance in exactly the same way. Oh goody.…
Then Robert Reich:
… Angry populism thrives on stories about the rich and privileged who use their influence to get cushy deals for themselves at the expense of the rest of us. AIG’s bonuses provide a perfect example. It’s too bad the same populist outrage doesn’t extend to issues involving far more money, affecting many more people, and entailing far more insidious abuses of power. Congress’s potemkin populism over AIG’s bonuses disguises business as usual when it comes to the really big stuff.
I’ll quote just a little bit of Matt Taibbi’s piece in Rolling Stone, and let you go Read The Whole Thing. Here’s the thing: the penny-ante AIG bonuses are a distraction. Let’s pay attention, please.
… In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world’s most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations.
In other words, it’s AIG’s rip-roaringly shitty business model writ almost inconceivably massive — to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that’s been allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what kinds of crap is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for it? When exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren’t such a nightmare.
…
As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.
The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.
“But wait a minute,” you say to them. “No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what’s left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?”
But before you even finish saying that, they’re rolling their eyes, because You Don’t Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they’re on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.
Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.
I wouldn’t have guessed that the likes of Jim Cramer would find a defense from the right. Or maybe it’s simply that any target of Jon Stewart must be OK. Here’s Marty Peretz at The New Republic.
On Jim Cramer: What I think has happened between Cramer and part of the entertainment industry—which the fact and opinion industry is fast coming to resemble—is that Jim is actually animated by a passion. It is the passion of democratic capitalism. That concern is very different from the concerns of the $10-20 million television comedians who ride around in stretch limousines. Those folk are happy when the people are in trouble. Even Jon Stewart and the makers of his “Daily Show” are happy. Jim Fallows, an always righteous commentator (like his ex-boss Jimmy Carter), has elevated him to Edward R. Murrow who was also over-rated in his time. The folk Cramer has been trying to help all these years with “Mad Money” are basically middle class investors…
via Brad DeLong
Well, we can hope so. I’m posting this, though, for one line. Juan Cole.
… Some Republicans claimed that Obama’s plan vindicated their Iraq policies, which is sort of like claiming that Captain Sullenberger’s water landing in the Hudson vindicated the geese that knocked out the jet engines. …
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at CPAC: “who wants to hang out with guys like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich when you can be with Rush Limbaugh?” (explaining that conservatives are more “interesting” and “fun” than liberals).
I do hope that this kind of thing doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody. The culture of money, power and politics in DC (or your state capital or county seat) is as bipartisan as they come. Even if he tries (and I’m skeptical), Obama isn’t going to drive the moneychangers from Capitol Hill.
Josh Marshall: Stanford (Hearted) the Dems
Sir Allen Stanford may be on the run today facing an $8 billion fraud charge. But back in the beginning of this decade he was pouring tons of money into Washington to help block a series of bills that would have created problems for his Antigua-based off-shore banking empire, which now appears to have been a massive fraud.
At the key time, Democrats controlled the Senate, where the key actions were going to take place. And Stanford poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Democratic coffers to help (successfully) deep six legislation he wanted killed.
David Kaiser has a nice overview of the Israeli elections, quod vide. What I’m curious about (and can’t find a way to ask him directly), though, is this bit:
Alone among democracies, Israel elects [its] 120 Knesset deputies according to proportional representation.
Unless I’m missing Kaiser’s point, this will be news to a rather long list of democracies that choose their legislators with some form or other of PR, including the Netherlands, which, like Israel, uses a nation-wide party list (most countries using PR have smaller multi-member districts).
As a side note, the recent role of Republican senators Collins, Snowe and Specter in negotiating the stimulus bill should put to rest the notion that the disproportionate negotiating power of a small swing group is peculiar to PR systems. Not that there aren’t plenty of other examples—Gang of 14, anyone?
Comments are open, David.
Some fun warnings about Clinton’s 1993 (remember 1993?) deficit reduction package, via Congress Matters. How did that work out, again?
Rep. Robert Michel (R-IL), Los Angeles Times, 5/28/93: They will remember who let loose this deadly virus into our economic bloodstream.
Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA), GOP Press Conference, House TV Gallery, 8/5/93: I believe this will lead to a recession next year. This is the Democrat machine’s recession, and each one of them will be held personally accountable.
Rep. John Kasich (R-OH), 8/5/93: Do you know what? This is your package. We will come back here next year and try to help you when this puts the economy in the gutter…
Rep. John Kasich (R-OH), CNN, 7/28/93: This plan will not work. If it was to work, then I’d have to become a Democrat…
Rep. Robert Dornan (R-CA), 8/5/93: The problem with our economy is that there is too little employment and too little growth. This plan will do nothing to improv that condition and will actually make it worse.
Rep. Christopher Cox (R-CA), 5/27/93: This is really the Dr. Kevorkian plan for our economy.
Rep. Thomas Ewing (R-IL), 8/5/93: …This bill is a disaster waiting to happen.
Rep. Jim Ramstad (R-MN), 3/17/93: …will stifle economic growth, destroy jobs, reduce revenues, and increase the deficit.
Rep. Phil Crane (R-IL), 3/18/93: …a recipe for economic and fiscal disaster.
Rep. John Kasich (R-OH), CNN, 7/28/93: …We have a stagnant economy and there is nothing down the road that makes it look like we’re going to have the kind of economic growth that puts people to work.
Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX), CNN, 8/2/93: The impact on job creation is going to be devastating, and the American young people in particular will suffer a fairly substantial deferment of their lives because there simply won’t be jobs for the next two to three years to go around to our young graduates across the country.
Rep. John Kasich (R-OH), 5/27/93: …your economic program is a job killer.
Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX), 8/5/93: The economy will sputter along. Dreams will be put off and all this for the hollow promise of deficit reduction and magical theories of lower interest rates. Like so many of the President’s past promises, deficit reduction will be another cruel hoax.
Rep. Wally Herger (R-CA), 8/4/93: The simple fact is that the Clinton plan will not lower interest rates. It will not lower inflation. It will not create jobs. And it will no lower the deficit. The Clinton tax plan will spur inflation, lose jobs, increase the deficit, and hurt our economic growth.
Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-OH), 5/27/93: The votes we will take today will not be soon forgotten by the American voter. [They] will lead to more taxes, higher inflation, and slower economic growth.
Rep. John Kasich (R-OH), GOP News Conference, Senate Gallery, 8/3/93: Come next year… we’re going to find out whether we have higher deficits, we’re going to find out whether we have a slower economy, we’re going to find out what’s going to happen to interest rates, and it’s our bet that this is a job killer.
Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX), CNN, 8/2/93: Clearly this is a job killer in the short run. The revenues forecast for this budget will not materialize; the costs of this budget will be greater than what is forecast. The deficit will be worse, and it is not a good omen for the American economy.
Rep. Jim Bunning (R-KY), 8/5/93: It will not cut the deficit. It will not create jobs. And it will not cut spending.
Rep. Dick Armey, CNN, 2/18/93: I will tell you, this program will not give you deficit reduction. It will be a disaster for the performance of the economy.
Rep. Clifford Stearns (R-FL), 3/17/93: …It will be the kind of impact that this country can’t absorb. It will slow economic growth, contribute to the massive federal deficit….
Rep. Joel Hefley (R-CO), 8/4/93: …It will raise your taxes, increase the deficit, and kill over one million jobs.
Krugman.
… This is really unbelievable:
The drug and medical-device industries are mobilizing to gut a provision in the stimulus bill that would spend $1.1 billion on research comparing medical treatments, portraying it as the first step to government rationing.
Because freedom is all about laying out vast sums on medical treatments without knowing whether they’re actually doing any good. …
Update, also Krugman:
Good news: Congress has defied the efforts of drug companies and medical-device producers to strip comparative effectiveness research from the stimulus bill. One small victory for sanity and justice.
Paul Krugman, Martin Wolf, Yves Smith…
Shock and oy
Martin Wolf has it right:First, focus all attention on reversing the collapse in demand now, rather than on the global architecture.
Second, employ overwhelming force. The time for “shock and awe” in economic policymaking is now.
…
Unfortunately, what is coming out of the US is desperately discouraging. Instead of an overwhelming fiscal stimulus, what is emerging is too small, too wasteful and too ill-focused. Instead of decisive action to recapitalise banks, which must mean temporary public control of insolvent banks, the US may be returning to the immoral and ineffective policy of bailing out those who now hold the “toxic assets”.
You know, it was widely expected that Obama would have a stimulus plan ready to pass Congress even before his inauguration. That didn’t happen. We were told that this was because the economic team was working flat out on the financial rescue.
In fact, when it comes to bank rescue it’s hard to see much evidence that anything was accomplished during all that time; the team is still — still! — running ideas up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes. And the ideas look remarkably bad. (Welcome to the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill, Yves.)
Meanwhile, when it came to stimulus legislation, when Obama finally introduced his economic plan he immediately began negotiating with himself, preemptively offering concessions to the GOP, which voted against the plan anyway. (And Obama appears, in the name of bipartisanship, to have thrown away a Senate vote he may well need.)
As a wise man recently said, failure to act effectively risks turning this slump into a catastrophe. Yet there’s a sense, watching the process so far, of low energy. What’s going on?
Michael Bérubé scores an exclusive blog interview with the new RNC chair.
Hey American Airspacepeople, do we have a treat for you today! This humble but insanely ambitious blog has scored the very first blog interview with Michael Steele, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee!
…
MB: … So can you say a few words about the new Republican agenda? You must be very excited about kicking it off.
MS: I am indeed very excited. This year we’re going to take a bold new approach to governing: we’re going to vote “no” on whatever Barack Hussein Obama and the Democrat party proposes. Then we’re going to complain that Obama’s attempts at bipartisanship have failed. We’re pretty sure we’ll have the media with us on this—they’ve certainly played ball so far.
MB: Um—and that’s it? Just voting no all the time and then making disingenuous complaints? Really?
MS [laughing]: No, that’s not it. Those are just temporizing measures. We’re actually just biding our time and messing up his stuff until we can impeach him.
MB: Impeach him? For what? I mean, don’t you have to have a reason?
MS: Not necessarily. But don’t worry, we’ll think of something. Look at what we’ve got already: between Daschle and Blagojevich, Obama’s administration is the most corrupt government in American history.
MB: Uh, I don’t think Blagojevich was actually. . . .
MS: Doesn’t matter. The verdict is in, and the Obama presidency has failed. He came in here promising to change the tone, and he trashed the place, and it wasn’t his place. He promised to reach across the aisle, and look what he’s done so far: nothing but vicious attacks on Rush Limbaugh and foot-dragging on the tax cuts Americans need. It’s altogether disgraceful, really, and we’re about to lose our patience with him. We can only take so much, you know. …
There’s nothing here you don’t already know, but you also know you want to read it. Go ahead. Indulge.
… To allow a craven scum eater like Rod Blagojevich to worm his way into the national political arena at precisely the moment when Barack Obama was supposed to begin restoring the great-power credibility America lost during the Bush years would be an almost unforgivable mistake. But that’s exactly what happened. Because Obama or no Obama, the Democrats are still the Democrats, and there still isn’t any political fight, it would seem, that they can’t find a way to lose.
Roger Clegg, at the National Review Online’s The Corner, would like to “improve black culture” (or at least parts of it). Who knew it could be so simple?
So, how do we address the racial stratification? A central task is to improve some parts of black culture—most obviously by addressing the fact that seven out of ten African Americans are born out of wedlock. It is illegitimacy that results in the bunching of black people in poverty and unemployment and prison. Fix that problem, and there won’t be much left to improving race relations.
Now, on racial preferences. …
It turns out that it’s all those “black people in poverty and unemployment and prison” that are responsible for bigotry:
The reason for bigotry today is not that it is taught by the government or in school or even at one’s mother’s knee, but that the bigots observe the disproportionate number of African Americans who are poor or jobless or in prison or whatever, and conclude that there is something wrong with the whole race. This is unfortunate, but so long as these disproportions occur, it will happen
Where do they find these guys?
