Our Elections 2010 hardly transformational---unless a more Third World, apartheid-driven America is your idea of “transformational” democracy---is sadly going to drive our public policy for generations to come.
Arianna Huffington sees us as headed toward becoming a Third World nation---I agree---but that’s just the beginning. Given our apartheid tendencies, it may be an “evermore Apartheid America.” Realistically, it always has been and for generations yet to come it will continue to be. And with the GOPers in charge---conditions in the entire nation will soon be just as dismally deplorable as they are in Texas Red.
Why do I say that? Let me briefly recap.
How about those compassionate conservative religiosities?Incarceration: it’s what the Christ would do, No?
The Families' Advocate
Texas incarcerates more of its residents than any other state. Most of them are people of color. In Houston, Tarsha Jackson, an organizer with the advocacy group Grassroots Leadership, is the go-to criminal justice person in her community. When she isn’t organizing “black-brown unity meetings,” she has an informal, full-time job helping families who have nowhere else to turn.
http://www.texasobserver.org/cover-story/the-families-advocate
White ex-officer's sentence spurs Oakland protest
OAKLAND, Calif. – Police made more than 150 arrests as a crowd broke windows and knocked down fences, protesting a Los Angeles court decision to sentence a white former transit officer to the minimum term for fatally shooting an unarmed black man.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101106/ap_on_re_us/us_train_station_shooting
Think last Tuesday was bad? Wait 'til Republicans get to redraw the electoral map.
The Republican Decade?
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/11/republican-decade-congressional-redistricting
Republicans map out their agenda of less
Arianna Huffington Sees A 'Third World America’
a class-less class of compassionate conservative religiosities should scare the be-jesus out of you…
Meet Your 112th Congress
A quick guide to the gay-bashing, detainee-abusing, coal-fired, bayonet-fixing class of 2011.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/11/meet-your-112th-congress
Report says education charities stingy with needy kids
A watchdog charity group has chided the nation's biggest education foundations for only allocating 11 percent of their collective grant money to the country's neediest children.The National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy's report evaluated 672 foundations that gave at least $1 million in grants to education from 2006 to 2008. Only about 11 percent of those grants went to "marginalized communities," defined primarily as children in low-income families and minority children. And just 2 percent of those funds went to fostering long-term change through advocacy efforts and community building.
This leaves the "alarming inequities in educational opportunities" in America unaddressed, the report charges. Since about half of public school funding comes from the local level, students living in poor areas tend to go to schools that are under-funded, and kids in richer areas go to better-funded schools. This feeds the persistent achievement gap between low-income and high-income students and minority and white students.
compassionate conservative euro anglo religiosity majority made the difference?---weirdly usual…..
Weird Findings From 2010's Exit Poll Data
The most important categories are probably white voters and older voters, both of whom shifted Republican far more than the general population. Beyond the raw size of the shift, however, whites are important because their absolute numbers are so big and older voters are important because their big.
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/11/raw-data
A return to the norm
For all the turmoil, the spectacle, the churning - for all the old bulls slain and fuzzy-cheeked freshmen born - the great Republican wave of 2010 is simply a return to the norm. The tide had gone out; the tide came back. A center-right country restores the normal congressional map: a sea of interior red, bordered by blue coasts and dotted by blue islands of ethnic/urban density.
Presently there are seven (7) million plus Americans tethered to the prison-industrial complex. In Arizona the for profit prison-industrial complex wrote, promoted and lobbied for SB 1070. 18 million Americans are out of work and unlikely to secure a job---at least not within the next two to four years. Mexican children are prisoners of the prison-industrial complex and of Euro Anglos on both sides of the Rio Grande. Mexicans and Mexican Americans are the fastest growing minority but also the Gazans of the U.S. The nation’s apartheid public education system just becomes more and more segregated and useless. Healthcare if it ever arrives is another three years away---a long time for GOPers to foist their twisted, tortured and tormented version of reality and compassionate conservative “values” on us all. Need I say more?
Notwithstanding Americans are more concerned about whether Conan O’Brien (a pampered, over-rated, talent-less, millionaire White Boy) gets a TV show than any of the conditions I setout above. Sad and unmendable.
From Texas Red: a cratered landscape of prisons, deplorable apartheid public education, lack of healthcare and politicians and majority population intent on keeping it that way…
Hasta Siempre,
Hasta Siempre,
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Illusions of Justice
The Rope, the Chair, and the Needle: Capital Punishment in Texas, 1923-1990
“However, James W. Marquart, Sheldon Ekland-Olson, and Jonathan R. Sorensen offer a more complex thesis. In their book, The Rope, the Chair, and the Needle: Capital Punishment in Texas, 1923-1990,[5] they argue that Texas' execution rate reflects the Southern "cultural tradition of exclusion," and that "[s]uch exclusion was a basic element of the legacy of slavery."
The Conscience of a Liberal
Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity
13 Bankers
Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future
Profiles in Courage
George Carlin describing facts about this plutocracy/Oligarchy
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