AI
Sunday, May 18, 2014 10:55:35 PM
Holder swipes at Roberts on race
By JOSH GERSTEIN |
5/17/14 9:07 PM EDT
Attorney General Eric Holder took a swipe Saturday at Chief Justice John Roberts's jurisprudence on the issue of race, arguing that forcing the government to be entirely color-blind isn't the way to heal America's racial ills.
Speaking at commencement exercises for historically-black Morgan State University in Baltimore, Holder alluded to high-profile controversies over racial comments by figures like rancher Clive Bundy and L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling, but said that it's a mistake to think that America's most serious racial problems stem from repugnant public statements. The attorney general argued that it's more important to end policies that perpetuate racial differences than to dwell on occasional spurts of racist rhetoric.
"Chief Justice John Roberts has argued that the path to ending racial discrimination is to give less consideration to the issue of race altogether. This presupposes that racial discrimination is at a sufficiently low ebb that it doesn’t need to be actively confronted. In its most obvious forms, it might be. But discrimination does not always come in the form of a hateful epithet or a Jim Crow-like statute," Holder declared. "And so we must continue to take account of racial inequality, especially in its less obvious forms, and actively discuss ways to combat it."
Holder was referring to Roberts's plurality opinion in 2007 case which overturned the Seattle public school system's use of race to improve diversity. "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," the chief justice wrote.
The attorney general made clear again Saturday that he prefers the formulation Justice Sonia Sotomayor offered in her dissent from a Supreme Court ruling last month on Michigan's affirmative action ban.
"We must not 'wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. …The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race," Holder said, quoting Sotomayor rephrasing Roberts.
On the issue of racist talk versus policies with a disparate racial impact, the attorney general told the Morgan State graduates: "Policies that disenfranchise specific groups are more pernicious than hateful rants. Proposals that feed uncertainty, question the desire of a people to work, and relegate particular Americans to economic despair are more malignant than intolerant public statements, no matter how many eyebrows the outbursts might raise. And a criminal justice system that treats groups of people differently–and punishes them unequally–has a much more negative impact than misguided words that we can reject out of hand."
http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2014/05/holder-swipes-at-roberts-on-race-188716.html?ml=po_r
===
When the rich are born to rule, the results can be fatal
I was schooled in a system that separated me from ordinary people's lives. The same fate has befallen the global elite
George Monbiot
The Guardian, Tuesday 29 January 2013 07.30 AEST
Jump to comments (1124)
Illustration by Daniel Pudles
Those whom the gods love die young: are they trying to tell me something? Due to an inexplicable discontinuity in space-time, on Sunday I turned 50. I have petitioned the relevant authorities, but there's nothing they can do.
So I will use the occasion to try to explain the alien world from which I came. To understand how and why we are now governed as we are, you need to know something of that strange place.
I was born into the third tier of the dominant class: those without land or capital, but with salaries high enough to send their children to private schools. My preparatory school, which I attended from the age of eight, was a hard place, still Victorian in tone. We boarded, and saw our parents every few weeks. We were addressed only by our surnames and caned for misdemeanours. Discipline was rigid, pastoral care almost non-existent. But it was also strangely lost.
A few decades earlier, the role of such schools was clear: they broke boys' attachment to their families and re-attached them to the institutions – the colonial service, the government, the armed forces – through which the British ruling class projected its power. Every year they released into the world a cadre of kamikazes, young men fanatically devoted to their caste and culture.
By the time I was eight those institutions had either collapsed (in the case of colonial service), fallen into other hands (government), or were no longer a primary means by which British power was asserted (the armed forces). Such schools remained good at breaking attachments, less good at creating them.
But the old forms and the old thinking persisted. The school chaplain used to recite a prayer that began "let us now praise famous men". Most of those he named were heroes of colonial conquest or territorial wars. Some, such as Douglas Haig and Herbert Kitchener, were by then widely regarded as war criminals. Our dormitories were named after the same people. The history we were taught revolved around topics such as Gordon of Khartoum, Stanley and Livingstone and the Black Hole of Calcutta. In geography, the maps still showed much of the globe coloured red.
My second boarding school was a kinder, more liberal place. But we remained as detached from the rest of society as Carthusian monks .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthusian . The world, when we were released into it, was unrecognisable. It bore no relationship to our learning or experience. The result was cognitive dissonance: a highly uncomfortable state from which human beings will do almost anything to escape. There were two principal means. One – the more painful – was to question everything you held to be true. This process took me years: in fact, it has not ended. It was, at first, highly disruptive to my peace of mind and sense of self.
The other, as US Republicans did during the Bush presidency, is to create your own reality. If the world does not fit your worldview, you either shore up your worldview with selectivity and denial, or (if you have power) you try to bend the world to fit the shape it takes in your mind. Much of the effort of conservative columnists and editors, and of certain politicians and historians, appears to be devoted to these tasks.
In the Origins of Totalitarianism .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism , Hannah Arendt explains that the nobles of pre-revolutionary France "did not regard themselves as representative of the nation, but as a separate ruling caste which might have much more in common with a foreign people of the same society and condition than with its compatriots".
Last year the former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote something very similar .. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/ .. about the dominant classes of the US: "the rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens … the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it."
Secession from the concerns and norms of the rest of society characterises any well established elite. Our own ruling caste, schooled separately, brought up to believe in justifying fairytales, lives in a world of its own, from which it can project power without understanding or even noticing the consequences. A removal from the life of the rest of the nation is no barrier to the desire to dominate it. In fact, it appears to be associated with a powerful sense of entitlement.
So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its frontbench can rock with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them.
Twitter: @georgemonbiot. A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/28/rich-born-to-rule-fatal
.. a couple of yours in case some haven't seen them, yet .. the first the rational Chris Hayes
Why conservatives want to dismantle the IRS
and for stark contrast ..
Alex Jones Conspiracies Debunked By... A Nazi??
totally irrational except for the rational conclusion of Nazi SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewsky
By JOSH GERSTEIN |
5/17/14 9:07 PM EDT
Attorney General Eric Holder took a swipe Saturday at Chief Justice John Roberts's jurisprudence on the issue of race, arguing that forcing the government to be entirely color-blind isn't the way to heal America's racial ills.
Speaking at commencement exercises for historically-black Morgan State University in Baltimore, Holder alluded to high-profile controversies over racial comments by figures like rancher Clive Bundy and L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling, but said that it's a mistake to think that America's most serious racial problems stem from repugnant public statements. The attorney general argued that it's more important to end policies that perpetuate racial differences than to dwell on occasional spurts of racist rhetoric.
"Chief Justice John Roberts has argued that the path to ending racial discrimination is to give less consideration to the issue of race altogether. This presupposes that racial discrimination is at a sufficiently low ebb that it doesn’t need to be actively confronted. In its most obvious forms, it might be. But discrimination does not always come in the form of a hateful epithet or a Jim Crow-like statute," Holder declared. "And so we must continue to take account of racial inequality, especially in its less obvious forms, and actively discuss ways to combat it."
Holder was referring to Roberts's plurality opinion in 2007 case which overturned the Seattle public school system's use of race to improve diversity. "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," the chief justice wrote.
The attorney general made clear again Saturday that he prefers the formulation Justice Sonia Sotomayor offered in her dissent from a Supreme Court ruling last month on Michigan's affirmative action ban.
"We must not 'wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. …The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race," Holder said, quoting Sotomayor rephrasing Roberts.
On the issue of racist talk versus policies with a disparate racial impact, the attorney general told the Morgan State graduates: "Policies that disenfranchise specific groups are more pernicious than hateful rants. Proposals that feed uncertainty, question the desire of a people to work, and relegate particular Americans to economic despair are more malignant than intolerant public statements, no matter how many eyebrows the outbursts might raise. And a criminal justice system that treats groups of people differently–and punishes them unequally–has a much more negative impact than misguided words that we can reject out of hand."
http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2014/05/holder-swipes-at-roberts-on-race-188716.html?ml=po_r
===
When the rich are born to rule, the results can be fatal
I was schooled in a system that separated me from ordinary people's lives. The same fate has befallen the global elite
George Monbiot
The Guardian, Tuesday 29 January 2013 07.30 AEST
Jump to comments (1124)
Illustration by Daniel Pudles
Those whom the gods love die young: are they trying to tell me something? Due to an inexplicable discontinuity in space-time, on Sunday I turned 50. I have petitioned the relevant authorities, but there's nothing they can do.
So I will use the occasion to try to explain the alien world from which I came. To understand how and why we are now governed as we are, you need to know something of that strange place.
I was born into the third tier of the dominant class: those without land or capital, but with salaries high enough to send their children to private schools. My preparatory school, which I attended from the age of eight, was a hard place, still Victorian in tone. We boarded, and saw our parents every few weeks. We were addressed only by our surnames and caned for misdemeanours. Discipline was rigid, pastoral care almost non-existent. But it was also strangely lost.
A few decades earlier, the role of such schools was clear: they broke boys' attachment to their families and re-attached them to the institutions – the colonial service, the government, the armed forces – through which the British ruling class projected its power. Every year they released into the world a cadre of kamikazes, young men fanatically devoted to their caste and culture.
By the time I was eight those institutions had either collapsed (in the case of colonial service), fallen into other hands (government), or were no longer a primary means by which British power was asserted (the armed forces). Such schools remained good at breaking attachments, less good at creating them.
But the old forms and the old thinking persisted. The school chaplain used to recite a prayer that began "let us now praise famous men". Most of those he named were heroes of colonial conquest or territorial wars. Some, such as Douglas Haig and Herbert Kitchener, were by then widely regarded as war criminals. Our dormitories were named after the same people. The history we were taught revolved around topics such as Gordon of Khartoum, Stanley and Livingstone and the Black Hole of Calcutta. In geography, the maps still showed much of the globe coloured red.
My second boarding school was a kinder, more liberal place. But we remained as detached from the rest of society as Carthusian monks .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthusian . The world, when we were released into it, was unrecognisable. It bore no relationship to our learning or experience. The result was cognitive dissonance: a highly uncomfortable state from which human beings will do almost anything to escape. There were two principal means. One – the more painful – was to question everything you held to be true. This process took me years: in fact, it has not ended. It was, at first, highly disruptive to my peace of mind and sense of self.
The other, as US Republicans did during the Bush presidency, is to create your own reality. If the world does not fit your worldview, you either shore up your worldview with selectivity and denial, or (if you have power) you try to bend the world to fit the shape it takes in your mind. Much of the effort of conservative columnists and editors, and of certain politicians and historians, appears to be devoted to these tasks.
In the Origins of Totalitarianism .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism , Hannah Arendt explains that the nobles of pre-revolutionary France "did not regard themselves as representative of the nation, but as a separate ruling caste which might have much more in common with a foreign people of the same society and condition than with its compatriots".
Last year the former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote something very similar .. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/ .. about the dominant classes of the US: "the rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens … the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it."
Secession from the concerns and norms of the rest of society characterises any well established elite. Our own ruling caste, schooled separately, brought up to believe in justifying fairytales, lives in a world of its own, from which it can project power without understanding or even noticing the consequences. A removal from the life of the rest of the nation is no barrier to the desire to dominate it. In fact, it appears to be associated with a powerful sense of entitlement.
So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its frontbench can rock with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them.
Twitter: @georgemonbiot. A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/28/rich-born-to-rule-fatal
.. a couple of yours in case some haven't seen them, yet .. the first the rational Chris Hayes
Why conservatives want to dismantle the IRS
and for stark contrast ..
Alex Jones Conspiracies Debunked By... A Nazi??
totally irrational except for the rational conclusion of Nazi SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewsky
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