Morning Reads for June 27

“the biggest unions”

Not my point or the point. The point is that very few food and hotel workers, retail workers and truckers are actually in those unions, and moreover those jobs do not make union membership mandatory in any way. (There are some niche jobs that require it – i.e. certain mechanics and machinists – but in some cases those also involve professional standards/licensing so it isn’t that cut and dry.) So that leaves teachers and state/county employees. Which I referenced in my own reply. And in that reply I mentioned that being a public employee is a choice. Only 10.7% of the workforce and that percentage has been dropping for decades. Changing workplaces should be less onerous than filing a federal lawsuit.

@xdog:

1. There are a lot of things that free traders can say about tariffs but calling them discriminatory is not one of them. Among other things, it ignores that free trade ideology was practically nonexistent in both parties before the rise of George H. W. Bush. Progressives tend to have this “the world only began to exist yesterday” attitude that pretends as if human civilization would cease to exist were policies that they put in place just 10-20 years ago were to be overturned (exhibit A: DACA). Conservatives shouldn’t follow their example.

2. “jump-starting the war on drugs” that is funny. Let’s just say that the rhetoric on drugs by civil rights leaders has changed 180 degrees. An example: the person responsible for the feds’ treating crack cocaine far more harshly than powder cocaine was none other than longtime Congressional Black Caucus stalwart John Conyers. Where today people claim that the war on drugs itself is racist, back then claiming that there was any connection or correlation at all between blacks and Hispanics and illegal drugs was racist. When Jesse Jackson first began pushing decriminalization of drugs during the Clinton administration – and that had more to do with his personal vendetta against Bill Clinton and especially Al Gore than actual policy – it represented a major shift. And when “legalize it” libertarians who despised the Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Fair Housing, Fair Lending etc. Acts all of a sudden started to exhibit great concern for the plight of minorities in the context of the drug war – but while remaining dismissive to hostile everywhere else – it was a real hoot. But never forget that Jeff Sessions and the CBC had the same policy positions on the drug war in the 1980s, which should give you pause before you attribute the opinions of those that haven’t changed to racism.

3. “reversing policies to keep people out of jail just because they’re poor … opposing sentencing reforms”
Please note that the general philosophy towards criminal justice and law enforcement has drastically shifted the past 2 generations. An example: “correctional facilities” used to be called “penal institutions.” There was once a deep and wide consensus – and by this I mean like 90% of the population meaning that it encompassed all racial groups – that crime was the result of individual moral choice and not economic and social conditions. It wasn’t that long ago. It was the worldview of a movie written, produced and directed by black Americans based on a book by a black author and filmed at a black owned film studio called “Once Upon A Time When We Were Colored.” Came out in 1996. A worldview diametrically opposed to this year’s “Black Panther.” To put it another way … did you know that Billy McKinney, father of Cynthia McKinney, was a “lock ’em up” tough on crime sort? And do you recall ANY opposition from the black community on Zell Miller’s two strikes law? Or that as recently as the late 90s a majority of the black community supported capital punishment and opposed gun control? (Associating capital punishment with George W. Bush is what finally pushed it below 50%.) So again, are you so willing to claim that people who hold the same views that a majority of black Americans did during the Clinton administration do so because of animus against blacks and Hispanics? (By the way, you should investigate the views of a great many black leaders and organizations on the topic of illegal immigration from that era. It was no different from Trump’s current position. Many of them actually proposed that illegal immigration was a Republican/big business plot to drive down wages and displace blacks from the labor force.)

“Blowing off the National Voter Registration Act. Dropping federal opposition to voter ID laws as intentionally discriminatory.”

If you go to Weekly Standard, National Review or anything similar they will state that Republicans are trying to limit Democrat votes as opposed to black and Hispanic ones. Whether you agree or disagree with their attempts to limit the franchise – I recall reading their columnists rooting for heavy rains in Democratic leaning areas on election day – they can plausibly claim that their motivations are partisan as opposed to racial. Were the black vote to favor Democrats 60/40 as it did during the 1970s as opposed to 95/5 as it does today, it would be easier to put that theory to the test. But suffice to say that there are absolutely no attempts to make it harder for Hispanics to vote in Texas, because Republicans easily win the majority of Hispanic voters in that state, and the same is true for Florida. Republicans also have never been accused of targeting Asian voters anywhere as historically – until Barack Obama’s election – Asians had a slight preference towards the GOP in voting.

“Revising Title IX”

Gender, not race. It would interest you to know that changes to Title IX were what allowed public charter schools such Chicago’s Urban Prep Charter Academy – and Georgia’s Ivy Preparatory Academy – to no longer fear the specter of the sort of discrimination lawsuits that would financially bankrupt them even were they to ultimately prevail.

“Tariffs on Canadian newsprint in response to complaints of a single hedge fund-owned paper producer.”

Pettiness != racism.

While there are good examples of what you are speaking of, your rejoinder did not contain any of them.