“ Feminism is anti-sexism. A male who has divested of male privilege, who has embraced feminist politics, is a worthy comrade in struggle, in no way a threat to feminism, whereas a female who remains wedded to sexist thinking and behavior infiltrating feminist movement is a dangerous threat. Significantly, the most powerful intervention made by consciousness-raising groups was the demand that all females confront their internalized sexism, their allegiance to patriarchal thinking and action, and their commitment to feminist conversion. That intervention is still needed. It remains the necessary step for anyone choosing feminist politics. The enemy within must be transformed before we can confront the enemy outside. The threat, the enemy, is sexist thought and behavior. As long as females take up the banner of feminist politics without addressing and transforming their own sexism, ultimately the movement will be undermined. ”
-bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody
just going to emphasize that last sentence again: As long as females take up the banner of feminist politics without addressing and transforming their own sexism, ultimately the movement will be undermined.
(via browndenim)
“ In one 1962 survey roughly 90 percent of White people believed Black children had an equally fair opportunity to get a quality education as White children. Wise recognizes that White Americans’ lack of awareness—and denial about the extent of racial inequality in America—is dated, calling it “borderline delusional”. ”
(Unpacking the Snowflake - Kevin M. Hemer)
In 1962— before Civil Rights legislation, when Black people were literally having their houses bombed for moving into white neighborhoods, and Black neighborhoods were being bombed in entirety for having nice houses, white people were literally releasing dogs on Black children (my parents) for walking to school, Black children and teenagers were literally leaving school to protest and then being arrested for demanding to be treated equally, police commissioners were driving through Black neighborhoods in tanks to instill fear in them for wanting to be treated equally, everything was separate with Black people getting the shittier end, they literally had lower education standards for Black schools and Black people were still getting lynched and the KKK was strong—
White people when surveyed said “there is equal opportunity“… So don’t think it’s weird that 93% or so of white people still think “there is equal opportunity” today. They’ve literally always been wrong and still are.
(via fuckyeahcracker)
This post isn’t about welfare, but it beautifully illustrates a point I’ve been making (or trying to make) since I started this blog:
Privileged people do not understand the realities of people who lack their privilege.
White people assume PoC have the same education and job opportunities.
People with permanent addresses assume homeless people can just fill out an application for McDonalds or Burger King, be hired, and immediately use their paychecks to secure housing.
People who don’t receive welfare assume people on welfare are lazy and intentionally having multiple children and not looking for jobs.
This is why I am always, always asking people if they’ve ever considered that maybe, JUST MAYBE, they don’t have the whole story about their cousin/neighbor/friend’s sister. Because people in privilege tend to ascribe their own circumstances to everyone, even when that’s the exact opposite of reality.
(via getoutofthewelfaretag)
The oligarchs are sucking dry America’s middle and working class, while the rest of us are being left to feed off of their crumbs.“Let’s start off by looking at the Koch Brothers.
Each of the Koch brothers saw his investments grow by a staggering $6 billion last year, which, if you do the math, means that they each made about $3 million per hour last year, based on a 40-hour workweek.
Meanwhile, as Buchheit points out, the average restaurant server made just $2.13 per hour last year, less than one millionth of what the Koch brothers pulled in.
And while these numbers alone seem incredibly startling, they only begin to paint the picture of wealth inequality in America.
On any given day during the winter of 2012, there were around 633,000 homeless Americans on the streets, trying to survive another day.
According to Buchheit, based on an annual single room occupancy cost of $558 per month, any one of America’s ten richest citizens would have enough money from his 2012 income to pay for a room for EVERY homeless person in the U.S. for the ENTIRE YEAR. One rich person not even sacrificing a penny of their more-than-a-billion-dollars wealth, just setting aside one year’s income, could end all homelessness in America.
And if that’s not mind-boggling enough, the total combined wealth of these ten wealthiest Americans is more than the entire U.S. federal housing budget. Even if all ten were to give up a year’s income, their wealth is mind-boggling.
According to a survey by the U.S Conference of Mayors, nearly 20 percent of the homeless population in America is Hispanic, and the number is growing each day.
In fact, for every single dollar of assets that a single black or Hispanic woman has, a member of the Forbes 400 has over $40 million.
To put that wealth number in perspective, as Buchheit notes in his piece, for every one can of soup owned by a single Black or Hispanic woman one of our wealthiest Americans owns a $30 million mansion AND a $10 million yacht.
As of 2009, the poorest 47% of Americans owned an unbelievable zero percent of America’s wealth, because their debts exceeded their assets. Contrast that with the era before Reaganomics, when the poorest 47% of Americans owned 2.5% of America’s wealth.
The nation’s wealth is now instead in the hands of the wealthiest Americans – the oligarchs. Right now, the 400 wealthiest Americans own as much wealth as 62% of our nation, which is the driving force behind America having the fourth highest level of wealth inequality in the world.
But why is it that America’s oligarchs have managed to obtain so much wealth, while the rest of us have nearly nothing, and that one of America’s wealthiest businessmen can afford to buy a yacht and a mansion, when a Hispanic woman just trying to survive is barely able to pay for a can of soup?
It’s thanks in part to the high levels of financial secrecy in the U.S.
The Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index highlights places around the world that provide the safest havens for tax refugees – otherwise known as millionaires and billionaires who want to escape having to pay their fair share to help their economies so that they can accumulate massive piles of wealth.
And, not surprisingly, the United States ranks 5th in the 2011 Financial Secrecy Index, behind the traditional tax havens of Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and Hong Kong.
In other words, as millions of Americans struggle to survive each and every day, the wealthiest Americans, the oligarchs, are accumulating vast sums of wealth, without anyone saying a word, or raising a finger.
Just look at Mitt Romney.
During the campaign of 2012, there was a huge battle over his disclosure, or lack thereof, of just how rich he is. And in the end, while Romney did disclose some information about his assets, including the fact that he was able to hide the vast sums of wealth in tax havens across the globe.
The bottom-line is that the outrageous levels of wealth inequality in America have been driven in large part by our society’s coddling of, and the media’s willful ignorance towards, our nation’s oligarchs.
For too long, the wealthiest Americans have been able to slip under the radar, while robbing us blind. The Reaganomics era has seen the largest transfer of wealth from working people to the very, very rich in the history of the world – trillions of dollars. As Elizabeth Warren pointed out a few weeks ago, if workers wages had kept up with productivity in the years since Reagan, like they did during the generations before Reagan, the minimum wage today would be over $22.
It’s time to start calling our oligarchs what they are – oligarchs. And tax cheats. And people who have corrupted both our politicians, our media, and our market-based economic system.
When enough Americans have figured out how badly we’ve been gamed and ripped off, things will start to change. Spread the word. And check out www.nobillionaires.com!”
“ Your Justice Department is continuing to put people in jail, for sale, and use, on occasion, of marijuana. That’s something the American public has finally caught up with. It was a cultural lag. And it’s been an injustice for 40 years in this country to take people’s liberty for something that was similar to alcohol. ”
Congressman Steve Cohen (from Tennessee!) tears into Attorney General Eric Holder over marijuana. (via think-progress)
“ In a colorblind society, White people, who are unlikely to experience disadvantages due to race, can effectively ignore racism in American life, justify the current social order, and feel more comfortable with their relatively privileged standing in society (Fryberg, 2010).Most minorities, however, who regularly encounter difficulties due to race, experience colorblind ideologies quite differently. Colorblindness creates a society that denies their negative racial experiences, rejects their cultural heritage, and invalidates their unique perspectives.
”
Monica Williams, Ph.D for Psychology Today, “Colorblind Ideology is a Form of Racism (via willworkforwords)
“ Thanks in large part to higher taxes on the wealthy, which Republicans said would not reduce the deficit, deficit reduction is picking up speed at a pace few could have predicted. We’re now looking at over $400 billion in deficit reduction in just one year, and about $800 billion in deficit reduction since President Obama took office…. It’s fair to say this problem has been largely fixed…. Let’s also not forget that Republican talking points on fiscal policy have effectively been left in tatters, and every conservative political figure who’s declared ‘Socialist Obama is turning America into Greece!’ looks incredibly foolish right now. ”
The right’s fiscal criticisms of the Obama White House are the exact opposite of reality.
(via liberalsarecool)
“ If he were a woman, they’d be calling him the weakest speaker in history. ”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), quoted by the Huffington Post, on Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).
Patriarchy is alive and well in America.
(via liberalsarecool)
“ You mean the generation that paid three times as much for college to enter a job market with triple the unemployment isn’t interested in purchasing the assets of the generation who just blew an enormous housing bubble and kept it from popping through quantitative easing and out-and-out federal support? Curious. ”
When comments are better than the article, Atlantic edition (“The Cheapest Generation: Why Millennials arent’ buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy”)
(Source: bostonreview)
“40 percent of Americans are clueless about [Obamacare’s] sheer existence. Some think it’s been repealed by Congress. Some think it’s been overturned by the Supreme Court. A few probably think it’s been vaporized and replaced with a galactic edict beamed down from one of Saturn’s moons. With…
“ …many gun owners are not paragons of probity. Some are drunks, drug addicts, wife-beaters, criminals or simply reckless, stupid, irresponsible humans with atrocious judgment. It’s anybody’s guess, for instance, how many of the one million concealed carry permit holders in Florida are a danger to themselves and others. (Trayvon Martin isn’t around to make his guess.) ”
Francis Wilkinson of Bloomberg News
“Here’s the blunt fact: for all the talk about “responsible gun ownership,” guns are easily available to everybody, responsible or not. It’s an empty compliment even to refer to “responsible gun owners” - many of them are people who through good luck simply have not had their irresponsibility catch up with them yet…” - David Frum
(via liberalsarecool)
“ …how could anyone claim that President Bush “kept us safe,” when the worst terrorist attack in America’s history took place nearly nine months after Bush became president? Moreover, how could anyone claim that Bush “kept us safe,” when Bush’s own intelligence services produced a National Intelligence Estimate in 2006, which concluded that America’s invasion of Iraq had actually made the world a more dangerous place, due to the proliferation of terrorists and terrorism that it precipitated? ”
“It does not have a state fire code, and it prohibits smaller counties from having such codes. Some Texas counties even cite the lack of local fire codes as a reason for companies to move there. But Texas has also had the nation’s highest number of workplace fatalities — more than 400 annually — for much of the past decade. Fires and explosions at Texas’ more than 1,300 chemical and industrial plants have cost as much in property damage as those in all the other states combined for the five years ending in May 2012. Compared with Illinois, which has the nation’s second-largest number of high-risk sites, more than 950, but tighter fire and safety rules, Texas had more than three times the number of accidents, four times the number of injuries and deaths, and 300 times the property damage costs….
It is impossible to know whether tougher regulations would have prevented the disaster near West, especially since investigators remain unsure what sparked the fire that caused the fertilizer to explode. McLennan is among the counties without a fire code.
But federal officials and fire safety experts contend that fire codes and other requirements would probably have made a difference. A fire code would have required frequent inspections by fire marshals who might have prohibited the plant’s owner from storing the fertilizer just hundreds of feet from a school, a hospital, a railroad and other public buildings, they say. A fire code also would probably have mandated sprinklers and forbidden the storage of ammonium nitrate near combustible materials. (Investigators say the fertilizer was stored in a largely wooden building near piles of seed, one possible factor in the fire.)
“It’s tough to overstate the importance fire codes would have made,” said Scott Harris, a former emergency management coordinator in Texas for the Environmental Protection Agency, who is now with UL Workplace Health and Safety, a safety science company. “Texas just hasn’t wrapped its brain around this fact yet.”
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