MAGA Woman SHOCKS Interviewer by Defending the Indefensible

 

UNPARALLELED IGNORANCE!

THESE PEOPLE ARE TOO STUPID TO EVEN RECOGNIZE THAT THEY'RE STUPID!

TYT Sports

985K subscribers

#RickStrom #TYTsports #Sports

Check out The Good Liars HERE:   / thegoodliars   Subscribe to The Good Liars HERE:    / @thegoodliars   Support The Good Liars on Patreon HERE:   / thegoodliars   Subscribe to Adam Mockler HERE:    / @adammockler   The Republican Party's voter base has always shown a very concerning amount of adoration for the racist losers who fought for the Confederacy during our Civil War and the movement Rick Strom breaks it down. Give us your thoughts in the comments below! You’re vital to our work. Support as a member: https://www.tyt.com/join Rick Strom TIKTOK:   / rickstrom   TWITTER:   / rickstrom   INSTAGRAM:   / rickystrom   FACEBOOK:   / stromrick   Follow TYT Sports on Facebook!   / tytsports   TYT Sports - one of the most dynamic sports shows on YouTube - is coming to Tune In! We cover all the latest need to know NBA, NFL, MMA, World Football [soccer] and breaking news specifically tailored to the young, dialed-in, and pop-culture savvy sports fan. Subscribe today and prepare to get hooked. #TYTsports #Sports #RickStrom

10:34

Legendary Olympics Protest Would've NEVER Happened Without This Tragedy

by TYT Sports

7:28

Donald Trump SNAPS After Getting Hit with the Facts

by TYT Sports

8:51

Right-Wing Weirdo Gets His Feelings Hurt Over Completely Made-Up Issue

by TYT Sports

10:02

LA Police Gang Uses NFL Team to Lure in New Recruits in Shady Ad

by TYT Sports

5:07

Comedian Gives Rude Hecklers the Public Humiliation of a Lifetime

by TYT Sports

The South Carolina You Won't See on CNN

 

FROM 2008:

The South Carolina You Won't See on CNN
South Carolina Primary Colors: Black and White?

by Greg Palast

South Carolina 2000: Six hundred police in riot gear facing a few dozen angry-as-hell workers on the docks of Charleston. In the darkness, rocks, clubs and blood fly. The cops beat the crap out of the protesters. Of course, it's the union men who are arrested for conspiracy to riot. And of course, of the five men handcuffed, four are Black. The prosecutor: a White, Bible-thumping Attorney General running for Governor. The result: a state ripped in half - White versus Black.

South Carolina 2008: On Saturday, the Palmetto State may well choose our President, or at least the Democrat's idea of a President. According to CNN and the pundit-ocracy, the only question is, Will the large Black population vote their pride (for Obama) or for "experience" (Hillary)? In other words, the election comes down to a matter of racial vanity.

The story of the dockworkers charged with rioting in 2000 suggest there's an awfully good reason for Black folk to vote for one of their own. This is the chance to even the historic score in this land of lingering Jim Crow where the Confederate Flag flew over the capital while the longshoreman faced Southern justice.

But maybe there's more to South Carolina's story than Black and White.

Let's re-wind the tape of the 2000 battle between cops and Black men. It was early that morning on the 19th of January when members of International Longshoremen's Association Local 1422 "shaped up" to unload a container ship which had just pulled into port. It was hard work for good pay. An experienced union man could earn above $60,000 a year.

In this last hold-out of the Confederacy, it was one of the few places a Black man could get decent pay. Or any man.

That day, the stevedoring contractor handling the unloading decided it would hire the beggars down the dock, without experience or skills - and without union cards - willing to work for just one-third of union scale.

That night, union workers - Black, White, Whatever - fought for their lives and livelihoods.

At the heart of the turmoil in South Carolina in 2000 then, was not so much Black versus White, but union versus non-union. It was a battle between those looking for a good day's pay versus those looking for a way not to pay it. The issue was - and is - class war, the conflict between the movers and the shakers and the moved and shaken.

The dockworkers of Charleston could see the future of America right down the road. Literally. Because right down the highway, they could see their cousins and brothers who worked in the Carolina textile mills kiss their jobs goodbye as they loaded the mill looms onto trains for Mexico.

The President, Bill Clinton, had signed NAFTA, made China a "most favored nation" in trade and urged us, with a flirtatious grin, to "make change our friend."

But "change," apparently, wasn't in a friendly mood. In 2000, Guilford Mills shuttered its Greensboro, Carolina, fabric plant and reopened it in Tampico, Mexico. Four-hundred jobs went south. Springs Mills of Rock Hill, SC, closed down and abandoned 480 workers. Fieldcrest-Cannon pulled out of York, SC, and Great America Mills simply went bust.

South Carolina, then, is the story of globalization left out of Thomas Friedman's wonders-of-the-free-market fantasies.

This week, while US media broadcasts cute-sy photo-ops from Black churches and replay the forgettable spats between candidates, the real issues of South Carolina are, thankfully, laid out in a book released today: On the Global Waterfront, by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger.

Erem and Durrenberger portray the case of the Charleston Five dockworkers as an exemplary, desperate act of economic resistance.

Thomas Friedman's bestseller, The World is Flat, begins with his uplifting game of golf with a tycoon in India. Erem and Durrenberger never put on golf shoes: their book is globalization stripped down to its dirty underpants.

While Friedman made the point that he flew business class to Bangalore on his way to the greens to meet his millionaire, Global Waterfront's authors go steerage class. And the people they write about don't go anywhere at all. These are the stevedores who move the containers of Wal-Mart T-shirts from Guatemala to sell to customers in Virginia who can't afford health insurance because they lost their job in the textile mill.

And the book talks about (cover the children's ears!) - labor unions.

South Carolina is union country. And union-busting country. But who gives a flying fart about labor unions today? Only 7%, one in fourteen US workers belongs to one. That's less than the number of Americans who believe that Elvis killed John Kennedy.

Think "longshoremen" and what comes to mind is On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando, the good guy, beating up the evil union boss. The union bosses were the thugs, mobbed-up bullies, the dockworkers' enemies. The movie's director, Stanley Kramer, perfectly picked up the anti-union red-baiting Joe McCarthy zeitgeist of that era of - which could go down well today.

Elected labor leaders are, in our media, always "union bosses." But the real bosses, the CEOs, the guys who shutter factories and ship them to China … they're never "bosses," they're "entrepreneurs."

Indeed, the late and lionized King of Union Busters, Sam Walton, would be proud today, were he alive, to learn that the woman he called, "my little lady," Hillary Clinton, whom he placed on Wal-Mart's Board of Directors, is front-runner for the presidency. She could well become America's "Greeter," posted at our nation's door, to welcome the Saudis and Chinese who are buying America at a guaranteed low price.

So what happened those five union men charged felonious rioting in 2000? Through an international union campaign, they won back their freedom - and their union jobs - after the dockworkers of Spain, the true heroes of globalization, refused to unload the South Carolina scab cargoes.

Erem and Durrenberger ask themselves why they were so drawn to a story of five Carolina cargo-handlers put in prison a decade ago. Maybe it's because the Charleston Five show how courage and heart and solidarity can lead to victory in the midst of a mad march into globalization that threatens to turn us all into the Wal-Mart Five Billion.

**************
See video of the dockworkers' uprising and read more from the book, On the Global Waterfront, by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger (introduction by Greg Palast) at http://www.ontheglobalwaterfront.org/.

Note: Palast will be speaking this Saturday at UCLA on "White Sheets and Black Votes: Race, Politics and Disenfranchisement." Free but RSVP required.

Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-sellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. View Palast's investigative reports for BBC Television on our YouTube Channel (Link).

Join our social networking sites on Facebook on MySpace and on Google's Orkut. Sign up for RSS updates of our site(link) and for our podcasts(link).

Support our work by donating to the Palast Investigative Fund(a 501c3 educational foundation).

July 8, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 8, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON JUL 9 On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.  In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited enslavement on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after an actor had murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.  Northern Republican lawmakers refused. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime. Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction. But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.  Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment. It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision declaring that Black men "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”  The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”  The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history; it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.  The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.  And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”  The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.  Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures. Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.  Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….

April 9, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

 

April 9, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON APR 10

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States Army at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lee’s surrender did not end the war—there were still two major armies in the field—but everyone knew the surrender signaled that the American Civil War was coming to a close.

Soldiers and sailors of the United States had defeated the armies and the navy of the Confederate States of America across the country and the seas, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and almost $6 billion. To the northerners celebrating in the streets, it certainly looked like the South’s ideology had been thoroughly discredited.

Southern politicians had led their poorer neighbors to war to advance the idea that some people were better than others and had the right—and the duty—to rule. The Founders of the United States had made a terrible mistake when they declared, “All men are created equal,” southern leaders said. In place of that “fundamentally wrong” idea, they proposed “the great truth” that white men were a “superior race.” And within that superior race, some men were better than others.

Those leaders were the ones who should rule the majority, southern leaders explained. “We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia wrote in 1857. “All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.” There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, “But we twelve hundred . . . never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.”

But the majority of Americans recognized that if it were permitted to take hold, this ideology would destroy democracy. They fought to defeat the enslavers’ radical new definition of the United States. By the end of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln dated the birth of the nation not to the Constitution, whose protection of property underpinned southern enslavers’ insistence that enslavement was a foundational principle, but to the Declaration of Independence.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

The events of April 9 reassured Americans that they had, in fact, saved “the last best hope of earth”: democracy. Writing from Washington, D.C., poet Walt Whitman mused that the very heavens were rejoicing at the triumph of the U.S. military and the return to peace its victory heralded. “Nor earth nor sky ever knew spectacles of superber beauty than some of the nights lately here,” he wrote in Specimen Days. “The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.”

So confident was General Grant in the justice of his people’s cause that he asked only that Lee and his men give their word that they would never again fight against the United States and that they turn over their military arms and artillery. The men could keep their sidearms and their horses because Grant wanted them “to be able to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter.”

Their victory on the battlefields made northerners think they had made sure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

But their conviction that generosity would bring white southerners around to accepting the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence backfired. After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee took over the presidency and worked hard to restore white supremacy without the old legal structure of enslavement, while white settlers in the West brought their hierarchical ideas with them and imposed them on Indigenous Americans, on Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and on Asians and Pacific Islanders.

With no penalty for their attempt to overthrow democracy, those who thought that white men were better than others began to insist that their cause was just and that they had lost the war only because they had been overpowered. They continued to work to make their ideology the law of the land. That idea inspired the Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the policies that crowded Indigenous Americans onto reservations where disease and malnutrition killed many of them and lack of opportunity pushed the rest into poverty.

In the 1930s, Nazi leaders, lawyers, and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws and Indian reservations for inspiration on how to create legal hierarchies that would, at the very least, wall certain populations off from white society. More Americans than we like to believe embraced fascism here, too: in February 1939, more than 20,000 people showed up for a “true Americanism” rally held by Nazis at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The event featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.

The decision of government officials 158 years ago to trust in the goodwill of former Confederates rather than focus on justice for everyone else seemed at the time to be the honorable and best course for healing the divided nation. But it ended up protecting the Confederates’ ideology and disheartening those who had fought for the United States. “When the Union men of those States who have suffered every kind of outrage, who have been fined, mobbed, imprisoned, and have seen their Union neighbors hunted and tortured and hung for their fidelity to the Government, see… a conspicuous, leading traitor hastily pardoned by the President that he may become Governor,” wrote Harper’s Weekly a little more than a year after Lee surrendered,

“When they see members of the Cabinet deliberately annulling the law of the land in order to appoint late rebels to national offices, while the most noted and tried Union men in the insurgent States ask in vain for such recognition of their fidelity, how can such men help bitterly feeling the contemptuous scorn with which the triumphant rebels regard them? How can they help asking why they might not as well have been rebels? How can they help the conviction that the policy of the Executive is conciliation of rebels and not recognition of Union men, or avoid asking with intense incredulity whether this is the way in which treason is to be made odious?”

—

Notes:

George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters (Richmond, VA: A. Morris, 1857), 353–354.

Alexander Stephens, “Cornerstone Speech,” March 21, 1861, in Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens. . . Letters and Speeches (Philadelphia, PA: National Publishing Company, 1866), pp. 717–729.

James Q. Whitman, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

Robert J. Miller, “Nazi Germany’s Race Laws, the United States, and American Indians,” St. John’s Law Review 94 (2020)

“22,000 Nazis Hold Rally in Garden,” New York Times, February 21, 1939; Ryan Bort, “When Nazis Took Over Madison Square Garden,” Rolling Stone, February 19, 2019.

Harper's Weekly, June 2, 1866.