Month: March 2016

“Money talks and BS walks”—corporate reaction to “religious freedom” bills in Georgia and North Carolina

Fans of This is Spinal Tap will recognize that immortal line, spoken by Bobbi Flekman, AR tour de force for Polymer Records. When the band find their album is being banned “by both Sears and K-Mart stores” because of its sexist cover art, Bobbi overrides the band manager’s protests and justifications to say “money talks, and b*** walks”. It became an instant mantra in many industries. (See the clip here.)

And it’s proving true in the real world as well: corporations in Georgia and Atlanta have responded forcefully to the anti-American “bathroom bills” and “religious freedom” laws those states have passed or are about to vote on. In North Carolina, PayPal, Bank of America, and Dow Chemical, all headquartered in the state, have denounced the state-wide law requiring people to use the bathroom earmarked for their biological or “birth sex” (not a real term) that was conjured up to overturn a Charlotte, NC law that banned discrimination against LGBT citizens. The NBA has threatened to move the All-Star game from Charlotte.

In Georgia, HB 757, protects “religious liberty” by allowing anyone calling themselves religious to deny service in a public business to LGBT people. Disney and Unilever now threaten to pull business from the state, and the NFL says Atlanta will not host the Super Bowl if the bill is passed. Through the group Georgia Prospers, Coca-Cola, Home Depot, UPS, Delta Airlines, and Marriott Hotels have all said they will reconsider investment in Georgia or move their operations if the bill passes.

You may recall that in 2014 the NFL successfully threatened to move the Super Bowl from Arizona if its governor signed a pro-discrimination “freedom” bill, and that pressure led Gov. Brewer to decline signing the bill.

In one way this is heartening: it’s good to see corporations, which usually bend most of their efforts to breaking the law and violating the Constitution, united behind the cause of justice.

But in another way, it’s depressing: voters, lawmakers, and elected officials in many states are kept from exercising tyranny of the majority not by their love of American principles of liberty and justice for all, but by their fear of losing money. Keeping Coke or NBA dollars in their state is more important than anything, even their supposedly deeply held “religious” beliefs.

Of course, the companies are motivated by money, too; they don’t want to alienate a portion of the population that is supposed to have a lot of money to spend (an enduring though fatally outdated corporate myth about gay people is that, since they don’t have children, they spend all their money on consumer goods. The “gay American” to most companies is a white man living in a city with his partner and more money than he knows what to do with).

We can’t rely on corporations to be the guardians of justice because they are very unreliable. They are motivated by profit, and if they ever sensed that not all LGBT Americans are rich and white, they would jump off the LGBT bandwagon pretty quickly. We all have to keep working in our cities and states to remind people that what makes America great is its commitment to liberty and justice and separation of church and state.

Remember: if you don’t want to serve gay or trans people, don’t open a public business. Once you open a public business, you are obliged to serve the public—no exceptions. There’s no difference between these anti-gay laws and the anti-black laws that kept black people from eating in restaurants with white people, going to movie theaters with white people, and riding city buses with white people. Anti-gay laws are discrimination, and America finally got rid of that curse through the hard work of the civil rights movement in the 1950s-70s. You can’t teach kids in school that Rosa Parks was a hero if you then vote for a law that says you can keep trans people off your bus or out of your bakery.

In an election year where people stumble over themselves to love America the most, one easy test of who really means it is whether they support anti-American discrimination laws.

“Hearing Harriet Smith”: a new take on WPA recordings of people born into slavery

Most American know about the FWP interviewers who, in the 1930s, went into southern states and recorded the stories of black Americans who had been born into slavery. The FWP (Federal Writers’ Project) wanted to capture their stories as living history. About 2,300 people were interviewed before the FWP project expired, but the project was continued by the Library of Congress and the Julius Rosenwald Foundation into the 1940s in an attempt to find every living witness to and survivor of slavery in the United States.

Most of us who encounter these interviews read them as transcripts, usually heavily edited from hour-long conversations to just those stories of slavery that really bring its horror most vividly to life. We don’t even notice how they are written in “black dialect” (we all remember reading Huckleberry Finn), and we don’t think too much about the lives of the interviewees as they were in the 1930s and 40s when they were recorded—we assume their lives are much better.

But there’s a great article that goes in-depth into the socio-political context of the interviews, the backgrounds of the white interviewers and the pressures on the black interviewees: Hearing Harriet Smith focuses on one interviewer, John Henry Faulk, and one interviewee, Harriet Smith, to go behind the scenes and shed some light on some troubling questions that linger over the interviews.

—How did the black interviewees perceive the process? Did they feel like they were expected to tell certain types of stories and omit others?

—Why did so many black subjects talk about how wonderful slavery had been?

—Who were the interviewers? What drove them to participate in this project?

—Why was “black dialect” used so insistently by interviewers writing the transcriptions? Why didn’t they ever use standard English? (One of the answers will surprise you.)

—What errors crept into the transcripts, which were supposed to be primary resource historical artifacts, and why?

—What stories were left out of the transcripts, and why?

The site has many links out to the actual recordings so you can listen for yourself. It’s worth it to hear Harriet Smith rather than read her.

 

CNN’s 10 “most bizarre” elections in U.S. history

We were looking for the video CNN uses in its ads for its new series Race for the White House, which shows the changing face of the White House from the mid-1800s to the present (very interesting—more and more barriers put between the street and the building). We couldn’t find it, but in the mayhem of features on the site we did find “10 of the most bizarre elections in American history”. The name implies that many more than 10 American presidential elections were bizarre, but likely they just mean 10 were actually bizarre.

At any rate, they do a pretty good job describing the 10 elections/campaigns they list. No glaring errors. They don’t say the 1824 election really was a corrupt bargain, they just note that Jackson claimed it was. They admit that the 1876 election was rigged by racist southerners to give the Republican candidate the presidency if he would end Reconstruction. And they focus on the real issue of the 1964 campaign—Johnson’s commitment to ending institutional racism—instead of talking about the Daisy ad.

This was more than we expected of CNN, so we thought we’d pass it along with our commendation.

Make America great again–by supporting its federal government

We’re re-running this post from a few years ago to counter the constant message of the Republican presidential campaigners and those of their supporters who get on TV and the radio saying that what makes America great is its people, not its government. Marco Rubio just made this statement a few days ago at a rally.

How the Founders would shudder to hear this. If the American people are great, it’s because of their government, which empowers and ennobles them, gives them national, political, and individual freedom, and relies on the people themselves to participate in the government, by voting and/or serving in public office.

When you have a government like that, you are free, even determined to offer free public education for all, to make sure everyone gets enough food, to sit on juries so your fellow Americans can get justice. Our representative democracy—still so very rare in the world, the first of its kind, and in the minority even in the 21st century—is what gives us our national character, our optimism, our passion for justice, our sense of fair play. We infuse our government with these good things.

When we decide the federal government is the root of all ills, that decision is usually led by  selfish people who don’t want to help their fellow Americans eat or get justice or live in decent housing; they are out for themselves and themselves alone. They call themselves libertarians or rugged individuals, and they claim that they are returning to original American values that made the country great.

These people are voted into office and there they pervert the federal and state governments into criminal systems that oppress the poor and non-white and female. It’s vicious circle: People who hate the government go into it to destroy and pervert it, and then the government actually becomes the root of all evils they said it was. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If America is no longer great, it’s because of these people saying they themselves will make it great again by destroying the government.

But we need to cling to our representative democracy, our principles of liberty and justice for all, taxation with representation that helps people get the things they need. We need to let it keep us generous and fair-minded. A woman on the radio this morning said she voted for Trump because “I just want a change. I want a change.”

Change in and of itself is not positive. You can’t just say I’m fed up and I will throw the baby out with the bathwater. You can’t say “change” when you mean “I want to get my own way all the time and not help anyone else.” You will get a change for the worse, and you might find that it’s a change you don’t end up liking.

Here’s the original post. We’re in it for the long haul to November and beyond.

 

We saw in the last post that Americans live in a unique situation: we enjoy all three types of basic freedom, national, political, and individual. Listing the nations that have offered all three freedoms to all of their citizens is a counting-on-one-hand proposition. Successfully providing and defending all three freedoms is what makes the United States great.

But it also presents some problems. Over the generations, Americans have veered between putting national freedom first and putting individual freedom first. We’re sometimes willing to give up individual freedom to be safe from attack, and sometimes unwilling to perform our duties of national and political freedom in the name of individual freedom. When the U.S. faces attack or threats to its safety, many Americans want to put laws in place curtailing individual freedoms like freedom of speech, religion, and assembly in order to at once weed out troublemakers and create a more homogenous society. Conversely, when the federal government tries to put sweeping legislation into effect, such as government-paid health care or social security or gun control, many Americans loudly protest the move as an infringement of their individual rights.

Individual rights also lead many Americans to neglect their political freedom to participate in government by holding office and/or voting. The feeling that participation in our democracy  is unnecessary, an extra rather than a basic tenet of American citizenship, is pervasive. Resentment of “big government” leads many people not to want to participate in government at all, as if they would be supporting an invasive federal government by voting or running for office, although the way to change the nature of government is to join it or vote in those you wish to have representing your views. The belief that our government is an impediment to individual freedom is sadly prevalent.

Holding all three freedoms in equal esteem is difficult. Many Americans have come to see our individual freedoms as the wellspring from which national freedom is born, and thus individual freedoms are the most important. But these individual freedoms come from our government, from the Constitution, and last only as long as we have our national freedom. Without national freedom, there is no individual freedom, and national freedom only lasts as long as we have political freedom. Giving up our right to vote—for refusing or failing to vote is tantamount to giving up that right—is a dangerous step toward losing national and individual freedom. Once we stop demanding that our government really represent us, our democracy is crippled, and then the nation is open to outside threats. If individual freedoms are seen as separate from or at odds with national and political freedom, then we begin to prioritize our liberty to do whatever we want at the expense of national safety.

Individual freedom is really our freedom to live up to the founding principles of our nation. It’s our freedom to speak and worship and serve our country as we each see fit, and not really the freedom to be lazy and uninvolved and prioritizing our own choices over other people’s choices. It is the freedom to live together as one without having to be the same, not the freedom to push our own ways at the expense of everyone else’s.

Political freedom is our freedom to have a democracy, to be represented accurately in the federal government, and to preserve the individual freedoms we enjoy.

National freedom is the end result of the first two freedoms, because we who value our individual and political freedom will not allow our country to be destroyed by outside forces—or by those Americans who don’t believe in the full triad of freedoms.

Going forward, we’re seeking to bring our three freedoms into balance and remember that each is equally valuable, and each demands our equal time and effort to maintain.