Renewable Revolution

I, for one, was not as aware as I should have been, about the particulars of the long, sad history of race relations in this country. This series of postings is more or less just a sharing of my current reading. I wanted to go all the way back to the Civil War, and then carefully try to see and understand how it all really happened. How we got from there to here.

I grew up watching MLK march on Selma. I remember the Watts riots, I remember Rodney King.

I did not know that these events are just the most recent events in a very long chain of ugly confrontations that spans more than a hundred years, with many, now mostly forgotten, episodes.

There were race riots in Detroit in 1863...and again in 1943. Three separate cases where martial law was declared in Texas during the Reconstruction period around 1870.  Houston, in 1917. Chicago in 1919.  Beaumont, Texas in 1943.


It's quite a long list, and the more I read the more I find. It isn't particularly encouraging.

Well done, Eddie. We all need to face the unvarnished truth about, not only our history, but how it is systematically massaged for the specific purpose (see mens rea) of perpetuating inequality and injustice for the benefit of TPTB.

One of the most insidious examples of this 24/7 in-your-face attack on the "wrong" people is the siting of pollution spewing industrial activity like coal fired power plants, city dumps, oil refineries, chemical plants, ETC. Through ruthlessly ethics free consistent planning in industrial board rooms, said industrial centers have been sited to undermine the health of the poorest Americans in general and minorities in particular.

The engineers that plan these factories and power plants know EXACTLY what kind of toxins they spew long before they are built. The claim that they "aren't profitable" if they are pollution free is baloney. In fact, when they MUST site them near the "right" people, they DO have adequate safeguards.

That's the dead giveaway that dumping industrial toxins on the "wrong" people has ALWAYS been part of a sadistic "profit equation" that most Capitalists willingly embrace while claiming that the "market" will "force" clean factories and power plants because the "customer base" will force them to. Baloney!

Tell me, how much did ANY OF US learn in history classes in high school or college about the deliberate poisoning of certain neighborhoods in our country for the purpose of providing profitable energy for, and profitable products from, industrialization? NADA! ZIP!

And it was PLANNED CAREFULLY. No, I'm not talking about chemical spills or three mile island or refinery fires. Sure, those were/are accidents. I'm talking about the 24/7 downwind and downstream toxins steadily entering the biochemistry of the poor. But since nobody wants to talk about it, then it allegedly didn't happen and the alleged victims are just being hysterical. 

And mind you, Eddie, that is BEFORE the poor and/or minority kid is born! His or her genes and IQ are under attack before exiting the womb. THEN comes the unhealthy nutrition, toxic air, water, inadequate schools and the police brutality. And then people wonder why those poor white trash and/or the minority kids can't seem to "get ahead" more...

Our culture REFUSES to accept the FACT that there has been a conspiracy by TPTB, willingly supported by the white majority that knows better, regardless of what they read in the happy talk history books propaganda, to achieve the heinous ends that protect the profit over people and planet status quo. But THAT is the reality.  :emthdown:


Chris Hedges paraphrased:

From the START, our country was NOT set up as a popular democracy.

Agelbert Comment: Most people in the USA do not understand what is meant by the type of economic model that is defined by asset stripping.

This was the economic model used in the Southern US before the Civil War. It's an extractive process that commodifies everything and everybody except the owners of the corporate/company/elite extractive force. Anybody that can add and subtract can see that this process is unsustainable.

But two hundred years ago, the bounty of slaves, animals and soil products looked endless.

When industrialization really got going in the USA after the Civil War, there was a battle that raged for several decades between a sustainable, seed corn saving type economic model that had the upper hand in the Northern Sates and the conscience free extractive one.

Taylor's Theory of Management even postulated that a CEO MUST take good care of his employees and look after their health and well being in order to ensure that a quality product was produced. The so-called "Good Will" accounting entry in balance sheets that gives added value to a corporation included LOW employee turn over. 

But the unsustainable, brutally extractive  "model" that increased short term profits gained the upper hand as the power of the vote in this country got more and more watered down and the power of big money in government increased.

This Fascist, Empire loving, greed based and unsustainable economic "model" predatory world view is now widespread. It is the reason things just get worse.

The book discussed in the video goes a long way towards explaining how STUPID this greed ball thinking is and how much horrific damage and death it brings.

The Lie About When Slavery Ended
by Denise Oliver Velez

SNIPPETS:

I hate lies. History books are still full of them.

Lies about the founding of this country. Lies about the treatment of Native Americans. Lies about the Civil War and slavery.

One of the most important things that takes place each year in Black History Month is the outing of lies and attempts to correct the distorted history we have been taught.

Slavery in the US did not end with the emancipation proclamation.

Slavery did not end in 1865. 


Thanks to PBS, we have an accessible documentary to address the truth. Too many textbooks distributed to schoolchildren are as yet unrevised. So we have to take it upon ourselves to spread some truth.

Directed by Sam Pollard, produced by Catherine Allan and Douglas Blackmon, written by Sheila Curran Bernard, the tpt National Productions project is based on the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Blackmon.

Slavery by Another Name challenges one of our country’s most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The documentary recounts how in the years following the Civil War, insidious new forms of forced labor emerged in the American South, keeping hundreds of thousands of African Americans in bondage, trapping them in a brutal system that would persist until the onset of World War II.

Based on Blackmon’s research, Slavery by Another Name spans eight decades, from 1865 to 1945, revealing the interlocking forces in both the South and the North that enabled this “neoslavery” to begin and persist. Using archival photographs and dramatic re-enactments filmed on location in Alabama and Georgia, it tells the forgotten stories of both victims and perpetrators of neoslavery and includes interviews with their descendants living today

If you have not yet seen it, Slavery By Another Name, is available in its entirety online. 


The first book to expose this travesty in our history was written as a novel, by James John L Spivak and serialized in several newspapers in the 1930's.

Agelbert NOTE: I corrected the name error in the article. It's John, not James.

John Louis Spivak (June 13, 1897 – September 30, 1981)

Spivak was a firebrand leftist journalist. Many of the photos Blackmon has used are from his groundbreaking book. His papers are housed at Syracuse University.

He was an investigative reporter and author whom fellow muckraker Lincoln Steffens described as "the best of us," was most concerned with the problems of the working class and the spread of fascism and anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States from the 1920s through the 1940s...

Spivak traveled throughout the South in the early 1930s interviewing prison camp officials and photographing camp atrocities and their corresponding punishment records. His novel, Georgia Nig ger, depicting the brutality of prison camp chain gangs was serialized in the Daily Worker.



His 1935 exposé in the New Masses charged a congressional committee with deliberately suppressing evidence of an offer made to Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler by Wall Street financiers to lead a military coup against the U.S. government and replace it with a fascist regime.


http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/spivak-NewMasses.pdf


He also investigated the anti-Semitic and financial activities of Charles E. Coughlin, the Catholic radio priest who founded the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan.

Agelbert NOTE: Empathy Deficit Disorder has a LONG HISTORY in American culture, along with the vigorous denial of GUILT and RESPONSIBLILITY for BENEFITING from the exploitation of people, animals and nimby profit over planet.    

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/27/1068168/-The-lie-about-when-slavery-ended