Eric Williams's List: Politics Left

• Conservative groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare, income tax, workers' compensation and the environment, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

  The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as "free-market thinktanks", includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

• It’s when you find yourself denouncing someone for unfairness to slaveowners that you should step back and reevaluate your life.

• Wait, we’re not done yet. Food stamps greatly reduce food insecurity among low-income children, which, in turn, greatly enhances their chances of doing well in school and growing up to be successful, productive adults. So food stamps are in a very real sense an investment in the nation’s future — an investment that in the long run almost surely reduces the budget deficit, because tomorrow’s adults will also be tomorrow’s taxpayers.
• • Blogged 6/5/2013

• “When that money comes due—and this isn’t racist, but it’ll be like slavery when that note is due. We are going to beholden to the foreign master.”

   

  Nothing about this statement is accurate. Yes, at $1.28 trillion, China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt. But the vast majority of American debt is owned by Americans. We’re borrowing from ourselves, and in the current economic environment of mass unemployment and sluggish growth, this isn’t a huge concern.
• To wit, in his opinion attacking the admissions policy at the University of Texas, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas compared affirmative action supporters to slaveholders and segregationists. “Slaveholders argued that slavery was a ‘positive good’ that civilized blacks and elevated them in every dimension of life,” wrote Thomas. “A century later, segregationists similarly asserted that segregation was not only benign, but good for black students.”
• And just a few months later, Dr. Ben Carson—the latest right-wing celebrity—told the audience at this year’s Values Voter Summit that “Obamacare” was, in fact, “worse than slavery.” Which is obvious, unless we all missed the part where Barack Obama lynched recalcitrant doctors, and Lyndon Johnson kidnapped children and sold them for goods and services.
• That slaves, unlike embryos, were fully autonomous doesn’t seem to occur to either, nor does do they seem to understand that the earliest abolitionists were slaves, a far cry from anti-abortion activists, who—from what I can tell—aren’t fetuses. Indeed, there’s an entire world of problems with the analogy, from its disregard for women to its refusal to deal with slavery as a fact and not just a slogan.
• To compare everything you don’t like to evil is to do a disservice to yourself, and—in a small way—minimize the reality of suffering.

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