Bleeding Edge

One has to wonder, how did the plantation slave owners and the wealthy confederate bosses along with their political rationalizers of Slavery, were able to mislead in such a widespread fashion and in such a successful way – so many people, and then drive all of them to complete destruction and general destitution — with so little effort, low tech methods and slight intellectual bandwidth for a reason?

And further, how did today’s racists have been able to perpetuate those same economic and social myths?

Here is how, and perhaps we can let this serve as a primer for your education and edification:

For starters, let us talk about the Confederate flag, its representation of trickle down economics and all of its combined impacts today…

For example, do you happen to know what the flutter of the Confederate flag and its economic policies feel like to anyone who identifies as a Black American?

I thought so…

And did you know or even remotely feel what flying the Confederate flag and talking trickle down economics in their face — is a hurt, a pain and an insult worse than injury — and much more hurtful than calling a person the “Nigger” word explicitly and repeatedly, over and over again?

And for the most prideful Confederate flag waivers and trickle down economics proponents out there, it seems to be the very point of waving those symbols of oppression, economic enslavement and hate — to want to hurt people more than anything else.

And that is only because they all know that it is the battle flag of the Southern Apartheid Slave States that seceded from the Union just so that they can keep their slaves in bondage, their working whites in poverty and the communal chains of trickle down economics for their own criminal personal enrichment formed on the basis of Apartheid economics…

Simply put — the Confederate flag and the trickle down economics it represents, symbolize RACISM & HATE for all of the oppressed people and especially for all of the Black Americans and all minorities out there. And believe you-me, this is enough reason to take that shit down and hide it in your socks drawer, in the dark recesses of your mind, and in your broken heart, or in the bottom of your tool box along with whatever fishing tackle and other legal or illegal junk you might have stashed away in there along with the fishing lures and the dog whistles you use to call the hounds to come home…

The economics lessons of Slavery and the perpetuation thereof to our times — are still today a far bigger reason why all working whites, all minorities and all other decent human beings, should not fly this flag, or spout the false flag trickle down economics nonsense, or even have a go at the Wealth Maintenance Econometrics, that measure the bread crumps falling from the table of the rich to the poor, as a valuable or even real economic theory.

Because the trickle down economics of the Confederacy and the slavery that spawned it in the first place, was not just a racial and social apartheid, but it was also an economic tyranny and an abomination against humanity. Yet above all else, it was also the most hateful economic affront to all the Southern white working classes and all other human beings because the Trickle Down Economics makes it impossible to allow Justice, Dignity and a Measure of Equity for All in a Civilized Society.

Indeed this economic trickle down was a trick-job, and a giant “swoosh sound” of disappearing capital from the pockets and the savings of the people. It was indeed a top-down tyrannical theft, and a saddle bag, foisted upon all the working people of the United States, because it funded the antebellum one percent of one-percenters, or the three-percenters, or whatever percent of the top wealthy plantation masters, that continues today in a similar form.

A total con job if I’ve ever seen one.

And the Slavers, managed this con job through the use of a propaganda technique that will be familiar to modern Americans, but hasn’t received the coverage it deserves in our current culture wars, because starting in the 1840s wealthy Southerners supported more than 30 regional pro-slavery magazines, many pamphlets, newspapers and novels that falsely touted slave ownership as having benefits that would trickle down to also benefit the non-slave owning whites and even the blacks themselves…

The flip side of the coin of this old-is-new, trickle-down economics propaganda is the mistaken notion that any gain by blacks in wages, schools or health care, comes at the expense of the white working class.

Today’s version of this con job no longer supports slavery, but still works in the South and thrives in pro trickle-down think tanks, magazines, newspapers, talk radio and TV news shows such as the Cato Foundation, Reason magazine, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. These sources are underwritten by pro trickle down economic one percenters like the Billionaire class of the Tech bosses, the Koch brothers and their ilk, as well as the publishing magnates and the bosses of CNN, FOX, MSNBC and your favorite TV channel too…

And if you look for political examples – a map of the states that didn’t expand Medicaid for all the people [which would actually be a boon mostly to poor whites], resembles a map of the old Confederate states, with a few other poor rural states thrown in. Another political indication of the remaining apartheid, that shows how this divisive propaganda works on Southern whites came in 2012, when Romney and Obama evenly split the white working class in the West, Midwest and Northeast, while in the South the people voted overwhelmingly by a margin of 2-1 for Mitt Romney and his regressive trickle down economics & health care proposals.

So, you now know that lowering the confederate flag from your automobile because of the harm done to blacks is the right thing to do– but lowering it down because of the economic harm that it still does to all the working classes, and especially to the white poor and all the minorities — is the smart thing to do.

And since we now recognize that we need to lower the Confederate battle flag because it stands for the hate, the oppression and the vast material harm this economic ideology of the Confederacy and its slavery apartheid, did to all the people of the whites that lasts even to this day — is proof that an American can still love the South without flying this divisive battle flag.

Yet it won’t help to get rid of an old symbol if we can’t also rid ourselves of the self-destructive beliefs that go with it, because only by shedding those beliefs, will the Southern whites finally catch up to the rest of the country in wages, in health and in education, since you don’t have to be an economist to see that forcing blacks – a full third of the Southern laborers – to work without pay, drove down wages for everyone else and kept them at a subpar level ever since…

And not just in agriculture, because upwards of a quarter of enslaved blacks — worked in the construction, manufacturing and lumbering trades — thereby cutting wages even for all of the upwards mobile skilled white workers…

Thanks to the profitability of this no-wage/low-wage combination, back in the day the majority of American one percenters were Southern whites. Because indeed it was the slavery which made the southern states the richest states in the country.

At the time of the divisive Civil War — the South was richer than any other country except England, yet that vast wealth was invisible outside the hedges and the palatial plantation house’s ballrooms, and it was right then and there that rests the proof of why and because of the low wages and the very few schools available to them, that the southern whites suffered a much lower land ownership rate, a lower life expectancy rate and a far lower literacy rate than all of the Northern white workers.

And although most Southerners didn’t own slaves — sadly, they were persuaded to risk their lives, their families and their limbs for the right of the few ones — less than one percent — to get as rich as King Midas from the exploitative qualities of enslavement of other human beings, the rentier advantage and the vast resource accumulations, they retain to this day.

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

For their sacrifices and their votes, the white working folk of the Southern states earned two things before and after the Civil War.

First, a very skinny slice of the immense Southern pie.

And second, the thing that made those slim rations palatable then and now — the shallow satisfaction of knowing that blacks had no slice at all.

And indeed the future is one long arc of Justice for the Universe and all its inhabitants and thus in terms of Economic Justice — maybe we can retire the nonsense of trickle down economics for good because it covers a lot of willful sins by the evil doers and the modern racists who use the tired tropes of hate to divide a Good People who share no grudge about each other’s skin color, creed, belief or ethnic origin…

Then again I am an optimist and this proves a soft spot in my heart for Loving You and loving all others as well…

Love You