Bleeding Edge

One has to wonder, how did the plantation slave owners were able to mislead so many people with so little effort?

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

Here is a primer for your edification:

For starters — let us talk about the Confederate flag and its impact today…

For example, do you happen to know what the flutter of the Confederate flag feels like to anyone who identifies as a Black American?

I thought so…

And do you know that flying that flag in their face — it is a hurt that is even worse than calling a black person the “N” word explicitly and repeatedly, over and over again?

And for the most prideful Confederate flag waivers, clearly that painful response is the point of waving that symbol of oppression and hate, because they all knew that it was the battle flag of the Southern Apartheid Slave States that seceded from the Union just so that they can keep their slaves in bondage and chains for personal enrichment.

Simply put — what the Confederate flag symbolizes for all of the oppressed people and especially for Black Americans — is enough reason to take it down and hide it in your socks drawer or in your tool box along with whatever else illegal junk you might have stashed aways there…

But there’s another and a far bigger reason — why all whites, all southerners and all other decent human beings, should not fly this type of flag, or have it on their state issued license plates as some do in both North and South Carolina.

And that reason is because the Confederacy and the slavery that spawned it, was not just an apartheid and an abomination against humanity — but it was also a hateful economic affront to all the Southern white working classes.

Indeed this was a giant “swoosh job” foisted upon all the working people because it was funded by some of the antebellum one percenters, or the three percenters or whatever small 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 the likes of the publishing magnates like the bosses of CNN & Rupert Murdoch.

For example, a map of states that didn’t expand Medicaid – which would actually be a boon mostly to poor whites – resembles a map of the old Confederacy with a few other poor, rural states thrown in. Another indication that 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 — yet in the South the people went overwhelmingly 2-1 for Mitt Romney.

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 is the smart thing to do.

And since we need to lower the Confederate battle flag because it symbolizes the vast material harm the ideology of the Confederacy and its slavery apartheid, did to Southern 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, they earned two things before and after the Civil War.

First, a very skinny slice of the immense Southern wealth 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…

Beggar thy neighbor, right after you “begarr” yourself, has never been a smart choice for anyone.