Tag Archives: unionized

Culture, Governance, Race

Po Boys and Indians

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At Book Club the other night we discussed a disturbing, true story from the 1920’s about the only partly resolved multiple murders of Osage Indians and the origins of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.(1)  Following the final forced relocation of the Osage to what looked like useless land in northeast Oklahoma.  Beneath that land, it was soon learned, lay a gigantic pool of oil and the Osage owned all rights to it.

Subsequently whites were declared to be “Guardians” of Osage “rich redmen” ostensibly assuring that they handled the contracts and ownership of their great wealth properly.  Instead, most took financial advantage and many, probably dozens, took part in both slow and quick murders of Osage families such that control of the oil and the leases would wind up in white hands.  The FBI finally got to investigate a handful of the murders and to convict a couple of conspirators and murderers, whereupon victory was declared.  In fact murders had occurred prior to those the FBI investigated, and continued past that time.  Sordid, and disturbing; dozens of Osage Indians were murdered but, in the views even of lawmen of the time, “they were only Indians.”

Prudence has always required that Nazi Germany be soundly condemned for treating a class of citizens and neighbors as something less than human and needful of extermination.  One wonders how so many Germans could have followed Hitler, accepted the “Final Solution” or actively ignored it, even as trainloads of Jews passed by and as gas-chambers and ovens processed them nearby.  Lo and behold, hundreds of Americans coexisted with, if not participated in, systematic murder of the Osage, even whole families, for no more than financial gain.  The membrane between Judeo-Christian ethics and societal murder schemes, is very thin.

So, the whole chapter might be buried in our national memories as something that we have moved beyond and would never, in our enlightened state, today, be repeated.  A bit more reflection is in order.

Following King Phillip’s War, or the French and Indian War, American colonists clarified their perception of the new continent as theirs for the taking, lacking only a few courageous men and women to push the frontier further and further and a little further.  The sometimes peaceful “Indians” who already lived on it were deemed uncivilized or even savage, and therefore lesser beings, a perception proven over and over as “Indian” land, waters and hunting grounds were “settled” by colonists, French, Spanish and English (as well as Germans and others), and the occupants lashed out in the only ways they knew, killing and brutalizing many “whites”.  It became easy to kill those indigenous “savages” since they were lesser and God clearly had provided “America” for the colonists.

Natives couldn’t seem to handle their liquor, either.  Frontiersmen quickly learned that “Indians” could be weakened and controlled with alcohol.  The fact that “firewater” was a problem for Indians was reinforcement for the idea that they were lesser humans and their problems were due to their own flaws – get rid of them.  Some Osage had those weaknesses, at least some did, and despite their remarkable assimilation, were perceived as not quite worth a white person and flawed, as shown by their ignorance of white people’s connivance and thievery.  Thank God we have moved beyond such arrogance and prejudice. Not.

One need look only at the last 55 years(!) of federalized welfare policy and effect to see that the “Osage” of that period are simply mainly inner-city blacks, today, but also Hispanics.  Their flaws, in our liberal sympathies, are evidenced by poverty and worthy of welfare programs too numerous to count.  Instead of stealing their oil we steal their opportunities by trapping them in failed ghettos and failed schools, failed health-care and failed economics, partly because of political advantage, but partly, Prudence dictates, because of a never-admitted belief that the inner-city demographic is not as capable of success as “normal” people.  This attitude is “proven” by the statistics of gang warfare and high murder rates.

Now professional sympathizers and the employees of the welfare industry will scream that I am racist because I think that poor “folks” are guilty of being poor when it is really my racist attitude that keeps them stuck in welfare.  The opposite is true.  There is a large bloc of people who earn elections and financial power off the backs of welfare recipients… but it isn’t comprised of conservatives.  Prudence suggests that a clear-minded examination of the last 55 years of inner-city problems and failures reveals that those awful conditions could never be sustained, maintained and profited from unless it fulfilled some over-arching purpose.  And, if not an articulated purpose, at the very least, an over-arching belief!

Fifty-five years is a long time, even for an all-intrusive government with unrestricted debt-creation power, to accidentally allow millions of its citizens to live in failed circumstances while trillions of dollars in entitlements are sent to them or spent on them.

While “Indians” have a flawed relationship with alcohol, for inner-city populations it is drugs.  Fortunately, in someone’s decades-old view, drugs also provide a source of income for blacks and Hispanics and they do, after all, mostly kill one-another, gang members, somewhat bad neighbors.  Just make ‘em vote correctly and leave the suburbs alone and, in fact, the rest of us can leave them to their miserable daily existences.  It’s a de-facto policy that has worked for over 50 years!  Who’s the cynic… or the racist?

Unionized social work and current public policies are certainly not the solution.  Dominant philosophy holds that these people are unable to break out of poverty because “government” – right-wingers, primarily, won’t provide “the resources” to make it happen.  Failing schools, by the way, also unionized public services, use the same logic. Rapid growth in expenditure-per-pupil have failed to reverse declines in educational achievement; more “resources” will fix the problem.  Worse, now that pharmaceutical companies and sales companies have expanded addiction into the suburbs, the dependable drug trade that has kept blacks and others from being too restive in the inner cities is causing wider concern about drugs and the whole corrupting profit-structure may collapse leaving ghetto-dwellers in a tough spot.  Only a racist would want that to happen.

President Trump has begun a decades-overdue process of review and undoing of welfare programs that have failed continuously.  What will make that actually “stick,” if any of it may be accomplished against the welfare bureaucracy and politics, is a change in philosophy, attitudes and beliefs, starting with belief in black abilities as equal to those of any whites.  Maybe this is the last generation that treats inner-city residents like children or, worse, like “Indians.”

(1) “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI”
by David Grann

Education, Race

Damned Conservatives

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Alas poor education, we once were free.  For those of us… you, who are angry with “conservatives” and who agree that conservatives are (choose all that apply): 1) racist;   2) homophobic; 3) Islamophobic; 4) “Trans”-phobic; 5) anti-women; 6) anti-science;    7) climate change deniers; and 8) fascists.  Excuse me, I forgot, 9) Christian fanatics.

Conservatives who support or, worse, don’t mind Donald Trump, are also stupid.  Did we pretty-much cover it?  Let’s not forget the Russians – don’t mean to slight anyone.

The United States was premised on the concept of individual sovereignty and liberty.  This isn’t taught anymore, but it’s true.  If you perceive or believe that we are “free” only when our entire group is free, then you are, to a degree, believing that the very basis for the exceptional founding of our nation, is no longer valid.  That’s quite sad.

The U. S. was not founded to be a unionized social-service mega-agency.  That we have become so is far from a testament to our benign compassion for the poor; not at all.  Rather, it is a massive subversion of liberty by the left.

“What?”  You exclaim, “Should we just let these poor, oppressed people starve?  If that’s what conservatism is, leave me out!”

No, conservatives would have taught those starving people to feed and otherwise take care of themselves.  Those same would then move forward in life without the artificial welfare of any government.  That seems, to the racist, homophobic, anti-women Neanderthals that liberals hate so deeply, like the ultimate compassionate action, and is, in fact, the very basis of free-enterprise capitalism.  There is wide misunderstanding about these principles.

The most easily grasped distinction between liberalism (in modern definition), or leftism, and conservatism (in modern definition), is responsibility – personal responsibility.  That is, modern liberals perceive everyone only as a member of a “demographic.”  Everyone only has identity due to matching characteristics of a named (must be known by a name) group.

Easiest to understand in this odd universe is a group known variously as “people of color,” “African-Americans,” “blacks,” or the current liberally-correct description.  People with brown skin are of a hundred origins and genealogies.  By definition they do not comprise a “group” or a tribe or even a nationality.  Why on earth would rational people look at people with brown skin as if they were somehow all connected or similar?  The answer reveals the heart of modern leftism.

The only rational purpose for grouping individuals who share a trait or appearance… even a little, is because those who consider them so might gain political power.  This rationalization has also infected members of the artificially constructed group, who join with liberals in maintaining the belief in the existence of a group that exists only politically and not in fact.  Great anger, hatred and historical distortion stems from this artificial group perception.  By automatic reflection, or reaction, every action of unkindness or perceived “hatred,” practiced by anyone not “in” the artificial group, becomes a failing of everyone in the “outgroup,” so long as its members share some identifiable characteristic – like a different skin color.  Suddenly, politically, hatred of the outgroup has flowered, and “white privilege” is the result.

Such hatred requires nurturing and nutrition.  Once embarked on the road to political power, people who know how to profit from hatred can’t seem ever to reverse course.  The joys of political office are too enticing; the lack of true responsibility too comforting, the outlandish emoluments too rewarding.  Today, hatreds are the MOST COMMON political motivations; statesmanship is nearly invisible.

For some “hatred” is simple cynicism.  These are they for whom “public service” is mere aggrandizement, and to Hell with society so long as they get as much out of our pockets as they can.  For the next level of public cynics, power is their profit, and they are satisfied to gain power for themselves, and to Hell with the rest of us.  The consequences of their powers are of little concern to them – indeed they generally absolve themselves of requirements to adhere to laws they codify.  Mixed into the second group are some of those who learn how to employ baser, defined hatreds in order to gain and retain their cynical powers.  Now it’s not simple lies and thievery, it is society-threatening.

And here we are.  Conservatives will point out that the left, constantly riding the “racist” bull, are using black hatred for white supremacists to enhance leftist political power, when it is the left that actually hates blacks by cynically trapping and consigning them to an artificial welfare life.  Blacks, themselves, hate what has happened to them, as they should, but careful education has taught them that it is conservatives who have done this to them.  And on the cycle of hatred goes, while fattened liberals live in mansions, sometimes not even in the districts they “represent.”

There are conservative haters, some of whom actually “hate” black or brown people.  Those are a very tiny minority.  Careful education and media manipulation teaches blacks that these few represent all conservatives.  This is easily refuted, but that is never taught. If one simply sets aside personal concerns temporarily and contemplates the question: “What element of society is primarily responsible for social and governmental failure?”

The likely answer will be “conservatives” or, at the very least, “Republicans,” the two far from synonymous.  At that point, the thoughtful and caring citizen has to wonder if that is a) possible; and b) how he or she came to think so.

Real conservatives, here defined as constitutionalists and others who believe in free enterprise and personal responsibility, are not haters… of anyone.  Mostly they, we, are disappointed that people of color aren’t doing better, on average, particularly with so much evidence of people variously brown in skin color, becoming champions of every field and discipline.  Clearly, or so it seems to us, there is no genetic reason for social failure.  It is based on beliefs, including carefully nurtured hatreds.

The actions that stem from hatred have no claim on forgiveness – from anyone.  The same is true for white-skinned people only more so, since they have no minority status to overcome along the way to happiness.  We have a left-induced tendency to forgive the hatreds of blacks, while trumpeting and often imputing those of whites.  Both destroy society and are to be condemned.  They are not to be exploited, God forbid.  But they are, to our shame… Black and White.

Education

SCHOOL CHOICE

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School choice is a big deal for our new president, our soon-to-be Secretary of Education, millions of parents and students, and for teachers’ unions. Three out of these four favor it. The process of expanding school choice and the effects of it are the basis, potentially, of a learning revolution.
“You’re destroying public education,” say public-school educators.

Charter Schools are a hot topic and part of the revolution. Politicians take strong positions on both sides of the issue. Some like to defend “allowing” more charter schools in urban school districts; others, mindful of union support, insist on defending “our public schools,” as if charter schools weren’t “public.” They are public schools, but they aren’t unionized, for the most part, and they can set many of their own policies, work rules… and inspirations.

Public schools have been saddled with tasks that do not improve learning. This has happened in fulfillment of social-engineering intentions, “political correctness,” whatever that happens to be this year, and in reaction to fairly poor management, generally. There is little accountability under unionization, particularly when most middle-level school managers are in the same teachers’ unions.

America has tried to “fix” education… we can give some credit for that, but the fixes are bureaucratic and government-growing, and have yielded spotty improvements. And, they’re damned expensive. In general, learning problems concentrate in “poor” school districts, and these concentrate in urban areas. Simply busing children around to “mix” them with richer kids in richer districts has some individual success, but it reaches very few.

There’s no news about school districts EVER recommending that less money should be spent because they have learned that a lot of it has no value to education.

School budgets start with staffing classrooms and balloon to provide disproportionate numbers of administrative personnel. In the mid-1980’s the Brookings Institution completed a survey of public school districts nationwide. Across every demographic stratum, they found, test scores and other grade performance metrics were lower in inverse proportion to the number of administrative personnel.

Another way to look at that result is to say that in school districts where higher proportions of personnel funds were spent on teachers, students did better. Too many highly energized, highly motivated teachers are ground into robots by having to explain what they intend to do, describing what they are doing and reporting on what they did.

Too many, who never were highly motivated, are protected by unionized tenure, sometimes reporting to lounges to do what they wish because no principal wants them – still paid as if one did. Will more money correct that?

Although the premise of the public complex says that now that we have calcified all of this waste and misspending, more money will make things better from this point forward, little evidence exists to show that it does.

Charter schools, by and large, have few administrators and are non-unionized. Their teachers may be fired if they don’t teach with zeal and initiative and love. The schools, themselves, will go out of business when they screw up, fail to educate or mis-spend their budgets. Public schools never close due to failures like these – they get more money… and administrators.

Choice is what makes freedom work… Free Will: the essence of our Judeo-Christian ethics and heritage. “Thou mayest choose from evil.” We can choose to accept the responsibilities of freedom… of our choices. Or we can choose foolishness, crime, irresponsibility… socialism, in effect, not to be confused with humanity or even humanitarianism.

We can choose what is best for ourselves, and still be responsible. We can choose to marry and be a parent and a dedicated spouse, and thereby to raise our children and choose their educations in fulfillment of our philosophies and responsibilities.

We are not obligated, except by the public school monopolies, to turn our children over to different philosophies and relinquish our responsibilities. We can choose – or should be able to in a free society of sovereign citizens – to direct our children along the responsible path of our choosing. We can choose his or her place of education and the teachers who will help us create a new adult one day.

Somewhere, a town or school district will vote to charterize all of its schools and provide separate, superb facilities for individuals who cannot contribute to or grow within standard classroom environments. May God bless their endeavors. Otherwise and in spite of that, the resources the polity has decided to spend on each school-age child should be available for parents to spend as they see fit. Universal vouchers, universal responsibility. Let a teachers’ union prove that it delivers better education.

Race

RACE? AGAIN?

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Prudence says that America needs some fresh thinking about race.  Anthropologists can “describe” some 300 “races” using markers like blood-type concentrations, in a process that tries to use physiology to delineate human “types” or races.  It is largely a waste of time for most people since it cannot relate social activities, social actions, with physiological differences.

RACE is a construct for both safety and control within societies.. except, lately, a construct for hatred.  The most visual markers are employed – like skin, facial distinctions, hair, eye-color… virtually meaningless attributes in terms of how people ACT, but crucial when differing groups come together.  No training or understanding is required to distinguish physiognomy.  That is a matter of belief.

Prudence has thought long about the power and dangers of belief.  It can exist and guide the actions of millions of people without paying any heed to reality… to truth.  Just as faith is the engine for maintaining religious traditions, there are many other belief structures to which individuals can adhere that effectively replace reality with constructed, believed paths of action that guide whole lifetimes.  Belief can be so self-fulfilling that it becomes its own evidence of “truth.”  It’s commonplace.

Less common is honesty.  An honest person can be taught the error of his or her beliefs and it is this very effect that has held the United States together through slavery, Manifest Destiny, the Civil War, destruction of Native American culture, waves of immigration and the Great Depression.  Beliefs have changed, honing more closely to reality little by little… until the 1960’s.

It was under the aegis of “The Great Society” that we changed the role of government to one of, essentially, social engineering – unionized social services that Lyndon Johnson and other hubris-laden socialists believed could change the nature of both rich and poor people for the better.  Change has certainly happened.

Blacks, who were making sure, but uneven progress in the 1950’s, have regressed in the inner cities where federal and state policies have re-enslaved them for 3 generations.  Why such conditions continue, even as the drug trade flourishes in that population, seems a great mystery to progressives.  It must be the fault of Republicans.  Our incoming president has mentioned conditions in the inner cities, but no policy changes have been described.

It’s all a matter of belief.  Progressives have long held the belief that the most generous “safety-net” possible, especially now that welfare has been federalized, will cause people WE have taught to be irresponsible for themselves, to become responsible, self-sufficient citizens.  We have placed them in a system where the only way to “get a raise,” requires careful cheating – things like getting two EBT cards or SNAP allowances beyond one’s entitlement.  Or, to sell some drugs, perhaps.  There should be no surprise that blacks hate whites.  They believe that whites have kept them from opportunity, that we discriminate in a thousand ways, that we are racists and on and on.  Some of it is true.  But the policies that have done so are not those of most whites, who feel guilty about black’s condition, and who act a little nutty because of their guilt; they are the policies of progressives who believe socialism will make better humans than God has… despite all reality to the contrary.

One might infer that Prudence indicates that progressives may not be truly honest, else they could learn the error of their beliefs, lo these past 50 years.