This Fight is Our Fight

    The opening for Senator Warren’s pro minimum wage argument sounds a lot like misplaced blame. She writes about her stressful teenage years in Oklahoma, her sickly out-of-work father, and her mother’s minimum wage job. It barely kept them in their house, because even in the late 60’s, minimum wage didn’t leave you with any extra money. Her mother lashed out at her for wanting to go to college, and now, in her book, Warren lashes out at Republicans who won’t raise the minimum wage. I wonder why Senator Warren doesn’t lash out at people who waste money? Her father could’ve given up smoking (which is probably how he got sick in the first place) and spent the money on her college application fees.

    Every single problem mentioned in this book seems to have foolishness at the root. She writes about the Black Chicago homeowners, who were scammed into risky mortgages, but at the same time she made no effort to regulate them. Next comes the evil CEO, paying low tax on his huge salary, while his workers make minimum wage. Again, Warren could place a cap on salaries for corporate officers, but she didn’t event try. Healthcare costs? Warren made no effort to put a cap on malpractice lawsuits that drive up insurance rates. We get more horror stories here, like the one about the girl who took out the crazy student loans, went to a shady for-profit college, and ended up with debt and a useless degree. Again, lack of regulation, and whose fault is that?

    In the chapter titled The Disappearing Middle Class the author disproves her own argument. She says that she did her undergrad – in the practical major of teaching – at a cheap local college. If that had been the goal of all these other sorry people, then none of these problems would ever have happened. Nobody’s forcing people to take out student loans, nor is anyone forcing students to major in graphic arts, film studies, or any of the arts majors where the jobs are highly competitive. Schools like NYU, Columbia, and UC Berkeley are full of students doing frivolous majors. But in public colleges, like Baruch, Hunter, and John Jay, the students go for practical things – business, education, science, and law enforcement – that will get them a job after they graduate. They’ll make good money and have few debts.

    Warren writes about her family’s struggles in the Great Depression, and they survived on their abilities, just like my ancestors did. But she blames it all on big business, ignoring the reason it lasted so long, and that was the Smoot-Hawley tariff. Throughout the book she blames the rich and the big businesses for everything, but she never has any problem with the lack of self-accountability in the country. What about all the crumbling cities like Detroit, Flint, Philadelphia, Camden, Newark, and New Orleans? Those cities all had liberal Democrat mayors, and look where they ended up. The corrupt mayors – Sharpe James, Ray Nagin, Kwame Kilpatrick, Frank Melton, Marion Barry – were all Democrats, same party as her.

   Elizabeth is right about one thing in her book; it’s the unions that negotiate the higher wages. If a charter school pays a higher rate than the public schools, then they’re benefiting from the union that negotiated the lower wage. If the public schools busted the union, then the wage would be lower, and the charter schools could lower their wages too. She hates what President Reagan did to the air traffic controller union, but what ever happened to tough love? Reagan was trying to avoid the crippling strikes that NYC had in the 70’s, and if he’d given in, then all the other unions would’ve called a strike. She calls President Trump “Ronald Reagan without the charm,” but I wonder how much of it is the fault of Hillary Clinton and her incredibly bad campaign?

    I think the main problem is that Warren practices but doesn’t preach. She mollycoddles the lazy and incompetent people, all the while forgetting where she came from, and that is why she is so out of touch. This is a woman who pulled herself up by the bootstraps; she earned her own money to pay for college applications, then she sought out a college that would give her a full scholarship, then after she left to get married, she still finished at a public college at her own expense. Nobody ever did anything for her, no student loans, no trust fund, no silver platter. This is a self-made woman who wants to make excuses for people who can’t (or won’t) take care of themselves.

    Warren wrote this book to promote (what basically amounts to) socialism, but after reading it, I’m convinced that we should neither raise the minimum wage nor make anything free.

Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

    Dr. Dyson starts his usual complaining about American life by recounting a bad memory. He was doing a stint at Connecticut’s Hartford Seminary, when he got pulled over by a rude (and probably racist) cop. The reason – someone saw him spanking his kid and thought it was child abuse - so she called cops. They order him out of the car, they’re domineering, they’re hostile, they shove him as they walk away. As for the ten-year-old son, he ends up crying. This is what always bothers me about Dyson, he just can’t seem to take responsibility when he does something wrong. He’s tough enough to give his son “a few licks on the hand” but is he tough enough to take a few licks of his own? He uses physical punishment on his (probably smaller) son for some perceived misbehavior, but what about when the cops punish HIM for a perceived misbehavior?

    There are some anecdotes that get you thinking, like the one where his kids are called “nigger” at a Chicago skating rink, same thing at a swimming pool in Kissimmee, Florida. A cute, blonde blue-eyed kid, no older than his children, calls them racist names, casually, and dismissively. I would love to know what motivated the White kids to say those things. Did their parents use that kind of language at home? What about their teachers at school? Would they dismissively address a Black hospital employee as a nigger if they needed medical help?

    Dyson recounts how he left Carson-Newman college before his senior year, over a financial and personal dispute. He makes it look like a protest, but I can see right through it – he left because he couldn’t have his way. He got into a personality conflict with the college’s White president, a man who had no PhD and was therefore not qualified. But what about all the Black high school principals who are not qualified? They’re out there right now, screwing over Black kids, nothing but puppets for the White establishment, or kicking up to the White elites in order to stay in power. There are more corrupt, dishonest, unqualified, and incompetent high school principals ruining Black children’s lives than there are unqualified college presidents. Where’s Dyson’s rant against it?

    It was interesting to read the chapter Inventing Whiteness, where he discusses how the Poles, Jews, Irish, and Italians, all became “white” partly out of their own initiative, and partly out of the way they were perceived (also discussed in an earlier book titled How the Irish Became White.) It’s his belief that all of these ethnic groups took advantage of the “white” label in order to get ahead, both at the expense of Black Americans, and at the expense of losing their own ethnic identity. In one example he uses O.J. Simpson (a man he thoroughly dislikes) as having bought into the White world, then switched back to being Black just for the convenience. Dyson says that prior to murdering his ex-wife, nothing was Black about O.J. except for the bottom of his shoe. No secret is made about how many Black Americans did in fact think he was guilty, but it was the anger of the people that drove them to support him. Despite his dislike for O.J, he credits the trial with giving Whites a taste of the absurdities that Black Americans face.

   Other Black-White issues are discussed, like White rappers who hijack (or mimic) Black American culture. Dyson credits Justin Timberlake for his use of hip-hop rhythms, while being wary of the singer using it to his convenience. But he seriously dislike’s Iggy Azalia’s appropriation of hip-hop, treating her like she hijacked it. He doesn’t have anything bad to say about Eminem. Dyson has respect for Eminem’s ability, but I also suspect that it’s because Eminem kind of “paid his dues,” growing up a poor kid in Detroit, no White privilege there. On the other hand, I always saw Eminem as an incredible opportunist, because you can’t claim “street cred” when you’re living in an upscale neighborhood. Then again, most hip-hop artists exploit violence in the Black community, while at the same time living in exclusive White suburban mansions (there’s the O.J. Simpson experience again.) Maybe it’s time for Dr. Dyson to write about that too?