WHITE SUPREMACY IS WHAT IT IS ALL ABOUT
For 100 years, the deeds and
words of Abraham Lincoln provided the template for American politics and for
campaigning for office. His speeches served as the measure of the man. Their
greatness, and his, the product of a literary and political genius, disclosed
an understanding of human nature social sciences have yet to appreciate. He
recognized slavery as a symptom, not the disease, in the struggle with evil. He
fought the Civil War to free everyone. He made the point in his usual succinct
and comprehensive way: "It is the eternal struggle between these two
principles--right and wrong--throughout the world. They are the two principles
that stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to
struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other is the divine
right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself.
It is the same spirit that says, "You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll
eat it.'"1
As he predicted, the struggle
continues. Only the divine right of money has replaced the divine right of
kings, a far more insidious evil than slavery itself because technology creates
so many subtle ways of stealing other people's labor. I include finance as part
of technology. Lincoln saw that coming after the Civil War made America an
industrial power: "It has been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the
near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for
the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been
enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money
power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the
prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the
Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my
country than ever before, even in the midst of the war."2
Lincoln was killed by a white
supremacist for holding such views. I use "white supremacy" as a generic term
for the belief that, by some natural law (an apology for greed), an elite class
has the right to exploit the labor of others (and the resources), even to the
extent of slavery. Those who believe in that divine right hold (in secret) that
the purpose of advancing the elite sanctifies any force or deception.
"Slavery" is a relative term.
The extent to which people are required to work for less than just compensation
provides the measure of relative slavery. The machinations in Washington have
more to do with who will be the elite than how to govern the nation for the
benefit of all. That intrigue is masked by the claim that an all- encompassing
"market" determines who will join the elite because, by unspoken assumption, success in making money determines whom
God loves. No human morality is required to govern. The market will always do
the right thing, as if it were a form of natural selection without anything
like the impediments inherent in natural selection that I discuss elsewhere.3
America stands at a
cross-road. Will the outcome of the Civil War and 100 years of social evolution
in care for everyone, including the poorest among us, and the earth, be
abandoned in favor of a free-for-all competition for the right to exploit other
people and the world"s resources--all under the rubric of fiscal and personal
responsibility? The grand deception that there ever was a time when people
survived on their own without any help from the community and that women can
revert to a strictly homemaking career fantasizes the past and ignores the
future. (Treating woman as second-class citizens is one of white supremacy's
strategies.)
An even bigger issue concerns
Lincoln's prediction that the Republic could be destroyed by concentrating
money in too few hands. Our three-part division of government at the federal
level, administrative (the president), legislative (Congress), and judicial
(the Supreme Court) prevents any one from exercising absolute power. That is
the genius of the Constitution. If all three branches of government accept the
ethic of money as the measure of all things, separation of powers will no
longer exist. Money and its priests will succeed in coalescing all three
functions of government, the separation of which provided a defense to white
supremacy.
White supremacy has its
origins in the adaptations available for acquiring the energy required to
survive. Lincoln identified the cruelest choice. It has everything to do with
the design of society. The choices are, looking at the poles between which the
choices fall: divisions of labor based on merit where all share in the
production and distribution of the product or, the alternative, stealing other
people's labor by violence, deception, or social edicts. The former (pure
socialism) is the most efficient and just way to organize society. It has
enjoyed little practice because those aspiring to elite status are very
resourceful and ruthless.
The South fought the Civil
War to preserve an elite's right to exploit black labor, if not all labor. That
is why the war had to be fought. All states would not protect labor but the
majority would. The hope America inspired everywhere was founded on a
constitutional government that would protect the right of people to the fruits
of their labor. The fight continues. Thanks to the seniority system in Congress
and a lock on electoral politics by white supremacists in the South that
followed the North's abandonment of reconstruction, exploitation continued by
terror (lynching) and segregation and the failure of Congress and the courts to
support the Constitution. It took 100 years more to make civil rights a fact.
But the struggle continues.
White supremacy did not give up. It went into the closet and became more
subtle. Support for public education and support for people in need have
declined since enforcement of the Civil Rights Acts. Jails are overflowing,
mostly with minority people. Means of disqualifying poor and minority voters
are emerging again. Election fraud, made easy by very close electoral races,
will increase and little is being done to prevent it. Changes in demographics
based on immigration threaten white supremacy to a point where desperate
measures are required to protect elite's privileges.
Unemployment and deceptive
antigovernment propaganda distract people from seeing the direction elite
supporters pursue. If they succeed in making government appear the enemy and
redistribution of wealth upward continues, money will finally achieve unlimited
power and the Republic will surely be destroyed. Some see destruction of
government as the way to place money in control, making necessary compromises
and governance for the common good impossible. Everything is for sale. Only
government, big government, can take on big money. How people who fear big
government fail to fear money big enough to buy government amazes me.
The elites no-tax mantra does
not balance the budget. Without taxes the debt will increase. Government has
for some time filled the void created by the elimination of jobs by technology
and outsourcing. Government spending and a continuous wartime economy (how we
got out of the great depression) hid the failure of capitalism to provide work
for all. A bankrupt government means a lot more unemployment. We will become
indentured servants of big money.
For moral justification,
white supremacy employs what I reference as the religion of money. Under the
religion of money promulgated by the likes of Ayn Rand and early Calvinism,
money provides the proof of God's love. Those who cannot keep up are lazy or worse
and God's judgment should not be ignored by government programs. President
Reagan invented his welfare queens to discredit the support of single mothers.
The result is a kind of social Darwinism that condemns the weak and crushes the
empathy necessary to support a just society.
Ironically, adaptation to the
wrong thing4 created the religion of money. God is that which we
think we must obey to survive. We went from hunter-gatherers to complete
financial dependence in a few short centuries. The change from adapting to
stewarding real resources to creating paper resources changed everything and
made us believe that something with no intrinsic value creates wealth. Because
we must adapt to making it, we all worship money to one degree or another as
part of our strategy for survival.
Given our biological limits
for adaptation, the intellect's ability to deceive itself, and society's
ability to advance white supremacy, how do we combat white supremacy? Only an
ethical construct can mitigate the conflict competition to survive generates.
While people do not all have the same genetic gifts or educational
opportunities, the peace required for the cooperation of all in the quest for a
pollution free, efficient, and just world requires that all have an equal right
to contribute to and to share in the earth's bounty--equality under a rule of
law.
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