Your Lying Eyes

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22 September 2005

Krugman Nails It!

...then walks away and turns to mush. In his latest column, Paul Krugman unleashes the following bold insight: "Race is the biggest reason the United States, uniquely among advanced countries, is ruled by a political movement that is hostile to the idea of helping citizens in need." And what does he do with this bit of truth? He goes on to some ordinary, run-of-the-mill Bush bashing, with a gentle swipe at Reagan thrown in for good measure. But just as Your Lying Eyes noted several months ago, he also points out ...Read morethat our lack of universal health care is due to our racial divide, but provides no further insights other than to say "it isn't yet a crisis among middle-class, white Americans (although it's getting there). Instead, the worst effects are falling on the poor and black, who have third-world levels of infant mortality and life expectancy." See, he understands that there's a connection between our reluctance to have free health care and the fact that blacks have poorer health, but he can't seem to connect the dots. Has Krugman ever noticed that whites and blacks almost never live together in the same neighborhoods? In advanced, mono-ethnic nations such as France, Germany, and Japan the middle class does not view the poor as being a separate under-class. But here in the U.S., where 1/4 of the population can so clearly be identified by their appearance or language as not carrying their own economic weight, there is little inclination for the income earners to be generous with the public funds - particularly when there is such a poor track record of public generosity making things any better. When child assistance turns into an epidemic of illegitimacy, when housing subsidies turn into wrecked neighborhoods and failing schools, and when constantly increasing education expenditures show little improvement in scholastic achievement - well, you can't expect a lot of enthusiasm for introducing universal health care.
Now you can go on about racism all you want, but people aren't going to just ignore their Lying Eyes and pretend that all the things they see day in and day out are just figments of their own bigoted minds - not anymore they're not. They're not going to start believing that if only we'd just spend more money these problems will go away.
It's hard to believe it sometimes but federal judges used to actually forcibly integrate schools by ordering students from one school district be bused to another. Any nitwit could have predicted what would happen next - in fact plenty of nitwits did predict exactly what happened next - that eventually all the whites would either send their kids to private schools or would move away, leaving the "integrated" public schools behind and in shambles.
Yes, Dr. Krugman, race plays a very important role in our nation and explains alot. But by smugly laying the blame on "racism," you are turning your back on the issue. It's easy to do, if you're a New York Times columnist or a President of the United States, to blame problems on racism and then turn away satisfied with your own moral superiority. But that doesn't do anyone any good. When trying to understand problems, being realistic is a good start.

15 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ouch!
A blogger assistance commercial! I bet everyone this guy visits has a "rockin blog".
H

September 23, 2005 9:26 PM  
Blogger ziel said...

More spam

September 23, 2005 10:24 PM  
Blogger Glaivester said...

Interesting. I made similar commetns on my own blog.

September 25, 2005 11:42 AM  
Blogger ziel said...

Glaivester, yes, I did notice that after I posted mine and I admit I was a bit mortified that your's went up the day before mine...

September 25, 2005 8:03 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"In advanced, mono-ethnic nations such as France, Germany, and Japan the middle class does not view the poor as being a separate under-class"
Since France and Germany have large immigrant populations, can they still be called "mono-ethnic"?

September 27, 2005 7:24 PM  
Blogger ziel said...

They don't really have large ethnic populations. From the CIA Factbook on Germany:
Ethnic Groups: German 91.5%, Turkish 2.4%, other 6.1% (made up largely of Greek, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish). So it's 97.8% European - the only "people of color" are a small number of Turks.
I believe France does not count up people by ethnicity, so the CIA doesn't have the breakdown, but I'd be shocked if her non-white population is more than 5%.
The USA is over 25% black and Hispanic, in contrast.

September 27, 2005 7:58 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This is from the Middle East Quarterly way back in March 1997. The author thought then that the Muslim population was "quite probably"about 6.6 percent. Since you are right about France not counting by ethnicity (or religion)it may be a case of Zionist(?)alarmism.
http://www.meforum.org/article/337
(...)
The Ministry of Interior and Ined routinely speak of a Muslim population in France of 3 million. Sheikh Abbas, head of the Great Mosque in Paris, in 1987 spoke of twice as many -- 6 million.4 Journalists usually adopt an estimate somewhere in the middle: for example, Philippe Bernard of Le Monde uses the figure of 3 to 4 million.5 The Catholic Church, a reliable source of information on religious trends in France, also estimates 4 million.6 A French-Arab journal published in Paris provides the following breakdown: 3.1 million Muslims of North African origin, 400,000 from the Middle East, 300,000 from Africa, 50,000 Asians, 50,000 converts of ethnic French origin, and 300,000 illegal immigrants from unknown countries.7 This brings the total to 4.2 million. One can state with reasonable certainty that the Muslim population of France numbers over 3 million (about 5 percent of the total French population) and quite probably over 4 million (6.6 percent)
(...)
An additional note:though the CIA Factbook indicates a Turkish population of 2.4%, it also shows a Muslim population of 3.7%. Probably a combination of Bosnians,Albanians and various non-Europeans make up the rest of the Muslim population.

September 27, 2005 10:53 PM  
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