Garvey's Ghost: Black Talk

Revenge of the Sellouts Episode 2

Having just recently recovered from the shock of Apple Computer ditching the PPC line of CPU's for Intel's offerings, I had the great misfortune of being a witness to one of the worst political show in Black America in many many decades. I had always thought it could not get much worse than Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, but I was sadly mistaken. The US Senate approved Justice Janice Brown to the State Circuit of Appeals for the District of Columbia by a 56-43 vote with a single yes vote from Democrat Nelson of Nebraska. Every single Republican in the Senate voted yes to this woman. I'm not going to get into the gender or explicit race issue here except to say that the Bush administration has been craftily using race and gender against Democrats in such a way to paint Democrats as against women and blacks.

However; Just as I did with Condoleezza Rice's appointment to Secretary of State, I do not believe that Justice Brown is competent to be a judge simply based on her own statements on record. The New York Times posted an article entitled: Latest Confirmed Nominee Sees Slavery in Liberalism in which Brown-Rogers is quoted as saying some incredibly stupid and in-accurate comments, non of which were even challenged. These comments include:

"In the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery," she has warned in speeches. Society and the courts have turned away from the founders' emphasis on personal responsibility, she has argued, toward a culture of government regulation and dependency that threatens fundamental freedoms.

"We no longer find slavery abhorrent," she told the conservative Federalist Society a few years ago. "We embrace it." She explained in another speech, "If we can invoke no ultimate limits on the power of government, a democracy is inevitably transformed into a kleptocracy - a license to steal, a warrant for oppression."

This line of thinking was recently rebuked by us here at Garvey's Ghost when it was espoused by "Willy" Williams. The crux of her argument is that somehow the government is out of control and this out of control government will eventually oppress the people. Well actually we agree with that. What we disagree with is by whome the government is doing these things. We know, and knew for a while, that the current administration lied to the people in order to go to war in Iraq. This was not the work of "liberals" but of Conservatives. We have a tax code that has taken more money from the poor and middle class while actually lowering taxes on the top .1% of the population. The very population that can afford to be taxed. Writes David Cay Johnson:

The average income for the top 0.1 percent was $3 million in 2002, the latest year for which averages are available. That number is two and a half times the $1.2 million, adjusted for inflation, that group reported in 1980. No other income group rose nearly as fast.

The Bush administration tax cuts stand to widen the gap between the hyper-rich and the rest of America. The merely rich, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, will shoulder a disproportionate share of the tax burden.

President Bush said during the third election debate last October that most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans. In fact, most - 53 percent - will go to people with incomes in the top 10 percent over the first 15 years of the cuts, which began in 2001 and would have to be reauthorized in 2010. And more than 15 percent will go just to the top 0.1 percent, those 145,000 taxpayers.

The Times analysis also shows that over the next decade, the tax cuts Mr. Bush wants to extend indefinitely would shift the burden further from the richest Americans. With incomes of more than $1 million or so, they would get the biggest share of the breaks, in total amounts and in the drop in their share of federal taxes paid.

One reason the merely rich will fare much less well than the very richest is the alternative minimum tax. This tax, the successor to one enacted in 1969 to make sure the wealthiest Americans could not use legal loopholes to live tax-free, has never been adjusted for inflation. As a result, it stings Americans whose incomes have crept above $75,000.

The Times analysis shows that by 2010 the tax will affect more than four-fifths of the people making $100,000 to $500,000 and will take away from them nearly one-half to more than two-thirds of the recent tax cuts. For example, the group making $200,000 to $500,000 a year will lose 70 percent of their tax cut to the alternative minimum tax in 2010, an average of $9,177 for those affected.

What this shows is that it is untenable that Liberals are "stealing" anything from the public. In fact it is the conservatives who are "stealing" from 90% of the tax paying public. They are stealing this money and using it to fund a war in Iraq and pay off Haliburton. Yet the "very intellectual" Justice Brown would have us believe that it is the "Liberals." And not a single challenge was printed to this nonsense.

Here's more from Brown:

This week, some Senate Democrats have even singled her out as the most objectionable of President Bush's more than 200 judicial nominees, citing her criticism of affirmative action and abortion rights but most of all her sweeping denunciations of New Deal legal precedents that enabled many federal regulations and social programs - developments she has called "the triumph of our socialist revolution."

I've already covered this issue but if anyone here has a problem with a 40 hour work week and regulations that govern healthy work environments, they should relocate to sweatshop companies right now. Clearly Justice Brown has been popping some sort of chemicals to have forgotten exactly what a sharecropper is and how exploitative business can be when it does not have to worry about governmental oversight. Speaking of Sharecropping, the NY Times then reveals the source of Brown's warped thinking:

Her friends and supporters say her views of slavery underpin her judicial philosophy. It was her study of that history, they say, combined with her evangelical Christian faith and her self-propelled rise from poverty that led her to abandon the liberal views she learned from her family.

"We discuss things like, 'How did slavery happen?' " said her friend and mentor Steve Merksamer, a lawyer in Sacramento, Calif. "It comes down to the fact that she believes, as I do, that some things are, in fact, right and some things are, in fact, wrong. Segregation - even though the courts had sustained it for a hundred years - was morally indefensible and legally indefensible and yet it was the law of the land," he said. "She brings that philosophy to her legal work."

First off, this friend and mentor is this man:

http://www.sacbar.org/members/saclawyer/oct_nov2001/merksamer.html
http://www.sacbar.org/members/saclawyer/images/oct_nov_2001/Merksamer.jpg

I'm not even going to discuss his lack of qualifications to discuss slavery or history of slavery in America. There are other white men, if one must choose one, that are more qualified for that discussion.

I would like to know exactly what "Liberal views" her family had that needed to be abandoned. It appears that no one even asked the question. Secondly on this "how did slavery happen" question what kind of comment was this? Is he discussion slavery in it's internation form? Is he talking about US slavery? How does he reconsile that the God of the Bible in fact sanctioned genocide and "servitude" of non-Jews? Does he in fact discuss that it was Southern Business (and to a lesser extent northern business) interests that gave us the legal compromises that kept slavery alive in the US? It was in fact a rebellion against government oversight and regulation that sparked the Civil War (you can forget all that "free the blacks" moralising it's garbage).

In fact it was the moralising of judges that enshrined Plessy v. Ferguson into American History. These Christian judges swore up and down that they were in fact doing "God's work." Clearly this is a prime example of why those who use "morals" rather than "logic" to make decisions are dangerous people.

I've said it many times and I'll say it again. It is clear that the black church is headed downhill very quickly. It would be easy to say that Janice Brown is an anomaly, but she is not. In our last discussion on the Black Churches it is clear that many black churches are headed in similar directions as Janice Brown and Condi Rice. If there is a great groundswell of black churches that are not in line with these ideas of politicised morality, they need to make a showing. Otherwise.....

Links:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/09/politics/09brown.html?hp&ex=1118376000&en=3dfdc077be26edc5&ei=5094&partner=homepage
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/national/class/HYPER-FINAL.html