Ezra Klein finds a different war when searching for war on white people
National Journal’s Ron Fournier seemed to have gotten under the skin of the Right Wing. “Your Party cannot be,” Ron Fournier said. “the Party of the future beyond November if you’re seen as the Party of White people.”
Rep. Mo Brooks went on the Laura Ingraham show and responded as follows when asked about Fournier’s statement. “This is a part of the war on Whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party, Mo Brooks said. “And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that Whites hate everybody else. It’s part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things. Well that’s not true.”
Monday Ezra Klein took Congressman Mo Brook’s statement to task on MSNBC’s All-In with Chris Hayes. The average wealth and income of white people continue to exceed that of minorities by very large percentages. The incarceration rates of minorities far exceed white people. The poverty rate of minorities far exceed that of white people. This led Ezra Klein to make the following statement.
“If this is what it looks like when the Democrats running the federal government declare war on White people, man I would hate to see what it would look like if the government declared war on non-White people.”
Ezra Klein got much of the story correct. He did not however stress one reality. The Republicans are in fact feeding a real fear.
In our great capitalist society, having a particular group that is marginalized plays an important role. That group works for lower wages. That group is abused in the housing and financial markets to extract its capital to subsidize others.
Those least able to afford credit pay much higher prices for it. Payday lenders and pawn shops are great wealth extractors. Reverse mortgages now provide the newly popular instrument that takes away one of the last vestiges of wealth accumulation to pass on.
The type of wealth extraction that afflicted mostly minority and systemically disenfranchised communities are going mainstream. In other words, the head has begun to eat the body. While it is true that Ezra Klein’s graph shows that the White people – minority gap has been fairly constant, it fails to qualify it. If one White person owns $9,999,001,000 of wealth and 999 White people own $1000 each, on average they are all millionaires, yet most of them are individually poor.
That is the nature of wealth and income disparity. In a society where wealth extraction has been maximize from the disaffected, a new source must be found. So who is next? The heart of the middle class. But how do you get the heart of the middle class to support extractive policies? Deflection.
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Rep. Steve King (R-IA), and all those politicians playing the immigration and the race card know that. They would have you believe that the economic pain felt by White people is caused by the Democratic Party’s War on Whites even as the 1% bleed us all with their capital extractive supported policies. They would have you believe that those refugees and immigrants are the cause of your job loss when it is the 1% seeking cheaper and cheaper slave labor abroad.
It behooves all Americans to see through the minutia. Dividing and conquering the masses is the plan. It is time for the poor and middle classes, people of all races, immigrants, and refuges to join together as one to fight the scourge that is attempting to rid us all of our birthright.