"We're Owed and They Aren't"

Writing in The American Thinker Ed Kaitz tells of how he got to know the immigrant Vietnamese shrimp fishermen of the Louisiana’s Gulf Coast.

When they arrived in Louisiana the refugees had no money (the money that they had was used to bribe their way out of Vietnam and into refugee camps in Thailand), few friends, and a mostly unfriendly and suspicious local population.



They did however have strong families, a strong work ethic, and the "Audacity of Hope." Within a generation, with little or no knowledge of English, the Vietnamese had achieved dominance in the fishing industry there and their children were already achieving the top SAT scores in the state.

So why was it, Ed asked a casual black acquaintance, that these Vietnamese had come to America and, become, without friends and influence, “within a generation, so successful?” And why was it “so difficult to convince young black men to abandon the streets” and build lives like the Vietnamese immigrants?

The answer was shocking.

"We’re owed and they aren’t."

Well, words are cheap. The trouble is that this “we’re owed” attitude is probably at the root of most black social pathology: the 70 percent of black babies born to single mothers and the abysmal performance of blacks in school. After all, what’s the point of sucking it in when “We’re owed and they aren’t?”

After the great catharsis of the civil rights movement when white America confessed its racist sins, blacks had a choice. They could forgive their white oppressors or they could torment them. Under the tutelage of white liberals and black nationalists they chose to torment.

Wrong choice.

It was wrong, of course, because forgiveness is at the center of our Christian culture. It is especially appropriate to remember this during Holy Week, when we recall how God sacrificed his Son for our sins and forgives the sins of the world.

But it is also wrong at a practical level because it destroys and retards the advancement of blacks from their status as an oppressed people.

When you come to the city you come as the member of a tribe, one of the Gentiles. Living in a tribe, scratching out a living on the land, tied to the land in serfdom or slavery, you rightly mistrusted everyone outside the tribe or outside the village. The outsiders are, after all competitors for the vital land you occupy, the land that gives you life.

But in the city, things are different. In the city you prosper not because you have the best land but because you serve your fellow citizens better with products and services that they want and need. In the city you prosper not because you prudently mistrust the brigands down the road but because you prudently enlarge and extend your circle of trust. You establish a reputation for trustworthiness and you seek out those who are trustworthy.

So long as American blacks sit in their ghetto of mistrust, so long as they cling to the motto of “We’re owed and they aren’t,” so long will they fail to journey from the wilderness of racism and rage to the Promised Land of trust and love and come at last to their great reward of full citizenship in this great America.

This week in his much noted speech, Barak Obama sent out a message loud and clear.

It’s still: “We’re owed, and you aren’t.”

And that’s a shame.

Too Big To Fail

What do we do about institutions, particularly financial institutions, that are “too big to fail?”

In the current credit crunch that becomes a big deal. The government runs around worrying about the bankers. It seems like we let the little guy go to the wall, foreclose on his mortgage, and send him out into the street.

Not one penny, you might say, for the struggling homeowner, but billions for the bankers.

Last weekend, the Federal Reserve bailed out failing investment bank Bear Stearns.

Actually, the Fed didn’t quite “bail out” Bear Stearns. They gave it to JP Morgan Chase for a couple of hundred million. That means that Bear’s stockholders got two cents on the dollar. I don’t think that’s exactly a bailout. It looks to me more like a haircut.

You can tell that the Fed probably did the right thing by reading what Larry Kudlow, an old Bear hand, had to say about it. He wonders if Bear Stearns really had to go down in flames. After noting that the Fed could have let Bear Stearns in at the discount window and telling us that he used to work at Bear, he gives us this:

All of this kind of makes me wonder whether Bear Stearns wasn’t some kind of sacrificial lamb. Did government policy makers hope to convince the public that a big Wall Street firm could indeed fail? Or wouldn’t be bailed out? Listen, they were buried, not bailed out.

The fact is, Bear shareholders got creamed with the $2 per share purchase price. The shareholders include all the men and women who’ve worked there for years, and who own roughly one-third of the firm’s equity.

After the Bear Stearns creaming, the word was that Lehman Brothers might be next. But the Lehman bears got a talking to from the Fed: Keep lending to Lehman, the Fed said. You could translate the message, if you like: If you chaps keep on down this road, the Fed seemed to say, we could end up giving all you chaps a haircut too.

So maybe the Fed isn’t crazy when it makes a sacrificial lamb out of Bear Stearns. Maybe it is sending a message to the sharks: we are loading up with harpoons here at the Fed.

Maybe the Fed is crazy like a fox.

Obama Fails the Test

Everyone agrees that Senator Barack Obama delivered a great speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

But not everyone agrees with the message.

Obama was forced to give this speech because of the recent flap over the racist, hateful sermons delivered by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor for over 20 years of the African nationalist church in Chicago to which Obama belonged.

Everyone understands that Wright is a symbol for America’s present shameful secret, the one you are not allowed to voice: that the most racist people in the United States are African Americans.

There’s a simple reason for this. Liberals give blacks a pass. If anyone in the United States other than a black voices a single racist word that person is shamed and blamed. But when blacks talk racist or act racist liberals give them a pass. Well, they say, how can you expect blacks to observe the standards of the rest of America—after centuries of slavery and oppression. Or there’s this one. You can’t be racist unless you have power, and blacks don’t have power.

Senator Obama, who now has the fervent support of black voters, had the opportunity, for one shining moment, to lead America’s blacks out of the wilderness of black racism and into the land of milk and honey. He could have said: “I utterly reject the hateful, racist philosophy of Minister Wright. That sort of rhetoric has no place in America. Period.” With that speech he could have begun the post-racist era in America. He would have gone down in the history books as a Jefferson or a Lincoln.

But he didn’t. Instead he ducked. He didn’t have the courage to be a leader.

Instead of leadership he gave us the usual liberal guilt trip and the usual bromides about racism and the understandable rage of blacks who lived through the 1950s and 1960s.

But the story of race in the United States is not shameful. It is incandescent.

At the dawn of the modern era, within 20 years of Lord Mansfield famously ruling in Somersett’s Case that slavery was unlawful in England, the founding fathers attempted to do the same in the United States. They tried to make slavery illegal in the new constitution. But they were blocked by the southern states. So they compromised, agreeing not to outlaw the slave trade—yet.

It was a weak moment, because for the next 80 years the South reacted with purple rage whenever the subject of slavery was brought up. For a potted history of the slavery issue start at the Northwest Ordinance and follow the events leading up the the Civil War. That was the epochal event, you recall, in which America tossed an entire generation of young men and a year of national income down the toilet. But the Civil War decided the slavery issue once and for all.

Only one US war was as costly as the Civil War. Our American grandparents spend 130 percent of national income in World War II fighting fascism and Japanese expansionism. We decided that question once and for all too.

Then right after World War II Americans rolled up their sleeves and began to work on the lingering race issue, the de jure oppression of blacks in the South and the de facto oppression in the North. This struggle culminated in the great Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. Liberals were the leaders in this great work. It was liberals’ finest hour.

It was a courageous thing for liberals to do, as President Johnson is said to have recognized, because it wiped out the Democratic Party’s power in the South.

Unfortunately, courageous as they were to walk away from white racism in the South, Democrats and liberals were not courageous enough to act against black racism in the North.

And so today we have the corrupt system of affirmative action, quotas, and “diversity” that has so poisoned the relations between the races, and has so cruelly prevented American blacks from taking their rightful place as equal and honored members of the American family. You can’t really take your place at the family table until you give up your rage and your victimhood, put on a smile, and start to discuss family business without always bringing up ancient feuds and humiliations.

In the United States today there is no worse accusation for a white than to be called a “racist.” But blacks get a pass on racist speech and actions. Instead, for blacks, most likely, there is no worse accusation than to be called an “Uncle Tom,” or to sneered at for “acting white.”

This double standard, this injustice, is a cancer eating away at the heart of America. America is waiting, longing for the leader who will lead us out of the tar pits of racist recrimination to the sunny upland meadows of post-racism. Many Americans hoped that Barack Obama might be that leader.

Now we know that he is not.

A National Conversation on Race

For as long as I can remember liberals have liked to suggest that we need a “national conversation” on something or other.

As often as not, that national conversation was about race.

Of course, liberals were not actually proposing a real national conversation about race. They were proposing something rather different and rather more sinister.

They were proposing to tell Americans what to think about race, what to feel about race, what to do about race, and if you didn’t agree with their prescriptions you had better shut up. Because if your voiced your disagreement you would be branded as a racist.

We know what this was all about. It was all about power, liberal power. The liberal ownership of the race issue allowed them to corral about 90 percent of the black vote, ever since the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. With that vote liberals could stop any reform of the welfare state and maintain their power, their perquisites, and their tenure.

In this liberal policy on race there were good cops and bad cops. Liberals were the good cops, telling us that their race-based quotas and set-asides were all for our own good. Then there were the bad cops, the black race hustlers like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and at the local level, men like Jeremiah Wright, pastor of a black nationalist church in Chicago..

The job of the good cops was to keep the white population cowed. The job of the bad cops was to keep blacks voting Democrat in a frenzy of race rage.

Then along came Barack Obama and promised Unity and Change. He was understood instinctively by white college-educated Democrats as offering a way out of the race ravine. In the words of Shelby Steele, Obama is a “bargainer,” offering “the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America’s history of racism.”

It’s lucky for Obama that he came along when he did. I’d say that American whites are getting close to the point where they are going to say “enough already” on race and refuse to be cowed by the race baiters.

But it turns out that Barack Obama is not exactly the race healer he pretends to be. How could he be when he has been attending a church of race hatred for most of his adult life. Barack Obama is asking us to believe that he is a race healer when he has belonged to a church, the biggest black church in Chicago, run by race baiter Jeremiah Wright.

[N]othing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama’s political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday — for 20 years — in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable.

You know what, liberals? I think we are about to have a national conversation on race. And this will be the first one in living memory in which liberals don’t get to set the rules.

So there’s a chance that the conversation will be a real conversation. For the first time in living memory.

Another Day Another Dollar

Is there enough fear out there after the Fed moved in to stop the rot at mortgage meltdown victim Bear Stearns?

Sure, I’m scared. Who wouldn’t be?

But the job of the Fed is to act as the banker of last resort and stop the spiral of credit contraction. And that is what it did over the weekend when it gave away Bear stearns to JPMorgan Chase for a couple of cents on the dollar and a bunch of guarantees on Bear Stearns’ “dark matter.”

It was the failure of the Fed to do that in 1929-1933 that made the Great Depression a ten-year vale of misery.

Larry Kudlow is confident. But then he always is. He commends the Fed for doing the right thing. But then he takes a shot at the Democrats.

Senator Schumer is calling Bush "Herbert Hoover." But Hoover signed protectionist Smoot-Hawley, just as Hillary and Obama are today trying to break up NAFTA. Hoover signed a huge tax increase, just as Hill-Bama are preaching. The Dems are emulating Hoover. Bush is trying to stop it.

That’s a very important point. Herbert Hoover made the first mistakes that made the Great Depression “great.” He let the banks collapse, he jawboned business to keep prices and wages up, he signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. He increased tax rates You could read it all up at Stuck on Stupid.

Democrats really have never learned the lessons of the Great Depression. They think that it was the genius of FDR that got us out, with the NRA, Social Security, the Wagner Labor Act, and TVA.

On the contrary. All those policies made the Depression worse.

If they try the same policies again then the American people will suffer greatly.

That is you and me.

Double Standard on Bigotry

One thing that conservatives and Republicans really know. When we step into the public square we have to be whiter than white. Anything we’ve said or written that doesn’t square with the liberal zeitgeist will be hauled out and used to prove that we are bigots, racists, and homophobes.

Barack Obama has, for twenty years, belonged to a church in Chicago. His minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., has opinions that, in a conservative or a Republican, would disqualify him from the public square. As Ronald Kessler reports:

In a sermon delivered at Howard University, Barack Obama’s longtime minister, friend and adviser blamed America for starting the AIDS virus, training professional killers, importing drugs and creating a racist society that would never elect a black candidate president.


"Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."

It’s ok to say stuff like that if you are liberal and black. But a Republican saying that would be driven from the public square, and anyone connected with him would be convicted of guilt by association.

But in America, we have a Double Standard. Liberals and blacks get a pass when they say racist and bigoted things. Well, their hearts are in the right place.

Some day, when the American people just can’t take it any more, this double standard will crumble into dust and a new double standard will arise to wave cynically over the fruited plain.

But that day is not yet.

Bill Buckley Didn't Like Writing

What a grand life Bill Buckley had, doing what he loved, and being so good at it. That’s what young Anthony Dick said to Buckley while serving as research assistant on a book on Goldwater.

He quickly corrected me. He did not love writing. He found it difficult, tedious, and increasingly painful. Nor had he ever loved politics, which was awash in sordidness and banality. He would rather be reading, or sailing, or visiting friends, or enjoying any of the other luxuries his wealth could have afforded.

No. He worked out of a sense of duty, Buckley said, to repay for all the beauty he had received and to “resist the totalizing designs” of the folks who want to ratchet up the power of politics.