Jesse Jackson wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that Black Americans will not fall for Trump’s absurd claims about the great things he claims to have done for them.
He wrote:
If a lie is repeated often enough, the truth may never catch up. Donald Trump understands this better than anyone, as he showers Americans with lies — often the same ones repeated over and over — knowing that more voters will hear him than the fact-checkers.
One of his favorite howlers is his oft-repeated claim that “I’ve done more for African Americans than anybody, except for the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.”
No one should fall for the con.
For example, Trump doesn’t come close to Harry Truman who desegregated the U.S. military, an act of simple justice that took immense courage. He’s done nothing as important as Dwight Eisenhower who dispatched troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to overcome resistance to school integration. He can’t hold a candle to Lyndon Johnson, who, working with Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, passed the Civil Rights Bill ending segregation in public facilities, the Voting Rights Act enforcing the right to vote, and the War on Poverty that reduced poverty to levels still not matched.
But comparing Trump to presidents who actually made things better is to fall into his trap, for Trump hasn’t done things for African Americans, he has done things to them.
He’s embraced the Republican strategy of race-bait politics, only he’s replaced their dog whistles with a bullhorn. He celebrated the neo-Nazis and other extremists marching against civil rights protesters in Charlottesville. He’s scorned African countries and Haiti as “s…-holes,” suggesting the only immigrants he wanted were whites from countries like Norway.
He sowed racial fears, painting the largely nonviolent Black Lives Matter demonstrators as “thugs,” and the demonstrations as “riots.” He’s tried to rouse support from suburbanites by charging that Biden’s support for affordable housing would “destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream.” He’s labeled cities with large minority populations like New York City as “anarchist jurisdictions” that should be stripped of federal support…
Trump’s Small Business Administration stiffed African Americans in dispensing loans through the Pay Protection Plan. More than 9 of 10 Black-owned small businesses that applied for loans were denied. That led directly to over 40% of Black-owned businesses shutting down in the pandemic.
Trump measures the economy’s success not by the health of the people, but by the health of the stock market, but while 61% of whites participate in the stock market (although for most the holdings are meager), only one-third of blacks own stocks. Nearly one-half of Black women report that they are unable to pay for necessities like food and housing, even though most work. Over half have less than $200 in savings. Trump doesn’t help. He did nothing to raise the minimum wage and has been actively hostile to unions that help workers bargain a fair wage.
Essential workers are disproportionately African American. Blacks are disproportionately in low-wage jobs, often without employer-based health care. The pandemic has killed Black people at double the rate of Whites. African Americans have suffered the most from Trump’s mismanagement. Blacks have been more likely to be denied health care, and less likely to have paid sick days.
And Trump has basically been AWOL as the Republican Senate blocked action on a relief plan as unemployment insurance was running out, and states and cities were facing massive cuts in services and jobs — disproportionately held by people of color — in the wake of the pandemic-caused fiscal crisis.
Trump touts the modest criminal justice reforms that he signed off on that will help reduce mass incarceration a bit, but he has actively undermined equal justice under the law. He encouraged police to rough up those that they arrest. He defended vigilantes shooting at those protesting the murder of George Floyd. He terminated the Obama Justice Department’s police department investigations and consent decrees that were reforming police practices. He boasts of arming police forces with military weaponry. He even terminated racial-sensitivity training in the federal government, mostly as a grandstand appeal to his base of angry White men. He’s appointed the most federal Appeals Court judges since Jimmy Carter; not one of them is Black.
Trump not only has done nothing to revive the Voting Right Act, gutted by the right-wing gang of five on the Supreme Court, he and his party have actively worked to suppress Black voting — passing ID requirements, shutting down polling places, purging voter lists, making registration harder, limiting early voting, undermining vote by mail, gerrymandering districts and more — all designed with laser focus to reduce the Black vote.
In short, Trump has left African Americans in the deepest hole with the shortest rope. Not surprisingly, most won’t fall for Trump’s big con. African Americans — and particularly African-American women — will vote overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. The base for Trump and Republicans will continue to be those not repelled by his racially divisive rhetoric and policies.
Periodically, however, it is useful to remind people that night is not day, that hate is not love. When Lincoln freed the slaves, they joined the Union armies in large numbers and helped save the Republic. Trump can’t be mentioned in the same breath as Lincoln, and African Americans aren’t about to save him.
I-con
A Lincoln
And a Don
An icon
And a con
Perfect, SomeDAM!
Thanks, but that one wrote itself.
Sometimes that happens,once in a blue moon.
That’s what happens with the best poems! The ancients attributed this to the Muses. Silly us, we attribute it to subconscious brain functions.
I said this once before, but I get the impression that poetry is already “out there” somewhere and it’s really just a matter of discovering it.
Kind of like math that way.
Plato’s poetic world.
Robert Frost was working one night, all night, on a long poem called “New Hampshire.” In the morning, he stepped outside, and there in his head, complete, was “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” He had but to go back inside and write it down before it was lost.
Except Plato banned poets from his Republic, but yes, I know what you are saying.
“Chance favors only the prepared mind.” (Le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés) –Louis Pasteur
And while some poets explore the complex plane, I usually stick to the simple integers.
LMAO! “God created the integers.” LOL. –Leopold Kronecker
Plato will be DAMmed
For poets that he banned
And though he don’t know it
He really was a poet
Lucky for me, even the integers are infinite.
Darned right!!!! In both directions.
I’d say that chance favors the twisted mind even more than the prepared one.
That’s where I have a slight advantage . Just slight though.
Chance favors the twisted mind!
SomeDAM’s mind, is twisted,
twisted like a mobius.
His work cannot be resisted,
for his mind is most commodious.
Though others may disagree on the latter point.
The opposite of tragic,
such twisting is truly magic.
By using just integers, my goal is to get down to “poetic zero” somehow.
I have approached it on a few occasions, but the closer I get, the further away it seems to be.
So, do infinitesimals exist in the real world? Of course they do!!! Consider, for example, Trump’s heart.
Then again, some would undoubtedly argue that I achieve poetic zero with all of my poems.
These questions are very deep.
But I have promises to keep
The Moebius mind
Is quite unkind
Except , you’ll find
For endless wind
lmao!
I like to think that this verse, 1 Corinthians, 4:5, is about light verse:
He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart.
Poetry, real poetry, is a big tent.
God created the Integers
God created “whole”
Because he thought “complex”
Were lacking in the soul
That integer begets
God created some of these numbers just to mess with our simple heads. LMAO!
I typically find most risible
people’s talk of the mystical,
but that proofs are there to find
seems like reading the cosmic mind.
Transcendentals like pi and e, for example
Yes. Freaky, freaky!
BTW, Boo!
Happy Halloween, y’all!
Samhain, for Tierra Chapman | Bob Shepherd
Listen.
Wind shakes the now-ravaged fields,
rattling the shocks.
Fall, we call it,
and not just because
of the leaves.
This is the bountiful time, yes,
but the wind that scatters those leaves
like rats from a cellar
in a war-torn land
reminds us that this word,
harvest, has two meanings.
Oh, tonight we shall eat well,
but let us not give way to gluttony,
for in this time we remember our mother
and all she has provided,
and the debt we owe in return,
to give no allegiance or assistance
to those who would despoil her,
to show toward all the tribes,
human and not, that generosity
she has shown to us.
And so we leave some fruit on the vine,
some grain on the stalk,
not only for the spirits who will roam,
hungry for remembrance, across the land,
on this night when the veil is thinnest–
leavings for the ancestors,
and for the poorest, the gleaners–
but also for the wee folk,
the mouse of the field,
and those most able tillers, the worm
and the fungus, our kin,
no less sacred to the mother
than we, for which of us would boast
so shamefully, “She loves us best”?
The year grows old.
The Lord of the Forest hath not
his youthful vigor,
but this, too, we honor,
for a baby, though precious,
is just a baby,
while a child holds the baby
within him or her,
and the youth the baby and child,
and the elders, all these.
So, tonight, we honor our eldritch eldest,
and they eat first,
and we leave a chair at the feast for our dead,
and listen for the old Lord’s voice
in the wind, reminding us,
that we, too, will be harvested,
and enter again the round
of the wheel.
And Euler’s equation is truly mind-blowing, although most people are not familiar with it
https://www.livescience.com/51399-eulers-identity.html
Wow, Bob
That’s phenomenal.
You have clearly mastered the complex!
I am going to have to start addressing you as Bob “Euler” Shepherd
And here I am stuck with 1 + 1 = 4
Trumpfinitesimal
Trump’s heart is not a decimal
Like 0.465
But tiny infinitesimal
The tiniest alive
I just broke out of the integers.
Perhaps there is some (albeit small) hope for me.
lol
Then again, I am still close to zero, so maybe not making much progress after all.
Maybe my main problem is that I see poetry as a subtractive process — expression with fewest number of wires — rather than an additive one.
Awesome observation. Yes. I do some mentoring of young writers. This is one thing that I teach them.
I should learn this lesson myself, as people who have waded through my interminable comments here can attest!
Words, not wires.
Using the fewest wires is the electrician’s job, not the poet’s.
Incidentally, when I was developing software for a living, I also viewed that as a subtractive process.
You start with something and then remove the unnecessary stuff (including the bugs).
Bill Gates seems to have the opposite philosophy. Start with a behemoth and keep adding stuff (including more and more bugs) until the whole thing collapses under its own weight.
Which is also his approach to education.
This is the way K-12 textbooks are made, too, SomeDAM. You bury a tiny, tiny bit of content under tons and tons of special features and sidebars and ancillaries and graphics and irrelevant headings to please every conceivable interest group in the country. The result is the unreadable drek that passes for K-12 textbooks now. It’s even worse than design by committee. One can’t even call it design. It’s more like what one finds in a hoarder’s trailer.
But, leave out one of those accretions on the base text, and you will lose an adoption in some state because you don’t have the “Metacognitive Special Feature” for “Guided Collaborative Peer Reflection” on “Activating Your Prior Knowledge” for left-handed kids born on Tuesdays.
I have also done a fair amount of rewiring over the years and some electricians also take the additive approach which can be downright scary.
Egret conversation guys. I have been looking at prime numbers lately. Don’t know why.
The Packrat Approach
The packrat approach
Is pile it on
Until the central pillar’s gone
The poet approach
Is weed it out
Until you see the vital sprout
Exactly, SomeDAM!
There is a great little book on design that I read back in college that had a lot to say about this.
Its called Notes on the Synthesis of Form by architect Christopher Alexander. His basic thesis was that design is all about getting a good fit between a new form and the already existing context it has to function in.
Alexander noted that the way you do that is actually a negative process. You remove the stuff that causes “resistance” or “incompatibility” between the two.
I’ll check it out, SomeDAM. Another great one: Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. He talks about doors that scream Push Me when you have to pull them and so on. My favorite example from the book: Engineers like rows of identical buttons, levers, etc. He includes a picture from inside a nuclear power plant, where the workers have placed beer raps over the levers so that they can distinguish between the one that means raise the fuel rods and the one that means lower them. LOL.
And here, some guidelines I put together for my film students on composing (arranging things within) the frame: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/thirty-for-suggestions-for-composing-the-frame/
I’ve actually read the Design of Everyday things. Norman actually expands on a lot of Alexander’s ideas.
What Alexander said is really just common sense, but lots of people lack it.
David Coleman is a prime example.
Anyone who believes you can take anything out of context and expect it to be meaningful is just an idiot.
Alexander also wrote another longer book called A Pattern Language which is also very applicable to design.
One hilarious example of an idiotic design is the Apple headquarters which is all glass, including the interior walls and doors.
People kept running into them so had to put sticky notes up to remind them where to walk.
But I think some of the critical design for Apples products has similarities with the glass headquarters.
For example, have you ever noticed how easy it is to break the glass on an iphone or iPad? Sometimes all you need to do is drop it once on a hard surface.
I don’t own an iphone ( i think its a piece of crap), but i have replaced screens on many iPhones for my siblings and their kids because they broke.
While some might say “just don’t drop the phone” I would say “yeh right”. How likely is that?
And I know for a fact that one can design a phone or tablet that won’t break when you drop it. I have an AT&T Trek tablet (not sure who made it) that I have dropped many times, including on concrete from about 4 feet and it not only has not broken but has nary a scratch on it. It’s all in the design.
Of course, knowing what I do about fixing iPhones (they make it hard so people wont try), I am convinced that the breakable design is purposeful. They WANT you go buy a new one every year.
Just one example of what I mean when I say Apple doesn’t want people to fix their iPhones.
They use about 5 different screw heads in their tiny little screws to hold things in place inside the phone.
First, you need a special set of tiny screwdrivers to even attempt to fix a part that has gone bad. Second, the screws are so damned tiny that you can’t even SEE the head, so have to watch YouTube videos made by people who somehow managed to figure out which driver to use on which screws.
Also, the home button on all the new phones s keyed to the processor, so if the home button goes bad , you can’t use one from an older iphone. They are also constantly changing the form of the phones do you also can’t just use a screen from an old iphone in a new one.
Lots of people love Apple, but as an engineer, I am not at all impressed. I think people who swear by their products just don’t know what real quality js because they have never seen it.
By the way, as a programmer, I had to deal with a lot of computer code that I had not written to modify it and usually debug it.
And I saw one helluva lot of the packrat approach and ironically, some of the worst offenders had degrees in computer “science”. Many of them would jump right into coding without even thinking about the design.
The best (most methodical and thoughtful) programmers by far came from outside CS. They understood the importance of defining the problem and designing an elegant solution before ever writing a single line of computer code.
…and a canal
Pandemonium!
I-con
A Lincoln
And a Don
A free-er
And a cager
Uniter
And untie-er
A thinker
And a winker
A feeler
And a groper
The Greatest
And the Gratest
An icon
And a con
The Game of Lies
If lie is oft repeated
The truth can never sway
Cuz lie can’t be defeated
If truth can’t even play
Love this.
America’s Second Black President (third if you count Bill Clinton)
Trump is really black
Though skin is white as snow
And that is just a fact
That Blacks should surely know
lol. And if you believe this, I have some hydroxychloriquine and oleander COVID cure to sell ya.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-losing-ground-with-white-voters-but-gaining-among-black-and-hispanic-americans/
One of my most lovely experiences was hearing the great Rev. Jackson speak at the 1987 Gay Rights March on Washington. He was and is awesome!
And Trump, of course, that profoundly ignorant and racist man, knows NOTHING of history. All these things that Rev. Jackson writes here about? Trump is entirely ignorant of them.
Trump is the guy who spoke of the Continental Army capturing the airports.
And talked about what a great job Frederick Douglass is doing.
I did not even know that Frederick Douglass was in the Continental army, to say nothing of military pilot .
How old would that make him now, by the way?
LOL!!!
But Lincoln did recruit him to go into the South, during the war, protected by U.S. troops, to arm enslaved persons and encourage them to revolt!!!! Quite the story, that!!!
Black Americans also aren’t fooled by the Democrats – the ones who passed the crime bills that have put so many of them behind bars, the ones who passed the bankruptcy bill that made it impossible for them to get out of debt, the ones who ramp up wars that kill black and brown people in foreign countries, the ones who signed the trade deals which have sent their jobs to foreign countries, the ones who deported record numbers of immigrants and who built the cages that they now scream about.
There’s a reason that the vast majority of those who do not vote are poor and/or people of color – they know that life will not change for them just by changing one lying racist sexist corporatist warmonger for another.
I recently saw interviews with undecided voters that were both white and black. These were all low information voters. What appealed to those that supported Trump was his strong man image. They did not listen to sort through the lies. They are voting based on an impression. This is sad. Trump is a brand, not a leader.
Most black voters see through Trump. They have heard and seen the dog whistles. They witnessed Trump’s response to Charlottesville and the BLM marches in urban areas. Despite Biden’s support for the ’90s Crime Bill, for which Biden has apologized, most black voters see Biden as someone that has learned from his experience. Black people like many white people want to vote for someone that can unite, not further divide us.
There are approximately 30 million black voters, and there are about 32 million Latino voters. Democrats should do more to reach out to potential Latino voters who are a not a cultural monolith.
I am glad Jesse Jackson wrote what he did. Trump hates people of color. And Trump has disdain for anyone he can’t “use.”
Right now, that dump is running from himself and making up all kinds of lies, as usual. The thing about his lies this time, is that he is inciting violence and hate and on purpose. He’s a spoiled toddler and there’s nothing cute about him whatsoever.
Trumpsy is having a “temper tantrum” in front of the entire world. The drugs he’s snorting, swallowing, and being shot up with are making him even more extreme.
Now he’s killing wolves and elephants. Thank goodness he doesn’t have a dog or any pets. Someone would have to call the authorities about animal abuse.
To whom can we report Dump’s human abuses?
Trump is one huge propaganda machine. In the meanwhile, infections are out of control. We have hit 10,000 infections/day. With all the spreading going on, soon there will be 1 million infections per day. We won’t have enough healthcare workers.
Do I dare say this outloud? “Only 3 more days.” Our young and the rest of the world are watching.
Our young and the rest of the world are watching.
Wow. That’s the most powerful thing I’ve read about this election.
Thanks, Yvonne!!!!
Welcome, Bob.
Thank goodness for you and the other teachers, and for Diane, who provides the forum.
When we look at Trump’s “accomplishments,” we see that most of what he has done is horrible, not just for people of color, for all of us. His infamy has no bounds!
Trumpcomplishment
Trumpcomplishment is not
A thing that that one would want
Trumpcomplishment is like
A brake-less motor bike
Unfortunately, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Ice Cube and various other black artists are all showing love for Trump. Of course, it’s because these artists don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes on their millions which Biden intends to do if he wins. Black, low information voters may fall for this.
Jesse Jackson has a offered a comprehensive list of Trump’s betrayals on supporting Blacks. That money thing is only part of it. Read this from a Black Woman who supports Trump and tells you why, including her gratitude to Betsy DeVos for school choice. It is a sobering reminder that not everyone who is Black thinks alike or with the political experience and wisdom of Jesse Jackson.
https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2020/09/10/black-republican-women-explain-why-they-support-president-donald-trump/
It looks like the exact opposite is happening. In many, many cities around the country, POC are standing in long, long, long lines to vote (thanks to the Repugnicans).
Trump’s racism has galvanized the vote! I think that we’re going to have an historic black turnout!
Bob, I hope you’re correct. I cannot live another 4 more years of this hell….and I’m not a POC.
Every Memorial Day my Girl Scout daughter plants flags on graves. There is one little Cemetary where my dear neighbors went to their final rest. In the corner of that African-American Cemetary, there is a veteran of the Civil War named Elias Murphy. He served in the union somewhere. Every year I go down in his corner of the cemetery and tell him to rest easy.