Killing The Black Middle Class

Killing The Black Middle Class

There’s a fascinating article in a recent issue of Fast Company, How Trump’s mass firings could quickly hollow out the Black middle class: The president has gone nuclear against federal union jobs—historically African Americans’ ladder to economic equality, originally in Capital and Main and written by Mark Kreidler.

The piece looks at how Trump’s furious assault on federal workers and unions is hitting Black Americans hardest. Government jobs have been one of the traditional routes by which African-Americans have entered the Middle Class. Now, those jobs are going away, and they could take the Black Middle Class with them.

The question, of course, is whether this is strictly an accident. Trump and the GOP have waged a war of annihilation on federal workers for a long time. And perhaps the demise of African-American employment is just collateral damage.

Or is it? Could there be more? Could there be a design here? After all, Trump and his MAGAts are no fan of racial equality. Perhaps the point of the war against the civil service (or at least part of the point) is to remove those men and women whose ethnic heritage is distasteful to them?

Perhaps we’ll never know for certain. But, that’s irrelevant. It is clear that the current Administration is a disaster for Black America. Whether that disaster is by accident or design does not, even remotely, change the larger effect.  

John Bolton: All American Chump

So John Bolton is finally just about ready to publish his kiss-and-tell book about the Trump Administration. According to news media reports, in it, he says that not only should Trump have been impeached for his role in Ukraine, but also he could have been removed for similar offenses in incidents all over the world. Ukraine was just one of many.

But, Bolton elected not to co-operate with the investigation into his boss, and waited to reveal the good stuff in his book, long after the impeachment process was dead and buried in the GOP-controlled Senate.

In a word, WTF?

Now he tells us?

Well, that’s three words, actually, but you get the point. If Bolton is telling the truth, and there’s no reason to doubt him, and if he had spoken up sooner, and helped remove Trump from the White House, then he might well have spared the country untold suffering. Who knows? Maybe he would even have saved lives. If competent authorities had been running things, maybe we wouldn’t have had so terribly, terribly many people die of Covid-19.

But Bolton didn’t act. And the country suffered. And many thousands died.

Which brings up an interesting question. To wit, where does being a witness leave off, and being an accessory to murder begin?

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About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Watch this incredibly powerful video from Rev. William Barber. This is the kind of thing we all need to hear in this moment of crisis.

A Ku Klux Rally In The Rose Garden

I saw an interesting piece in the Washington Post the other day, “Trump’s attempts to smear Obama could backfire spectacularly,” by Eugene Robinson. In it, Mr. Robinson argues that Trump’s current (and slightly unhinged) personal attacks on Barack Obama may not be the wisest course he would follow. He says that 45’s smear campaign might actually so infuriate Africa-Americans that they’ll be more likely to vote in November, and to vote for Democratic candidates.

I sure hope he’s right. The Democratic Party could really use the support.

But, part of me worries a bit. Trump has already done so much to alienate African-American voters. I mean, let’s face it, he’s done everything short of wearing a full Ku Klux outfit at the State of the Union address. So, like, what else can he do to piss them off even more?

Still, maybe I’m just underestimating him.

After all, he’s already proved that if any man can turn a fiasco into a debacle into an outright disaster...

Tis he...

 

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About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.