Damn Fools

9 Comments

1. 

   hz on July 10, 2012 at 3:11 am

   Classy Reince Priebus, too.

2. 

   JimF on July 10, 2012 at 6:51 am

   “Winston loved Big Brother.”

3. 

   Brendan Skwire on July 10, 2012 at 7:57 am

   ouch.

4. 

   Snarki child of Loki on July 10, 2012 at 8:00 am

   They didn’t have a sufficiently developed WMD program.

   By “WMD”, I mean “weapon of mass deception”. Aka, FOX News.

5. 

   TarheelDem on July 10, 2012 at 8:12 am

   As a historical footnote, the slave owners did have a few free African-Americans argue for the perpetuation of slavery.  Any slaves speaking would have automatically discounted as being the mouthpieces of their masters.

   But the Civil War discussion of Secession was only obliquely in terms of slavery.  Abraham Lincoln was against slavery but had made no commitments to end it.  But his successful election created the reaction of Secession.  Nonetheless, South Carolina’s Secession Convention stated:

   The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union; but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since that time, these encroachments have continued to increase, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue

   And no, it is not the Tenth Amendment that South Carolina uses to make its argument.

   The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” ……….

   The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.

   ……. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. …….. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation. ……

   It is the failure of non-slave states to return slaves as Constitutionally guaranteed (the “original sin” of the Founders) that is the reason for Secession.  Framed as a failure of other states to obey the Constitution of the United States.

   You need not look to the Civil War for the origin of Allen West’s comparison of the social safety net to slavery.  It is instead F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom that is the origin of West’s equivalency.

   Jumping to the conclusion that it is about the Civil War is the rhetorical trap that conservatives think they have laid to come back with accusations of racism and overweening focus on the Civil War–ain’t projection wonderful?

   As to “damn fools” — damn straight.

6. 

   The Voice In The Wilderness on July 10, 2012 at 9:09 am

   I have read several places that sharecropping was more economically advantageous than slavery to the plantation owner, seeing as how slaves represented an economic investment and sharecroppers could starve to death with little cost to the planter. This was particularly true after the import of African slaves was forbidden and enforced by the British Navy at the source in Africa. Like any scarce quantity the price of slaves soared.

   From this I conclude that slavery was really held on to by the desire to have utter control over other human beings, not economics. Poor White Southerners went along because slavery gave them someone beneath them in the social pecking order. They continue to resist racial equality because it lowers their social class.

   • 

     TarheelDem on July 10, 2012 at 10:52 am

     Sharecropping was a contract whereby the farmer (white or black) paid back an operating capital loan for farm supplies, equipment maintenance, and sustenance with a contractually specified share of the crop.  The value of that share and the value of the crop itself depended on prices that were not known at the time the contract was entered.  If the sharecropper starved, most likely the lender was hard hit as well.

     The class system in the ante-bellum South was quite complicated. See Bill Cecil-Fronsman’s Common Whites: Class and Culture in Ante-bellum North Carolina for a good, readable study of it. Poor white Southerners went along with it mostly because it was the traditional arrangement; the metaphor of a fish not knowing it’s in water applies here.

     By the time of the Civil War, selling slaves raised on an owner’s plantation was a significant profit center.  This is why the expansion of slave states became such a priority in places like Virginia and South Carolina.  And the value of slaves is why the nullification of fugitive slave laws in practice became a flash point.

     After the Civil War, the larger plantation owners did not go to sharecropping loans, they became capitalists.  The largest slaveholder in NC invested in some of the first orange groves planted in Florida.  Another started the Atlantic Coast Line Rairoad.  Others started banks that became some of the leading banks in the South.  Others started insurance companies.  A few invested in cigarette and smoking tobacco processing or in textiles.

     The ones who were the beneficiaries of sharecropping were the many middling owners of country stores, who paired sharecropping with debt peonage.  In a bad year, you could work off your debt by working on a wealthier neighbor’s farm.  The wealthier neighbor would pay the store owner.

     Whether slavery or sharecropping was better economically depended on who you were and where you were.

     The desire to have utter control over other human beings is a property of having any sort of command over other people–whether slaveowner, robber baron capitalist, or modern manager.  When you engage in an economic relationship, they set the political terms, the economic terms, and the cultural terms of that relationship.  So look like you’re busy. Cut your hair. And keep secret the company’s misdoings.  Or you’ll not have a job.

     The Southern class structure enforced a set of upward and downward traditional cultural obligations.  That is what the notion of “place” was all about.  Often the downward obligations were fulfilled because of the influence of religion and a human sense of charity.  But not always.  And the ones that weren’t are the ones that make the newspapers and the history books.

     Defined class structures with traditional obligations exist elsewhere in the US but they take different forms.  And no region was completely egalitarian.

     • 

       The Voice In The Wilderness on July 10, 2012 at 3:36 pm

       I bow to your superior knowledge of Southern history and culture.

7. 

   BobX on July 10, 2012 at 10:18 am

   ‘Let’s see who can we kick today? The disabled, they can’t defend themselves.’

   They’re not damn fools, they’re evil sociopaths.