When you reference "New Deal type largesse" cnulan, what are you describing?

Simply take the examples noted in the Landau article I cite upthread which links the New Deal and the Great Society in the context of larger right wing cultural domination. The point that I took from this and from your contortious objections to AA is that racism is the indispensible lever underscoring all right wing cultural engineering and propaganda, it is the sine qua non of the corporatist big lie perpetrated on America.

Observe the the biggest example of a New Deal benefit, by orders of magnitude, has been Social Security.

The author of your cited piece lost me cnulan when he claimed that the effect of Prop 13 was that "rich people paid minimal taxes".  He needs to check his facts. California taxes rich people among the most taxing five states in the nation. I'm guessing some of his other facts are equally suspect. (states have three major sources of tax revenue: real estate, income, and sales.  CA has exceptionally high income and sales, and somewhat below average real estate taxes.)

When I think of "New Deal", two things come to mind.  Social Security, and the WPA.  I've known several people who worked for the WPA, mostly building dams.  It's sure plausible that these jobs were preferentially given to white people. Importantly, the WPA did not last very long, and went away.  The jobs were just that: jobs.  They didn't pay well. The work was hard. They were temporary.

From the synopsis, it sure seems that Katznelson is claiming that the damage was done before LBJ's Great Society, so in analyzing Katznelson's case, it would presumably be a mistake to combine the two.  In any case, as I hinted at earlier, I find the New Deal minus Social Security to have been so limited in both scope and time so as to had only a symbolic effect when analyzed nationwide.  The real effect was that it preceded, and broke the trail for the Great Society,as well as deficit spending by the federal government.

The real effect was that it preceded, and broke the trail for the Great Society,as well as deficit spending by the federal government.

I picture you just cracking yourself up when you say stuff like this..., now far be it from me to deny anyone a good belly laugh, but tickling yourself aside, I'm not at all certain where your trajectory on this discussion - away from racism and toward macroeconomics - is headed. Surely you don't propose that social welfare programs even remotely approach predatory welfare programs in their capacity to produce deficit spending? is this your idea of a counter to my request that you quantify the effects of a century of apartheid action with less than half a century of affirmative action, most of whose benefits accrued to white wimmin in any event?

i.e., quantitatively WAR is the deficit spending exemplar of predatory welfare programs, and, the prison industrial is war's closely allied handmaiden. I dare you to show me that historical programmes of social welfare - gerrymandered as they were by jim crow and racist administration - even remotely approach the $$$ outlay of the contemporary military and prison industrial systems of welfare for useless eaters.

Now given that these are not programs that invest in universal domestic social well-being. and yeah, in my admittedly parochial world-view, I can't feature equating military industrial or prison industrial welfare for useless eaters with universal domestic well-being, shouldn't it be incumbent upon me to set up a countervailing model of predatory apartheid action as the reflexive counterweight to irrational critiques of affirmative action?

The question regarded how many blacks were unfairly denied the benefits of Roosevelt and Truman's New Deal, 1934..1950.

I linked to the second page of the review on purpose.

Katznelson reserves his harshest criticism for the unfair application of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, a series of programs that poured $95 billion into expanding opportunity for soldiers returning from World War II. Over all, the G.I. Bill was a dramatic success, helping 16 million veterans attend college, receive job training, start businesses and purchase their first homes. Half a century later, President Clinton praised the G.I. Bill as ''the best deal ever made by Uncle Sam,'' and said it ''helped to unleash a prosperity never before known.''

But Katznelson demonstrates that African-American veterans received significantly less help from the G.I. Bill than their white counterparts. ''Written under Southern auspices,'' he reports, ''the law was deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow.'' He cites one 1940's study that concluded it was ''as though the G.I. Bill had been earmarked 'For White Veterans Only.' '' Southern Congressional leaders made certain that the programs were directed not by Washington but by local white officials, businessmen, bankers and college administrators who would honor past practices. As a result, thousands of black veterans in the South -- and the North as well -- were denied housing and business loans, as well as admission to whites-only colleges and universities. They were also excluded from job-training programs for careers in promising new fields like radio and electrical work, commercial photography and mechanics. Instead, most African-Americans were channeled toward traditional, low-paying ''black jobs'' and small black colleges, which were pitifully underfinanced and ill equipped to meet the needs of a surging enrollment of returning soldiers.

The statistics on disparate treatment are staggering. By October 1946, 6,500 former soldiers had been placed in nonfarm jobs by the employment service in Mississippi; 86 percent of the skilled and semiskilled jobs were filled by whites, 92 percent of the unskilled ones by blacks. In New York and northern New Jersey, ''fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the G.I. Bill supported home purchases by nonwhites.'' Discrimination continued as well in elite Northern colleges. The University of Pennsylvania, along with Columbia the least discriminatory of the Ivy League colleges, enrolled only 46 black students in its student body of 9,000 in 1946. The traditional black colleges did not have places for an estimated 70,000 black veterans in 1947. At the same time, white universities were doubling their enrollments and prospering with the infusion of public and private funds, and of students with their G.I. benefits.

 

"...do you mean to tell me that the facts of the situation actually bear out the existence of a predator culture which cannot exist without the constant fabrication of enemies both without and within?"

You got it down. We live in a country where they have conned folks into believing that manufacturing war materiels, building prisons, creating foreign and domestic enemies and waging armed conflict against real and mostly imagined foes is more important than building schools and educating our children, providing universal health care, feeding the poor and creating affordable housing. These folks are getting their heads bumped and they don't even see the damage it is causing.

As a result, thousands of black veterans in the South -- and the North as well -- were denied housing and business loans, as well as admission to whites-only colleges and universities. They were also excluded from job-training programs for careers in promising new fields like radio and electrical work, commercial photography and mechanics. Instead, most African-Americans were channeled toward traditional, low-paying ''black jobs'' and small black colleges, which were pitifully underfinanced and ill equipped to meet the needs of a surging enrollment of returning soldiers.

Some of that stuff seems speculative, but this seems highly plausible.  It was an era when everyone knew that college and business loans would be wasted on most black people.

We don't need to get hung up on the details: everyone knows that the Jim Crow era suppressed the advancement of American blacks, both overtly because some whites utilized the climate to implement their personal feeling of inequality with respect to blacks, but far more universally by the mechanism described in that quote.

The interesting question, the interesting evidence should Katznelson have any, is how that might apply to today.  He seems to claim it does, and posters here want to believe it does, but so far all we have is speculation.  Do we expect that Katznelson is going to lay out an argument that racist admininistration of the GI Bill, 1946-1950, is responsible for contemporary black ghettos?

Do we expect that Katznelson is going to lay out an argument that racist admininistration of the GI Bill, 1946-1950, is responsible for contemporary black ghettos?

Interesting shift from racism, to macroeconomics, to an attempt to place temporal constraints on the scope of disparate impacts..., frankly I don't see a need for Katznelson to provide evidentiary support for anything anything beyond your own earlier common sense concession that whites have received an apartheid action benefit at an economic ratio that you quantitatively guesstimate at 100 to 1 over the benefits accruing to blacks from Great Society affirmative action. I believe the burden of proof has now been shifted into your court DW.

As an ironic aside, there was an impassioned letter to the editor in today's KCStar from a representative for disgruntled merchant marines seeking reparations for not being taken care of like veterans of the regular armed services during WWII...,

Black conservative Republicans who make the talk show circuit or whose columns are carried by various news syndicates simply think they are engaging in a partisan political struggle with their counterparts on the Democratic side of the aisle. They actually believe what they are saying and, more importantly, as long as it trumps whatever black Democrats are saying they don't care.

Looks like the NBRA has jumped to the head of the class to take the lead in the GOP scripted coonshow;

Retired Army Lt. Col. Frances P. Rice, chairwoman of the
National Black Republican Association (NBRA), said her group aims to "enlighten" black voters about the Republican Party and make the black community one that supports two parties.

She said the Democrats' insistence that blacks rely on socialism -- welfare, public housing, public schools -- is destroying the community.

"Blacks after 40 years of Democrat control are complaining about the same things: poorly performing schools, dilapidated public housing," Col. Rice said. "Socialism has not worked anywhere it has been tried. Why should we do it here?"

Groups such as NBRA are getting their message across with candidates like Richard Holt, a 25-year-old Republican who is running for the House seat in Ohio being vacated by Rep. Ted Strickland, a Democrat.

"The interesting question, the interesting evidence should Katznelson have any, is how that might apply to today. He seems to claim it does, and posters here want to believe it does, but so far all we have is speculation. Do we expect that Katznelson is going to lay out an argument that racist admininistration of the GI Bill, 1946-1950, is responsible for contemporary black ghettos?"

Your search for causal links between the invidious and insidious forms of racial discrimination practiced against American blacks is a form of speculative analysis on your part, too. The links between past forms of racial discrimination and contemporary black ghettoes was cumulative and productive, not causal. In the first place causal lines run all through the universe and human events. There is no straight line of causality between these practices and their result. Looking for relationships of causality will result in your missing the significance of the outcomes of such practices which have a predicted probability of occurence. Your search for causality puts you firmly in the camp of the artistic apparatchiks of the Communist Party apparata and I know you don't want to be there. Or do you?

If a group of people are denied employment and educational opportunities for generations; thwarted by racially discriminatory practices from living whereever they could afford to live; and, denied access to capital markets and these practices are allowed to go on for several generations then the result would not be markedly different from what you see today in major and small American cities. If, after World War II, blacks in Philadelphia and especially black veterans had been allowed to live whereever they could afford to buy or rent a home or apartment Philadelphia and its surrounding suburbs would look vastly different from how they look today.

Would Philadephia still have poor people? Yes, but they wouldn't all be concentrated in certain areas of the city. And they probably would be less numerous than they are because if their parents or grandparents had been allowed to live in other counties surrounding Philadelphia there is good reason to suppose that their descendants life chances would have been greatly increased.

The interesting question, the interesting evidence should Katznelson have any, is how that might apply to today.

Do you think this had no effect? 

Tell me, what do YOU think the repercussions of this was?  

The interesting question, the interesting evidence should Katznelson have any, is how that might apply to today.

Do you think this had no effect?

Everything has some effect, but to leap 50 years in time requires a strong argument indeed, because more recent factors typically have far more effect. This is particularly true when fundamental changes of context have broadly occurred, such as with the civil rights restatement during the '60s. 

Another fundamental change which occurred was a transition away from adoption of the children of unwed mothers and to welfare funding for unwed mothers. As you would predict, I suggest that that change has far more to do with the size of today's black ghettos than events during the '40s.  Adopted kids do better, because their raising is better than that provide by typical teenage girls.

So we end up with competitive explanations.  For one to be more convincing than the other, it has to both be more plausible and pass common sense skeptical barriers better.  This isn't really a scientific pursuit, it's more a logical and historical one.  None of us, to include Katznelson, are going to be able to provide hard evidence. 

Your search for causal links between the invidious and insidious forms of racial discrimination practiced against American blacks is a form of speculative analysis on your part, too.

I confess, PT, I don't expect anyone to provide such a causal link.  I wondered what kind of evidence might be forthcoming from Katznelson, as compared to the informed analysis we do here every day.  Our arguments are frequently light on evidence regarding what caused what, but heavy on historical fact and insight regarding links between historical phenomena.  I suspect we'd welcome Katznelson should he arrive, but we would find his arguments to be of that familiar form.