Work or Not To Work Isn’t The Question

Funny, Republicans don’t want to renew the child credit because it would be a disincentive for the child’s parents to work. This hypocrisy is from a party that has done nothing in this session that would amount to “work”. Yet, they get paid and have health insurance. How can people continue to vote for such cruel, hypocritical representatives?

The expanded Child Tax Credit in 2021 reduced child poverty to a low of 5.2%. When the Child Tax Credit expired, child poverty rates increased. Guess what? Corporations were against the renewal of the child tax credit because their tax rates would increase. Note: corporations, at this time, do not pay their fair share of taxes. As MLK said a long time ago–this country has socialism for the rich (and I add to that corporations) and rugged individualism for the poor. You see, in their skewed greedy world, transfer payments, i.e., our tax dollars, go up the ladder and never down the ladder to the ones who actually need a helping hand.

These corporations had the gall to argue that the Child Tax Credit was not connected to work. And their tax breaks, etc. are tied to what? Not to value returned to this country. Does no one remember where the transfer payments during the Pandemic, during the bailout of all those corporations that were too big to fail ended up? Those transfer payments went into the corporate executives’ pockets to increase their personal wealth while they laid off the rank and file.

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/01/benjamin-herold-disillusioned-suburbs/677229/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

The Suburbs Have Become A Ponzi Scheme is the title of the above cited article from The Atlantic. Here’s what’s happening–the whites move to the suburbs and they do what whites do…pillage the place. They do not maintain the infrastructure. They borrow money for projects that have no long term value for the community or are phantom or they steal the borrowed money for their own personal use. When the area has no further value that can be pillaged, the whites sell their homes to Blacks or other minorities (for a premium) who are then left to cope with the crumbling infrastructure and debt. I don’t know that I’d call it a Ponzi Scheme. Isn’t it more like what a swarm of locusts leave behind? I think a better title for the article is The Locust Effect. Or remember the killer ants’ movies where the legions of ants leave not even skeletons behind as they devour all life as they march onward in their mindless quest? Another title for the article…The Ants of Suburbia. (The first movie I remember about killer ants is Them!, one of the The Big Show afternoon movies I watched after school.)

This article interested me because it reminded me of what is happening in a small town in West Tennessee. This being the South, the Black mayor and administrators who came in after years (decades?) of white administration were blamed for the financial condition of the town. When major new development was announced for the area, the State wanted to take over the town because of the financial mismanagement or so it said. In reality, it did not want a majority Black town to profit from the new development. However, the State, after being sued and the subject of negative publicity, agreed to work with the town.

https://time.com/6172481/mason-tennessee-ford-naacp-lawsuit/

https://tennesseelookout.com/2023/04/03/black-farming-community-fights-to-get-fair-deal-as-state-takes-land-for-ford-plant-roadways/

https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/29/us/tennessee-black-majority-town-ford-plant/index.html

https://news.yahoo.com/happened-black-tennessee-town-faced-083058690.html

Also, the State did what has been done in Black neighborhoods in the past. (Think how the construction of the interstate system destroyed Black urban neighborhoods from the 1950s to the present.) The State deliberately routed a road through Black owned land and, then used eminent domain to offer the landowners much less than the land was worth. Some of the landowners are fighting this egregious taking of their property for the benefit of a private corporation.

This also brings to mind a case before the Supreme Court–Grants Pass, OR v. Johnson, Gloria, et al. The Supreme Court could criminalize homelessness. If that happens, those who are convicted would be subject to the involuntary servitude (slavery) provision of the 14th amendment. This could also be a preliminary move to the re-building of company towns. From what I have read about the prior iteration of company towns, the residents would lose many rights that we take for granted.

One thing that I remember reading about company towns is that the residents were deliberately, with malice aforethought, kept in penurious debt. I think there were some songs about that aspect of the company towns.

This return to the company towns is not an act of altruism. It is corporate America’s greed. Corporate America does not want to pay a living wage to its workers. So criminalizing non-criminal behavior is a way to create an underclass that can be exploited. Remember Jim Crow…loitering while Black was a criminal offense and many were sent to prison who were then hired out to local businesses. Not that the prisoners received any payment for their work. The money went to the prison officials. And the corporations benefited from the prisoners’ unpaid labor. That underclass will populate the company town and there will be no escape for the residents who will never have the wherewithal to leave. Cheap, controlled, subservient labor is the goal.

Hair…as I’ve said before, I’m not a hair person. Recently, I saw a You Tube video, Black male presenter, talking about Black females’ hair choices and our beauty or lack thereof. Black male presenter, when someone from who knows where comments on our hair choices or our beauty, why not say mind your own business. No one is forcing you to look at Black women. Or at least educate the ignorant.

What is the CROWN Act? It is a law that has been passed in eighteen states. CROWN stands for Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair. The bill would against discrimination based on hair texture and protective styles, including locs, cornrows, twists, braids, Bantu knots, and Afros.

Why do we need this law? Because if we styled our natural hair, many employers would not hire us. Students, male and female, are punished through the so-called neutral dress codes because their hair is natural. Why? Natural hair, especially since the 1960s has been seen by the white establishment as a political statement. If one had natural hair, one did not have the white majority’s interests as a priority or so they thought.

I will not reinvent the wheel. Excerpts are from below cited article:

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/tangled-roots-decoding-the-history-of-black-hair-1.5891778#Hair%20as%20Resistance

“But when the transatlantic slave trade began, these traditions were erased, and a new set of meanings were imposed onto Black people’s hair, particularly by white slave owners.

“The hair was one of these physical attributes that was very easy to point to and say, “Look at their hair. It’s more like an animal than it is like our hair. That’s what makes them inferior,” said Tharps.” Black women’s beauty was depicted as a negative, and we can see that from the time of enslavement in North America forward,’ said Tracy Owens Patton, a professor of Communication and African-American Diaspora Studies at the University of Wyoming, who has spent time tracing how Eurocentric beauty standards have shaped the psychology of Black women today. 

“If you think about Sara Baartman, for example, also commonly known as the Hottentot Venus, her Rubenesque body style was made fun of through the white Western eye. Black women were [simply] told that they weren’t beautiful.“

These Eurocentric beauty standards have consistently cast Black people as deviant or abnormal because they didn’t fit into the narrowly-defined parameters of how white people saw beauty.  “And so we went from loving our hair and carefully caring for our hair, to covering up our hair and trying to emulate European styles [but] not because we thought they were pretty. There was none of that,” said Tharps.

The emulation of European styles was to push back against the idea that we were inferior or that we were animalistic. If the white slave owners were going to tell us our hair is what makes us inferior, then we’re going to say, “Well, if I can make my hair look like yours, then I’m not inferior. I’m just like you.”

This means that Black women and children in particular, are being increasingly policed and punished for their hairstyles, whether through school regulations, office dress codes, or even rulebooks for competitive sports.

And for the first time in American legal history, states are being forced to recognize that the kind of hair-based discrimination that Black people have been subjected to for years is, in effect, a form racial discrimination.

So, Black male, do a simple Google search before you backhandedly defend us and our hair choices. And beauty? Beauty is a societal construct that changes with the times. What is considered beautiful today was probably not considered beautiful in the past. Remember Rubenesque figures–a beauty standard that would probably be considered obese today. Remember the ashen pallor achieved by the ingestion of arsenic–a past beauty standard. Remember the moles, artificially and artfully placed on a cheek–a past beauty standard. Remember the tiny corseted waist–the cause of much fainting–a past beauty standard. I don’t think Black women think white women are beautiful. I think we are pragmatic. We live in a capitalistic country. We have to have money to afford living in this country. The legitimate way to earn money is to have a job. In order to have a job, we have had to suppress who and what we are, especially our hair. No more; no less.

I think some of us have taken it too far. No one should mutilate themselves in order to feel good about themselves or to have a job. When I see the videos of the women who have lost their hair because of wigs, relaxers, dyes, I want to tell them to stop, please stop. Like the article says it’s not our hair…it’s the whites need to feel superior that feeds their discrimination. If it’s not our hair, the whites would find some other feature to serve their discriminatory mindset. And, we must do what is necessary to reduce the stress in our lives. Hair should be the least of our stressors.

Make it make sense. TN’s governor does not want to accept Federal funds for schools because TN does not want to be told how to spend the funds, does not want the Federal government to have any say in how to educate its children… Yet, TN wants a say, has a say in a woman’s medical decisions, what books a child reads, the content of the subjects a student is exposed to. The governor and his minions cannot rid Tennesseans of a tax on groceries because the corporate tax rate would increase. As I’ve said before, corporations that don’t pay their fair share of taxes don’t deserve more state welfare.

I like the color red. The color red does not deserve to be associated with hate, bigotry, ignorance, stupidity, barbarianism. So, let’s call the color that MAGAs wear “MAGA red” to distinguish it from all other shades of red. The other day I heard a quip that MAGA means Make America White Again, but it means something more…make America the playground of WASP males who are accountable to no one for their atrocities.

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