There I said it.

Admittedly Al Jazeera’s reporting has a bias just as all media do, but the fact that the reporter found it so easy to find such sentiments is worrying.  Let us hope such sentiments exist only on the fringe.

Paul Krugman asserts that much of American’s political discourse over the past forty years has really been a disguised discussion on race. The Right, Krugman states, has more effectively taken advantage of this new, disguised racism since,

Without racial division, the conservative message — which has long dominated the political scene — loses most of its effectiveness.

Krugman asserts that the following political mantras are really racially charged code meant to quietly reinstate Jim Crow:

Thank you, omniscient Paul Krugman, for translating these political code words of the bigoted masses. Here I was under the impression that all the people who wanted reduced government spending simply didn’t want to saddle their children with enormous debt. Little did I know they wanted to cold-heartedly snatch welfare payments from blacks.

I was also under the impression that people who were fed up with heinous, incivil, urban violence merely valued human lives and the safety and civility of civilization. Little did I know they were merely looking for an excuse to incarcerate blacks.

Leave it to Paul Krugman to trivialize and dismiss the political beliefs of others as mere racism. Maybe he’ll next take a page from the Obama playbook and write a column about guns and religion.

Two good articles from Post today.

The Manhattan Institute finds that immigrants in America adapt quickly. Though measuring economic, cultural, and civic integration is difficult, it’s useful to look at the index as a good way to compare different groups rather than interpreting 100 as a full integration (whatever that really should mean). Either way, the numbers tell a story that contrasts sharply with what one will find in the Parisian banlieues.

Despite this, sadly, there’s still plenty of racist hostility to blacks, as Sen. Obama’s campaigners are finding. It’s a story barely reported on the campaign trail over the past few months, but Sen. Clinton may have hinted at it when she discounted Obama’s electability. At first I thought she was referring to his liberal, if scant, voting record. Now I suspect she may have been referring to something else.

What’s most disappointing about Rev. Wright’s racists and paranoid tirades is that he neglects to discuss the veracity of his statements.  Some of his most outlandish claims include his accusation that the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill black people and his suggestion that those 3,000 people who died on September 11, 2001, deserved what they got.

Instead of discussing his statements, he prefers to whip out the trusty race card if anyone dares to criticize him, since to criticize him is really an attack on “the black church”, so he says.

After several weeks of blowback from his absurd remarks, I finally read a column in the Post explaining the real trouble with Rev. Wright.  The problem is not that he has been influential in Sen. Barak Obama’s life—Sen. Obama rejects Wright’s racist lies.  However, when Rev. Wright speaks, plenty of people listen and take him seriously, eventually adopting a fatalist attitude that no matter what they do, the white man will conspire against them.  The column gives an example:

I … recall a conversation I had during a visit to the maximum-security prison in Joliet, Ill. As I sat in the library there, talking with three men about why they were incarcerated, one man said: “Look around this room — almost everybody here is black. This is white man’s genocide. You put us in here to keep us down.” Where would this 20-something black man, or other relatively uneducated young people, get such an idea? From the vitriol spewed by the Rev. Wrights of this world.

Rev. Wright does a disservice to his congregation when he encourages people to adopt the mentality of hopeless victimhood.  That’s the real scandal here.

John Edwards mounted his campaign on his message that there are two Americas: one for the rich (like him, I suppose) and one for everyone else. This rhetoric caught on especially on the left as he railed against the Bush tax cuts and the Administration’s perceived favoritism toward its corporate friends. Though the Left loves to accuse the Right of exacerbating class divides, the city of Washington, a stronghold of the Democratic Party, is itself riven by race and class more than any of Edwards’s wildest quasi-Marxist nightmares. The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute co-authored a new report released today and found that the city, even while benefiting from a renaissance and real estate boom, is failing to solve issues of structural unemployment, thus leaving many poor and near-poor families behind in the boom.

Between 1998 and 2006, there was a 10 percent increase in the number of jobs in the District, the report says. But the employment rate among D.C. adults with only a high-school degree dropped, from 61 percent in 1999 to 51 percent in 2006.”We’ve got this huge irony of a city in the throes of enormous economic development . . . but the job growth is not going to District residents,” said Walter Smith, Appleseed’s executive director.

The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute also issued a report four years ago revealing that the city had the largest income gap of any major U.S. city. The report, based on Census data, found that in 1999 the average income for the poorest fifth of households was a mere $6,126, while the average income for the wealthiest fifth of households was thirty times that amount, $186,830. How ironic that a stronghold of the Democratic Party is also an exemplar of John Edwards’s two Americas. What’s worse than the two Americas are the two Washingtons: one for the rich, white liberals who sport anti-Bush bumper stickers and send their children to private school, and one for everyone else shut out by lousy schools and an unresponsive city government.

In a heavily one-party city such as Washington, all constituencies are competing for the party’s attention. However, it is the powerful side of the Democratic Party that continues to hold sway. The city continues to push deals that benefit well-heeled Democratic interests, such as organized labor, to the detriment of minority-owned businesses, which are much less likely to be unionized and much less likely to have pricey lobbyists on staff. For building the new Nationals Stadium, the city required union labor in effect, though not in law, essentially negotiating a wealth-transfer scheme from small, minority-owned contractors to wealthy union bosses. The Post reports:

The [stadium labor] agreement does not require union workers. But it does demand that all workers be paid union rates and that they pay union dues while on the project — a major plus for organized labor. For the city, the pact held out the prize of good jobs for District residents

…..

Although the unions and city came away with potential benefits, the agreement drew the ire of nonunion contractors, who unsuccessfully tried to get Congress to intervene and block it.”It excludes us from the workplace,” said John Magnolia, who owns Joseph J. Magnolia Inc., a nonunion plumbing contractor with 400 employees that has been based in the District since the 1950s.

Supporters of the agreement, including union leaders, said there is nothing to prevent nonunion contractors from working on the ballpark. Many smaller subcontractors do not have union employees. But Magnolia said that he opposes forcing his employees to pay union dues in order for them to work on the ballpark. If those requirements were not there, he said it would have been much easier to reach the hiring goals for employing more city residents.

Thus Magnolia and his employees, in order to qualify to work on a project they are already funding through their taxes, must pay access fees to their competitor. Clearly unfair. The city council when . Unfortunately in a one-party city such as Washington, any call for fairness and equal opportunity will have to wait in line behind the demands of organized labor, which have trumped residents’ demands in other cases.