Guest Post: Frederick Douglass on the 4th of July and the American Dream, 1852

I hate to be "that guy" on a day of national celebration, pointing out the gross inequities and hypocrisies of an otherwise free and prosperous country. Frederick Douglass had no such qualms, however, in his scathing "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" delivered in Washington D.C. on July 5th, 1852, excerpted here:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Is this sentiment only limited to historical American hypocrisy regarding the slave trade, which President Abraham Lincoln abolished after a bloody civil war? Nay - Susan B. Anthony was not to be outdone, with the National Woman Suffrage Association's "Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States" just 24 years later.

http://news.yahoo.com/y--big-story--lesser-known-truths-about-fourth-of-july.html

As I continue my series on Incarceration in America, here are a couple articles more, food for thought, on this day of liberty. Freedom isn't free - literally and figuratively:


Probation Fees Rise, Firms Profit and the Poor Go to Jail - NYT

Teen on American justice: 'I'm dead' - Sentenced to 162 years in Jail

Debunking Liberal Economics Volume 1 "A College Degree is Key to the Middle Class" Issue 1: Government Inflated a Bubble

Before I begin I also would like to welcome our new writers and thank them for their time to helping Matt and I out on this crazy project we envisioned. To our readers, I hope I am turning you. 

(Matt, I would love to put up a poll to find out the ideological skew of our readers, my guess is at least 70-30 against me. Maybe even 95-5…) 

Now, I will dive into the issue at hand: liberal policies of just throwing money at the problem have created an issue and the only way to solve it is by completely re-envisioning the model.

I didn’t mean to make this post a response to Matt, but I later decided to just focus this post on something Matt wrote in his last post in what has shaped up to be “Education Week at CR”. Matt wrote, “Whenever anything goes wrong, you can always expect conservatives to blame the government.” Matt, there’s probably a cause-effect problem here. You see if A constantly causes B, one would be correct to say that A caused B. However, what you are asserting in that statement is that A did not actually cause B. So let’s take a look at whether A did cause B, shall we?

Friday Links: Economic Magicians and Real Ones

An economic inequality-themed morning update to dampen your naturally perked up spirits this Friday morning, lest you be in too good of a mood before the weekend has really begun (you've still got 8 more hours).  In sports, they call that regressing to the mean.  Here at Conflict Revolution, we're just mean.

Steve and I are getting ready to debate this topic in the near future.  We've just been waiting for an opening, and with the return of Occupy Wall Street, not to mention the informal kickoff of a general election campaign involving a former private equity executive that happens to be a multi-millionaire, it may be time.  So stay tuned, readers.  All eight of you are in for a real payoff in the near future.

Here's what's on our desktops, laptops, iPads, and iPhones right now:

1) Ed Conard, a former Romney partner at Bain Capital, says that inequality makes the economy more efficient and helps us all out in the long run... and points to a soda can as evidence.  Some fascinating back and forth here between the subject and author - though I must say, in addition to my general disagreements with his thinking, I too found Conard's economic philosophy to be disturbingly indicative of a worldview where none of us are worth anything unless we make boatloads of money.  Hat tip to CR reader Mario Arthur-Bentil for the link ["The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy," The New York Times Magazine, 5/1/12]. 

2) Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich makes a counterpoint as well as anyone, and marks the occasion of the Dow Jones returning to its 2007 high by noting that the ratio of total income going to capital (investors) rather than labor (workers) is at its highest level since the 1920s.  I'd like to see him and Ed Conard debate ["The Tinder-Box Society," Huffington Post, 5/1/12]

3) On a related note, why tax cuts won't jolt the economy ["Tax Cuts and Job Growth: They're Just Not That Into Each Other," Huffington Post, 5/2/12]

4) And on an unrelated one, even I'm not going to deny that this doesn't look good.  Magicians?  Really NOAA?  ["NOAA pulls ad seeking magician for training event," CNN.com, 5/3/12]

5) Finally, if you're a recent college grad, and you live in DC, there's a good chance you work at one - they have names like the American Society for Surgery of the Hand, and they are the country's professional associations.  Really interesting take, I think, on how a lot of these membership organizations find themselves at a crossroads between being creators and curators, and the implication that holds for the future of managing digital overload ["The Secret Power of Associations - Revealed," Forbes, 4/29/12]. 

W.H. Auden once said that "a false enchantment can last a lifetime," so if you're a returning visitor to Conflict Revolution, we've got you good!  Enjoy your Fridays, folks.  Keep your browsers dialed for this week's roundup later in the day, only at the one and the only.