11312: McBudget McBullshit.

From The Miami Herald…

‘McBudget’ an insult to those living in poverty

By Leonard Pitts Jr.

A few words about the McBudget.

Perhaps you’ve heard of it. As fast food workers around the country protest for higher wages, we learn that McDonald’s offers advice to help them live on the wages they make which, while not technically bupkes, do amount to a paycheck you can pretty much have the driver cash for you on the bus ride home. In December, for example, Bloomberg profiled a Chicago man who, after 20 years with the burger giant, earns $8.25 an hour — and doesn’t get 40 hours a week. This, as McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson pulled down, according to the Wall Street Journal, a compensation package worth $13.8 million last year.

Anyway, Mickey D’s isn’t blind to the difficulties of french fry makers and drive-through order takers getting by on not quite bupkes. It partnered with Visa on a website — http://www.practicalmoneyskills.com/mcdonalds/budgetJournal/budgetJournal.php — which includes a sample budget showing how to live reasonably well on next to nothing.

The impossibility of doing so has been attested to by everyone from writer Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Nickel and Dimed to noted obstetrician Cliff Huxtable, in that episode of The Cosby Show where he uses Monopoly money to teach young Theo the value of a good income. It has also been attested to by the people trying to do it. But all that notwithstanding, the McBudget insists it can be done.

It envisions monthly take-home pay of $2,060 from working two (!) jobs. Out of that, you pay $600 for rent, $150 for a car note, $100 for insurance (home and auto), $100 for cable and phone, $90 for the electric bill, $20 for health insurance, etc. You save $100 a month and have $750 to play with — if, by “play,” you mean pay for clothing, child care and water. Also, gasoline, maintenance and repair for the 1997 junkmobile you’re able to buy for $150 a month. Oh, and food. Can’t forget food.

As you might expect, the McBudget is mildly controversial. Washington Post blogger Timothy B. Lee called the figures “realistic” and praised McDonald’s for “practical” advice. This seems to be a minority opinion. ThinkProgress, the left-leaning website, called the budget “laughably inaccurate.” Stephen Colbert skewered the company, saying a $20 health insurance premium will buy you “a tourniquet, a bottle of Night Train and a bite stick.” In the Wall Street Journal, columnist Al Lewis suggested that McDonald’s $13.8 million man show us how it’s done by volunteering to live on the McBudget.

The most vexing thing about that budget is its condescension. Take it from this welfare mother’s son: If there’s one thing poor people do not need, it is lessons in how to be poor. To the contrary, you will never meet anyone who can wring more value from a dollar.

We’re talking every trick of layaway and two-day-old bread, coupon clipping and off brand buying, Goodwill shopping, Peter robbing, Paul paying and plain old going without. You ever hear of a jam sandwich? That’s when you “jam” two pieces of bread together and call it lunch. Heck, if you handed the federal budget over to a couple welfare mothers, we’d be in surplus by December.

And McDonald’s has lessons for the poor?

Look, there are many reasons people wind up in poverty. Sometimes they make bad life choices — they drop out of school without salable skills, or they become teen parents. Often, it falls on them from the sky in the form of illness, injury, addiction or financial reversal.

However they got into poverty they all need — and deserve — the same things: a way to work their way out and to be accorded a little dignity while they do so. The former comes with paying a living wage, the latter by treating people with respect and not presuming to teach them what they could teach you. McDonald’s fails on both counts.

The McBudget is a McInsult.

7990: Revisionist History.

From The Chicago Tribune…

On race, look away, look away, look away …

By Leonard Pitts

“I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten …”
—lyric from “Dixie”

Actually, old times there are forgotten quite a bit.

For 145 years, ever since a grim-faced Robert E. Lee rode away from Wilmer McLean’s house in Appomattox, Va., where he had surrendered his army, apologists for the South have been trying to induce the rest of us to forget the causes of the Civil War, to imbue an act of treachery and treason with a nobility of purpose it did not, in fact, possess.

“States’ rights,” they say. “States’ rights to maintain a system of human slavery,” they do not say.

It is the social and political equivalent of an extreme makeover. The thinking seems to be: When history collides with cherished self-image, change history.

Something very similar seems to be afoot with regard to a related event much closer to us in time: the civil rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Just a few months ago, we saw conservative activist Glenn Beck claim ownership of that movement, in defiance of historical memory. “… We were the people that did it in the first place!” he cried.

Last week, in an essay in The Washington Post, University of Virginia professor Gerard Alexander analyzed voting trends from the civil rights era to bolster his thesis that social conservatism is not intolerant. Somehow, he never got around to explaining how it is, then, that social conservatives were always the ones standing in schoolhouse doors, blockading polling places, burning buses and cracking skulls.

And now, here’s Haley Barbour. The governor of Mississippi raised eyebrows and blood pressures a few weeks ago when, in an interview with Human Events, a conservative Web site and magazine, he credited his generation of white Southerners with leading the South into a new era of integration. It was, he said, “my generation, who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college — never thought twice about it.”

Barbour is 62. In the Mississippi of his youth, he legally could not have gone to integrated schools. As for college: He attended Ole Miss in 1965; three years after, the attempt by a single black man, James Meredith, to enroll there required negotiations between the attorney general and the governor and ultimately, the intercession of U.S. marshals; a riot ensued in which more than 100 marshals were injured and two people killed.

Pressed on this in a later interview, Barbour doubled down. Those years of forced integration were, he said, “a very pleasant experience.” He singled out a black classmate, Verna Bailey, with whom he said he developed a friendly rapport. They sat next to each other; she let him copy her notes. “I still love her,” he said.

So Margaret Talev of McClatchy Newspapers called Bailey, now an educator in Oregon. “I don’t remember him at all, no,” said Bailey, “because during that time that certainly wasn’t a pleasant experience for me. My interactions with white people were very, very limited. Very, very few reached out at all.”

While she didn’t remember Barbour, Bailey did remember days when “I thought my life was going to end.” She did remember being pelted with coins and beer. She did remember “this mass of anger and hostility.” Bailey completed four years of course work in three — not because she was a great student, she said, but because she couldn’t wait to get out of there.

Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it? It softens rough places. It absolves our sins. Memory forgives us.

But sometimes, it is morally necessary to forgo that salve, to embrace the rough places and lack of absolution, for the lessons they have to teach. Apparently, some conservatives still can’t bring themselves to do that, even now.

That’s truly sad. When history collides with self-image, it is not history a principled person seeks to change.

5936: Guilty Displeasures.

From national news sources…

Memo to African-Americans: Sometimes blacks are guilty

By Leonard Pitts

If Kwame Kilpatrick were white, don’t you think he’d have been thrown out of office a long time ago? Heck, he’d be out of jail by now and shopping his memoirs.

Instead, it was just last week, after a year of scandal and revelation that has paralyzed his city and made it the punch line to an international joke, that Detroit’s mayor surrendered his office and copped a plea: 120 days in jail, 5 years’ probation and a $1 million fine. Because, you see, Kilpatrick is not white, he is black in a city that is itself more than 80 percent black. And that complicated things.

For instance, it led to undeserved support from the local black paper.

And to a massive rally for him at a black church.

And to black people blaming the media for “bringing down” a gifted black man.

And to a political consultant calling the case “Jim Crow justice.”

And to Kilpatrick repeatedly portraying himself as a victim of racial politics and a “lynch-mob mentality.”

All the claims of racial solidarity and victimization gave Kilpatrick what Eliot Spitzer could never have imagined: a base from which to dig in his heels and declare he would not be moved.

If you didn’t know better, you might have thought this was Birmingham in 1963 or Montgomery in 1955, with strains of “We Shall Overcome” ringing in the air. You’d never know it was Detroit in 2008 where the issue wasn’t desegregation or human dignity but, rather, a mayor who had an extramarital affair with his chief of staff, fired police who came too close to discovering it, lied about it under oath, agreed to an $8.4 million payoff to keep police from releasing explicit text messages proving the affair and, for good measure, shoved a sheriff’s deputy trying to serve a subpoena to someone else in an unrelated matter.

Racial victimization? Jim Crow justice? Give me a break.

Earlier this year, I excoriated the mayor for playing upon African- Americans’ reflexive tendency to rally in defense of any one of us who gets in trouble. But that’s only part of the problem here. It’s not just that someone played black folks, but that black folks keep letting themselves be played.

Truth is, we get played like checkers any time any high-profile one of us is caught in scandal or sin. From Michael Jackson to O.J. Simpson to Tawana Brawley to Mike Tyson to Marion Barry to Kilpatrick, lying his natural backside off in court, we keep proving pathetically susceptible to manipulation by any brother or sister who says white folks have done him or her wrong—especially if they invoke God a few times for good measure.

There’s an axiom that goes: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. But what about fool me 87 times? What about fool me like the nerdy kid with the “kick me” sign taped to his back?

What happens when you get fooled like that? I’ll tell you what should happen. You should say, “Enough.” You should evolve the social and political maturity, the common sense and the plain self-respect to stop letting yourself be used like a dishrag.

African-Americans—and, for that matter, all people of conscience—have a moral responsibility to stand up for those who truly are victims of racial injustice. In defending those people, we should be unstinting and unwavering.

We should not, however, be unthinking. We should stop falling into the easy trap of believing every black man in trouble is a victim of racial malfeasance. Sometimes, a black man in trouble is a victim of his own malfeasance. If more black folks in Motown had understood this, the city might not have spent the last year embarrassing itself.

Leonard Pitts is a syndicated columnist based in Washington.

5516: Poor Excuses.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Poverty gets the blame, not racism

By Leonard Pitts

I keep thinking I should be mad at West Virginia.

Not because Barack Obama was recently beaten like a red-headed stepchild—to use my father’s expression—in that state’s primary. No, I’m thinking I should be upset about “why” he was beaten. According to exit polls, 2 out of every 10 voters said race was a major factor in how they cast their ballots.

Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” ran a clip of a white woman who explained her refusal to vote for Obama thusly: “I guess because he is another race. I’m sort of scared of the other race ‘cause we have so much conflict with ‘em.”

It’s disappointing to see bigotry in Appalachia so vividly displayed. Yet I find it doesn’t make me angry. I feel sorry for them. If that sounds patronizing, I apologize. That’s not how it’s meant.

It’s just that, if the headline here is that Obama was rejected by whites on the basis of race, I submit that’s not the whole truth. Pollsters say he was rejected on the basis of race by whites who lack college degrees and whose household income is less than $50,000 a year. In other words, he was rejected by the poor and the less educated.

Which is a description that fits many in Appalachia—and also a vast swath of black America. So for me, the story here isn’t simply the old, familiar tale of the nation’s stark racial divide, but also another tale, of how the white poor and the black poor have long been kept at one another’s throats as a means of keeping them from looking too clearly at the ways both are manipulated by the forces of money and power.

And here, let me tell you what I am not saying. I’m not saying all bigots are poor or all the poor are bigots. I’m not saying everyone in Appalachia is poor, or less educated, or atavistic about race.

But I am saying this: The white poor have been victims of a con job going back at least as far as the Civil War, when poor white men were used as cannon fodder for the right of rich white men—I repeat: “rich” white men—to keep slaves. They were told they fought for state’s rights.

My point is that race has often been used as a means of distracting and diverting the white poor. They had little in life, but the one thing they did have—or so the con went—was whiteness itself. Which meant they had someone to be better than.

There are those in positions of political power who can and should be held to answer for the meanness and narrowness of poor people’s lives. But they can’t and won’t so long as those who should be standing together to demand those answers are kept busy fighting one another over superficialities of color and culture.

Over the years, many of us have figured that out.

In West Virginia, at least, 2 in 10 of us have not.

Leonard Pitts is a syndicated columnist based in Washington.

Essay 4898

From The Miami Herald…

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Exhibit traces comic industry’s Jewish origins

By LEONARD PITTS JR.

It was 1940 and the Jews were dying. Shot down on cobblestone streets, starved in barbed-wire enclosures, frozen in winter snows, racked with disease. All seemed lost.

Then, from up in the sky, like a bird, like a plane, came Superman. With ridiculous ease, he captured the tyrants Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. “I’d like to land a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw,” the Man of Steel told the Führer. He settled for delivering both men to the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.

It did not happen, of course, except in the pages of a short comic-book story in Look magazine in 1940. In real life, Hitler and Stalin lived for years more and consumed millions of lives. But hey, a kid can dream, can’t he?

Visit the Jewish Museum of Florida in Miami Beach between now and April and you will find that Superman tale in an exhibition honoring the dreams of those kids. Of course, they’re not kids anymore. They are men long ago grown old or dead. But in the years of war and rumors of war, they were young men and boys who daydreamed. In the process, they dreamt up an icon as fully expressive of American values as baseball, jazz and a cheeseburger, side of fries, with a large Coke.

He was the superhero. Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive. And Jewish, too.

Indeed, the first superhero, the aforementioned Superman, first published in 1938, was created by two Jewish boys from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Batman followed in 1939, brought to life by two Jewish men, Bob Kane (born Robert Kahn) and Bill Finger. Captain America, born in 1940, was the brainchild of two Jewish artists: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg). In the early 1960s, Kirby, along with writer Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber) reinvented the superhero genre with the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Thor, the Hulk and (with a non-Jewish artist named Steve Ditko) Spider-Man. And so on. In fact, one could argue that had there been no Jews, there might have been no superheroes.

Marcia Jo Zerivitz, founder, executive director, and chief curator of the Jewish Museum, says that pioneering role was news to her when she happened to see Zap! Pow! Bam! The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books 1938-1950, at The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta a few years ago. “When I saw it,” she says, “I fell in love with it. First of all, I didn’t know that these [characters] were created by Jews. I figured if I didn’t know, a lot of other people aren’t going to know.” So she arranged to bring it to South Florida.

[To read the full story, click here.]

Essay 4701

[From The Chicago Tribune.]

Essay 4590

From The Chicago Tribune…

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The history of rope

By Leonard Pitts, a syndicated columnist based in Washington: Tribune Media Services

This will be a history of rope.

It strikes me that such a history is desperately needed just now. It seems the travesty in Jena, La., has spawned a ghastly trend. Remember how white students at Jena High placed nooses in a tree last year to communicate antipathy toward their African-American classmates? Now it’s happening all over.

A noose is left for a black workman at a construction site in South Elgin. In Queens, N.Y., a woman brandishes a noose to threaten her black neighbors. A noose is left on the door of a black professor at Columbia University. And that’s just last week. Go back a little further and you have similar incidents at the University of Maryland in College Park, at a police department on Long Island, on a Coast Guard cutter, in a bus maintenance garage in Pittsburgh.

Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told USA Today, “For a dozen incidents to come to the public’s attention is a lot. I don’t generally see noose incidents in a typical month. We might hear about a handful in a year.”

The superintendent of schools in Jena famously dismissed the original incident as a “prank.” It was an astonishing response, speaking volumes about the blithe historical ignorance of people who have found it convenient not to peer too closely at the atrocities of the past lest they be accidentally … moved.

But watching this trend unfold, it occurs to me that maybe what we need here is the opposite of ignorance. Maybe what we need is information. Maybe what we need is a history of rope.

A history of rope would have to include, in 1904, Luther Holbert and his wife, who had their fingers chopped off and handed out as souvenirs. Holbert was beaten so badly one of his eyes came out. It hung by a thread. A large corkscrew was used to bore into the couple’s flesh. It tore out big chunks of them each time it was withdrawn. A rope was used to tie them to a tree.

A history of rope would have to include, in 1917, Rufus Moncrief, who was beaten senseless by a mob. They used a saw to cut off his arms and otherwise mutilated him. The mob hanged Moncrief. Then, for good measure, they hanged his dog. Ropes were used for both.

A history of rope would have to include, in 1918, Mary Turner, burned alive in Valdosta, Ga. A man used a hog-splitting knife to slash her swollen stomach. The baby she had carried nearly to term tumbled out and managed two cries before the man crushed its head beneath his heel. A rope was used to tie Turner upside down in a tree.

A history of rope would include thousands of Turners, Moncriefs and Holberts. It would range widely across the geography of this nation and the years of the last two centuries. A history of rope would travel from Cairo, Ill., in 1909 to Ft. Lauderdale in 1935 to Urbana, Ohio, in 1897 to Wrightsville, Ga., in 1903 to Leitchfield, Ky., in 1913 to Newbern, Tenn., in 1902. And beyond.

You might say the country has changed since then, and it has. The problem is, it’s changing again.

It feels as if in recent years we the people have abandoned even the pretense of believing our loftiest ideals. It has become fashionable to decry excessive “political correctness,” deride “diversity,” sneer at the “protected classes.” Code words sanding down hatred’s rough edge. “States’ rights” for the new millennium. And now, out come the nooses. Just a prank, the man says.

Mary Turner would argue otherwise. I find it useful to remember her, useful to be reminded of things we would rather forget. To remember her is to understand that there is no prank here.

A history of rope would drown your conscience in blood.

[Leonard Pitts is a syndicated columnist based in Washington.]