Nancy Isenberg

Nancy Isenberg - White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College

 

Jun 12, 2017 Roosevelt House hosts a special evening featuring Nancy Isenberg, author of the groundbreaking bestseller White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, in conversation with Frank Rich, Writer-at-Large for New York Magazine, and Bill Goldstein, Public Programming Curator for Roosevelt House. Isenberg, the T. Harry Williams Professor of history at Louisiana State University, has updated the paperback of White Trash to include updated reflections on the 2016 presidential election. As Isenberg and Rich will discuss, the voters who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, from the earliest British colonial settlement to today's hillbillies. Isenberg's White Trash upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society – where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the nineteenth century, she argues; Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics, a widely popular movement that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and the Great Society. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the American identity. Welcoming remarks by Roosevelt House Director Harold Holzer. Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, May 9, 2017.

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Paul Edwards

January 24th, 41 AD – The Assassination of Caligula (Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus). Yes, he was the great Julius Cesar's namesake.

If this were ancient Rome, the Praetorian Guard would already have killed him.  That’s what they did when it became obvious that an emperor was too goofy, too crazy, too abusive, or was otherwise a shaming liability.  Roman Emperors had a history of not reaching their sell-by dates, not making it to early retirement.  Once they lost it, there was no hand-wringing agonized debate in the Senate about their fates.  They were summarily offed.

Not suggesting for a moment that this was a justifiable means of ending even a terrible reign, or that any violence should ever be inflicted on our CEO, no matter his howling liabilities.  We murder Presidents only when they cross our Capitalist oligarchy, or dare suggest we cut our War Machine back a few hundred billions.  That crosses a Red Line.  For some sins there is no absolution.

So no, there must be no rough stuff, but Melancholy God, action must be taken to remove this blithering, beclouded ninny.  At the NATO shindig he introduced Zelinsky as President Putin.  You saw it, and so did the rest of the world.  He could not have been more deeply ridiculous if he had thrown up, or farted.

Can you even imagine what the rest of the world thinks of The Empire, the Indispensable Nation, whose masses chant “We’re Number 1”, at witnessing this absurdity?  Z. hid the reflex grin he could not suppress.  Putin must surely have loled.

Certainly, his ushering out should be gently done; this pathetic shell of a man is not to be excoriated for his deteriorated mind and mechanically impaired body.  His condition is due to age for which he can’t be blamed.

What he can and must be blamed for is his long, disgraceful, and devious career as a phony, smarmy, glad-handing flack for Big Money as the Senator from MBNA, his vulgarly cynical two-faced record on race relations, his Chickenhawk cheerleading for every military crime and folly, his rah-rahing for our fubar debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and finally, now, in his dotage, funding and embracing mass murder by Nazi Israel in Gaza and a grossly evil proxy war in Ukraine that bids fair to trigger World War III.

Easing this bumbling, manky marionette off to benign retirement in a cushy facility, immune from criminal prosecution, is a fate far better than the one he truly deserves.

Of course, it leaves the Democratic Party with its bare face hanging out.  Of course, choosing a stand-in for this jinky sham will be a ludicrous burlesque, a prat-falling, pants-down farce, leading to unimaginable carnivals of chaos in November.

And, of course, we know, or should, the certain winner: a man so nakedly unprincipled, so shallowly self-promoting, nurturing in the impenetrable thickets of his jungly brain who knows what odious nightmares.  We know him because we had him, a full dose of him, with his shady, vindictive cadre of moral gnomes and girning knuckle-draggers; the kind of ethical cripples and sociopathic gangsters who, while furthering the danse macabre of American disaster abroad, will butcher any remaining civil liberties and inflict ecological insanity at home.  This is the “democracy” Capitalism has made, and this will be your prize.

This grisly debacle, is what you as a public have been schooled for, over many decades, over lifetimes, because you turned your minds—such as they were—and your hearts, over to a Capitalist oligarchy that has owned you since before black slaves had their physical freedom.  America, The Empire, is a sad, disintegrating, bankrupt corporation, a failed, fraudulent, insider hustle posing as a government, a ruined Potemkin Nation, set up to rape and exploit to exhaustion a once bountiful, magnificent land, and to fleece, degrade and dispossess its prostrate people.

As Yogi Berra advised: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”.  We’re there.

Due Dissidence
Keaton Weiss • Russell Dobular

Due Dissidence
Jul 8, 2024
The team demonstrates that far too many Democrats have become members of a cult inured to facts or reason, and which in this case will happily and stubbornly go down with the Biden ship. Their attitude almost guarantees another Russiagate—and worse than that as the country descends into a terrain that not even the ruling class managers are sure to control.

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Bruce Lerro

Le Pen during a tendentious interview by CNN's C. Amanpour.

THE FRENCH PEOPLE HAVE BEEN FOOLED AGAIN

If any of you think that some hodgepodge of long discredited socialist party, communist party and raging anarchists are going to help move France forward, we don't agree.

Had Le Pen's party won there probably would have been no more arms to Ukraine, and a death knell for the EU and another nail in the coffin of NATO. They also would have reversed Macron's austerity measures. Russia would have been invited into Europe to provide cheap gas.

The treacherous maneuvers of the fake left guarantee years of non-stop chaos and horse-trading

Contrary to the usual left formula, Le Pen is not a fascist. There is a fascist party in France who are against Muslims but they are small and isolated. My prediction is that this "popular front" will do none of these things listed above. In fact they will look like the SPD and the German Greens in six months. Europe will be an even greater vassalage than it is now. When a CIA rag like the New York Times roots for this "left" there is something that smells rotten in Denmark.

I will wager anyone about my prediction. This is a defeat for the multipolar world. The French people have not yet learned to think like internationalists. This is not 1968 anymore. Although they claim to hate Americans they don't hate them enough to realize that Mordor is ultimately the cause of their misery.
(Nor do most of the rest of Europe, at least not yet.)