#bootstrap theory

[odinsblog]

“Hard working, self made man” my Black ass. But we already knew this.

👉🏿 https://futurism.com/elon-musk-dad-emerald-mine

[odinsblog]

For four decades, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has extolled the importance of “personal responsibility.” He has chastised those who “make excuses for black Americans” and argued there is a need to “emphasize black self-help.” He has denigrated affirmative action programs on the grounds that they “create a narcotic of dependency” where there should be “an ethic of responsibility and independence.” He bemoans the “ideology of victimhood” that allows the marginalized to “make demands on society for reparations and recompense.”

In light of recent revelations that Thomas has been showered by billionaire Harlan Crow with over two decades’ worth of getaways on superyachts and private jets and various other gifts, none of which he ever reported, the jurist’s long con of principled advocacy for Black self-reliance and opposition to white largesse has finally run its course. Turns out, Thomas was never against reparations—he just wanted them for himself. He is and always has been precisely what he wrongly accuses Black folks of being.

It’s been a con run by a self-serving fabulist all along.

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[odinsblog]

I wonder how many liberals are falling for his “self made trillionaire” bullshit. Dude was literally born into wealth.

It’s only called hard work and “meritocracy” when white people recieve unearned benefits. But meritocracy is a myth. The United States was NOT built on a system of meritocracy. It was built on genocide & land theft, slavery & labor theft, and a system of DENIED ACCESS.

“When white people are seen with nice things, people attribute it to hard work, but when Black people have nice things, it must have been unearned or a handout” ...... this casually racist mindset is a recurring theme throughout American history.

👉🏿 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/blood-batteries-fuel-the-fortune-of-elon-musk-qkhlvp5dr

[odinsblog]

Jared Kushner on the Black community: "President Trump's policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they're complaining about, but he can't want them to be successful more than they want to be successful."

“Kushner’s latest misstep has all the trappings of a typical Trump administration scandal: Trump or an official says something offensive, critics attack, the White House cries persecution. But the Kushner interview is still notable, and not just because Kushner said something racist, or because he is one of the most powerful members of the Trump administration. It’s because Kushner admitted in public something the GOP has believed for decades.

The idea that poverty is a moral rather than a material state is old and persists in both major parties, but in the GOP it has achieved a uniquely virulent status. Shrinking the size of the government comes at a high cost to the poor; to paraphrase Adam Serwer, the cost is also the point. The same welfare policies derided by conservatives as handouts actually provide a route out of poverty — a lesson reinforced by the CARES Act that kept at least 12 million out of poverty before Republicans let its benefits expire. Without welfare, people will work, or so think tanks and elected Republicans insist. Since the Republican Party also opposes minimum-wage increases and regulations that make workplaces safer places to be, it offers the poor nothing but a trap. You can work yourself to death in America and have nothing to show for it but depression, hunger, and a miserable old age. The result is social stratification. Which, again, is the point.

Consider the “welfare queen,” as Ronald Reagan introduced her in the 1970s: Black, lazy, and female, the welfare queen soon assumed near-mythological status in the conservative movement. (The real-life woman Reagan cited to make the case against welfare was named Linda Taylor, and her life was substantially more complicated than Reagan or other small-government proponents ever allowed, as Josh Levin documented at length in his book The Queen.) Reagan was not an original thinker. Around the same time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan helped plant seeds that future generations of welfare-hostile politicians would reap. His titular report identified the breakdown of the family, namely the absence of Black fathers, as factors contributing to a culture of poverty. By reframing poverty as a behavioral rather than an economic problem, laissez-faire mythologists try to fend off the redistribution of wealth and power to the poor, and an accompanying loss of status. They shift the burden from their own shoulders to the poor: If small-government policies didn’t help you, examine your own heart and don’t point fingers, they suggest. A president can’t make Black men be good fathers, can’t make people work, can’t reform an underclass with bad values.

It would be unfair to assign Republicans sole credit for policy making that treats poverty like moral delinquency. Moynihan worked for Lyndon B. Johnson when he authored the report and was later elected as a Democratic New York senator. Bill Clinton would later cite personal responsibility as the impetus for his infamous welfare-reform push. But the GOP’s dog whistles are uniquely clumsy; everyone can hear them, and Trump is loud even by the standards of previous Republican presidents. Kushner, then, is true to form. His only real innovation is his brutal, stupid honesty. He dispensed with the fiction that conservative policies are meant to help Black people, or anyone else without money or power. He was defending his own status because he believes it’s his birthright, and that is a fundamentally conservative view. If poverty is a state a person enters or stays in through their own lack of merit, wealth comes to signify superior character. Kushner, and the family he joined by marriage, have what they have because they deserve it.

That attitude won’t vanish with the Trump presidency. It’s mainstream Republican opinion and it complicates any effort to “save the GOP,” a cause that some Never Trump conservatives and Democrats still champion. Removing Kushner from power will be far easier than dismantling the ideas he represents.”

Read more: https://apple.news/AB3t6lYm_ToGztFIVNKp4Rw

[odinsblog]

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as [race], education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

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[itsjennetic]

[sashafoxx]

Unpopular Opinion: There’s nothing wrong with “Bootstrap Theory” when it’s properly applied. And guess what? 99% of ppl are doing it wrong.

[odinsblog]

Paul Ryan once argued that “liberal government programs give people comfort, but not dignity.”

And to justify cutting Welfare and defunding food programs, Republicans disingenuously equate having the basic necessities needed to live — like food — to dignity. Following that logic, are we to believe that wealthy people somehow have more dignity than poor people, because they have more access to more resources like housing, food and clean drinking water? Do the mostly white residents of Bismarck North Dakota have more dignity than the Native Americans at Standing Rock? Do Donald Trump’s children somehow have more “dignity” than does Little Miss Flint? Because Trump’s children don’t need to depend on free lunch programs?

Wealth ≠ dignity.

Access to resources ≠ dignity.

People living in or born into poverty do not have less dignity. They have less wealth and less political power.

Providing free school lunches to children living in poverty doesn’t “give kids an empty soul” it simply feeds hungry children. Feeding a hungry child is not “giving them undue comfort” or making them lazy, it’s simply feeding a hungry child. How did feeding hungry children become a controversial act for “Christian” conservatives?

Intentionally starving children to teach them the “dignity” of hunger is inhumane.

Stop stigmatizing poverty. Stop equating poverty with a lack of dignity. Stop reinforcing the notion that poor people have no dignity just because they’re poor. There is no nobility in starvation, and there is no benevolence in allowing children or anyone else to go hungry when you possess the power to prevent it.