Race Cards
Ah, Republicans, so sensitive to the plight of minorities. They care so much about the basic racial and social inequalities in America that any objection to a candidate for office must be because of that insidious racism they've heard so much about. Seems they're up in arms over those pesky Democrats, always with the race baiting and slandering. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, whose state's most multi-cultural institution is the Jazz, not only declared that "I love the Hispanic people" during the Gonzales Senate confirmation hearings. He also warned that Hispanic Americans were "sensing there's something unfair going on."
The only reasons that the future-AG's race has been raised are to praise his Horatio Alger-esque rise to power and distract from his tendency to weasal out of any laws Bush deems inconvenient. Bush's tendency is to promote incompetents to head departments that he'd like to make irrelevant. Thus an education secretary more concerned with animated bunnies than teaching. Perhaps the justice department has now become irrelevant.
posted by EB at 9:10 PM
1 Comments:
Also proving their sensitivity to monority folks: lying to African-Americans about Social Security.
http://www.startribune.com/dynamic/story.php?template=print_a&story=5187689
Editorial: Social Security/Blacks get more, not less, from it
Published January 17, 2005
Of all the lies -- let's call them by their right name -- that the
Bush administration is spreading about Social Security, none is as
vile as the canard Bush repeated last Tuesday, when he said,
"African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means
the [Social Security] system is inherently unfair to a certain group
of people. And that needs to be fixed." That is an entirely phony
assertion; it has been debunked by the Social Security Administration,
by the Government Accountability Office and by other experts. Bush and
those around him know that. For them to repeat what they know to be a
blatant lie is despicable fear-mongering.
Bush didn't make up this phony line on his own; it comes from the
Heritage Foundation, which a number of years ago did a study
purporting to show that because African-Americans have a shorter life
expectancy than whites, they get less in return for the taxes they pay
into the Social Security system.
But when the Heritage study was examined by actuaries at the Social
Security Administration and by the Government Accountability Office,
serious methodological flaws and numerous bad assumptions were
uncovered. For example:
• Heritage failed to factor in the progressivity of Social Security
benefits; on a taxes-paid to benefits-received ratio, those with lower
incomes get more back. Blacks tend to earn less than whites, and thus
their Social Security benefits are larger in comparison to taxes they
pay.
• Social Security is more than retirement benefits. It also includes
survivor and disability benefits. Blacks benefit disproportionately
from those programs. While blacks are 11 percent of the workforce, for
example, they are 18 percent of those receiving disability benefits.
Almost half the blacks receiving Social Security -- 47 percent -- are
getting disability benefits or survivor benefits.
The Social Security actuaries found that Heritage had exaggerated
substantially the amount blacks pay in Social Security taxes and
low-balled the benefits they receive. "In fact," the actuaries said,
"results from more careful research reflecting actual work histories
for workers by race indicate that the non-white population actually
enjoys the same or better expected rates of return from Social
Security than for the white population."
The GAO reached the same conclusion. It said that, "In the aggregate,
blacks and Hispanics have higher disability rates and lower lifetime
earnings, and thus receive greater benefits relative to taxes [paid]
than whites."
While Bush didn't mention Hispanics, he probably will, as Heritage
did, with similarly misleading results. Both the GAO and Social
Security actuaries found Hispanics, too, in the aggregate, benefit
more than whites from the Social Security system. Hispanics actually
live longer than whites, and thus the mechanism that links their
future benefits to inflation (which the Bush administration wants to
undo) is particularly important. Currently, as Hispanics grow older,
Social Security makes up a more and more important element of their
income.
Social Security is a complex program, so it's easy to tell outright
lies or make misleading statements about it with little fear of
contradiction from the general public. All Americans should be on
notice that the Bush administration, in its drive to start dismantling
Social Security, isn't telling the truth on several fronts.
The system is not in crisis; it has money to last for about the next
half century, and even then, if nothing is done the required benefit
cuts would still leave retirees better off than those getting benefits
today. Pay close attention to this debate, and don't get snookered.
The crisis in Social Security is no more real than the "crisis" that
led the United States to war in Iraq.
© Copyright 2005 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
More on the topic of Republicans lying and using race-baiting tactics
about African-Americans and Social Security. I think the point made
by Baker at the end is especially astute . . .
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/02/04/security/print.html
Does Social Security shortchange blacks?
Bush says it does -- but the facts show that he's dealing this race
card off the bottom of the deck.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Farhad Manjoo
Feb. 4, 2005 | Republicans are generally loath to acknowledge the
racial inequalities that plague American society. When liberals argue
that issues like the education system or the criminal justice system
or election reform must reckon with racial disparities, Republicans
often accuse them of race-baiting. But in its push to privatize Social
Security, the GOP has been surprisingly willing to play the race card.
"African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means
the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people,"
President Bush said at a White House-sponsored conference on Social
Security in January. "That needs to be fixed."
Because blacks, on average, don't live as long as whites, Bush
contends that they collect fewer Social Security retirement benefits
than whites. Last week, he made a personal pitch to black leaders in a
closed-door meeting, arguing, according to spokesman Scott McClellan,
that the private investment accounts he favors for Social Security
will let blacks "build a nest egg of their own and be able to pass
that nest egg on to their survivors."
The idea that blacks are being cheated by Social Security could prove
to be a powerful rhetorical weapon for Republicans. Already, the media
is falling for the story line. CNN, for example, broadcast a
heart-tugging story Thursday that focused on the plight of the
dependents of African-Americans who die young. The network interviewed
Barbara Haile, a black woman whose husband died of cancer in 1997. He
was 50 at the time of his death; through payroll taxes, he'd been
contributing to Social Security for about 30 years. But because he
hadn't reached retirement age, neither he (nor his dependents) were
eligible to receive any money from Social Security.
Under the Bush plan, conservatives say, Haile would have been eligible
to receive the money that her husband had been collecting in his
"personal account," invested in the stock market. Because blacks
(especially black men) have lower average life expectancies than
whites (especially white women), the current system is unfair to them,
Republicans contend, and private accounts would be a boon for them.
Although CNN did interview supporters of the current system, the
emotional upshot of its report was clear: Social Security screws poor
black people and President Bush wants to help them out.
Here's the trouble with the emotional, race-based appeal: It has no
basis in fact. Or, as Dean Baker, co-director of the left-leaning
think tank Center for Economic and Policy Research, puts it, "It's
wrong in just about every single respect."
To begin with, there is no evidence that blacks, as a group, are
cheated by Social Security. Yes, whites do live longer than blacks,
which means that the average white woman will collect more benefit
checks than the average black man. But, Baker points out, blacks also
generally make less money than whites, which means that they get a
higher rate of return on their contributions to the system. And
because African-Americans suffer higher rates of disability than
whites, they draw more from Social Security's disability benefits than
whites. Meanwhile, spouses and minor children of African-Americans
heavily depend on the system's survivor benefits. When economists have
studied all that blacks put into the system compared with all they get
out of it, Baker says, blacks, as a group, aren't being treated
unfairly -- and they may even be doing better than whites.
Anti-Social Security agitators such as Stephen Moore, who heads the
Free Enterprise Fund, have taken to calling Social Security a "massive
income redistribution program" that sucks money out of
African-Americans' pockets and spits it out to whites. But in truth,
says Hillary Shelton of the NAACP, African-Americans would be
absolutely destitute without Social Security. "African-American
children are almost four times as likely to be lifted out of poverty
by Social Security benefits than our white counterparts," Shelton
says.
In a Social Security briefing paper, Shelton declares that "almost 80
percent of African Americans over age 65 depend on Social Security for
more than half of their income, and more than half rely on it for 90
percent or more of their income." Basically, he writes, "without the
guaranteed Social Security benefits they receive today, the poverty
rate among older African Americans would more than double, pushing
most African American seniors into squalor and poverty during their
most vulnerable years."
But the main problem with the Republicans' argument that private
accounts would be better for blacks than the current system is not
that it's economically wrong. It's that it's gravely pessimistic. As
the president took pains to point out in his State of the Union
address, Social Security reform won't affect today's generation of
retirees; it will benefit today's young people, who will retire 30 or
40 years from now. By that reasoning, conservatives are conceding that
blacks will die young not only now but 40 years from now. Apparently,
they aren't concerned about working to ensure that young
African-Americans live as long and healthy lives as today's young
white people.
The conservative argument, Baker points out, is based on the idea that
inequality is persistent. But why should we accept that it is?
According to national mortality statistics (PDF), African-Americans
suffer a higher death rate than whites for a number of plausibly
preventable causes -- AIDS and homicide, for instance. Innumerable
such inequalities are responsible for blacks' shorter lives. "Maybe
those inequalities won't disappear over the next 40 or so years,"
Baker says. "But can't we assume that they will get smaller and
smaller?"
But then, he adds, "If Republicans continue to stay in the White
House, maybe not. I'm not really joking about that -- if you've got
people who are not really committed to ending inequality, you might
well have to go 20 to 30 years without anything changing."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Farhad Manjoo is a staff writer for Salon Technology & Business.
***
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1759-2005Feb5?language=printer
Challenge Presidential Assumptions
By Courtland Milloy
Sunday, February 6, 2005; Page C01
"African American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people. And that needs to be fixed."
-- President Bush, speaking Jan. 11 at a forum on Social Security in Washington
You'd hope that what Bush believed needs to be fixed were the conditions that contribute to the premature deaths of African American males. That would certainly be in keeping with his talk of compassion and morality. But it's money, not life, that Bush values here.
It's bad enough that a president would take the early death rates of African American men as a given. But in Bush, we also have a president with a vested interest in our untimely demise: Forget about living long enough to spend time with the grandchildren; with private investment accounts instead of Social Security, early black deaths mean our kids can inherit more dough even faster.
Here is a president who never wants to take any racial disparity into account when it come to public policy -- except now, when the matter is a racial gap in lifespan. And he doesn't even want to close it.
In a closed-door meeting with African American leaders Jan. 28, Bush repeated his remarks, which prompted another round of debate as to the accuracy of his claims that blacks receive fewer benefits from Social Security than whites.
But excuse me for not getting caught up in that numbers game when Bush is counting on large numbers of us dying prematurely over the next 50 years.
Why would Bush care about anything that correlates with lower life expectancy for blacks -- violence in urban areas, racial disparities in income, higher unemployment and a lack of access to health care, for instance -- when part of his pitch to reform Social Security is based on that outcome?
Black adults are more likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease, complications of uncontrolled diabetes and HIV than white adults. African American men and women have higher incidence of colon, rectal and lung cancer than any other group. Moreover, black women are more likely to die from breast cancer even though white women have a higher incidence of the disease.
Although blacks make up only 12 percent of the U.S. population, we make up nearly a third of the 20 million Americans with life-threatening kidney disease.
There is much the federal government could -- and should -- do to help improve the life expectancy of African Americans.
But let's be real. Waiting for the Bush administration to act is like waiting for the Grim Reaper.
In a 2002 issue of the Harvard Health Policy Review, Karen Williams and Veronica W. Johnson attributed many of black America's illnesses to a "slave health deficit" and called for a national commitment to "close the disparity gap without blaming African Americans for their historically sub-optimal health status." I applaud them. But in the absence of that commitment, black people must realize that nobody is going to save us but us.
Last year, cigarettes caused more than 45,000 black people to die from preventable diseases. Put them out.
Put down the handguns and put on the condoms. Black women are 23 times as likely to be HIV positive than white women -- in part because they are having unprotected sex with black men who are having unprotected sex with other black men and not being truthful about it.
Black Americans are at greater risk of vascular disease, such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels, and black men between the ages of 20 and 40 have a twentyfold increased risk of kidney failure compared with white men -- with obesity and high salt intake the likely culprits.
Some researchers say they have found links between racism and hypertension, while others believe that racism actually can sap a person's will to live.
Perhaps. But if history has revealed anything about black people, it is the presence of a strong survival instinct. May it kick in now.
Bush's cavalier attitude toward premature deaths among African Americans must be challenged. But, as the president obviously knows, dead black men don't fight.
E-mail: milloyc@washpost.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
9:24 AM
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