How "The Great Society" Harmed Blacks
Mychal Massie writes at WND about how the welfare state, a legacy of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society," laid ruin to a good bit of black America:
First, The Great Society:
The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States launched by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964-65. The main goal was the elimination of poverty and racial injustice.
Great! Except...it caused a vast, uh, public assistance problem. James Piereson writes in The Weekly Standard:
Between 1964 and 1969, for example, a period of expanding economic opportunity, the welfare rolls in New York City tripled from around three hundred thousand to more than a million people because the mayor and community activists saw an opportunity to take advantage of the new availability of federal funds. Those numbers on public assistance stabilized at a million or more until the 1990s, when reform efforts succeeded in paring back the rolls. What happened in New York City occurred throughout the country: Welfare rolls multiplied, and so did crime, disorder, broken families, dysfunctional schools, and out-of-wedlock births. The unraveling of America's cities largely took place within a few years in the late 1960s, corresponding to LBJ's time in office. Ronald Reagan once remarked that "In the '60s, we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won." That statement may have been an exaggeration, but it also contained an element of truth: The scores of burned-out, crime-ridden, and bankrupt cities in America today must be counted as part of the legacy of the Great Society.
Massie lays out what was not so great for blacks about The Great Society:
In 1964, Republicans - led by Sen. Everett Dirksen, R-Ill. - were responsible for the Civil Rights Act, which overturned 80 years of Democratic opposition to ending race-based and gender-based inequality. It was intended to provide all peoples, regardless of race and/or, sex, the right to service in all public facilities, and banned the unequal application of voter requirements insuring all the right to vote. Sexual consideration pursuant to employment could only be considered where sex is a bona fide occupational qualification for the job.The Act should have ended there - allowing society to advance the conditions on its own - but it didn't. Reducing the requirements for positions that had been male-dominated circumvented the sexual component of the Act. The end result was/is that we now have women performing certain jobs for which they may have passed an exam only because of relaxed employment qualifications - making it a job for which they are not qualified.
...I argue that the racial discrimination component of the bill wasn't circumvented by ignorance and intrusion. It wasn't the best-laid plans of man run amok. It was the further implementation of a Wilsonian-Roosevelt-Kennedy template for socialism, vis-à-vis the Great Society Initiatives.
On one level or another, the Great Society Initiatives were harmful to all, but no group was harmed more than blacks.
The Great Society theme was the foundation of Democrat Lyndon Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign. Republican candidate Barry Goldwater called for reducing the size of government. But Johnson's not-so-veiled "government will take care of you" agenda cemented the decline of American civilization - especially for blacks and the elderly.
...When Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, 82 percent of blacks lived in married, two-parent households; 40 percent of blacks were small-business owners. In little more than three decades after said signing, blacks went from a legacy of Booker T. Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King, to Al Sharpton, Suge Knight, Jesse Jackson and Maxine Waters.
The charity state -- the constant state of dependence on government -- sends independence out the window.
Or as X puts it, "black accountability" was replaced with "anger, hatred of whites and a refusal to embrace modernity."
via @mark_j_perry
LBJ, who opposed the anti-lynching bill and the civil rights bills of 1957 and 1960: “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.”
LBJ, after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964: "I'll have those niggers voting Democrat for the next 200 years."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-relentless-conservative/the-democratic-partys-two_b_933995.html
Ken R at May 31, 2016 12:09 AM
Wow. Gregg just watched the LBJ pic with Cranston. He's not here or awake, so I can't ask him, but I wonder whether that was in the movie.
Amy Alkon at May 31, 2016 5:07 AM
Let's not overlook the role played by the major unions and umbrella labor organizations, all rock-solid Democratic supporters, who fought tooth-and-nail to keep blacks out of good-paying, family-supporting jobs for decades, before and after the CRA. Their efforts can be seen even to this day in the auto-industry skilled-trades ranks, which remain overwhelmingly Caucasian.
llater,
llamas
llamas at May 31, 2016 6:53 AM
LBJ was an ass.
I wonder is his misogyny, racism, ignorance, and bullying were in the movie.
Conan the Grammarian at May 31, 2016 7:49 AM
Some other unintended consequences: when a place like Detroit or even an area of a city goes belly-up, welfare makes it too easy to stay instead of moving to places where there are jobs, like Texas or ND. Welfare discourages enterpreneurship as well. And it isn't just about blacks--welfare in England has caused persistent problems there as well among both whites and immigrants.
Craig Loehle at May 31, 2016 8:55 AM
Why do people think unions are the friend of minorities or that the gov is? The Davis-Bacon act ordered that any government construction work had to pay the prevailing union wage. Why? Because back in the 50s blacks were willing to work for less and were getting into the building trades. The Act forced the gov to pay them the same, and if the same, then the gov went ahead and hired the unions, which in various ways keep minorities out. This Act is still on the books and still implemented. Still official government discrimination.
Even in skilled trades, as llamas mentioned, minorities are kept out of the unions and the democratic party is pushing unions as hard as they can via the NLRB. It is so racist it makes my head spin but everyone ignores it.
Craig Loehle at May 31, 2016 9:02 AM
This is an interesting story, but focuses only on the very poor (in the snipet above). The story itself seems inconsistent with the overall drop on black poverty described by the data. See Pew Trust report. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/13/whos-poor-in-america-50-years-into-the-war-on-poverty-a-data-portrait/ Am I missing something?
Alan Chudnow at May 31, 2016 4:43 PM
Some call it bullying, but is was really the politicking of a Master, best described as the treatment. It's how LBJ became LBJ. There's a shelf full of books about it. Johnson wasn't Ringo, just some miscellaneous guy in happenstance visited by fate. His posture was so intense, his engagement with his targets so encompassing, that he could do it over the telephone.
Also, I cannot fugging believe how attractive Eartha Kitt is in that one photo.
Crid at May 31, 2016 10:20 PM
I fucked up the link to pictures of "the treatment."
The point is that to concentrate on LBJ's racism in private soundbite slapdowns is to trivialize the impact he had on race and black life in America. As Cosh once put it:
History is more than meen peepil saying meen things.Crid at May 31, 2016 10:30 PM
Alan,
Here are the details that slip through that report. Blacks are heavily represented in the 'south' geographic area. Compared to national averages the GDP of the south has increased tremendously. Hence the poverty among black has decreased compared to national averages. This has nothing to do with welfare. Instead it is driven by the south industrializing, much like China did.
When you break thing out by region and compare to local averages instead of national ones you find the introduction of modern welfare had a disastrous effect on blacks financially. Their rate of financial growth is nowhere near as high as their neighbors. I and many others credit this primarily with the destruction of the black family.
A rising tide does lift all boats. But it lifts some faster and higher than others.
Ben at June 1, 2016 6:25 AM
The KKK could not, in their wildest fever dreams, have come up with something as harmful to American blacks as the Great Society has been.
Cousin Dave at June 1, 2016 8:51 AM
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