You just can't make this Sh#t Up sometimes. You just can't.
Ryan at CPAC.
“We call it a poverty trap,” he explained. “There are incentives not to work, and to stay where you are.”
Ryan also pointed to the work of Charles Murray, a white nationalist, who has used “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“That’s this tailspin or spiral that we’re looking at in our communities,” he told Bennett. “Your buddy Charles Murray or Bob Putnam over at Harvard, those guys have written books on this.”
“Which is, we have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities in particular of men not working, and just generations of men not even thinking about working and learning the value and culture of work,” Ryan opined. “So, there’s a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.
Oh, so it's a "cuilture" problem? They just don't
want to work? The jobs are out there, just rolling by down the sidewalk and they Just. Won't. Reach Out and Pick THEM UP?
What. A. Crock.
This is frankly, such bullshit.
Most people who are in fact on public assistance, are not living in the "inner cities" - or to decode his oh-so-clever euphemenism - not BLACK.
As a matter of fact...http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...
Another finding of the study is that the distribution of benefits no longer aligns with the demography of poverty. African-Americans, who make up 22 percent of the poor, receive 14 percent of government benefits, close to their 12 percent population share. White non-Hispanics, who make up 42 percent of the poor, receive 69 percent of government benefits – again, much closer to their 64 percent population share.
So it's not at all the case that people in the "Inner Cities" are receiving a massively disproportionate amount of government assistance, they actually get only 14% of what should be - if all things were theoretically "even" - 22% of the benefits, while White people get 69% of what should be their 42% "share". (Some of the reason for this may be the fact that many of these benefits are actually coming from Social Security and Medicare, not "Welfare")
If Ryan and his pal Murray the supremacist were right, what then explains Applachia? Did all of them just wake up on the wrong side of the Still this Decade?
I could say a lot more about this but the main thing is it's just infuriating.
This is a simply a fancy way of saying All those Black Guys are just Lazy and if we simply stop "Coddling them" with benefits, they'll finally get off their asses and Work!
Yeah, it's a bit like saying that all the Slaves needed was to quit stalling and Start Being Free, because it's not like anyone was in direct opposition to that idea out there was there?
People like Ryan might have a shred of a point if we had fair and honest job hiring practices in the country, but unfortunately - we don't.
COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Bank of America has been ordered to pay nearly $2.2 million in restitution for discriminating against more than 1,100 black job seekers.
Judge Linda S. Chapman of the U.S. Department of Labor has ordered the bank to pay 1,147 African American job applicants $2,181,593 in back wages and interest, for race-based hiring discrimination at the company's Charlotte, N.C., facility.
Think that's merely a single exception and
not sometimes the general rule?
Pager and Western found strong evidence of hiring discrimination by New York employers against male job-seekers who were African American or of another oppressed nationality as compared to white men.
The study used teams of young men who posed as job applicants, listing identical work and educational experience. They sought work as drivers, couriers, cleaners, fast-food servers, deli clerks, sales representatives, stockers, busers, waiters, cashiers and telemarketers. Some members of the study reported a felony drug conviction and 18 months of served prison time.
The results? According to the June 17 New York Times, “Black men who had never been in trouble with the law were about half as likely as whites with similar backgrounds to get a job offer or a callback.”
Think again.
Here's the thing, I'm not claiming this type of thing is an insurmountable hurdle or something that stops All Black Men Cold in their Tracks. it doesn't. The reality is that life isn't fair. We all know this, we all understand this. While some people go through life on greased rails, others have to battle through an uphill steeplechase. When you know that fact, in your bones, that people are not giving you a fair shake - and they simultaneously deny it and do their damndest to make you feel all the while that it's, somehow, all you're own fault that they've treated you this way - it can sometimes cause what I call a "Hope Deficit".
If Ryan thinks that some people who aren't trying to work are doing it because of some "cultural" problem, I have two things to say: First, maybe the culture he needs to look at first is his own and second, maybe those few who really aren't trying anymore aren't doing it because they're "Lazy", maybe it's because they've simply given up all Hope that things can, or will, ever truly change.
There's a reason that Jesse Jackson has for so many years said "Keep Hope Alive". It's not just a slogan, it's damn good advice, because without Hope you have nothing. Nothing to strive for. Nothing to live for. Nothing to work for. Once you've lost that, you've lost everything.
Why doesn't Ryan go to work on that "Cultural" problem instead of blaming and punishing the poor for having the temerity to get the short end of the stick?
Vyan
Thu Mar 13, 2014 at 11:20 AM PT: Ryan now claims he was "taken out of context" or that "he was inarticulate" and that his comments had "nothing to do with race" and also Derp....
“It is clear that I was inarticulate about the point I was trying to make,” Ryan said in the statement. “I was not implicating the culture of one community—but of society as a whole. We have allowed our society to isolate or quarantine the poor rather than integrate people into our communities. The predictable result has been multi-generational poverty and little opportunity. I also believe the government’s response has inadvertently created a poverty trap that builds barriers to work.”
“This isn’t a race based comment it’s a breakdown of families, it’s rural poverty in rural areas, and talking about where poverty exists — there are no jobs and we have a breakdown of the family. This has nothing to do with race,” he insisted.
Even outside of a racial context, this is still horse-shit. It can't simultaneously be a "cultural/generational problem" and that there a "no jobs" too, because if there are "no jobs" - which there aren't, even for people with multi-graduate degrees - the problem isn't cultural, it's a
rational and logical reaction and adaptation to that circumstance to
seek help elsewhere. Yet again, he is trying to claim that it's the horses fault that the cart needs to be pulled when it a) has no engine and b) has no gas for that engine and c) is fucking DESIGNED to be pulled by a horse.
If he wants to motorize the cart, ok, fine. Go for it. But he doesn't now does he? He doesn't want to improve education, he doesn't want to raise the minimum wage and increase the buying power of the poor, he doesn't want to give companies better incentives to move their business to places that NEED JOBS most desperately. He doesn't want to do jack, except take away the horses because they're "trapping the carts in dependency".
Fucking asshole.