dagblog - Comments for "One Southerner says the Confederacy was a ‘con-job’ on white people — and its legacy still is today"

The take home message is that

rmrd0000 — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 12:27:39 +0000

In reply to This is the original article

The take home message is that Southern whites fought a war to keep blacks enslaved and maintain a system that made any white superior to any black. Some Southern whites realized the trickery and had to be forced to fight for the Confederacy. Freedmen fought Northern politicians for the ability to fight against the Confederacy.

Today, we see Jeb Bush demonize blacks as wanting "free stuff" from the government. Bush is the Republican "moderate", but he fits in with the ongoing Southern war against black people. Alabama decided that would deal with a budget shortfall by closing drivers license bureaus in areas serving a most black and Democratic clientele. The important factor in the closures is that licenses are the major form of voter ID in the state of Alabama. There is concern the the move to close the bureaus serves as another method of suppressing the black vote.

Florida Jeb's dog-whistle comment and Alabama's bureau closures transmit the message that efforts still exist to keep black Southerners under the feet of whites. Black legislators in Alabama asked the DOJ to look into the closures.

Fatally flawed economic

PeraclesPlease — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 09:30:05 +0000

In reply to This is the original article

Fatally flawed economic reasoning. Without relatively free slave labor, growth of cotton would have simply died out - it didn't take white jobs as whites wouldn't have continued the practice at any conceivable wage. (nor would blacks if not forced to or later with absolutely no other job possibilities). When he says 1/4 of blacks worked in lumber, manufacturing, construction, etc., those were undoubtedly the worst of the worst jobs that would have been too dangerous or ugly to be attractive to whites - and with typically half the sparse southern population white and heavy exports, the local economy likely sustained the white workforce rather easily.

Exports of cotton to the north almost certainly had trickle down benefits for non-slave owning whites. Unfortunately for the south, most of those treacle benefits accrued to northern whites who owned the textile mills and sold local, back to the south and exported to Europe. Still, there were certainly southern benefits to the economy - as he said, slavery made southern states the richest in the country (I'm a bit doubtful of that claim though) and that money would have gotten spent on local services more than just accrued in banks. Antebellum homes and goods flowing through Charleston harbor - a bustling economy, though certainly not as wealthy as the industrial north and more spread out, therefore QED fewer schools and lower education.

Land ownership was less in the south principally because of economies of scale needed for tobacco and then cotton. Large plantations would of course dominate the count, and the profitability of cotton made it much more attractive than smaller plots for wheat.

Sadly, another article that comes along with a reasonable assessment of modern times, and then tries to shoehorn history into supporting that notion, for whatever reason. He could have quit with "I found the flag a historical insult to blacks so I quit waving it". Perhaps an analogy to OWS/the 1% could be effectively made, but this one didn't do it.

[almost fell into the Groucho Marx line leaving a party, "I have had a wonderful evening... but this wasn't it." - one for grammar teachers I suppose]

This is the original article

trkingmomoe — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 08:49:17 +0000

In reply to One Southerner says the Confederacy was a ‘con-job’ on white people — and its legacy still is today

This is the original article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. 8/14/2015

http://www.myajc.com/news/news/opinion/lasting-effect-of-confederate-con-job/nnJ45/?icmp=myajc_internallink_megamenu_link#79adcd8e.4109244.735826