[Peace-discuss] ...take money from rich people and give it to poor people...

[Anthony Pomonis]

Murray's, "Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010" is nothing
more than a childish rant calling for White America to save the nation
through discursive practice.
In it he proselytizes that what lower classes really need is proper
instruction, not money.
According to Murray, if elites were to simply talk the lower classes into
marrying, going to church, and attending art openings then they would be
able to pass on the "American Dream".

Of course, there are a few problems with this.  1--it is code for
assimilation  2--it is predicated on a moral, educated, principled base of
elites that are the result of a meritocracy  3--it presumes knowledge of
what is, and how to gain, happiness.

Great article, thanks for sharing.

On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 10:06 AM, C. G. Estabrook <cge at shout.net> wrote:

> [Ron Szoke discussed this article on this week's *News from Neptune* (C-U
> cable channel 6, repeated thru the week); the following is from Doug
> Henwood of the excellent Left Business Observer.  --CGE]
> *
> *
> *How to stop worrying about class*
>
> Today’s [Feb. 10] New York Times contains a fine example of how ideology
> works at the high end: report information that might trouble the
> established order, but conclude on a tranquilizing note that allows the
> comfortable reader to turn the page (or click “close tab”) without changing
> his or her worldview. Both functions are important. Outlets like
> the Times do report tons of important stuff that one would be hard-pressed
> to learn otherwise. But, as Alexander Cockburn put it long ago, a primary
> function of the bourgeois press is reassurance.
>
> The piece by Sabrina Tavernise, “Education Gap Grows Between Rich and
> Poor, Studies Show,” shows that “while the achievement gap between white
> and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades,
> the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the
> same period.” (The paper from which much of the data is drawn, by Stanford
> sociologist Sean Reardon, can be gotten here.) While it’s long been well
> known that parental income and education have a stronger influence on
> educational outcomes than schools themselves, the gap between kids from
> affluent and poor families is widening.
>
> All that information, and then some, is nicely presented in the first half
> of the article. But the second half consists mostly of quotes from three
> right-wing sources: University of Chicago labor economist James
> Heckman; Bell Curve ghoul Charles Murray (newly famous for his cultural
> take on the crisis of the white working class); and Douglas Besharov, now
> of the Atlantic Institute but formerly of the American Enterprise
> Institute, where he ran the Social and Individual Responsibility Project.
> Heckman says the last thing we should do is give poor people more money.
> Murray says it has “nothing to do with money and everything to do with
> culture.” And Besharov chimes in with the inevitable “no easy answers,”
> because “no one has the slightest idea what will work.”
>
> Nonsense. The answers are conceptually easy, though politically anything
> but. You take money from rich people and give it to poor people, and spend
> at least as much, maybe more, educating the children of the poor as you do
> on the children of the rich. But that might make the Times’ audience
> uncomfortable. Better to flatter them on their excellent parenting.
> *http://lbo-news.com/2012/02/10/how-to-stop-worrying-about-class/*
>
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20120211/7e76a155/attachment-0001.html>