Tucker
Carlson: ‘America’s Core Problems Are Not Racial — America’s Core Problems Are
Economic’
Carlson argues that the
country’s problems are not racial but economic, explaining that “a small group
of people have a disproportionate amount of money.”
He suggested that for those “on
the right end of that equation,” it may behoove them to “fund racial conflict,”
so those on the wrong end of the equation would not think about it from that
viewpoint.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: It’s hard to think
clearly when things are on fire. That’s a basic rule of life, that may be why
looking back on it, we’ve seen so much arson recently.
If you wanted to keep the
public from thinking clearly about what you plan to do to their country, you
might riot and no one would notice that you’re lying. They definitely have been
lying.
Every story we’ve been told for
the past three months has been at its core, a lie, all of them from the first
day.
George Floyd was executed by
racist cops on the street. That’s what they told us. That’s what everyone
believed. Yet when the autopsy became public, it showed that George Floyd had
lethal levels of fentanyl in his system among other drugs. Floyd said he
couldn’t breathe long before police landed on him as he was in fact sitting
untouched in the back of a patrol car.
But the mob wasn’t interested
in hearing those details. They torched Minneapolis.
In Kenosha, Democrats told us
that bloodthirsty cops just walked up and shot Jacob Blake as he was trying to
break up a fight between two women. It was horrifying. But that’s not what
happened.
Police arrived there after a
woman called 911 to say Blake was at her home in violation of a restraining
order. That woman had previously accused Blake of sexual assault. Blake fought
with the responding officers, first cops tried non-lethal force to subdue him.
They Tased Blake, that didn’t work.
When they saw him reach for a
knife, they shot him. What else were they supposed to do exactly?
But Kamala Harris wasn’t
interested in knowing what actually happened. She declared that she was proud
of Jacob Blake and then her voters burned Kenosha.
Tonight, the mob is in
Louisville to protest the death of Breonna Taylor. News organizations told us
that Taylor was in bed when police shot her. But she wasn’t, she was in her
hallway. They told us that Taylor had nothing to do with her drug-dealing
ex-boyfriend whom police were investigating. That’s why they were there.
In fact, intercepted jailhouse
communication suggests that Taylor was warehousing that man’s drug money. They
told us that police shot first. That’s not true. Taylor’s boyfriend shot a cop
first.
Then they told us over and over
and over again that police surprised Taylor in the middle of the night. They
barged into her apartment in a so-called no-knock raid. Then yesterday the
Attorney General of Kentucky exposed that as yet another lie.
The police did in fact knock on
Breonna Taylor’s door. They identified themselves as police. There’s a witness
to it. But it didn’t matter. They kept lying to us.
Kamala Harris issued a
statement attacking no-knock raids. Amazingly, so did Senator Tim Scott of
South Carolina, a Republican. Tim Scott should know better.
A grand jury did know better.
The jurors considered all of the available evidence in the Breonna Taylor case.
And yesterday, they declined to charge the officers with murder. There wasn’t
any evidence that a murder took place.
That is how our system is
supposed to work. We don’t indict the innocent. That’s wrong. It’s not justice.
But the mob doesn’t care about justice no matter what they scream. They want blood.
So with the encouragement of so
many of our leaders, they unleashed violence on the City of Louisville. They
set fires. They destroyed businesses, then to the surprise of no one, they
opened fire on the police. Here are scenes of it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Shots
fired. Shots fired.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Good?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I’m good.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You all
good?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I’m good.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Right
there. Right there. Officer down, right there.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Officer
down?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We’ve got
an officer down.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Two police officers
were shot last night in Louisville. They’re not the only police officers who
have been shot recently for political reasons. They’re just the latest. That’s
not front-page news. No, it’s not front-page news.
Tonight, thank God, both of
those officers are still alive. A man called Lorenzo Johnson is under arrest
for shooting them. It seems clear this was not a street crime. It seems clear
these were attempted political assassinations.
Lorenzo Johnson’s social media
posts don’t look very different from Kamala Harris’s Twitter feed, pro-BLM,
outraged by the racist killing of Breonna Taylor.
Whipped into a frenzy by media-generated
lies, it is not surprising that people like Johnson will try to murder the
police. In fact, they told us last night before they did that they plan to do
that.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All y’all
get ready to [bleep] die.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “Get ready to die.”
Now that’s not the kind of thing liberal suburban moms are thinking when they
plant BLM signs on their lawns. But that’s the reality of it. BLM leaders have
told us many times they would like to murder cops, it’s not something they
whisper, and it’s something they shout on camera.
When two cops were shot last
night in Louisville, BLM’s Chapter there did not express a word of sympathy for
the officers in the hospital with bullets in them. Instead, BLM Louisville
called for the total abolition of law enforcement. Apparently, the plan is to
take out one cop at a time. Here’s BLM last night in Louisville.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Burn it
down. Burn it down. Burn it down.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Turn that
camera off. Turn it off.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: These are violent
thugs obviously, many of them, by the way, have college degrees from expensive
universities. But in the end, they’re all just foot soldiers. There are legions
behind them. People you don’t see on camera. It takes legions. It takes money
and it takes organization to stage effective riots for three and a half months.
So it’s worth asking, who is
funding all of this? That is a central question too few have tried to answer
it. We still don’t know the full answer, but we’re getting a clear picture
tonight.
Last night, we showed you
footage of a U-Haul truck in Louisville full of rioting supplies and mobile
armor. Watch the mob descend on that U-Haul within minutes of the grand jury’s
verdict.
[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]
CARLSON: When we showed you
that footage last night, we suggested we had leads as to who might have rented
that U-Haul. Tonight we know who did.
We’ve determined that a woman
called Holly Zoller paid for that U-Haul truck. Zoller works as a so-called
bail disruptor. That’s her description from an organization called The Bail
Project. The Bail Project helps get suspected criminals and rioters back out
onto the street as quickly as they can.
So who funds The Bail Project?
It takes money to get people out of jail. Take a look at that organization’s
Board of Directors and it tells you the story.
There’s a first-term Democratic
congresswoman on there, but other than that, you will not find a more pampered
group of revolutionaries. One Board member is a woman called Lisa Gersh. She
previously served as the President of Strategic Initiatives at NBC and a
Managing Director at NBC Universal. She also was the CEO of Martha Stewart
Living Omnimedia. Gersh even founded her own law firm at one point, not a
starving artist.
Another Board member is a man
called Michael Novogratz. He is the CEO of Galaxy Investment Partners and a
former principal at Fortress Investment Group LLC, and the Fortress Macro Fund.
He’s a finance guy. He also serves on the Board of the Princeton Varsity Club.
So what’s going on here? Why
are the most privileged people in our society, rich executives like Gersh and
Novogratz supporting an organization that bails people out of jail who are
destroying our cities and attacking our police? People like that, Board members
like this live far from the scenes of riot. So why are they paying for riots?
Maybe they’re doing it to cover their own tracks. That’s a thought.
America’s core problems are not
racial. America’s core problems are economic. A small group of people have a
disproportionate amount of money. Everyone else is getting poor. For the
majority of the population, the American Dream is dying.
But if you were on the right
end of that equation, you wouldn’t want the public to think too much about
this. So maybe you’d fund racial conflict, so they wouldn’t think about it.
It’s pretty clever. It’s also completely evil.
Last night, we told you about
the Hearst Corporation. That’s a media company that generates more than $11
billion a year. One of Hearst properties — maybe its most famous property — is
Cosmopolitan magazine. Cosmopolitan magazine spent most of yesterday raising
money to bail out rioters in Louisville.
At one point yesterday, Cosmo
tweeted an image of Holly Zoller, the woman who rented the U-Haul and others
along with this message. “Support protesters who are brave enough to go out and
take a stand-in coming days.” Take a stand? Cosmo wants you to take a stand and
send money to people who are taking a stand.
So what does taking a stand
look like? Well, they took a stand last time in Portland, Oregon. Cosmo readers
did. They tried to kill police officers with Molotov cocktails. Keep in mind,
this took place thousands of miles from Louisville and Breonna Taylor. Why?
[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]
CARLSON: Just Cosmo readers
taking the stand. You’ll notice that no one in the crowd tries to stop the
firebombing. Instead, they hoist middle fingers at the police. Meanwhile, in
Seattle last night, BLM forgot the gasoline, so they tried to kill a cop with a
baseball bat. Watch this.
[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]
CARLSON: Just to be clear,
because this is something else they’re lying about pretty relentlessly, the
people you just saw are not Trump voters. And that’s not a partisan point
designed to help the President’s re-election campaign. It is true.
Every one of these people is a
Democrat or Democrat adjacent. Why is that relevant? Many reasons. But here’s
one, a word from Kamala Harris might slow these people down. But Harris isn’t
interested in slowing them down. There’s an election to win so the mob rages
on.
By the way, you should know
that in the name of racial justice, a BLM supporter shot a black cop in
Louisville last night against racial justice. In Los Angeles, rioters screamed
racial epithets at another black cop. Watch this.
[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]
CARLSON: Well, if nothing else
that shows that real life is a little bit more complicated than the
straightforward black and white race war the media are always promoting. MSNBC
won’t acknowledge that though.
In fact, yesterday, they turned
over its airwaves to talking heads who described the African-American Attorney
General of Kentucky, Daniel Cameron as a race traitor for disagreeing with
them. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: Don’t
look at the fact that this guy is black. That does not mean anything. He is a
Republican through and through. He spoke at the RNC He told you who he was
believing.
CHERYL DORSEY, RETIRED LAPD
SERGEANT: He is skin folk, but he is not kinfolk. And so just like he thinks
they can’t speak for Kentucky because he is up there with a black face, he does
not speak for all of us.
ALICIA GARZA, AMERICAN CIVIL
RIGHTS ACTIVIST: I think what I saw this morning was a Bull Connor speech in
2020, and you’re right. Unfortunately, it was being given by a black
prosecutor.
JASON JOHNSON, MSNBC
CONTRIBUTOR: I’m so disgusted by this. I’m so disgusted by Daniel Cameron’s
performance. I am so sick and tired of black people going on the air and
performing for violence and white supremacy and state-sponsored violence
against black people and claiming their mama’s and claiming they are because
they are a black man, they care about it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Here’s the thought.
You shouldn’t put crap like that on TV. It’s too dishonest. It’s too divisive.
It hurts the country too much. It’s flat-out racist, and it’s wrong.
And the people who run NBC News
should be ashamed of that. They should stop putting that stuff on television.
It legitimately hurts the country.
But that’s the position of the
Democratic Party. Remember when Joe Biden announced that no true black person
could vote Republican? Well, Biden’s allies in the media — and that’s everyone
— went a step further. At MSNBC, they explained that black people are, quote,
“performing for white supremacy,” if they don’t tow the D.N.C.’s line.
At CNN, the anchors want you to
know it’s quote “politically charged” to criticize, quote, “mob violence.” Can
you imagine saying something like that?
Our leaders in Congress and on
television and at Cosmo have decided that law enforcement of any kind is an act
of bigotry? Do they really believe that? Well, of course, they don’t really
believe that. That’s why so many of them are surrounded by armed bodyguards.
But it doesn’t matter what they
really believe. In the short term, in the run-up to this selection, they are
getting their way, and the rest of us will have to live with the consequences
of that.
As pandemic death
toll approaches 200,000, American oligarchs celebrate their wealth
12
September 2020
The United States is passing through a historic social,
economic and political crisis. The death toll from the coronavirus pandemic is
nearing 200,000 and could double by the end of the year. Democratic forms of
rule are breaking down, with the Trump administration intensifying its open
incitement of fascistic violence. Tens of millions are unemployed and face
impoverishment and homelessness. Wildfires are burning out of control on the US
West Coast.
It is impossible to understand any of these processes
outside of the massive levels of social inequality. The United States is an
oligarchy, with a concentration of wealth that is historically unprecedented.
The release of the Forbes 400 billionaire report
gives a sense of this reality. The richest 400
individuals (0.00012 percent of the population)
now possess more than $3 trillion.
The report declares: “Pandemic be damned: America’s 400
richest are worth a record $3.2 trillion, up $240 billion from a year ago,
aided by a stock market that has defied the virus.” The surge in the stock
market, underwritten by the multi-trillion-dollar CARES Act passed in March,
has filled the already overflowing coffers of the super-rich, who now hold
claim to the equivalent of 15 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
Even the numbers provided by Forbes,
based
on figures from July 24, are a major
underestimation of the current reality. Since
that time, the wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff
Bezos, the world’s richest person, has shot up
to more than $200 billion, while the wealth of
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has grown to over $100
billion. Bezos’s holdings are three million
times greater than the annual income of the
typical American household.
The staggering level of inequality reflected in the Forbes
list is the central feature of American society, which is defined by the
transfer of obscene and ever larger amounts of wealth from the working class
into the hands of a tiny financial oligarchy through tax cuts, bailouts, the
slashing of wages and the clawing back of pensions and other benefits won by
workers in the struggles of the 20th century.
The latest rise in the billionaires’ wealth is not based on
any exertion of labor but on the inflation of the stock market, with trillions
of dollars in debt from the Federal Reserve and Congress which will be paid off
the backs of the working class. Everything has been subordinated to ensuring
that the Dow Jones and S&P 500 rise to new heights.
It would take the median American, who earns $33,000 per
year, 97 million years to earn as much as is controlled by the wealthiest
Americans. Consider what $3.2 trillion could pay for in a year:
·
In the 2016-17 school year, $739 billion was spent on public
elementary and secondary schools, providing education for 50.8 million students
and employing 3.2 million teachers and another 3.2 million school employees.
·
The Congressional Budget Office projects that the federal
government will spend $1.3 trillion on health care programs this year.
·
Diabetes cost the US economy $327 billion in 2017, with insulin
accounting for $40 billion of this total. The average cost of insulin, critical
for the survival of diabetes patients, is up to $6,000 per year and continues
to rise.
·
According to the US Department of Agriculture, $800 billion was
spent by Americans on food and beverages for consumption at home in 2019. The federal
government provided $60 billion of this in food stamps for the poorest and most
vulnerable to gain access to essential nutrition.
·
The 2018 fire season cost $24 billion, driven by record
devastation including the destruction of the city of Paradise, California. All
told, extreme weather and climate disasters that year cost $91 billion.
Added up, the wealth of just 400 people could pay for an
entire year of public education, health care, nutrition and disaster relief for
millions of Americans. The UN recently reported that 132 million more people
will go hungry worldwide this year due to the pandemic, driving the number of
undernourished close to 1 billion.
Despite the burning need to save millions from
malnourishment and starvation, the World Food Program faces a shortage of $5
billion in its effort to deliver food to those in need. The wealth of the 400
richest people in the US is more than 600 times this amount.
Every element of politics is subordinated to the interests
of this social layer. It is for this reason that the danger of the pandemic was
initially covered up, the bailout of Wall Street was organized and the
back-to-work and back-to-school campaigns were implemented.
The systematic looting of society left the country
vulnerable to such an outbreak. The subordination of health care to the
predatory interests of for-profit health care companies and insurance giants
turned nursing homes for the elderly into death chambers and left nurses and
doctors without the necessary personal protective equipment and other medical
equipment—such as ventilators—needed to treat patients.
The drive of the Trump administration to fascism and the
cultivation of extreme right cannot be understood except in relation to the
class interests of the oligarchy, representing that faction of the ruling class
which seeks to smash outright any sign of opposition from the working class. On
the other side of the coin, the Democrats represent that faction that has
sought to use the politics of race and identity to smother the class struggle
while fighting for access to positions and greater wealth.
As only the latest example, the racially
fixated New York Times published its “Faces of Power” list
this week, noting that too many people in “influential positions” are white.
What difference would it make if everyone one of them was black, Hispanic,
Asian or Native American? In fact, the report found that a majority of police
chiefs in the largest cities are black or Hispanic. Cold comfort for the young
black men who are disproportionately killed by police.
The obsession by upper-middle class academics and
journalists on race and gender is a distraction from the grotesque levels of
wealth that define social relations in American society. This form of politics
has nothing to do with the interests of the working class. Instead, it seeks to
harness anger over racism and social inequality to advance the interests of a
small layer of minorities in the next 9 percent who want a larger piece of the
pie hoarded by the top 1 percent.
At every point, science, reason and human solidarity
collide with the economic interests of the current rulers of society—the
oligarchs, the parasitic masters of finance capital. It is impossible to defend
democratic rights or save lives without confronting this issue.
Mass problems such as the COVID-19 pandemic, increasingly
deadly fires fueled by climate change, and global hunger require mass
solutions. The problems of mankind cannot be resolved without breaking the
stranglehold of the capitalist oligarchy in every country. The wealth must be
expropriated and directed toward meeting social needs. The large corporations
and banks transformed by the working class into democratically controlled
institutions oriented to meeting human need and not private profit.
The social inequality that characterizes capitalist
society—and all the policies that flow from it—is fueling an immense growth of
social anger and working-class struggle. These struggles must be organized and
united on the basis of a conscious, revolutionary and socialist program.
THE ENTIRE REASON FOR OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY, NON-ENFORCEMENT,
AND NO E-VERIFY IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. IT WORKS!
ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS FOR AMNESTY AND WIDER OPEN
BORDERS!
Desperate to ensure profits,
capital has gutted the living
standards of the working class
while engrossing the coffers of
those at the top through
financial parasitism.
Study finds 90 percent of Americans
would
make 67 percent more without last four
decades of increasing income inequality
25 September 2020
A new study from the RAND
Corporation, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018,” written by Carter Price and
Kathryn Edwards, provides new documentation of the profound restructuring of
class relations in America over the last 40 years.
The study, which looks at changes in pre-tax family income from 1947 to
2018, divided into quintiles of the American population, concludes that the
bottom 90 percent of the population would, on average, make 67 percent more in
income—every year (!)—had shifts in income inequality not occurred the last
four decades.
In other words, any family
that made less than $184,292 (the 90th percentile income bracket) in 2018 would
be, on average, making 67 percent more. This amounts to a total sum of $2.5
trillion of collective lost income for the bottom 90 percent, just in 2018.
Furthermore, the study
concludes, that had more equitable growth continued after 1975 (a date they use
as a shifting point), the bottom 90 percent of American households would have
earned a total of $47 trillion more in income.
Given that there were about
115 million households in the bottom 90 percent of the US in 2018 population
(out of a total of 127.59 million in 2018), that would mean that each of these
households would, on average, be $408,696 richer today with this lost income.
To reach these conclusions,
the authors break down historical real, pre-tax, income into different
quintiles of the population (bottom fifth, second fifth, third fifth, fourth
fifth, highest fifth). Looking at the period between 1947 and 2018, they divide
the years based on business cycles (booms and busts of the economy).
Their data quantitatively
expresses the restructuring of class relations that began at the end of the
post-WWII boom. Facing intensified economic crisis, automation, and global
competition, the US ruling class undertook an aggressive campaign of
deindustrialization, slashing wages and clawing back benefits won in the
previous period by explosive struggles of the working class, while
simultaneously funneling money to financial markets, expanding the wealth and
income of both the upper and upper-middle class.
As the data shows, while the
bottom 40 percent of American households made significant percentile increases
to their income, relative to the top 5 percent, for the 20 years between 1947
and 1968, in the 40 years from 1980 to the present, this trend was reversed. In
1980-2000, the bottom 40 percent of the population experienced a net income
gain significantly below that of the top 5 percent. It must be noted that because
these are percentile increases, the absolute differences between the gains of
the rich versus the poor is far larger.
Furthermore, not included in
this data is wealth. In the last 40 years, and especially the last 10 to 20
years, the stock market has become the principal means through which the top 10
percent of the population has piled up historic levels of wealth.
Significantly,
the data from 2001 to 2018 shows a sharp slowdown in income gains for all
sections of American society as per capita GDP growth slowed and US capitalism
experienced a historic decline. However, while the income of the top 5
percent of the population may have only grown by about 2 percent between 2008
and 2018, the wealth of
the top percentiles of the population exploded. For example, according to data
from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, the wealth of the top 1 percent of the
population increased from almost $20 trillion in the first quarter of 2008,
just before the worst of the financial crisis, to almost $33 trillion at the beginning
of 2018.
By using the data, the
authors come up with a set of counterfactual incomes based on what would be the
different income brackets in 2018 without a shift in income distribution. The
top 1 percent, instead of making on average $1,384,000 would make $630,000. The
25th percentile, instead of making $33,000 would make $61,000.
The authors of the study
also make several other important observations by breaking down their data on
the basis of location, education, and race.
For example, they note,
“Racial income disparities below the median have declined over the last four
decades. This has primarily occurred because White men in the bottom half of
the income distribution are earning the same or less than in 1975.” In other
words, for the bottom half of the population, the bulk of the working class,
there has been greater parity between sexes and races in terms of pay as white
men’s pay stagnated and pay for other sections of the working class slightly
increased.
While black men in the
bottom 25th percentile of the population only increased their income from
$27,000 in 1975 to $30,000 in 2018, black men in the 95th percentile, the
upper-middle class, increased their pay from $65,000 in 1975 to
$128,000—effectively doubling it.
Regarding education, they
note: “Because incomes for those without a college degree have not increased
more than inflation over the last forty years, education is frequently touted as
a solution to rising income inequality. However, even for college graduates,
incomes failed to grow at the rate of the overall growth of the economy. Thus,
the economic value of a college degree may largely be in avoiding the negative
outcomes felt by those who do not have one. …”
This saliently expresses
what a college degree has become for most Americans: a necessity to avoid
extreme poverty but in no way a guarantee of a well-paying, stable job.
The authors also note that
“Incomes in rural areas have neither kept pace with the growth in broader
economy nor with urban and suburban areas,” due to “a decline in the economic
health of rural areas.”
The stark class divide
expressed in the report is not the outcome of a single politician or for that
matter a specific party. Rather, it is the policy, collectively, of the entire
ruling class, as American, and indeed global, capitalism entered a period of
profound and protracted crisis. Desperate to ensure profits, capital
has gutted the living standards of the working class while engrossing the
coffers of those at the top through financial parasitism.
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