Different Day, Same Shit.

Until recently, the heartbreaking tale of Malaga Island remained buried within the recesses of Maine's collective history, largely as something most wanted lost in the sands of time. And like the stories surrounding Rosewood, Florida and the Greenwood community of Tulsa, Oklahoma, it's a story where prejudice and hatred took center stage to annihilate a community:

A century ago this spring, Maine Gov. Frederick Plaisted oversaw the destruction of a year-around fishing hamlet on Malaga Island, a 42-acre island in the New Meadows River, just off the Phippsburg shore. The island's 40 residents -- white, black and mixed race -- were ordered to leave the island, and to take their homes with them, else they would be burned. A fifth of the population was incarcerated on questionable grounds at the Maine School for the Feebleminded in New Gloucester, where most spent the rest of their lives. The island schoolhouse was dismantled and relocated to Louds Island in Muscongus Bay.

Leaving no stone unturned, state officials dug up the 17 bodies in the island cemetery, distributed them into five caskets and buried them at the School of the Feebleminded -- now Pineland Farms -- where they remain today.

Several islanders spent the rest of their lives in this state-run mental institution. One couple, Robert and Laura Darling Tripp, floated from place to place in a makeshift houseboat, but, unwelcomed, wound up moored to another scrap of an island. Malnourished, Laura fell sick during a gale; when her husband returned with help, he found the couple's two children clinging to her lifeless body. Many others suffered from the stigma of being associated with the island.

"After the island was cleared, people did not really want to talk about this incident, especially the descendants, because to raise your hand and say you were from Malaga supposedly meant you were feebleminded or had black blood in you or both," said Rob Rosenthal, whose 2009 radio documentary "Malaga: A Story Better Left Untold" helped draw attention to what is one of the most disgraceful official acts in our state's history. "Nobody wanted to declare that."

The prelude to Malaga Island's wholesale clearing rings similar to the events preceding the destruction of Rosewood and Greenwood - whereas the latter involved the perceived threat of miscegenation through sexual assault, Malaga Island was a community where not only did black and white Americans co-mingle freely, but the threat of miscegenation was realized through the presence of mixed families on the island. By all counts, that was something that neither the eugenicists of the era nor those who endorsed their views could abide by:

But the shell middens offered no protection from Gov. Plaisted, who visited the obscure island with his entire executive council in July 1911. That December, the governor ordered the eviction of the community, and officials institutionalized eight residents, some for failing to identify a telephone (which none had likely seen) or for not knowing that William Howard Taft had succeeded Teddy Roosevelt as president. Those who remained were given payments for their homes and ordered to leave -- with or without them -- by the first of July, 1912.

Later that year, the cemetery was cleared and the island sold to a close friend and business partner of the chair of Plaisted's executive council, Dr. Gustavus C. Kilgore of Belfast, who played a central role in the creation of the governor's policies, including signing the commitment orders for those sent to New Gloucester.

Nobody has lived on the island since.

A Sun Journal article (Google cached version here) describes how the island came under ownership of the MCHT:

In 2001, the MCHT bought Malaga Island from a man who sold it at a bargain price because he wanted the island to be preserved. He wanted to keep developers away and he wanted local fishermen to continue using the island.

"But for this generous landowner," says Rich Knox, communications director at MCHT, "there would be houses out here. There would be no archeology, no education. If it wasn't for land conservation, you wouldn't have these kinds of places."

Now this is interesting. I'd like to know about this man and anyone else who came into ownership of the island after Kilgore.

---

It took nearly a century for the state of Maine to express regret and issue an apology. That's another common thread linking Greenwood, Rosewood and Malaga Island together. The passage of time does a lot of things. It dries freshly drawn blood and turns hot, vivid pain into a dull, distant ache. It makes people forget, especially if what's to be remember is buried under the ever-growing rubble of history itself.

But for better or worst, it makes talking about events such as those on Malaga Island "safe" to talk about, as the people involved in this injustice are themselves long in the ground and therefore only culpable in the eyes of history. The descendants of those who perpetrated this terrible act are also removed from any culpability by virtue of time. All that's left is the descendants of the victims and their willingness to make the world aware of what happened. And, of course, the various historians and archaeologists tasked with studying what life was like before the community was destroyed:

Malaga's people were certainly poor. The island's soil is inappropriate for farming, and fishing, laboring or doing laundry and carpentry for mainlanders didn't pay well. Their homes were modest, and one family lived in a converted ship's cabin. Some relied on charity from the town to get through the winter, and in 1908 private donors stepped in to help build an island school. School ledgers have survived.

"The papers written by the students show their penmanship was perfect and their spelling was better than mine," said Lynda Wyman, a trustee at the Phippsburg Historical Society, which also will have a small Malaga exhibit this summer. "It absolutely shows that kids were educated, not illiterate or so-called feebleminded or any of those things."

Archaeological digs by University of Southern Maine researchers Nathan Hamilton and Robert Sanford show the islanders caught lobsters, shellfish, cod and even swordfish. Thousands of buttons near the home of the island's laundress attest to how much washing she took in from Phippsburg's boardinghouses.

They built their homes on piles of discarded clam, mussel and scallop shells because they could be made level and provided excellent drainage. In doing so, they inadvertently gave a valuable gift to 21st-century archeologists.

"The shell middens protected almost all the artifacts and household stuff they mixed into it, and we actually know who lived on each spot," Hamilton said. "To actually have a patch of ground where we know the name and age of the individuals associated with it, their race, their jobs and when they lived there -- that's really interesting and unique."

These people made a life for themselves, free of the interference, strife and hardship that was endemic in many places where various forms of prejudice were tolerated and even given legal sanction. And because the community's existence upset the sensibilities of a powerful few while giving license to naked greed, Frederick Plaisted and his executive council found ample justification to right what they saw as a wrong and, in the process, committed a crime that cast a lingering pall over Phippsburg and the rest of the state for an entire century.

The events that happened afterward were especially appalling. To erase practically every single trace of the inhabitants' existence from the island by unearthing and removing its dead meant harboring a blinding, intense hatred and nearly unfathomable disrespect. To declare a fifth of the population as "feebleminded" and condemn them to a life of unjustified institutionalization required a mind attuned to the belief of the Negro and those who deigned to mix with them as "feebleminded" as any mentally ill individual. To re-intern those dead on the same grounds of that institution required pure, unadulterated malice.

It didn't just border on evil - it practically was.

The first step of reconciliation involves admitting you were wrong, but that's only the beginning:

Relatives of the Malaga evictees say having a high-profile exhibit at the state's official museum is cathartic, but there is another step Voter would still like to see. "Closure for me is to return the bodies to the island because my aunts died there believing their bones would become part of it," she said. "Removing the bodies was the difference between eviction and annihilation."

"She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000."

Ronald Reagan's infamous "Welfare Queen" mythos shaped and defined the way conservatives and many ordinary Americans saw - and continue to see - public assistance and "big government," as well as those who rely most on both. It's a sweet siren song that tantalizes the baser natures of the conservative constituency while serving as a cautionary tale to taxpayers when rendering unto Uncle Sam that which is Uncle Sam's.

Reagan, who began weaving this narrative into his speeches throughout his 1976 candidacy bid for president, never mentioned the identity of the woman behind the story, nor did he ever make mention of any ethnic background. In fact, the narrative sounded so patently ridiculous that many liberals assumed he made the whole thing up just to discredit welfare and curry favor to voters' racial resentments in the process.

For decades, few bothered to learn the true story of the "Welfare Queen." It was more than enough for most to use her illustrated escapades as outrage porn fodder for straitlaced conservatives and purported proof of indolence and sloth among a particular ethnic group.

Josh Levin's extensive Slate report finally pulls back the curtain on the "Welfare Queen" mythos. As it turns out, there's a lot more to the life of the woman starring as Reagan's "Welfare Queen" than meets the eye.

Of course, there were few things that stood out in my mind about this story and the woman at the center of it:

• Linda Taylor was a profoundly broken individual and a poster child for psychopathy, judging by her actions and the way she treated others and even her own children.
• Much of Taylor's life was based on ambiguity, lies and conjecture. Documents proved a relatively unreliable way of pinning down truths. Even her death certificate stood as proof that things were never as they appeared.
• Taylor's ethnic background was equally ambiguous and fluid. The commonplace caricature of the dark-skinned, heavy-set and weave-donning EBT/SNAP cheat gives way to a woman who was considered white by most and able to switch ethnicity based on her needs and whims:

It’s possible that Taylor’s biological father—identified by Hubert Mooney as a man named Marvin White—was black. Or perhaps a family secret was buried a few more generations back. No matter her bloodlines, the more persistent truth was that Martha Miller—who would later shed her childhood name for a nearly endless set of aliases—was a racial Rorschach test. She was white according to official records and in the view of certain family members who couldn’t imagine it any other way. She was black (or colored, or a Negro) when it suited her needs, or when someone saw a woman they didn’t think, or didn’t want to think, could possibly be Caucasian.

• Taylor wasn't just a con artist and a fraudster - she was also a suspected murderer. It's likely that she's responsible for killing Patricia Parks and possibly had a hand in the deaths of Sherman Ray and Mildred Markham. In the case of Patricia Parks, Taylor positioned herself as a friend and caretaker, feeding Parks a steady diet of barbiturates while draining the Trinidadian native's finances dry. She wasn't above setting other people against one another to get what she wanted. In the case of Ray, it's said by many that she fueled a mutual conflict between Ray and another man, Willtrue Loyd, eventually leading to the death of Ray by Loyd's hand. Taylor later married Loyd.
• Taylor was also a suspected kidnapper and child trafficker. During the 1960s, she was arrested twice for kidnapping, but was never charged since the children were returned safe and sound. She was also suspected in the 1964 kidnapping of Paul Joseph Fronczak, who has yet to be found. Some thought it was part of a scheme to better substantiate fraudulent welfare claims, but her son offered a far more troubling explanation:
  

  Given Taylor’s ability to fabricate paperwork, acquiring flesh-and-blood children seems like an unnecessary risk if all you're looking to do is pad a welfare application. Her son Johnnie believes his mother saw children as commodities, something to be acquired and sold. He remembers a little black girl—he doesn’t know her name—who stayed with them for a few months in the early 1960s, “and then she just disappeared one day.” Shortly before Lawrence Wakefield died, Johnnie says, a white baby named Tiger showed up out of nowhere, and then left the household just as mysteriously. I ask him if he knew where these kids came from or who they belonged to. “You knew they wasn’t hers,” he says.

• The ultimate motive in Taylor's acts was always money. In the cases of Parks, Markham, Ray and Loyd, Taylor stood to gain financially, whether through veterans benefits, life insurance payouts or, as with Parks, a steady drain her finances and assets until there was nothing left.
• The mainstream media either glossed over the above exploits or treated them as mere sideshows for what was considered the main event - her outsized penchant for welfare fraud. Even law enforcement officials and the courts were more concerned with her conviction as a welfare cheat than bringing her to justice as a murderer or kidnapper. After her trial and conviction for theft and perjury, the politicians and media lost interest in Taylor. However, the political narrative created from her exploits lived on.
• While many of the details offered by Reagan's Welfare Queen narrative seemed true, there was also plenty of room for fudging on his part. The oft-quoted $150,000 figure came about as estimates from various reporters. In really, Taylor was only charged with bilking $8,000 in welfare benefits, since it was all the hard evidence that officials could find. Nevertheless, bigger numbers make for larger guffaws of indignation among voters.

BETWEEN me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

W.E.B. DuBois pondered this question in the first chapter of "The Souls of Black Folk." In light of the George Zimmerman verdict and its affirmation of all that's been wrong with this nation for generations, it bears repeating among the millions of black Americans living here.

"How does it feel to be a problem?"

It's a long story. Long story short, America as a collective entity hasn't quite come to grips with what to do with or how to treat a people who, just a scant 150 years ago, were considered nothing more than farming implements and thus unworthy of being considered full human beings. Old habits die hard and learned behaviors prove hard to unlearn. After generations of learning how to loath and despise your fellow former farming implements, it proves hard to finally accept them as human beings.

George Zimmerman tapped into this national stream of consciousness to fulfill his fantasy of being a "neighborhood hero." It resulted in the death of a young man who, if it weren't for his misfortune of being born a seventh son in a land that merely tolerates and ultimately ridicules his presence, would have been home that fateful night with that pack of Skittles his brother asked for.

Trayvon Martin's death was treated as a "no harm no foul" moment by law enforcement until local and national outrage built up. His murderer's trial was treated as a vindication of his actions and an indictment of his victim's existence. By all accounts, mainstream America won't mourn the loss of someone it saw as "a problem."

Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way.

With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

Black Americans have spent countless generations as outcasts in their own house, shunned and loathed unless they could somehow be of service for mainstream America's benefit, whether it be in self-depreciating entertainment, quiet servitude or harsh and unrelenting manual labor. Perhaps Trayvon Martin didn't pay heed to it that night, but he was an outcast in the very neighborhood he thought he would have been safe in. The constant and unending perception of he and others like him as "problems" to be "solved" dovetailed with Zimmerman's desire to "solve" that "problem."

The absolute refusal to see black Americans as anything but collective problems and individual successes (but only within strict, narrowly defined confines) and eager willingness to glamorize the worst traits and rumors about a collective people is how the Sanford police department refused to see anything wrong with murdering a young black male with little to no cause. It's also led to a sympathetic legal climate where generous concern was shown for the perpetrator's "unfortunate" predicament, as encouraged by his defense team. The six jurors, five whites and one Hispanic for buffering concerns of racially motivated impropriety, were merely messengers delivering a statement that rings true for black Americans the nation over: "We see you as a problem."

Oddly enough, Native Americans understand how it feels to be a problem. After decades of the U.S. "solving" the problem with forced migrations, mass genocide and sequestration onto rapidly shrinking reservations, the Native American problem is slowly solving itself through mass alcoholism and suicide. Since black America proved too resilient for that treatment, it's taking legally sanctioned acts of malice, as delivered by police departments throughout the nation, to solve the problem. Mass media and it's constant portrayal of blacks as dangerous beings or laughable buffoons is another way of encouraging solutions to the problem. Even groups like the Ku Klux Klan once helped out by solving the problem in their own unique way.

The heart of the so-called "problem" lies with an unstoppable and long-coming shift in sociopolitical power between mainstream America and America's minority groups. The fear of Reconstruction heralding the arrival and cementing of black political power drove the ex-Confederate backlash and the institution of measures to stymie said power. The fear of the Civil Rights Act as a milestone for reclaiming black political power fueled the ex-Dixiecrat backlash and the conservative "silent majority" movement that resulted in the formation of the GOP as we know it today. The fear of Barack Obama as a harbinger of things to come in terms of black political power drove the Republican backlash, the formation of the "Tea Party" as its weaponized arm and the unleashing of rabid racism, sexism and discrimination among the once largely quiet unreconstructed. To look any closer would warrant its own discussion in the near future.

Throughout its history, America feared that particular problem getting out of hand. That night, George Zimmerman "feared" a particular problem "getting out of hand." Funny how retrospective history can be.

RT @profblmkelley: I have a nine-year old who followed the trial with me. This verdict made her feel afraid. @lauradeethomp
— Matthew Elliot (@matttbastard) July 14, 2013

As it should the parents of any black American child, especially in this day and age. Especially when full-grown adults have no compunction against seeing young black children as "thugs" or "thugs in training."

The irony of this entire tragedy is if Trayvon Martin was every bit of the cannabis-consuming, jewelry-stealing gangster thug he was purported to be, Zimmerman would have stayed in the car as he was instructed by 911 dispatchers. Rousting an otherwise defenseless young kid going about his business based on preconceptions is one thing. Doing the same to a genuine thug with no fear of jailtime will likely get you seriously hurt or murdered.

Instead of being murdered at the hands of a man too mentally and behaviorally inept to be a real police, Trayvon Martin would likely still be alive, albeit dealing with a civil lawsuit against the Sanford police department on brutality and civil rights grounds.

Had Trayvon Martin been "Todd Martin," a creature every bit as photogenic and "all-American" as could be, George Zimmerman's fate would had been as good as sealed. Had George Zimmerman been "Tray Zimmerman," his date with the needle would be chiseled in stone. Had it been a "black on black" affair, no one but Martin's parents and friends would  have cared. Black on black murders are considered an effective way of solving the black problem.

How does it feel to be a problem?

If you're asking, it feels downright shitty. But maybe it's mainstream America that's the problem.

It's not everyday you see a person of color willing to pal around with a confederacy of Confederates, let alone pose for a photo shoot that proved to be a bit too much for the NAACP to take. Apparently, the city of Lake City, Florida has a rich and storied history of capturing and reverberating the echos of the long-since-lost Confederate States of America under the guise of "heritage." If the National Socialist German Workers' Party had been better students of history, you'd probably see the swastika aloft in Germany as much quantity as one sees the Confederate battle flag in portions of the United States:

The controversy surrounding the Stars and Bars, or the Confederate Flag, is a controversy that has hounded Lake City for decades. The Stars and Bars, emblazoned as part of Lake City's logo, rides on every City vehicle and is part of Lake City stationery. The recent controversies surrounding the City Police Chief and the City Manager have culminated in the Local Branch of the NAACP asking for the Chief and City Manager's resignations. The straw that broke the camel's back, a photo of Lake City's African American Police Chief posing with the Confederate Mechanized Cavalry during the Olustee Festival. The Lake City Branch of the NAACP is being supported in its efforts by the State chapter of the NAACP.

A letter obtained by the Observer and dated July 2, 2012, purports to be from the NAACP and is addressed to the City Council. It asks for the resignations or termination of both Police Chief Gilmore and City Manager Wendell Johnson. The letter claims that the community has lost "all confidence in Chief Gilmore and the Police Department." The letter also claims that black and white Lake City police officers are treated differently.

The letter concludes: "We supported Chief Gilmore when she became the new police chief but after several incidents of poor decision making and judgments, we believe that continuing to turn our heads, is not going to solve the problem, and City Manager Johnson has done nothing to address any of these problems. We wish Chief Gilmore and City Manager Johnson much success in their endeavors but we believe that Chief Gilmore has not managed the Lake City Police Department well during her tenure here, and neither has City Manager Johnson."

It's interesting to me how the Confederate mystique is so embedded in this community that the police chief has to take a glamour shot with people who like to "ride with Forrest."

For those who don't know who Nathan Bedford Forrest is, he was, to put it lightly, an interesting figure in the annals of history. Born in poverty, he eventually grew up to become a wealthy businessman and slave trader. When the Civil War started, he joined the Confederate Army, where he was swiftly kicked upstairs* to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and with time, Lieutenant General. After the war, he became the first "Grand Wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that would have defined the words "domestic terrorists" if their targets weren't so...colored. People with a starry-eyed affection towards the defeated Confederacy won't waste any time hailing him as a great man. Everyone else will most likely wonder why the Union neglected to hang him and other Confederate commanders for treason.

By not putting Forrest, Jefferson Davis and other important figures who created and contributed to the Confederacy to the gallows and by not "deconfederatizing" the southeast when it had the chance, the U.S. not only allowed a sick and otherwise deficient mindset to develop for generations, it also cultivated a spirit of rebellion that caused the "solid south" to remain at political and ideological odds with the rest of the nation till this very day. It's one that caused the state of Georgia to incorporate the Confederate battle flag within its own state flag in protest of Brown v. Board of Education.

That spirit recently manifested itself as the Tea Party/GOP goal of open rebellion against the "liberal" federal government, with the president featured as the centerpiece at which Teabaggers and other conservatives hurl hateful invective and death threats. It's a spirit that encourages discriminatory laws and behavior against minorities for the good of the nation and one that suggests national safety nets like Medicare and Social Security to be "socialist" devices hardworking people would do without. People kept saying "The South Shall Rise Again," but no one figured it would be the spirit of the South that would be risen.

It's sad that the NAACP and Southern Christian Leadership Conference have to fight battles that should have been long won. Then again, I suppose the price of freedom and progress is constant vigilance.

*His superior officers didn't think wealthy planters should have to suffer the indignity of being low-ranked cannon fodder.

Whenever I think about the various conservative movements, such as the Tea Party and others throughout the years, I can't help but notice how the interests of the so-called "small town America" conservatives seem to dovetail neatly with those of corporate America. Lower taxes, looser (or nonexistent) regulation, greater military involvement, less government welfare and the ability to dictate social morality and enforce religious doctrine on a national scale (except when it inconveniences the Powers That Be™). Okay, so the last two aren't exactly things you'd see corporate America cosigning to, but stranger things have happened.

I hate it when small business stand behind their larger corporate brethren, thinking those lowered taxes are going to benefit them instead of allowing Wal-Mart and others to either run them out of business or buy them out. Ditto for small town Americans who think the entire country can be run on the same shoestring budget faced by their own small municipalities. These same taxpayers shit themselves when their "hard-earned taxpayer dollars" go to help the homeless, but have absolutely nothing to say when those same dollars are poured into law enforcement or military expenditures. When it comes to government functions that specialize in beating, maiming or killing undesirables as a matter of policy, you'll either hear cheers or crickets. The aforementioned social morality issues serve as distractions from the issue of consolidated and concentrated wealth.

It doesn't surprise me the least to see Tea Swillers stand up for the same things that corporate America want. Lower sales and corporate taxes equal higher profits and larger bonuses. Larger budgets for law enforcement insure a standing force better equipped to enforce the laws that largely apply to the "little people" and not the "job creators." The push to get rid of welfare and other "entitlements" gives the self-righteous another social windmill to tilt it, while freeing up federal and state funds for kickbacks and other pet projects. The death of Social Security in exchange for a "stock market-based free market solution" for pensions and retirement provides financial markets with more taxpayer capital to gamble away on Wall Street. The whole self-reliance bit is meant to invoke the country's past as a nation full of rugged individualism, but in reality, it subconsciously prepares Americans for a period of time where the only service available to ordinary Americans is the ghost of Dick Cheney telling you to "go fuck yourself."

Yesterday, Robert Reich posted a straightforward piece outlining the true motives of those behind the general conservative movement, including where conservatives and corporate America want the nation to regress to.

They’d like to return to the 1920s — before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act.

In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.

In truth, if they had their way we’d be back in the late nineteenth century — before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the pure food and drug act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons — railroad, financial, and oil titans — ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few.

Very few people have a working memory of what life was like before Social Security, worker's rights, minimum wage and other protections were put into place. Ordinary Americans who genuinely believe the nation could do without these things have no idea what it would be like for them if the nation did just that.

Rather than conserve the economy, these regressives want to resurrect the classical economics of the 1920s — the view that economic downturns are best addressed by doing nothing until the “rot” is purged out of the system (as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, so decorously put it).

The only people who'd benefit from "doing nothing" about economic downturns are those who stand to benefit greatly from said economic downturns. The Carnegies, Mellons and Morgans of the world benefited from low tax rates and economic policies that allowed them to not just hold the vast majority of the nation's wealth, but also make even greater fortunes through interest payments and other forms of rent seeking, while extracting the maximum amount of labor from average Americans for the least amount of money possible. The end result is an impoverished nation that works for pennies while the moneyed men and women profit from their deeply discounted sweat equity. Their successors currently have over 42% of the nation's financial wealth and 34.6% of the nation's net worth.

Latent filial piety among small town Americans and their employers and the idea that ordinary Americans will someday be the next Andrew Carnegie through sweat equity are the only explanations I can come up with as to why conservatives like to line themselves up with the Carnegies and the like. The former is something I've seen in the Deep South -- essentially, if you do right by the company, then the company will do right by you. This could explain part of why unions aren't particularly welcome in these parts -- if you piss off the company, the company will take a good, long piss on you. This works, in the reference of small-to-medium-size companies where the bosses know the workforce, but at huge, multinational corporations, the idea of filial piety towards an employer becomes something of a joke. These huge companies couldn't give a good fig about you or yours.

The latter implies that with enough hard work, you too could be up there with the big boys. Or at least have a very comfortable lifestyle. Once upon a time, this was possible to pull off, with decent wages and low barriers to entry when it came to starting your own businesses or just methodically saving your money (with interest, even). Today, most of those avenues are closed, and unless you hit a huge lottery jackpot, you're not going to have much chance of being up there with the big boys.* Yet some conservatives hold on to this hope. Others fancy themselves to already being in the comfortable 1%, when they're really just a couple of bad days and bad decisions away from falling from grace.

Then there are those who genuinely believe that if they keep rewarding the wealthy by giving them everything they want, they themselves will be rewarded with "a seat at the table," or at least a few crumbs thrown their way. Social Darwinist doctrine offers this while tapping into America's "inner asshole":

Listen carefully to today’s Republican right and you hear the same Social Darwinism Americans were fed more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: Survival of the fittest. Don’t help the poor or unemployed or anyone who’s fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.

Have you ever felt the urge to be an asshole to someone just because? Or better still, be an asshole to someone perceived as beneath your own social standing in order to reaffirm and validate said standing? This is what Social Darwinism essentially offers. It exploits the average person's base desire to not want to appear weak or accommodate what could be perceived as weakness. The wealthy represent the strong, talented and successful, while the poor are derided as being weak, stupid and generally worthless. These beliefs benefit the wealthy, as there are a few challenges to their wealth and nothing but a public outpouring of support by the masses who are enamored and even somewhat jealous of their wealth and power. It encourages Americans to become sycophants who curry favor with and avoid doing any sort of harm to the most powerful and successful among them, while showing great disdain to those seen as weak and useless.

Apparently, that's the America conservatives want, whether they say so outright or not. That America runs counter to the general principles of the America envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

Corporate America has little to no interest in helping conservatives usher the "small government America" they've envisioned unless it is to the financial benefit. Conservatives will be disappointed to see the "job creators" strip everything of profit away from them after they've gleefully helped corporate America do the same to liberals and others outside of the conservative ideology.

The Carnegie Corporation and other similar foundations came about only because those people felt they were duty-bound to give something back to the American people. Can anyone say the same for the latest batch of CEOs and CFOs?

*Even the lottery winners are hit hard with federal and state taxes, not to mention the winners' own spending habits. Unless you're careful in how you manage and invest your money, chances are your dreams of being with the 0.5% won't come true any time soon.

I won't go into the man's history, the actions that helped positively shape and mold the nation or the legacy he's left behind. Anyone can research that and come up with an abundance of info. I'll just remind everyone that the MLK Memorial in Washington, D.C. was finally dedicated this past Saturday.

And I'll leave everyone with this, which happens to be fitting with Occupy Wall Street and other movements happening today: