http://atlantablackstar.com/2018/04/12/harry-belafonte-white-people-change-course-conduct-thing-left-black-people-burn/

Harry Belafonte: Until White People ‘Change Their Course of Conduct’ the ‘Only Thing Left for Black People to Do Is Burn It Down’

Meh. Belafonte is a loon, and even black people recognize that.

iSteve whitey poll.

1. How many of you inherited anything from your ancestors who were old enough to buy a house in the pre-1950 redlining era? Not a penny in my case.

2. How many of you have parents or grandparents who lost significant amount of money because black crime and disorder took over the central city where they lived?

Not me either, since fortunately my grandparents on both sides purchased their first homes in safe suburbs, and most of my great grandparents grew up in small towns. Some of my great aunts and uncles were not so foresighted and saw the home they spent years paying for rendered nearly worthless.

Back of envelope estimate: white people fleeing central city black crime following WWII lost about $800 billion in real estate wealth in current dollars. And blacks were able to purchase millions of homes for far less than their construction cost.

Harry Belafonte: Until White People ‘Change Their Course of Conduct’ the ‘Only Thing Left for Black People to Do Is Burn It Down’

Chilling remarks, and all-too-familiar. No one dares enjoin black people away from their epidemic of violent crime, but white people dare not bat an eyelash the wrong way or we’ll “burn it all down”. Sort of like the justifications the Israelis use when hammering the Palestinians. One or two of them misbehaved, therefore we’ll bomb their cities, hospitals and schools to teach them all a lesson.

Imagine if such strictures were applied to black people in the USA, for even a week. It might actually do some good, as opposed to the way we’re doing things now which is guaranteed to make the situation even worse.

The cities with the smallest gaps were Killeen, Tex.; Fayetteville, N.C.; Charleston, S.C.; Austin; and Augusta, Ga.

This dovetails with your theory that some of the most well-adjusted blacks are military and former military. Killeen is home to Ft. Hood. Fayetteville is home to Ft. Bragg. Charleston is home to Charleston AFB. Augusta is home to Ft. Gordon.

“These losses reflect the persistence of financial racism …”

Yeah, because banks hate making money. They just love turning away customers with good credit because they have excess melanin in their skin.
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Is the NYT mostly epicycles these days?

I thought Belafonte died years ago.

But African-Americans were essentially shut out of early federal programs that promoted homeownership and financial well-being

So were Chinese who immigrated to the US in the last twenty-thirty years (i.e. about 95% of those here now). They missed out on the New Deal. But somehow they’re doing fine real-estate-wise. For that matter, the entire populations of western Europe who stayed home and never even immigrated to the US, have managed to live well with no help from the New Deal.

Yes, ever-more-complex ones.

How do you figure $800 billion? Just asking…

Please mister tally man, come tally his banana already!

He’s a concern troll who pulls numbers out of his ass.

NYT is, as usual, wrong. Watch this (strong stomach recommended):

The man never says the race of these Section 8 tenants. But watch through the video and I’m pretty sure you can connect the dots. Quite likely the guy either inherited the house or bought it in an estate sale. By the looks of it he put at least $50k to fix up the place – and who knows how much of his own labor. My guess is due to employment he had to move, so he rented it out through Section 8… And came to regret it.

Estimated white population decline due to black migration, divided by three for an estimated average household size, multiplied by $100,000, added another $200 billion to account for commercial real estate losses.

Off topic:

This does have an “auto-ethnography” feel to it.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6055021/rushed-amazon-warehouse-staff-time-wasting/

AMAZON warehouse staff are peeing in bottles because loos are hundreds of yards away.
One ex-worker said staff fear getting into trouble for taking too long away from the job.

The warehouse measures 700,000 sq ft and some of the 1,200 workers face a ten minute, quarter-of-a-mile walk to two toilets on the ground floor of the four-storey building.
Undercover investigator James Bloodworth said: “For those of us who worked on the top floor, the closest toilets were down four flights of stairs.”
Mr Bloodworth, who worked ten-hour shifts as a picker selecting goods for despatch, walked ten miles a day in the job to research for a book on low-wage Britain.
He claimed workers were continually monitored for time wasting by supervisors.

Urine rotting in the TMI???

Harry Belafonte sure got a lot of mileage in the 1950s out of being “Jamaican.”

He was a American guy born in Harlem who happened to live in Jamaica for a few years in childhood with one of his two black grandparents, before returning to New York City.

Remember that Asians are ‘invisible colored’.

Frankly, in the most Asian big metro in the 48 (the Bay Area), almost all the towns with average home prices above $2M and populations above 25,000 are at least 40% Asian and under 2% black.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Japan-s-workers-win-biggest-pay-raises-in-20-years

Japan’s workers win biggest pay raises in 20 years
Logistics and retail lead the way as companies compete for labor

I was told by our esteemed economatrixes that supply/demand doesn’t apply to the labor market.

The logistics sector enacted an average pay raise of 3.39%, the highest across all industries and the only one with an average increase exceeding 10,000 yen. The industry is struggling to keep pace with the surge in demand for e-commerce shipments.

Hi, Jeff

That’ll show whitey re: property values.

AMAZON warehouse staff are peeing in bottles because loos are hundreds of yards away.

To be precise, a quarter mile is 440 yards, one lap of a traditional track and field track, about a five minute walk. It doesn’t make it clear if that is one way or a round trip. But either way, I don’t believe it.

Somehow I don’t see Amazon firing you for walking to the toilet, but not caring if you pull out your dick and pee in a bottle and carry it around with you among the merchandise.

By the way, the “I worked undercover at an Amazon warehouse” genre of journalism died off about five years ago in the U.S. Has it found a new home in the U.K.? I hope these kinds of copycat articles don’t go in cycles. If they do, we may have a new round of “I am a clitoridectomy victim” articles and books, written by willowy, model-like black African women, coming up soon.

In LA, “African blacks” have a median wealth of $72k which is about 20x higher than US blacks. It’s also higher than Latinos, Koreans and the Vietnamese but alas it’s lower than whites so nothing else matters:

http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/besol/color_of_wealth_report.pdf

White households in Los Angeles have a median net worth of $355,000. In comparison, Mexicans and U.S. blacks have a median wealth of $3,500 and $4,000, respectively. Among nonwhite groups, Japanese ($592,000), Asian Indian ($460,000), and Chinese ($408,200) households had higher median wealth than whites. All other racial and ethnic groups had much lower median net worth than white households—African blacks ($72,000), other Latinos ($42,500), Koreans ($23,400), Vietnamese ($61,500), and Filipinos ($243,000).

The gap was widest in Northeastern and Midwestern cities — with the widest gaps, listed in order of severity, found in Minneapolis; Albany; Buffalo; New York; Salisbury, Md.; and Bridgeport, Conn. The cities with the smallest gaps were Killeen, Tex.; Fayetteville, N.C.; Charleston, S.C.; Austin; and Augusta, Ga.

So is the NYT saying that Democrats are more racist than Republicans?

Color me skeptical. At least in the US, there are regulations about a business providing sufficient access to restrooms. I suspect something similar applies in UK.

The gap was widest in Northeastern and Midwestern cities — with the widest gaps, listed in order of severity, found in Minneapolis; Albany; Buffalo; New York; Salisbury, Md.; and Bridgeport, Conn. The cities with the smallest gaps were Killeen, Tex.; Fayetteville, N.C.; Charleston, S.C.; Austin; and Augusta, Ga.

A friend from a very Republican southern state whom I came to know in a very Democratic northern state frequently remarked that he found relations between blacks and whites, while not very good anywhere, were noticeably better in the conservative south than in the liberal north. He attributed this to familiarity breeding pragmatism rather than contempt.

“Harry Belafonte: Until White People ‘Change Their Course of Conduct’ the ‘Only Thing Left for Black People to Do Is Burn It Down’”

That is pretty much what that have been doing for a long time: Watts (1965), Detroit (1967), (buncha cities (1968), LA (1992) Ferguson, MO, Baltimore (2014-15) “But why can’t we all just get along.?”
On the plus side, in place of the “white supremacy” monuments they are tearing down, they are building monuments to victims of racism.

See: http://fosterspeak.blogspot.com/2018/04/monuments-museums-and-racial.html

Dude was an adult in the 1950s and 1960s but says we are more “racially divisive” today than at any time in his lifetime? What an idiot.

Hey, it worked for Detroit, didn’t it?

Thank you, Rain Man. This is the most autistic comment you have made in a while.

He led us through the Second World War. He helped us weather the Great Depression. He stoically endured crippling disease. He (presumably) maintained an erection during intercourse with Eleanor Roosevelt! And now, approaching a century since his death, the great man is beating back Negroes from the few remaining decent neighbourhoods.

Is there anything the guy can’t do?!

Well that’s kinda how it was. 97 years ago in Tulsa, a black community was destroyed by whites as a form of collective punishment after a black man was accused of raping a white woman. I’m obviously not excusing the “burn this bitch down” mentality that many blacks have, but really they learned it from the white people who were more than happy to murder and terrorize blacks in order to perpetuate the racial hierarchy. So nowadays, people like Belafonte insist on a racial hierarchy where blacks are on top, and any misbehavior by uppity whites deserves a brutal collective response. He wants the mirror image of the world he was born into.

As disgusted as one may be by the way so many blacks think and act, when one reads the history of race relations in this country, it’s clear that whites are living in a glass house. Any honest response to black supremacists like Belafonte requires admitting some ugly truths about past generations of whites.

I may be living in a Southern city these days & I’ve noticed something similar. Rough hypothesis: when there is such a large number of blacks, it makes sense to move away from actions based on the mean of the distribution – you’d never leave the house.

Although the redlining argument gets trotted out as a catch-all for the gap in household wealth, it ignores that there are big swathes of NYC, DC, and other cities where the black homeownership rates was traditionally pretty high, and in areas formerly dominated by whites. These areas should be valuable based on access to public transportation and other amenities, but they tend to get passed on to kids and grandkids whose lives are substantially messier than the aspirational couples who originally bought the house, and the neighborhood starts to sink as more homes get handed off to loser descendants or renters if the descendants of the original owners have no desire to live in the old neighborhood themselves. Eventually developers, city planners, and young whites notice these neighborhoods are actually pretty good real estate and start the much-decried gentrification process.

A neighborhood is only as good as the people in it – there are plenty of working class neighborhoods that are well-taken care of and low crime. But a reflexive anti-majority culture set in around the late 60s and picked up steam, which resulted in the destruction of marriage as an institution in black society, consciously naming kids with ‘black’ names that set them apart from the rest of society, as well as retention of a speech dialect that does the same (when the children of immigrants from the world over adopt a traditional American accent). The result of this self-segregation and rejection of traditional norms has been catastrophic and entirely self-inflicted, but instead we have to pretend that redlining and white supremacy creates conditions that magically only affect the descendants of slaves while every other immigrant group, including Africans, moves ahead.

Like, I suspect, most of us, I inherited nothing from this supposed redlining windfall. And as you correctly point out, the NYT, as usual, ignores the far larger and more recent coercive wealth transfers away from disfavored groups and to favored ones, especially blacks. And here I could tally up quite a few bananas for myself.

Besides the $ billions, probably trillions at net present value, in real estate transferred from the disfavored to the favored during the Equal Housing Pogroms, there are the further trillions transferred in welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8, educational grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and various other programs explicitly designed to favor blacks. Beyond these direct transfers, governments, businesses and colleges actively discriminate against whites and for blacks with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas. And this doesn’t even count the relentless, unofficial and individualized subsidies the productive pay to the unproductive, such the fellow in that Section 8 video.

And yet, the median wealth of blacks is approximately zero, meaning these trillions upon trillions of value have been annihilated. Has any society ever sacrificed so generously and and so uselessly as ours has?

Paul Kersey likes to say that we could have gone to the Mars but we chose to fund black-ism instead. That’s probably true, but it actually trivializes the matter somewhat. I don’t particularly miss Mars, but I did want a free and prosperous country. But each of these things has been a sacrifice to the Diversity god, a god who not only is never satisfied no matter how great the sacrifice, but who actually grows more angry with each offering. Ultimately, there is no appeasing this god. It will simply eat its worshippers and their countries alive.

The tragedy is that Diversity is a weak and stupid god who, as everyone but its worshippers knows, can safely be ignored, even ridiculed. Neither logic, nor emotion, nor aesthetics recommends this silly religion. Yet today it reigns supreme, overruling law, custom and reason wherever it goes. Please let us throw off the yoke of this insane cult, tear down its monuments, and end its oppressive and poisonous institutions.

I’m sure this has been linked already, but Thosewhocansee has a great summary of Redlining:

http://thosewhocansee.blogspot.com/2014/08/reparations-for-red-lining.html

Belafonte rccorded “Day-O” a/k/a “The Banana Boat Song” in 1956.

What the hell has this guy done since?

Hey, come on guys, give him a break. It takes a while for a body (with a mind attached) to get used to a totally different set of awake hours. It’s working out bad enough for me, having comments written at formerly prime-time sit around in moderation for 3/4 of the live-long day. Won’t somebody think of me!

Anyway, good luck Steve, with the new way of life. To your, albeit hilarious, detractors of your semi-autistic comments, made solely due to your de-energized mental state, I say this:

How many toothpicks can YOU count if I spill them out on the floor, huh, wise guys?

(BTW, maybe iSteve will will so much money counting 6-deck sets of cards in Lost Wages, that we may not here so much from him.)

And complementarily, some of the less well adjusted whites.

Now, as to this post in general, FDR is to blame for a lot of shit, and redlining is pretty low on my list. That bastard’s implementation of Socialism at the weakest point in America’s economic history (soon to be surpassed though) is something he is very likely rotting in hell for.

It’s not a thing for the alt-right to care about liberty, freedom, free-markets or any of that, but just about each comment on here shows some awareness even though the commenter himself may not be aware he is aware. The video by the distraught landlord above is a good example – did the narrator/landlord even understand that there’s a correlation between the fact that the lady paid only $53 monthly to stay in his formerly nice house, yet didn’t take care of things? Hmmm, sounds like stuff I understood in kindergarten.

I’ve got more to write regarding the video in YIH’s comment #15. Stuff like that should be in a post by itself, just because most of us have had experiences being tenants and landlords.

Dude was an adult in the 1950s and 1960s but says we are more “racially divisive” today than at any time in his lifetime?

Perhaps because of his grammar, I don’t get exactly what this 80-100 y/o senile old man means,. Does he mean, “we”, as in the white people, are more “divisive”, or did he mean “we”, as Americans are more racially “divided”? In the latter case, in terms of thoughts/ideas, not geography, I’d agree with him.

As far as burning it all down goes, this is why we have kept the gun control nuts at bay.

Imagine if such strictures were applied to black people in the USA

I’ve been saying that we need to be more like the Israelis for some time now.

As someone with years of experience dealing with Section 8, I can say you really can’t guess the race of Section 8 vermin by how disgustingly and thoroughly they trash a Section 8 rental property. With rare exceptions, they’re all scum. I could tell you stories–!

This tends to go against the idea that blacks necessarily thrive in Republican areas.

For example, a VERY large percentage of the black population in Hawaii is military or former military. And Hawaii is as blue as the Pacific.

Making things Dem vs. GOP can often mask the real issue. Some Republicans like to point out the problems of Detroit which has a Democratic mayor, while ignoring Hawaii with a Democratic governor (and Democratic mayors as well). One place was devastated when the auto industry fizzled. The other place makes money off thriving tourism and military bases.

It’s almost as if the places where the economy is strong will do well no matter what politician is in power, while the places where the economy is weak will suffer.

And yet, the median wealth of blacks is approximately zero, meaning these trillions upon trillions of value have been annihilated.

That’s not what it means. It means the blacks aren’t really the “favored group” who are intended to benefit from the transfer.

The money didn’t disappear, it went to someone else.

The blacks are just the excuse. They are a conduit through which money flows from White labor to White — and, of course, (((White))) — capital.

Tldr;

Joke: blacks are leeches, taking our money

Broke: liberal Whites are stupid, taking our money and giving it to blacks

Woke: rich people are taking our money and giving it to themselves

Harry Belafonte was in the Celebrity Quantum State, which somebody just flipped, and Harry’s coin came up heads.

Yes, this is what I was going to write in reply. They have no stake in keeping the place decent since the money they pay is chump change (for ANYBODY).

I also think that many section 8 landlords are the problem themselves. They do it to get guaranteed rent vs. having to deal with people that are 75% decent and rent-paying. However, it takes judgement on the front end to try to get this percentage higher rather than lower for your rental house. Section 8 takes that judgement away – it keeps it simple – rent out a house with simple white walls,a simple kitchen, cheap appliances simple light fixtures, and no fancy landscaping; plan to redo all this stuff regularly. Anything that can be broken will be broken.

The section-8 landlords can be the scourge of a neighborhood, if they are the only ones in the area doing this. The rest of the inhabitants, owners and renters, don’t like this, as they know that likely trashy people will move in.

“Harry Belafonte: Until White People ‘Change Their Course of Conduct’ the ‘Only Thing Left for Black People to Do Is Burn It Down’”

Kind of curious. What if they “Burn it Down.” Then basically they get a “So what?” What exactly do they do if they are amid burned out rubble, and no one rebuilds it for them?

IOW, Belafonte’s comment is at least as attributable to advancing senescence.

Amazon’s pretty bad. I can see this happening – its not merely driven by company policy. But the culture it creates through what is essentially a permanent struggle session of every worker against another, tattling, etc, means that people go increasingly nuts in finding ways to appear productive.

Its exciting in a way. Its appealing to the masculine nature to know how much torture you can take.

About the missing refrigerator, washer, and dryer: A friend of mine rented out a place only about 50 yards away from his own house, and he had put in some nice new appliances. He was very lucky to be leaving or pulling in when the (white, BTW) guys renting it were moving the $1000 refrigerator out the back door put onto the trailer of a couple that had just bought them from these guys on Craigslist!

It was apparently a scene, as the young tenants took off in their car, the perplexed buyers were pretty upset, and my friend got the law involved.

My, father, who was very much a Democrat and very pro-integration, had an interesting idea about welfare.

He said welfare was basically a bribe to keep blacks from rioting.

There are a lot of ways to interpret that statement.

Since my father died too young, I never got a chance to ask him which interpretation he meant. He was the type who would often leave clues as to his meaning, and let others figure it out. For example, in his bookshelves in his office, he put The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital right next to the Holy Bible. When I finally figured out that meant Communism had become a religion, he just said “yup”.

almost no renters care about the space they’re in. Commercial renters, yes, because they’re using the place to make money. But residential renters, nope.

Until you’ve been a landlord/landlady, you really don’t understand humanity.

This is not surprising, but it’s less about red state / blue state than it is about places that are military-heavy vs. places that have no military presence. The northeast is notorious for its separation (both physically and spiritually) from the US military. In contrast, Killeen, Augusta, all Fayetteville, all happen to be homes to huge army installations as well. Charleston and Austin are both surrounded by several army bases. In my experience, the US military is the greatest creator of a black middle class and the greatest engine of black homeownership in history. One would expect to find that in cities in which the black population is closely affiliated with the military, black homeownership rates would more closely approximate white homeownership.

I volunteer in the inner city of Buffalo. Recently, due to a fire, I had to change my route. Travelling down Moselle St.’ which is maybe a mile long, I counted 28 vacant lots where houses formerly stood. This is my childhood neighborhood. Every store or business I pass has glass block side windows, security gates at the doors, steel roll up shutters on the store front and visible security cameras. There is enough trash and litter in the streets and against the curbs to fill dumpsters and yet nearby is a shiny new school building (corner of Sycamore and Walden) with all the bells and whistles. The Buffalo News last week featured a front page article describing how the City of Buffalo’s housing dept. spent $4.3 million dollars to rehab 10 inner city homes. They spent a jaw dropping $530K to rehab one house that they then sold for $100K. A Habitat for Humanity crew from my suburban town, mostly old farts like me, was beaten and robbed of cash and tools trying to rehab a house in the city. So, I’m sorry that I can’t form a more cogent thought, but I think the NYT Editorial Board is full of shit and I would gladly say that and more to their face but I don’t run in their circles and I don’t see them volunteering in mine. Money is not the answer and responsibility is. Couple this article to their one about the young unwed mother of three whose health problems are the result of racism and you get a Mobius band of never ending pot stirring.

my grandfather was born in West Philadelphia (Powelton Village) His parents were born in West Philadelphia in the 1880s. His neighborhood was 99% white during his childhood. His father owned a 3,200 foot 3 story Brownstone type home and was an electrician and contractor. Blacks started moving to nearby neighborhoods in 1918. While he was forced to enlist in the Military with his 3 brothers in 1941 the Blacks started to move in rapidly. When they returned from the war his family moved to the suburbs, but his father kept the building and rented it out. When he died in 1960 my Grandfather inherited the property , which was in an area that was red-lined. He sold it for less than what his father bought it for…But today the area has gentrified and the house is worth about $600,000

unfortunately the suburb where my grandfather and his brother moved to eventually went from 100% white to 40% Black. When My grandmother passed away this year their home was sold for less than they paid for it in 1959 (adjusted for inflation)…Thus both my grandfather and mother lost significant capital via demographic changes to the neighborhoods where they were raised. and now the property value of my parents home suffers the same fate. My parents bought their home , near my grandparents, for $36,000 in 1973 and it is worth about $200,000 today…which is what the same homes were selling for in 1988. In contrast the nearby town of Haverford PA, which is 2 blocks from their house, a similar home sells for $390,000 because Havertown schools have remained 90% white while Upper Darby High School is now 40% Black. Back in the 1970s Havertown home prices were identical to those in Drexel Hill. My Uncle bought his house in Havertown in 1975 for $37,000 and it is now worth $400,000 , 100% more than my parents home 4 blocks away.

Anybody know if Silk and Diamond own their own house(s)?

I read back in the ’80s, that the Housing Bill of ’65 let the middle class and higher negros out of the ghetto and move to Zyd areas. That removed most of the negro owned jobs, legal role models, and other benefits of having successful negros around. It was just ghetto rats that were left, with predictable results…

Of course this was yet another unintended consequence of libtard do-gooder nonsense.

They could have built a pretty nice neighborhood with the discounted property they got from the whites streaming out, but not with only the worst of the worst doing it.

Not to fear, the people in charge will be flipping the fake money machine back on just in time to solve the housing shortage and the red lining goblin.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/just-how-widespread-is-the-housing-shortage-1523876401

Yeah, Kersey writes that often about “we could have been to Mars.” I agree with him. We were at the cusp of almost evolving like whatever-the-hell-was-happening at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and this Socialist drag on our economy to try to bring up certain segments of society put the kibosh on it all. Imagine that there were place to go off this planet – we could let the socialist diversity-promoting scum stay here and cause whatever ruination they were going to – they can’t tax us libertarians on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri when then run out of money to build spaceships to come collect!

We were THIS CLOSE, man! I don’t write this in jest either, and I think that’s the way Paul Kersey sees it – at least I do.

Regarding the latter part of your comment, A.M., Dieversity is treated as a religion because other religions have dropped the ball. This god had replaced God for the cult followers, but you are right that there is nothing to be afraid of from the followers themselves, just as no one had to follow Jim Jones and drink the Kool-Aid down in Guyana. (Every time I write about this, I think about that big happy Kool-Aid pitcher guy – Strawberry Kook-Aid would hit the spot right now!) Kool-Aid’s big, yeah, yeah, yeah!”

It is true that there is a vampire class composed of white gentiles and Jews who use the financial system to drain the wealth of the productive classes.

It is also true that in this country those of African ancestry are psychotic narcissists draining the energy of those around them. Their vampiric hunger for your attention, time, and money will never be satiated. They are aided in this theft of life force by supposedly colorblind conservatives and negrophiliac whites.

If you see any empty Hawaiian Punch containers they’re probably Black .

A political loon quite good at his craft, though. You’d rather he were more like his chum Sidney Poitier, who is fairly reticent about public affairs.

2. How many of you have parents or grandparents who lost significant amount of money because black crime and disorder took over the central city where they lived?

I do, but what irks me as much or more is the institutions that they had built over decades to centuries but went fallow as a result of black crime and resultant white flight.

I grew up in Philadelphia and the number of Catholic parishes, parish schools, and Catholic High Schools that fell to nothing and then were made to close because the neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed by blacks and their antisocial behavior is staggering.

I don’t know if you can begin to quantify the value of these institutions either economically or socially. The attempts to re-create them in the surrounding suburbia were largely failures.

He said welfare was basically a bribe to keep blacks from rioting.

After TANF replaced AFDC, the rolls were cut by 1/3. About 1.3% of the population received TANF. You’re not seeing any riots.

Here’s an alternative suggestion: the utility of our rococo welfare state (to a certain sort) is that it provides employment to that sort to act as gatekeeper and navigator. The sort in question commonly have ‘MSW’ after their names.

The dense settlement in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, and Washtenaw Counties in Michigan has a population of about 4 million. The “City of Detroit” accounts for about 18% of that. If you went to any other metropolitan glob in the country and drew a municipal boundary which was limited to the slums and some connecting territory, the City of Detroit as it is now is roughly what you’d get. The City of Detroit has a homicide rate of 48 per 100,000, almost identical to the mean of of the four islands of wretchedness in greater Chicago. (Though it is true the islands of wretchedness make up only 12% of greater Chicago’s population, rather than 18% as in Detroit).

Greater Detroit was hit harder by the industrial shift than any other top tier city, but not nearly as hard as certain 2d tier cities (Buffalo, Cleveland) or 3d tier cities (Youngstown, Scranton-Wilkes-Barre). The ruin of the core city came from intrametropolitan migration, as normal people headed out to suburbs and what was left consisted of two elements: lumpenproletarians and working people willing to tolerate lumpenproletarians for one reason or another. Not a whole lot of human capital in either residue. All northern cities saw some of this sort of migration. The thing is, cities like Buffalo found a natural floor at a level much higher than did Detroit, because they had uncreative politicians rather than destructive politicians. Cleveland got Carl Stokes and Ralph Perk. Detroit got Coleman Young. One has a homicide rate 2.5x the other.

He might not be.

Thomas Sowell once wrote a column about a random letter he’d received from a young woman which posed a question about his experiences as a college student ca. 1955 given the racial climate at the time. Her remarks indicated his experience must have been harrowing. His open reply was that the only racial slurs he could recall hearing at the University of Chicago at that time were the ones he uttered himself. He said the racial climate actually was disagreeable at Cornell when he had a position there ca. 1970. He offered that the source of the trouble was the mollycoddling of blacks by Cornell’s administration, which induced bad behavior by clients on the one hand and bad behavior by irritated people in the surrounding matrix in response.

It’s a shame what happened Upper Darby, Lansdowne, and all of Eastern Delco.

Ed, so Filipinos, doing the jobs blacks and Mexicans use to do, have 6o times the wealth of either group. It starts when you first take a job and build on that.

Re: AFDC replaced by TANF cutting the roll of recipients, yet “You’re not seeing any riots.”

According to the U.S. Census, 52 million Americans received some form of means tested govt. assistance in 2015. Of these 41% were black (21,320,000).

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-97.html

As you may be aware blacks account for only 12% of the U.S. population.

Assuming a total population of 320,000,000, blacks amount to 38,400,000 of the total.

Thus of the 38 million blacks in the U.S., 21 million of them – 55% of the black population – received some form of public aid in 2015.

It appears that the bribery continues, in different forms, explaining the lack of riots.

Art, I grew up in Buffalo and have three children living next to Cleveland. Both cities were industrial and banking giants. The one saving grace for both cities is their strong medical complexes. Buffalo has a renown cancer center and a Women and Children’s hospital. Toronto, for instance, had/has neither. Cleveland has the world famous Cleveland Clinic. These medical centers and some decent colleges and universities in both cities, attract educated people to good paying jobs. Buffalo and Cleveland have been governed by democrats for forever, but developed by a coterie of forward thinking businessmen. Cleveland, unfortunately, has a very high murder rate that keeps some neighborhoods from rebounding, almost like No-Go Zones. Detroit might be better off moving all of it’s remaining residents into one sustainable neighborhood. Leave the abandoned area fallow.

Alec, I could not agree more. I have pointed out to family and friends that the end of affordable Catholic education meant that thousands of children were thrown into the public school blender.

Sad, because in the 80s, many decent black families who were AME or African Baptist sent their kids to parochial schools, even if they had to work multiple jobs to swing it. Everybody knew about the public school system in Philly. I grew up in a Philly suburb where the high school was so notorious for its drug problem, despite its high college acceptance rates, many non-Catholic parents sent their kids to the Catholic high school. I was told there were four Jewish students there as early as the 1970s

At his age, senility is common, but he seems lucid, and we all know his sentiments aren’t exactly rare in the black community.

His estimate seems reasonable. Has anyone made a scholarly, peer-reviewed estimate? Or would that be a taboo topic? I have gotten very hostile reactions from leftists for suggesting whites were ethnically cleansed from urban areas from the 1960s on.

This might just be my own preconceptions speaking, but also I suspect that black and white southerners are more similar in a cultural sense (religion, manners, food, etc.) than black and white northerners. There is a shared history there that is missing in places like Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, etc.

Homicide rates in Cleveland and Buffalo have both bounced around a set point of 18 per 100,000 the last 15 years, though Cleveland had a big spike in 2016 and Buffalo did not.

The breakdown of order could have been averted with vigorous law enforcement, but that was incongruent with the priorities and assumptions of the courts and city hall at the time. See James Q Wilson’s research on the complete disconnect between the public and city hall in Boston ca. 1966 to take one example.

An additional problem Catholic institutions had and have had was the demographic collapse of the religious orders. I’ve seen data indicating that the number of woman taking their final vows declined by 97%. That’s the mean across all orders of women religious. Among men, there was a 90% decline in the number of regular priests ordained. The last bits of data I’ve seen on the census of seminarians suggests that the number of working Jesuits may eventually settle at a number under 1,000 (there were 9,500 in 1965), the number of Franciscans at about 200, and the number of Christian Brothers at a couple dozen (there were over 900 Christian Brothers in 1965). That’s pretty much wrecked the economy of Catholic education. Sisters, Brothers, and religious priests live communally and require only modest stipends. Their education is also much more religiously intensive than all but a few laymen.

During the Great Migration, probably just as many white southerners came to places like Chicago and Detroit as blacks. Much of Chicago’s West Side and Uptown neighborhood had a huge influx of whites from Appalachia and the Deep South in the 40′ and 50′s. Suburban areas, like Lake County, Illinois had many southern whites move in around this time.

If you listen to his video you will notice that his voice is in ruins. He was not a singer, he was a Calypso Shouter. He yelled in recording studios and night clubs. He developed vocal nodes early on. He had his cords scraped in several operations. After his vocal career was over he was in a few race themed movies as a gravel voiced actor.

Lately of course he has become a professional civil rights celebrity. He expresses grievances for a living.

Maybe black people could rather than “Burn it down” they could build Wakanda.

It never seems to occur to blacks to do something themselves. They prefer to give advice and orders to white people. At any hour of any day when you turn on the TV there will be a negro whining about some imagined grievance. What an annoying race.

It is even worse. They consider the epicycles to be the unifying and most important causative influences.

Fine go ahead burn it down.

There won’t be any whites to rebuild civilization for them afterwards.

Ok but my recommendation is to close most of these Forts in the South and make the entire US Southern border an army base

Defend the border

“He was not a singer, he was a Calypso Shouter.”

Hate his politics, but I’d disagree.

So he’s admitting blacks are violent arsonists?

But not in his old rural hood methinks. Or urban one either.

http://wpdh.com/peek-inside-harry-belafontes-hudson-valley-home/

http://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/harry-belafontes-house/view/google/

https://www.cityrealty.com/nyc/broadway-corridor/apple-bank-building-2112-broadway/31402

How about some contempt for all those nice middle and working class white people who thought calypso music was so interesting and exotic!? Thanks for buying my masters’ product, whitey! You suck! Die now!

What the hell was he doing renting out that nice of a place via Section 8? He got what he deserved as I’m sure the neighbors loved that tenant.

I think of the NYT as being kind of like the old pulp magazines from the ’30s.

It is like you can feel the crazy ideas being pitched, or the way some stories are changed and get a new ending slapped on them because the editor didn’t like first one. It evokes certain fixed themes through the lens of a far out imagination. It is like sci-fi during the super-science phase.

Art, Thank you. Two years ago Cleveland had a 5 year old boy, a two year old boy and a 5 month old girl shot and killed. That is horrific. This year a 12 year old boy, who accompanied his father to work, was shot and killed at his father’s business. Among those arrested was a 15 year old who had a three years prior rape conviction, Simple math shows he was then just 12. A culture beyond hope?

Art, for those who don’t know, the Jesuits, the Franciscans and the Christian Brothers operated the better prep schools in most major cities. Buffalo still has one of each.

So True…My Grandfather was raised in Powelton Village in Philadelphia, attended St. Agatha and West Catholic High School….In 1976 St. Agatha merges with St. James. My Grandfather would go to reunions at St.Agatha…the last one was in 1988 and his car was stolen during mass. The cops were no help , but my mother, uncle and my Grandfather drove around West Philly for 2 days and eventually found his car, they abandoned it when it ran out of gas. He loved and babied his car, and was proud that it was in excellent shape even with over 100,000 miles on it.

It is difficult to put a value on the destruction of West Philadelphia due to the ethnic cleansing experienced while the whites were sent off to war…not only did the Blacks take the best neighborhoods in many cities, they largely escaped being killed in World War II. My Grandfather lost his brother in WW II , in addition to losing an uncle in WW I. I have never met an African American who lost relatives in WWI or WWII. Yet they complain about redlining when they escaped being drafted and then ethnically cleansed the white areas and destroyed the white institutions and property values while my grandfather was sent to kill Germans in another continent…to make it worse his net-worth was again destroyed by Blacks when they started to migrate into the Philly suburbs where he had raised his family..

Both my great grandfathers on my dad’s side were wealthy Detroit businessmen. The family businesses both closed circa 1968.

The black-white wealth gap is largely due to heavy black investment in things like automotive accessories, jewelry and drugs, which form what I call Blackshire Halfaway Class N – an investment that’s hit zero every year since 1865.

I remember from elementary and middle school many white ethnic type Catholics who attended public schools but were also sent to catechism classes, called CCD, by their parents. These classes , and, I assume, their lessons, were universally dreaded, derided and, ultimately, dismissed.

I napkin-estimated residential real estate losses in Detroit alone to be ≈ $120 billion. That could be consistent with around $800 billion in nationwide losses. But it doesn’t factor in commercial real estate, which in many cities may approach or even exceed residential losses.

I would like to see even the laziest effort to quantitatively back this up. Let me break out pen and napkin to get some inkling of how off the mark it is. Take, for example, the real estate losses in Detroit, as just one isolated example. In 1950, the population of the city was 1.8 million. At an average person per household of 3 (anyone know if is this close?), adjusted upwards a little from today’s number of 2.58, that would be about 600,000 homes. At that time, Detroit was considered one of the most important and sought-after cities in the United States. So I could probably reasonably go on the very high end when estimating what those houses might be worth today if the racial order had been maintained. But I’ll be conservative, since it will just lead to an endless counterfactual debate about the auto industry etc.

Today, at a rate of 2.58 people per household, it means that there are approximately 260,773 residential units in the city. That means 339,000 homes simply disappeared. Between Devil’s Night and slum clearance, it’s no mystery where they all went, especially to anyone who’s ever toured the rubble.

I’ll avoid factoring in distracting yet substantive things like the widespread partitioning of the remaining homes into rental properties, which may mean the 260,773 number above is massively overstated, nor will I attempt to address commercial real estate, which, at least at first glance, is probably in considerably worse condition than its residential counterpart across most of the city. Let’s just bear in mind that this is likely to be an absolute lower-bound estimate.

The median home price in Detroit, according to Zillow is $45,000.

The median home price in mostly white Traverse City, Michigan, a city with similar housing stock from a similar period in a similar location, is $224,000. If we assume the difference between the two prices is equal to the single-home “black dysfunction tax”, then the total black dysfunction tax incurred by Detroit residential real estate owners since 1950 $46,678,367,000. On top of that, there has been an outright 339,000*$224,000 = $75,936,000,000 loss on the housing units that have simply disappeared. The total residential real estate loss in Detroit, due almost entirely to the unoppressed unconstrained presence of blacks, is about $123 billion dollars.

This number is likely to be a severe underestimate, as evidenced by the fact that, at the point of its peak population in 1950, Detroit was considered one of the three top cities in America. A more appropriate baseline non-Africanized housing price for comparative purposes might be San Francisco or New York. Instead, Traverse City, a nice but not overly industrious Midwestern town, was used. Nor have we even attempted to look at the probably much worse asset history of commercial real estate in the city.

Doh, second to last paragraph: the word “unoppressed” was originally stricken through.

Don’t know where this fellow’s property is located. However, I am aware that at least one jurisdiction – Cook County, Illinois, the second most populous county in the U.S. – has made it illegal under the local Human Rights ordinance to discriminate against Section 8 voucher holders on the basis of the source of their rental funds.

Putting it another way, it is illegal in Cook County to reject a potential tenant merely because he wishes to use a voucher to pay the rent.

Perhaps other jurisdictions have done the same. Perhaps the landlord in question was constrained by law.

Moreover, various fair housing advocacy groups in Cook County have used “testers” – one black and one white – who present themselves at different times to apply for housing at the same location. On paper the testers have comparable credit and work histories and references. Any pattern of disparate impact for the black applicants is alleged to be discriminatory under applicable law and referred to the authorities for investigation and prosecution.

I thought Belafonte died years ago.

Just his brain. Daaaa Oh!

He just looks dead.

Those blacks who are successful integrate into white society pretty quickly. For the most part, they move out of black neighborhoods and associate with white people. Because they don’t have much in common with black people who aren’t successful.
It’s like Rockefellers and rednecks. They don’t look out for each other, even if they have shared ancestry. After first cousins, you aren’t family.

My mom attended UT Austin in 1955. There were no blacks as undergrads, but they were allowed in as grad students. In one chemistry class a female black grad student sat across from her and asked if they could be lab partners. My mom, from CA, said that was just fine. The black girl was relieved because, she said, the other white Texans in the class wouldn’t want to be her partner.

I find that story pretty funny since as a chemistry student myself in the 80′s, I don’t remember a single black female student in any of my classes… for all four years. There was one black guy, but he was majoring in biology and only took one semester of Chem 1. The 1950′s in all its segregation did better than the 80′s with all its affirmative action.

He was not a singer, he was a Calypso Shouter.

What does that even mean?

He expresses grievances for a living.

He’s 91 years old and has an 8-digit net worth. He’s not doing it for a living.

After his vocal career was over he was in a few race themed movies as a gravel voiced actor.

He continued touring and recording past age 70. The movies you’re referring to were produced > 20 years ago and predated the end of his recording career.

Just go to any city where half has been lost. Look at equivalent housing on other side of city. Not hard to extrapolate the value of housing lost. When I say lost, I mean areas whites fled. In Baltimore 70%. In nyc and Chicago about 50%. Gorgeous, grande housing. Built ins of beautiful wood. Wood staircases. Beautiful colored glass. The outside decor made of brick.

Unless you’ve lived it, you can’t comprehend the housing stock lost in white flight. And not just housing. Parks built. Parishes built. Etc.

Not true. The first few assimilate. When they reach 10% they complain about whites. Their relatives and cousins visit and rob the white neighbors. Soon 10% is 30% and the cries of racism grow as whites grapple with all the crime and flee. I don’t know of the kind of people you speak of. They want a white neighborhood without whites. When the white base flees, they then ask who will pay for upkeep of schools. Oh, and the schools go from top to bottom with nary a change in teachers or curriculum. Just students.

What the heck is wrong with LA’s Koreans?

I want to applaud those who openly speak of where they come from. I don’t. Out of fear of the left. I hope our identities are protected or my secrecy of no value.

Granted, it’s tiresome that you can’t tell the truth in America. It’s tiresome that nonwhites demand an honest discussion on race knowing that if you tell your story, they will call you a racist and try to destroy you. Well, actually, they will destroy you.

There is no reciprocity. No one wants to hear what whites have to say.

during the time TANF rolls were cut disability claims soared.
Social Security’s disability programs have become “a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills.” In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed: Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.

The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined…..A child may be eligible for SSI disability benefits beginning as early as the date of birth; there is no minimum age requirement….a child who gets SSI benefits can get Medicaid to help pay medical bills….the number of kids on a program called Supplemental Security Income — a program for children and adults who are both poor and disabled — is almost 5 times larger than it was in 1990, from 300,000 kids to 1.4 million today.

I got the impression that had been his own home that he converted to a rental after he purchased another home to live in (hence the very nice features). He didn’t strike me as a landlord with a string of properties. Therefore, it seems to me he could’ve avoided the authorities for one property. He was either a clueless liberal that thought the k00l-aid was actually good for him or he thought it was good business idea to get into bed with the government and a section 8 tenant because he would make more money. Either way I’m sure his neighbors were as harmed as his property was.

I bear absolutely no responsibility for what happened in Tulsa decades ago. If you wish trans generational collective guilt to become the norm, we are about to make Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia look like a cribbage tournament.

Good. Let them blame FDR. This arrogant, highly overated, president was our first liberal democrat whose new deal put us on a path to doom that’s only been accelerated as time goes on.

Killen Texas = Ft Hood
Fayetteville NC = Ft Bragg
Augusta Ga = Ft Gordon

The military and the VA are a huge welfare schemes for most black service members/ vets. They arent necessarily doing better in those red states. The federal government is propping them up.

Well (as we’ve noted here before) we could certainly stand to emulate them when it comes to protecting our nation’s cultural and physical integrity.

Good points. The spectacular old architecture, solidly built of the finest traditional materials, turns out to have been pretty much irreplaceable.

Sure, we built new places, but very few of them are even remotely comparable in terms of quality or aesthetics.

This transformation brings costs which are difficult to quantify, but which are nonetheless quite real and which bring ill effects for generations.

It’s no wonder white people want back in to the places their great grandparents built. Not to mention their country.

The ruin of the core city came from intrametropolitan migration, as normal people headed out to suburbs and what was left consisted of two elements: lumpenproletarians and working people willing to tolerate lumpenproletarians for one reason or another. Not a whole lot of human capital in either residue

Detroit got hollowed out when it was pretty much built out in the ’40s. You need a couple of hundred acres with railroad access to build a new factory. And there wasn’t any raw land to buy cheap in Detroit.

The farmland up in Macomb County was cheap, had a rail line, so 80% of the new plants were built there. Warren, in Macomb, was the fastest growing city in the US during the ’50s; 12,000 percent growth during the ’50s!

The factories are still there, but with lots fewer jobs, robots are everywhere.

You can’t win.

Holy strawman.

It’s not that I “wish it to become the norm.” It’s that any solutions to racial problems in our country will involve both sides owning up to their dirty laundry. If whites won’t take responsibility for their historical legacies, then blacks will be less likely to take responsibility for their bad behavior today.

Yes, there are different methods to estimate, but there isn’t much differnce as to the actual number.

A lot of the loss was suffered by the first waves of black homeowners rather than fleeing whites. The initial fall in constant dollars from about 250k to 150k was mostly suffered by whites, the fall from 150k to 30k was mostly suffered by blacks, though plenty of now elderly or dead whites who didn’t flee lost it all.

The destruction and ethnic cleansing of Detroit, from one of the world’s great cities with 1.5 million whites, to a burnt out husk with 0.06 million whites, is not an especially healthy topic I’d want to dwell on. But if the left wants to talk about redlining, we have to talk about Detroit (and Chicago, Buffalo, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Gary, Oakland…)

Harry Belafonte:

I am truly shocked– to learn that he’s still alive!

A political loon quite good at his craft, though.

In those days, you put up with the occasional political spout from the Guthries, the Seegers, the Baezes, the PP&Ms, the Smothers Bros, etc, because they were skilled at what they do.

Laura Ingraham was off by a generation or two. Those people should have shut up and sung.

Today’s “artists” should shut up, period.

John Strausbaugh had better advice: rock till you drop. Like flies.

Good illustration of the problem with conspiracy theorists: everything has to be really complicated.

No, rich people do not benefit from the welfare system because they profit off of black purchases. The rich pay a huge share of taxes, but black welfare case customers represent a small share of their revenue and profit.

Rich liberals support welfare out of ethnomasochism and guilt, rich conservatives oppose it out of principle and the desire not to pay taxes. It really is that simple.

No, rich people do not benefit from the welfare system because they profit off of black purchases.

Farmers do, though. Food stamps come from the Dept of Agriculture.

>blacks will behave if we do
Nope.

Tolerating redlining was a retreat for FDR, who precipitated the 1943 Detroit race riot (truly a race riot and not a black riot like in 1967) by aggressively attempting to desegregate housing for defense-manufacturing workers the year before. The whole history of this problem is a Rube Goldberg mousetrap of bright leftist ideas.

For over fifty years, virtually every single part of American culture has been immersed in a continuous stream of anti-white propaganda, including and especially the sort of “owning up to dirty laundry” that you promote. In fact, ‘dirty laundry’ is now supposed to be the entirety of our heritage as white people.

The weird thing is that white people are continually held collectively and individually responsible for every single thing some other white person may have done in distant history, while people of color aren’t held responsible for crimes they commit today. Near as I can tell, you exist in some kind of alternate universe.

The weird thing is that white people are continually held collectively and individually responsible for every single thing some other white person may have done in distant history, while people of color aren’t held responsible for crimes they commit today. Near as I can tell, you exist in some kind of alternate universe.

In the progressive/SJW (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, neocon) worldview, white people are ontologically distinct from the rest of humanity. They alone have agency, including the power not just welcome or integrate ‘the other’, but indeed to save him. This grotesquely hubristic messianism represents the decaying, heretical shell of what once was Christendom.

In this worldview, members of oppressed groups are essentially subhuman, in that they are not responsible for their actions, and cannot control their own fates. Only wise, generous, self-sacrificing white SJWs have the power to mold and direct human cultures, and thus to bring about the immanentized eschaton, i.e. the humanistic, egalitarian utopia that always lies just over the progressive horizon.

The problem, of course, is that SJWs make lousy substitutes for the only-begotten Son of God. They fail, and fail, and fail in their tireless salvific endeavors — and then they get angry, and somebody’s got to be blamed. Since ipso facto only white people can bear responsibility, it must be the Wrong Kind of White People who are wrecking the plan.

I think Lot has taken a pretty good shot at it.

Yeah, it would be one helluva PhD thesis in economics. Unfortunately, it would make you too toxic for any university, even for conservative think tanks like AEI or Heritage. Your career would be over before it ever started.

Yep. I recommend St Louis, especially the area just north of Wash U. It’s not ghetto at all, but it’s not far from the ghetto either, so it’s a precarious life. You can buy a three-story 8000 sqft brick mansion for less than you’d pay for a shack in a not-particularly-fancy part of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Well what do you suggest?

Almost–didn’t get around to it yesterday, but wanted to say that this is an excellent comment with a bunch of well stated points.

Like, I suspect, most of us, I inherited nothing from this supposed redlining windfall. And as you correctly point out, the NYT, as usual, ignores the far larger and more recent coercive wealth transfers away from disfavored groups and to favored ones, …

And yet, the median wealth of blacks is approximately zero, meaning these trillions upon trillions of value have been annihilated. Has any society ever sacrificed so generously and and so uselessly as ours has?

And especially …

I don’t particularly miss Mars, but I did want a free and prosperous country.
But each of these things has been a sacrifice to the Diversity god, a god who not only is never satisfied no matter how great the sacrifice, but who actually grows more angry with each offering. Ultimately, there is no appeasing this god. It will simply eat its worshippers and their countries alive.

The tragedy is that Diversity is a weak and stupid god who, as everyone but its worshippers knows, can safely be ignored, even ridiculed. Neither logic, nor emotion, nor aesthetics recommends this silly religion. Yet today it reigns supreme, overruling law, custom and reason wherever it goes. Please let us throw off the yoke of this insane cult, tear down its monuments, and end its oppressive and poisonous institutions.

Your words on the Diversity god here–absolutely on the nose, pure gold.

If we can get a substantial number of people to understand your last two paragraphs–we win.

The Southerners are much more inured to the behaviors of the black community. Well, that and the fact that they’re much more heavily armed than Northerners.

Lot–excellent thread in the comments btw–i think your back-of-the-envelope here is reasonable for very direct losses.

However, once you mention the commercial real estate angle, my brain rebels, because that figure doesn’t begin to cover not the direct–i had to move my business–losses, but the losses we’ve all incurred from having to build the post-War economy to escape black crime and dysfunction.

America has incurred huge costs, because of the existence of crime ridden, unpleasant city cores. The costs are both in not being able to use–optimally use, or sometimes use at all–the land and infrastructure of most of its great cities, and extract the full synergies city concentration is designed to provide. And then the huge costs entailed in duplicating infrastructure, business and housing, out in suburbia–sprawl, with reduced synergies.

The costs of these factors has not been a mere $800 billion. It’s been multiple trillions of dollars in reduced values, foregone efficiencies and duplicated costs. I’d guess it is at least on the order of the a year’s GDP–$18 trillion. I.e. that over the 70 odd post-War years–or 50 odd post-Civil Rights years–about a year’s worth of economic value (2%) has been destroyed just by white Americans reacting to–fleeing, working around–black crime and dysfunction. And that estimate may be low.

That explains some of my elementary school teachers. All the stuff about the Environment, Racism, Pacifism, etc. had little to do with stewardship of the Creator’s world and quite a bit with showing we could run it better.

27, I like your style, as I’ve said here before. But when a house is wrecked by the Section 8 tenants or a bank branch is burned down by rioting blacks, this doesn’t sneakily transfer wealth to plutocrats. It just destroys it.

I don’t think that I’m walking out on an Economics limb to say that destroying wealth … destroys wealth. Shocking and controversial as that is nowadays.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and a blunt is just a piece of what could have been the Mars booster rocket.

IMHO, there are two types of landlords.

Back in the late 80s when I lived in the City of Presidents, I rented an apartment in a two-family in a lovely neighborhood from the brother of a friend and his bride. I paid about $200 under the going rent for a two-bedroom. They the owners, who occupied the second floor, didn’t want to advertise for tenants and would only rent to friends of friends of friends. I lived there for 11 years. When I moved out, they rented the place to a single woman who was the sister of a friend. She’s been there ever since. They’ve had 2 tenants in 30 years, collected a rent check every month and suffered no depredations to their property.

A guy I occasionally lift with owns an 8-unit property in the SWPLville I live in now. He lost some tenants after the 2008 crash and decided to take Section 8 tenants. Almost immediately he started to complain about how these tenants destroy his apartments. I asked him if he thought subjecting his properties to people with no discernible history of paying a bill on time was a sound business practice.

Yeah, you have to use the del tags rather than the s or strikethrough tags in Unz comments. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I forget. But anyway, strikethroughs are a hazardous business here. You have to check in the 5-minute window, as even the “Preview” function doesn’t accurately represent how the comment will post.

“really they learned it from the white people”

Right. Prior to white guys showing up, Africa was an earthly paradise of peaceful astronomers living in vegan harmony.

I made a typo. The rolls were cut by 2/3. AFDC / TANF is unusual inasmuch as it’s supposed to provide general living expenses. The vast majority of those receiving ‘some form of means tested govt. assistance’ are on Medicaid or receiving SNAP. SNAP is an income supplement and the typical household might receive about $250 a month. Medicaid is used episodically. Medical costs are socialized all up and down the social scale.

The military and the VA are a huge welfare schemes for most black service members/ vets.

The military is a welfare scheme? You are determined.

As for the VA, benefits per living veteran currently amount to about $8,500, so I don’t think anyone’s livin’ large on that. North of 40% of that is accounted for by medical care and a similar share is accounted for by disability pensions.

during the time TANF rolls were cut disability claims soared.

Ever fuzzier notions of disability has been a problem for > 40 years. It’s not a function of the demise of AFDC / TANF. The beneficiaries are drawn from completely different demographic segments. The vast majority of those awarded Social Security Disability are single adults and the median age of the beneficiary at the time of the award is 49 years. With AFDC, you’re looking at a 20-something woman and a couple of illegitimate kids. As for SSI, it’s awarded to individuals who’ve passed through a disability screen, not to random young women who’ve had children out of wedlock. Again, the demographic profile differs. The ratio of blacks to non-blacks on AFDC was about 1:1. In re SSI, it’s about 1:3.7.

Steve’s on top of this.

That was slightly before my time, Reg, even though I enjoy the music from all of them, because it was GOOD.

In the 80′s – ’90′s though we put up with our Bonos and our Stings for the same reason. Same shit, different decades, last-nameless musicians.

NOBODY since the time could top your CCR, who while not very political in general, came out with this tremendous anti-war song:

“It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate one!”

John Fogerty – vocals, lead guiatar
Tom Fogerty – rhythm guitar
Stu Cook – bass guitar
Doug Clifford – drums

Belafonte is a West Indian mulatto born in Harlem. See Thomas Sowell on the Harlem of his youth. He remembers it fondly and has offered that it suffered a severe decline in the quality of life between 1947 and 1960. Some of Belafonte’s youth was spent in Jamaica. That’s one thing which makes Belafonte’s rude remarks so odd. His experience of American life as a youth was about as congenial as that of any child of a skilled wage-earner. See also the reminiscences of George Schuyler about growing up in Syracuse a generation earlier. Schuyer’s father, like Belafonte’s, was a cook. Except passing through, Belafonte knew nothing of any place like Mississippi.

One curio: Stokely Charmichael was another West Indian who grew up in New York City, albeit from a younger cohort more exposed to social disorder. Wonder if the same mechanism has been at work in both men.

I was told by our esteemed economatrixes that supply/demand doesn’t apply to the labor market.

I was told by the same people that Japan is in terminal decline and ready to crater any day now.

I liked CCR, and this song in particular. I bought the single because I couldn’t afford the album. However, they’re hardly “mine”.

Tom was the unfortunate son– he was one of the rare celebrities who contracted AIDS from a transfusion of blood. Arthur Ashe was another.

I meant “your” in the same sense as “your Baezes, etc.”, just because my time was after that.

I had no idea that’s why Tom Fogerty died, but I did know about the serious falling out between John and Tom. I don’t think John Fogerty talked to his brother much until many years later.

…but I did know about the serious falling out between John and Tom.

Famous musical brother tiffs include the Bachmans and Ray and Dave Davies. Before they and the Fogertys were even born, the Dorseys broke up onstage, before a crowd.

Brother acts are kind of like how Steve described royal sons. The right number of sons for a king was one, to prevent rivalry. The right number for family bands would be at least four. The Jacksons, the Osmonds, the Cowsills all seemed to remain on good terms within their clans. The sheer number douses ego growth, and there will be plenty of peacemakers available.

Two or three brothers will chafe, however. They should have separate careers. James and Livingston Taylor, Paul and Mentor Williams, Paul and Michael McCartney.

For extra credit, class, work out how three brothers, a first cousin, and a friend can be predicted to interact:

Pittsburgh was hit just as bad, but rebounded as well as anywhere.

Other places, like Racine, Wisc., and the old textile towns of Massachusetts, saw the writing early and shifted successfully to postindustrial strategies.

We ask recently-arrived immigrant Chinese men, in ordinary conversations, “by the way, have you ever heard of an African American suffering impotence?” And then we sit back and wait.