The conditions of the working poor in Louisville and in the USA are such that only a fully functioning social ideology apparatus pumping out bread and circuses

24/7 can divert the desperate masses from  organizing to seek relief from internal and external misery. To the extent the sex repressive element is ameliorated from its most acute manifestation in school and religion the present ‘character of the masses’ is less oppressed than 1933 Germany, but the economic exploitation for many people produces desperation.

In Louisville, decades of racist exclusion have destroyed any expectation of sharing in a fair community. The criminal sub-culture is fully functioning and follows its own rules based on fear and exploitation. Those young people that embrace it in rebellion of schools that teach irrelevant subservience to an exploitive business elite survive for a short period before they are arrested and thrown into the expanding corrections system. They emerge after losing their youth into an inhospitable economic system.

As election time comes around, some of the code words used to identify a particular candidate with social ideology that resonates with repressed reactionary people will be heard.

See <http://billmoyers.com/episode/ian-haney-lopez-on-the-dog-whistle-politics-of-race-part-two/>

The result of the dynamic interplay of mass character and ‘approved’ social ideology in Louisville is politicians who can give away millions of dollars of tax incentives to major corporations with impunity while the Metropolitan Housing Coalition and JCPS report 12,750 homeless school children and income inequality.

In 1934 a psychologist in Germany- Wilhelm Reich- was already applying Freudian insights to explain the mass behavior of the German working class rejecting socialism and embracing Nazi fascism. Adopting a Reichian framework the role of the ‘character structure of the masses’ and ‘social ideology’ purveyed by the dominant class is considered for Metro Louisville in 2014. This is a generalized flowchart to be used as a basis of discussion about the influence of public and economic policy on social unrest.

Modern kids have more sexual freedom and self-affirming social and educational opportunities. Topics like ‘diversity training’ and ‘sensitivity training’ were not around in 1933.   The entertainment culture pulses with affirmation of sexual identity, but confusion and moral repression are not  vanquished. Reich integrated ‘sex economic’ thinking into his political analysis as a required element in view of its potential to create a lethal population that could commit genocide. This analysis is still not regularly employed.

The churches have emphasized mystical teachings -‘born again’ theology that promotes obedience to an authoritarian God. The patriarchal pattern is replicated in family structure and frustrated and unhappy people use violent discipline on children. To the extent the church groups understand the link between childhood repressive training and adult misery they could advance the cause of their people.

The School to Prison pipeline has been functioning to expel black children in disproportionate numbers in JCPS. Since the economic system has been manipulated to deny economic advancement to the Descendants of American Slaves, many are disaffected and in personal rebellion.

The Mass Psychology of Racism

The fight over raising the minimum wage demonstrates the elite business class wants to continue a stratified economic system where an impoverished lower class provides a fearful fate for workers who dare to demand fair pay for their work.

In the NYTimes Sunday Book Review March 29, 2014 Brenda Wineapple  author of “Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877 reviews, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation,’ by David Brion Davis:

“Less a political historian than a moral philosopher, Davis focuses here on 19th-century trans-Atlantic abolitionism and, in particular, the intellectual and theological origins of the antislavery movement in America. Borrowing from Freud and Descartes, he suggests that slaveholders projected onto their chattels the qualities they repressed in themselves. Particularly in America, the black population represented to white people “the finitude, imperfections, sensuality, self-mockery and depravity of human nature, thereby amplifying the opposite qualities in the white race.”

As a consequence, an American dream of freedom and opportunity was inseparable from a white illusion of superiority, bolstered by the subjugation and “animalization” of black people. That is, slaves were considered domesticated savages who would, if given the chance, revert to murder and mayhem. To many whites, particularly pro-slavery Southerners, this seemed the lesson of the violent and ultimately successful Haitian Revolution, which represented, as Davis puts it, “the unleashing of pure Id.”

In March 2014, Louisville city fathers seem concerned about a possible unleashing of “pure id” by local black youth following the random violence and property crimes after a confrontation at Waterfront Park on March 23, 2014. Quickly labeling the incident ‘mob violence’ the media worked the story for a solid week in the headlines, somehow losing the underlying causes of black poverty and chronic segregation in the process. The dominant press and the city leadership will focus on the lawlessness of black kids in the West End projecting on them animalistic and exploitive motives they reject for themselves.

The exploitation of the black underclass in Louisville by the white leadership and their sycophants was why the WALMART to be constructed at 18th and Broadway will be some of the first economic investment in that neighborhood for decades. The exploitation by white leadership may have something to do with the allegations in the lawsuit by Jay Morgan against the Mayor that a FORD training center that was to have been built in west Louisville was moved to the east county. The exploitation of the black underclass by white leadership may help explain the high incidence of impoverished single mother head of households in West Louisville and the disparity in asthma illness, lowered life expectancy and disproportionate arrest rates.

The metropolitan 20 year action plan “Making Louisville Home for Us All” in its narrow but accurate history chronicles the ‘containment strategy’ of Louisville government using everything from racist Jim Crow segregation laws, housing and zoning policy, urban renewal, cultivation of religious groups, pre-emptive astroturf neighborhood organization, and school administration to divide and conquer the black political strength--to contain the ‘pure id.’

During the 2012-13 academic year there were 15,316 homeless students in Jefferson County Public Schools, and an additional 1,091 homeless students in the surrounding Louisville MSA counties.

State of Metropolitan Housing Report 2013

The logical outcome of oppressing the same race and class of people was recognized by the Courier-Journal at least as early as 1888:

“The consequences of such conditions are obvious—a high death rate because of poor medical care and high rates of criminality, drunkenness and vice, which result from the depraving effects of poverty.” (Id.)

Its too late in the story for Louisville Leadership to appear baffled by black youth wreaking havoc from Waterfront Park to 15th Street, and to go seeking its causes amid the boarded vacant houses and broken homeless drug addicts and cagey dealers of the urban core. The cause lies in decades of development policy that favored east end growth and job creation while creating a black ghetto.

Without sophisticated political analysis or command of history, what the black youth has is its restless energy and choking frustration born of real experience at being appointed the underclass and object of white indignation to bolster the racist illusion of superiority. The kids have little respect because the leadership deserves none.

Since the arrival of slaves in 1619 at Jamestown the exploitation of blacks has never ended in America. As the internet media and iPhone generation becomes connected to the Goggle universe, the experience of the underclass has been transformed by ready answers from Wikipedia and History webpages. The curtain is being pulled back from the exploitive history in America and patience is wearing thin as it should.

Informed children don’t want to attach themselves to a society in which income inequality dooms everyone they know to a lifetime of poverty wage subservience. The proliferation of teenage rebels in the movies hoisting bows to oppose the authoritarian militarized plutocracy is having an impact. The iPad in the hand speaks the truth about the “suits” in the top 10% and their global designs.

Typically, city leaders will vote a $ million dollar increase in LMPD police patrol budgets and more money for new surveillance cameras for Waterfront Park.  Blinded by the illusion of superiority, the white controlling economic elite have employed the lower class as a fearful specter justifying new programs of criminal punishment.

The rest of the workforce clinging to its poverty wages will be chastened by the perp walk of the Descendants of Slaves.

Lincoln at Waterfront Park

“This late conceptualization of what “racism” is has imprinted on public understanding – including that of lawyers – the idea that racism is fundamentally a matter of attitude: of conscious belief and a will to act on that belief. That understanding has had incalculable consequences for American law, and for the larger society. It is that (mis–)understanding that this conference addressed.

[ ] sociologists have distinguished between two manifestations of racism:

• Traditional racism, of the Jim Crow, Ku Klux Klan variety; and

•  Structural racism, also known as institutional racism.

“The legal model of traditional racism focuses on an individual with a bad attitude. It assumes that the racist is aware of his beliefs and by acting on them, intends to bring about discriminatory results for the victim. He cooperates with others similarly ill–disposed to people of another race to act deliberately in a private or public capacity to adopt policies that discriminate against disfavored individuals.

The racist’s actions are presumed to be conscious and deliberate, and to most people today, morally reprehensible.

Absent such self–aware motivation, the perpetrator’s action cannot be  properly considered racist in any actionable legal sense.

The most important consequence of these assumptions is that the United States Supreme Court has shrink–wrapped equal protection doctrine to fit traditional racism and little else.

The Justices have displayed unease verging on hostility to legislative attempts, such as affirmative action programs, Title VII, or pupil assignment programs, that go beyond traditional understandings of racism to grapple with non–intent–based structural racism.

Eight characteristics distinguish structural racism from its traditional Jim Crow predecessor:

• Structural racism is to be found in racially–disparate outcomes, not invidious intent.

• Structural racism ascribes race as a basis of social organization to groups through a process of “racialization.”

• White advantage is just as important an outcome as black subordination, if not more so.

• Structural racism is invisible and operates behind the illusion of colorblindness and neutrality.

• Structural racism is sustained by a model of society that recognizes only the individual, not the social group, as a victim of racial injustice. This individualist outlook refuses to acknowledge collective harm, group responsibility, or a right to collective redress.

•The effects of structural racism are interconnected across multiple social domains (housing, education, medical care, nutrition, etc.).

•Structural racism is dynamic and cumulative. It replicates itself over time and adapts seamlessly to changing social conditions.

•Structural racism operates automatically and thus is perpetuated simply by doing nothing about it.

A major problem we encounter in discussing forms of racism other than the traditional volitional sort described here is the assumption that anything labeled “racism” must include all the components of traditional racism: prejudice, intent, and discrimination. Where these ingredients are

missing, the social phenomenon under discussion, such as residential segregation

and consequent inferior schooling, cannot be culpable, and is not remediable within the confines of the United States Supreme Court’s inadequate understanding of racism. Responsibility evaporates, and the law is helpless, short of legislative intervention . . .”

Traditional racism and Structural racism

From

Structural Racism and the Law in America Today: An Introduction

William M. Wiecek (2012)

Kentucky Law Journal Vol 100, No. 1

“A key goal of the 1968 Fair Housing Act (“FHA”), which was passed as an immediate response to Dr. King’s assassination,  was to replace the ghettos with “truly integrated and balanced living patterns.”  It hasn’t happened.

Today, more than four decades after the FHA’s passage, “residential segregation remains a key feature of America’s urban

landscape,”  continuing to condemn new generations of minorities to a second–class set of opportunities and undercutting a variety of national goals for all citizens.”

Overcoming Structural Barriers to Integrated Housing: A Back–to–the–Future Reflection on the Fair Housing Act’s “Affirmatively Further” Mandate Robert G. Schwemm

KY Law Journal Vol. 100 No. 1 (2012)

‘Hooverville’ along the railroad tracks in

Louisville 2013. Below: homeless sheltering under I-65 at Breckinridge.