Racism and Texas politics

The Russkies and/or Diebold do not need to steal the elections if they have gerrymandered the districts so that their minority of votes will always return a majority of the representatives to the electoral body they are being elected to.

Obvious. Also very true. As an 18 year-old I left Texas for two months in July and August of 1961 and returned to find that I was paying a sales tax and that an income tax had become a violation of the Texas Constitution.

No conspiracy. It was just the wealthy Texas oil company owners (who else mattered in Texas politics then?) protecting their pocket books. and yes, it was a manipulation of the low-impact elections.

But LBJ was elected Vice President in that year, 1961. Unfortunately, he had run both for Senator and for Vice President. In the special election for Senator to replace Johnson, a strange little man who had been a WW II navy enlisted man and taught government in Wichita Falls, Texas at Midwestern University.(John Tower). He and George Herbert Walker Bush between them cleaned up the Texas Republican Party so that it was no longer one of the conservative crazy parties (like American Nazi Party and the KKK - I knew members of all of these groups in high school - they switched between organizations back and forth) and became a serious political party in Texas.

Tower became a Senator and Bush was given the CIA by Nixon as a result of their building the Republican Party in Texas.

When the Civil Rights Movement became successful in Texans the Republican opposition to African-Americans in Texas went underground and was referred to by code words rather than by active  blatant racist language. But both Bush and Tower continued to run for elections as racist candidates.

Gerrymandered districts have been the key method of running racist campaigns in Texas  especially since Karl Rove took over the Bush campaign for governor and defeated Ann Richards. Based on this same racism to attract many voters, George W. Bush was elected President.  But it could no longer be blatant in-your-face racism.

Such racism created anti-racist blowback that made it ineffective. Since the Presidential election of 2000 the racism has had to be dog whistles in which the racists coordinate using code words the rest of us no longer recognize. I suspect that the blatant racism as a campaign tactic was a key element of the election of Barack Obama.

So after 2008, liberal anti-racists thought we had won with Obama. McConnell proved us wrong, and we drew the wrong conclusions. The Presidential election of 2008 was not the victory for anti-racism.

The elections in America continue to this day to be about race and racism, not about the code words liberal and conservative. Those words are European in origin and are used by American politicians to conceal the degree of racism they are appealing to in our elections. Conservatives hide their racism to avoid liberal blow-back. And we anti-racists  let them do it. But every time we let the political discussion shift to European ideas of economics, we liberals are conceding the racist vote. Economics in America are not about wealth or class relations. They are about the competition between Black and White races which - as created by the wealthy White Virginia slave-owning planters to prevent their serfs (White and African) from revolting and displacing them - was a way the wealthy plantation-owners manipulated the lower classes and kept their wealth to themselves. The owners and executive of Wells Fargo Bank have been conducting similar scams today.

(By creating chattel slavery,  wealthy owners marked two classes of serfs - white skins and dark skins. They passed laws against the dark skins owning weapons and required the white skins to own weapons and belong to the state militia. The state militia then was required to do nightly patrols to prevent the dark-skinned individuals - prevented by law from owning weapons - from revolting. Two separate law codes were created to separate the artificially created races and the white skinned ones were require to enforce those laws. RACE IS AN ARTIFICIAL CONSTRUCT! There is no difference between those of white skins and those of darker skins except the way the children are treated as they grow up!