Affirmative action with quotas!
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President George Bush's veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1990 has brought howls from liberals. Senator Edward Kennedy, the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, and top officials of the AFL-CIO point to Bush's action as proof that the Reagan era is not over. They urge working people and others to rally behind the Democratic Party so a veto-proof Congress is elected.
These crocodile tears, however, don't tell the whole story. The stance of the liberals, of all races, has the discrimination suffered by women. Race and sex discrimination is based on the conscious and deliberate actions by the government and employers-historically and to this day. Affirmative action without quotas is not very effective. The employers will do the the minimum to prevent legal suits and public pressure.
As a result, while progress has been made since the overthrow of legal segregation in the 1960s, civil rights gains have been under attack and are eroding. The reactionary claim that we live in a "colorblind" society is a lie. The latter term is a code word for the status quo: discrimination.
The 1989 Supreme Court rulings put more of the onus on victims to prove that their employers consciously discriminated against them before winning their claims. It is almost impossible to prove intent; especially under the Bush guideline that it allows employers to do so for justifiable business reasons.
The liberals give away the moral high ground when they agree with Bush and the Supreme Court that quotas are discriminatory. It means the debate becomes: how much discrimination is legal and okay. The average white male working person is therefore miseducated that the affirmative action rights of minorities and women are discriminatory, whether there are quotas or not.
That's a sham defense of civil rights. It is more harmful than good.
The debate on the proposed bill exposes the bipartisan retreat on civil rights. The fight is no longer on how to protect and extend civil rights. It is now over how much to concede. Not surprisingly avowed racists such as Louisiana's former Ku Klux Klan dragon David Duke, now a leading Republican in the state, hailed the Bush veto and even sat in the Senate gallery when the veto was upheld.
Working people need to rally in defense of affirmative action with quotas. Putting them in union contracts would be one place to start. Demanding that the government and courts fully enforce all existing civil rights laws should also be a top priority of the trade unions, Black rights, and women's rights organizations.
Managua continues to swell, Ramirez said, as unemployed agricultural workers and their families drift into the city. There is no industrial production of any kind. The mood is explosive.
In our conversation, Ramirez refused to consider expropriation of the large landholders. He would not even support government or worker management of the large estates.
But he joined the chorus in condemning the past behavior of these people: They accounted for the bulk of decapitalization. They bilked the government of hundreds of millions by not repaying loans, they diverted to U.S. banks their profits from government subsidies, and they smuggled out government-supplied farm machinery.
How could he hold this position of denying an extensive agricultura