St. Louis CofCC Blog

Mayor Slay:

I plan to spend most of today (and some of tomorrow) on an airplane [but not a slow boat -- ed.]. Along with a delegation of regional and state officials, I am traveling to China to suggest that the central geography, moderate climate, established transportation infrastructure, and lower costs of St. Louis make us the perfect choice of that country’s Ministry of Commerce for a new air freight hub.

(snip)

It is a simple economic reality that more and more US goods will be going to China over the next several decades. An airfreight hub in St. Louis makes perfect sense.

You actually think that the Chinese government wants an airline hub in the middle of America because they want to make it easier to sell American manufactured goods in China?  Actually, it’s more like the other way around.

To assume that is to assume (just as obliviously) that America still manufactures anything.  If there are going to be any goods transported from America to China via this airline hub, it will be raw materials to help China grow and sustain its own manufacturing base.  The items manufactured in China will then go in the opposite direction, to razzle and dazzle the patrons at Big Box Mart.

World Net Daily:

2nd Obama-linked pastor under fire for racist talk

Sen. Barack Obama has been linked to another controversial pastor, this time a declared spiritual adviser who has called white American mayors “slave masters,” and referred to black preachers and politicians who “protect” the “white man” as “house n-ggers.”

“We don’t have slave masters, we got mayors,” exclaimed James Meeks, an Illinois state senator and pastor of one of the largest churches in the state, in an August, 2006 sermon broadcast on a Chicago community television channel.

The speech was broadcast last week by Fox News Channel’s “Hannity and Colmes.”

Continued Meeks in the sermon: “But they are still the same white people who are presiding over systems where black people are not able to be educated. You got some preachers that are house n-ggers. You got some elected officials that are house n-ggers. Rather than them try and break this up, they’re gonna fight you to protect that white man.”

Meeks at the time was lashing out at Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley over public-school funding issues.

I think Pastor Meeks is just lashing out at Mayor Daley and his whiteness in general.  It has to do with the racial animosity in Chicago and its history of mayoral selection.

In 1983, the city’s black political machine defeated the decades-old Daley machine, and elected one of its own (Harold Washington) as mayor, and it did so with a suspiciously high black turnout.  The machine held out after Washington’s death to elect another black mayor, but in 1989, the current Mayor Daley, son of the machine’s archon, exacted revenge and won back the mayor’s office.

What happened in 1989 foreshadows the future of American politics — the city’s population that isn’t white but isn’t black attained enough political clout, and for whatever reason, they weren’t (and still aren’t) too fond of the black establishment.  So the current Mayor Daley strung together a coalition of white and non-white-non-black voters to beat black the black machine, and elect himself as Mayor.  The coalition has held ever since then, and by the time it’s through, this Daley will have more tenure as mayor than the 21 years his father had.

Similarly, in Los Angeles, at the current time, neither white, black, Hispanic nor Asian voters have a majority clout on their own.  Therefore, a successful politician has to string together a coalition based on the racial conflict and frustration of the day.  In 2001, James Hahn exploited white-black-Asian fear of Hispanic power to beat Antonio Villaraigosa.  Four years later, the latter pulled the same trick using the other groups’ jealousy of whites to beat the incumbent Hahn.  Eventually, the Hispanics will have the numbers, but until then, coalition-stringing is necessary.

The Chicago city’s black machine has been reeling from that setback ever since, blaming Daley for every pothole and hung toenail in town.  It’s purely racial jealousy on Meeks’s part.

UPDATE 3/25:  It looks like Rev. Meeks has been playing with dirty Rezkobucks.