Imagine if Warren had claimed black ancestry: Would they have shown up with watermelons?

Oh goodd! Then black face isn't racist either, by your limited definition.

Lots of folks are unhappy about football teams that use tomahawk chops and war whoops. Because it's racist. People have been fighting it for years.

Those definitions of racist that you're using are really the core of the problem with "race" in this country (other places as well, but I'm just talking about the U.S.). First off it posits race as a real concept. It's not. It's not just that the belief of some races having superiority over others is the problem. It is the belief that "race" as a concept is anything more than a man-made construct for social ends and very useless as any sort of verifiable thing. Once you start digging into it, race is a useless idea. You want to talk about cultural differences or the genetics of specific populations, ok, but "race" is like talking about elves and unicorns.

Secondly, reducing racist activity to just the kind of behavior we can all shake our heads about when watching "Mississippi Burning" misses huge realms of wrong. It's not just the extremes like lynchings and apartheid -- it's all the little everyday things that work their way into the behavior, attitudes, beliefs and actions of "good" people who may have black/Latino/Asian friends, "so how could they be racist??"

By making this all about individual behavior, it leaves out the systemic nature of racism. It's a social construct for social ends. It keeps groups of people down to maintain other groups above. By not looking at the bigger picture of systemic racism, you'll never understand white privilege, because racism is just something that white trash do down south or in Appalachia or someplace else. A bunch of rambunctious guys supporting their candidate and calling out hypocrisy of the opponent couldn't possibly be racist. And what does football or old Hollywood movies have to do with race? "Lighten up." No. You get out of the dark.

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it wasn't directed at you. It was a formulation of your argument.

You want to talk about LVT steel? Fine:

Bankruptcy is built to handle “old” claims. The asbestos case we already talked about “old” that aren’t known at the time: people who were exposed but have not yet become sick.

LTV was a little different. The Coal Act was a special fund to pay health benefits to retired mine workers, won by the workers through a series of difficult strikes. The problem was that there were a great many workers, and the healthcare got expensive. The original plan was that companies handle their own ex-employees, and the government would handle the former employees of defunct companies.

In the 80s, a lot of mining and steel companies crashed. A series of companies went bankrupt; some tried to reorganize, which meant that there would continue to be an operating steel company. LTV was one that tried to reorganize.

In 1992, the government tried to address the huge health benefit shortfall by making all operating companies liable for a share of the total bill, even though the total included former employees of other companies. LTV said, wait, we dealt with these old claims for health benefits in the bankruptcy, through which it made some payments, but less than it owed. This was the position taken, I would imagine, by EW in the cert petition.

The cert petition was an appeal from an order that said “nope, this isn’t an old claim, but a new one– that must be paid in full by the reorganized company.” The UMW supported this decision because they wanted as much as possible paid into the fund.

The imposition of old claims against the reorganized company was a factor in the failure of the reorganized company, which shut down all plants and folded completely in 2000.

In the end, the health benefit fund was not paid in full, will not ever be paid in full, and there are 10 to 20 thousand fewer people working in the steel industry.

In my view, that is not a very good outcome, which is why her position was the correct one, even though not successful.

The difficult policy question is how to deal with the pension and benefit obligations of a formerly profitable industry with hundreds of thousands of employees once that industry ceases to exist.

The manner in which Brown, personally, refers to this in today’s paper is grossly misleading. At this point he has driven me completely off the fence–from where I was leaning Brown less than a week ago– to the other side.