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

Stevil, you're smarter than that. When was the last time "European Americans" had their entire culture and very being dominated by another group of people who made them subservient to the economic and social underpinnings of their society? You could make a case for Spain and the Muslims, but otherwise the SYSTEMIC racism I'm referencing is almost exclusively "you and me against the world" (assuming you are like me - a white/Euro-American kinda guy - don't know if that's true).

The point is that racism is more than one person treating another person poorly. "I don't like you, you're white."=="I don't like you you're black." It's an entire society whose norms and expectations are set up for us to "reasonably" justify why we should be nervous walking down the street past a group of black kids versus a group of white kids. Or why people are so ready to hear "black people" when a politician talks about "people on welfare."

Until "European Americans" spend a few generations building the economic base of some country as slaves, I really think reverse racism is complete and utter horseshit that only serves to indicate that the speaker just doesn't get it. That doesn't mean that someone who discriminates against you because you are white is justified. Just don't think that it is equivalent to what a "non-white" person is confronted with on a daily basis in this country. All the bullshit p.c. govt programs in the world won't offset a racist society. It takes education and people willing to try and understand the complexity of what the hell is going on. Going by message boards and blogs, I have little hope for the future.

[img]https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-KXLeZfdl1vQ/UGI...

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.

Who is making the claim that Brown is directly at fault? Not I. I simply find him to be responsible for his staff as they are his representatives. If the cashier at McDonalds spits in your food, it's the cashier's fault, but it's McDonalds' responsibility to correct the situation.

This isn't a football game and your side didn't fumble. Scott Brown is a Senator first and candidate second. He has a responsibility to correct a situation that his subordinates created by their intentionally bigoted actions. By distracting from that point, you belittle the seriousness of the offense in an attempt to defuse the situation and turn it back into a political football that can be scored for one side or the other. That is wholly inappropriate.

Furthermore, you were first and foremost attempting to deflect attention from Brown by using a tu quoque logical fallacy ("oh yeah, but Deval..."). To reshape it into some sort of high-minded attempt at satire and hyperbole is naked and unappealing.