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Business4Wales
- Caerphilly-based workplace services provider PHS Group appoints a new chief executive
- Governor’s storm warning as Bank slashes growth forecast
- Unemployment fell by 45,000 between January and March to 2.63 million, official figures showed today.
- Chief executive of the Principality Building Society Peter Griffiths to stand down
- Dairy and sports nutrition firm launch new fitness shake
Well done spin on complex political and cultural issues. Let’s leave it at this: People created and came to the US for opportunity and to escape government intervention in their lives. It’s as much a cultural issue (that makes many Americans different from Europeans – continental or islanders) as it is political. Our Constitution was designed to minimize government and created checks and balances to prevent any one group from gaining complete control. The Obama administration has attempted to circumvent some of these checks and balances. And the Constitution is extremely important to the majority of Americans. Despite your following the “line” of the left-wing of the Democrats, the US will survive if Republicans gain influence.
I have no argument with the fact that the US will survive more Republican influence. I also believe that we in the UK have far too much government and EU interference in our lives although I suppose it could be argued that it curtails warfare between European nations.
I also heartily wish that we had a written Constitution on the lines of the truly admirable American Constitution.
Nevertheless, obervers from this side of the Atlantic view what is happening with the politics of the right with bemusement and sometimes outright horror. So let’s leave it at that.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking the Republiçan landslide in the House of Representatives and State Governorships is a vote for the Republicans. It was, primarily, an anti-Democrat vote. If the Republicans become arrogant and push too far to the right as the Democrats did in pushing too far to the left, the Republicans will lose in 2012 and many think a new, Centrist party, could very will emerge.
Part of the perception problem in your part of the world is that much of the European press doesn’t understand the American mind just as much of the American press doesn’t understand the various European mindsets.
It’s slightly naught to Derry to try and hide behind a sort of ad hominem-lite, but it certainly is the case that there are problems of perception. Comparing the media on both sides of the Atlantic, my distinct impression is that, while European commentators don’t necessarily accept the narratives that some people in the USA would like them to reiterate, many US commentators are quite exuberantly misinformed, even about their own country.
I also agree with admin about the US Constitution. If told that I had to start a new country somewhere next Monday, I’d name it as one of the founding documents, together with the Code Civil, the Rules of the Tredegar and District Working Men’s Medical Aid Society, the Rulebook of the Great Western Railway, and Geiriadur Bruce.
Ah yes! The Rules of the Tredegar and District Working Men’s Medical Aid Society. Good choice!
Re American politics, I have been reading Robert A Caro’s masterpiece on LBJ and the first Civil Rights bill – it seems that extreme polarisation on some fundamental issues is a thread that runs through US politics like a fault line and which takes extraordinary almost superhuman effort to patch over and bridge. As a case in point, the health bill initiated by Obama is clearly a ‘flawed’, compromised and ‘weak’ piece of legislation and yet it serves to ‘break the virginity’ in the colourful words of LBJ and over the years can be strengthened and added to in future years just as the Civil Rights Bill has been.
Obama seems to be just as much a war monger as Bush was.
1. Perception: I’ve seen numerous claims by European commentators that Republicans are racists. Fourteen of the 60 Republican House members elected Tuesday are black, the Republican governor-elect of South Carolina is an Indian woman, three of the newly-elected Republican senators are Hispanic and the chair of the Republican National Committee is black, to name a few. Odd for a racist party?
2. One reason American politics is divisive is that the founding fathers wanted it that way (see my first post). The basis of our country is the Constitution, a legalistic document, and the Bill of Rights, a humanistic document. In several respects, they contradict each other.
So we argue about that (a lot). While neither major party is totally one way or the other, broadly speaking the Republicans are Constitutionalists and the Democrats are Bill of Righters.
3. For the most part, critics of Obamacare do not disagree with the intent. They believe the bill fails to attack the problem in a sensible, constitutional way. So admin’s comments are correct.
Regarding Toby’s notions about forming a new country, I suspect an inside joke here. So being an outsider, I shall let it pass except to say if his idea is a good one, why not use it with the Welsh Assembly?
If it had been up to me, rather than installing a cardboard replica of Westminster I’d have used the Welsh translation of the US Constitution that the emigrants on board the ‘Mimosa’ took to Patagonia in 1865.
Speaking of Welsh emigrants, you might find it interesting that Utah, which is one of the three or four most reliably Republican states, has a higher percentage of its citizens claiming Welsh ancestry than any other state. In total numbers, however, Pennsylvania and Ohio have the most, thanks to coal.
Utah also leads the nation in the number of Mormons and polygamists.
The Welsh were certainly heavily committed to the founding of the Republican Party, as they tended to be both strongly Unionist and Abolitionist.
Which raises an interesting question: why is Country and Western, the music of the defeated South, one of the most popular genres here?
By the way, I would still say that any country where Fox cab pass as a news channel is in deep wombats doo-doos.
Country music evolved from the music of Celtic immigrants, Although it spread through the south faster than it spread elsewhere, it really isn’t as southern as it is Appalachian (as in Appalachian mountains) in origin. an area in which there were few slaveholders because the terrain did does not lend itself to the agriculture slaveholders practiced.
Two professors at Texas Christian University wrote a book several years ago called “The Cracker Culture” that claimed the culture of the South was rooted in Celtic culture while the North was rooted in Anglo-Saxon culture. They noted that 80% of the names in southern cemeteries of people who died before 1820 were Celtic. (continued on next post)
Western music originated with cowboys (who came from everywhere) in the 1800s. After WWII, Country and Western got joined at the hip commercially, though it’s easy to tell the difference. Meanwhile, “Bluegrass” emerged which kept truer to the Appalachian tradition, though it has jazz and black influences and usually a strong backbeat. So to your question: By “here”, do you mean Utah? Utah is a western state with a western tradition. If here means generally here and there, we are a mobile people, so cultural things spread. And don’t forget radio. Though stronger in some areas than in others, you will find country and bluegrass throughout the United States. Western is more limited because, I think, it is less interesting and has less variety. Hope this helps.
‘Here’ is Wales.
It’s certainly the case that jazz and blues received a great boost here from the presence from 1942 onwards of African-American soldiers, especially in the Southwest. C&W had, with equal certainty, taken root by about 1960. However, nobody can explain how. It had just become part of the wallpaper, without anybody’s noticing. It had also started happening in Welsh. In Geraint Griffiths’ album ‘Rebel’, Wales and the South have been seamlessly joined – the track about the burning of Atlanta is especially powerful. Jon Dressel’s writings might throw some light on the conceptual affinities, but the process by which the music took hold – even to the extent of being sung in Welsh – remains obscure.
Over 30 years ago I met a very nice professor from BYU who was doing his Sabbatical in Aberystwyth. He was having great fun looking at documents illustrating the life and work of his ancestor, Captain Daniel Jones, who seems to have translated the Book of Mormon into Welsh and encouraged thousands of people to set out for the place they called Dinas y Llyn Halen.
I’ll see if I can find the “Rebel” album.
Yes, the Mormons were very successful in Wales and in getting converts to emigrate to Utah. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir began as a Welsh singing society.
Regarding Fox: MSNBC, a leftward “news” channel, is worse than Fox which garners the most viewers of cable tv news channels by some margin. There aren’t many wombats in the US, so we can’t be too deep in their doo-doos. On the other hand, many Americans consider BBC a bit to the left.
This a fascinating discussion on American history and politics, if either of you want to contribute an article on the subject please contact us and we’d be glad to publish it here.
The Mormons apparently call their version of heaven ‘Beulah land’ and this is where they go when they die. Is this any kind of reference to any of the many places in Wales called Beulah?
I will indeed try and put together a few thoughts on the subject, which is a very interesting one. Much of the piece will take the form of questions rather than assertions.
I DO like the charming fantasy of the BBC as a left-leaning body. Having worked there at one point of my chequered career, I’m trying to work out exactly ‘a bit to the left’ might mean in this context, though.
1. Beulah in a religious sense was popularized by a hymn written by Edgar Page Stiles around 1875. Stiles took the term from the King James version of Isaiah 62:4. The idea that Beulah Land represents heaven comes from John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”. The notion also is found among some evangelicals and fundamentalists.
2. A bit to the left should be perfectly clear, Toby. It’s less to the left than far left.
3. Not being as creative as Toby, I would appreciate a bit more guidance (as opposed to a lot more) as to what direction, focus, etc. you prefer in an article.
ANYTHING to the left would have had the rock-ribbed Tories amongst whom I worked spluttering into their gin. And, unlike some of the Fox footage I’ve seen, they always knew the difference between reportage and having an adolescent rant.
Let’s just each think up a piece, dump it on this platform, and leave it up to the punters to come back fighting (or fainting, or whatever).
I finished a piece of about 750 words that touches on how 1. the U.S. founding documents facilitate conflict and 2. the tea party basically is a group reaching back to recover one historical interpretation of those documents. As a technical Luddite, I have no idea how to send it other than to use a bunch of small response spaces like the one on which this note is written.
Are you interested in an item about the fact that every injustice imposed on black slaves in America was first used on whites? My source is “The Shaping of Black America” by Lerone Bennett Jr, a black American historian who is black. Or would you prefer something (much shorter)about the Welsh in U.S. coal mines?
Sorry to be so tardy in stumping up, boys and girls. Everything’s been such a whirl.
An American thing … hmmm … I’m not certain how this applies to people who, at least in their more lucid moments, are so plainly in thrall to various dead French and Austrian economists.
It seems a recurring trope in American politics for the desperately worried to respond to existential fear by claiming to be channelling the Founding Fathers. At least the current exponents don’t claim that they Know Nothing, unlike the ‘nativists’ who ended up as one of the constituent elements of the original Republican Party.
With a change of language and boo-words, the Tea Party movement looks uncannily like the tendency in French politics during the Fifties that crystallized into the UFF. Leaving aside the hysterical rhetoric and the loopy conspiracy theories, there’s the same moral panic about taxation (the tendencies feeding into the UFF managed to inhibit the accrual of revenue in some areas, by the way), the same unshakable conviction that alien and treasonous elements are endangering the existence of the state, the same denunciation of the political class per se by individuals desperate to join it, and the same relish at talk of arms and armed force.
Switching back to 2011, what do we see in the USA? An anglophone version of Poujadism, an unwinnable colonial war, and a government that gives the appearance of drifting and of trying to conciliate people determined to eliminate it. Mes braves, we’ve been here before. I’m worried. In fact, I’m bloody worried.
A federal court appears to agree with the Tea Partiers. Yesterday, it supported the 26 states that sued he federal government charging that Obamacare violates the Constitution because it is contrary to the Commerce Clause. The court agreed that forcing someone to buy a commercial product under threat of penalty is unconstitutional and because that requirement underpins the functionality of Obamacare, the entire law is null and void.
The Federal government is appealing the case and the guess is that it will be “fast-tacked” directly to the Supreme Court. The situation now is chaotic because the Federal government is attempting to enforce a law that has been declared unconstitutional. The odds favor a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that upholds the lower court determination.
Now to a couple of points Toby makes (I think – he doesn’t offer specifics).
1. Many Americans are enthralled by some of those dead economists because their economic theories work a little better than the ones with which President Obama is enthralled.
2. There is no effort to “eliminate” government but to return it to the role originally assigned to it by the Constitution. It may be difficult for Toby to understand or to accept, but many Americans have no desire to find themselves in a Western Hemisphere version of European Socialism which appears to be where the Obama Administration and the leftward Democrats are attempting to take the country.
3. When you are up to your ass in debt, maybe it’s time to panic.