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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (158275)	1/17/2003 12:44:01 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1574102

Yes, but not enough.........they are no way near making up the disparity: Most of the disparity has been made up when you consider how big it used to be. There is a lot left to go but raising racial consciousness is not the way to get there. Also even absent the slightest tinge of racism races will not always have everything equal. There are other sources of the disparity besides current racism or even besides current racism and lingering effects from past racism. If there had never been any racism, or even racism ends tomorrow and then we have no racism for the next 1000 years it would be unlikely that all races, or all people in different areas of the country or all people of any number of different groups would be exactly equal. I think the problem now is less continuing racism (even though racism has not gone away) as it is the aftereffects of past racism. But I think affirmative action 1 - Is itself racism and 2 - Encourages both a backlash racism and also at least some times a sense of entitlement among those it is supposed to benefit. 2 - Affirmative action doesn't make up for anything. It just adds to the injustice in the country and helps continue racial animosity. There is a price to be paid when there is injustice.....you don't get away with murder. People who did murder shouldn't be allowed to get away with it, but I'm not sure that people with racist attitudes or who legally discriminated before civil rights laws should be punished. Ex-post facto laws are a very bad thing and are unconstitutional. But even more important then that is the fact that most people who you want to punish are not guilty of anything. The only people you could rightfully punish for slavery and slave trading are dead. The people you could punish for Jim Crow laws and other forms of official discrimination are old or dead. Re: Easter Germany - Worse......equal pay for less than equal work and education. They don't get equal pay. There is not a national pay scale. All they did was equalize the money. The result of that was a lot of people in the East lost their jobs. Also even if it was what you say it would not be worse. Paying two people who are not equally productive the same is not as bad as hiring and firing based on race. The two are not connected........both East and West have high unemployment, but in the East, its structural...their industries could not compete. They are indeed connected. Since the East was not very competitive its only real chance to compete was with lower salaries. Some of the people in the East do have lower salaries but right at the moment when the currency conversion took place they did not because the currencies where set to be equal; and it is hard to reduce salaries so it will take some time for the East German salaries to find their natural level. This is hardly the only reason for unemployment in the east but it is an additional factor keeping people out of jobs. Tim