I don’t think Dunkin Donuts or capitalism in general is racist in itself. Its just a basic tool in the toolbox for splitting people up, keeping them disorganized and breaking down the social bonds that lead people to have supportive feelings about each other. This de-socialization is really a key element in getting wealth and decision making into the hands of private power. Divide and conquer. Identity politics. Its complicated ‘tho. You have to pick a vulnerable target to match the situation, and you can’t go too far, or it can backfire. Right now in many situations of course Arabic peoples are the vulnerable target. A good media person has good instincts here, that’s how you get ahead in the game and maximize funding from the advertisers. Michelle Malkin’s nationally syndicated column is doing very well.

On her website it looks like she’s also having fun with several other people dividers. Illegal immigrants is a great program of course, it attacks us on so many levels. It incorporates racism, but also increases the percentage of the working class who have no political or social rights at all. It drives down wages, pitting legal and illegal sectors of the working class against each other instead of uniting in common interest against the ruling class, etc. That’s why we have it, not porous borders. Other countries with more difficult borders maintain 100% control when they want to. In Europe they chose to use the “guest worker” program to split people up, some of the ruling class wants to implement that in the US now, that’s what they’re talking about on the TV when they say “immigration reform”.

More interesting on the web site is how Malkin is working on splitting up the coffee drinkers. Dunkin Donuts (“conservative”) vs. Starbucks (“liberal”). This corresponds to a big effort here throughout the media, check it out on your computer. Its usually in the context of “conservative” verses “liberal”. Consistent efforts to portray country music as “conservative” and rock music as “liberal”, gun nuts as “conservative” and non-gun nuts as “liberal”, Christians as conservative, etc. Which of course in the reality of everyday people is bullshit. The Beach Boys are Reaganites and Merl Haggard loves Hilary Clinton, etc. Right wing gays and hippys abound, I know some. The actual social mores of a “conservative” bible belt person of course exceed the wildest decadent fantasies of your stereotypical “east coast liberal” intellectual.

Dear Wingnuttia,
Congratulations.  With this latest five-alarm inferno of assembly-line red-bating stupid you have finally roasted the shark that you gleefully keep jumping over and covered its charred remains in a burial shroud that maybe-kinda-sorta…

I think that using the symbols of a murderous dictatorship for that purpose is probably a lot more upsetting to a lot more people (like, say, many of the Armenians who have immigrated to the United States and congregated in the western states) than a vaguely kaffiyeh-looking scarf showing up in a TV commercial. But, then, we’re talking about people who actually suffered through living in the Soviet Union under that regime. Comparing their sufferings to 9/11 is pretty out of proportion.