http://www.buzzfeed.com/joeflood/how-white-people-made-it-big-by-getting-government
check out the smug trying to look down on Oprah is he jealous she's richer them he is?
“The demographics are changing. It's not a traditional America anymore,” a glum Bill O'Reilly said during Fox News' Election Day coverage. “And the voters, many of them, feel that this economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff... People feel that they are entitled to things. And which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”
What O'Reilly — and other members of what the Fox host called the "white establishment" who are blaming Obama's re-election on minority-group moochers — aren't mentioning is that white Americans have their own long tradition of using voting power to get an economic leg up.O'Reilly's own Irish-Catholic cohort is now seen as just another group that makes up the “traditional” establishment. But when the Irish were chased to America by famine and British repression during the 19th century, they faced violent attacks from nativist groups, political cartoons caricaturing them as apes, “Help Wanted — No Irish Need Apply” signs, anda butcher knife–wielding, one-eyed Daniel Day Lewis.Desperately poor, uneducated, and barred from even menial jobs, the one tool the Irish had at their disposal was their sheer numbers — according to Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer's bookBeyond the Melting Pot, by 1855, 28% of New Yorkers were Irish-born, with cities like Boston experiencing a similar surge. The Irish turned out in droves to support urban Democratic political machines, and in return collected the Christmas turkeys and government jobs that came with their newfound power.
typical right wing thinking "i got mind, but you can't have any cause it's mine too".
"When you were elected mayor of a big city," says historian David Nasaw, author of an epic Joseph Kennedy biography called The Patriarch due out next week, "you had fire department jobs, police jobs, you had teaching jobs, all kinds of jobs at all kinds of levels you could hire [Irish voters] for. The only way the Irish were going to climb their way into the middle class was through what we now call these civil service jobs. No one else was going to look after them."And it wasn't always just the ballot box, but also the bullet, that the Irish sometimes used to balance the scales of power. In 1863, New York City underwent three days of bloody draft riots that forced Abraham Lincoln to send troops from Gettysburg to Gotham. Poor Irish-Americans were enraged that they were being drafted and sent to die when wealthier citizens were able to pay their way out of service. The riots were put down and some of the organizers hung, but under the leadership of William "Boss" Tweed, New York's Tammany Hall political machine funneled jobs and money for schools, housing, and health care to the Irish in return for their peace and electoral support.
"he who forgets history is destined to have it repeated in their face", paraphrase notice O'Reilly brags all the time how rich he is but he still begrudges them the same path his ancestors took, how selfish can you be? today more whites are on the receiving end of gov't "stuff", so you people he calls "the folks" how many of you are in that category and is he really looking out for your welfare or making sure you don't take too much?
