Bold Ideas to Reset America

If you want to combat racial divisions in America, Malcolm Gladwell has a few ideas for doing just that. Spilled in rapid succession on The Carlos Watson Show and beginning with not giving a damn whether people end up liking each other, Gladwell says we must separate the conversations over race relations and whether the systems by which we run our society are fair. “I couldn’t care less whether white people are nice to Black people, or vice versa. To my mind, all that matters is that the fundamental structure of society be fair,” he said. Issues like voter suppression, redlining, reparations, legacies of Jim Crow — these are the serious issues that have profound impacts on an entire population.

Country star Roy Rogers got it right when he sang “Don’t Fence Me In,” as far as IT manager Lee Hunka is concerned. Shrink the power of the federal government — which has expanded far beyond the dreams of those men who once gathered in Philadelphia — and devolve more duties to states and localities via the 10th Amendment, this OZY reader says. “I want a government that’s in my life only enough to protect me from foreign intrusion. Not to tell me who I have to like, do business with, etc. Anything more should come from the state government, where I might have a little more influence.”

Curing poverty, unsurprisingly, would prove to be a major step toward curing the ills associated with poverty. All of which are presently being felt more keenly in the midst of a global COVID recession. The ability to see the interconnectivity that drives extreme poverty rates, access to education and improved living conditions for all is precisely the kind of big thinking we’d expect from the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, Gita Gopinath. Join her as she joins us on The Carlos Watson Show.

The problems of racism are grim, continuing and metastasizing into a daily drumbeat of “accidental” deaths for minor traffic stops, buying cigarettes, playing, driving or being at home sleeping. Shouldn’t there be a law? Criminalizing racism could start with ending protections that shield law enforcement from civil rights violations. Additionally, America could follow Europe’s lead by levying charges against those who trade in racist hate speech. And here’s a truly wild idea: Ban racist voting by overturning results where one candidate makes racist appeals. Sounds crazy? The Supreme Court has already ruled that a jury verdict can be overturned when a juror expresses overt bigotry. So why not elections too?

If you’re looking to solve the U.S.-Mexico border crisis, the solution, according to Mexican journalist León Krauze, starts with looking to the so-called Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, where people are fleeing north for “a shot at survival,” writes Krauze. The problems there have everything to do not only with crime but also the kind of corruption that makes sending $4 billion in aid to the region a skosh worrying. How to combat that? According to the U.S. State Department, by only giving the money to governments that have advanced anti-corruption efforts.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo just signed a bill to legalize recreational marijuana in New York, requiring at least 40 percent of the revenue to be steered to minority communities. By the same token, Ald. Robin Rue Simmons of Evanston, Illinois, passed a historic resolution establishing a $10 million housing and economic reparations fund to develop programs for Black Evanston residents. But OZY Editor-at-Large Christina Greer asks: “Why not 50 percent? Heck, why not the entire thing? Certainly, there are more cities than New York with these intentions. The advent of the marijuana boom cannot continue while paying a pittance to those imprisoned along the way.”

Over the past few years, Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee for president, became the leading anti-Trump Republican voice in Congress. Now, in the Biden era, he’s making heads turn with the Family Security Act — a new take on federal anti-poverty programs. The plan would involve a monthly cash payment for all but the wealthiest American families of $350 per young child and $250 per school-age child to replace the less generous child tax credit, coupled with other tax reform measures to avoid adding to the deficit. Romney estimates the plan would immediately lift 3 million children out of poverty. “We have not comprehensively reformed our family support system in nearly three decades, and our changing economy has left millions of families behind,” Romney said in announcing the proposal. “Now is the time to renew our commitment to families to help them meet the challenges they face as they take on the most important work any of us will ever do — raising our society’s children.”

If you take the same paths to the same places and expect to end up someplace different, you might be making a mistake. So when Sen. Sarah McBride became the nation’s highest-ranking elected transgender official, it seemed pretty clear that she had upended the old arithmetic. For a glimpse into greater LGBTQ representation in politics and how that expands our palette of choices and solutions, join her when she joins us on The Carlos Watson Show.

You can study all you want, but to have any real sense of how the have-nots live in America, it’s much better that you experience what it’s like to be a have-not. Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, grew up poor and gay. Walker believes that the recipe for equitable access to success in America is a collaboration between federal programs/aid and private philanthropy stepping up to fill the gaps. As a guest on The Carlos Watson Show, he said “the effort that my country, that private philanthropy,” made to “finance my education” and “invest in me made it possible for me to be successful.”

The Black Lives Matter movement has always been a divisive one. Actor Terry Crews got caught in the crossfire when he tweeted, “Defeating White supremacy without White people creates Black supremacy. Equality is the truth.” While some felt the tweet was akin to the statement “all lives matter,” as Crews revealed to Carlos Watson, he agrees with Black Lives Matter but was expressing his discomfort with the small percentage of BLM supporters he feels are “super militant” and alienating people by using violent rhetoric. He also pushed back against “cancel culture,” saying that within the Black community, “we have to be able to speak.” He called out cancel culture for toying with the line between “culture and cult.”