Cadillacs zoom in America

LONDON In the early 1970 s, Saudi Arabia s King Faisal reportedly confided to senior members of the royal family his fear that, just as in a single generation the country had moved from riding camels to riding Cadillacs .the next generation could be riding camels again.

Precisely for this reason, political opportunists in the US have long used the race card to discredit welfare and redistribution, from the Jim Crow system that segregated blacks in the South before 1964 to the infamous Reagan era charge about black welfare queens who drive Cadillacs. Right wing white politicians, predisposed against taxes and redistribution, use the race issue to secure the votes of poor whites, who otherwise might vote differently on purely economic grounds.