Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Donald’s law.

Based on their rhetoric of late, it seems clear that, with the economy in very rough shape, the Trump administration is opting for a law-and-order driven campaign for re-election. Trump has always been fond of “tough on crime” rhetoric, partly because he likes to present himself as “tough”, but also because he is very much a product of his 70s, 80s, and 90s heyday when political careers were made and broken on the issue of crime and harsh punishment. He has a base, very rudimentary mentality, and one that is laser focused on visceral political issues. His rally speeches are like fascistic comedy routines during which he trots out tried and true laugh lines that pull directly from his generously proportioned sack of prejudices – the same exclusionary and self-aggrandizing posturing that resonated so deeply with his base in 2016.

Can that work in today’s America? I don’t freaking know. It seems like perhaps not, but maybe it can. All I know is that Trump is simply the most prominent standard bearer of this militarist approach to what’s called “public safety”, not its author. And while the Republican party seems most heavily invested in this madness, it is not their sole province; many Democrats have made their political bones on the …. well, bones of generations of young black, brown, and poor white men and women who populate our prisons and wear the chains of the carceral state after they’re released. Joe Biden is one of them. So is Amy Klobuchar. There are many more.

I recently re-listened to an interview of the well-known advocated for prison abolition Mariame Kaba on Chris Hayes’s podcast, and frankly she blew me away. Her critique of our current mess of a system – a system that fails nearly everyone – is spot-on, in my opinion, and she offers both a vision of a better alternative and a theory of change – in effect, a pathway to the vision. We pour $170 million into law enforcement, almost zero into alternatives to incarceration or community investment, and somehow expect things to improve on their own. And as she points out, it’s a system that does not even succeed on its own terms. Severe punishment for murder is meaningless when only 13% of those who murder are serving time, as is the case in Chicago. And policy built from trauma is almost definitionally bad. That’s how political careers are made – developing laws that punish whole classes of people on the basis of a single crime. That’s what Trump will leverage this fall – count on it.

We need to send Trump back to his shabby golden tower. But we can’t stop there. We have to follow through with what he’s telling his Klan rally audiences is the crazy agenda of the far left: building towards an alternative vision of public safety that provides for minimal application of force and maximal investment in under-served communities. That’s the path to a more just society.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Eyes open.

We’ve reached a moment in American life when blindness is no longer an option. When I say “American life”, I’m referring to the world of relatively comfortable white people, a world I inhabit. A lot of the people in this world were skeptical of the notion that racism is a feature of our society, not a bug. Many still are, I’m sure, but not as many as at the beginning of this year. We’ve seen race-based murder on the part of police and vigilantes many times in the decade prior to January 2020, but like mass shootings, they never seemed to move the needle on public opinion. And again, by “public opinion”, I mean the views of relatively comfortable white people, whose preferences and sentiments drive public policy (not as much as corporate power does, but to some degree).

In July of 2014, Eric Garner was choked to death by a New York City cop. It was an arbitrary, racist killing shockingly caught on video, and yet very little happened as a result. The cop was eventually fired, that’s about it. George Floyd was killed in a similarly arbitrary, racist manner, caught on video, but as if to underline the heinousness of the abuse of power that took Garner’s life, Floyd’s murderers affected a kind of casual air as they choked the life out of him, keeping the knee on his neck minutes after he stopped breathing. And the effect was like, listen up, white people, this REALLY is a thing. If you didn’t get it when you saw Eric Garner heinously murdered by a choke hold, here’s the same crime plus a kind of devil-may-care attitude and mutilation for good measure.

In 2015, Walter Scott was shot in the back by a cop. The heinous crime was, again, caught on video. The cop went to jail, but still, not a lot changed. Now, five years later, Rayshard Brooks was killed in a similar way, under similar circumstances in some respects, but with the added outrage of physical abuse of the wounded victim. When Scott fled, his assailant shot him, then dropped his taser next to his dying victim in an attempt to substantiate his bogus police report. When Brooks fled, his assailant shot him through the heart, then kicked him as he lay dying while another cop put his boot on Brooks’s shoulders. So here again, it was as if the gods were saying, take another look, white people – Walter Scott’s death was not some kind of unicorn. This shit happens all the time.

Obviously, it takes a lot to get through our thick skulls. But if the recent wanton murders of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor and others have opened some … perhaps most white people’s eyes a bit, well, better late than never, I suppose, though distinctly not better for the families of those we’ve lost.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Vox populi.

I’m going to open with a line from the late Trinidadian author and Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul (no leftist, btw): a million mutinies now! The primary election this past Tuesday in Georgia was an utter disaster, thanks to a republican-dominated political class dedicated to denying the vote to people of color and anyone else inclined to vote against the GOP. Once again, we’re seeing endless lines in predominately black districts, people waiting for three or more hours, standing in the rain, coping with dysfunctional machines and poorly trained poll workers. It’s a system designed to fail, and it did not disappoint. The combination of this chicanery and striking half a million people from the voter rolls was enough in 2018 to ensure Kemp’s election as governor, and it appears they have the pieces in place to game the November races as well.

The proximate reason for this meltdown was a precipitous replacement of all of the voting machines with new, touch-screen devices designed by a small company connected to the Governor’s campaign manager. Of course, they didn’t work properly. Poll workers were not properly trained on the devices, as they had only just been installed. Access keys were not working, so poll workers and voters were locked out of the machines. In many locations, provisional ballots were in short supply, so it’s likely that many thousands of people were disenfranchised, despite the court orders to keep the polls open beyond the designated closing time. In addition (or I should say, in subtraction), many polling locations had been eliminated prior to the vote, a decision that was not subject to prior review thanks to the Supreme Court’s striking down of the pre-clearance provision in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Shelby County v. Holder).

I’ve said this numerous times on this blog: when the Republicans win office, the first thing they do is try to lock the door behind them. With the presidency, the senate, many state legislatures and more than half of the nation’s governorships in their hands, they have been able to rewrite the rules, gerrymander the living shit out of districts, appoint hundreds and hundreds of reactionary judges, and basically stack the deck against progressive or even watery centrist challengers. On top of that, the President has been setting the predicate for crying fraud in the event he loses his re-elect this fall. That means the Democratic ticket, Biden presumably, needs to win big in order to overcome the shit-storm of challenges and heated rhetoric from the Trump camp. Because of the power dynamic between the two major parties (Republicans fanatically aggressive, Democrats a bit on the limp side), the GOP can afford to win narrow victories, like 2016. Democrats can’t. They need a blowout this November.

Can that happen? We shall see. Biden’s a bit fragile looking for a landslide, but hell … anything can happen. We know that, right? Til then, a million mutinies now!

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.