Tag Archives: congress

Political Rants

Back at it.

The year is just getting started, and already there are too many things to write about. Let’s start with the obvious.

New Congress. The all-new, all-GOP controlled Congress is now in session, with old Kentucky Mitch holding the gavel in the first Republican-led Senate since 2006. You might think you could resist, even for a single moment, the impressionThe Keystone cop that the GOP is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America, the energy companies, and Wall Street … but that wasn’t possible even on  the first day of the session. Our representatives are ready to push forward the Keystone XL pipeline, repeating all the bogus claims that this project will create jobs, jobs, jobs, make America more energy secure, and is only opposed by “environmental extremists”. Sure, blow up the atmosphere on your first day. Good going, Kentucky Mitch.

Charlie Hebdo. The sickening murder of 12 people in Paris by extremists has focused our media-driven culture on the issue of speech freedom. The principle is a good one. I have to say, though, that we live in strange times when the symbols of free speech are somewhat vulgar and childish cartoons about the prophet Mohammed and some dumb-ass Seth Rogen movie. You’d like to think that if people are going to sacrifice their lives and those of their colleagues for freedom of expression, it would be over something that really needed saying. In any case, for all of the anxiety over a threat to free speech, I hope people save some concern for ethnic Algerians in France, who will now be the target of even greater abuse than the substantial measure typically meted out to them.

P.S. – Just so no one understands me, I think Charlie Hebdo and anyone else has every right to publish whatever the hell they want without fear of harassment, imprisonment, or terror attack. People also have the free-speech right to say a particular piece is dumb, inflammatory, gratuitous, childish, etc. (I’ve said as much about our own podcast. Useless rubbish!)

Palestinians and the ICC. I’m not a big believer in the International Criminal Court. The minute they haul a powerful nation in and put them on the dock, I’ll start believing. As of right now, it’s victor’s justice. That said, it’s always a positive thing when there’s a move in the direction of real justice, however modest. Establishing the principle that, say, Netanyahu might be held accountable for killing more than a thousand Palestinians last summer, is worth doing. That would be a far cry from accountability, but a place to start at the very least.

Do that and Cheney might need to start sweating a little. Not much, but … a little.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

New year, old ways.

It’s January 2015 (news flash!) and we’re on the brink of true divided national government – Congress in the hands of one party, the Presidency controlled by the other, and a 5-4 split on the Supreme Court. If electoral politics may be considered by anyone to be a true measure of the nation’s policy aspirations, it’s hard to see how we have reached this outcome. We hear from our corporate media that the American people are tired of gridlock and dysfunction in Congress, and yet the electorate has rewarded the faction most responsible for these maladies with control of the Senate and an expanded majority in the House. Is there any expectation on the part of those who voted in the last election that Congress will function more smoothly and more effectively as a result?

95% for the 1%Perhaps it’s simply that our Congressional elections are really 435 tiny local races rather than one big, national one; that each district decides on the basis of who’s running and who’s most likely to show up at the polls. My home district, New York’s 22nd (the fighting 22nd!) is a pretty good example. Our representative, Republican Richard Hanna, ran unopposed last year. The Democratic Party won the seat for the first time in a generation in 2006, lost it in 2010 and again in 2012, and apparently decided it wasn’t worth spending any more money on. Hanna is far from the most reactionary member of his caucus, but he is a conservative Republican in the traditional sense, holding a 95% rating with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and an “A” rating from the NRA, so it would have been nice to have someone else to vote for. So much for that.

Hanna presents himself as a moderate, at least between elections, as do some other upstate Republicans (like the recently elected John Katko, who unseated Democrat Dan Maffei this past November). But the effect of their presence has not been to moderate their caucus; they generally support their leadership. (Katko claims he will be independent, but I’ll believe it when I see it.) When you cast your vote as a member of the House of Representatives to elect leaders that will willingly drive the country over a cliff economically (through austerity budgets), environmentally (through inaction on climate change and support for domestic oil production and the Keystone pipeline), and in the realm of foreign policy (with support for interventionist policies around the globe), it makes little difference what you call yourself. You are part of the problem.

So … happy new year, friends. Let’s work to make 2015 better than the lousy year we just left behind.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Unopposed.

Do we live in a democracy? Formally speaking, yes, if by democracy you mean representative democracy and, for most races, one person, one vote. But an election truly democratic if an incumbent runs unopposed? What choice is there but to assent or remain at home? That is the reality for a significant number of communities across the country, including my own. Our Congressman, Richard Hanna, will not face a Democratic opponent this fall. The county Democratic party has said they could not find anyone willing to run. What that tells me is, they likely could not find a millionaire, because after losing to the G.O.P. twice, the national Democratic party is probably not willing to drop another thin dime on this district.

Permanent fixture?That has been the situation here over very long stretches of time, including every election throughout my youth, but there have been exceptions. One was the election of 2006, when our longtime Republican Congressman Sherry Boehlert retired. The national Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee saw an opportunity in what seemed like (and turned out to be) a Democratic-leaning year. They poured some significant resources into this district in support of the local D.A. at the time, Michael Arcuri. I worked on the campaign, manning the phone bank, and it was unlike anything I had seen short of a presidential campaign. They leased a building (an old restaurant) and set up a VOIP phone system with about 20 workstations. They sent a very sharp team of consultants to manage the ground game. It was a pretty impressive effort, and it succeeded, electing the first Democrat to that seat since well before my arrival on this planet.

Needless to say, the largess did not survive that election year. During Arcuri’s re-election campaign in 2008, the phone bank was in a cramped union headquarters in downtown Utica.  I used my cell phone for calls some nights. He got over the line just barely that year, apparently without significant investment on the part of the national party, only to be knocked off in the deluge of 2010, the consequences of which vex us still. Token opposition from a sadly underfunded  Democratic candidate ended in predictable failure to unseat Hanna last year, and now the DCCC has likely written this district off. So we’re stuck with a supposed moderate who sends me flyers on his efforts to protect the “2nd Amendment” against background checks, on his battle against “Obamacare”, and other clap-trap collateral handed to him by his much more generous national party.

So, hey … nothing to see here. Welcome to the one-party state that is Central New York … or as Schumer has dubbed it, “Silicon Valley of the Drones.”

luv u,

jp