Tag Archives: New York Times

Political Rants

“The Improvement association” needs improvement

I probably spend way too much time thinking about elections. I suspect you think so too, particularly since I’ve devoted so many blog posts to the subject. I even talked about it a lot on my short-lived political podcast, Strange Sound, though not so anyone would hear. The fact is, I kind of hate elections. They’re nerve-wracking as hell, they often turn out badly, and I’m not a big fan of suspense, especially when it runs all night long. But that’s just experience talking – long, bitter experience.

There are many things we can do that are more important than voting. Mutual aid, organizing, public service … all of these things make an immediate difference for people. But more than one thing can be important at the same time, and my contention has always been that voting is important enough to do, even if it isn’t as important as all that other stuff. For people like me – CIS-gender white males – the time commitment involved is negligible.

So, though I’m not a huge NPR fan, I was excited when I heard that a recent Serial Podcast had centered on elections in North Carolina and purported voter fraud. But after listening to it, I can only say that they kind of hid the ball. Or dropped it. Not sure which.

Organizing is the enemy

Without getting too deep in the weeds of the podcast, The Improvement Association – a co-production of NPR’s This American Life / Serial and the New York Times – talks about a political action committee in Bladen County, North Carolina that does get-out-the-vote efforts for black residents. They basically hand out a sample ballot with their recommendations and encourage people to support their list. In short, this is organizing 101, completely legal and above board, and a really effective way to drive turnout and support for Democratic candidates.

Naturally, the Association is under constant attack by white politicians, who accuse the organizers of voter fraud. They basically gaslight the organization, so that when an actual Republican voter fraud scheme is busted, somehow this black organization’s name is dragged into the conversation both on a local and a statewide level. The white people in this story – mostly Republicans – understand the power of this black voting block, and they’re using the tools available to them (i.e. baseless accusations of cheating) to undermine it. What is more of a threat to white power than organized black people?

Strange focus

What kind of astonishes me about this podcast is the degree to which the reporter, Zoe Chase, gets sidetracked by this internal power struggle within the PAC. Now, it should come as a surprise to no one that organizers and political agitators tend to have egos. It seems likely that the two lead organizers, Horace and Cogdell, push to get their own way in the context of the organization. But if the ultimate goal is more power and resources for black people in the sea of white people known as North Carolina, is this all that bad?

Chase follows Cogdell’s efforts to elect three black councilmembers in a little town named Elizabethtown – a majority black community run by rich, white people, where there is virtually no public investment in the black neighborhoods. Chase spends a lot of time on the critics’ accusation that Cogdell is doing this so that he will be able to control these three black women on the town council. In the end, Cogdell’s candidates lose, and his colleague Horace suggests that this was essentially because black people were voting against their own interests for one reason or another. This is Chase’s take on Horace:

“It’s always zero sum with Horace when it comes to politics. I’ve learned that. If you’re not with him, you’re against him. And if you’re against him, you’re wrong.“

The thing that must not be named

On the other hand, what I hear from Cogdell is a pretty reasonable economic, almost Marxist analysis of how power works in that little town. A minority of white people with money get all the benefits, while underrepresented black people get the shaft. NPR / NYT say little if anything about this dynamic. It’s really more about personal squabbles. That’s what makes a podcast go viral, right?

Am I surprised to learn that NPR / NYT reporters are constitutionally incapable of giving credence to this kind of analysis? Not at all. There was a similar issue with the podcast Nice White Parents which I talked about on my podcast, Strange Sound. They will twist themselves into knots trying to avoid it.

luv u,

jp

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

That’s one small step for money.

The increasingly crusty-looking billionaire owner of Virgin Galactic Richard Branson took a sub-orbital flight aboard a rocket plane last week. News outlets like MSNBC spent nearly an entire day’s worth of air time covering this monumental achievement and the presser/victory rally that followed. So, just to be clear – a self-obsessed billionaire essentially did what Yuri Gagarin did sixty years ago, and somehow it’s news.

Of course, there’s more to this than space flight. On one level, it’s a childish pissing match between three billionaires – Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk – all of whom want to CONQUER SPACE. More than that even, it’s a marketing effort, helped along by drooling press coverage by everyone from CNBC to the New York Times.

Ticket to nowhere

The Times article made note of the fact that the cost of a ticket on one of Branson’s rocket-planes rose from $200K to $250K since they first went on sale, perhaps dampened somewhat by a crash in 2014. “For the vast majority of Americans,” the Times correspondent observes, “the cost of such a trip is out of reach.” Can’t get anything past these people.

Not that the vast majority of Americans will be missing anything. After all, Virgin is offering a trip to space, not a trip from one place to another. It’s basically a carnival ride for the uber wealthy. And believe me, those people have no shortage of carnival rides as it is.

A modest proposal

Now, people might justly accuse me of being hostile, even abusive with respect to the uber rich. Fair enough. Mea culpa! But at the risk of providing even more fuel for this accusation, I have a modest suggestion to make. Now that Branson has banked all this free advertising from MSNBC, CNBC, and various print media outlets, there are ways that his little space enterprise might actually do humanity some good.

If this media carnival around the flight of the VSS Unity has its desired effect, billionaires might buy tickets like hotcakes. Hopefully, that will prompt Branson and his various competitors to start offering excursions to the Moon, Mars, and other reachable planets. With Earth currently on fire as a product of their collective greed, our Billionaires may be tempted to spend longer and longer periods of time on other planets. If that happens, all we need to do is bar re-entry. That would take care of our billionaire problem, full stop.

Or, we could do the more practical thing and just tax the living piss out of them. That solution doesn’t make for great television, but it has the virtue of eliminating unaccountable power in a very practical and do-able way. All it takes is the will to do it.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

The Picks.

This is the first week there was a general acknowledgement that Joe Biden is president-elect of the United States, and like a dam breaking, the news cycle was flooded with announcements of his cabinet picks. In a cleverly stage-designed event, Biden appeared with Harris and the beginnings of his “national security” team, inclusive of foreign policy. His nominee for Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, caused some serious crowing of approval on Morning Joe with the story of his Holocaust survivor uncle, who escaped from a Nazi death march and ran across an American tank, from which emerged an African-American soldier. “This is who we are,” Blinken said, referring to the image of America as a liberator and a light unto the darkness of a troubled world yearning to breathe free.

What Blinken’s story didn’t include was an acknowledgement that, in all likelihood, the Black soldier was part of a segregated unit, as mixed race units were barred in the U.S. military throughout World War II. That is who we are, too. But that part of American exceptionalism isn’t likely to find its way onto the set of Morning Joe anytime soon, aside from the contributions of Eddie Glaude and a handful of others. And so, while the largely bipartisan imperial consensus experiences a moment of bliss at the re-establishment of its place at the helm of U.S. foreign policy, the manifold failures of this longstanding policy set will fade into the background for hopefully a brief spell. (We’re fortunate to have Rho Khanna and others to jog our memories this time around.)

Let me be clear – I am overjoyed that Trump and his crew of warmongers will be leaving Washington in a couple of months. I think Biden’s administration will be an improvement in many respects. But to say that they will be better than the Trump team is not to say that we are embarking on a new era of enlightenment in American foreign policy. Michele Flournoy, for instance, appears to be edging closer to being appointed Defense Secretary (as attested to by Politico, of course). She was four-square in favor of the Afghanistan surge policy, supported the wars in Iraq and Libya, has worked extensively in the for-profit military consulting and lobbying world, and is poised to place China in the crosshairs of the U.S. “defense” posture in the years ahead – a direction The New York Times appears to be signalling ahead of the incoming Biden administration. (Yes, they’re mostly just reporting on what Biden’s advisors have been saying, but they’ve been drinking the Kool Aid on this for a long time.)

I prefer to remain optimistic about our future – that there are enough countervailing forces now on the left to prevent another Iraq-like catastrophe. But doing so will require constant vigilance on the part of my fellow leftists. No time for sleep, my friends.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.