Tag Archives: Race

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

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Political Rants

What’d they say?

All right, so, I watched most of the debate last week, and the thing I came away with was something like what Anand Giridharadas said the weekend after – that I had watched what should amount to Joe Biden’s retirement party. The odd thing about that phenomenon is that almost no one on mainstream television appears to agree with that. In fact, some of the usual pundits were saying that this was Biden’s best night of the three debates. I have to scratch my head when I hear this stuff – did they see the same show I saw? Or is it just that they have lowered the performance bar for Biden to such an extent that he basically can do no wrong. That is not the Biden I saw.

His worst moment, namely his response to the question about the legacy of slavery in America, was aptly dissected by the Majority Report crew, who I think nailed it on the head. In his halting way, Biden began his response by talking about his fight against segregation, then pivoted quickly, recalling that this was a trouble area for him. He then talked about education, specifically poor kids in inner city schools, and once again he equated black kids with being poor. His solution sounded positively draconian: let’s send social workers into these kids’ homes, because their parent(s) don’t know how to handle them. What? Kind of astonishing, but that’s where the guy is coming from, so he was doing a public service of sorts.

Get off my lawnism.

The health care debate was probably the most contentious that forum got. This is probably where the usual pundits got the notion that Biden did better than usual. He was old man-splaining Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as to why Medicare for All can’t work and is too expensive. The questioning, of course, sought to support Biden’s case – It will raise taxes, right? Right?? The ABC team, like their predecessors at CNN and MSNBC, are trying their best to generate a soundbite of Warren saying “Yes, I’m going to raise your taxes!” If they ever succeed, they’ll probably blow some kind of ship horn. Biden seemed to think that $1,000 out of pocket was no big deal. Not surprised that that wasn’t the headline.

I think the biggest threat on that stage is the possibility of Biden becoming the nominee. I don’t know how to tell centrist Democrats this, but nominating him would be like rewinding to 2016 and running it again. We’ve already seen that show – let’s get someone on that ticket who will inspire the masses, not grab a couple of centrists here and there. That didn’t work out real well in the last election, and it won’t this time either.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Skin game.

Not so very long ago – within the span of many Americans’ lifetimes – crossing the southern border wasn’t that big of a deal. People from Mexico and points south would make their way into the U.S. for seasonal work mostly, do the jobs Americans tend not to want to do, then make their way back. Most of them wouldn’t stay very long because they had families back in Mexico, so they might travel back and forth as their work allowed, bringing their meager earnings back with them. There was an explicit guest worker program during World War II, but otherwise it was kind of an informal, administrative matter for many years.

Gradually, though, immigration across the southern border became more heavily policed. The option to harass migrant workers and other visitors was always available to law enforcement, but in more recent decades it became a matter of policy. As PBS journalist John Carlos Frey details in his new book, Blood and Sand, the crackdown really began in earnest during the Clinton Administration, reflected most shockingly in Clinton’s second State of the Union, which included a section on undocumented immigrants that might have been ripped from Trump’s current playbook. There were a couple of things going on in those days. Implementation of NAFTA was decimating rural agriculture in Mexico, pitting small farmers against U.S. agribusiness conglomerates. But most importantly, politicians were re-discovering the efficacy of targeting brown people. Clinton and the Republican Congress funded the construction of walls in major border cities, forcing migrants into the harsh desert and mountain terrain that straddles the border between populated areas.

Not the desired effect.

Similar to Trump’s policies now, Clinton’s approach was formulated specifically to discourage people from even attempting to cross into the U.S. The result was a spike in migrant deaths as families and individuals continued to be driven north by need and in search of safety and sustenance. That policy set the template that we have operated under ever since, though Bush, Obama, and now into Trump. Of course, Trump has ratcheted up the pressure, making it impossible to adjudicate asylum claims, incarcerating immigrants regardless of their personal histories, treating all crossers like murderers, rapists, gang members, etc., holding terrified people – even children and infants – in squalid, dehumanizing conditions under the hateful eye of bigoted officers.

We have to take the administration at their word that they’re doing this to discourage migrants fleeing the remnants of the countries we worked so hard to destroy in past decades. That makes Trump and his crew terrorists, plain and simple – they are deliberately terrorizing people for political ends, and the longer we tolerate it the more complicit we are in these crimes against humanity.

luv u,

jp