Tag Archives: Georgia

Political Rants

New pilot.

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As I write this, the details are still filtering in from Georgia about the shooting at the massage parlors in and near Atlanta. Yet another sickening crime carried out by some dude who bought a gun the same day he decided to use it on a bunch of innocent people. That’ll be $600, young man. Enjoy the pistol! Want bullets with that? Goddamn, what a crazy country we live in. Still, the part of this incident that made me scratch my head was when the police told us that the suspect had said the crime was not racially motivated. (Of course, this was followed up by the officer’s comment that the alleged shooter was having a bad day.) My first reaction to that was …. since when do you care what the suspect says? The answer, of course, is obvious – the suspect is white. Can you picture them coming out and saying something similar about a black person in custody? Neither can I.

I’m listening to a podcast called Resistance, and though I’m not crazy about the corporate advertising (for instance, I now know way more about the latest Mitsubishi compact SUV than I ever needed to know), they do really good work. The episode I’m listening to, entitled “My Somebody”, focuses on a young man from Baltimore who is incarcerated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can tell you, the police didn’t give a damn what this fellow had to say about his guilt or innocence. They shot him in the face and stood guard around his hospital bed. But then … he’s black. As for the white guy who shot up three massage parlors in Georgia this week, well, he was having a bad day, according to some random (white) police captain known for sharing anti-Asian posts on Facebook. I mean, seriously …. they don’t even bother trying to hide it anymore, do they?

This is what underlies the movement for de-funding and even abolishing the police. If you are a white person, and you grew up in, say, a town like my old home town, which was almost entirely white at that time, the police are there to protect you. In other words, they are there to protect you from the nasty, non-white people down the street in Utica or Albany or Rochester or wherever. If, on the other hand, you are a person of color and you live in a community of color, the police are not there to protect you. They are there to contain you, to detain you, to keep you in your place. They are there to watch you like a hawk. That is why so many black families don’t dial up the cops when stuff goes wrong. It doesn’t matter if there are black police officers, or a black police chief, or a black mayor … or hell, a black president. Like the Pentagon, law enforcement is like a big killing machine. You can put a different pilot in there, and they may drive the killing machine more slowly, even nudge it into reverse, but it’s still going to do what it’s designed to do. The abuse is a feature, not a bug.

There’s a lot to be said about criminal justice reform, and we’ve barely even begun to have that conversation. But if we’re ever going to even attempt to fix these problems, we must first acknowledge the nature of the system we have. That is a prerequisite for moving forward.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Vox populi.

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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.
Political Rants

Sickness as strategy.

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Some may consider what I’m writing about today as controversial, but frankly, I don’t care at this point. If you don’t see this as a real possibility, you’re not looking very hard. The Trump administration and its allies in the GOP-led states are pursuing a very cavalier policy regarding COVID-19 and their plans to reboot the economy. They have minimized the impact of the current crisis, essentially hiding the ball on fundamental questions of who has been infected, who has been exposed, and even who has died as a result of this awful virus. They have openly denigrated the idea of expansive testing, Trump first among those calling testing “overrated” and complaining that more testing means more cases. They have characterized the risks of ending the shutdown as risks worth taking, and have encouraged Americans to think of themselves as “warriors” worthy of sacrifice.

Now, we know that Trump wants things to magically return to normal so that he can have a better shot at re-election. But why would any president seeking a second term advocate policies that would result in tens if not hundreds of thousands of dead Americans? I think a fairly convincing answer lies in the demographics of those most severely affected by this virus. According to current research (see this APM report), the COVID-19 death rate among Black Americans is almost 2-1/2 times that of White Americans. Nationwide, Blacks make up 22.7% of COVID deaths, significantly over-representing their numbers; they make up a much larger percentage of losses in states like Georgia, Mississippi, Michigan, South Carolina, etc. It’s no secret, either, that this disease hits people harder when they have fewer resources, less access to quality health care, more exposure to conditions associated with poverty, and so on.

In other words, this disease hits hardest those people who tend not to vote for Donald Trump in particular and Republicans in general. When Trump and GOP governors push for workers to go back to the mill, the restaurant, the fields, etc., they know that those people are not their core supporters. If they drop dead, it’s no skin off of Trump’s nose – in fact, it may in some small way contribute to his victory. A cynical suggestion? Not at all. Trump bends every effort towards giving himself an advantage in the November general election. He has railed against vote-by-mail, particularly in states like Michigan, whose leaders he has threatened with federal funding cuts – this in the odd belief that vote-by-mail favors Democrats. (Based on his own comments, he certainly thinks that more people voting is bad news for Republicans.) He is a self-dealing bullshit artist, and not a particularly convincing one, either. How he garnered as many votes as he did in 2016 I’ll never know. (PT Barnum had a theory about that.)

Dark people, poor people, undocumented laborers … they’re all expendable, worthy of sacrifice for the sake of decent economic numbers going into the Fall. How long are we going to stand for this crap?

luv u,

jp

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

Roe v. Squee.

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As I write this, we are witnessing a shameful pissing match between the state legislators and governors of Republican-dominated states to see which group of Christian Taliban can pass the most restrictive abortion ban in the nation and spawn the lawsuit that will result in the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Ohio and Georgia were taking the lead last week, the latter passing a “fetal heartbeat” bill that would make the procedure a felony after six weeks, no exceptions other than saving the life of the mother. (The bill was signed by Georgia’s illegitimate governor, Brian Kemp.) Not to be outdone, Alabama this week sent to its Nazi governor (Kay Ivey) a very near to total, outright abortion ban, again, criminalizing the procedure. Texas, not surprisingly, is working on making abortion a capital crime.

Probably the only good thing that can be said about this orgy of ignorance is that we don’t have to listen to these right-wing boneheads claim disingenuously that they care about the health and safety of pregnant women – a trope we frequently heard in defense of TRAP laws that required hospital-grade specifications in women’s health clinics and hospital admitting privileges for providers. Cold comfort, to be sure. Based on some of the comments I’ve heard from these “pro-life” legislators, I have no confidence that they have any inkling of what the consequences of this legislation will be, and I’m sure they don’t care. And these are far from simple questions. For instance, if you live in Georgia and you travel to New York for an abortion, I understand that you will be subject to prosecution under the new law. What if you live in New York, get an abortion in New York, then move to Atlanta? What sanctions will that carry?

What would Squee do?

I have heard a lot of speculation on whether any of these recent bills will be the trigger for Roe’s demise at the Supreme Court, now fully constituted with the illegitimate justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh (i.e. Squee’s buddy). Some have suggested that the Roberts court prefers a more gradualist approach to sending women back to the middle ages; that the reactionary majority is more likely to sign off on something like the Louisiana TRAP legislation than these more recent, far more draconian measures. I will believe this when I see it. I know Roberts is reputed to care deeply about the reputation and public perception of the high court, but will he resist reversal of Roe when it is served up to him and the pressure from the right is at full volume? Again … we’ll see. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

Moral of the story? Simply this: we didn’t get to this place by doing the right thing. By letting the GOP win race after race, in 2010, 2014, 2016, and yes, 2018 (in the Senate), the attack on women’s reproductive rights was practically guaranteed. Whatever else we do as activists and citizens, WE NEED TO VOTE IN OVERWHELMING NUMBERS. That is our last hope for women, for the environment, for sane public policy.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Three percent solution.

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Some election news this week. Jon Ossoff, Democratic party candidate in the Georgia 6th congressional district “jungle” primary topped 48% of the vote tally, which is impressive in Tom Price/Newt Gingrich territory but still a couple of points below an outright victory. As always, the Republicans furiously worked the refs on this race, establishing the easy-bake narrative that Ossoff needed to win an outright majority and that anything short of that would be an abject failure. The mainstream media, of course, adopted this line because it’s simple and requires zero analysis (a lot of stories run this way), so the news shows the morning after the election were full of Democrats falling short postmortems. Useful.

Actual Tenney quote.Okay, because I am at heart a fair person, I will admit that the likes of Joe Scarborough said something that I actually agreed with this past Wednesday – something to the effect that Democrats need to rediscover getting out the vote, knocking on doors, calling people, etc. I agree. If Dems are ever going to return from the electoral wilderness, they need to start building their ground game right now. With the Georgia race and the contest in Kansas for that open House seat (lost to the GOP by seven points), that point has now been underlined and circled in red. (Okay, you can go back to despising Scarborough again.)

This doesn’t amount to a repeat of the same “air war” strategy the national Democratic party keeps running over and over again, dropping TV ads at the last minute. Democrats need to be a factor on the ground; they need to be a positive force in people’s lives. In my region, the congressional seat is held by a tea party Republican, way to the right of her district. We have only elected one Democrat in my lifetime – Michael Arcuri back in 2006. The only reason why he won was that the Democratic party invested in the race. They sent paid, seasoned campaign organizers to the district. They invested in a sizeable call center. They ran phone banks and knocked on doors. That – not the ads – was what put Arcuri over the top. I remember one of the party organizers giving a pep talk to the volunteers, telling us that a good ground game can add three percent to the vote total on election day. “We’re going to need that three percent,” he said.

There’s a coda to that story: two years later, there was none of that. Calling was done out of a cramped room in the local labor council office, and Arcuri just barely squeaked by in a presidential election year. In 2010 he got knocked off; same problem. This past fall, I was dialing for the Democratic candidate at the labor council again, working from a pretty crappy list. It’s not just lack of investment – it’s lack of the right kind of investment that kills our chances.

We have to start winning elections. It’s not the only thing we have to do, but it’s goddamned important.

luv u,

jp