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Why Did Americans Abandon the Greatest Economy in History?

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2023 //
43

This excellent article in The Atlantic by Rogé Karma should be widely read. Something changed radically in our economy and our society in the past several decades, limiting access to “the American Dream.” He explores the reasons why.

He writes:

If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.

What happened?

One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was that a rising tide would lift all boats. Instead, inequality soared while living standards stagnated and life expectancy fell behind that of peer countries. No other advanced economy pivoted quite as sharply to free-market economics as the United States, and none experienced as sharp a reversal in income, mobility, and public-health trends as America did. Today, a child born in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than one born in the U.S.

This story has been extensively documented. But a nagging puzzle remains. Why did America abandon the New Deal so decisively? And why did so many voters and politicians embrace the free-market consensus that replaced it?

Since 2016, policy makers, scholars, and journalists have been scrambling to answer those questions as they seek to make sense of the rise of Donald Trump—who declared, in 2015, “The American dream is dead”—and the seething discontent in American life. Three main theories have emerged, each with its own account of how we got here and what it might take to change course. One theory holds that the story is fundamentally about the white backlash to civil-rights legislation. Another pins more blame on the Democratic Party’s cultural elitism. And the third focuses on the role of global crises beyond any political party’s control. Each theory is incomplete on its own. Taken together, they go a long way toward making sense of the political and economic uncertainty we’re living through.

“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGhee, the former president of the think tank Demos, in her 2021 book, The Sum of Us. In many places, however, the pools were also whites-only. Then came desegregation. Rather than open up the pools to their Black neighbors, white communities decided to simply close them for everyone. For McGhee, that is a microcosm of the changes to America’s political economy over the past half century: White Americans were willing to make their own lives materially worse rather than share public goods with Black Americans.

From the 1930s until the late ’60s, Democrats dominated national politics. They used their power to pass sweeping progressive legislation that transformed the American economy. But their coalition, which included southern Dixiecrats as well as northern liberals, fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” exploited that rift and changed the electoral map. Since then, no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote.

Crucially, the civil-rights revolution also changed white Americans’ economic attitudes. In 1956, 65 percent of white people said they believed the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living. By 1964, that number had sunk to 35 percent. Ronald Reagan eventually channeled that backlash into a free-market message by casting high taxes and generous social programs as funneling money from hardworking (white) Americans to undeserving (Black) “welfare queens.” In this telling, which has become popular on the left, Democrats are the tragic heroes. The mid-century economy was built on racial suppression and torn apart by racial progress. Economic inequality was the price liberals paid to do what was right on race.

The New York Times writer David Leonhardt is less inclined to let liberals off the hook. His new book, Ours Was the Shining Future, contends that the fracturing of the New Deal coalition was about more than race. Through the ’50s, the left was rooted in a broad working-class movement focused on material interests. But at the turn of the ’60s, a New Left emerged that was dominated by well-off college students. These activists were less concerned with economic demands than issues like nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, and the war in Vietnam. Their methods were not those of institutional politics but civil disobedience and protest. The rise of the New Left, Leonhardt argues, accelerated the exodus of white working-class voters from the Democratic coalition…

McGhee’s and Leonhardt’s accounts might appear to be in tension, echoing the “race versus class” debate that followed Trump’s victory in 2016. In fact, they’re complementary. As the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, since the’60s, left-leaning parties in most Western countries, not just the U.S., have become dominated by college-educated voters and lost working-class support. But nowhere in Europe was the backlash quite as immediate and intense as it was in the U.S. A major difference, of course, is the country’s unique racial history.

The 1972 election might have fractured the Democratic coalition, but that still doesn’t explain the rise of free-market conservatism. The new Republican majority did not arrive with a radical economic agenda. Nixon combined social conservatism with a version of New Deal economics. His administration increased funding for Social Security and food stamps, raised the capital-gains tax, and created the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, laissez-faire economics remained unpopular. Polls from the ’70s found that most Republicans believed that taxes and benefits should remain at present levels, and anti-tax ballot initiatives failed in several states by wide margins. Even Reagan largely avoided talking about tax cuts during his failed 1976 presidential campaign. The story of America’s economic pivot still has a missing piece.

According to the economic historian Gary Gerstle’s 2022 book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, that piece is the severe economic crisis of the mid-’70s. The 1973 Arab oil embargo sent inflation spiraling out of control. Not long afterward, the economy plunged into recession. Median family income was significantly lower in 1979 than it had been at the beginning of the decade, adjusting for inflation. “These changing economic circumstances, coming on the heels of the divisions over race and Vietnam, broke apart the New Deal order,” Gerstle writes. (Leonhardt also discusses the economic shocks of the ’70s, but they play a less central role in his analysis.)

Free-market ideas had been circulating among a small cadre of academics and business leaders for decades—most notably the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The ’70s crisis provided a perfect opening to translate them into public policy, and Reagan was the perfect messenger. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” he declared in his 1981 inaugural address. “Government is the problem.”

Part of Reagan’s genius was that the message meant different things to different constituencies. For southern whites, government was forcing school desegregation. For the religious right, government was licensing abortion and preventing prayer in schools. And for working-class voters who bought Reagan’s pitch, a bloated federal government was behind their plummeting economic fortunes…

The top marginal income-tax rate was 70 percent when Reagan took office and 28 percent when he left. Union membership shriveled. Deregulation led to an explosion of the financial sector, and Reagan’s Supreme Court appointments set the stage for decades of consequential pro-business rulings. None of this, Gerstle argues, was preordained. The political tumult of the ’60s helped crack the Democrats’ electoral coalition, but it took the unusual confluence of a major economic crisis and a talented political communicator to create a new consensus. By the ’90s, Democrats had accommodated themselves to the core tenets of the Reagan revolution. President Bill Clinton further deregulated the financial sector, pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, and signed a bill designed to “end welfare as we know it.” Echoing Reagan, in his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton conceded: “The era of big government is over.”

In the remainder of the article, the author says that the nation is at an inflection point, ready for a change. But what that change will be determined by voters next year.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Democrats, Deregulation, Economy, Elections, History, Racism, Republicans

Pennsylvania: New School Board Tosses Out Rightwing Policies

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2023 //
6

In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, voters elected a new school board pledged to reverse the policies of their Moms-for-Liberty style predecessors. That meant ending censorship of library books and ending the ban on gay-friendly displays, among other things. The old school board gave the retiring superintendent a $700,000 going-away gift; the new one is trying to recover the gift.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

The new Democrat-controlled Central Bucks school board moved quickly Monday to roll back some of its GOP-led predecessors’ most controversial actions — from suspending policies restricting library books to authorizing potential legal action into the former superintendent’s $700,000 payout.

What shape the new board’s actions will ultimately take isn’t yet clear. The board’s new solicitor, for instance, said earlier Monday that he needed to learn more about the separation agreement reached between the prior board and now-resigned superintendent Abram Lucabaugh before pursuing a lawsuit.

But the crowd that lined up outside the Central Bucks administrative building to witness the swearing-in of new members Monday was ready to celebrate regardless — cheering new leadership after what numerous speakers described as two years of “chaos,” bookended by highly contentious, big-money elections.

Republicans who cemented their majority in 2021 enacted bans on teacher “advocacy” in classrooms — including the display of Pride flags — and “sexualized content” in library books, and faced a federal complaint alleging the district had discriminated against LGBTQ students.

But Democrats swept the Nov. 7 school board elections — as they did in a number of area districts where culture-war issues had dominated debate.

“Two years ago, I stood in this room a broken woman,” said Silvi Haldepur, a district parent. But “this community banded together and stood up against the hate.”

Keith Willard, a social studies teacher, told the board it was “incredibly difficult” to work for the district when the previous board had “actively marginalized people” and pushed the “belief that staff are indoctrinating kids.”

“What I ask of this board is that you help steer the ship… and return the stewardship to the people that do the real work every day” — teachers and staff, said Willard, who drew a standing ovation.

The room again broke into applause as the board voted to suspend the library and advocacy policies,as well as a policy banning transgender students from participating in sports aligned with their gender identities — a measure the former board passed at its final meeting in the wake of last month’s elections.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Censorship, Curriculum, Democrats, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Gender, Pennsylvania

Thom Hartmann: The GOP is the Party of Austerity, Tax Cuts, and Death

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2023 //
12

I don’t know how Thom Hartmann does it. He puts out one brilliantly researched article after another, connecting the dots and explaining why our country and our democracy are in trouble. The Democrats want to build a sturdy safety net; the Republicans want everyone to fend for himself or herself. If you are rich, the Republican formula works; if you are not, you are in trouble. It’s amazing that so many who rely on government programs give their vote to a party pledged to kill those programs.

He writes:

In the 1930s, after FDR rolled out programs to aid the homeless and unemployed across the country, America enjoyed a longer life expectancy — and more healthy years within that life expectancy — than any other wealthy nation.

While some of that was due to the public health crisis echoing across Europe in the wake of World War I, it was largely because FDR’s Democrats in charge of the country were building schools and hospitals like there was no tomorrow. 

Republican President Eisenhower followed in that tradition through the 1950s, and in the 1960s LBJ rolled out Medicare and Medicaid. As a result, we continued to have the world’s best lifespans and quality-of-life.

Then came Reagan’s austerity and neoliberalism campaigns in 1981 and America began to become unraveled.

A new study published by the National Academy of Sciences in the journal PNAS Nexus looked at “excess deaths” (they called them “missing Americans”) in our country versus others around the world. The researchers from Boston University School of Public Health, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Harvard Medical School and TH Chan School of Public Health found:

“The United States had lower mortality rates than peer countries in the 1930s–1950s and similar mortality in the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in the 1980s, however, the United States began experiencing a steady increase in the number of missing Americans, reaching 622,534 in 2019 alone.”

The excess deaths, it turns out, are almost all entirely the result of Republican policies, both at the federal and state level. 

The researchers found:

“Stagnant minimum wages and losses of collective bargaining protections have contributed to widening economic inequality. A scant safety net for working-age adults and the absence of universal healthcare have privatized risk, tying health more closely to personal wealth and employment.

“Additionally, lax regulation of opioids, firearms, environmental pollutants, unhealthy foods, and workplace safety has contributed to elevated US mortality, particularly among lower-educated and lower-income people.

And it’s worse in Red states:

“Increasingly divergent policies at the state level have resulted in widening health gaps across US states. In those geographic areas of the United States where excess mortality has increased the most, voters have turned towards policy-makers who have further undermined population health, e.g. through refusal to expand Medicaid or to implement firearm regulations.”

While not coming right out and saying that people live longer in Blue states than Red states, that’s largely what the study found. And it’s not a small effect:

“In 2021, there were 26.4 million years of life lost due to excess US mortality relative to peer nations…”

While President Eisenhower ran for re-election in 1956 by bragging about how on his watch millions more Americans had gotten good union jobs or signed up for Social Security, by 1981, when Reagan took office, the 1978 efforts of five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court to legalize political bribery were beginning to seriously take hold.

That’s when everything changed. Since 1981, millions of Americans have died unnecessarily because of neoliberal austerity policies: their lives were sacrificed on the altars of increased corporate profits and lower taxes for billionaires.

— Reagan told us that the “union bosses” were just out for themselves and the best thing American workers could do was to rely on their employers’ good will. He also claimed that the minimum wage actually hurt low-wage workers because, he said, it prevented employers from hiring more people.

Both were lies, as history has vividly shown, and both contributed to our epidemic of early and unnecessary deaths, as Red state minimum wages are still as low as $7.25/hour and Red “Right to Work for Less” states make it nearly impossible to unionize.

“Stagnant minimum wages and losses of collective bargaining protections have contributed to widening economic inequality” that leads to early deaths, reported the researchers.

— The Republican backlash to Obamacare extending Medicaid to everybody in the country wasn’t limited to their lawsuit before the Supreme Court that ended up letting Red states opt out of coverage, or to the Astroturf “Tea Party” movement funded by rightwing billionaires.

— To this day, more than a decade later, there are still a dozen Red states that have taken the five Republican justices up on their offer and refuse to expand the program. Those Republican-controlled states have also thrown hundreds of bureaucratic roadblocks to people getting any kind of state services, from food stamps to unemployment insurance to housing assistance.

“A scant safety net for working-age adults and the absence of universal healthcare have privatized risk, tying health more closely to personal wealth and employment” that leads to early deaths, reported the researchers.

— A collaborative research project between the University of Texas and the University of Toronto published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that the Red state preference for deregulation and a lack of oversight: 

“…explained 9.2% of an enrollee’s odds of receiving prolonged opioids… The correlation between a county’s Republican presidential vote and the adjusted rate of … prolonged opioid use was 0.42 (P<.001). In the 693 counties with adjusted rates of opioid prescription significantly higher than the mean county rate, the mean Republican presidential vote was 59.96%, vs 38.67% in the 638 counties with significantly lower rates.”

— Cancer alley is alive and well in Texas and Louisiana thanks to Republican governments’ in those states refusal to enforce environmental regulations that would keep carcinogens out of the air and water.

— A child living in Mississippi is ten times more likely to die from gunshot than a child in Massachusetts because Republicans in Mississippi refuse to adopt rational, constitutional gun control regulations like Massachusetts has had for decades.

— Obesity and the diabetes, heart disease, and strokes associated with it are vastly more prevalent and thus deadly in Red states than Blue states because so many more people are living in poverty in Red states and junk food is cheaper than healthy food.

— Twenty-nine states, encompassing virtually all the nation’s Red states, have no state-level workplace safety agencies; those only exist in 21 mostly Blue states. As a result, Red Wyoming has 10.4 workplace deaths per 100,000 workers while Blue Rhode Island only has 1.0 deaths per 100,000 workers.

“Additionally, lax regulation of opioids, firearms, environmental pollutants, unhealthy foods, and workplace safety has contributed to elevated US mortality, particularly among lower-educated and lower-income people” wrote the researchers about unnecessary/early deaths in America.

When The Washington Post looked into the differences between Red and Blue states, what they found was shocking. 

For example, noted the authors:

“Ohio sticks out — for all the wrong reasons. Roughly 1 in 5 Ohioans will die before they turn 65, according to Montez’s analysis using the state’s 2019 death rates. The state, whose legislature has been increasingly dominated by Republicans, has plummeted nationally when it comes to life expectancy rates, moving from middle of the pack to the bottom fifth of states during the last 50 years, The Post found. Ohioans have a similar life expectancy to residents of Slovakia and Ecuador, relatively poor countries.”

While it would be easy and glib to say that Republican politicians want the citizens of their states to die young, the simple truth is that they don’t care: their priority, instead, is the profitability of the companies in their states and keeping the taxes on their oligarchs low.

Author Mark Jacob noted on Xitter: 

“Voting for Republicans is like eating poison.”

In fact, eating poison is a choice. Most people trapped in Red states, though, don’t have the means or ability to move to a Blue state because they’ve been denied a good education, are saddled with medical debt, and/or haven’t made enough at their work to afford the transition.

Blue states, for their part, are fighting back on behalf of their citizens. As Bernie’s poverty advisor Nikhil Goyal wrote for The New York Times:

“Fourteen [Blue] states have adopted a state-level child tax credit, with many featuring a fully refundable provision so that families with little to no income can benefit. This year, New Mexico has expanded free preschool seats and made child care free for families earning up to four times the federal poverty rate — roughly $120,000 for a family of four.

“In the upcoming fiscal year, Minnesota will pour more than $250 million of additional funding into early childhood education to reduce the costs of child care and create thousands of new preschool slots. This includes $10 million to supplement funding of the federal Head Start program, which serves children up to the age of 5 and should be bolstered by states.

“Today, nine [Blue] states have universal free school breakfast and lunch on the books. Just last month, the governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, established a $20 million initiative that will help fund grocery stores in food deserts.”

But every action draws a reaction, as Isaac Newton was quick to point out. Republicans are now trying to do to Blue states — to all of America — the same damage they’ve done to Red states over the past 40 years.

In the eleven months since Republicans have taken control of the US House of Representatives, child poverty in America has doubled. This is because Republicans in the House refused to renew programs Democrats put in place providing health care, food assistance, housing support, the child tax credit, and subsidized child care: all have now expired.

In the past 40 days, 3.2 million children lost access to healthcare, 70,000 childcare and preschool programs have closed, and the child tax credit has expired. So have the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s emergency allotments. As of yesterday, 10,046,000 Americans have been kicked off Medicaid, nearly all in Red states.

And it’s all intentional.

Republicans will proudly tell you it’s necessary to keep taxes low on their billionaire donors, and to prevent poor people from becoming “lazy.” Speaker MAGA Mark Johnson will tell you that it’s the Christian way, just like trashing queer people and forcing 10-year-old rape victims to carry their pregnancies to term.

Welcome to the 2023 GOP and their plans to “deconstruct the administrative state” and drag America back to the 19th century.

Mark Jacob was right about the poison part. But instead of Republican voters eating it, their politicians are determined to force it down the throats of all of us, our children, and our grandchildren.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Democrats, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Health, Republicans

Carol Burris: Fleecing the Taxpayers! Write Your Senator Now!

By dianeravitch
October 24, 2023 //
6

Carol Burris writes here about a new legislative proposal, co-sponsored by some Democratic Senators, to shower millions of dollars on organizations that promote or planet new charter schools, including religious charter schools. This is a ripoff of government funds. Write your Senator now to kill this bad proposal..

Burris writes:

Eight senators (Bill Cassidy [R-La.], John Coryn [R-Tx], Cory Booker [D-NJ], Tim Scott [R-SC], Michael Bennet [D-CO], Mike Braun [R-Ind], Maggie Hassan [D-NH], Brian Schatz [D-HI]) introduced a bill last week that was clearly written with the help of the charter lobby. The Empower Charter School Educators to Lead Act would allow billionaire-funded nonprofits operating as “state entities” to keep more of a cut when dispersing Charter School Program (CSP) grants. The bill would also allow these “state entities” to award up to $100,000 to would-be charter entrepreneurs, including religious organizations, to pre-plan a charter school before they have even submitted an application to an authorizer.

Send your letter to your senator to oppose the charter lobby’s bill today. Click HERE.

As we documented in our reports, CSP planning grants have led to enormous waste and fraud. NPE found that millions of CSP dollars have gone to school entrepreneurs who never opened a school—confirmed by the Department of Education and the GAO. That is why the 2022 reform regulations we supported put some modest guardrails on how and when planning grants could be spent.

That did not sit well with the charter lobby, led by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which persuaded these eight Senators to make it even easier to get funding to pre-plan a school. 

But it gets worse.  This bill would also increase the funding state entities can keep for themselves when they disperse grants. That cut is already at 10%. This bill would raise it to a whopping 15%. 

Here is an example that shows the impact. The Opportunity Trust is funded by millionaires and billionaires, including the Walton Family Foundation and The City Fund, which itself was funded by billionaires Reed Hastings and John Arnold. It just received a $35,555,557.00 Charter School Program SE grant to open more charter schools in Missouri, even though the St. Louis School Board and the municipal government have made it clear they do not want more charter schools in the city. Charters are only allowed in St. Louis, one unaccredited district, and Kansas City, which their application failed to mention. 

The democratically elected school board of St. Louis just passed a resolution asking the U.S. Department of Education to rescind the grant, stating, among other objections, that the Opportunity Trust lied in its application regarding its working relationship with the district. The one charter school in the unaccredited district that Opportunity Trust opened has been a financial disaster. 

Yet, The Opportunity Trust can currently keep more than $3.5 million for administering grants and “technically assisting” charter grantees. This new bill would allow Opportunity Trust to increase the amount it can keep to more than $5.3 million. 

In addition, the bill would allow the Opportunity Trust to award nearly $1.8 million to would-be charter entrepreneurs to pre-plan schools in a city where they are not needed or wanted. This June, St. Louis Today exposed how three present and former executives of the controversial Kairos Academy, an Opportunity Trust-sponsored school, double-dipped to receive over a half million dollars to “plan” the charter school even while receiving a full salary from their public schools. Two of the three have already left the charter school. 

Shockingly, the Empower Charter School Educators to Lead Act would not only encourage such double-dipping, it would also increase the funding stream.  

At the beginning of the CSP, only state education departments could receive these large grants. However, the charter lobby worked to change the law so that nonprofits like Opportunity Trust could also control who gets the money and keep a share for themselves. 

Half of the 2023 CSP SE awards went to organizations like Opportunity Trust—nonprofits that advocate and lobby for charter schools and are unaccountable to the public. 

Contact your Senators today. Stop the charter school lobby’s new attempts to fleece American taxpayers and undermine public schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democrats, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Religion

Mississippi: Can a White Democrat Win the Governor’s Race?

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2023 //
2

Mississippi is as red a state as any in the country but a white Democrat has a real chance of winning. His name is Brandon Presley. He’s a second cousin of Elvis, and he grew up dirt poor. He’s a genuine progressive. He has gone out of his way to court Black voters. Presley has a chance of upending politics in the state and perhaps the region.

The Daily Yonder reports that Presley must overcome the rural-urban divide:

American politics are defined by the rural-urban divide. Democrats own the major cities; Republicans dominate smaller cities and the countryside. Brandon Presley aims to change that, at least in Mississippi. The 46-year-old Democrat is challenging the GOP incumbent, Tate Reeves, for the governorship. If he wins, he would be the Magnolia State’s first Democratic governor in a generation.

But a Presley victory is potentially something more. To win, the Democrat must score well with Mississippi’s rural voters. Such a turnabout would redound across the nation. William Browning, a Mississippi-based reporter, claims “If Brandon Presley beats Reeves, this changes the way people view elections.” In other words, a Presley victory could shake the nation out of its rural-urban divide. It would prove that Democrats can win rural America, and prompt Republicans to woo the cities.

Presley’s campaign is an uphill climb. Mississippi is the definition of a Republican stronghold. The GOP controls every statewide office and possesses supermajorities in both the state Senate and House. The race will be decided by rural voters, a Republican-leaning demographic. Sixty-five of Mississippi’s 82 counties are designated as rural (using the nonmetropolitan definition) and more than half of the state population, 54%, qualify as the same.

Despite these realities, Presley has more than a puncher’s chance at victory. Reeves is vulnerable. A January 2023 survey showed 57% of state voters wanted an option beyond Reeves. A June poll was even more ominous for the incumbent. One-fifth of Republicans supported Presley over the GOP incumbent. A Mississippi political observer explained these numbers bluntly, “Reeves is not likeable and is kind of arrogant.”

Presley’s prospects go beyond an unpopular incumbent. Every observer of any political stripe agrees that he is a one-of-a-kind political talent. Brannon Miller, a longtime state political hand, calls him Mississippi’s “best retail politician.” One reporter already termed him the “second best politician in state history.”

Tall, gregarious, and oozing Southern charm, he is, as one Democratic official described him, “a back-pattin’ doesn’t-know-a-stranger Democrat.” He is also equipped with a biography straight from a Hollywood script. Second cousins with Elvis, Presley was born dirt poor. Raised just down the road from Elvis’s Tupelo, he came of age in tiny Nettleton, Mississippi (population 1,995). At age 8, his alcoholic father was murdered. Thereafter, his single mom struggled to provide for him and his two siblings, Greta and Greg. The family regularly lived without electricity, running water, or a phone.

In 2001, the 23-year-old came home from college and was elected mayor of Nettleton. He has been running ever since. In 2007, voters elected him Public Service Commissioner for northern Mississippi, a post he has been reelected to three times by successively wider margins.

Presley is not a standard issue “national” Democrat. He steers clear of divisive social issues. Pro-life on abortion, he is an evangelical Christian who hews to Mississippi’s cultural mainstream. He is also a self-described “populist.” Born from his rough-and-tumble childhood, Presley also draws upon the rich tradition of Southern economic populism. Dana Burcham, the Nettleton city clerk, sums up Presley’s philosophy in saying, “He’s for the little people.”

Presley’s populism is apparent in his rhetoric. He defines his politics as one in which, “you side with the people against a system that is set up against the people all day long.” But his populism is also obvious in his record. As mayor and public service commissioner, he focused upon bread-and-butter issues for his rural and small-town constituents. Nettleton’s current mayor, Phillip Baulch, and Burcham credit Presley as the source of the town’s turnaround. Mayor Presley turned abandoned property into parks, audited the city’s books, balanced the budget, and cut taxes. The results are tangible. Storefronts abound with commerce. Downtown is tidy. Nettleton, if not thriving, is surviving.

Read on to finish the story.

The New York Times says changes in the laws of Mississippi may have a large effect on the outcome of the Mississippi race.

Just three years ago, Mississippi had an election law on its books from an 1890 constitutional convention that was designed to uphold “white supremacy” in the state. The law created a system for electing statewide officials that was similar to the Electoral College — and that drastically reduced the political power of Black voters.

Now Mississippi is holding its first election for governor since those laws fell, the contest is improbably competitive in this deep-red state, and Black voters are poised to play a critical role.

Voters overturned the Jim Crow-era law in 2020. This summer, a federal court threw out another law, also from 1890, that had permanently stripped voting rights from people convicted of a range of felonies.

Black leaders and civil rights groups in Mississippi see the Nov. 7 election as a chance for a more level playing field and an opportunity for Black voters to exercise their sway: Roughly 40 percent of voters are Black, a greater share than in any other state.

Presley is going after Black voters.

“This election is going to be one that is historical,” said Charles V. Taylor Jr., the executive director of the Mississippi state conference of the N.A.A.C.P. “It’d be the first time we don’t have to deal with this Jim Crow-era Electoral College when it comes to the gubernatorial race. And also, we’re at a point in our state where people are fed up and frustrated with what’s currently happening.”

Democrats are trying to harness that energy behind Brandon Presley, the party’s nominee for governor. Mr. Presley, who is white, is seeking to ride his brand of moderate politics and his pledges to expand Medicaid to an underdog victory over Gov. Tate Reeves, an unpopular Republican incumbent who has been trailed by a welfare scandal.

Black Mississippians lean heavily Democratic: Ninety-four percent voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, according to exit polls. Any path to victory for a Democrat relies on increasing Black turnout and winning over some crossover white voters.

Mr. Presley, a member of the Mississippi Public Service Commission and a second cousin of Elvis Presley, has made outreach to Black voters central to his campaign, seeking to win them over on Medicaid expansion, addressing a rural hospital shortage and providing funding for historically Black colleges.

On a recent October weekend, Mr. Presley navigated the tents and barbecue smokers at the homecoming tailgate for Alcorn State University, one of six historically Black colleges in the state. As he darted from tent to tent, wearing a purple-and-gold polo to support the home team, Mr. Presley introduced himself to unwitting voters and took selfies with his backers, many who flagged him down amid the din of music and aroma of smoking ribs.

Presley needs a strong turnout to win. I plan to send him a donation.

“This election is going to be one that is historical,” said Charles V. Taylor Jr., the executive director of the Mississippi state conference of the N.A.A.C.P. “It’d be the first time we don’t have to deal with this Jim Crow-era Electoral College when it comes to the gubernatorial race. And also, we’re at a point in our state where people are fed up and frustrated with what’s currently happening.”

Democrats are trying to harness that energy behind Brandon Presley, the party’s nominee for governor. Mr. Presley, who is white, is seeking to ride his brand of moderate politics and his pledges to expand Medicaid to an underdog victory over Gov. Tate Reeves, an unpopular Republican incumbent who has been trailed by a welfare scandal.

If Mississippi voters elect Presley, it would affect th southern

Categories Courage, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Hope, Mississippi, Poverty, Race, Racism

Heather Cox Richardson: GOP Prepares to Shut Down the Government

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2023 //
3

Heather Cox Richardson writes about the tumultuous showdowns yesterday:

The fight over how we conceive of our federal government was on full display today.

The Biden administration announced the creation of the American Climate Corps. This will be a group of more than 20,000 young Americans who will learn to work in clean energy, conservation, and climate resilience while also earning good wages and addressing climate change.

This ACC looks a great deal like the Civilian Conservation Corps established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1933, during the New Deal. The CCC was designed to provide jobs for unemployed young men (prompting critics to ask, “Where’s the She, She, She?”) while they worked to build fire towers, bridges, and foot trails, plant trees to stop soil erosion, stock fish, dig ditches, build dams, and so on.

While the CCC was segregated, the ACC will prioritize hiring within communities traditionally left behind, as well as addressing the needs of those communities that have borne the brunt of climate change. If the administration’s rules for it become finalized, the corps will also create a streamlined pathway into federal service for those who participated in the program.

In January, a poll showed that a climate corps is popular. Data for Progress found that voters supported such a corps by a margin of 39 points. Voters under 45 supported it by a margin of 51 points.

While the Biden administration is establishing a modern version of a popular New Deal program, extremists in the Republican Party are shutting down the government to try to stop it from precisely this sort of action. They want to roll the government back to the days before the New Deal, ending government regulation, provision of a basic social safety net, investment in infrastructure, and protection of civil rights.

Extremists in the House Republican conference are refusing to acknowledge the deal worked out for the budget last spring by President Biden and Republican speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). Instead, in order to pass even a continuing resolution that would buy time for Congress to pass an actual budget, they are insisting on cuts of up to 8% on discretionary spending that Senate Democrats, as well as Biden himself, are certain to oppose.

The White House has noted that the cuts the Republicans demand would mean 800 fewer Customs and Border Protection agents and officers (which, in turn, would mean more drugs entering the United States); more than 2 million women and children waitlisted for the WIC food assistance program; more than 4,000 fewer rail inspection days; up to 40,000 fewer teachers, aides, and key education staff, affecting 26 million students; and so on.

House speaker McCarthy cannot corral the extremists to agree to anything unless they get such cuts, which even other Republicans recognize are nonstarters (those cuts are so unpopular that Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported today that Republicans are somewhat bizarrely considering changing their messaging about their refusal to fund the government from concerns about spending to concerns about border security).

Meanwhile, the extremists are threatening to throw McCarthy out of the speakership. There are rumors that Republican moderates are considering working with Democrats to save McCarthy’s job, but Democrats are not keen on helping him when he has just agreed to open a baseless impeachment inquiry into the president in order to appease the extremists.

“If you’d asked about two months ago I would have said absolutely,” Representative Dean Phillips (D-MN) told Manu Raju, Lauren Fox, and Melanie Zanona of CNN. “But I think sadly his behavior is unprincipled, it’s unhelpful to the country,” he said.

As a shutdown appears more and more likely, even Republicans acknowledge that the problem is on their side of the House. Until the 1980s, funding gaps did not lead to government shutdowns. Government agencies continued to work, with the understanding that Congress would eventually work out funding disputes. But in 1980 a fight over funding the 1,600-employee Federal Trade Commission led President Jimmy Carter to ask Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti if the agency could continue to operate when its funding ran out. Civiletti surprised participants by saying no.

Four years ago, Civiletti told Ian Shapira of the Washington Post that his decision was about a specific and limited issue, and that he never imagined that politicians would use shutdowns for long periods of time as a political weapon. And yet, shutdowns have become more frequent and longer since the 1990s, usually as Republicans demand that Congress adopt policies they cannot pass through regular procedures (like the 34-day shutdown in 2019 over funding for the border wall former president Trump wanted).

Many observers note that “governing by crisis,” as President Barack Obama put it, is terribly damaging and that Civiletti’s decision should be revisited. Next month’s possible shutdown has the potential to be particularly problematic because there is no obvious solution. After all, it’s hardly a surprise that this budget deadline was coming up and that the extremists were angry over the deal McCarthy cut with Biden back in May, and yet McCarthy has been unable in all those months to bring his conference to an agreement.

Republicans appear resigned that voters will blame them for the crisis, which, honestly, seems fair. “We always get the blame,” Representative Mike Simpson (R-ID), a senior appropriator, told Katherine Tully-McManus and Adam Cancryn of Politico. “Name one time that we’ve shut the government down and we haven’t got the blame.”

Meanwhile, the House extremists continue to push their vision for the nation by undermining the institutions of the government. The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), today held what normally would have been a routine oversight hearing focused on policy, law enforcement, and so on. Instead of that business, though, Jordan and the hard-right Republicans on the committee worked to construct a false reality in right-wing media by attacking Attorney General Merrick Garland over his role in the investigation of President Biden’s son Hunter, begun five years ago under Trump.

Glenn Thrush of the New York Times noted drily that “[m]any of the claims and insinuations they leveled against Mr. Garland—that he is part of a coordinated Democratic effort to shield the Bidens and persecute Mr. Trump—were not supported by fact. And much of the specific evidence presented, particularly the testimony of an investigator who questioned key decisions in the Hunter Biden investigation, was given without context or acknowledgment of contradictory information.”

Instead, Jordan and his extremist colleagues shouted at Garland and over his answers, producing sound bites for right-wing media. Those included the statement from Representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN) that the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were actually “good Americans” who brought “strollers and the kids.” Even as both Biden and Garland have prioritized restoring faith in the Justice Department after Trump’s use of it for his own ends, the extremist Republicans are working to undermine that faith by constructing the false image that the Department of Justice is persecuting Trump and his allies.

Their position was not unchallenged on the committee, even within their own party. Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) defended Garland from their attacks, while Democrats on the committee went after the Republicans themselves. Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) accused Jordan of making the Judiciary Committee into a “criminal defense firm for the former president.”

Garland, who is usually soft-spoken, pushed back too. “Our job is not to take orders from the president, from Congress, or from anyone else, about who or what to criminally investigate,” he told the committee. “I am not the president’s lawyer. I will add I am not Congress’s prosecutor. The Justice Department works for the American people.”

“We will not be intimidated,” he added. “We will do our jobs free from outside influence. And we will not back down from defending our democracy.”

Please open the link for the footnotes and consider subscribing to this valuable blog.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Democracy, Democrats, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Republicans

Wisconsin: GOP Thinking of Impeaching Newly Elected State Supreme Court Judge

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2023 //
18

Democrats in Wisconsin celebrated the election last spring of a liberal judge to the State Supreme Court. Her election was decisive—she won by 11 points. Her election shifted the balance on the court to 4-3 favoring liberals. Justice Janet Protasiewicz made clear as she campaigned that she would support abortion rights and oppose partisan gerrymandering. Republicans claim that her campaign statements demonstrate she is prejudiced, which is grounds for impeachment. The legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, which is evidence of partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts in a state with a Democratic governor.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled Legislature is talking about impeaching a newly elected liberal state Supreme Court justice even before she has heard a case.

The unprecedented attempt to impeach and remove Justice Janet Protasiewicz from office comes as the court is being asked to throw out legislative electoral maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2011 that cemented the party’s majorities, which now stand at 65-34 in the Assembly and a 22-11 supermajority in the Senate.

Here is a closer look at where things stand:

Protasiewicz won election in April to a 10-year term on the Wisconsin Supreme Court beginning Aug. 1. Her 11-point victory gave liberals a 4-3 majority, ending a 15-year run with conservatives in control.

During her first week in office, two lawsuits were filed by Democratic-friendly groups and law firms seeking to overturn Republican-drawn legislative maps.

WHY IS THERE TALK OF IMPEACHMENT?

Republican lawmakers who have talked about the possibility, most notably Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, allege Protasiewicz has prejudged redistricting cases pending before the Supreme Court because of comments she made during her campaign. They also argue her acceptance of nearly $10 million from the Wisconsin Democratic Party disqualifies her.

The state Democratic Party is not part of either redistricting lawsuit, but supports the efforts.

The court has yet to say whether it will hear the redistricting challenges. Protasiewicz also has yet to say whether she will step aside in the cases, including the decision on whether to hear them.

If she does step aside, the court would be divided 3-3 between liberal and conservative justices. However, conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn has sided with liberals on major cases in the past, angering Republicans.

WHAT EXACTLY DID PROTASIEWICZ SAY?

Protasiewicz frequently spoke about redistricting during the campaign, calling the current Republican-friendly maps “unfair” and “rigged.”

“Let’s be clear here,” she said at a January forum. “The maps are rigged here, bottom line.”

“They do not reflect people in this state,” Protasiewicz said at the same forum. “I don’t think you could sell any reasonable person that the maps are fair. I can’t tell you what I would do on a particular case, but I can tell you my values, and the maps are wrong.”

She never promised to rule one way or another.

WHAT DOES THE LAW SAY ABOUT RECUSAL AND IMPEACHMENT?

On recusal, the U.S. Constitution’s due process clause says a judge must recuse if they have a financial interest in the case, or if there is a strong possibility of bias.

There are also state rules laying out when a judge must step aside from a case. Those generally include any time their impartiality on a case can be called into question, such as having a personal bias toward one of those suing, having a financial interest or making statements as a candidate that “commits, or appears to commit” the judge to ruling one way or another.

On impeachment, the Wisconsin Constitution limits the reasons to impeach a sitting officeholder to corrupt conduct in office or the commission or a crime or misdemeanor.

HAS A WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT JUSTICE EVER BEEN IMPEACHED?

The Wisconsin Legislature has voted only once to impeach a state judge who was alleged to have accepted bribes and heard cases in which he had financial interests. It happened in 1853, just five years after statehood, and the state Senate did not convict.

HOW WOULD SHE BE IMPEACHED?

It takes a majority vote in the Assembly to impeach and a two-thirds majority, or 22 votes, in the Senate to convict. Republicans have enough votes in both chambers to impeach and convict Protasiewicz.

If the Assembly impeached her, Protasiewicz would be barred from any duties as a justice until the Senate acted. That could effectively stop her from voting on redistricting without removing her from office and creating a vacancy that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers would fill.

Vos, the Assembly speaker, has said he is still researching impeachment and has not committed to moving ahead.

The day after Protasiewicz was elected, Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu seemed to cast doubt on the Senate proceeding with impeachment.

“To impeach someone, they would need to do something very serious,” LeMahieu told WISN-TV. “We are not looking to start the impeachment process as a regular occurring event in Wisconsin.”

WHEN COULD THIS GET CLEARED UP?

The court is under no deadline to decide whether it will hear the redistricting challenges. Likewise, Protasiewicz doesn’t have a deadline for deciding whether she will recuse herself. Both decisions could come at any point.

If the court decides to hear the challenges, it would then set a timeline for arguments. It is unclear when, if Protasiewicz remains on the case, the Legislature might proceed with impeachment proceedings.

Why would the Republicans move to impeach the Justice? Power. They have successfully gerrymandered their state and don’t want to lose their super-majorities in both houses, where they can veto anything that Democratic Governor Tony Evers proposes.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Politics, Wisconsin

Thom Hartmann: Why You Should NOT Vote Third Party

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2023 //
147

Thom Hartmann is one of the best political bloggers in the nation and a superb journalist. This is a very important article. In 2016, I pleaded with readers not to vote third party because Trump was clearly unhinged and ignorant. Jill Stein siphoned off enough votes to elect him. I’m still haunted by the infamous photo of Jill Stein sitting at Putin’s table with Michael Flynn before the election.

We can’t afford any more George W. Bush’s or Donald Trump’s, who were both brought to us by Democratic-leaning voters thinking they were doing the right thing by voting for third party candidates…

One of the most fashionable statements these days among progressive-leaning voters who pretend to great political insight is:

“I want to vote for the person I like themost, not some party or candidate that I only half-agree with.”

Its corollary is:

“You’re just trying to get me to vote Democratic because you support that party’s corruption. I won’t be intimidated: I’m going to vote for the best person to run the country!”

Often these types of statements are followed by:

“People in France and Israel can vote for any one of a dozen parties and nobody complains that they’re ‘throwing away their vote.’ This is America: we’re even better! So, I should be able to vote for anybody I want!”

Some people pushing this line simply don’t understand the difference between thepolitical systems of France/Israel and theUS. 

Others are cynical hustlers (this is true mostly of the talk-show and YouTube hosts trying to differentiate themselves by pushing this), trying to grab and hold an audience by being “edgy,” “iconoclastic,” or “a rebel with a cause.”

So, let’s review some political basics.

Whatever its genesis, this opinion — that ignoring our two-party system and “voting for the best candidate is a good thing” — is widespread. After all, intuitively it seems to make perfect sense. 

In a rational world, who would want to vote for anyone less than the best candidate? Unfortunately, though, America’s political system is not as rational as that of countries with proportional representation or ranked choice voting.

A 2022 Pew poll found people’s unfavorable view of both parties has gone from 6 percent in 1994 to 27 percent today. Similarly, 38 percent of Americans “wish there were more political parties to choose from in this country” and may be persuaded to vote for a third-party candidate.

So why is it that third parties don’t work in America, but they do in France?

The United States, in 1789, became the first modern democratic republic founded on thenotion of the leaders of a government, through elections, “deriving their just powers from theconsent of the governed.”

The Framers of the Constitution had never heard of proportional representation or themodern parliamentary system (more on that in a minute), so they went with a simple strategy that’s today referred to by political scientists as “first-past-the-post winner-take-all” (FPTP) or, sometimes, as “majoritarian” or “plurality” election systems.

Whoever gets the most votes becomes theelected politician, and everybody else gets nothing. If you voted with the majority, you’re represented; if not, you’re not at all represented by a person or party that shares your view.

America was an English-speaking country and, as a result, this system spread mostly throughout the English-speaking world and in former British or American colonies. Majoritarian FPTP systems like ours are used in Canada, the UK, India, Jamaica, Liberia, Singapore, Philippines, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Bangladesh.

As a result, most all of these countries are dominated by two parties who tend to pass control of the nation back-and-forth over time. (Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland use Ranked Choice Voting, an even more recent innovation which allows for more political parties; more on that in a moment.)

In such a system, third parties almost always act as spoilers, drawing votes away from the major party to which they’re most closely aligned. People who vote Green, for example, generally would have voted Democratic, thus reducing that party’s vote; people who vote Libertarian would have voted Republican with the same effect.

For example, in Florida in 2000, Ralph Nader on the Green Party’s ticket got 97,488 votes, while George W. Bush “won” Florida by 537 votes. 

It strains credulity to assert that the majority of Nader’s voters would have either voted for Bush or not voted at all, which is why when David Cobb ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2004, he explicitly told people in swing states not to vote for him but to cast their ballots for John Kerry instead.

Jill Stein had no such moral compunction with her Green Party candidacy in 2016. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin provided Trump’s margin of victory in theElectoral College over Hillary Clinton, and, in each of those states, Stein pulled more votes than Trump’s margin.

(In Michigan she got 51,463 votes and Trump won by 10,704; in Pennsylvania she won 49,678 versus Trump’s margin of 46,765; and in Wisconsin Stein carried 31,006 votes but Trump only won by 22,177.)

In other words, had liberals not voted for Ralph Nader in Florida in 2000, Al Gore would have become president and we never would have been lied into a war; had people in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin not voted for Jill Stein in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have become president and America would have been spared thetrauma of 500,000 unnecessary Covid deaths and the ongoing assault to our democracy.

This is apparently not lost on sour-grapes Jill Stein, by the way; she’s reportedly helping run Cornell West’s 2024 Green Party candidacy. It’s also not lost on the Democrat-hating folks at No Labels, who have pledged to put up a candidate for president (presumably Joe Manchin) in 2024.

In the 1950s, French sociologist Maurice Duverger published several papers on this odd quirk of FPTP systems and the way they turn aligned third-party candidacies into agents for the opposition party.

This simple reality — apparently unknown to those who advocate third party candidates — has since come to be known as Duverger’s Law.

So, why can France have so many political parties without damaging their political system but here in America third parties harm those they’re most closely aligned with?

This goes to the invention of what’s called “proportional representation.”

It wasn’t until the year the Civil War started, 1861, that British philosopher John Stuart Mill published a how-to manual for multi-party parliamentary democracies in his book Considerations On Representative Government.

It was so widely distributed and read that nearly all of the world’s democracies today — all of them countries that became democracies after the late 1860s — use variations on Mill’s proportional representation parliamentary system.

In Mill’s system, if a political party gets, say, 12 percent of the vote then they also get 12 percent of the seats in that country’s congress or parliament. A party that pulls 34 percent of the vote gets 34 percent of the seats, and so on. 

The result is a plethora of parties representing a broad range of perspectives and priorities, all able to participate in thedaily governance of their nation. Nobody gets shut out.

Governing becomes an exercise in coalition building, and nobody is excluded. If you want to get something done politically, you have to pull together a coalition of parties to agree with your policy.

Most European countries, for example, have political parties represented in their parliaments that range from the far left to theextreme right, with many across the spectrum of the middle. There’s even room for single issue parties; for example, several in Europe focus almost exclusively on the environment or immigration.

The result is typically an honest and wide-ranging discussion across society about the topics of the day, rather than a stilted debate among only two parties. 

It’s how the Greens became part of today’s governing coalition in Germany, for example, and are able to influence the energy future of that nation. And because of that political diversity in the debates, the decisions made tend to be reasonably progressive: look at thepolitics and lifestyles in most European nations.

In our system, though, if a party gets 12 percent of the vote — or anything short of 50 percent plus one — they get nothing. Whoever gets 50-percent-plus-one wins everything and everybody else gets nothing, which is why we always end up with two parties battling for thehigher end of that 50/50 teeter-totter.

Pretty much every democracy in the world not listed above under the FPTP label are using Mill’s proportional representation. But we don’t, which is why we’re stuck with a two-party system.

Australia and New Zealand have diminished the damage third parties can do to themain, established parties, by using a voting system called ranked choice voting. In a system like that I could have voted for Ralph Nader as my first choice in 2000, with Al Gore as my second choice. When it becomes apparent that Nader isn’t going to make it, my first choice is discarded by thesystem and my vote for Gore becomes theone that gets counted.

Over 300 communities in America are now using ranked choice voting (including Portland, Oregon) and it works great. Moving from FPTP to proportional representation would require amending the Constitution, though, so that’s not going to happen any day soon: ranked choice voting is a nearly-as-good alternative.

At the national level, though, the best way to solve the problem of some Democratic politicians not being as progressive as we’d like is to get active by joining theDemocratic Party and becoming a force for positive change within it. To stand up for public office and elect more progressives, something that can only be done within theDemocratic Party.

To not “throw away your vote,” but to help rebuild the institution that brought America Social Security, the minimum wage, the right to unionize, Medicare, Medicaid, free college, regulatory agencies that defend and protect the environment and working class people, support for people in poverty, and that built America’s first real middle class.

Yes, there are corrupt and bought-off politicians within the Democratic Party. Ever since the Supreme Court fully legalized political bribery with their Citizens Uniteddecision and its predecessors, there have been more than a few Democrats who have enthusiastically put their hands out. The most obvious and cynical ones call themselves corporate “Problem Solvers.” 

But voting for a third-party candidate and thus handing elections to Republicans won’t solve that problem: if anything it will make it worse, because the entire GOP has committed itself to being on the take and, as we saw with Nader and Stein, third-party candidacies often simply hand more power to the GOP. 

Try to find, for example, even one Republican who isn’t benefiting from the billions in oil dollars that have flowed through the Koch network over the years and is thus willing to do something about climate change. Republican governance and their fealty to the fossil fuel industry is literally destroying America.

This is why real progressives like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and Pramila Jayapal stay and work within theDemocratic Party. For progressives to take over the country, we must first take over the DNC.

In other words, get inside the Party and take it over! It’s what hard-core conservatives did with the GOP over the past 20 years, starting with the Tea Party movement, and it’s what progressives must do with the Democratic Party.

Cornell West is a great guy, but with our FPTP election system a vote for him for president in a swing state is effectively a vote for theRepublican nominee. No third-party candidate has ever won the White House, and none ever will until we have nationwide ranked choice voting.

So, the next time somebody tells you how they’re going to only vote for “the best candidate,” you may want to give them this little Civics 101 lesson, along with the phone number, website, or email address for their local Democratic Party. And get behind themovement to bring ranked choice voting to national elections.

We can’t afford any more George W. Bush’s or Donald Trump’s, who were both brought to us, in part, by Democratic-leaning voters thinking they were doing the right thing by voting for third party candidates

Categories Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Has the GOP Become a Party of Hate and Trolls?

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2023 //
29

Thom Hartmann, journalist and blogger, describes the loathsome identity of the Republican Party. It was once a sensibly Conservative Party that believed in local control and minimal government. It boasted leaders like Dwight D. Eisenhower, Howard Baker, Leverett Saltonstall, and Margaret Chase Smith.

What does the GOP believe today, other than cutting taxes for the richest?

Today, the GOP leaders peddle lies and conspiracy theories. On social media, they take turns smearing Biden (“the Biden crime family”) and retailing any charges they stumble across on the internet. I am appalled whoever I read any Tweet (X) posted by Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Jim Jordan, or other current GOP leaders.

You will not hear from any of them a hint of bipartisanship. It’s all hate, hate, hate. They call their opposition whatever names come to mind: socialists, Communists, radical left, fascists. Their words have no substantive meaning. They are intended to spread hate and fear.

Hartman explains why they stoke hate: They have no substantive ideas to improve people’s lives.

Hartmann writes:

So, Donald Trump says that if Judge Tanya Chutkan orders him not to reveal details of the prosecution’s case before they can be presented to a jury, including the names, addresses, and testimony of witnesses against him, he’s going to do it anyway and challenge the court.

And there’s little reason to believe he won’t do it: he’ll take what he’s asserting as his First Amendment right to troll and threaten witnesses against him all the way to the Supreme Court he packed with three rightwing crackpots. If nothing else, it may buy him enough time to get elected president and pardon himself before he’s convicted.

In this, Trump has raised vicious social media trolling into a form of electoral performance art. He’s become our troll-in-chief.

America has been under the sway of rightwing trolls before. When I was a child in the 1950s, Republican Senator Joe McCarthy was conducting an active witch-hunt for “communists” in the federal government. This was the era when Robert Oppenheimer lost his security clearance for, in part, declaring himself a “New Deal Democrat” and standing up to the witch hunters, as characterized in the new movie about his making the bomb.

McCarthy destroyed the lives of thousands of people, and many were imprisoned because of his efforts. Historian Ellen Schrecker estimates his victims at over 10,000. He — and his right hand man, Roy Cohn (who went on to be Trump’s mentor) — were classic trolls in the worst sense of the word.

Some of McCarthy’s efforts live to this day, including his insistence throughout the Army-McCarthy hearings on never saying “Democratic Party” but, instead, always saying, “Democrat Party.”

Similarly, McCarthy echoed the John Birch Society’s (JBS) argument that America is not a democracy but a republic, an argument that James Madison made — and then refuted — when he was trying to sell the US Constitution. McCarthy’s and the JBS’s apparent rationale was that “democracy” sounds too much like Democratic while “republic” evokes good feelings for the Republican Party.

Nelson Rockefeller, who would become Gerald Ford’s Vice President, got a dose of this with the John Birch Society-pushed Goldwater sweep of the Republican Party at their 1964 convention.

“It is essential that this convention repudiate here and now,” he said over boos and chants, “any doctrinaire, militant minority, whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan, or Bircher (pause for ‘republic not democracy!’ chants set off by his attacking the John Birch Society)…”

Today’s trolling, however, has gone beyond the fringes defined in that era by the JBS, Cohn, and the occasional McCarthyite wannabee. It’s become the core, the essential identity, of the post-Trump GOP.

From “rolling coal” trucks blowing poisonous smoke at Prius and EV drivers, to “Free helicopter rides for liberals” tee shirts invoking Pinochet’s murders, to hate groups and militia members showing up at school board meetings, today’s Republican Party has fully embraced hate and trolling.

“Owning the libs” is the main online sport of many Republicans today, as you can see by following the social media feeds or reading the hate mail of any high-profile progressives or Democrats.

In large part that’s because Republicans don’t have anything else to present to Americans as a positive national governing agenda.

Please open the link to read the rest of this excellent post.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Politics, Republicans

Two Democratic Legislators from Wisconsin Attended ALEC Meeting, Spill the Beans

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
10

Two Democratic legislators from Wisconsin joined the hard-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to keep track of what their opponents were planning. They recently attended the 50th annual ALEC convention in Orlando, Florida.

ALEC has about 2,000 state legislators as members. ALEC writes model legislation on the environment, education, gun rights, and every other topic likely to be considered by state legislatures. The members take the model legislation back to their home state and introduce it after writing in the name of their state. ALEC is against gun control, against public schools, against environmental protections, etc. ALEC is funded by major corporations and acts as a voice for corporations that want no government regulation.

Erik Gunn is the deputy editor of the Wisconsin examiner, which first published this report.

Wisconsin State Reps. Francesca Hong and Kristina Shelton aren’t exactly the typical lawmakers to belong to the American Legislative Exchange Council — ALEC for short.

Hong, of Madison, and Shelton, of Green Bay, are staunch Democrats who have consistently voted against bills advancing the policies of the sort ALEC promotes. While the organization is legally nonpartisan and a tax-exempt nonprofit, it has become widely known as the birthplace of right-wing legislative proposals that find a home mainly with Republican state lawmakers around the country.

Last week, however, the two second-term Assembly members were in Orlando for ALEC’s annual meeting. It was Shelton’s second visit and Hong’s third. When they posted about their participation on social media, some followers wondered what they were doing in a crowd so ideologically at odds with their own political stances.

“I think it’s important to understand the agenda of the opposition,” Hong says. “And our current political reality requires us to know what the motivation is of our colleagues and where they’re getting model legislation from [along with] talking points, candidate training. These are all things that are available at ALEC.”

“It gives us an understanding of what’s to come,” adds Shelton — in the form of future legislation that members of the Republican majority might introduce. “And it helps us prepare as Democrats, organizing our own legislation and messaging. There’s no better way to prepare than to hear it directly from the folks on the other side….”

Hong and Shelton view themselves as carrying on a tradition among progressive Wisconsin lawmakers in joining ALEC, attending its events and going back home to report what they see and hear. Their predecessors are former state Rep. Mark Pocan, now a member of Congress, and former state Rep. Chris Taylor, now an appeals court judge.

Their name tags for the ALEC event simply identify them as Wisconsin state representatives, and Hong and Shelton say they don’t go out of their way to out themselves as Democrats — but they aren’t undercover, either…

As paying ALEC members (dues are $200 a year; conference fees are $750), they can’t be excluded on ideological grounds because of the group’s nonpartisan legal status, says Hong, who adds she has asked ALEC for its guest list “multiple times” but never received it.

Membership includes the opportunity to join two subject-matter task forces. Hong chose energy and environment as well as taxation and federalism. Shelton’s two were health and human development and education and workforce. Those sessions are where the details of proposed model legislation from the organization are outlined. They are also where the role of big business is most evident in helping to shape the organization’s proposals….

On education, Shelton says, the organization has heavily promoted school privatization proposals, including education savings accounts and universal private school vouchers, such as were included in a sweeping education bill in Arkansas, the LEARNS Act, enacted earlier this year.

“They’re no longer interested in sort of nibbling around the edges on school vouchers,” Shelton says. “They’re going all in — removing the income limits, moving to those education savings accounts, wildly expanding public investment for religious schools … [and] dismantling any sort of bureaucratic accountability measures.”

Hong says the education proposals have also been made with reference to the difficulties that employers have had filling job openings.

“The framing of it didn’t come off as full, ‘We’re attacking public schools,’” Hong says. “This is how we’re going to get more workers is to essentially make schooling and education’s sole purpose is to be producing workers.”

On economic and social policy, a persistent talking point was “about making poor people rich, not rich people poor,” she adds, while government assistance is “dragging down the economy” and “morally wrong.”

“They’re really digging into that narrative and saying that growing government to help those people is going to be the end of time,” Hong says.

To be sure, ALEC is just one of many organizations, from the AFL-CIO to the Sierra Club, that pursue policy change, sometimes constructing model legislation for that purpose. The difference, Shelton says, is that the group’s agenda doesn’t appear to her to be about policy so much as about political power.

“I think what’s different here is a sort of militant approach by those on the conservative right to not be as interested in actually solving the problems in the critical issues of working people,” she says, “but rather creating legislation to drive issues that they see as winning at the ballot box.”

Even so, a prevailing theme was diminishing the role of government and freeing corporations and business, the two Wisconsin Democrats say.

Categories ALEC, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Democrats, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, North Carolina, Privatization, Vouchers
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