Author: Tom Sullivan

Republican Lite and lighter
by Tom Sullivan

Long before the craft brewing craze started in the U.S., a German student told me that in America they only made two kinds of beer: light and lighter. How times have changed.

Times have changed politically as well. In the wake of centrist Democrats’ recent trouncings, a resurgent liberal movement has emerged. “Liberal” is no longer a dirty word.

Yet in spite of the fact that Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders drew 11,000 at rally last week in Arizona, red-state Democrats do not seem to have gotten the memo. They have taken the wrong message from their trouncing in the 2014 elections. Politico quotes centrist Democrats fretting over the party’s blue shift:

“The national Democratic Party’s brand makes it challenging for Democrats in red states oftentimes and I hope that going forward, the leaders at the national level will be mindful of that and they will understand that they can’t govern the country without Democrats being able to win races in red states,” said Paul Davis, who narrowly failed to unseat Republican Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback last year.

“Davis and his ilk” (Politico’s words) failed to win in 2014 because their party went too far left rather than that centrist Democrats went too far milquetoast:

“It’s important that the Democratic party be ‘big-tent,’” said Vincent Sheheen, who lost last year to South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. “So if the result of that kind of rhetoric is an antagonism toward or a hostility toward the moderate elements of the Democratic Party then yeah, it’s big trouble and big problems.”

“We’ll never take back Congress unless we can win in the South. We’ll never take back governorships unless we can win in the South,” he added.

Delaware Gov. Jack Markell tells Politico, “I think what we need to do is we need to have a message that is compelling to Democrats, to independents, and even to some Republicans.”

I couldn’t agree more. Republican Lite ain’t it.

In North Carolina, former Sen. Kay Hagan snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in 2014 running for reelection on her Republican Lite record, dodging questions early in her campaign on her support for the president and Obamacare. Lightweight Thom Tillis was opposed by many in his Republican party, yet prevailed. In Georgia, Democrat Michelle Nunn, daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), “prevaricated, kvetched, and weaved” regarding her support for Obamacare. I could go on.

“Where the hell is the Democratic party?” an exasperated Howard Dean asked in the aftermath. “You got to stand for something if you want to win.”

Centrist Democrats have reason to be nervous. The public isn’t buying what they’re selling. Given a choice between Republican and Republican Lite, they will choose the real thing. At least they know what they are getting.

Your daily death count
by Tom Sullivan

Wonder what time Lester’s Guns and Ammo opens? ‘Cause it’s time to run down and stock up again. Again.

The gunman who opened fire inside a packed movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, Thursday night, was John Russel Houser, police said at a news conference this morning.

Houser, 59, who killed himself, is among three people who died, police said. The other two were Mayci Breaux, 21, of Franklin, Louisiana, who died at the theater, and Jillian Johnson, 33, of Lafayette, who died at the hospital.

Nine others were injured, including one who was in critical condition, police said.

Gov. Bobby Jindal praised two New Iberia teachers as heroes. One leaped over the other to shield her and pull a fire alarm:

“Her friend literally jumped over her, and in her account actually saved her life,” Jindal said during a press conference. “If she hadn’t done that … that bullet, she believed it would have hit her in the head.

“Even though she was shot in the leg, she had the presence of mind to pull the fire alarm to help save other lives.”

So there’s a bright side. Sure, more people are dead and traumatized this week. After others were dead and traumatized last week — the same day Colorado convicted another guy for killing 12 and wounding 70 at another movie theater two years ago. But, you know, heroes.

At least I know I’m free

We may be slow on the uptake, but Americans have finally learned to respond appropriately to the ongoing gun-rampage carnage. We set up GoFundMe accounts for survivors. Private charity is an appropriate response to gun violence because government action is tyranny. And we buy even more guns. That goes without saying.

So for many of our neighbors, it will be off to Lester’s once again for another backup weapon, more magazines, ammo, and maybe one of those new laser sights. Because soon the only way they’ll feel safe going outdoors is wearing a web harness with magazine pouches and grenades hanging off it.

If needing an arsenal to defend against neighbors and your government is your idea of freedom, you don’t need weapons. You need medication.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the ALEC States of America
by Tom Sullivan

Republican presidential hopeful Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is in San Diego this morning to address the 2015 convention of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). If politicians really did wear sponsors’ logos on their jackets like NASCAR drivers, Walker’s relationship with ALEC’s funders would win him the pole position:

It is a relationship that spans two decades. Since he first took public office in 1993 as a Wisconsin legislator, through to his current position as that state’s governor, Walker has maintained close ties to Alec, with policies to match. Many of Walker’s most contentious actions – a tough-on-crime bill that sent incarceration rates soaring, stand-your-ground gun laws, protection of corporate vested interests, attacks on union rights and many more – have borne the Alec seal of approval.

Should Walker win the Republican nomination in 2016 (a plausible outcome) and then defeat the Democratic candidate to take the presidency (a harder, though not unthinkable, challenge) he would become the first Alec alum to enter the Oval Office. In short, it is now possible to conceive of the first Alec president of the United States.

See Merriam-Webster’s definition for “shill.”

For those needing a refresher, Brendan Fischer of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reports:

More than 200 corporations and a quarter of state legislators belong to ALEC, where corporations vote as equals with state legislators on “model” bills before they are introduced in legislatures to become binding law. The group receives 98 percent of its funding from corporations like Shell Oil, Peabody Coal, and Altria/Phillip Morris, and from sources like the Koch family foundations, and many of the “model bills” that it has promoted – from prison privatization to environmental deregulation — directly benefit the financial interests of its funders.

Fischer explores the conference agenda here.

ALEC may have chosen San Diego for its conference to draw a line in the sand. ALEC strongly opposes moves across the country to raise the minimum wage:

Aside from the weather, ALEC organizers may have also been attracted to the city’s political climate. Last year, the San Diego City Council voted to raise the minimum wage to $11.50 an hour. It joined Los Angeles and Boston as one of the communities to raise the minimum wage at the local level. Detractors were able to put the measure to a referendum scheduled in 2016. Businessweek labeled San Diego a “bulwark against minimum wage hikes” in headline, talking [about] the referendum.

The group has long had public education as a target, with a goal of transferring public education funding to private schools (part of its overall privatization agenda) and abolishing pubic education altogether. Milton Friedman addressed this at an ALEC meeting in 2006 [emphasis mine]:

How do we get from where we are to where we want to be—to a system in which parents control the education of their children? Of course, the ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it. Then parents would have enough money to pay for private schools, but you’re not gonna to do that. So you have to ask, what are politically feasible ways of solving the problem. And the answer is, in my opinion, choice, that you have to change the way government money is directed. Instead of its being used to finance schools and buildings, you should decide how much money you are willing to spend on each child and give that money, provide that money in the form of a voucher to the parents of the children so that the parents can choose a school that they regard as best for their child.

And of course deceiving the public about that goal is the way you go about it. You sell the hollowing out of the American tradition of public education with talk about choice, racial inequity, innovation, etc. And school reformers did for a long time. At this ALEC conference, however, it seems finally the mask has come off:

With vouchers gaining momentum nationwide, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is meeting in San Diego today, has decided to drop the pretense that vouchers have anything to do with social and racial equity, and is now pushing vouchers for the middle class—a project which, if pursued enough in numbers, will progressively erode the public school system and increase the segregation of students based on race and economic standing.

As President of the United States, Scott Walker hopes to take the first ceremonial swing with ALEC’s golden sledge hammer.

Now that’s a low blow
by Tom Sullivan

Donald Trump seems determined to turn the GOP presidential primary into his next reality show, and to drag other Republican aspirants with him. Check out this Trump twofer insult of Lindsey Graham and former Texas governor Rick Perry. From Politico:

On Tuesday, Trump ramped up his attacks on the South Carolina senator — who made headlines Monday for calling the Donald a “jackass” — and even gave out Graham’s private phone number.

Trump began his rambling diatribe by calling Graham a “lightweight” and an “idiot.”

“He doesn’t seem like a very bright guy. He actually probably seems to me not as bright as Rick Perry. I think Rick Perry probably is smarter than Lindsey Graham,” Trump added, riffing on prior insults he had lobbed at the former Texas governor.

Oh, my.

Graham has been flinging insults at Trump since Trump told an audience that Sen. John McCain is not a war hero. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK?” Trump said on Saturday in Iowa:

Asked on CBS about the reaction to him calling Trump a “jackass” repeatedly, Graham said, “A lot of people are offended. The jackasses are offended. All I can say is that I’ve had it.”

Hair pulling and bitch-slapping are next. Wonder what the Very Serious People think about being cast members?

Changing lanes [while black]
by Tom Sullivan

Sandra Bland’s name featured prominently in the Black Lives Matter (#BLM) shutdown of the Netroots-Phoenix town hall on Saturday. Like the other black women mentioned, Bland died in police custody, in her case just a week earlier. Why? And how? The Los Angeles Times (emphasis mine):

According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, Bland failed to signal that she was changing lanes so a trooper pulled her over. The trooper was going to give her a written warning but Bland became argumentative and uncooperative, officials say.

The Chicago Tribune provides additional details:

Trooper Erik Burse, a department spokesman, said last week that Bland was going to be left off with a warning for a minor traffic violation, but was charged with assault on a public servant after she kicked the officer.

The trooper who stopped Bland has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation by the FBI and Texas Rangers for allegedly violating the department’s “courtesy policy.”

The stop escalated over a cigarette, according to the family’s lawyer, Cannon Lambert:

Lambert, citing what he had seen on the dashcam video, said the trooper then asked Bland to put out her cigarette.

Bland, who seemed irritated at having been pulled over in the first place, responded: ‘Why do I have to put out a cigarette when I’m in my own car?'” Lambert said. “And that seemed to irritate him to the point where he said, ‘Get out of the car.'”

Bland, a civil rights advocate who had moved to the Houston area from suburban Chicago for a new job at Prairie View A&M University, “wasn’t comfortable getting out of the car,” Lambert said. So the trooper “looked to force her to get out of the car by way of opening the door and started demanding that she do,” Lambert said.

You don’t even need me to finish this story. Sandra Bland exits the car, yadda yadda yadda, she dies in a Texas jail cell three days later.* The local medical examiner rules Bland’s death a suicide.

However, the Houston Chronicle reported late Monday:

HEMPSTEAD – With new questions being raised into the arrest and death of Sandra Bland, Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis said Monday that his office has not determined a cause of death for the woman who was found hanging in a cell in the Waller County Jail. Her death was initially ruled a suicide by medical examiners.

“This is being treated like a murder investigation,” Mathis said at a news conference late in the afternoon, explaining that he has requested scientific testing from items at the jail, including touch DNA evidence on the plastic trash bag that officials earlier said Bland used to kill herself.

The thing I cannot get out of my head is that this professional woman is dead after failing to signal a lane change [while black]. Who hasn’t done that? But for African Americans, everyday acts from walking to shopping to changing lanes [while black] has become a sick version of that stupid game we play with fortune cookies. Only this game can be deadly.

* We “yadda-yadda” African Americans dying in police custody. Ending both was the point of the #BLM action on Saturday.

Keeping the help from getting all uppity
by Tom Sullivan

Eliminating tenure is only one front in the effort to rationalize the academy. Writing for Al Jazeera, Mark LeVine looks beyond the Midas Cult’s effort to housetrain the academy:

For academics lucky enough to have tenure at an “R-1 research university” — one with “extensive” doctoral level graduate programs and support for faculty research as well as teaching — the erosion of traditional tenure protections is damaging because it threatens not only academic freedom but research and teaching that contribute hundreds of billions of dollars to U.S. GDP.

Undermining that investment would seem counter to the goal of turning every public resource into gold. Yet as we have seen with the astronomical amounts of money it is willing to throw at elections, the Midas Cult is willing to spend what it takes (and to sacrifice others) to stop the contagion of critical thinking that might threaten its dogma. Clearly, this is not about money. It is about ideology. Whatever the fiscal arguments for attacking the academy, it is not as if the cost of funding academics is that expensive (emphasis mine):

Indeed, upwards of a quarter of faculty with doctorates live below the poverty line — eight percentage points higher than the national average for all Americans. Think of this in the context of the American dream, where dedication and education are supposed to ensure a piece, however modest, of the American dream. If 10 years of intensive college and graduate study can’t even get a person a better salary than the average Walmart cashier, there is something profoundly wrong.

The Walmartization of higher education is of course part and parcel of the larger McDonaldization of American society, which devalues broad skill sets and critical thinking in favor of consumer-driven “choice” and a cheap and controllable workforce. As anthropologist Sarah Kendzior asks in perhaps the most viewed article in the history of Al Jazeera English, what does it mean when education has gone from being the great path out of poverty to being “a way into it”?

Cultists don’t need educated thinkers or researchers. Until education can be fully automated, all it needs is education delivery drones. And frankly, there is no reason cultists should have to pay for education in America anymore. As I wrote in 2011:

In the Atlantic’s “The Rise of the New Global Elite,” Chrystia Freeland describes the super-rich as “a nation unto themselves,” more connected to each other than to their countries or their neighbors. Freeland writes that “the business elite view themselves increasingly as a global community, distinguished by their unique talents and above such parochial concerns as national identity, or devoting ‘their’ taxes to paying down ‘our’ budget deficit.” Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, explains that globalization means, “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business …” Why should it be?

In a global economy driven more and more by bottom-line thinking, public education is just another community expense the elite would rather not bear, isn’t it? The rich can afford private schools for their children and have little need for educated workers in the multiple cities where they own houses. How much education do gardeners and waiters really need anyway?

Why should the global elite pay taxes to educate the children of those below their station? Why pay to educate workers when they can import them on H-1B or L-1 visas and pay them less than American workers? As Allstate’s CEO implied, their companies can easily set up shop in India, Indonesia or China. Globalization means multinational corporations can simply swoop in and exploit an educated workforce in countries that have already incurred the sunk costs of developing that resource. And multinationals get to pay those foreign workers less to boot. Whether here or abroad, why not just let somebody else pay taxes for educating other people’s children?

Besides, educated workers only get uppity, and whether they realize it or not, “permanent faculty … are in fact part of the laboring classes.” At least in the view of the Midas Cult. LeVine concludes:

The threats to academic freedom and shared governance posed by a system of largely contingent academic labor are obvious. If you’re treading water around the poverty line and have no guarantee of a job three months down the line, you are going to be very reluctant to teach any subject that might challenge students or the powers that be in your community, whether it’s science that is literally verboten to discuss — such as climate change in Wisconsin — “divisive” ethnic studies in Arizona or “anti-Semitic” Palestinian history almost anywhere.

Get some shuffle into it, Jackson. [timestamp 10:35].

Motivating the top 1%
by Tom Sullivan

Whenever the subject of tax rates comes up, we never lack for pundits to argue that raising taxes on the highest earners will remove their incentives for working hard. What we do lack is 1) an explanation for why the motivations of the 1% are such a fixation and, 2) evidence to support the assumption-packed “hard work” claim.

The first unsupported assumption is that top earners make more money because they work “harder.” Harder how or harder than whom remains unspecified.

A second assumption is that money is more powerful than all other incentives for working hard, including raw competitiveness, achieving a sense of autonomy, mastery and purpose. You think what drove Steve Jobs most was money?

Raising top marginal tax rates, say pundits, will hurt the economy because top earners will stop working and creating jobs (a third unsupported assumption). In libertarian fantasy, maybe, but that’s not what real people do.

A final assumption is that working “hard” is a public good we should not discourage – if not explicitly encourage – through public policy. If so, why all the concern about the work ethic and compensation of a mere 1.4 million Americans when no matter how much worker productivity surged over the last 30 years, 240 million working-age Americans’ incomes remained flat. Shouldn’t incentivizing their hard work be of greater public concern than just the few at the top?

“You maniacs!”
by Tom Sullivan

Pretty dry out here in the American West. From ProPublica and Matter:

“Killing the Colorado,” a joint reporting project by ProPublica and Matter, set out to tell the truth about the American West’s water crisis. As serious as the drought is, the investigation found that mismanagement of that region’s surprisingly ample supply has led to today’s emergency. Among the causes are the planting of the thirstiest crops; arcane and outdated water rights laws; the unchecked urban development in unsustainable desert environments; and the misplaced confidence in human ingenuity to engineer our way out of a crisis — with dams and canals, tunnels and pipelines.

All that’s missing in this drought photo spread is Charlton Heston in a loincloth dropping to his knees and shouting, “God damn you all to hell!”

“You Maniacs!”

Catching up is hard to do
by Tom Sullivan

One reason Donald Trump gets the attention he does is that he’s Donald Trump. He is already a household name. Becoming one as a presidential candidate takes a lot of money, shoe leather, and time. Bernie Sanders will need all three. The Washington Post explains:

A new Washington Post-ABC News national poll offers a fresh look at Clinton’s and Sanders’s standing among Democrats. The survey finds Clinton is overwhelmingly popular across the Democratic Party, but Sanders is a far-less-familiar pol and is weak among a handful of key voting blocs.

Overall, 82 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of Clinton, while 15 percent are unfavorable (a scant 3 percent have no opinion). Sanders’s favorable rating is 36 percent among Democrats, with even more offering no opinion of him. Nearly a quarter — 23 percent — give Sanders negative marks. That’s notable because, despite being better-known than Clinton, his negatives are eight percentage points higher than Clinton.

I assume the Post meant that to say “less-known than Clinton.”

While strong among liberal Democrats, Sanders is still weak with moderate and conservative Democrats, those without college degrees, and non-whites. A high percentage of those groups have no opinion of Sanders, while Hillary Clinton’s favorables are high, unfavorables are low, and virtually no Democrats have no opinion of her. She’s a household name.

That’s a tough, but not insurmountable hill to climb for a Clinton challenger like Sanders. Some little-known guy named Obama has some experience with that.

Beyond the hate
by Tom Sullivan

One story that really struck me in the wake of the Charleston murders and the Confederate flag debate in South Carolina was actually about Kentucky. James W. Loewen, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Vermont mentioned it on NPR. He explains in his July 1 article for the Washington Post, “Why Do People Believe Myths About The Confederacy? Because Our Textbooks And Monuments Are Wrong.” He writes, “As soon as Confederates laid down their arms, some picked up their pens and began to distort what they had done, and why.” The project to rewrite history began in earnest:

Take Kentucky. Kentucky’s legislature voted not to secede, and early in the war Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston ventured through the western part of the state and found “no enthusiasm as we imagined and hoped but hostility . . . in Kentucky.” Eventually, 90,000 Kentuckians would fight for the United States, while 35,000 fought for the Confederate States. Nevertheless, according to historian Thomas Clark, the state now has 72 Confederate monuments and only two Union ones.

Neo-Confederates also won western Maryland. In 1913, the United Daughters of the Confederacy put a soldier on a pedestal at the Rockville, Md., courthouse. Montgomery County never seceded, of course. While Maryland did send 24,000 men to the Confederate armed forces, it sent 63,000 to the U.S. Army and Navy. Nevertheless, the Confederate monument tells visitors to take the other side: “To our heroes of Montgomery Co. Maryland / That we through life may not forget to love the Thin Gray Line.”

Pretty stunning stuff. Loewen provides examples of how the “states’ rights” rationalization for secession quickly replaced slavery in Southern memory and in schoolbooks, until people will insist slavery had nothing to do with the “War Between the States” (itself renamed), in spite of plenty of contemporary evidence to the contrary. Then, of course, there is the romance of the “Lost Cause” and the battle flag.

Not to minimize the racist component behind the fetish for the stars and bars, but what gets lost in that simplistic analysis is the psychic impact the Civil War had on Southerners. They were superior by nature and breeding to their northern counterparts:

For most Southern proponents, the argument went something like this. In 1066, William the Conqueror subdued the Saxons — a barbarous, uncivilized race — not only providing England with cultural refinement but also imposing upon the island a class of gentry who were genetically equipped to rule. The enduring features of the subdued Saxon race — which because of medieval sociopolitical reality did not tend to intermarry with their Norman overseers — were a resentment of just authority, a tendency toward fanaticism and a reflexive valorization of liberty for its own sake. The Puritan settlers of Massachusetts were the descendants of those vanquished Saxons, separatist fanatics who burned witches until deciding to dump tea into Boston harbor instead.

[snip]

The colonies of the South, on the other hand (Jamestown, but also later colonies in the Carolinas), were established by members of Elizabeth’s and James’s courts, descendants of the Norman conquerors, the ruling class of England. Though the federal union that followed the Revolution sufficed, for a time, to assuage the centuries-old enmity between representatives of these bloodlines, the writer for that 1863 issue of The Southern Literary Messenger insisted that “none of the circumstances which blended the interests of both people … none of the alliances and intimate associations of Society itself — have availed to obliterate any of the decided marks of this innate, fixed, enduring difference.”

Then Southern gentlemen lost a war on their own soil to common yankee tradesmen and shopkeepers, Saxons, and worse, were forced to accept (though many never did) their former property as co-citizens. That had to be a bitter pill. “Heritage not hate” barely scratches the surface. The Confederate flag represents simmering resentment, a big middle finger to the rest of the country over that loss a century and a half ago.

Someone on a FB thread pointed out that the bulk of Southern troops were dirt poor and hardly aristocrats. True. Neither are the pickup truck drivers flying Confederate flags from the back of pickups down here lately. But they absorbed the mythology nevertheless.

Most likely the dirt poor were not the men of means who erected stone monuments to memorialize the Lost Cause in town squares across the South. Nor the ones who crafted an alternate, more flattering, less treasonous origin story for the war, and promote it still in textbooks.

“Teaching or implying that the Confederate states seceded for states’ rights is not accurate history. It is white, Confederate-apologist history. It bends – even breaks – the facts of what happened,” writes Loewen. And that’s just the way they like it. After a century and a half of determined resistance to history and facts, is it any wonder why conservative politicians, many from the Old South, spout patent nonsense with the same dogged defiance?