Cynical and Consistent

Charles Krauthammer has favored us with his miraculous two step Republican rehab program.  It is of a piece with the same old prescriptive cynicism we're accustomed to hearing from him and his ilk.  Krauthammer offers up a wondrously instantaneous and pain free way to remove what he apparently sees as the only obstacle to resurgent Republican electoral dominance, i.e., the pissed off Latino vote. 

Are you ready?  Grant amnesty to those already here illegally, thereby allowing them to remain as guest workers, and ending the ominous threat of economic desperation leading to self-deportation.  Combine that with a rock solid seal of the border, slowing any future illegal crossing to a trickle or drying it up altogether.  This is the cynical equivalent of saying, "Welcome aboard, enjoy the rest of your cruise through life, but pay no attention to those left drowning in the deep and putrid economic and civil swamps of your homelands." 

Notice there is no commitment to any sure and relatively short path to full citizenship, which would make them less susceptible to abuse by their employers and situate them to maturely and confidently choose the option to join or form unions.  Absent that guarantee, even those selfish enough to turn their backs on their brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, or generally desperate and suffering brethren, would themselves actually be punching their own ticket to continue on cruising for an ultimate bruising. 

This prescription is nothing short of a crass and unprincipled copy of the equally ugly and bogus bribe offered to seniors regarding Social Security and Medicare.  The Republican pitch to them is, "If you're already old, you can keep Medicare and Social Security, but only if you let us cut your kids out.  Don't worry, they're young and can make other plans, meanwhile you'll be protected."

If seniors in general are either scared or selfish enough to make such a deal with the devil, they too will utltimately wind up with a pitchfork run right through the heart and meat of the benefits they so desperately want to preserve.  And they forever will be remembered for having made a bad deal for themselves and a hell of a future for their kids.

I think American seniors and illegal immigrant workers alike are better than the cynical Republican strategists think.  But I worry about zerObama.

A Smooth Ride and A Safe Landing?

Well, at least we didn't crash and burn, as I feared we might.  I really expected and was prepared for a long election night, followed by a drawn out legal donnybrook of court filings in several critical, closely contested states.   I said as much in the last two posts.  But it didn't happen, so I was happily wrong.

I also explicitly indicated that this opinion was not reflective of any disagreement with statistician par excellance, Nate Silver, who called the outcome more or less on the nose.  Quite the contrary, I have no quarrel whatsoever with empirical evidence, or the proven methods of uncovering it.  Rather, my expressed concern was that experience had shown there is decidedly more to determining election results in our system than a straight counting of the votes cast and/or the votes which were meant to be cast.  In other words, there is a whole hell of a lot of cheating and illusion that goes on in this, the beacon of liberty and freedom, and gold standard of democracy.  A whole hell of a lot. 

I won't tediously rehearse, but will at least briefly refresh memories of relevant instances, to wit: the blatantly stolen, Supreme Court determined 2000 presidential election, along with the still mysteriously "wrong" exit polls in the 2004 presidential contest, which had Kerry besting Bush all day long.  So, go figure.

And that is indeed the point.  Elections here are not a numbers game alone; they are a numbers, people, and power contrivance.  This is the ground upon which I stand, and have not one inch been pushed from.  In fact, the outcome of this race ironically solidifies the foundation of that view. 

The internal plutocrat machine apparently suffered from a raft of  Karl Rove/Ralph Reed  OZ-like conclusions, manufactured exclusively in the interest of the producers at the expense of the consumers of the information.  In the end, Romney was more the victim of his own PR than the Obama campaign.

Certainly this was reflected in the last Romney/Obama debate, wherein Romney behaved as though he had the lead and didn't want to blow it, as opposed to the aggressive, lying, brute he had demonstrated a talent for being in previous meetings.  He really thought it would be an outright decision in his favor, or at least close enough to steal.  The Romney campaign was all lawyered-up and ready to go into at least four of the most important battle-ground states to take a close race.  In the end, it was caught off guard and mistakenly at ease.

If you depart from this outlook, fair enough.  But just consider that the treasure trove of electoral votes, known as Florida, has not been officially awarded as this is written, on the Saturday following the Tuesday election.  If the margins had been almost infinitesimally closer in at least two of the other seven or so battle-ground states, this contest would be undecided today.

Speaking of today, it is the first day of another too brief, chore filled weekend during which I am tasked by sundry calls other than blog posting.  So, enough for now.  But there are several subjects waiting and needing address.  They include the signals of continuing Republican reactionary policy essayed by customary suspects such as Charles Krauthammer, and signs of more limp-wristed, hand-wringing capitulation from zerObama.  Hope to get to it this evening.

Stay tuned. 

Hanging Fire

Really hope I'm wrong, but I think you can forget Tuesday.  It won't be over.  Not for a long time.

A big part of me wants to say it could have been decided then, had ZerO at least shown up for the first debate; but probably not.  The fascist machine was going to have to pull out all the stops to try to steal this election, no matter what.  How come?

It's their last chance under even the slimmest imitation of a democratic process, that's how come.  Their racist reactionary base, both in absolute and proportional terms, is shrinking, thank God.  This is, in raw demographic terms, their last stand.  It literally is now or never.  Lose now, and next time it's brass knuckles.

But the brain dead 2000 Bush versus Gore  experience alone demonstrated this electoral system is sufficiently screwy that even a home grown, three county, country bumpkin itinerant  legal mouthpiece could tangle it up indefinitely, if asked.

So, you can laugh, go ahead. I hope this call is wildly wide of the mark, but be forewarned that you should keep the seat belt fastened, and hunker down for a rough ride.

.

Out On A Pretty Fat Limb

Nate Silver is not wrong, he is insufficient.  So are his smug, genotronic acolytes.

Data don't vote.  Data are not grains of sand on the beach, nor levees - the water's edge.  Data don't steal elections. 

And in recent times, the last 50 or 60 years anyway, it has been the plutocratic/crypto-fascist interests which have stolen both national and local elections.  As a convenient, down-and-dirty shorthand explanation and support for this claim, I'd simply reference the relative decline and disappearance of urban, populist accented political machines, and their replacement by the wall-to-wall, blinding white noise dominance of money.  I won't bore you with a recitation of specifics.  Readers of this blog know what I'm talking about.

This is not to say that I think ZerObama will lose.  God forbid he does.  But he well may.  By now, those of us paying attention should all understand that God gets the hell out of the way, and demurs acting to forbid things we should.  He is painfully patient.

In 2000, the Supreme Court blatantly stole the presidential election for Bush, and there was no price. No price other than human loss and suffering.  No price for the plutocrats.  No loud declamations. No demonstrations.  No civil unrest.  Nothing but slavish acquiescence.  No opposition to the slaughter of countless innocents, civilian men, women and children, victims of warrant less war in far off lands.  God did not intervene.

The plutocrats got what they wanted.  The thinnest margin of privileged Americans have been made extravagantly wealthier.  99.9% of Americans have been punished with cheaper and cheapening employment, and the threat of hopeless demotion to membership among the  ranks of the utterly discarded.

 Of course, you can also absolutely forget the survival of  public education - even on the grade school level- and the  overarching reach of a meaningful social safety net.  This is a rich irony given the line of rhetoric that many working class - white, black and brown - people have swallowed regarding even the price of being a union member.

The dollar cost of union dues is tiny, especially compared to almost any regular voluntary expense that can be brought to mind.  I mean, com'on, let's get real.  Think cell phone, cable, or almost any other superfluous splurge spending by knuckle headed, genotronic age, pseudo-gastronome, with-it twitter-ite smart asses.  Utterly clueless.

More to the point, union dues today are social.  Completely.  In the past few decades, when a relatively ascendant liberal outlook reigned as a result of hard won, street fought battles, the burden of being a union member was regarded as more or less a gratuity-styled financial chipping-in.

But not now.  The flame throwing, lying right wing would have us believe that union membership is economically onerous.  However, every serious study continues to report that union workers are far better compensated than their unorganized counterparts.  Moreover, unionized workers enjoy a rights protected working relationship with their employer completely absent in the naked "at will" employment regime inscribed in state law.   Into the bargain, being fired from a  job for union organizing activity today is, financially, as likely a blessing as a hardship.

But the genotronics are better than us.  They think.  They are tragically wrong.  I would spare them unintentional ignorance, but theirs is disreputably willful.
 
So, we come to the only question that matters:  Is this thing close enough to steal?  Yes.

Why?  Well, 3 or 4 things: Money and power - those can be counted 1 & 2 or just the same thing, next comes bigotry, and then simple vanilla ignorance and genotronic smugness.

So, if it happens, don't tell me, "we was robbed."  You done throwed it all away, smart guys.









 

Lincoln Addendum ... And A Wrinkle

We're all familiar with Lincoln's "You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."  Doubtless, its universal currency arises both from its rhetorical appeal as well as its reach.  I mean, it seems so comprehensive.  But is it?

Actually, no.  Turns out, that with every turn of the electoral wheel, which is to say whenever a plebiscite is on order, most of us more or less default to a rather fervently - if unconsciously - clutched belief that you can't even fool most of the people some of the time.  That is precisely the basis of our faith in democracy.  But we have learned over time, like the Church since Copernicus and Galileo through Darwin to an ever newer - if not braver- world, it pays to be flexible.  We seem to have made peace with the fact that sometimes most of the people are willing to fool themselves.

They kid themselves that they can satisfy their bigotry without sacrificing their own economic and social standing.  They have been doing this now ever since LBJ signed the historic Civil Rights legislation of the 1960's.  That is what provided the modern Republican Party with the racist foundation for arguing that anything so powerful that is can insure equal status under the law for all, regardless of race, is too damn powerful to be trusted to do anything right. 

Hence, white working class people have participated in and fueled the suicidal dismantlement of every institutional (Federal government) underpinning of the modern American middle class and the degradation of societal norms in general:  Social Security and Medicare, labor rights, public education , safe food and drugs (case in point: the current unregulated drug related national meningitis outbreak), environmental protection, Banking/Wall Street regulation, and even restraint over the out and out buying of the electoral process itself by home grown and foreign plutocrats and fascists.  What's next, the buying and selling of body parts?  Oh, wait, pretty sure that already goes on.  How long before we're back to buying and selling whole living bodies again? 

So, whereas even a rather shopworn Lincoln quotation can still provide a jumping off point for a current political observation, nothing seems more spiritually wanting than a miraculous Lincoln resurrection.

Plutocrat's Pain

Chrystia Freeland is in pretty tight with the Plutocrats.  That doesn't mean she is simpatico with their world view or politics, but she has a lot of empathy for them.  She feels their pain.   She should, she has been making her living off of them as a professional financial reporter/editor for some time now.  She knows many, many of them personally.  And they often confess their personal feelings to her.  That tawdry, little gossipy fact, indeed appears to be the entire excuse for her most recent publication.

I have not yet read her new book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, but I've been in the audience when she has held forth at length on NPR,  Bill Moyers Journal,  and Real Time with Bill Maher.  She argues that our super-rich - richest ever on the planet - class of pampered scumbags have real feelings, which have been injured by Obama's constant insistence that they lack a sense of social responsibility.  Apparently they think Obama is either insensitive or insolent or something like it  for relentlessly reminding them and us that they are now paying the absolute lowest effective tax rate the rich have paid since the Great Depression. 

All the while, they cry and wail about budget deficits, begrudge the poor even the slimmest of life support sustenance, and rail against the aspirations of the majority for some semblance of a bourgeois middle-class life style.  They - the plutocrats - really think that their rigging the system and scamming it to pile up the biggest haul of loot in the history of class thievery is an act of civic duty.  They really believe that their obligation to the country lies in exploiting whatever strategy - however evil and dirty - may be available to enrich themselves.

Here's the thing.  There is not and never has been any moral or natural justification for allowing one tiny fraction of the actors in the economy, those at the point of transaction, negotiation, or administration to exercise confiscatory control over the revenue generated by the ensuing activity undertaken and conducted by an additional and indispensable multiplicity of players.  Hence, contrary to the accepted mythology of the system's apologists, like Freeland, this is not at all a question of redistribution.  It is - and always has been - a fight over the basic original distribution of the proceeds which flow from the dynamic of economic activity. 

What is needed, and really all that is needed, is a resurgence of economic democracy.  Strong unions, backed up by a civilized respect for the imperative of appropriate legal oversight of market activity, alone can insure fair labor compensation and a just society.

These are all old lessons, learned the hard way.  They remain as sure as the lift of a wink or the smell of sweat, yet are willfully forgotten by today's elites.  Shame on them.  Really, shame on them.

For we are not now suffering the want to somehow come up with a new or exotic formulation to address today's challenges to progressive political ideals, as Freeland and others of her ilk argue.  That is just so much lame bullshit.  We are suffering from the closing embrace of a lowering darkness and the lack of will.

 

1856*

This debate is going to be a humdinger.**  This is the last chance the Fascist right modern Republican Party has to win under the present presidential electoral system.  Angry white men are dying off, and the number of diverse ethnic young voters is on the rise.  As Bill Clinton might say, it's just arithmetic.

They have no choice, Romney and Co. have to go for the kill shot.  No telling what crazy bullshit will hit the airwaves tonight, but get ready, it will surely be without precedent.  Gonna be ugly and hilarious all at once.

And so I come to the point of this little post.  Just a thought I've not seen floated anywhere else, but I would take a flyer on adventure and speculate that should the plutocrats and their overpowering money falter and fail to win this time, look for a full-court press across the country to return to a presidential electoral system whereby the state electors are chosen by state legislatures, not popular vote within the states.  The last time any state selected its electors in that manner was in 1856 when South Carolina was still that backward.  And the constitution  allows states to adopt that method even today.  Just a thought.  I know, hilarious and ugly. 

*Clarification:  1856 was the last time any state granted its legislature the regular and continuing task of appointing the state's presidential electors.  South Carolina did it that way, just as it always had, up until its act of secession in 1860.  For isolated, nonrecurring reasons, three other states' legislatures last appointed electors in the same historical era:  In 1848, Massachusetts did so because a 50% majority requirement had not been met by any contesting party.  In 1864, Nevada was admitted to the union and did not have time to conduct a popular canvass.  Similarly, in 1868, Florida had only recently been readmitted to the union and had not time for a popular vote.

**Update:   Wow, that was a dud of a debate - at least when thought of as a potential humdinger.  So, it was also a dud of a prediction.  Someone once told me that if you want to make at least a few correct predictions, make a lot of them.  So, I'm not shy or embarrassed on that score.

What is worrying though is that Romney did not swing for the fences last night, and that should tell us he and his campaign are feeling confident enough to be playing "not to lose" rather than going all out for the win.  Obama was the only one who came in with a pre-packaged zinger to launch, the one about horses and bayonets.  His delivery still needs some work, but it was fairly effective.

Anyway, I stand by the warning that the fascist right sees this election, under the usual methodology, as key to implementing its final solution to the legacy of the both the New Deal and Great Society, i.e. total destruction of Social Security and Medicare.  They know that from this point forward the demographics will trump their money and thwart their schemes in anything remotely resembling a popular vote election.  And, by the way, that is all we have now, the semblance of one. 

But they also know that they can pretty easily control state legislatures with their power and influence, regardless of the individual state constituency make-up.  This inside dealing is even more secretive, opaque, and effective than it shows on the national stage.  Just look at Louisiana, for instance.  Perhaps a more extended analysis of this proposition in a future post.

For now we should be aggressively pursuing strategies which will accomplish the opposite goal.  That is to say the dismantlement  or disabling of the so-called electoral college.  Remember, as Scalia said in 2000 when he and the other fascists were busy stealing the presidential election, individual citizens do not have the constitutional right to vote for president.  As long as the electoral college is still functioning, we never will.

LOL

I have no idea whether Obama will come to fight tonight or not.  I know he personally has the tools.  I know he has the most sacred human social agenda available to him, the defense and promotion of truth, justice and human dignity.  But I also know that the record clearly reflects that he doesn't fully comprehend the reality of the struggle over that agenda. 

For whatever complex tangle of reasons, be they generational, emotional, or intellectual, Obama is not, repeat not,  a genuine liberal.  He has more or less always said that very thing himself.  Just think of the last so-called debate when he mumbled something into the microphone to the effect that his and Romney's views on Social Security are probably not all that dissimilar.  God help us if he ever does have the opportunity to act on what I take him at his word is his real opinion.  We are all sunk.

Thank God that the modern Republican Party is so demonically driven to depths of depravity by its racist core base as to deny it sufficient maneuvering room to conspire with the clueless "liberal" pretender to kill one of the three great domestic achievements of the last century.

 And that century truly deserves to be remembered as the "American Century."  After all, this country in that century rescued the rest of the world from two great wars, led the way in overcoming the debacle of an unregulated capitalist system's great collapse, enshrined twin elements of a decent social safety net, at least for the elderly, and - to our everlasting credit - finally broke through and ended all of the legal structures of racial oppression. 

But today, we find ourselves teetering towards the abyss.  We are stumblingly led by a man with outstanding academic credentials, but no real education.  The lack of education part is not his fault, it is generational.  At the time he went through college, the economic lessons learned during the Great Depression were almost totally written out of the curriculum, and replaced by the bogus conservative nonsense peddled by the likes of Milton Friedman and others.  Such largely explains why Obama is not a true liberal, he was taught a bunch of  conservative economic claptrap, and hasn't yet fully overcome that disability, even in the face of this modern day financial "downpression."  And he is in no sense alone.  Most new age Democrats - from Clinton forward - are likewise ill-equipped to meet the enemy head-on.

Overlay that complex dynamic, one which has whittled down and weakened the determination of a once proud and progressive Democratic Party, with the ascendancy of the modern Republican fascistic edifice, and understand that tonight everything is at risk. 

Let's hope Obama shows he is starting to get it.

Generations Or Choices ... Take Your Pick

So, David Brooks is at his very best in the New York Times this morning.  That means he is almost all wrong, which is as good as he gets.  Usually, like all conservatives, he is simply stupid.

He claims the Biden/Ryan debate was generationally driven.  That is maybe ten percent right.  But then he goes on to claim that Ryan did well, which is a total crock.  All of us who watched the thing know as well as we know our own names that that is bullshit.  Biden wiped ... the bottom of things with the Charmin (Ryan). That is all.

To be sure, Brooks is correct in saying that Ryan is - more than anything else - into himself; that is to say, self-obsessed.  Ryan spends all of his spare time (which for Republican, i.e. conservative, elected officials means most of the day) in the work-out room or gym.  Biden, on the other hand, is the product of far more serious times.  Well, excuse me for thinking the obvious: Biden is of strong stuff and real substance; Ryan is a developmentally arrested, narcissistic, shallow punk. 

Speaking of which, then comes Stephen Colbert on one of the Sunday morning talking head programs and admits that satire without a point is at bottom "skszoid."  For once, I totally agree with the mentally unhinged, rootless, pointless, unlettered, unread, and ignorant, modern satirists like Colbert and Stewart.  They are every bit as much a part of the social illness we confront as is Rush Limbaugh.

To the extent that this whole argument can be generationally divided - which is a very small, but noticeable amount - the irony is that the Biden generation cares a whole hell of a lot more for the Colbert/Stewart generation than those kids have the balls to care for themselves. 

For example, I am about to head out for the Greater New Orleans Labor Day Picnic, which was postponed to this date because of Hurricane Isaac.  Others will be attending second line parades in Central City or the annual Seafood Festival.  I love all three events, as both my social calendar and personal diary reflects.  But, on certain days, one makes this or that choice.  If there is any generational component, well, I am happy to stand my actions against those taken or not taken by others.

Don't Cry For Joe Biden, America

When you're on your game and pounds-the-best the class of any contest, you know it.  Never once do you look at the scoreboard, during or after the event; it is but small ornamentation.   You not only own the victory, you are the victory. 

When you've turned back and laid waste every strategy of the opponent, when you've dominated in every way, when you've borne high the standard of accomplishment and truth, when you've frustrated the misdirection and trampled the lies of frauds and fakers, the ultimate deed is done.  Yet again, the real has been shown to exist and matter in the world.

When the engagement has ended, the real people are lifted up, united in purpose, and positioned to meet whatever challenges life may offer; to not merely persevere, but overcome.  When you've fulfilled a vital assignment in such an event, no one can help you feel it more, or steal it away.   And if you've delivered all this with honest gusto, style and savoir-fare, remember Joe Biden and smile your Sunday best.

It is a sweeping and grand human accomplishment.  And it is not despite the fact that the con men and connivers will return for another run against the real, but precisely because we know they will.  Then will it be well to look to Biden's example.  Then on that day, and we should hope many days to come, perhaps Obama will be inspired to give us Henry V, not Hamlet.   

For those battles, come they will; relentlessly.  Here's why: we live not in an age of miracles and wonders, as Paul Simon once sang, but in a very dark day of cynicism, characterized by a virtual doctrinal pointlessness embraced by many of the young, and a consciously willful dishonesty abroad within the organs of communication and institutions of community that once were reliably sincere, even when mistaken or misguided.  In concert, they attempt a sort of genetic decoding of the truth and reality, not to better understand the world, but to disdain the notion that there is actually anything out there to understand.  It amounts to nothing less than a denial of the value and dignity and meaningfulness of human life; a death wish.

Indeed, among the most vital component of this generation, it seems like everything serious is to be ridiculed.  Nothing gets past being some kind of existential satire, a parody of  virtue and integrity.  I give you Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert - Beavis and Butthead come to life.

Meanwhile, formerly reputable social entities and institutions, especially among news reporting organizations - but certainly not excluding many others like businesses, universities, religions, etc., appear to have no higher purpose (let alone purpose at all), beyond expanding a hold on the popular imagination or the people's pocketbook.  Hence, we find ourselves presented with a shallow, spoiled, childishly ignorant ideologue, Paul Ryan, propped-up by false media proclamations of substance and courage, draped in bogus bona-fides, and sent out with a straight face to stand for the second highest office in the land. Of course, Biden laughed him off the stage.

What is in no way funny, however, is that the same dishonest media which invented the Ryan myth, continues to push the lie.  It invested so much of its reputation in misrepresenting a weirdly narcissistic, emotionally arrested, overage adolescent, whose guiding light in life and "intellectual" North Star was an equally warped personality of no real accomplishment, Ayn Rand, that it cannot now afford to allow even an obvious truth to interrupt its corrupt narrative.  It just can't bring itself to fully comprehend or admit Biden's total triumph. 

But don't cry for Joe Biden, America.  Joe knows, and he knows you know.  He laughed the whole way through it, and he's still laughing.  Save your tears.  They could still be needed, should we ultimately let him and ourselves down.

Unnatural Natural Enemies ... Or ... You Got A Problem!

The human animal is different.  Thank God there are no more like us ... most others would surely agree.  And if we were truly smart, we would try to be a much different animal in a much better way.

We are the only animal on the planet which pushes other animals to the edge of existence or to absolute extinction for reasons other than nutritional need, competition for territorial range, or fear of predation.  We do it not out of natural instinct and need, but because of the bullshit which otherwise goes on in our heads.

We imagine the most ridiculous crap.  It may be aphrodisiac related or connected to some other silly super-human bio-enhancement delusion.  Worse, it may just be because we want to try it in some new chic restaurant culinary preparation.  Shame.

Oh ..... you want to affect the effete skeptic's pose of the modern clueless period, do you?  Tell it to the scores of  Elephants, Rhinoceroses, Tigers, Sharks, Chimpanzees and legions of other bush animals pushed to the end of life or extinction by ironically self-destructive human appetites and gluttonous, greedy grasping.

We also imagine ridiculous grounds for harboring murderous opinions of other humans. It's all part of the same capacity that makes us the only delusional and most dangerous animal on the planet. 

Think about these things:  It's only 50 years since the enlightening of Vatican II, and reaction now has another dark and firm grip on the Catholic Church, about the same amount of time has passed since LBJ finally forged national legal freedom for all in this country and the reaction is running at flood stage, finally, FDR has not much longer absented the political stage and the Reagan "Welfare Queen" stooges are in the flood lights.  I predict, though, that Joe Biden, a true, and truly good, human being, will expose this punk.  Ryan is toast.



 

Such A Very Good Thing

Some more explicit thoughts on our fair city's current newspaper saga, which was discussed in the previous post. Here are the most important features of the transition to daily home delivery and local focus by the brand-spanking-new Daily New Orleans Edition of the The Advocate.  This is what makes the incredibly brutal, ugly and crass attempt by the Times-Picayune to insult and push us around, sully our good name, and demote us to second-rate status such a very good thing.

First of all, the Times-Picayune's gambit has failed, utterly.  In fact, it has backfired, devastatingly.  The Picayune, instead of being able to cut overhead to the bone, pare back service to only three days a week home delivery without consequence, and generate higher profits at our and their former employees' expense, has effectively committed suicide; good riddance.

Best of all, that is in no way owing to any campaign or effort on the part of any of the know-it-all-entrepreneurial newbies, all come to town since Katrina to instruct us about all the things we've gotten wrong in the last 300 years, the slacker and eccentric indulgences we call a culture, and overall want of civic virtue.  No, all this group of clueless kids have done is foster a wholesale wreckage of any semblance of public education or effective health care for the poor and, along with it, the strongest medical training anywhere in the country, through its willingess to support coloring-book childish conservative leadership like Stacy Head here and Bobby Jindal in the state capitol.  They can't even unstick their eyeballs from their electronic light-up toys long enough to do the laundry.

Nor did the whining and polite letter-writing efforts of  big-ass wallets like Tom Benson and the uptown society page clubby swells have any effect.

No, Baton Rouge Advocate publisher, David Manship, stepped-in, stepped-up and invested in a New Orleans daily version of the Advocate for home delivery here because we are who we are, nothing more.  He has raided the remnants of the Picayune's offices, made off with the T-P Loving Cup chalice awarded annually to some goody-two-shoe local aristocrat, and used it to christen this wonderful new publication.  And it has all happened simply because, as I pointed out previously, we are who we are: a people, a culture, and a city.  -30-.







 

Requiem For A Paperweight

Don't let the title fool you, this is a feel good story.  And we deserve it. 

We are a people.  We are a culture.  We are a city. 

And more, we are a champion.  Events have proven that.  Take a victory lap.

Better yet, take another sip of your CDM, Mimosa, or Bloody Mary, light one if you wish, sit back and relax with the paper today and tomorrow.

For unlike the protagonist of Rod Serling's classic Requiem for a Heavyweight, Mountain Rivera, who never threw a fight, the late Times-Picayune took an intentional dive in an elaborately staged imaginary duel between print and digital news delivery, yet hoped to remain the bully of New Orleans.  But, the curtain has dropped.  They are gone.  We are still here.

Cheers!!  In order for sure.  But like any print worth the ink, this should be clipped and cut to the true skinny. 

Today is the 7th day of home delivery of the New Orleans Edition of  The Advocate.

Like many others who consider themselves lifelong New Orleanians, I lived some four years in the Baton Rouge area.  It was many years ago.  And during those years, I read The Morning Advocate daily.  Note the word "Morning" in the masthead; no doubt an artifact of even earlier times when Baton Rouge, too, had an evening paper.  I'm certain I haven't read more than ten to twenty Advocate issues in the last thirty plus years. 

I always thought it a quality publication.  Still, I don't know how to say this more politely, so here goes:  In my experience it has always been stupidly conservative, editorially.  But it was also pretty damn good at covering its beat.  And that is what counts. Over the long haul, institutional outlook can, and often does, change; and, where it really matters, outlook is up to you, dear reader.  If the assigned duty is secured, that is all that counts.  So I will leave the rest of this to the publisher of The Advocate, David Manship.

This from Manship in the Monday, October 1, 2012 New Orleans Edition of The Advocate:

 

"We understand that people make decisions about how they consume news on an individual basis, and our products are available in many formats, including online and an E-edition, but we also have The Advocate Daily New Orleans edition for Crescent City readers who want a printed daily newspaper delivered to their home or workplace.

 

We know the daily paper has an important role in the community, especially New Orleans, and with your support, we will meet your demands for quality reporting of the news of the day in and around New Orleans.

 

A few months ago, New Orleans was in the  national spotlight because it seemed slated to become the largest American city without a daily newspaper.

 

That was supposed to happen today, Oct. 1.

 

But, it hasn't happened.

 

At The Advocate, we think New Orleans and its citizens deserve a quality newspaper printed each and every day, and we intend to provide one."

 



The Return Of Zero

Just when you thought it was safe to hold a presidential election again, look who showed up to throw the debate to the plutocrat last night.  You gotta love him, I guess; he's all we've got now.  But would anyone care to tell me why you ever thought zerObama would be better than Hillary or even, oh my, that little bastard maker, John Edwards.

Just when he's daily gaining lead distance in the polls by channeling FDR, he climbs back into his new age, yuppie-fied, new Democrat, third way, lame and blind mindset, and reverses course.  Face it, in his heart he's really not an economic liberal, the only kind there is by the way.  He's never been for steadfast and bold Keynesian economics, absolute defense of Social Security and Medicare, or unions.

Just when you were becoming comfortable that he would battle to the death for the middle-class, he once again reveals his inner sweet surrender to the empty-headed, let's all pretend class differences don't matter in society or politics zeitgeist.  In other words:  "Simpson-Bowles, marry me.  Working people,  plan to work until you drop, and get fucked the whole way from the birth canal to the last sinkhole."


Oh, yeah, we're coming back soon as well.  And not a minute too soon.  Stay tuned or on-line or whatever the proper term of art may be.

The Incentive To Abuse

Entergy, the behemoth "public utility" which "serves" New Orleans and most of south Louisiana slammed by Hurricane Isaac, is - in economic parlance - a regulated monopoly.  The main, perhaps the only, problem with that is nowadays almost no one, inclusive of the totality of private citizens and public officials, betrays the slightest understanding of the term.  And it is no small problem.

In fact, it is central to solving the bedeviling riddle invented to stifle and straight jacket the righteous outrage and anger - nay, fury - among the hundreds of thousands of citizens still left sweltering, suffering and - in some cases - at imminent risk of expiring during an excruciatingly long, Bataan Death March of a service restoration campaign, a week after the initial attack of Issac.  That riddle goes pretty much like this:

"There is no hard evidence of a conscious decision by Entergy to delay restoration, fail to make plans for rapid restoration, or even not go after it full bore - given the fact of having recruited and brought in thousands of contractors and personnel from around the country at great expense to assist in the effort.  Moreover, they are losing money every minute that a customer is off line and not running up the electric bill, so why wouldn't they do everything humanly possible to get this done quickly?"
 

Sad to say, most people, including most elected officials, seem unaware of the fallacy embedded in that superficially logical line of reasoning.  It is this: they are not losing money, they never do.

A regulated monopoly like Entergy has no economic interest in efficient operation.  Ironically, just the opposite is true.  By law, they are guaranteed a fair rate of return or profit, which in traditional economic terms means all capital expended plus an amount ranging anywhere from 3 to 7 percent above the current and near term projected rate of inflation.  That means they have a built-in incentive to blow spend as much as they can "justify" to the public service regulatory body, in order to increase the overall amount of money they will make.  In other words, it is literally a case of  the more they spend, the more they make. Indeed, unlike businesses which operate in a competitive market, spending more is the only way in which they can increase their revenue stream and profit.  Such is why they always lust after the most expensive options - like nuclear power plants (risk to public be damned) - which they can get the regulators to sign-off on, as they build the cost into their rate base.  So it is, gentle reader, distressingly, depressingly, and inevitably true that despite the fact you are not "running the meter" during this outage time, the rate you will ultimately be assessed over the long term, when finally back to receiving the service, will be adjusted to cover all of the cost of this restoration campaign, along with the revenue that Entergy would have enjoyed had there been no outage at all.  That is the legal framework, and there are many, many very sound reasons why such a model is the very best for the provision of an essential public necessity.  The "economy of scale" feature in conjunction with the critical "public good" nature of this service justifies the monopoly character of the undertaking, but in turn magnifies the intense importance of serious and strong regulation, religiously faithful to the public interest.  That strong regulation, however, is not what we are seeing here.

 

 Today, we have largely clueless public officials, a completely misled populace, and airheadedly vapid, ignorant and corporately corrupted media. The key characteristics of the current stupid zeitgeist are the mind numbing, drug-like effects of the false promises, precepts and pronouncements peddled by the regulation hating so-called supply side economic salesmen left over from the Reagan era debacle, which continues to visit ruin on the middle class, and worse on the poor. All of which makes the rich and the extremely rich extremely happy - just as it was always intended to do. 

It is also why Entergy operations are so opaque.  The company has a core economic interest in remaining inscrutable, so as to not only more easily get by with but actually immensely benefit from an impenetrable and yawning lack of efficiency in their operations. All at the cost of our ever shabbier and shredded pocket books, and utterly disdained human pain and suffering.

 

 

Everything Old Is New Again

Okay, another brief diversion from the explanation of the long absence promised at the end of the last post.  I mean, you know, who cares anyway? 

Meanwhile, yesterday sales sailed up to the heavens in the local Chick-fil-A franchise, as throngs gathered in support of the privilege of denying fellow humans a full acknowledgement of their humanity, in homage to an entity generally known as "The Lord."

Perhaps that entity's real work may have actually been somewhat served had all those who got sandwiches in the drive-thru lane then driven their perfectly distribution-sized packages of sustenance over to mission to the other throngs daily gathering in ever swelling numbers under the raised expressway bridges, for want of a real home.  You know, the ones with the begging signs asking for aid to a "disabled vet" or maybe "laid-off mechanic" or other down and hurt pleading.

But that would require the impulse to revere rather than revile the common humanity of others somewhat differently situated, marked, or inclined than yourself.  Instead, an echo of the 1950's chant "two - four - six - eight, we don't want to integrate" aimed at public education policy was heard in the obnoxious clamor of holier than thou amateur missionaries loosed on one hell of a mission.

UNACCEPTABLE

At work today, I asked several friends if they were aware that Gore Vidal had passed away yesterday.  Three in a row responded, "Who?"  So, I decided to add that by way of some weird, surreal coincidence, Rush Limbaugh also choked to death on a baloney sandwich.  All said, "No, really?!  I said, "Well, really ... no."

If you want to know why we are so royally fucked as a people, that is a good place to start.  So, I guess I'm back.  A tad bit earlier than I thought I'd be, but more on all that in the next post.

Clinton Still Gets Out Of Bed Every Day To Lie To You

Remember when Bill Clinton was president and endlessly used to tell us that he got up every day to work his heart out for us?  Well, that was a lie, too.  The ones I have in mind right now are those he told yesterday to a group of graduating high school seniors.

He was here, in New Orleans, to address the Urban League College Track program graduates, all 152 of them.  Each has been assisted by private efforts to receive intensive after school tutoring and college prep training during the last four years.  As a result, they are all now headed off to four year colleges.  Good for them. 

Bad for us though is the political claptrap that sell-outs like Clinton, as well as our own Mayor and U.S. Senator named Landrieu, spread at such events.  They use such small scale, very expensive and exclusive efforts as arguments to support the dismantlement of public education in this country.  They make bogus claims regarding achievements scored by the Charter School movement, which simply do not exist.  They attack teachers' unions for their own political purposes. And they even ultimately get around to attacking all of us as being responsible for the catastrophic condition of the economy, by telling us we are just too stupid or ignorant or inept or whatever to be employed in this high tech savy, uber competitive world. Guess they were just luckier than the rest of us; you know, by being so smart and successful and all.  Please.

Clinton included this specific insult in his talk:  He said the billionaires of Silicon Valley have assured him, as recently as one week ago, that they could hire as many as three million of us immediately, if only we were qualified for the jobs.  That, my friends is not only an ugly insult, it is demonstrably false.  Moreover, the same thing was being said by the plutocrats in the 1930s during the depths of the depression.  Once the government started spending real money to build up for the war effort, stupid people miraculously proved smart enough to be hired en mass, and produce brilliantly effective high tech (for the times) products.  The problem today is that Clinton, and other sell-outs like him, have exported most of our middle class jobs, and think we are stupid enough to let them blame the overall economic decline on us.

Stoking The Fire ... Or Capitulation?

In a carefully choreographed two week performance, the dance ensemble of Biden, Hillary, and the new Nureyev himself, Obama, staged a masterful,  political scene switching ballet, which has effectively changed the subject from the persistent economic calamity to a spring cleaning of the darkest corners of conservative psychosis.  Yesterday Obama's insight on the issue of whether all humans are entitled to full human rights finally achieved a complete human genetic encoding.  So, let's all offer him a big "welcome aboard"  the good ship Human Dignity, although there was no indication from the new crew member of any forthcoming effort to help man the oars.

Let's also note that the crowd of youngsters, once all ga, ga and google-eyed over this guy, are no longer "fired up and ready to go."  No, most of them have either been fired or, more likely, never hired, and gone away.  And the lame, only thinly liberal economic program of this administration is directly responsible for this continuing national disgrace. 

Changing the subject is what yesterday's big gay marriage thing was all about, nothing more.  It is truly  shameful that a Democratic President has pursued economic policies so hollow, the even crazier proposals of the plutocratic party sound plausible to average people.  Shades of  Jimmy Carter.  All Liberalism is economic, all else is merely a costume for a masquerade.  Take down the fear of want and scarcity, and all other targets of social failings become softer and more attainable. Miss the main target, and pulling the trigger on other issues is just shooting blanks.

The Gospel According To Paul

But there is no Gospel of Paul, you say.  That would be good news, if I didn't already know it.  So let's just thank God.  For if there were a Gospel of that self-proclaimed good Catholic, Republican zealot, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul (Ryan), it would be all bad. 

According to the Ryan Republican led House action yesterday, it would preach cuts to social services for the poor, such as food aid and health care, in favor of maintaining the bloat in the most bloated military industrial machine the world has ever seen.  You see, Ryan and his fellow zealots really claim to believe that:

                                         The quality of mercy is not strained.
                                     It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven ...


But that if we want to go around dropping bombs, of course we have to make them ourselves.

This is the same interpretation of the Catholic faith which holds that public financing for religious schools should come at the force of law, but that, on the grounds of religious freedom, church run secular service entities should be exempt from the public law governing employee rights. 

All of which is as believable as a phony Gospel.

General Pershing, We Are Here

In 1917, President Wilson sent the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) to Europe under the command of General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing, to bail-out the French and end the slaughter of WWI before Europe ran out of Europeans to kill.  Upon arrival, Pershing was reported to have exclaimed, "Layafette, we are here," in honor of the Marquis de Layafette, the French aristocrat and general who saved Washington's ass, along with all of ours, by cutting off Cornwallis at Yorktown, and essentially handing us victory in the American Revolution.

Now comes Mr. Hollande, the newly elected President of France, with a promise to break the strangle-hold of German led economic warfare against the common man.  Be mindful that the blighting of Europe by the austerity Prussians has not only laid waste to the lives of millions on the continent, but also played a central role in our own politics as well.  I give you the modern day Republican/Teacan party.  Let's hope that Mr. Hollande delivers, let's hope he can shore-up his base and withstand the sure-to-come counter-attack from the right, and, finally, hope his success may inspire a more energetic liberal, anti-capitulation response to the forces of darkness here. Let's put an end to the slaughter, and raise a toast, "Vive La France."

Too Old To Let Happen

Yesterday, Jimmy Buffett did an acoustic set to close out the "locals Thursday" of this year's final Jazz Fest weekend.  The morning newspaper's favorable recounting was a bitter-sweet read.  Quick confession: I really can get into Parrothead frivolity; love that Buffett oeuvre, sometimes too much. But I skipped it in favor of, you guessed it, work.  I'm getting too old to let fun times slip by.  I keep telling myself there will be more chances, but down deep I know I could be wrong.

 I worked not for the money this time, no.  I worked because we are at the very end of a long project and need to push it to completion.  Still, my friend and boss, knowing my weaknesses, offered over and over to cover for me if I wanted to catch Buffett.  I declined. What are friends for?

Also in the morning paper is more sad reporting about the tragic European mistake of pursuing austerity measures in the face of final euro zone collapse.  The entire continent is sinking into a second and worsening recession.  The same story recounts how the U.S. has so far fared somewhat better for having taken at least some expansionary steps via the Obama stimulus.  But the cautionary upshot is that Friday looks like a down day on Wall Street, due to an expected anemic jobs report of only 170,000 new hires this period.  This is far short of the quarter million period-over-period number needed to simply inch ahead in recovery. 

By now, we all know that what is needed is more, much more in the form of governmental outlays to lift the U.S. out of this generation long economic backslide, which really started when Bush II was appointed.  Do we really care nothing at all about the young?  They are being penalized a decade or more at the very start of grown-up life.  What's the matter here, do they not have any friends?  These are precious times they will never see again.

UPDATE:  The actual new jobs number for the period came in at an even more dismal 115,000.

On The Ropes

Low in downest Central City, the truth shelters in shambles and shadows. The blown-out abandoned row house on S. Robertson Street, between Thalia and Martin Luther King Blvd., offers open air accommodations stoop-by-sidewalk: brothers and sisters wedge around the rim of an urban drain strainer, choked amid the of scrapings from Broadmoor and Gert Town.  A mere minutes long bike ride from the haughtiest haunts grants free admission to the daily horror-show ceaseless pounding of the pounded and pummeled.

Pain and punishment versus privilege and power face-off in the final rounds.  The wearying, heavy hands flail the air for more advantage:  additional prisons, less public education, another recipe to smother social activism in an etouffee of non-participation and disaffection?  So close to the crown, but no white flag from the row house corner.  Only a banner scrawled on the weather boards: "death to the sistum."

Perhaps, some will remember Ali coming off the ropes to topple a tired giant. 

Music, Maestro, Please!

The morning newspaper was filled with coverage of this year's opening weekend of the New Orleans Jazz Fest.  Most of it taken up with Bruce Springteen and Dr. John, rightfully so.  No, I was not there, opting instead for the typical Sunday of a lazy, slow start, the newspaper, some talking head television, and yard work.  Been to most of the Jazz Fests; sometimes feel I don't need to go to them all.  But I must say I remember them, every single one.  Here's why.

The recounting of the Spingteen and Dr. John individual performances, as well as their collaborative efforts, centered quite unsurprisingly on the message of outrage and truth-telling regarding the Katrina and BP oil spill abuses visited on this city.  The pictures revealed throngs uncountable enthralled. 

All were obviously on the same page.  However, you and I know that apart from such transcendent occasions as that, the breakdown of opinion would range from acknowledgement of the truth regarding such things all the way to acceptance of the most idiotic right-wing political and corporate clap-trap. 

Conversely, Nobel laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, appeared on a television talking-head panel yesterday with a bunch of dolts, none of whom could spell dollar.  All of them remained utterly convinced of their respective preconceived renditions of reality, no matter how many times Krugman demonstrated they were full of crap.

So, note to all of us: The truth wants cadence and rhythm; in a word, poetry.  Without it, we are unmoved.  It has always been so from Homer through Joe Hill, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, John Lennon, Phil Ochs, Bob Marley, and Martin Luther King.  The truth must be made to sing, else many will never hear it.  Talk to you later, after some more clarinet practice.

Father Ryan ... Oh My God!

So, yesterday we were treated to "news" coverage of scoundrel Paul Ryan preaching at us from his peculiarly hateful perspective regarding the poor, while claiming to be a good and faithful Catholic. 

At last, we see the Catholic Church really does have enemies among the current national political class.  No, not Obama, nor any genuine liberal for that matter.  The real threat is from the enemy within.

On the same evening, a nun who has long toiled in the vineyards of poverty and despair among the poor, was interviewed on an MSNBC television program and flatly said the obvious: Paul Ryan is a liar.

Catholic Paul Ryan.  Now, that is something that should worry the Hell out of the Vatican.

Feel The Burn?

The burn we can expect to soon be feeling is not the type which results from active exercise, just the opposite.  Whenever a society becomes so imbalanced by a super powerful and gluttonous elite ruling over an utterly disaffected and outcast majority, trapped in penury and hopelessness, bereft of any opportunity to improve their situation within the confines of the established process, so much so that they have even given up or have had taken from them the right to meaningfully participate in democratic governance, look out.

That is where we are in New Orleans.  It just screams at you when an election for a citywide office draws only twenty-four percent turnout, and the establishment brags about it.  The first whiff of smoke escapes from the empty voting booths smoldering with resentment.  Democracy turns to ashes in the absence of exercise.

Simply The Best

Read this new post from the Library Chronicles blog.  There simply is no more elegant and analytically precise dissection of the woeful state of Amercian faux democracy, race relations, class divisions, and "mainstream" media bias, hypocrisy, and overall banality.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

"Unspoken" Rules Of NOLA Political Coverage or Why We aren't "In"

At first glance, it's a relief. It's a relief to see that despite the rain, the tall ships, and the general not giving a fuck around town, turnout at least managed to bump up a bit from the dismal 18% of the primary.

With all 366 precincts reporting, unofficial returns showed Head with 27,787 votes to 27,506 for Willard-Lewis. About 23.5 percent of the city's 235,553 registered voters went to the polls, significantly more than in the primary, although there were no other items on the ballot.

And yet 55,293 people is a pretty lame crowd. If the Saints are ever drawing that, Tom Benson might up and move them to San Antonio... or run off and buy a basketball team or something. So maybe we're not exactly In when it comes to our most preferred spectator sport of local politics these days.

The problem could be that the storyline isn't all that compelling. Or maybe it's just that the T-P keeps trying to write the same boring script.

She appeared to have survived a racially charged contest against former Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis by the narrowest of margins.

Was this really a "racially charged" election? Just the assertion that it was, in fact, "charged" with anything at all strains credulity. But leaving that aside, let's look at the evidence supplied in Sunday's re-cap.

The two Democrats waged a spirited runoff battle focused in part on the so-called "unspoken rule" that for three decades kept the two at-large council seats divided between white and African-American politicians.

The tradition of racial balance in the seats ended in 2007, when Jackie Clarkson, who is white, was elected after Oliver Thomas, who like Willard-Lewis is black, resigned after admitting he took a bribe. Fielkow, the other incumbent at the time, also is white.

For an "unspoken rule" the T-P's political reporters sure do an awful lot of speaking about it. In fact, they haven't been able to shut up about it ever since the unspoken rule was tossed away after Oliver Thomas' departure. Two election cycles later, we're still reading about it as if it's the law of the land.

One side note here. A proposed reform would divide candidates in future At-Large elections into two separate races for either seat. If this comes to pass will future candidates conform to the "unspoken" rule by self-segregating themselves into white and black At-Large races? If not maybe then we can stop un-speaking about this business.

But whatever you think of the "unspoken rule" it alone doesn't mean that this election was "racially charged"... at least not any more or less than any citywide election might be. Race is obviously a factor in local politics. But it isn't so neatly divided from context the way the T-P's handling of it would indicate. Let's look again at Michelle Krupa and Frank Donze's Sunday re-cap article.

During the campaign Willard-Lewis kept the issue of racial balance in the forefront, saying it is important that all segments of the community feel "they have access and that their voices will be welcome, respected and heard."

Head countered that voters are more concerned about which candidate is "going to work hard for their neighborhood, who's going to make sure that the delivery of governmental services is as good as it possibly can be. That's far more important than race."

What a fascinating way to frame those quotes. Here we have each candidate saying equally bland things. Cynthia says it's important for everyone to "have access" and "be heard." Head "counters" this by saying "delivery of governmental services" is "far more important than race." It's a mild exchange that obliquely touches on a debate about whether the question of for whom government services are working is as important as how well they are working. Does that question have a racial element to it? Certainly. Does the article attempt to explain this at all? Nope.

Instead the reporters keep the focus on how "racially charged" all of this is. In their version of the story, Willard-Lewis' having "kept the issue of racial balance in the forefront" was a troublesome matter necessitating a "counter" from Head. Even if we are to accept the dubious premise that this election was any more "racially charged" than is typically seen in New Orleans politics, we are given no means of understanding why race might be a relevant matter. It's lightly implied that the alleged racial charge is probably a bad thing... and that it's mostly Cynthia's fault... but that's all we get.

Willard-Lewis targeted black voters with a pair of radio ads, including one featuring New Orleans native Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and civil-rights leader. He told listeners: "If you don't have somebody representing you in public office, you really don't get your share."

The other ad, which suggested Head was trying to buy the election, urged voters to send her a message that "the vote that our parents and grandparents fought and died for is not for sale, nor will it ever be."

In her TV ads, Head featured a range of residents -- black and white, male and female -- with each supporter praising her ability to get things done.

See, Cynthia "targeted black voters" by having Andrew Young say something pretty elemental about representative government. Meanwhile Head "featured a range of residents" who talked about how she can "get things done." What things are getting done? Head's supporters typically cite her office's responsiveness regarding things like individual permitting and zoning hang-ups. If you own a business or a (well maintained) piece of property in District B, Stacy Head is probably your pal. She gets things done. For you, anyway. Just don't ever say she's "targeting" your vote, though.

Recently, Head voted with her targeted constituency against an ordinance that helps ensure contractors the city is doing business with are in compliance with state and federal labor standards.The law was put forward by interim At-Large Councilman Eric Granderson as a response to widespread complaints of wage theft in New Orleans; a cause taken up by Arnie Fielkow who Granderson replaced on the council. As a result of the special election, Head will now fill that seat.

In Willard-Lewis' ads, when Ambassador Young says, "If you don't have somebody representing you in public office, you really don't get your share," he's talking to people like the exploited day laborers Head voted against. When Willard-Lewis says "it is important that all segments of the community feel 'they have access and that their voices will be welcome, respected and heard,'" this is what she's talking about. But when Times-Picayune reporters reduce these points to mere racial dog whistling they divorce the campaign from any sense of its actual impact on people's lives.

Whenever we talk about issues of economic status and political power, of course race is going to factor into that discussion. But it's going to do that in complicated ways our political reporters don't usually want to unpack. Instead they make a perverse parlor game of isolating race from any meaningful context and then making that de-contextualized extraction the sole focus of their election coverage.

And this is, of course, topped off by tut-tutting at one or both of the candidates for allowing this completely manufactured bullshit to "racially charge" the campaign in the first place. In this election, the brunt of the blame for having "kept the issue of racial balance in the forefront" as Krupa and Donze put it, fell on Willard-Lewis.

Just look at this lede from Donze's report on a WVUE debate between Head and CWL. The debate ranged on a number of topics but Donze picked this.

It seemed like a good bet that, as the African-American candidate in the April 21 runoff for an at-large New Orleans City Council seat, former state Sen. Cynthia Willard-Lewis would be the first to broach the subject of the council's white majority. But in the contest's first face-to-face, post-primary meeting, it was her challenger, Stacy Head, one of the council's four white members, who tackled the thorny issue, albeit indirectly.

Translation: "It seemed like a good bet" that nasty Cynthia would titillate us offend our sensitive hearts with the race baiting no-no we all came to shake our fingers at but that didn't work out and we were starting to get bored so here's what our rabbit ears picked up "indirectly."

Oh by the way, here's the tackling of "the thorny issue" Donze is referring to. Prepare to have your mind blown.

The discussion of race during their appearance Monday on WVUE-TV was triggered when Willard-Lewis asked Head whether she was supporting President Barack Obama's re-election in light of the "significant Republican support" she has in the race.

Ok quick fact check time. Does Stacy Head enjoy "significant Republican support"? Why indeed she does! It's maybe a little cheap but still understandable that CWL might want to see if she can exploit that given the President's overwhelming popularity in Orleans Parish. It's unclear, however, exactly why this is a "thorny" or even "indirectly" racial issue as Donze suggests. Anyway here's Head's response.

"So, I think that President Obama has been one of the greatest leaders for the country because he's a man who doesn't look like me," Head said. "But he represents my interests."

And, you know, she's right. The President who is bringing us legalized stock fraud under the Orwellian guise of "Job creation" does indeed represent the interests of people like Ms. Head. But that digression aside, does the side-issue of either candidate's opinion of the President really merit front-and-center attention in an article about a municipal election? If it's kind of "indirectly" related to race a little bit, it apparently does. Even so, how does such a silly, weak bank shot bring us to describe the entire debate with this headline?

New Orleans City Council candidates touch on race

Probably the same way we got

New Orleans council primary plays out along racial lines

or

New Orleans City Council runoff may be test of trends in the city's racial politics

or

New Orleans City Council endorsement appears to have racial component

There were a lot of these throughout the campaign often with an "appears to" or a "may be" or a "touch on" forced in to connect "City Council" and "race" one way or another. If this election was "racially charged" at all, it acquired this charge as a result of the static generated by the T-P (usually Donze) constantly rubbing those words together.

And more often than not, the recipient of the T-P's racial static was Cynthia Willard-Lewis. Even as she was receiving her "crossover" endorsement from the Mayor, Donze managed to describe it as a sly and underhanded "racially charged" move.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu never made direct reference to the touchy subject of the New Orleans City Council's white majority Thursday as he endorsed former Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis in the April 21 runoff to fill an at-large seat on the city's legislative panel. But it was clear by what he did say that the thorny issue of race was a key factor in his decision to choose Willard-Lewis, who is black, over her white opponent, Councilwoman Stacy Head.

Oh good another "indirect" reference to "the thorny issue." Want to read it?

"I need someone who's going to be a partner with me to represent all of the people of the city of New Orleans," Landrieu said to a cheering crowd of more than 100 gathered at the New Orleans Healing Center on St. Claude Avenue.

Did you miss it? Well you see Mitch says he's looking for someone to "represent all the people of the city of New Orleans" which, in Donze's interpretation, must "indirectly" mean something racial. Evidently there's something about the word "all" that Donze takes as exclusionary. Recall that when Donze and Krupa compared these two statements,

During the campaign Willard-Lewis kept the issue of racial balance in the forefront, saying it is important that all segments of the community feel "they have access and that their voices will be welcome, respected and heard." Head countered that voters are more concerned about which candidate is "going to work hard for their neighborhood, who's going to make sure that the delivery of governmental services is as good as it possibly can be. That's far more important than race."

They judged Head's to be the more racially inclusive for some reason. Without Donze and Krupa around to read the tea leaves for us, we would have guessed that Mitch was endorsing Cynthia partially as repayment for her having "crossed racial lines" to back his 2006 campaign against Ray Nagin* and also probably as a slap at Head who has bucked his administration from time to time since he has become Mayor. But apparently there's this "racially charged" thing the Mayor and Ms. Willard-Lewis keep trying to force on us. And we might have missed that without the benefit of the Times-Picayune's political team.

Similarly, we would have thought that Austin Badon's subsequent endorsement of Head was an act of political payback. Badon had the backing of the Morrell family during the primary in part because the Morrells have been enemies of Ms. Willard-Lewis as of late. It's also possible that Badon (like President Obama) simply shares Head's interests since we know Badon to be an outspoken supporter of Governor Jindal's scheme to privatize elementary and secondary education in Louisiana.

But when the endorsement actually happened, Krupa included none of this in her account. Instead we got a handicapping of the racial subtext she had read into it for us.

New Orleans voters split along racial lines in the March 24 primary, with Head, who is white, claiming 96 percent of votes cast by whites and Willard-Lewis and Badon, who are black, taking 95 percent of the votes cast by blacks, an analysis by University of New Orleans political scientist Ed Chervenak shows.
Whether Badon's supporters again will vote along racial lines or cast a vote against Willard-Lewis or stay home altogether will be a critical factor for Saturday's victor.

Later, when Badon actually spoke, he didn't mention race at all.

"I want someone who speaks with quality and not quantity," Badon told a roomful of Head supporters.
"I don't want a 'yes' woman on the City Council. New Orleans doesn't need someone who is just going to put their stamp of approval on issues without proper evaluation. I want someone who is analytical. I want someone who is going to bring all of the department heads to the table and ask the tough questions."

We would have expected Donze to delve into this statement and pull out the "indirect" means by which Badon was actually beating around the "thorny issue" of race. But for some reason, that never happened. Maybe it's because we're already supposed to assume it always "seems like a good bet" that only Willard-Lewis' camp engages in the racial subterfuge.

When the T-P excludes all context other than race, their framing lines up this way. Either the voters will "vote along racial lines" and support Cynthia, or overcome this presumed flaw in their character to support Head. Meanwhile Head gets to go right on pretending that her choice of management over labor, or of property owners over renters is really a forward-thinking focus on "service" and Willard-Lewis' rhetoric about "all segments of the community" getting their "voices heard" amounts to some sort of nefarious racial code talk.

Maybe in another 30 years when Head finally grows up to be Jackie Clarkson, our gentle reporters will have to change gears and start covering for her in more of an aw-shucks-that's-our-good-old-buffoon fashion but, man, that is a long time to wait.

Anyway, it should come as no surprise that the political team at the T-P would apply their powers of induction to conclude from the results that they were right all along.

Willard-Lewis, who is black, picked up only about 5 percent of the non-African-American votes on a day when white turnout nearly doubled black participation, according to the analysis.
"Turnout and crossover vote were the keys for Head's victory," Chervenak said Sunday.
In his review, Chervenak found that turnout in precincts where 90 percent or more of the registered voters are white was 30.3 percent, compared with 16.8 percent in precincts containing 90 percent or more black voters.
While those heavily African-American precincts contain 32,000 more voters, Chervenak said there were less than 300 more votes cast in those areas than in the heavily white precincts.
Bridging the racial divide was seen as the likeliest path to success for either candidate in what quickly developed into a racially charged battle.

See? This election really was "racially charged" but somehow the forces of ... um... light prevailed due to the "bridging of the divide" or something.

This analysis, including its "Stacy Head's New Orleans City Council victory credited to turnout, black vote" headline is terribly misleading. Technically, the headline is true. But it's only true if we read it as "Stacy Head's victory credited to (low) turnout and (somewhat divided but mostly disengaged) black vote" As written, however, it might imply to the casual headline glancer that Ms. Head benefited from a heavy black turnout.

That isn't very likely, of course. But even the argument Donze is trying to make; that Head won by virtue of picking up a small but decisive percentage of a dismal black turnout; is masked by his attempt to characterize this as some noble "bridge the racial divide" moment. Had a mere 282 more Cynthia voters (less than one per precinct, as Clancy DuBos told us repeatedly) decided to slog through the rain that day, would we be reading today about the "bridging of the divide"? Or would Donze tell us, instead, that those 282 voters had rushed upon us in a loathsome "racial charge"?

Is there a way to explain these results without talking about the racial component? No, of course not. But if you're going to say, on the one hand, that the election was strictly about race, it's unfair to interpret one candidate's victory as a rejection of racial politics. Especially if the numbers don't bear that out.

Among the joys of post-election handicapping these days are Brian Denzer's Pac-Man maps. This one (PDF) shows us the precinct-level vote share along with the intensity of the turnout. It was picked up by The Lens this week along with the following analysis from Denzer.

“Stacy Head received an average 26 percent turnout in precincts that she won, compared to 17 percent turnout in precincts that Cynthia Willard-Lewis won,” Denzer said.
He also said that based on his analysis, Head won only eight precincts that were majority black, compared to Willard-Lewis, who won 215 majority-black precincts.
“In a city that is 60 percent African-American…and in a contest which heavily favored Cynthia Willard-Lewis by voters’ racial preferences, the deciding factor was the overwhelming turnout for Stacy Head compared to Cynthia Willard-Lewis — and even then, the vote returns coming in all night showed a very close contest that was ultimately won by only 281 votes,” Denzer said.

Overall turnout was around 24%. Clancy (see above) thinks that's pretty good. Maybe he means it's "indirectly" good since it's higher than it was in the primary but I think it sucks. This was a war of attrition where Head benefited from strong turnout in her base precincts, particularly in Lakeview and along the Carrollton and St. Charles Avenue corridors Uptown. Turnout among Willard-Lewis' base precincts in the East was OK but tepid compared to what Head was able to muster.

Stacy Head eked out a slim slim victory from among less than a quarter of all registered voters because her supporters, though small in number, were more enthusiastic than her opponent's. We could speculate as to whether or not Head's supporters were more racially charged up than Cynthia's but, unlike the T-P, I don't really buy that race is what defined this election. It's far more correct to say that apathy did.

And that's hardly surprising given all the bullshit about race taking precedence in the narrative. When voters are given little if any opportunity to learn what either an election might actually be about. Is it any wonder so few of them find it worth their time to be "In" for it?


*The 2006 Mayoral election was, in fact, quite "racially charged."

Labels: Austin Badon, Cynthia Willard-Lewis, Mitch Landrieu, New Orleans, politics, race, Stacy Head

It's Getting Real Now

Robin Wells, a.k.a. Mrs. Paul Krugman, and an outstanding economist in her own right, has a nice piece in The Guardian, which Krugman linked on his site yesterday.  Wells reports on the political turmoil currently burning through the Eurozone, as a result of the ignorant, counter-productive, and punishing austerity policies being imposed on the poor and working people of the continent, to enrich and the secure the choke hold of the super rich there across all borders.  It can be found by simply clicking here: http://gu.com/p/374d2. 

The most interesting point Wells makes, and the one that demands our attention, is that real time experience in this depressed worldwide economy is proving day after day that cutting government spending in these circumstances only further depresses economic activity, and ironically increases deficits.  In a demand starved economic environment, reducing government purchases and outlays actually brings on proportionately more debt than that which it unburdens.  That is to say, to cut debt by 1% in these circumstances, it is necessary to reduce spending by some greater percentage because revenues fall as the economy suffers from the cuts.  A classic downward death spiral.

The upshot: Republicans and conservatives, as we have been saying all along, are dead wrong about everything.  What more proof do you need?  How much longer do you want to suffer?  Are you really willing to risk a deepening crisis and greater depression than the "Great" one, because of some hateful anti-poor and working class rhetoric you have bought to fuel your bigotry?

Wage Subsidy

I suppose most people do not think of child care assistance for poor working women as a wage subsidy from which an employer benefits just as much as or more than the worker, but that is exactly what it is.  If you are a conservative and disposed to resist that assertion, then take your complaint to your own economic Godfather, Adam Smith. 

Yeah, I know, Smith lived and wrote in the late 1700s when such programs did not exist, but what he said about free market wage levels are instructive and relevant here.  And as a liberal, I am among that group of folks who have, unlike the vast majority of conservatives, actually read the man whom ultra free market right wingers claim as their inspiration.

In The Wealth of Nations, Smith holds that  market competition over time sets wages at subsistence levels, which essentially means an amount sufficient to attract needed workers by providing enough compensation, but just enough, to assure those workers have both the ability and incentive to come back for more, day after day.  Assuming - and this is a big assumption - Smith had something useful to tell us in this highly nonspecific and basically intuitive formulation, a detailed fulfillment of such a broad assertion is dependent on a multitude of factors regarding the the overall standard of living in a given society, as well as its mores.  Consider, for instance, the fact that workers by the hundreds of thousands in one factory town in China are content to be housed in mass dormitories like inmates in a penal colony, while workers here are usually partial to having their own digs.  In a free country, which says something significantly more moral than simply a free market, workers rights are protected and the general welfare is respected by the civil authority, i.e. law.  Hence, unions participate in the economic dynamic which determines the allocation of the revenue generated in the market among the participants responsible for its production, and the indigent are extended various forms of assistance for essential needs such as child care and housing.

And here is the crux of the matter.  A free country, like that referenced above, is typically said to be a liberal society.  Conservatives say they oppose all things liberal.  But when it comes to some features, such as child care, Romney is full square in support.  Why?  Well, because the world is far more complicated than anything right wing economic theories can be stretched around, especially those that arise from the failure to even read, let alone understand, the implications of the writings of people like Adam Smith.  Employers do not, and can not always provide for every need of every potential worker in the labor pool, which they would like to draw upon to staff their operations.  In a free country, people have vastly differing lifestyles and needs, even those of similar education levels and economic circumstances.  Some are single parents, some not. 

A child care subsidy has the net effect of expanding the potential labor pool for employers, without requiring them to cover the real costs of tending to the subsistence needs of all of their employees.  Hence, they can keep wages at the level they want, and have more folks to choose from when hiring.  At the same time, folks who otherwise might not have been able to hold a job can afford to take one. Just too tough for most anti-liberals to get their minds around.

Suddenly Liberal Again

By now everyone is familiar with the hypocritical Romney, as in Romney the fire-breathing conservative. After all, he was the Governor of Massachusetts who proposed and pushed through the "universal coverage" legislation which became the model for so-called "Obamacare."  Many folks, most especially those among the radical right, think of this quite pale imitation of a liberal position on the issue as being an extreme example of left-wing  policy making.  And Romney today claims to be in steadfast opposition to such wild-eyed liberal market meddling.  So, okay, for the sake of argument, let's accept that Obamacare is an example of liberalism run amok, even though most of us see it largely as a massive sellout to insurance and drug companies.

That provides a rather telling backdrop for Romney's recently articulated position on the issue of child care subsidies for poor working women.  He is all for it, and in whatever amount it takes to get impoverished mothers out of the house and strapped to the wheel, in any old cheap-ass, hell-hole place of employment which fails to pay sufficient compensation to allow them to care for their children without government assistance.  So, pray tell, dear reader, exactly to whom is the benefit of the subsidy flowing, the poor working woman who no longer is a stay-at-home mom, or the stingy Scrooge of an employer who pays poverty level wages which come short of providing for basic needs?  And to whom do you really think Romney sees it going?    Liberals would say the first question is a rather sticky one; both parties really could be said to benefit.  But there can be little doubt Romney sees the business welfare side quite clearly.  He is once again revealed as a liberal when it suits him.

More on this in the next post, when time permits a look at the opinion of Adam Smith, the founder of classical conservative economics.

I Like People ... Pretty Well

A dollop of fresh egg orange fire shimmered a spring afternoon course through the ice blue sky while I partied at the French Quarter Festival yesterday.  A river cooled breeze chased off the heat and conducted arcs of squawking gulls high and low over their mile wide feeder flow.

Stages spotted on countless corners of closed streets and along lanes traversing blocks and blocks of the town's original settlement sounded the syncopated rhythms of sweet and soulful New Orleans.  Jackson Square, our original Place d'Armes and the first public center for Church and State, served as temporary headquarters for an army of open air kitchens and taverns crafting fascinating flavors and fare found nowhere but here. And the world squeezed in to get its fill.  I like people pretty well, but not all of them in one small place at the same time, however fun the occasion.

On the other hand, there are some significant economic effects which should not be overlooked.  This annual selling frenzy of small plates at big prices and overpriced booze is euphemistically said to be free.  But if you can spend more than two hours in attendance and leave less than fifty bucks lighter in the wallet, courtesy of the food and drink vendors, you are a master of self-restraint.  Hence, our civic and business leaders uniformly praise and promote this important part of the city's huge tourism industry. 

To me, though, its very enactment also serves as a clear example of the downside to relying on tourism as a key element in the community's economy.  The point of sale for every revenue producing item in this industry is always in our own lap.  Every customer has to come here to buy it.  For all the money it raises, it also takes quite a toll on our resources and private lives.  It can be a considerable nuisance.

A greater and too little remarked negative is the fact that, compared to almost every other  industry, proportionately more of the revenue generated through the tourist trade winds up as profit for the few business owners than as compensation for the legions of minimum wage, tip dependent workers. A fairer and healthier distribution usually obtains for workers in fields which traditionally require they be better educated or trained, so more highly skilled, and in which they are more likely - oh, my - to be unionized. 

It would be much appreciated if our business and political leaders would stop cheating on us by showering their affections only on tourists, and show some love for the average New Orleanian.  We should  focus on building an economy that builds things which can be shipped for purchase somewhere else.  Is it too much or wrong for us to think New Orleans belongs to New Orleanians?  This, at least in the sense that we should welcome visitors on our own terms, because we want to share our  beloved traditions, rich culture, and generous spirit with them, not because we are desperate for their money.