July 2012
July 30, 2012
Elections without candidates, voters without choices
By Bill Kraus
There are 16 state Senate elections scheduled this year. Five of them have only one candidate and are already settled. In another six races there is an unopposed Democrat and an unopposed Republican. That leaves 5 where it may be worth voting for one of the candidates in the party of your choice in hopes of having that candidate on the ballot in November with a qualifier. Due to artful gerrymandering over the decades only one of these five districts is considered competitive enough so either a Republican or Democrat has a chance of winning in November.
There's more action in the Assembly, but not much. All 99 representatives will be elected. Except for the 15 who are elected because they have no opposition in either the August primary or the November general election. Another 45 seats are not really contested in August because there is only one candidate from each party in the field. All 90 of them will be on the November ballot. There are, finally, 39 districts where there are multiple candidates for a place on either the Democratic or Republican fall ballot, maybe both. This number is illusory as well. After the primary if candidates from both parties contend or survive, only one of them will have a realistic chance of winning in 17 of these districts, thanks again to decades of gerrymandering deals by both dominant parties.
All of you who thought the redistricting battle was just fun and games among the politicians might want to reassess that conclusion.
There are going to be, at the most, 18 meaningful races for state legislative seats in November out of a possible 115.
Our tendency to live among people we like who like us and whose values and political preferences we largely share is strong enough to assure several candidates of a free ride in, or on the way to, the finals.
But 84 percent of them?
That seems a little high. This is pretty serious virtual disenfranchisement.
Various proposals have been made in Wisconsin and enacted elsewhere to make contests out of more elections to the state legislature. All of them have one thing in common. They have moved the power to draw the lines of the districts out of the hands of the people who are trying to be elected to those districts. All of them, to put it bluntly, remove the foxes from the henhouse.
The possibility that the incumbents who are fighting to stay that way will vote for any districting system that they don't have a hand in, that some dispassionate mapmaker is designing to meet whatever criteria the courts have put in place, who doesn't care where the lines are drawn, where the incumbents live, where the voters sentiments lie, where more districts might be more competitive (including theirs), is minimal.
But even these advantage seekers, if they were asked to change the system in hopes of reversing gerrymandering where it exists and accepting competitiveness if, as, and when it is still possible, might buy into it for the incumbents who will be in office in 2021 or 2022.
If they conclude that they are unlikely to have a dog in that faraway fight, they could safely support the constitutional amendment to take the next redistricting out of the hands of that future legislature. Such a proposal is in the works.
If you think more than 16 percent of the voters should have a choice when they go into the voting booth in the next decade, you might ask whatever candidate is seeking your vote this year, if he or she will vote for the constitutional amendment if given a chance to do so.
Do it.
Oh, yes. There are eight congressional elections scheduled as well. One of them is for an empty seat and will be contestable and contested in the primary. All the others have incumbents running and all the incumbents are the beneficiaries of favorable gerrymandering. Anything can happen in an election, of course, but the horse-trading architects of the congressional districts think they have made all the incumbents unassailable.
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July 27, 2012
Fighting Bob Radio: borders
By David Giffey
Two guests on Fighting Bob Radio yesterday provided informed perspectives on human rights losses and the mounting militarization, since 9/11, of the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) in the U.S.
“These are definitely challenging times,” Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera (VDLF), Milwaukee, told Ed Garvey, fightingbob.com founder and editor, on the weekly online radio show hosted by Eric Schubring of WOJB-FM radio, Hayward. “The need to organize, the need to build alliances [on behalf of immigrant workers] is crucial,” she said. A leading immigrant rights’ advocate and activist, Neumann-Ortiz described paradoxes in Wisconsin that place immigrant workers under scrutiny and subject them to harassment and deportation even as they are valued residents and workers.
“Particularly cruel,” Neumann-Ortiz said, was Wisconsin’s new voter ID requirement, which had the potential to deny as many as 300,000 people in the state of voting rights. Implementation of the law was blocked recently after being challenged by VDLF and other groups.
Pointing to the importance of immigrant workers, Neumann-Ortiz said many have been here for years, contributed to the tax base, and are integral to the economy. “Conservatively, 40 percent of the dairy industry here in Wisconsin is immigrant labor,” she added, quoting a dairy farmer as saying: “If we get rid of immigrants, we’ll be importing milk.”
“I feel in some ways the tide is turning on the issue of immigration with the recent decision by the Obama administration to provide at least a temporary legalization process for immigrant students who came here at a young age who want to pursue higher education,” said Neumann-Ortiz.
Greg Boos, immigration attorney and founder of Cascadia Cross-Border Law, joined the radio conversation to describe the border patrol and its widening and unclearly defined police authority to question people – in many cases Latinos – who may be stopped as far as 100 miles from the Canadian border or any U.S. boundary. Inland stops by the border patrol, once primarily confined to the border with Mexico, “have begun up north,” said Boos.
Neumann-Ortiz said VDLF is part of a coalition of organizations working to halt harassment of workers by border patrol agents. “There’s been an incredible level of racial profiling,” she said, in some cases as parents were taking children to school or attending church.
Failing to recognize immigrant workers as full members of society will, among other things, continue to undermine wages and working conditions for people who have legal status, Neumann-Ortiz said. “Workers never move forward by taking away rights from each other,” she concluded.
Boos warned that there is a strategy in certain elements of the U.S. “to equate immigration with terrorism, which has led to the militarization of the United States’ borders and the expansion of what is being conceived of as being a border.” Even though there is little evidence of border patrol success in catching terrorists, Congress continues to provide increased funding for the border patrol.
You can hear this hour-long discussion as well as previous progressive political talk shows online at blogtalkradio.com/fightingbobradio.
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July 23, 2012
Fighting Bob Radio live Thursday: tune in and call in
By David Giffey
Christine Neumann-Ortiz, founding executive director of Voces de la Frontera, Milwaukee, and Greg Boos, founder of Cascadia Cross-Border Law, Bellingham, Washington, are guests on Fighting Bob Radio 11 a.m. to noon, Thursday, July 26.
Voces de la Frontera (VDLF) is a low-wage and immigrant workers’ center and a leading voice for immigration reform. Current VDLF campaigns include supporting the independent Palermo’s Workers Union strike against the Milwaukee frozen pizza maker. Palermo has attacked the union effort with threats of deportation against union supporters by bringing in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to weed out union backers.
VDLF also joined with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as a plaintiff in successfully blocking Wisconsin’s new voter ID requirement. The law put in place by Scott Walker and the Republican-dominated state Legislature in 2011 was found to create a “substantial impairment of the right to vote” guaranteed by the state Constitution in Dane County Circuit Judge David Flanagan’s decision July 17. Flanagan’s decision disarms the oppressive voter ID law that would have affected hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin voters and seriously hampered voting rights.
The FightingBob.com radio guests will also discuss a major buildup in Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) personnel and what it means for millions of Americans living within 100 miles of U.S. boundaries, an area said to include 84 percent of Wisconsin population.
Boos, through his immigration law firm in the Pacific Northwest, has long expertise on border security and immigration-related issues. He is a leading advocate of human rights and questions the practices of border patrol policing authority, which extends 100 miles inland from the entire U.S. boundary and covers two-thirds of the nation’s population.
While the border patrol is already the largest law enforcement agency in the U.S., thousands of new agents will be hired and trained thanks to increased federal funding. A border patrol recruitment effort is planned for September in Wisconsin, according to a CBP announcement.
Tune in to the radio show online at blogtalkradio.com/fightingbobradio.
You’ll hear the guests along with FightingBob.com founder and editor Ed Garvey and radio host Eric Schubring, public affairs director at WOJB-FM, Woodland Community Radio 88.9, Hayward. During the hour-long show, you can join in with questions or comments by calling 213-943-3485.
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July 22, 2012
Flim flams then and now
By Bill Kraus
It’s flim flam time again on the campaign trail. This year the subject of the flim flam is jobs.
In 1968 the flim flam was Vietnam. Everybody talked about it. Nobody knew what to do to end it, or if they did, they weren’t willing to toss that ball into the campaign rhetoric ring.
In 1960 the flim flam was the missile gap. A subject that was never mentioned again once the election was over. Flim flams have a way of doing that if they are all rhetoric. The missile gap was.
Jimmy Carter’s flim flam was something called zero base budgeting. Nobody else knew what he was talking about, and it turned it he may not have either, because no budget of his had the characteristics of this money saving flim flam. If you erase the slate clean and make everyone budget ab initio as if there had been no budgets before this one, the savings we were told would be enormous. If, of course, the budget creators ever finished putting this monstrosity together which was unlikely.
This year’s flim flam is jobs.
Everybody talks about jobs, some even make ridiculous promises about how many jobs they will create. Others put their history of real or imagined job creation into the discussion on the ridiculous assumption that the microcosms they describe can expand exponentially under their guidance and all those things that have changed and are changing the global economy in general and the US economy in particular will succumb to their magic wand.
I had an opportunity recently to ask an over-promising candidate for an important office three job questions: What jobs, for whom, making what?
As usual, anything that specific is troublesome on the campaign trail where messages are sound-bite sized and slogans trump disquisitions.
The candidate said in response that manufacturing jobs were coming back. From where? From places where labor intensive low skill manufacturing is done at half the cost? From the robots that are doing more and more things every day and are getting smart enough to do more and more things every day as well?
The candidate also said that the opportunities in skilled trades are legion, that the country needs 600,000 welders as we speak. Fact or flim flam?
As long as vague promises and encouraging slogans suffice no candidate is going to talk about the Information Technology revolution which is even more disruptive than the Industrial Revolution of the last millennium was. The Industrial Revolution moved jobs from the artisans’ shops to the factories. The Information Technology is moving them to cyberspace which human beings do not occupy.
The press which at one time was ever present and enormously annoying. Reporters used to ask the kind of questions I posed to the candidate already mentioned. When they got a non answer or an evasive one, they asked a follow up question and they kept asking follow up questions until they got an answer that satisfied them, which could be “I don’t know” which is clearly a political no no.
They didn’t settle for flim flam.
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July 19, 2012
Fighting Bob Radio: Romney, Voter ID and more
By David Giffey
The July 19, 2012, installment of Fighting Bob Radio covered:
·Why is Mitt Romney afraid of disclosing his tax records?
·Circuit Judge David Flanagan’s permanent barring of GOP lawmakers' and Scott Walker’s oppressive voter ID law. FightingBob.com editor and publisher Ed Garvey called Flanagan’s ruling “a great step forward,” and one that might be emulated in other states burdened with voter ID laws.
·A post-recall survey from the Wisconsin Democratic Party asking - too little and too late - what went wrong.
·Praise for the Solidarity Movement among Polish workers 30 years ago, and reasons why it makes sense today.
·A rundown of events planned for Fighting Bob Fest September 15, including presentations by Bill McKibben, Phil Donahue, Norman Solomon, attorney and radio host Mike Papantonio, and many more.
Eric Schubring hosts Fighting Bob Radio with Garvey and me at 11 a.m. every Thursday. It’s a lively hour. Listeners can call during the show at (213) 943-3485. The shows are recorded and archived for repeated enjoyment.
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July 15, 2012
Recalling lessons from history
By Bill Kraus
The current edition of the State of Wisconsin Blue Book features an excellent essay by John Buenker describing the accomplishments of the 1911 state Legislature and then-Governor Francis McGovern. What they did was enact almost the entire Robert La Follette agenda. They did this despite the fact that the Legislature, which was composed of Socialists, Social Democrats, Democrats, Progressive Republicans, and stalwart Republicans appeared to be almost as dysfunctional as today’s.
The populist La Follette not surprisingly had recommended initiative, referendum, and no-fault recall additions to the state Constitution. All passed. All were subsequently rejected when submitted to popular votes in 1914.
Ten years later no-fault recall was resubmitted, passed, and approved. The motivation at the time was purely political. The progressive Republicans feared that the stalwart Republicans would reverse what had been done in 1911 once Fighting Bob was gone.
The recall deterrent either worked or was unnecessary.
It had been more or less dormant until the recall epidemic of 2011 and 2012 took over politics in Wisconsin.
The results of this outburst are debatable and debated. The most unexpected result of the gubernatorial recall is that the voters, not unlike the voters of 1914, expressed serious misgivings about the idea of recall itself.
But it is still there.
I thought that the reaction to the disruption and the distaste would prompt immediate action to restrain at least and maybe even eliminate the recall option, and we would revert to the more judicial impeachment process to deal with public brigandry. I thought the iron was hot.
The governor in his final debate before the recall election, in an answer to a different question, went out of his way to denounce no-fault recall and suggest that making changes would be a priority if he survived, which he did.
Joint Finance Committee co-chair Representative Robin Vos had already introduced a joint resolution that would have made recall a process used to punish malfeasance in office.
The silence from both sources in the wake of the June election has been deafening.
Two consecutive sessions of the Legislature and a popular vote are necessary to modify or remove the recall provision of the Constitution. The first step could be taken in a special session this summer or in the fall during a lame duck session. No one in a position to take this step is showing any interest in doing so. Quite the contrary.
I am no fan of the excessive populism which I think no-fault recall is. The disruption of the governing process and the divisiveness of an already seriously segmented representative government are exacerbated by the specter of a repeat of the frenzied recall year.
I want the 1914 electorate back, the electorate that came down firmly and decisively in favor of representative government despite its shortcomings.
Those voters and the voters of 2012 said, in effect if not in fact, that government by recall is worse.
Does anyone with a hand on the levers of power agree?
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July 12, 2012
Fighting Bob Radio: transparency in politics
By David Giffey
Outing individuals behind the fortunes used to bankroll elections, like the Walker recall election June 5 in Wisconsin, is a reason for a new push for election transparency in Wisconsin.
Lisa Graves, executive director and editor-in-chief at the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), was the guest on Fighting Bob Radio July 12, the weekly hour-long radio blog hosted by Eric Schubring.
The conversation included details about CMD’s joining with WisPIRG, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, and other organizations in calling on Wisconsin legislators to hold hearings on the need for greater transparency and accountability for political spending in the state. More than $100 million entered the state during recent recall elections from undisclosed special interest donors.
Graves also described CMD’s efforts in pressing corporations to dump their memberships in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group responsible for ghost-writing legislation designed to benefit rich and powerful corporations at the expense of people of color, workers, and the environment, and handing the proposed laws to receptive state legislators. Recently dropping ALEC memberships were Deere & Co., MillerCoors, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Best Buy, and CVS. Twenty-five corporations have broken from ALEC since the campaign supported by CMD began.
ALEC’s tactics are “an attempt to pre-empt local communities” struggling to regulate critical environmental issues including mining and water use, said Graves.
Graves' CMD publishes the online magazine PRWatch.org, which is home to ALEC Exposed, Source Watch and Bankster USA and other projects.
FightingBob.com editor and publisher Ed Garvey is joined by host WOJB radio host Eric Schubring on the live show at 11 a.m. each Thursday. Listeners can call in during the show with questions and comments at (213) 943-3485.
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July 8, 2012
Hard to heal
By Bill Kraus
A week ago I urged candidates to tell us to quit making vague promises and start talking turkey about what they will do about the big problems of debt and dependency if they are elected.
A friend reminded me about the distance between diagnosis and cure by asking “and your solutions?”
Like Republicans historically, I am simply baffled by people who pass up opportunities and choose to behave in ways that doom them to lives of squalor and dependence or worse. This, incidentally, leads to the main difference between me and the historical Democrats. The Democrats think that it is their (our) fault that people pass up opportunities and choose destructive lifestyles. So they propose a lot of programs and spend a lot of money to assuage their guilt by using the blunt implements available to government to do something about this.
The war on poverty comes to mind. It didn’t last long. Poverty won. The Democrats get credit for attempting more than the baffled Republicans do, but as Charles Murray articulates in his depressing book Coming Apart this societal cancer persists and may be growing.
What I didn’t suggest last week, but would settle for, is putting this very high on the campaigners’ agendas.
Once it’s there we may have to resort to what old timers will recall was the Ross Perot solution to almost anything. Bring more intelligence and creativity to bear on the problem. Put the most able people in the room and get them working on practical solutions for the woes that afflict us, including, and perhaps particularly, this one. Too simple, but not dumb.
Since Perot was around destroying whatever chance Bush I had to be re-elected, there has been a serious decline in the quality of the people running for and being elected to public office. There are economic reasons for this (like there are economic reasons that 40 percent of Princeton's graduates head for Wall Street), but the main one is that a lot of the things I dislike about the turn our elections have taken have turned people away from careers in politics and made the barriers to entry higher both ideologically and monetarily.
At the same time a lot of things, many of which are also delineated in Charles Murray’s book, have led to destructive non-involvement by the people: staff driven do-good political organizations, outsourcing of political activity by the elites of all persuasions, and a kind of downgrading of the respect that those who ran for office and represented us were given by too many of us.
Governing and politics were honorable trades, practiced by people who we mostly thought deserved our respect and support.
We need the elites back in the game and a lot of good stuff that came with them, including civility and pragmatic rather than ideological solutions to new and difficult problems.
One example from the far distant past comes to mind. When FDR got Social Security through a docile Congress, he knew it was probably unworkable. Nothing this complicated goes from the drawing boards (or worse yet, the sausage factory) into smooth operation. He brought Republican Governor Winant out of New England to Washington to run it. Obama should do the same to navigate the launch of healthcare reform if there is a Republican governor who could do the job. If there isn't, he should find someone with those credentials in the business or academic community.
An old rule of government is that the partisans like issues that inflame. The people want a government that works. When it gets one, respect will return.
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July 7, 2012
Fighting Bob Radio: Health care and social justice
By David Giffey
Health care in the U.S. “is a social justice issue,” said Dr. Daniel Bennett on Thursday’s Fighting Bob Radio show.
Bennett, of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), and Progressive magazine editor Matt Rothschild were guests on Ed Garvey’s hour-long weekly radio blog with host Eric Schubring.
Talking about last week’s U.S. Supreme Court upholding a lukewarm Affordable Care Act, the panelists considered ways to push for a single-payer system and bring to term a health care policy in the U.S. comparable to working systems enjoyed by many citizens of developed nations.
“We recognize that single-payer is the way we should evolve toward, and hopefully will one day,” said Bennett. He sits on the steering committee of Wisconsin’s PNHP chapter.
Isn’t the Affordable Care Act a step in that direction?
Not quite, said Bennett, noting that the act expands the health insurance industry while it broadens some aspects of coverage for Americans. He’s not sure that the act is a good first step toward single-payer.
“We’re stuck defending the Affordable Care Act which we don’t like,” he said. Additionally, on the executive horizon in Washington, Barack Obama is the candidate more likely to move toward single-payer. Faint praise at best.
Conservative rhetoric screeching that the Affordable Care Act puts government in charge of making health care decisions just doesn’t hold water. For one thing, what’s Medicare if not a government program, and a highly popular one at that? And the favors granted to private insurance companies through the Affordable Care Act are not in anyone’s best interests, other than insurance corporations.
“I would rather have a government that is responsive to voters than corporations that are responsive to shareholders,” said the physician.
What to do? “We need to broaden our appeal,” Bennett said. That involves small businesses outside the insurance industry that would realize important relief with a single-payer system. And religious communities, many of which uphold and work for the tenets of social justice. And, yes, job creators foundering under the existing system that results “in a large number of personal bankruptcies due to health care.”
Editor Rothschild echoed Bennett’s critique of the Affordable Care Act, saying that the reforms it brings are insufficient “but we’ve got to defend them.” He proposed expanded Progressive councils in states not fortunate enough to be home to a Fighting Bob Fest, as is Wisconsin.
Garvey said statewide progressive forums are being considered by Fighting Bob Fest veterans in places like Iowa (Tom Harkin) and Vermont (Bernie Sanders).
FightingBob.com editor and publisher Ed Garvey is joined by host WOJB radio host Eric Schubring on the live show at 11 a.m. each Thursday. Listeners can call in during the show with questions and comments at (213) 943-3485.
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July 2, 2012
Merchandising discontent
By Bill Kraus
There is widespread unhappiness about jobs, or the lack thereof. This will be exploited to the extent possible mostly by those in the minority and those challenging incumbents. Perhaps someday someone will ask those doing the exploiting what jobs they would create for who doing what? When they do, they will learn that beyond the skilled trades, taking in each other’s laundry, amusing ourselves to death, and shuffling money, nobody really knows what the IT revolution economy will offer in the way of jobs.
On that day, underlying concerns will rise to the top of the short campaign agendas: debt and resentment.
Debt is probably there already. The widespread recognition that we have never had a pay-as-you-go war, police action, or military intrusion, and that perhaps war is not good for the economy, is taking hold of the public consciousness.
It’s like nobody had noticed that the country has been putting a lot of things, including military things, on the tab for a very long time.
This is propelling a loud WHOA! on public spending, including public spending on things that create jobs or initiatives that are designed to induce the private sector into investing in things that might create jobs which would have the desirable side effect of increasing revenues enough to perhaps pay off some of that newly oppressive debt that so many are worried about.
The debt worry has reignited resentment to the way the government spends money. This is not new. Is there anyone who hasn’t heard someone who plays by the rules, works hard, pays taxes complain about the fact that 50 percent of the people pay 100 percent of the income taxes and that income taxes are a major part of the dole the government ladles out to that 50 percent who don’t pay those taxes?
This is a flawed cause-and-effect indictment, of course. The 50 percent are not freeloaders. They pay sales taxes, they pay real estate taxes either directly or in rent, and nobody escapes the proliferating fees that have been invented to make us all feel better about our tax burden.
This does not ameliorate the complaint that this has become a beneficiary/entitlement society which supports the needy, the unfortunate, and not a few deadbeats as well. As an aside, I find it interesting that the health care bill, which brings the much despised deadbeats into paying that bill, is being criticized by the same people who are complaining about freeloading everywhere, but I digress.
If this is a legitimate complaint, it seems that those registering it or basing their election campaigns on exploiting it should be recommending alternatives.
What the merchandisers of discontent say is, “I am not the incumbent.” What needs to be said is, “I have ideas and proposals to deal with things like the emerging underclass, the new cognitive economic revolution, the unmotivated who pass up opportunities or court disaster in other behavioral ways.”
I, for one, have had a bellyful of the bellicose bitchers.
It’s time for voters to reward problem solvers instead of finger pointers and viewers with alarm.
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