Democratic Irrelevance

In 2006 the South Carolina Labor Party secured a statewide ballot line by gathering more than 16,500 signatures (10,000 were required) from rank and file South Carolinians of all races on the basis of the following statement:

For too long, we have watched the other political parties make concession after concession to the corporations that rule this state while our jobs have disappeared, our incomes have eroded and our children have gone uneducated. We are tired of the politics of fear and division that keep us divided and weak. We understand that only a party that is run by and for working people can speak to our real concerns.

We will conduct a never-ending campaign to secure the promise of the American Dream of opportunity, fairness and justice for all South Carolinians.

We will fight to create and preserve decent jobs and living wages for all who want to work.

We will work to establish the right to universal and quality health care in our state.

We believe that every South Carolinian deserves equal and free access to educational opportunity from pre-school through college to the maximum of their human potential.

The situation in South Carolina is bleak. As the 2006 Labor Party analysis noted:

South Carolina has the seventh slowest rate of wage growth in the United States. This is partly because the state is one of only six that have no state minimum wage. It ranks 48th in job growth, ahead of only hurricane and FEMA-ravaged Mississippi and Louisiana.

The state also has the second highest rate of unemployment in the nation and lost 76,000 manufacturing and textile jobs between 1999 and 2004. Unsurprisingly, therefore, in key textile areas, such as Chester County, unemployment is greater than 10 percent.

More than 600,000 South Carolinians—over 14 percent of the entire state—are without health insurance, and this, of course, doesn’t count the thousands who think they have insurance until they get sick. To compound this problem the state legislature and governor adopted a “reform” that will eliminate traditional Medicaid in the state and replace it with skimpy personal health care accounts. They did this without significant Democratic opposition.

Working people in South Carolina clearly are hurting, and neither major party is at all inclined to address their most pressing concerns. Politicians from both parties boast that the state’s average wages are 20 percent below the national average. Republicans offer working people only corporate plunder and bigotry. Democrats abet them.

In just the last five years, Republicans have sought to divide South Carolina’s workers over whether the Confederate battle flag should fly at the state capitol, whether prohibition of same-sex marriage and civil unions should be written into the state constitution, and whether evolution should be taught in the state’s public schools. They have been able to make these into “hot button” issues because Democrats have not countered them with a political agenda that seeks to unite working people by speaking to their real, everyday needs.

Forty of the state’s eighty-three districts are classified as “disadvantaged.” The situation is so dire in many of these districts that several joined in a lawsuit against the state for not living up to its obligation to provide decent education to all South Carolina’s children.

The state Supreme Court ruled this past December that South Carolina’s only obligation is to provide a “minimally adequate” education. The remedy the court imposed is that K-3 education must be improved in the school districts that sued.

With only a shoestring operation, the South Carolina Labor Party was able to gain support among multiracial, working people for a progressive agenda directed at redressing these wrongs.

The SCLP is not itself going to win the state for progressive causes, but its minimal success should have pointed the way for Democrats supposedly interested in "change." The lesson here is that there's no need to pursue politics as usual, no need to tack to the right, to build a majority movement for progressive change.

Yet with three putatively progressive candidates vying to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, we’ve had a debate about South Carolina that has pushed these issues virtually off the table. Bob Herbert in the Times today noted the catastrophe that is South Carolina public schools, but emphasized only the racial dimensions of the problem, while even the idiotic David Brooks observed that conservative South Carolinians aren’t salivating at the mere mention of such issues as abortion. Nonetheless our would-be progressive leaders are hammering away at each other's character and integrity.

What was this election supposed to be about anyway?

Friday Malamute Blogging

He's been a constipated crybaby since Lenora and Ceds left. Now he can get back to normal eating and walking routines. No more gummy worms. No more Cocoa Puffs. No more screaming gorillas.

Obrother

For someone, who, by his own admission "missed the '60s...," Matthew over at 40 Years In The Desert has a very hip analysis of Obama's recent praise for Ronald Reagan. And by "hip" I mean this guy has a clue. He points out astutely that Obama missed the turmoil of the '60s by virtue of being in Hawaii and Jakarta, and that Obama accepts Reagan's view that Big Government was really big and bad and excessive in the '60s, and what was really missing from that decade was clarity, optimism, and dynamic entrepreneurship—all of which were provided by Reagan.

So, to review what Barack Obama believes:
government expenditures in the '60s = bad / Ronald Reagan = good

Let's take a closer look with Matthew Saroff and Phil Gaspar.
Excesses of the '60s:

• Voting Rights Act
• Civil Rights Act of 1964
  
• Medicare
  
• the opening of social welfare programs to people of color

Clarity, optimism, and "a sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship" provided by Reagan:

• fired 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 -- one of the most devastating union busting moves of the past century
  
• his vision of deregulation opened up the country for the wholesale thievery of the savings & loan crisis
  
• underfunded federal programs dealing with AIDS; believed people suffering and dying from AIDS were punished by God
  
• directed the Department of Agriculture to classify ketchup as a vegetable in September 1981 in an attempt to slash $1.5 billion from the federal school lunch program
• presided over the worst recession since the 1930s
• opposition to civil rights
• spearheaded class warfare on behalf of the rich
  
• supported apartheid in South Africa
• trained and supported terrorists, including the Nicaraguan contras and Islamic radicals in Afghanistan who later formed the al-Qaeda network.

A Democrat who admires the "different path" that Ronald Reagan led the country down—this is inspiring?

News from the political front

Red rabbit's been down with the flu, and Lenora's in the throes of exams, so I thought I might divert our readers by directing them to Andrew Stephens's article in the New Statesman, Obama Unmasked, which, while it includes no new reporting, draws attention to how little attention the media in general have devoted to the questions that the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times have raised about Obama's slick and misleading strategy of self-presentation.

Quoth Stephens:

The further away you get from Chicago, though, the more the saintly image takes hold. Publications like the New Yorker may coo for pages over "the conciliator", but the two Chicago newspapers are much more interested in Obama's close 17-year friendship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a long-time Obama donor and property developer awaiting trial on charges of attempted extortion, money laundering and fraud. A low-income housing project received more than $14m from taxpayers while Obama was a state senator, but he consistently denied that he had done any favours for Rezko.

All of this would matter little if there were some truly progressive politics being furthered by the self presentation, but alas . . .

Saturday Malamute Blogging

Toward a more active activism

I meant to link to this thought-provoking piece by our good friend, Adolph Reed, Jr., in The Progressive a month ago, but better late than never:

Sitting This One Out

By Adolph L. Reed Jr.
November 2007 Issue

OK, HERE WE ARE AGAIN, a year out from a Presidential election, and we’re all supposed to be figuring out which of the Democrats has the best chance to win—determined mainly by the standard of raising the most money—and subordinating all our substantive political concerns to the objective of getting him or her elected. This time, I’m not going to acquiesce in the fiction that the Presidential charade has any credibility whatsoever. I’m not paying any attention to the horse race coverage—that mass-mediated positioning in the battle for superficial product differentiation.

...

Saturday Malamute Video Blogging

Christmas in Oaxaca

Kate has a beautiful post up over at Broken Windows describing the Dia de la Natividad festivities in Oaxaca.

Afterwards, Jonathan took us to a nameless clandestine cantina on the north side of town. The cantina is run by Enrique and his wife. When we arrived, the women of the posada were still eating and drinking chocolate. The posada is a religious function, a sort of parade of its own, that goes from house to house on holy days and ends at a host house that serves food and chocolate. Gathered along the front part of the little courtyard of the cantina were a dozen women eating dressed hot dogs. Just beyond them were a few little tables and a bar (which in traditional cantinas like this one serves more as a buffet table). Enrique served us mezcal from old Smirnoff bottles and one of the young women gave us each a little plastic bag filled with Christmas cookies and candies. They offered us some of the posada hot dogs, but we were all completely stuffed. Later we were served beers, queso fresco, salsa, and tostadas, which are crisp, baked tortillas. The cantina is really a part of Ernesto’s house, with a public outhouse in the center of the courtyard, potted plants, and a corrugated metal door held shut with a couple of rusted steel bars. Some of the family’s clothes were hanging to dry on the clothesline near our table. Jonathan told us that it is not uncommon for there to be copal incense burning in the front while Ernesto’s devout mother and wife pray just feet away from the cantina tables where customers drink mezcal and beers and tell all matter of stories. It’s just pure, beautiful, Oaxacan complexity in one little house.

Happy Birthday, Lenora!

Saturday Malamute Blogging

Barack's Christmas with Campaign props

Skeptical Brotha has a wickedly perceptive take on the Obamas' new Christmas ad.

Mitt Can't Handle the Truth

Handle it? He has a hard time identifying it. Romney claimed on Meet the Press that he'd received an endorsement from the NRA during the 2002 gubernatorial race in MA. Turns out he didn't. He's also claimed to "hunt varmints." Turns out he only straps them to the roof of his station wagon on family road trips.

Why do Republicans Hate Animals?

from Corrente via Atrios

1. We’ve got Rick Santorum’s obsession with “man on dog” sex,
   

   we’ve got Bill “Hello Kitty” Frist stealing cats from the pound, treating them like pets, and only then dissecting them,
   

2. we’ve got George Felix Allen “shoving” a severed deer’s head into a mailbox,
   

3. we’ve got Bush himself blowing up frogs by shoving firecrackers up their ass and lighting the fuse,
   

4. we’ve got one Janet Rowland comparing gay marriage to a man marrying a sheep, and of course,
   

5. we’ve got Willard Mitt Romney strapping his dog Seamus on top of his car until a “brown liquid” ran down the back window.

6. And now we’ve got the son of likeable Mike Huckabee, Republican candidate for President, killing a dog using a “particular process” that was, to say the least, not “kind.” Makes you wonder how these guys bring up their kids, doesn’t it?

The little shit hung a stray dog, cut it's throat and threw rocks at it until it died, then claimed they put the animal out of it's misery. This is the same son who was arrested in April for carrying a loaded gun in his carry-on luggage. Sounds like Holy Mike Huckabee spared the rod and ruined the child, or whatever it is you're not supposed to do as a Christian.

If any of these Christian candidates are ever caught emulating Christ, please let me know.

Saturday Morning Malamute Blogging

I don't care if it feels like 5° outside, I want to go out and play!

Here kitty, kitty, kitty...

I read this in Sunday's NYTimes magazine and found it disturbing, so of course, I thought about sharing it with you.

Here’s a little-known and slightly terrifying fact: According to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 60 million people in the United States are infected with a parasite that may migrate into their brains and alter their behavior in a way that — among other things — may leave them more likely to be eaten by cats. New research into this common parasite — Toxoplasma gondii — may offer clues to the phenomenon known to the unscientifically-minded as “crazy cat lady” syndrome.

The basic facts: Toxo can infect many species, but it undergoes sexual reproduction only in cat digestive tracts. Once the parasite reproduces, the cat passes it in its feces, where the next unwitting host picks it up by digesting it (intentionally or unintentionally). Then the cycle starts again. In the long run, Toxo must find its way back to a cat’s stomach to survive. So the parasite has evolved a complicated system for taking over its hosts’ brains to increase the likelihood that they’ll be eaten by cats.

How? Scientists are still figuring that out. Research conducted this year by Toxo expert Robert Sapolsky of Stanford, and also by Joanne Webster, professor of parasite epidemiology at Imperial College London, has found that Toxo actually causes rats to become attracted to the smell of cat urine.

Might Toxo explain why some humans develop an unhealthful attraction to cats and apparently become immune to the smell of their urine? And might that explain the mystery of crazy cat ladies? “That idea doesn’t seem completely crazy,” Sapolsky says. “But there’s no data supporting it.”

Not yet. But Jaroslav Flegr, an evolutionary biologist at Charles University in the Czech Republic, is looking into it. He has spent years studying Toxo’s impact on human behavior. (He found, for example, that people infected with Toxo have slower reflexes and are 2.5 times as likely to get into car accidents.) He won’t have results of his study for a while and refuses to speculate. But Joanne Webster says the connection isn’t much of a stretch: “In our evolutionary past, perhaps we were eaten by cats, too,” she says.

Huckabee called for AIDS Quarantines in '92

By 1992, after Magic Johnson announced he was HIV positive, people with brains understood that AIDS could not be spread by casual contact.

"It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents."
...
"I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk."

Huckabee also opposed federal funding for AIDS research and "suggested that Hollywood celebrities fund AIDS research from their own pockets, rather than federal health agencies..."

And this guy's apparently surged into second place, behind Mayor 9/11.

Saturday Malamute Video Blogging

23° feels like 13° but that doesn't discourage Kodizliak, one of an ancient breed of snow dogs of the north.

Shorter Washington Post

Hormonal teenagers breaking the law and having sex is somehow just as shocking as a congressman preying on congressional pages.

Oy.

First Rule of Fight Club...

...know who your opposition is.

Something's really gone off the rails when the Obama campaign decides to release an oppo document on Paul Krugman. It's not only the actual attacks that are weak (most of them rely on misinterpreting one comment, then misinterpreting the next, then pretending there's a contradiction), but, seriously, it's Paul Krugman. Arguably the most progressive voice in American media.

Obama's basically embraced what Krugman has accused him of. His campaign is essentially an attack from the right. I'm inclined to agree with Jason in comments:

But Obama is a sideshow, a candidate whose celebrity is his only rationale. It is very fitting that Oprah is campaigning for him. Obama's supporters represent a disturbing cult of personality that I do not see anywhere else (except Ron Paul). They seem to think that his very existence is somehow miraculous and that his election would be "transformative" in some ineffable, metaphysical way. Andy Sullivan's argument, essentially, which should really tell you something.

Friday Night Malamute Blogging

Snow bunny?