Wisconsin and the Politics of "Winning" (duh!)

Noon, Wednesday, 6 April 2011

The Wisconsin Supreme Court election votes are still being counted and will be for hours, if not days. There will then be recounts and court challenges, no doubt. News reports and blogs—including my own—will cover each maneuver, every fiery soundbite, and all of the turns of fortune for Kloppenburg and Prosser along the way.  I’m just having trouble getting my partisan rant on right now.

I know this election matters, and it matters a lot.  Thousands of people in Wisconsin, some of them dear friends, will likely be affected by the outcome of this election.  Under normal circumstances, this election would have gone largely unnoticed by most folks within or outside of Wisconsin, if not for the bizarre and radical acts of the GOP legislators and governor since January.  

I voted in a dozen or more elections in Wisconsin during my adult years there: I cannot tell you the name of even one Supreme Court justice for whom I voted.  Were it not for the GOP attempt to bully public sector unions and pit the people of the Badger state against each other, I wouldn’t know their names now.

I care about the people.  Even though I do favor the Democrat, I’m just not feeling the suspense about the result. And I am beginning to understand why.  What is playing out in Wisconsin is a bad melodrama, not politics.  Can the corporate-backed GOP tie the unions to the train tracks?  Can the lonely middle class liberal stare down the evil richest-man-in-town and take him out in the final gunfight?  The great advantage the old black hat/white hat films had over the current political melodrama was at least the movies were silent.

7 PM, Wednesday, 6 April 2011

It now appears that Kloppenburg has prevailed in the first full vote count.  Again, while it is uncertain what will happen in the inevitable recounts and court challenges, some are trying to say what this outcome means to larger questions or forecasts other contests to come—particularly the recall challenges.  Speculation on how Kloppenburg or Prosser would rule on the injunction blocking the implementation of the “Budget Repair Bill” when it reaches the WI Supreme Court is the hot topic on blog posts and news reports tonight. 

Too bad that the value of these two seemingly capable and complex human beings have been reduced to how they would decide one legal issue.

Our elections have taken on a glamour, the illusion that they are referenda on a position, philosophy, or ideology.  Somewhere in my dim memories is a civics class where it was suggested that elections might be a process by which the person better suited to perform the functions of governing is selected.  That may be a lot less sexy, since in the short term only one direct winner identified: the prevailing candidate. Any benefit to the electorate is slow to develop and may be subtle.

But when an election is seen as a referendum on an ideology, then there are many vicarious “winners”: the candidate’s victory is a victory for the thought pattern her/his supporters have adopted.  Governing is beside the point. Serving the electorate is beside the point.  The office holder is only there to hold the office as a marker of the battle won.

The people of Wisconsin, and the interests that have used them as proxies in their own battles, have expended so much energy and money on a contest decided by a few hundred votes out of 1.4 million…less than one quarter of one percent of the ballots cast.  That much unsettling acrimony and bitterness for an election margin so razor thin that it settles nothing about the direction of a great state with a complex and important political history.

I am afraid that this race will add little to that history, because the battle in Wisconsin is about standing for something political only on the surface. How tragic that the mainstream political discourse has been reduced to a Charlie Sheen slogan.

The first problem with “Winning!” as a political philosophy is that you them have to portray opponents as “losers”.  Then, you wake up on the day after the election is decided and go to work or school or church with “losers” who used to be your colleagues and friends.

The second problem is that, once achieving “Winner” status, becoming a loser is an ever more terrifying fear.  Rhetoric becomes louder and more extreme, divisions more polarizing, and battles more fierce.  Resources, including the time and energy of legislators, are diverted from the needs of the people to the needs of preserving a majority.

If there is a ray of hope in the apparent election of Kloppenburg, it may be in the emotional, financial, and physical fatigue of both her backers and Prossers’.  Only when the politics of melodrama gets too tiring and too painful will the electorate again get the chance to decide between candidates on skill and experience, not ideological purity and the ability to shout it loudly.

Scott Walker's administration gave a state job and a 26% raise to the son of a major supporter

Not much I can say can top or amplify this.

Scott Walker's administration gave a state job and a 26% raise to the son of a major supporter

Looking for the Last Honest Republican

I am sincere in that headline. I used to vote for Republicans on those occasions where either: A) they were the incumbent and had served well, or B) someone I regarded as having integrity and ideas that their Democratic opponent lacked.

Where will I find such a candidate today? Not that all the Dem candidates are paragons of virtue, either, but I'm having trouble finding a major GOP figure these days who just does not repulse me.

Once upon a time, I liked John McCain. He spoke some hard truths about his own party and the nation as a whole back in the 80's and early 90's.  But since 2008, he has become a mealy-mouthed, duplicitous puppet of what he thinks is the GOP power base, diluting or reversing everything he said he stood for in previous decades (while denying that he was doing that!).

And that was about the time that Diogenes just hung up his lamp in despair for the whole GOP. Saddam Hussein's WMDs, domestic surveillance executive orders that use the constitution as a car floormat, Birthers, "Obamacare" boogymen, a VP candidate who couldn't tell you the policies of the president from her own party...


And then came the Wisconsin (and Ohio, and...) Disinformation-of-the-Week club that gives tax cuts to businesses, then blames teachers, nurses, and DMV employees for the state's budget deficit. One week, the measure to strip public sector unions of collective bargaining is a non-negotiable, vital "fiscal policy", then it isn't "fiscal" after all, so it can be approved by GOPs who can't even consider changing the bill. That approval came in a hastily called meeting that judges have twice ruled as a violation of Wisconsin law (which the responsible parties knew at the time, but ignored).  While Republican governor Walker gives lip service to obeying the judge's order, GOP Senate Majority Leader Fitzgerald seeks to bypass the judge's order by intimidating the office responsible for publishing the bill. When they cave to the "request" by their boss, Fitzgerald announces that the law is in effect and the provisions effecting public employees' paychecks will begin in mid-April. As closely as these two worked together on enacting the legislation, it seems absurd to suggest that one Republican hand did not know what the other was doing. GOP Leader Fitzgerald leans on agency to publish bill despite judge's order

The despair continues as a sitting WI supreme court justice, a Republican facing re-election, knowingly distorts his opponent's record and inflates his own. When called on his utterly false and fiery rhetoric--delivered with disdain and anger in the debate--he said it was an attempt at "levity"...a "joke" no one laughed at in the hall, according to reports of those present. David Prosser ,Wisconsin supreme court justice says opponent's record limited

Ultimately, this judge will likely rule on the legal case about the union-weakening bill passed by his party cronies.

With the accumulating pile of falsehoods and duplicity, can the organizations currently allied with Badger State Republicans completely escape the nagging fear that, someday, their day will come, too?  Fire and Police unions did not oppose Walker in 2010 and were exempted from the legislation this time around. But the actions of members of these unions' actions in the first few months of 2011 indicate they may suspect their loyalty will not be rewarded for long.

Loyalty: I have been a loyal liberal for all my adult life, and when candidates of the party that generally stood for liberalism failed to earn my trust, I was willing to vote for others outside that party. Loyalty is a good thing, but not at the expense of faithfulness to law, fairness, honesty, and integrity. I hope my loyal conservative friends will consider the limits of loyalty, too.

Then maybe we won't be looking for the last honest politician of any party: they will step out of the shadows of their ideologue leaders and become our elected representatives. Regardless of party, when they step up I will vote for them.

Who needs protecting in Arkansas?

On a dark, rural highway in eastern Arkansas, a black transgendered woman was murdered. Her body was dragged under the car for the length of a football field, apparently because the driver--presumably the killer or an associate, since there were tracks for only one vehicle--ran over the victim's body. In an interview with UALR Public Radio News, St. Francis Co. Sheriff Bobby May

"...conjectured that Tye might have been out looking for sexual encounters at 2:00 a.m., then gotten involved in a liaison that somehow went bad." (link below).

 Others guess that it must have been a drug deal gone bad. This speculation all despite the fact that the victim, Marcal Camero May, had no criminal record (link below) and had been living as a woman openly in Forest City (St. Francis Co.) Arkansas for many years without any recorded significant trouble.

What was immediately off the table was any possibility in the minds of the sheriff and others was that this was a "hate crime". Of course, there was no such thing in Arkansas as it is one of five states that has declined to create a hate crimes statute--at least not at the time of Ms. Tye's execution.

But there is a hate crime now recognized in Arkansas. On the afternoon of Monday, March 28, the Arkansas House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved (68-19) Senate Bill 214 to criminalize cyber bullying. If someone were to post unkind comments on Ms. Tye's Facebook page, they would now be subject to prosecution.

To be honest, I am not a civil rights lawyer, nor do I watch enough CSI episodes to consider myself an amateur forensics wiz, so I will grit my teeth and not opine about whether the Tye murder was indeed a hate crime.  I am also in favor of laws that prosecute deliberately abusive or violent behavior that has a negative effect on an individual or a class of people. Full disclosure: I have worked for 13 years with men who committed domestic violence and wanted to change their behavior, and I was deservedly in batterers treatment for a year before that after my own violence.

What I find distasteful is that the State of Arkansas says, on one hand, that it need not have a statute regarding the abuse or murder of a person committed because that person is, or is perceived to be, LGBT; yet will act swiftly to punish a crime in which the plurality of victims (and majority of dramatic stories getting play on local and network news) are white teenage girls. (see link)  Until the recent advent of very inexpensive mobile phones with text and web access, it was the privileged and mostly white youth who had the broadband access by which to be bullied. (*note below)

Perhaps the passage of this bill is the foot in the door to other appropriate hate crimes legislation. Or, perhaps that day will not come until the son or daughter of an Arkansas legislator comes out as gay, lesbian, or transgendered, and tells their parent-legislator that they are being bullied, abused, demeaned, or threatened for who they are.

But such bills have failed before. With the strong rhetoric from Arkansas politicians objecting to the very concept of "hate crime", it may seem safer to that legislator's child to stay silent at home and risk the violence elsewhere that too often comes with being discovered. Ms. Tye was courageous to live as she did. Arkansas and the other 5 states could match her courage and act boldly to prevent such tragedies in the real world, too.

MDT
Tomorrow: The Chrisitian Conservative objection to hate crime laws
*To the question of "Have you ever been cyberbullied in your lifetime?", a larger percentage of whites and females responded "yes" than did to the question "Have you been cyberbullied in the past 30 days?". This could indicate a trend of cyberbullying being aimed increasingly toward non-whites as the digital divide narrows. Still, the narratives receiving media coverage are still overwhelmingly of white female teens.

Local Sheriff speculates on murder case

Tye had no previous criminal record

Cyberbullying studies and statistics

Why does Libya feel different? Should it?

I clearly identify myself as a pacifist--a conscientious objector with an uncompromising opposition to all war. I have taken it to the streets in protests and vigils opposing both "Operation Desert Whatevers" in Iraq, and correctly feared that Afghanistan would become flypaper that would stick US forces there for a very long time.

So why am I not (yet) up out of my seat in outrage as Tomahawk cruise missiles rain down on Libyan anti-aircraft and radar facilities this night? Why did my heart lift a bit when network news interrupted my weekend sports to tell us that French fighter jets chased Gaddafi's planes from the sky?

Oh, I still feel the same fears. I don't believe that this will end quickly, and I won't be surprised if it does not end well. And I am absolutely sure that innocents will, already have, died at our hi-tech hands. But this time I am entertaining the thought that this could, maybe, possibly be a "right" war, even though I have always considered that an abhorrent and self-contradictory concept. I feel differently tonight. I just am not sure why.

This is not the first time that brave people will have their fight for freedom brutally crushed. Do I feel differently about the dictators, Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein? They both were monstrous in suppressing thier own people. Libya's army has many mercenaries from outside the country, while Iraq's army was largely home grown. Gaddafi was tied up in Lockerbee and the German nightclub bombings, while Saddam never was a significant player in international terror (sorry, neocons.)

But none of these reasons, nor all of them together, can explain why today feels different to me. I cannot make my emotions consistent with my beliefs tonight.

Maybe I just feel like it has been a long time since my country has been on the right side of history. Or the right side of humanity's advancement. Perhaps we could act in the Muslim world, for once in a way that Muslims see as supportive and respectful of Islam. Egypt's overwhelmingly peaceful uprising against Mubarak was so thrilling, so inspiring, and the Libyan opposition's first week of action seemed full of similar promise. I had hopes...

"I had hopes." As I typed those words, the air just went out of me, and the tears have started to well up. My urge to support this military force arises, ultimately, not from what Gaddafi is doing to the hopes of the people he governs, but what he did to my hopes. I had expectations, my own picture of what should happen for people I do not know in another continent I have never seen. I didn't ask, and I cannot trust that the men I have seen speaking for the "rebels" (in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are "insurgents") also speak for the mothers and daughters and young sons of Libya. Maybe they do, but I don't know so.

I do know it this the Libyan people's struggle--succeed or fail--and if America had not made such poor choices over the past two decades about jumping into the wrong struggles for the wrong reasons in Islamic nations, this intervention would not be so appealing to me now. I must admit that part of me hopes for America's redemption through this conflict, but that again is my hope. I ultimately cannot condone killing others for the sake of my hopes. Nor will I ask our fighting women and men to die for what I imagine is the right thing.

We are...no, I am so steeped in the thought patterns of imperialism: knowing what is right for the rest of the world, when in fact I am unconsciously rooting for what would be my preference. A committed pacifist has to keep asking "why" when something inside him exults at war. It is the only defense against imperial thinking.

Am I happy with my answer? Is my answer satisfying? No. It's just true. My truth. Pacifism is not a philosophy that is free of problems, but it has the problems I can live with.

War doesn't.

GOP Topic #1: "Talking Jobs"

The Republican party has realized that their agenda priorities have slipped.  Senate Republican Conference Committee Chair Lamarr Alexander admitted yesterday that the GOP drumbeat on spending cuts may not be addressing the real concerns of Americans outside the beltway and the halls of state capitols, namely jobs.  As Republican legislators travel to their home districts during next week’s recess, Alexander says, “…you will hear us talking about, No. 1: jobs; No. 2: debt.” 

As a counselor in recovery programs for the past decade, I know that “breaking denial”—admitting you have a problem—is the first step to recovery. The GOP is admitting they have a problem both nationally and in the states, as party leadership awakens to the reality that most people are not connecting the dots between obsessive cuts in government spending and lowering unemployment.  Kudos on this first step, Republicans. 

Too bad about the mistake on what your next step should be.

Like most folks in recovery from their misguided choices, Republicans are the last to notice the undesirable outcomes of their actions.  Polling trends have indicated for months a growing majority of people who are clear that they see no improvement in their own situations as their local, state, and federal governments slash budgets.  And why should they?  Corporate profits in many sectors have risen to record levels since the 2008 recession; meanwhile, hiring is essentially flat.  More Americans each week see that while corporate tax rates are cut along with government services and support for education, so many individuals languish in prolonged unemployment.  The only folks getting overtime, it seems, are the ones printing the pink slips. 

Republicans have produced no compelling evidence that their budget “slash and burn” actually results in increased hiring, but the talking points coming out of their caucus are to exactly that. “We will talk about, #1: jobs”, as if the creation of jobs has actually flowed from the spending cuts.

That is the extent of the plan—talking. Charlie Sheen’s approach to sobriety—“I closed my eyes and made it so!”—at least suggests some effort on his part. The conservative approach to economic recovery sounds more like, “We will close our eyes, and business will make it so!”

In recovery, we do not evaluate success by what the client is talking about, but by the evidence of outcomes.  I have one overarching question in my work in recovery and changing a life direction: “How’s what you are doing working out for you?”

How's it is working? In a very predictable, though not helpful, way: The reasonable motive of a corporation in “de-tax and deregulate” culture is to get the most productivity out of the fewest people, not to hire an optimum number of people to do the work well. There is no incentive to hire if the goodies roll in whether they increase payrolls or not. Meanwhile, unemployment—and deficits—are made persistent by ideological attacks on the supports for middle and working class income: unions, mortgage and credit regulation, civil service employment, and tax policy based in evidence instead of ideology.

When the country doesn’t just spin around to the conservative line because of the GOP talking points this spring, please don’t blame us for asking, “How’s that working out for me?”

Sorry, Republicans: She's Just Not That Into You.

Hey, my GOP friends and Tea Party true believers. Dudes (and most of the folks I'm talking to are of the "dude" gender), it has happened to us all. It's part of the game to think you have scored, really found the one that will love you forever. And it doesn't hurt that she's so fine, says the sweetest things, and--she's hella rich, too. She looks good on your arm and helps you get into all the right parties. Hooks you up with the right people. Generous people.

Problem is, guys: It's not forever.
It's just your turn.

 I know; my Democrat buddies and I have been there before, and she dumped us, too, once we did--or could no longer--give her what she really wanted.

We romanced the (rhymes with) "Rich" ourselves--gave her chocolate-covered tax breaks, diamond-clad defense contracts, and gallantly went into battle to defend...well, whatever we were defending, it sounded sweet and important when she whispered it in our ear.


Your grandfather, Ike, was clear-eyed enough to try and stay clear of her. He had a pet name for her: "The Military Industrial Complex". Since then, she and her girlfriends in Big Finance have done a good job of flirting with both of us, only to really go out with the winners each cycle. I call them, "The Mean Riches".

Remember when the Mean Riches put George W up for class president as a joke, and he wound up winning!  All the time, they were really snogging the neocons that pretended to be his friends. When the boys got unpopular in 2008...well, they flirted with my man Barak, but they really started working on you.

Like I said, it's been happening for a long time and to your friends and mine. But, it is different this time. There is something else going on. It's going to hurt, but I'm really trying to warn you...as a friend:

She's not that into you. Or me. She just wants the money.

When you give her new tax breaks that empty your state budget wallet, she will promise you how that's going to mean all her friends will run to your state and give your constituents jobs! When you new Republicans put the public sector unions out of business, she's whispering in your ear how you are going to be unbeatable! But where are those jobs, my man? Who makes an unbeatable profit if unions disappear in America: You, your people, or her corporations? She won't need you anymore when there are no taxes on corporations and no regulators and no unions. She'll already have it all.

Okay, you still think I'm just trying to spoil your good thing because I'm a jealous, sore loser? Fair enough; I'm not happy, but I'm not trying to take it out on you. All I'm asking is this: What are you going to be left with when you win all the fights she's putting you up to? Did you forget what she's really after?

Remember Grover Norquist? Back in 2001 he said,  "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."  I've seen a picture of her room; she's got his poster on the wall.

Get it? You want to be the government...and she wants to drawn the government. In a bathtub of debt.

And you filled the tub with deficits by telling her she didn't have to pick up the tab for anything. Gallant, unless you consider that she's a whole lot wealthier than you are. When the government is broke, and the unions are broken, and all your opponents are kneecapped, you will think you won.

And then she'll kick you to the curb, man. You will rule nothing. Then you are going to look back and see that the signs were all there all along, but you didn't want to see them. All the stuff she told you would be so fun to do that seemed just a little shady, kinda cruel, maybe not even all that constitutional?

Hey, I don't think I'm going to change your mind. I know you can't hear this right now. You don't want to, even when the doubts won't go away. I probably wouldn't have listened when it applied to me; nobody ever does.

But, hey--give me a call if you do see this going south someday, and we'll see if we can salvage something. I'm in the book, under "Loyal Opposition".