Tag: elections

As Barry Obama stumps for extending the payroll tax cut designed to cripple Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in New Hampshire, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is promoting what she calls a Green New Deal to help put Americans back to work fixing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and finding cleaner, renewable ways to fuel things.

The tenets of her plan include building infrastructure and public transportation, supporting sustainable agriculture, developing clean and renewable energy and restructuring the nation’s manufacturing base.

“There is a strong economic argument that unemployment is more expensive than a plan to deal with unemployment,” Stein said.

The plan’s details have not been worked out, according to Stein, but she said it would be a community-based effort that extends to the local level. Her plan would aim to create 17 million new jobs, and she said that, through a multiplier effect, those 17 million would translate into the 25 million needed to achieve full employment.

And that’s not all.  Unlike Obama, whose record of suppressing civil liberties reads like something out of some other third world dictatorship, Stein is coming out swinging against the assaults by cops against Occupiers.

“The aggressive, needless police actions across the country against Occupy Wall Street (OWS) are an assault on civil liberties and an effort to suppress a much needed movement for economic justice and democracy,” said Stein, a Green Party member and past candidate in Massachusetts elections. “The courageous protesters who have stood up to intimidation by lethal force are standing up for us all.”

In the statement, Stein called upon mayors in occupied cities to “follow the example of Green Party Mayor Gayle McLaughlin of Richmond, Cali., who welcomed the local occupation” and contrasts that with videos and reports from Wall Street, UC Berkley and Occupy Oakland, which she says show public officials are “suppressing rights of free speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press.”

“The use of police in full riot gear with helicopters buzzing overhead to arrest peaceful and largely sleeping protesters is frightening commentary on the militarization of state and municipal security,” Stein said i nthe statement. “Unprovoked police violence against citizens practicing peaceful civil disobedience – clearly documented on videos gone viral on the Internet – is deeply alarming.”

Small wonder then, that in a mock election held earlier this month in Illinois (the largest in the nation), Stein and the Greens garnered twenty-seven percent of the vote.

The mock primary/caucus process produced three tickets: Democrats nominated Barack Obama for President and Hillary Clinton for Vice-President; Republicans nominated Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan; Greens nominated Jill Stein and Kent Mesplay. Then, at the mock general election, the results were 39% for the Democratic ticket, 33% for the Republican ticket, 27% for the Green ticket, and 1% other.

Libertarians were involved but they chose to work for Ron Paul in the mock Republican convention. Jill Stein spoke on campus, and this obviously helped the Green campaign, because no other actual presidential candidates appeared on campus.

In a race that, no thanks to Obama’s endless and ongoing betrayals of the public interest to curry favor with the top 1%, may be so much closer than it should be, that twenty-seven percent could make the difference.  This isn’t a bad thing by any means; Stein’s candidacy seems to be having an effect already by forcing Obama to adopt policies he ordinarily wouldn’t.  (For example, Hopey McChangerton seemed last week to back off of plans to open up even more public lands to oil drilling.)

The biggest problem of the 2012 election won’t just be the ongoing right-wing policies that have turned America into a fascist police state, but the exclusion of any left-wing voices from the national dialog.  But if Jill Stein keeps up her campaign and manages to resonate with more voters, this could change.

In a comment posted in response to the Open Salon version of my previous entry, Barzin Pakandam posted the following:

Hi Michael, I completely agree with your assessment. My post goes one step further:

http://open.salon.com/blog/bar…

Mr. Pakandam, with all due respect, I think you glossed over what I wrote about Obama.  Yes, voters are fed up with far right, anti-labor, anti-woman, anti-civil-liberties, pro-war, anti-environment, pro-torture, pro-corporate Republican policies.  But they’re also fed up with far right, anti-labor, anti-woman, anti-civil-liberties, pro-war, anti-environment, pro-torture, pro-corporate Democrat policies.

On the issue of health care, for example, Obama cynically bet that by ramming through what amounts to a corporate boondoggle, he could remove health care as a wedge issue going into 2012.  And the best way he could do that was to pass something the Republicans had already passed at the state level.

Enter Romneycare, on which Obamacare was modeled and which bears many similarities to the Clinton plan Obama campaigned against in ’08.  (And they all appear to have swiped the idea from Richard Nixon.  Go figure.)

The thinking on this was painfully simple, and horrendously evil.  There’s an institutional crisis in how Americans are able to gain access to decent health care.  So Obama’s, Clinton’s, and Romney’s plan was to institutionalize the problem.  If it’s a built-in part of the system, no more crisis in the system because it’s now a feature instead of a supposed aberration.  Now we’re being forced to bail out the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries because they went too far in price gouging and were losing paying customers.

And, of course, Obamacare, as is Romneycare before it, is deliberately designed to fail.  As Jon Walker and Scarecrow at FDL reported last year, the Massachusetts plan failed spectacularly the same week Obamacare became law.  The state objected to proposed premium increases, which prompted insurers to back out of agreements to offer new coverage.

Why pass such a flawed plan if it’s very design guarantees failure?  As I wrote above, there’s a cynical political ploy at the heart of the matter.  But it runs much deeper than that.  By passing a health care law at the national level that’s designed to fail, the far right-wing lackeys of Wall Street (which include Obama in their ranks) can pretend to justify their long-disproven claims that government health care or insurance doesn’t work.  And also as I wrote above, they got to bail out two massive industries that had priced their goods so ridiculouly high that they were starting to worry that they’d not have enough customers.

It’s pretty insidious, but then what can be expected from a guy who, as a state senator in Illinois, and at the behest of his corporate bosses, actively and enthusiastically worked to gut a proposed bill that would have extended health insurance to impoverished children?

By the way, a year after the collapse of Romneycare in Massachusetts, it was still a miserable failure.

And that’s just on health care reform.  Look at each and every one of Obama’s policies and you will find a continuation or expansion of Bush’s far right policies.  He isn’t doing these things out of weakness or some misguided desire to be conciliatory.  He’s doing them because he is a right-wing extremist and his policies are the same as those of the Republicans.  THAT is what voters rejected in Ohio on Tuesday.

Ohio voters last night voted overwhelmingly against both Republican and Democrat corporate-favoring policies in a referendum.  Senate Bill 5, passed by the Republican-dominated legislature and signed into law by Republican governor John Kasich, was shot down by sixty-one percent, too large a margin for the GOP to rig the vote count in its favor.

By a reportedly larger margin than Issue 2, Obamacare, the law passed in spring of 2010 in a huge giveaway to the health insurance industry, was voted down at sixty-six percent of the vote, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  However, the constitutional amendment as written would make it extremely difficult to pass meaningful regulations on insurance companies, and pretty much rules out all hope of single-payer health insurance in the Buckeye State.

In Mississippi, voters shot down the anti-abortion amendment proposed by right-wing extremists.  The bid to declare life as beginning at conception was defeated 58-42%.

The measure would have bestowed legal rights on fertilized eggs and cut off access to abortion by equating it with murder, making no exception for rape, incest or when a woman’s life is in danger. Medical groups warned it might have criminalized contraception and miscarriages while limiting access to treatments such as in-vitro fertilization.

The voters of Mississippi are smarter than the far right gives them credit for.  Cheers to them!

What, however, does the defeat of Issue 2 and the passage of Issue 3 in Ohio mean?  It is incredibly easy for Democrats and Republicans, and their spinmeisters in the corporate-owned media, to speculate as to what it means, and many are doing just that.  But what it all boils down to is that voters are fed up with far right policies that benefit no one but large business interests.  In Massachusetts, for example, according to Physicians for a National Health Program, Romneycare – the insurance giveaway on which Obamacare was modeled – nearly 400,000 people still find health insurance unaffordable, and those people are predominantly the working poor.  Given this realization, it is no wonder voters would rather opt out.

On a broader scale, Americans are increasingly hostile to far right policies, be they industry bailouts, invasive laws designed to take away women’s reproductive rights, or attempts to restrict voting rights, We the People are starting to fight back against the wave of fascist power grabs.  Only time, though, will tell if it’s not too little, too late.

Cross-posted from Progressive Independence.

2011 may be an “off” years for elections but this one was of particular interest as it may forecast some outcomes for 2012. There were a couple of really important ballot initiatives and a recall that would have significant impact for both parties and there was a special disappointment for a first term, rotund, bullying Republican governor.

First the Ohio, the law restricting the collective bargaining rights of public employees was overturned by Ohio voters with an overwhelming 61% to 39%. Ouch. That must burn for new Republican governor, John Kasich. Many political pundits, left and right, see this a set up for a major political battle in a swing state and a possible resurgence of the Ohio State Democratic Party.

Ohio voters also approved a proposal to prohibit people from being required to buy health insurance as part of the national healthcare overhaul supported by Obama. The vote was mostly symbolic but Republicans hope to use it as part of a legal challenge.

On to Mississippi where some legislators wanted to give “personhood” to a 4 celled entity called a zygote. Voters there rejected ballot Initiative 26, which would have defined personhood as beginning at fertilization. With 63% of the vote reporting, the ‘No’ position is leading by a margin of 57%-43%. The proposal, initiated through petitions by pro-life activists, would have outlawed not only abortion but many forms of birth control that can prevent the uterine implantation of a fertilized egg.

The proposal obviously conflicted with the right to an abortion as decided in the Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade, and if passed could have set up a potential Supreme Court battle to overturn Roe. It was opposed by the state Medical Association and Nurses Association. Even Governor Haley Barbour had his reservations about the proposal, feeling that it went too far and would put unworkable restrictions on fertility clinics and possibly put a woman’s life at risk in the face of an ectopic pregnancy. Congratulations  to Mississippi voters for protecting women.

In Maine, voters restored same day voting, shooting down the specious argument that it would be open to fraud. They overturned the new state law supported by the state’s new Tea Party-backed Republican governor, Paul LePage, that requires voters to register at least two days before an election.

The wise voters of Arizona ousted the Senate President and author of the state’s hard-line laws against illegal immigration, Russell Pearce by 53 to 45. Replacing Pearce is Jerry Lewis, a Republican school administrator who has said he opposes Pearce’s enforcement-only approach to immigration policy. The recall is seen as part of a backlash against the immigration policies that gained the state and Pearce national attention. It is also seen as a swing toward more moderate Republicans. Lewis will serve the remainder of Pearce’s term through 2012. He will be required to run again in November of next year if chooses to seek re-election.

In the two governors races, Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Steve Beshear, was re-elected, becoming the second Democrat to win a governorship in 2011. In Mississippi, lieutenant governor, Phil Bryant, appeared poised to keep the governor’s mansion in Republican hands, succeeding term limited, Haley Barbour. Bryant defeated Hattiesburg mayor, Johnny Dupree, the first black major-party nominee for governor in Mississippi, by a vote of 60% to 40%.

In the Garden State of New Jersey, the voters handed their buying first term governor, Chris Christie, the equivalent of a “no confidence vote” despite low voter turn out. Democrats maintained their 24-16 control over the Senate and added one seat in the Assembly, giving them a 48-32 edge, according to the Associated Press and Star-Ledger. While still not enough to reverse some of Christie’s draconian policies, it is enough to keep him in check and force him to negotiate instead of governing by fiat.

Dear Seattle Teachers  and Seattle Education Advocates –

On Wed. 19 Oct the ballots go in the mail for the Seattle School Board election of Tues. 8 November.

WE each need to get 5 people WE know to vote for the FOUR challengers to the school board.

– Do YOU want to be on Strike in Sept. 2013 because the fellow travelers of Maria Goodloe-Johnson’s management by disruption, confusion and chaos have changed their tunes but NOT their behaviors?

NOTE:

–The more disruptions from downtown, the less we can help our kids.

–The more the school board is dancing to the tunes of education “reformers” who RARELY help us do our jobs better, the more disruptions from downtown.**

–The LESS we participate in elections, the more the school board dances and the more downtown disrupts.

— This really doesn’t require a mountain of degrees to figure out, because it is simple cause and effect.

Read the words of a Tacoma teacher who has taught at Lincoln High School for 21 years and who was on strike this year –

DO YOU WANT THESE EXPERIENCES?

http://postdefiance.com/reflec…

WE each need to get 5 people WE know to vote for the FOUR challengers to the school board.

Salon.com has a piece up urging Democrats to dump Obama and go with a candidate who will restore their party to its New Deal era politics.  According to the column by Matt Stoller, there are a number of reasons why they should, including:

If would be one thing if Obama were failing because he was too close to party orthodoxy. Yet his failures have come precisely because Obama has not listened to Democratic Party voters. He continued idiotic wars, bailed out banks, ignored luminaries like Paul Krugman, and generally did whatever he could to repudiate the New Deal. The Democratic Party should be the party of pay raises and homes, but under Obama it has become the party of pay cuts and foreclosures. Getting rid of Obama as the head of the party is the first step in reverting to form.

This is an institutional crisis for Democrats. The groups that fund and organize the party — an uneasy alliance of financiers, conservative technology interests, the telecommunications industry, healthcare industries, labor unions, feminists, elite foundations, African-American church networks, academic elites, liberals at groups like MoveOn, the ACLU and the blogosphere — are frustrated, but not one of them has broken from the pack. In remaining silent, they give their assent to the right-wing policy framework that first George W. Bush, and now Barack Obama, cemented in place. It will be nearly impossible to dislodge such a framework without starting within the Democratic Party itself.

In other words, party inflexibility has a price. If the economy worsens going into the fall, and the president continues as he has to attempt to cut Social Security, Democrats might be facing a Carter-Reagan scenario. Reagan, at first considered a lightweight candidate, ended up winning a landslide victory that devastated the Democratic Party in 1980. Carter wasn’t the only loss; many significant liberal senators, such as George McGovern, John Culver and Birch Bayh, fell that year.

Stoller nails it by pointing out the extreme inflexibility inherent in the Democrat Party today.  Its leaders have decided that they want it to be the party of Big Business, and they don’t care what base voters think – so long as the Republicans are content to be the party of overt extremists, as opposed to the Democrats’ “covert” extremism, they reason, voters will at the end of the electoral season either shut up and vote for them anyway or else not vote at all.  Either way, that suits Democrat Party leaders just fine, wanting all the perks of power but none of the responsibility.  Stoller continues toward the end of his column by writing:

Obama has basically endorsed every major plank of George Bush’s administration, yet Democrats still grant their approval. What we’re finding out is that Obama’s pathologically pro-establishment and conflict-averse DNA was funded by party insiders and embraced by liberal constituency groups in 2008 for a reason.

Political parties need to be flexible enough to allow for new ideas to come into the process, or else third parties or civil disorder are inevitable. All it would take to provide this flexibility are well-known Democratic elders who understand that rank and file Democrats deserve a choice, and a few political insiders who realize that they can increase their own power by encouraging a robust debate. I don’t think this will happen.

Stoller rightly points out that the disastrous presidency of Grover Cleveland necessitated the removal of him as the Democrats’ candidate in 1896 in favor of William Jennings Bryan, who pressed for many populist reforms and began laying the groundwork for both the Progressive Era of the early 1900s and the New Deal Era of the 1930s and 1940s.  But for that to happen, there had to be widespread acknowledgment within the party that the path being taken could only lead to its ultimate collapse – self preservation instinct had to take over in order for the party to save itself, and in the 1890s, that realization rose and was accepted by party leaders.

Many disaffected Democrats still presume to think that they can take back the party from the corporate interests that have seized it.  But not one of them has dared come up with any serious roster of candidates willing to risk political suicide by running against Obama next year.  Corporate money, and therefore corporate influence, is so entrenched within the Democrat Party that it is now beyond all hope of repair.  Thomas Hartman does offer advice for retaking the Democrat Party from the corporatists, but it’s probably far too late for that.  The party has so alienated and disillusioned voters with its pro-war, anti-labor, anti-civil liberties, pro-corporate, anti-democracy nature that it is now highly unlikely that enough citizens trust that their activism will result in any significant reforms.

A serious effort to build a strong, viable third party organization can send the needed message to Democrat leaders that they can no longer take voters for granted, that we do have alternatives and we will turn to them if Democrats keep refusing to live up to their obligation to represent the public interest.  In 1992, H. Ross Perot’s strong showing of nearly nineteen percent of the vote in that year’s presidential election demonstrates that it is possible within our own era to gain significant votes to fundamentally alter the political landscape.  Progressives, laborers, and traditionally oppressed citizens can and should begin building that third party effort now, while the iron is white hot.  While we are doing that, remaining progressives within Democrat ranks can begin their takeover of the party by gaining precinct committee seats, especially executive committee seats, to obtain more control over the candidate-nominating process.  Sun Tzu admonishes students of warfare not to fight on multiple fronts, but to instead force the enemy to do so, thereby dividing his forces.  In World War II, Nazi Germany lost because it faced the dual military threats of the Allied forces in the West and the Soviet forces in the East, each of which operated in tandem with the other to close in around their mutual enemy and destroy him.  In politics, the same strategies and tactics apply.

Now, Democrat Party loyalists will cry foul, claiming that any attempt to run a primary opponent against Obama or draw voters to third parties will almost certainly result in a Republican victory next year.  But the way their party is doing things now, that result is practically inevitable regardless of what progressives do.  Obama and corporatist Democrats at the top are leading their party off a cliff, and no amount of hope will cause them to deviate from their chosen path.  What’s more, Republican vote-rigging is already well underway with highly restrictive ballot access and voter ID laws to prevent poor and minority voters from exercising their right to vote.  By running as the party of continuation with George W. Bush’s extreme right-wing policies, Obama and his sycophants are guaranteeing a close enough electoral result that Republicans will easily be able to steal 2012, just as they did in 2000-2006.  That they have such enthusiastic help from Democrats themselves makes GOP electoral “victories” all but inevitable.

For the unwashed among you, Cee Lo Green has had a hit “Fuck You”, which is about a girl dumping him for his lack of funds. Taylor Swift has had a hit “Mean”, where she tells off some mean meanie for being a meanie – it is very high school song.  

I’ve listened to pop music for decades – it tells us what is going on out there among the mob of us nobodies, kind of like how the highly priced painting of a campbell’s soup can tells us how outta touch our ‘elites’ are.

These 2 songs have been popular for months – and some of the excuse making for 0bummer’s LATEST $ell out just hit me the other day – blaming fascist pigs for being pigs while your ‘champions’ sell you out is … great for the well paid ‘champions’!      

According to a CBS/NYT poll 71% of Republican voters want more choices. That doesn’t say much about the current field of candidates.

Overwhelming dissatisfaction with the direction in which our country seems to be heading, and mediocre approval ratings for President Obama, should provide plenty of opportunity for Republican presidential candidates to find traction.

But a new CBS News/New York Times poll suggests the current field have a long way to go to impress the nation’s conservative-minded voters.

click on image to enlarge

Apparently the Democrats aren’t that enthralled about their current only choice:

click on image to enlarge

And by the way, there were 428,000 new jobless claims filed. Where are the jobs?

People camped out last night outside the FEC headquarters in Washington,DC to get a seat in the hearing room this  morning. Why? Because Stephen Colbert would be testifying about his request to form a super PAC to raise campaign money. This morning the FEC approved his request:

Stephen Colbert learned an important lesson Thursday at the Federal Election Commission: Even a gifted comedian can’t make campaign-finance law funny.

In a meeting devoid of anything beyond a gentle chuckle, the FEC decided that Colbert could go ahead with his plans to form a self-titled “super PAC” that could raise and spend unlimited money on the 2012 elections.

snip

The real parody came outside the FEC building, where Colbert began accepting donations from fans for the newly registered “Colbert Super PAC.”

“Some people have said, ‘Is this some kind of joke?’ ” Colbert told the crowd. “I for one don’t think participating in democracy is a joke.”

Colbert continued being coy about the ultimate goal of his new PAC, and whether he would take advantage of a loosened campaign-finance environment to solicit big money from corporations and others. When asked by a reporter when the first ad might run, Colbert said: “I’ve got to get some money first.”

Voting has started in Western New York House District 26 to replace Craig’s list Republican Christopher Lee. The strongly Republican district is expected to flip to Democratic blue because of the Republican melt down over Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget bill which wold end Medicare and decimate Medicaid. So far the Democratic candidate, Kathy Hochul, has a comfortable lead in the polls over Republican choice Jane Corwin and the 78 year old perennial candidate, Jack Davis, who is running on the Tea Party line. All eyes are on this race since it is likely to be the template for coming elections in the national debate over the Ryan budget despite House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s protests that this is not a referendum on that bill.

Democrats should not get too comfortable and I’m sure they’re not, this can always go the other way. Politico will be watching five factors in this race tonight:

The Davis effect

There’s probably no more critical factor in the race than Jack Davis, the Democrat-turned-tea-party-candidate who’s spent nearly $3 million of his own funds casting himself as an independent-minded outsider who will save the Buffalo area’s blue-collar workers from losing their jobs to China.

Erie County Democrats

Simply put, Hochul needs to rack up a big margin in her home base of Erie County, the district’s population center and the portion of the district in which Democrats have performed most strongly in recent congressional races.

Rural Republicans

Corwin is looking to make up for her expected Erie County deficit with a large turnout in the district’s more GOP-friendly rural counties, such as Wyoming and Livingston, which in previous years provided sizable margins for former GOP Reps. Chris Lee and Tom Reynolds.

The senior set

There’s little question that Democrats have succeeded in focusing the race on the future of Medicare – an issue that’s critical in the minds of senior voters who heavily populate the district and are among those most likely to vote in a special election.

The expectations game

Just as important as any tactical factors will be who finishes ahead in what has emerged as a vigorous spin war. With the race emerging as a preview of the 2012 campaign and the first political litmus test for the Republican budget push, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

The polls close at 9 PM. I will be phone banking for Kathy Hochul for most of the day. I’ll up date later as the results come in. Best of luck to Kathy.

Special Election Streaming Video