Tag Archives: politics

Meeting Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee

Politics, Uncategorized, ,

I woke up early for this. #BlackHistoryMonthBreakfast and meeting Congressmember #SheilaJacksonLee. Good speech!

Also, she implored me and the guy who graciously took this photo (Jeremy Ackles) to consider supporting Hillary in the Dem primary over building on, rather than “ripping up”, the ACA. I didn’t get to mention to her that I support Bernie before she left, but I did introduce myself by telling her that I admire her work on Haiti and defending the Cherokee Freedmen community. But hearing this from an African-American congresswoman from Texas, this makes sense.

There is a fear among incumbent Dems, perhaps well-founded, that Bernie will campaign on starting over on healthcare reform, taking us back to the drawing board of 2009-2010. Convos with Dominick on the utter dearth of healthcare for isolated parts of South Georgia come to mind, especially for African-American rural residents.

Maybe I’m weighing between the heart and the head. Heart-driven progressives are concerned with taking on Wall Street, Big Pharma, Fossil Fuels, and other big profit-driven or security-driven institutions. Head-driven liberals, especially those concerned with maximizing the social contract for their historically-disadvantaged communities, are concerned with making the best (and better) of the here-and-now. My heart and head are at play. Revolution or chess match? Immediate uprising or long-term reform?

I have no doubt that Clinton would be able to lead needed reforms or that Sanders would be the voice of conscience as head of state, even though Republicans have the downticket advantage. But which approach can we afford, the moral appeals of Sanders or the effective pragmatism of Clinton? It feels like the most dichotomous party primary in history.

One thing you will not see from me on Facebook or Twitter is me explaining Sanders to African-American voters, women or Hillary supporters. I will not. Also, with the outright verbal violence being done between Bernie and Hillary supporters and Twitter corporate starting to lose users, one can only imagine if Twitter was this popular a microblogging platform back in 2007, when President Obama posted his first tweet as a Senator. Now, it’s incredibly vicious. 9 Years Later, two people are now trying to campaign on his legacy.
Something I and Jeremy noticed on the way out of Atlanta from the #GeorgiaUnites rally this afternoon: the beds and bags of all the homeless people living under both sides of a bridge on Coca Cola Pl SE, in freezing, windy, below-zero weather. Neither of us had seen just how bad, or horrific, homelessness is in Atlanta until that moment. And neither of us Muscogee residents could stand the cold on the Georgia State Capitol for 2 mere hours. I don’t know how to parse that sight.

Black Republicans and Black Nationalism

Politics, Uncategorized,

I would better respect the Black Republican platform when they can recognize that the Black American Nationalism and “Do for Self”-ism of Garvey, Malcolm X, Maulana Karenga and the RBG (red, black, green) movement is as “American” and “Free-Market” as the nationalism and conservatism espoused by the Republican Party. But of course, the nationalism of some Americans is not the nationalism of most Americans.

The cultural nationalism of African Americans has never been the nationalism of all Americans, and has been treated as “subversive” and, more recently, “self-segregating”. Yet the Black Panther Party, their internal factional violence notwithstanding, was the direct opposite of African-American cultural nationalism. The BPP was intentionally interracial, critical of the foundational normalities of apple-pie America, and was pro-#BlackLivesMatter before it became a hashtag.

To this day, the short-lived BPP has become a recurring meme, a legend for those who wish for interracial solidarity and a change to the racial and economic contract which holds the American status quo on a nigh-unquestionable platform. Books, films, comic books, music, music videos and even the concert staged by Beyonce last night at #SB50 have come to pay some degree of homage to the BPP and their members in the American mass media. Quotes and coinages from members – i.e., Stokely Carmichael’s “institutional racism” – recur to this day in political discussions, but are consigned largely to discussions on the American left and center as the centering of people of color continues apace.

Meanwhile, the cultural nationalism of RBG, of Kwanzaa, of the person who waxes poetic and political for “Mother Africa”, remains marginal in African-American communities.

Perhaps it is sidelined to an expensive, academic pursuit that the average African-American can’t afford. Perhaps it clashes too much with the lived experiences of African-Americans who work, live, play and do business with diverse ranges of people frequently. But Black Republicans in general, I find, can’t even get behind that. They subscribe to the entirety of the myth of America as the land of the Founding Fathers(tm), in which racism of any kind is old history, the free market reigns supreme, ne’er-do-wells should be punished with the full savagery of the state and the vigilante, life begins at the expense of the woman, and the pure image of America must be protected from the adulteration of college professors and other deviants.

This foundational myth, one which is cobbled together across a range of political currents to please a coalition, is one that I find to be static and untenable in the longer run. It’s full of contradictions. The more I see of America, the less I see myself, my experiences or the histories of people of similar background in this myth.

I can’t see myself as a Republican, especially in Georgia. I wish I didn’t have to be a Democrat, especially not in Georgia. I’d be a Working Families Party member, or I’d rename the DPG to something that is relevant. But I vote against this myth.

First Afro-French Justice Minister, Christiane Taubira, just resigned from office to refuse approving a bill stripping citizenship from accused terrorists on civil liberties grounds. She stuck by her principles throughout her time in office. Introduced marriage equality to France, now known as #LoiTaubira. Unbought and Unbossed. I greatly admire her due to this speech. #ChristianeTaubira #Taubira

This poker-faced ratfucker, David Daleiden, started out at homeschool baby and ratfucker Lila Rose’s Live Action circus before starting his own group, the “Center for Medical Progress” in 2013. Interesting that fellow ratfucker James O’Keefe, who posted the ACORN “sting videos” and bugged former Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office, also got his start with Lila Rose back in 2006 by filming Lila Rose posing as a pregnant 15-year-old girl at a PP clinic. They all happen to describe themselves as “culturally Catholic”. #BirdsOfAFeather #ProBirth

Greg Abbott Wants a Convention to Undermine the Working Class

Politics, Uncategorized, ,

Spoiler alert: these amendments would solidify power in the hands of states which consider themselves mini-states and fiefdoms, like Texas.

Summary:

“Prohibit congress from regulating activity that occurs wholly within one state. Require Congress to balance its budget. Prohibit administrative agencies from creating federal law. Prohibit administrative agencies from pre-empting state law. Allow a two-thirds majority of the states to override a U.S. Supreme Court decision. Require a seven-justice super-majority vote for U.S. Supreme Court decisions that invalidate a democratically enacted law Restore the balance of power between the federal and state governments by limiting the former to the powers expressly delegated to it in the Constitution. Give state officials the power to sue in federal court when federal officials overstep their bounds. Allow a two-thirds majority of the states to override a federal law or regulation.”

Yet, none of this would be extended to cities. The gall of state-supremacists like Greg Abbott.

“The traffickers — these aren’t people who take drugs. They are guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty,” he said. “These type of guys that come from Connecticut and New York. They come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home.,” “Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave. Which is the real sad thing, because then we have another issue that we have to deal with down the road.”

from WaPo

#PaulLepage #GotEm #Maine

Aftermath of #HERO

Politics, Uncategorized, , ,

I’ve seen some crap. Few things are as much of a travesty as how the #HERO vote went in Houston. One of the worst I’ve ever seen.

Some from the campaign were saying “Let’s not engage in Monday-morning quarterbacking”. Yet how can you not when the vote was so lopsided? How can you not when the turnout for the Houston vote was the highest in a city election since 2003? How can you not when the anti-HERO campaign was, and continues to be, particularly vicious toward transgender people?

Dan Patrick, Gary Abbott, the “Campaign for Houston”, “Texas Values” and the right-wing in Houston are pretty damn unbelievable in their “win” against transgender women.

They demand grace from Annise Parker, but are very ungracious, snidely and spiteful in their reaction to the result. The transgender people who were targeted explicitly by Patrick and Abbott as “men in women’s restrooms” in the campaign are nowhere to be found in their reactions. I wonder if, thanks to this vote, it will now be acceptable to assault, attack and harm transgender women in Houston. They were targeted hard by cartoons and vicious rhetoric throughout the state by the Christian right-wing, called “perverts” and “confused men” who would harm “6 year old girls”. This was statewide, and this was scary.

The target wasn’t even L, G or B people. None of them. It was the T. I will not be surprised when a transgender woman trying to use the restroom is violently attacked in Texas, and the Christian right clucks its tongue at the transwoman saying “That confused ‘man’ was wrong to go into the wrong bathroom and look like that, ‘he’ had it coming. No sympathy from me, he deserved it!” That rhetoric won last night. Those who spoke it are effluent in their gloating.

This is a bad way for Mayor Parker to leave office. This next year in Houston will be particularly bad for transgender women. In the name of getting a similar ordinance passed in Houston, any mention of “gender identity” may even be stripped out of the ordinance for expediency’s sake a la ENDA.

The optics of this are hard to overcome, and must be fought for years to come. But the lives of transgender people in Houston must be watched out for as the next few years unfold. I remain proud to have done what I did for HERO. I am ashamed of this tragedy. I am afraid for trans lives in Houston and Texas. #TransLivesMatter #BlackLivesMatter.

Opioid Chickens Come Home to Roost

I find this speech poignant. But it reminds me of the NY Times article on White (affluent, non-Southern) families seeking a “gentler” war on drugs than the war we’ve been waging for most of the 20th century. This war is racist, it is classist, it is regionalist, and it has been all of that from the very beginning. But the elite of American society, the Southern landed gentry, the urban elite, had been using these drugs for the whole time, too, even after criminalizing it for Black and White working class people.

But now….NOW, because it has gotten out of hand among the upper class, now it is a problem to be solved non-violently, to be treated as a disease and epidemic and not as a criminal enterprise to be cracked over the head and shot through with bullets. Now, after the death and destruction of the war on drugs, we wonder what the fuck we are going to do.

Chris Christie is disturbed and confused by how his classmate of greater means ended up losing everything by getting strung out on percocet and xanax. But it has not hit him just how much destruction has befallen those of lesser means who end up dying on or over addictive drugs.

If Christie is running for president and really wants to understand why people say “they’re getting what they deserved”, the fact that we have cultivated and nursed our cultural anti-drug-user pathology over a century has to hit him with a force comparable to that of a roid-jacked drug-warrior policeman’s billy club.

We helped build this house of rage against the working class and their use of drugs, and now, because the affluent among us are dying from the malady, we’re no longer in love with this shit house that we’ve built. Oh noes. “#AllLivesMatter”, indeed. Hah. HAH! Not for the last century!

#LeelahAlcorn was right. Fix this society, please. #BlackLivesMatter #Occupy #EndMassIncarceration