Tag Archives: politics

This article goes in-depth on members-only unions, especially in the South. Apparently, they’re far in between, but they exist and are often very civil rights-oriented. Read this:

What is often lost in many of the discussions on workers’ rights is that members-only unions are not a theoretical construct or historical remnant. In fact, beyond UAW Local 42, a variety of public and private-sector locals have operated on a members-only basis for many years, with varying degrees of success. For example, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has approximately 120,000 members in members-only unions spread across Texas, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Virginia.

Most of the existing members-only unions are located in southern states, because legal conditions in those states such as right-to-work laws make it difficult to organize a majority union. Similarly, most members-only unions are public-sector unions, because many states that are inhospitable to labor can easily pass laws that limit collective bargaining rights in the public sector. However, there are members-only unions in the private sector and in other geographic locations as well.

via With Traditional Unions on the Decline, Can Members-Only Unions Breathe Life Back Into Labor? – Working In These Times.

First off, I’m guilty of this.

Second off, right now I’m reading another article on members-only unions and how they fair in very rural, politically anti-union states like Texas and North Carolina. I’m wondering if members-only unionism (aka “minority unions”) are the only sort of unionism that can work here in rural Georgia. But read this, first:

If you spend time among coastal liberals, it’s not unusual to hear denigrating remarks made about poor “middle Americans” slip out of mouths that are otherwise forthcoming about the injustices of poverty and inequality.

Yet, since the 1950s, Americans living in non-metropolitan counties have had a higher rate of poverty than those living in metropolitan areas. According to the 2013 American Community Survey, the poverty rate among rural-dwelling Americans is three percent higher than it is among urban-dwellers. In the South, the poorest region of the country, the rural-urban discrepancy is greatest—around eight percent higher in non-metro areas than metro areas.

So why is the poverty of rural America largely unexamined, even avoided? There are a number of explanations.

via Why the Left Isn’t Talking About Rural American Poverty – Rural America.

Why Did Fannie Lou Hamer Integrate the Democrats and Not the GOP?

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From a comment I posted to John Jackson’s thread:

“If the GOP were the more effective alternative for African-American voters to the racist Southern Democrats in the post-WWII South, why did people like Fannie Lou Hamer attempt to integrate the Mississippi Democrats (who were atop an effective one-party state since Reconstruction) and not the recently-reestablished Mississippi GOP (re-born 1956)?

Why did her MFDP become the focus of attention in the 1964 Democratic Convention when they sought a seat at the Mississippi delegation table, when the free-market GOP championing Barry Goldwater was available that year?

In relation to what [some guy] said earlier, where were all this “free stuff” that Democrats were handing out for the 90+ years that Democrats had one-party rule throughout the South, and were Southern White people being given this free stuff that Black people were clearly prohibited from accessing? Southern White people, with high rates of regional illiteracy and racial privilege, “pulled the lever” for Democratic governors for over 4 generations, and never pulled that lever for a GOP governor, so what changed?

That’s what I’m curious about. What changed in the South that Democrats went from being “my (racist) grandpapy’s party” to being the party of “free stuff”, from a racist kleptocratic party in the South to the “socialist party” in opposition for the next century?

Was it FDR’s New Deal? Truman’s integration of the military? Johnson’s ban on bigoted poll taxes or his Great Society? I don’t think that it is the viability or non-viability of the GOP’s free-market policy or its anathema to “free stuff” that is the issue.

Otherwise, many would have been more attracted to the GOP as a party on a Booker T. Washington/Marcus Garvey/Malcolm X “do for self” nationalist pro-business basis. But that didn’t happen, and so you didn’t have traditional Black Republicans get into federal office after Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, who was the last gasp of the type of Black GOPer who was promoted aggressively by the Radical Republicans to Southern statewide office in Reconstruction.

Now it’s all “bootstrap”, “anti-big-gov” and militarist types like J.C. Watts, Mia Love, Allen West and Tim Scott since the civil-rights movement era.

What happened, and why can’t the GOP relate to the Black Nationalist “do for self” trend in the same way that the Democrats have been able to relate (somewhat) to the Black social-democratic tendency?”

My Future with the Sanders Campaign

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After #DemDebate night and reflecting with Dominick on how the nomination contest has played out in both social media and real life, I don’t think I can take anymore of the presidential race. I’d rather work to get Democratic lawmakers into majorities, and let others work to get Sanders or Clinton into succeeding PBO.

News media is jostling over whether Clinton or Sanders won the first debate, while Democrats are hurting all over from the last two midterms. While Sanders expands his interactions with AAs and starts to affirm that #BlackLivesMatter (for which I am proud), his supporters have already burned bridges with many pro-BLM activists on social media while I looked on in horror. I’m really muted about Hillary because of the iconic symbolism of having a (first) woman president who at least tilts toward progressive ideals (“a progressive who gets things done”). I really do want her to do better intersectionally in her policies, as I do Sanders and, yes, (VP-in-waiting) O’Malley.

But again, Democrats are hurting. Progressives and liberals in general are hurting. Social cannibalism abounds in the GOP’s state-level and federal-level policies. Nothing is getting done with state or federal legislatures to fix the cracks left by negligent or abusive government in our society. The state-level Democrats in Georgia and the Old South are a lost brand, spoiled goods which make little sense for progressives and liberals in the South to support.

So I’m just tired of presidential election news, because the presidency has only so much that it can get done. I tire of waiting on pins-and-needles to see the candidates become everything that America needs. I’d rather help get more progressives and liberals into legislative and statewide office. Next year will be an opportunity for that, so I will ask around.

I’m thinking of backing away from most of my active involvement with the regional Sanders grassroots campaign. I have not been too actively involved for months.

Elections with Two Female Candidates

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I’m reading about the upcoming Taiwanese presidential election, pitting two women against each other from the two largest parties in the Republic of China and ensuring that Taiwan’s next president will be a woman. Given that we have two presidential candidates running for their respective parties’ nomination (Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina), I’m trying to build a list of women who have ran against each other in U.S. elections. The list is in its early stages:

  • Dianne Feinstein (D) vs. Elizabeth Emken (R) (U.S. Senate for California, 2012)
  • Barbara Boxer (D) vs. Carly Fiorina (R) (U.S. Senate for California, 2010; also with women from Libertarian and Peace & Freedom parties)
  • Bonnie Watson Coleman (D) vs. Alieta Eck (R) (U.S. House for New Jersey, 2014)
  • Patty Murray (D) vs. Linda Smith (R) (U.S. Senate for Washington, 1998
  • Margaret Chase Smith (R) vs. Lucia Cormier (D) (U.S. Senate for Maine, 1960)

Alabama and Political Apartheid

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Another thing about Alabama: they suffer from a slightly-worse case of Southern Political Apartheid than Georgia does. Alabama, like the rest of the South (save, maybe, for Florida) has one of the most racially-stratified political systems in the country. When the Dems had ran the South like Alabama during Jim Crow, they built the South to become a one-party state. When the pro-apartheid base was lost, the GOP claimed that base with a vengeance.

The goal in the South is to take everything. Electorally, we’re a very greedy, jealous, spiteful region.

Religious Diversity and the Commons

Politics, Uncategorized,

Just thought about this. Here in the United States, we don’t have a shared sense of the government-sponsored commons as is understood in countries where the majority of a population belong to a shared religious sect (i.e., a Catholic country). I think a few economists have tied this to why so many of us have an allergic reaction to government-promoted commons such as the Affordable Care Act.

“Not only are such commons being used by people who don’t look like us, but they are being used by people who don’t share the same ethical or religious cosmology as us.”

Religion plays a large socio-economic role in the lives of so many Americans because the government, by being nonsectarian and agnostic in a country populated by a multitude of religious allegiances, does not speak entirely in the language which so many of us are taught by our intimate such-and-such religion.

But what’s so undermining about our approach to religious diversity and its impact on the separation of religion and state is that our sense of religious diversity inherits the exclusivity of Abrahamic religions from the Middle East and Europe. “You can only be one sect of Christianity/Islam/Judaism”, according to their gatekeepers. “Nevermind those sinners in Latin America who practice Yoruba/Ife traditions and venerate the orisha while also venerating Catholic saints. They’re going to Hell for not following the exclusivity clause.”

Meanwhile, in East Asia, Buddhists can also practice folk religion, Confucianism, Daoism, all at the same time, in the same lifetime, and not think of them as contradictory but as complimentary. They have no problem with practicing more than one religion, and are still supportive of government-promoted commons.

So why do Americans have a problem with practicing more than one religion? And if we were more acknowledging of multi-religious practice, could that allow us to better support secular, government-sponsored common resources?

That “All Lives Matter” protest

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That “All Lives Matter” protest was led by *drum roll please* Glenn Beck and Chuck Norris. Auntie Alveda King tagged along.

I also noticed the pictures of Frederick Douglass. None of these individuals have the fortitude to read his 4th of July speech without putting revision to it, I’m pretty sure. But why only pictures of Douglass and Lincoln? Could someone have had a Malcolm X picture somewhere? Does he leave a sour taste in some mouths when he damned the fundamentals of this system? “Justice” “Courage” What about “Reparations”? What about “Human Rights”? And does their “Justice” come at the barrel of a police’s firearm?

This is very Christian. An assertion that everyone can only come together if they only complied to this “(Judeo-)Christian” framework of society. Not even race, #BlackLivesMatter. Not even class, #Sanders2016.

Religion, or should I say “FAITH” as the religious tribalists who run most local governments would assert and unconstitutionally mollify. And of course, the proceeds of this march didn’t go to any communities affected by police excess or to community institutions, but the current real-life cause celebre of the Christian victims of ISIS’ genocide in Syria and Iraq. Not the Yazidi victims, not the Shia victims, not the moderate Sunni victims, not the Kurdish victims, JUST SPECIFICALLY the Christian victims. Not even, arguably, the Christian minority affected by displacement from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who rank low in the hierarchy of Middle Eastern “save the Christians” needs. Just those a cozy distance away from the “rapture practice” zone of Israel/Palestine.

Everything about this march says a lot more about the inconsistencies of reactionary Christian U.S. politics toward ethnicity, foreign affairs, undermined populations, and their own comfort zones.

This is a funny march. Obtuse as shit, but funny. The fact that Glenn Beck organized it is just eyeroll-worthy. It doesn’t show the love that “All Lives Matter” asserts to high heaven.