SNAP Notes

This holiday season I’ve gotten a few joyous political listserve celebrations touting the victories of 2005. And they’re right: there is much to be celebrated. Even when there’s only a little to celebrate, we on the left still need to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, remove the cloak of perpetual mourning, and pat ourselves on the back – how else could we go on fighting tomorrow?

But I’m still feeling a bit of the moping in me. An honest assessment of 2005 can leave even a well-meaning optimist in a bit of a state of distress. Some of the lowlights of 2005, by the numbers:

• an increasingly devastating project of war and occupation in Iraq continues: 844 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq in 2005 (vs 848 in 2004 and 486 in 2003, starting 3/03), bringing the total body count to 2,178 for US military forces (Iraq Coalition Casulaties website), while the Iraqi death toll is estimated to be between 27,636 and 31,160, as of 12/30/05 (Iraq Body Count) .

• a massive humanitarian disaster in New Orleans and surrounding regions after Hurricane Katrina and the bungled response left enormous numbers of this country’s citizens devastated and displaced . According to official numbers, about 1,200 people were killed, in addition to the more than 1 million displaced (NBC) . Prior to the Hurricane, as in most places, access to the essential resources of escape were disproportionately allotted to the wealthy, the young/middle-aged, and the white: 35% of black households at all income levels did not own a car, 54% of poor households did not own a car, and 65% of poor, elderly households did not own a car (CBPP) .

• a huge federal corruption scandal, the worst of which remains to be seen, by all indications. It’s hard to know which way the money’s flying, as members of congress now return Abramoff’s donations and those from related Native American tribes in a flurry of “corrective” moralizing, in an attempt to extricate themselves from the brewing scandal of Abramoff, Delay, and who-knows-who-else (NYTimes). The Washington Post writes, “Abramoff is the central figure in what could become the biggest congressional corruption scandal in generations.” As his Jan 9 trial date looms, news updates indicate that a deal may be on its way to being brokered as I write—and who knows who will go down with him. “Team Abramoff” received hefty awards, political and financial—some up to $300,000 “salaries”—and included journalists, congressional staffers, and members of congress themselves.

These, of course, are in addition to those ongoing social problems that by now feel almost too familiar to mention: a lack of affordable health care for many Americans; a public education system plagued by increasing bureaucratization and decreasing real funding; an ongoing and unspoken war on women and children maintained through economic, sexual, and physical violence; rapid, extreme environmental degradation; increasing economic polarization on a global and national scale; and so on…

But to recite grievances, truly, is not to win. Tides don’t turn on angry rants alone. On the list of new year’s resolution recommendations, maybe you’d like to join me in a bit of the moping-to-movement transition. We need to shake off the paralysis induced by a presidential defeat more than a year ago. It’s time – no, not to get over it – but to get on with it. Enough already! We need to do something! Tomorrow we’ll be in a serious congressional election year. 2006 is a year for more than talk: it is a year for work. For organizing, for educating, for voting. It is a year to prove ourselves with a new set of numbers–poll numbers: a massive electoral victory to match our commitment.

On behalf of SNAP PAC, may your 2006 be full of joy, love, cheer—and a progressive congressional sweep to boot!

A few days ago, I watched Bill O’Reilly assure viewers of his TV show that Christians had won the War on Christmas (TM). “Christians have the right to defend their traditions,” he said triumphantly.

It’s easy to laugh at the excesses of the War on Christmas crusaders (Dan chronicled them well here). But it’s a campaign that’s worth paying attention to. It serves as a sobering reminder of how many of the standard-bearers of the right believe themselves to be spokesmen for a righteous majority besieged by hostile religious, sexual, and racial minorities.

Behind the rhetoric about religious freedom, the demand of the War on Christmas crusaders, as articulated by their most earnest advocates, is that both public and private employees greet people of all religions as if they were Christians. They want schools encouraging teachers to say “Merry Christmas” to their students and department stores encouraging check-out clerks to say it to customers. Having them say the “Happy Holidays” instead, which merely acknowledges the possibility of a multiplicity of religious observances, is to be seen as religious persecution of Christians.

Bill O’Reilly showed a Wal-Mart commercial in which “Merry Christmas” appeared on screen, but declared it only to be a step in the right direction from Wal-Mart because it appeared with the hated “Happy Holidays” and neither was mentioned in the voice-over. This is a few weeks after he showed a (year-old) clip of Samantha Bee on the Daily Show joking about separation of church and state and then sneered “Merry Christmas, Jon Stewart.”

So what we’re facing is self-appointed spokespeople for a majority insisting that everyone, be they members of the majority or not, speak as if that majority encompassed everyone in the country.

As for the real desecration of the values of Christ this holiday season, not a creature on the “religious right” is stirring, not even a mouse.

A generation ago, my Dad got kicked out of his first grade classroom for refusing to write a letter to Santa Claus. Unfortunately, that’s still what some people have in mind when they say “family values.”

Happy holidays to students for a new politics everywhere (and everyone else, for that matter).

Big week on the not-trampling-over-all-of-our-values-and-freedoms-in-the-same-of-security front. I’m skeptical of how much difference the McCain ammendment committing us not to torture will make on the ground, but it’s a good sign that even after sending Dick Cheney out of his undisclosed location and onto Capitol Hill, Bush wasn’t able to keep Congressional Republicans on the reservation (the anti-anti-torture reservation, that is). The ultimate result, in which Bush met McCain much further than halfway from his original “waterboarding is freedom” position, shows him to be a weakened President and puts this nation back on record against willfully inflicting abusive pain on prisoners. The urgency of the issue, and the limitations of legal language like McCain’s in addressing it, were reinforced in Human Rights Watch’s announcement Monday on pervasive torture in secret US-operated foreign prisons:

Eight detainees now held at Guantánamo described to their attorneys how they were held at a facility near Kabul at various times between 2002 and 2004. The detainees, who called the facility the “dark prison” or “prison of darkness,” said they were chained to walls, deprived of food and drinking water, and kept in total darkness with loud rap, heavy metal music, or other sounds blared for weeks at a time. The detainees offer consistent accounts about the facility, saying that U.S. and Afghan guards were not in uniform and that U.S. interrogators did not wear military attire, which suggests that the prison may have been operated by personnel from the Central Intelligence Agency…Some detainees said they were shackled in a manner that made it impossible to lie down or sleep, with restraints that caused their hands and wrists to swell up or bruise. The detainees said they were deprived of food for days at a time, and given only filthy water to drink. The detainees also said that they were held incommunicado and never visited by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross or other independent officials.

This “dark prison” report follows Friday’s New York Times revelation that President Bush has been authorizing the NSA to spy on Americans without even going through the secret courts designed for the purpose, which should shake any confidence one might have that better laws will fully set this administration straight. Bush apparently believes that he is authorized to personally designate Americans as surveillance targets based on the congressional resolution authorizing him to go to war in Afghanistan.

That Congress showed much less deference on Friday, when Bill Frist could only muster 52 votes for cloture on the Conference Committee’s version of the PATRIOT Act reauthorization, which took out all the civil liberties protections that Russ Feingold and others managed to get into the version passed unanimously by the Senate. In a striking victory for sensible privacy protections over fear-mongering, Feingold, Leahy, and company have kept the Senate from approving the Conference Committee Draft. It’s also a huge victory for Feingold personally, who has gone from being the only Senator to vote against the PATRIOT Act to leading a charge to continue debate on the bill which saw more Republicans cross over to oppose cloture than Democrats crossing over to support it. Looks like the Democratic leadership, rather than marginalizing him, is now trying to pull him into the party establishment, handing him a seat on the Intelligence Commission.

Here is to a Progressive New Year
Jason Paul

Today, is the fifth year anniversay of the Bush versus Gore decision and the handing of the White House to George Bush. Never let that fact leave your mind. It might no longer be good politics to speak about Bush versus Gore but we as progressives, who want a New American Politics must never forget that horrible moment in old American Politics. I will not retell the story here. We all know it, but we all must remember it.

Ezra Klein claims that

making Wal-Mart do better will not change [T]arget, or whoever dominate[s] the next major industry.

Of course it will.

Right now, Wal-Mart is militating against living wage employment with human rights nationally by forcing higher-wage employers out of business and inspiring competitors to ape its strategies for temporarily squeezing as much labor power as possible out of each of their employees before dumping and replacing them. Puffed up with public subsidies, Wal-Mart is the pep squad as well as the front-runner and the finish line in the race to the bottom. Transforming Wal-Mart into a progressive ally, as Ezra rightly seeks to do, would cease the damage Wal-Mart is currently doing far beyond the ever-multiplying communities which it’s entered.

And transforming Wal-Mart will send a clear signal to its competitors. Wal-Mart does business the way it does – locking employees indoors, forcing them to work off the clock, vetting them for class consciousness – because it can get away with it. When Wal-Mart changes, it will be because a broad-based coalition has used effective mobilization and pressure to show that they can’t.

The longest strike in the history of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International (HERE, now merged to become UNITE HERE) was the strike at the Las Vegas Frontier Hotel and Casino, fought against a viciously anti-union family which preferred to run their hotel into the ground rather than settling with the union. These people reprogrammed their sprinkler system in an effort to target picketers. Once they caved in 1998 (the family essentially went bankrupt and had to sell the hotel to someone else willing to settle), after a six-and-a-half year strike during which none of the 550 strikers crossed the picket line, workers at each of the neighboring hotels were able to win recognition without having to go on strike for a day.

The same principle, writ large, is at work in the campaign to transform Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is the biggest and the baddest, and a movement which fought them and won would entirely reshape the playing field in the struggle over whether we a s a country will race to the bottom or pave the high road. Change them, and you change the country.

How about Lobbyist. The only question is how many of his toadies are we sending back
with him?
From the DNC.

TX-22: Constituents Ready To Vote Out DeLay

CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll. 803 Adults (713 Registered Voters). December 1-4, 2005. MoE +/- 4%

If Tom DeLay runs for re-election in 2006, in general, are you more likely to vote for the Republican candidate Tom DeLay or for the Democratic Party’s candidate for Congress?

Tom DeLay: 36%
The Democrat: 49%

Voters’ Opinion of Tom DeLay:

Favorable: 37%
Unfavorable: 52%
Unfamiliar: 11%

Based on what you have heard or read, do you think the charges against DeLay are definitely true, probably true, probably not true, or definitely not true?

Definitely True: 15%
Probably True: 40%
Probably False: 26
Definitely False: 8%

Lampson for Congress
www.lampson.com

Rosa Parks died last month at age 92. In the time since, we’ve heard a lot of very-much deserved prasie for Parks’ refusal to abide bigotry and her courage in the service of a cause. Unfortunately, we’ve also heard a new round of recitations of the stubborn myth that Parks was an anonymous, apolitical woman who spontaneously – fifty years ago, to the day, tomorrow – refused to yield to authority and in so doing inspired a movement. The truth, as Aldon Morris wrote in his book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, is that a decade earlier

in the 1940s Mrs. Parks had refused several times to comply with segregation rules on the buses. In the early 1940s Mrs. Parks was ejected from a bus for failing to comply. The very same bus driver who ejected her that time was the one who had her arrested on December 1, 1955…She began serving as secretary for the local NAACP in 1943 and still held that post when arrested in 1955…In the early 1940s Mrs. Parks organized the local NAACP Youth Council…During the 1950s the youth in this organization attempted to borrow books from a white library. They also took rides and sat in the front seats of segregated buses, then returned to the Youth Council to discuss their acts of defiance with Mrs. Parks.

This history is not hidden. But the Times’ obituary still described Parks’ arrest nonetheless as an event which “turned a very private woman into a reluctant symbol and torchbearer…” Parks was certainly reluctant to see too personal valoration of her as heroine distract from the broader movement. But she was not private about her politics. And her refusal to give up her bus seat was nothing new for her. As she would later tell an interviewer, “My resistance to being mistreated on the buses and anywhere else was just a regular thing with me and not just that day.”

The myth of Parks as a pre-political seamstress who was too physically worn out to move has such staying power not because there’s any factual basis but because it appeals to an all-too popular narrative about how social change happens in America: When things get bad enough, an individual steps up alone, unsupported and unmediated, and spontaneously resists. And then an equally spontaneous movement follows. Such a myth makes good TV, but it’s poor history.

Movement-building takes hard work, no matter how righteous the cause or how desperate the circumstances.

The pivotal moments of the 60’s civil rights movement, as Morris recounts in his book, were not random stirrings or automatic responses. Most of them were carefully planned events which followed months of organizing and were conceived with an eye to political tactics and media imagery. There were even some long meetings involved.

That shouldn’t be seen as a dirty little secret, because strategic organizing and planned imagery shouldn’t be seen as signs of moral impurity. Organizations, like the people in them, each have their faults (Ella Baker was frequently and justifiably furious with the sexism and condescension of much of CORE’s leadership). But the choice of individuals to work together and find common cause in common challenges doesn’t become less pure or less honest or less noble when they choose to do it through political organizations. And there’s nothing particularly progressive about a historical perspective in which Rosa Parks’ defiance of racism is made less genuine by the knowledge that she was secretary of the NAACP.

The myth of Rosa Parks as a private apolitical seamstress, like the myth of Martin Luther King as a race-blind moderate, has real consequences as we face the urgent civil rights struggles of today. Seeing acts of civil disobedience like Parks’ as spontaneous responses to the enormity of the injustice justifies the all-too common impulses to refuse our support for organized acts of resistance and regard organized groups as inherently corrupt. Those are impulses people like Rosa Parks had to confront and overcome amongst members of her community long before she ever made national headlines for refusing to give up her seat on the bus.