Ya Been Took

There is a governing coalition and has been for the whole of the Obama presidency, the Democrats in the House along with a handful of establishment Republicans have passed all the budget bills, often after a proper bloodletting. The basic assumption is that compromise of this sort caused Cantor his seat, and McCarthy his shot at the Speakership. I have little doubt that GOP voters would punish Republicans that get caught "siding" with the Dems, and their Kenyan, Islamic, President.

It becomes easy to blame politicians in DC, but the GOP voting base largely does not want compromise. This is maybe one in three voters, hard core conservatives, inflamed by the radio right. A majority of them believe the President is a Muslim. In a recent focus group of GOP voters, ten of ten agreed with Carson that a person of Islamic faith should not even be considered as President. These folks are second amendment absolutists, true believers in arming kindergarten teachers and Baptist preachers in the sanctuary of their churches. They want smaller government, protesting loudly during the debate over ACA that government needed to stay out of their Medicare.

But this is the problem. There's a great speech in Spike Lee's Malcolm X movie. Apparently Malcolm never said the words. Lee cribbed them from another speech:

"Oh, I say and I say it again, ya been had!
Ya been took!
Ya been hoodwinked!
Bamboozled!
Led astray!
Run amok!
This is what He does...."

Yes, ya been hoodwinked. You're views are not predominate any longer. The governing coalition is younger, mixed race, mixed gender, and yes, even mixed sexual orientation.

You own lots of guns, more and more each year. Studies show, however, that while the number of guns is increasing, the number of gun owners is declining.

Climate science is just that. Science. I'm sorry, and I feel bad to have to tell you this, but the politicians waving snowballs on the floor of the senate, telling you this is all a conspiracy, are--you may want to sit down-- on the payroll of big oil! Countries around the world, including China are abandoning coal, and pursuing green energy. The President is not having a war with coal, and the foot dragging of the GOP has actually slowed progress that every other advanced country has already made, especially in the last 20 years. When we talk about America's greatness, most of us think of advancements in medicine and science, space travel, interstate travel, economic equality and access. Now the narrow coalition of Tea Party members of congress has managed to block even basic infrastructure bills. How is this possible?

Ya been bamboozled. There is no broad consensus to move against social programs, and no electoral path to reduce such programs. The ACA might still be overturned or weakened, but this won't happen while Obama is president. More than 16 million have ask access to medical insurance because of the ACA. They GOP can't tell you the truth so I will. They're all in with symbolic votes, but real repeal is increasingly out of political realm of reality.

Adjustments need to be made to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, but these programs are going to be in place for decades. Your leaders keep grandstanding on food stamps but the real money is in defense, entitlements, and tax policies for corporations and the wealthy. Paul Ryan has taken his shots at Medicaid, a program which provides care mostly to poor people, but even his very detailed budgets have left Social Security and Medicare largely intact. Unable to address truths about the dimension of entitlement programs, Republican leaders work to further impoverish the poor and call it serious policy.

Me, I'm a single payer guy, but I know the political climate is not in place for the heavy lift that would require. It's call reality.

Ya been led astray, especially, most especially, those of you who are of moderate or limited means. Citizens United has unleashed a torrent of campaign cash. A lot of that is going to slick PR campaigns designed to convince you that there is some sort of silent, let's be honest, mostly white majority, if we all just showed up in the polls we could get some stuff done. I feel for you. Your leaders have been edging you out to the cliffs of oblivion since Reagan. They lied to you and didn't know how, and actually don't know how, to tell you.

Ya been run amok. You're not losing national elections because your party is not radical right enough. That calculation assumes an electorate made up of far more old, white, straight, and male voters claiming European ancestry than will ever exist again. The only place you have political numbers is state houses which define Congressional District lines, and by the gerrymandering that grows from that, the House of Representatives. A filibuster proof Senate is increasingly unlikely, and good luck in the Presidential election with a platform which attacks gay marriage, tries overturning the ACA, and proposes sending 11 million undocumented workers back to where they came from.

Meanwhile, know this. While we've been fighting over this bullsh** going all the way back to the Reagan years, the one constant, the only constant really has been the ongoing concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The pure economic impact of the tax plans of every GOP candidate who has announced one would continue and accelerate that pattern. The billionaires funding these campaigns do not give a f*** about your social issues. They want tax breaks for themselves and a lax regulatory environment for their businesses. Reagan ran on an anti-abortion platform, passed the first large trickle down tax package, which really benefited his rich friends, and didn't show up at the political events organized to attack Roe.

The money people don't give a f*** about the deficits either. Reagan and Bush II both exploded the deficits, Bush I made limited progress, but the GOP base slaughtered him for raising taxes. Clinton and Obama both made dramatic reductions in deficits, but the Koch brothers are aligning $900 billion in the cause of overturning the policies that led to that progress.

The problem is not only the Republican leaders in congress. They've lied to their voters though, so it's hard to feel bad for them. Many Republican voters have also lied to themselves. They've been betting for 40 years that an adhoc coalition with billionaires would both make them rich and overturn Roe. Billions have been spent in advertising convincing them of that.

Fear has been a great motivator. America's sickness on race, our utter dishonesty about it, even in liberal circles, has been absolutely debilitating. We've gone from Nixon's closeted bigotry, and cynical Southern strategy, to a war on crime that has devastated communities of color, to Reagan's Philadelphia, Mississippi campaign kickoff and vilification of welfare cheats. Then Willie Horton. Then the SCOTUS decision eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, and voter ID laws specifically spoken of as discouraging turnout among African Americans. Most recently we get self-deportation, then rapists, drug dealers and "illegals" with calves like cantaloupes, and then send them all back.

As the drama in DC unfolds, what is left for us? We take stock. We watch. Those so inclined say a prayer. Even as we hope for leadership, disillusionment sets in. America is not willing to face real truths.

Perhaps all we can do is whatever uplift each of us can do in our daily lives. Bide our time. Wait for sunlight and enlightenment. My sister has been working in her community this week to help those devastated by historic floods, likely exacerbated by global warming. My wife and I made a small contribution to that effort this week. What else?

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

― Robert F. Kennedy

Which Side Are You On

The candidate is a coward. He is afraid to stand up to the gun lobby.

"You're going to have these things happen and it's a horrible thing to behold, horrible.

"It's not politically correct to say that, but you're going to have difficulty and that will be for the next million years, there's going to be difficulty and people are going to slip through the cracks,What are you going to do, institutionalize everybody?"

Jeb Bush is a coward. He is afraid to stand up to the gun lobby.

"Look, stuff happens. There’s always a crisis and the impulse is always to do something and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do."

Ok, Jeb...What did we do in the years since Newtown? Or since Gabby Giffords was assaulted? Or after Virginia Tech? Or Fort Hood? Would a response to any of those atrocities also be a rash or impulsive move? Coward.

If I'm going to be fair, I have to say Bernie Sanders is a coward on guns also.  I plan to follow the President's advice and be a single issue voter in the next election. If Sanders does not make a clear and definitive policy statement in support of sane gun laws I will not consider voting for him in the Democratic primary in NY.

"I don’t know that anybody knows what the magic solution is. What we do know is the current situation is not tenable. It is clearly not working. And as the president indicated, we can and must do a lot better … You can sit there and say I think we should do this and do that. But you’ve got a whole lot of states in this country where people want virtually no gun control at all. And if we are going to have some success, we are going to have to start talking to each other."

80% of Americans believe a background check should be conducted before all gun purchases, regardless if the gun is purchased at a gun show or a retail outlet. Background checks have a proven record of success in reducing gun violence in states that have enacted them. So Sanders statement is factually inaccurate. He must know that, and he deserves no more tolerance or acceptance in his capitulation to the gun lobby than we would give any Republican.

Chicago's, a city with very strict gun laws, and its level of violence is often pointed to as a distorted example of the hopeless nature of legislation in a country with 300 million guns. But, in a study conducted in 2013 by the CPD, 15,000 out of a total of 50,000 guns tracked  were purchased in the exurbs which are a short driving distance from the city. 4,000 were traced to a single state, Mississippi. Studies by the NYC PD indicated a similar pattern of gun traffic from a few southern states with lax gun laws along the I-95 corridor.  Localized gun laws, while effective in saving some lives,will never be as effective as national legislation.

While I understand that gun safety legislation will have a limited effect on mass murders committed by people struggling with their sanity, there is ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT that gun safety laws enacted at the federal level will save thousands of lives, most especially in poor communities like those in Chicago racked by gun violence.

Politicians who point to mental health as the core of the problem, but then vote against legislation to require insurance companies to provide expanded mental health coverage  are playing voters for fools. Pro gun legislators have in the past few years blocked laws designed to limit access to guns by domestic abusers and a long list of people that any sane, or to put it more correctly, any uncompromised representative of the people would ever stand for. Sanders voting record is atrocious. The two Senators from NY, and the Representative from my CD all stand for gun safety laws, where do your political leaders stand?

The only candidate who has spoken without qualification of her intention to fight for sane gun laws is Hillary Clinton.

"It is just beyond my comprehension that we are seeing these mass murders happen again and again and again. And as I have said, we have got to get the political will to do everything we can to keep people safe."

This is the only acceptable response.

Of those that have spoken on the GOP side beyond Trump and Bush, almost all of offered their condolences and their meaningless "thoughts and prayers". Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. None of them, from the liberal Pataki to the libertarian Paul to the Conservative and the especially despicable Huckabee have any intention of standing up to the gun lobby. Without exception they stand in opposition to 80% of all Americans.

We must also note the racial hypocrisy of the gun zealots. Reagan enacted strict gun laws in direct response to the rise of the Black Panther Party. Now as we debate guns and police violence against people of color, we see a great divergence on the right. Guns are urged on us everywhere except in poor communities where a child like Tamir Rice is shot while playing with a toy gun and a man is shot in a Wal-Mart while in possession of a pellet gun. Do open carry advocates imagine this doctrine would have value in Baltimore? Easy access to guns is a policy built on fear. Directed mostly at whites, it has its roots in the racist law and order propaganda which was spawned in the 70's, a direct response to the Civil Rights movement.

While I am gratified to see a bipartisan consensus forming to address the the mass incarceration of a couple generations of African Americans, what Ta-Nehesi Coates called "the age of mass incarceration", it must be said that so long as America accepts this level of gun violence, any promise of reform will ring like a hollow bell on empty street.

I stand with my friends, like Dan Olmstead, and with the president. We are more than tired of the Newtowns and Umpquas, but we are just as appalled with the utter carnage in Chicago, New Orleans, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and poor communities in every state in the country. We find the advocacy  which claims safety can be found when more people open carry in church's, theaters, and schools to be morally bankrupt.

As we stand here today, we must understand that we may be years away from reform of our gun laws. A year from now 30,000 more Americans will be dead. In just two years more American lives will be lost to gun violence than were list in the whole of the Vietnam war. We mourn those lives in a solemn memorial in Washington, but the only logical honor we can bring to the folly of our addiction to guns is to say no more.

No more.

No more.

Which side are you on?