Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

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Guest-blogging over at Ezra Klein’s site (mazal tov!), Dan Munz is suggesting the possibility of a Mfume v. Steele Maryland Senate race as a chance for Democrats to take on and shoot down the GOP argument that Democrats take Black voters for granted. I think Dan’s absolutely right that a concerted, rigorous response from the Democrats is long overdue. I’d say part of the problem, though, is that the Democratic party establishment does indeed take Black voters for granted, in much the same way it takes most chunks of the party’s base – union voters for example – for granted, and in a way the GOP simply doesn’t treat it’s own base. Wherever one comes down on the Katha Pollitt vs. Thomas Frank debate on whether or not evangelicals who vote Republican to erode reproductive choice get their money’s worth, the Republican party makes a serious, year-in and year-out campaign of selling itself to its base while the Democratic party more often treats its base like the weird uncle who always shows up drunk to Thanksgiving (the pundits who complain about how short-sighted the NAACP is for wanting Democrats to swing by when the NRA doesn’t ask the same of Republicans might spend their energies better considering why the parties’ records might leave NAACP members with more concerns about how loyal the candidates they vote for will be).

Granted, President Bush’s appeal to Black voters to better defend their interests by spreading their votes more evenly is pure condescending silliness (I’d like to see him apply the same logic to, say, Enron executives: “As long as you all keep voting for us, what incentive do we have to keep giving you those invisible handjobs?”). More fundamentally, of course, the problem with Bush’s case is the idea that Democrats brazenly push forward with liberal policies they know are bad for their Black constituents. The reality, unfortunately, is that Democrats tend not to do nearly enough brazenly pushing forward with much of anything. The problem isn’t that the Democrats are too far left; the problem (I know I know, I’m the guy with the hammer, and look – it’s another nail!) is that the Democrats are failing Black constituents, as well as White ones, by not offering a program or an approach that’s progressive enough. The Republicans are hard at work rolling back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, while the Democrats, even when they had branches of government of work from, have shown precious little initiative in extending them. Republican national candidates have mastered the art of the coded appeal to racist voters, while Democratic candidates remain anxious about looking like they’re trying too hard to attract Black voters (or, god forbid, “dependent” on them).

What might an aggressive Civil Rights agenda look like? An aggressive push for comprehensive voting reform, including a constitutional individual right to vote, uniform standards for ballot access and machinery, paper trails, and abolition of felon voter disenfranchisement. An aggressive push to transform the crimminal justice system into one which takes seriously the equal protection rights of Americans of different races and classes and which rehabilitates rather than stigmatizing those who pass through it. An aggressive push for drastically increased investment in education at all levels. An aggressive push to raise the minimum wage and strengthen the right to organize. An aggressive push to strengthen anti-discrimination legislation. An aggressive push for universal health care. An aggressive push for real affordable housing. That would be a start. Some of these areas have attained greater prominence in the Democratic party’s agenda of late, to a lot of people’s credit; others are still waiting. As Dr. King observed not long before death, the reforms that will achieve real progress in Civil Rights will cost billions. All of these reforms are changes in which Americans of all races have a stake, and which could be achieved such that the great majority of Americans would benefit. And this summer in Florida, I had infinitely more conversations with African-Americans reluctant to register to vote because of the party’s silence or meekness on continuing the progressive work of the Civil Rights movement than because they wanted school vouchers or felt demeaned by affirmative action or were scared of gay people.

So yes, the Democrats need better answers to the Republicans’ cynical appeals to Black voters, and they need candidates who are better at articulating them. But any message which boils down to “No, Democrats don’t take [you/us] for granted, they care about [you/us] very much” is doomed to fail. What the Democrats need, as Al Sharpton put it several times during the Presidential debates, is candidates who can give the donkey the kick it needs (not something Sharpton accomplished a great deal at). And the most powerful kicks tend not to come from candidates at all. As much as Dan talks about a “traditional” relationship between Democrats and Black voters, the tradition is fundamentally one of tension and contestation, one which envelops both Jack Kennedy’s supportive call to Coretta Scott King and Bobby Kennedy’s call to John Lewis pleading him to cancel the freedom rides. As with so many other cases, the job facing the leaders of the Democratic party is as much about improving its record as defending it.

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Today, after a several-year struggle, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers gathered to celebrate their settlement with Taco Bell. As Lucas Benitez announced earlier this week:

Today, Taco Bell has agreed to work with us to address the wages and working conditions of farmworkers in the Florida tomato industry. And so, today, we are ending our boycott of Taco Bell. And today’s message is simple: Taco Bell and the CIW — one a fast-food giant and the other a farmworker organization — are indeed part of the same industry. The food industry in this country is rooted in communities like mine, Immokalee, where every season thousands of farmworkers arrive to pick the tomatoes that end up, just a few days later, on tables across the country. Many of those tables are found in Taco Bell restaurants, from Florida to California. It is that connection, from the field to the table, that makes us members of the same industry, and it is that connection that is, finally, recognized in this agreement today. Not much more can be said about the conditions in Florida’s tomato fields that hasn’t been said already. Wages are extremely low, working conditions can be brutal — Florida’s fields have seen some of the most shameful extremes of exploitation that this country has known, both decades ago and still today. My community is one of the poorest communities in the country, and our sacrifices have helped make Florida’s tomatoes some of the least expensive, highest quality tomatoes on the market today.

But with this agreement, we are laying the groundwork for real change, both in the concrete conditions of farmworkers’ everyday lives and in the market itself, where this agreement is establishing important new standards of social responsibility. With the penny more per pound, Taco Bell has recognized that it can – and should – help improve the wages of the men and women who pick their tomatoes. And with the strict new additions to its Code of Conduct, Yum and Taco Bell are making the working conditions in the fields where we labor their business. But the real significance of this agreement lies in the promise it holds for much greater change in the future. As Jonathan himself has so eloquently put it, human rights are universal, and if we as farmworkers are to one day indeed enjoy equal rights, the same rights all other workers in this country are guaranteed, this agreement must only be a beginning. To make those rights truly universal, other leaders of the fast-food industry and the supermarket industry must join us on this path toward social responsibility. With a broad coalition of industry leaders committed to these principles, we can finally dream of a day when Florida’s farmworkers will enjoy the kind of wages and working conditions we deserve. And when that day comes, the restaurants and markets of this country will truly be able to stand behind their food, from the fields to America’s tables.

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A compelling argument against libertarianism…from Glenn Reynolds:

…if bankruptcy law is “anti-freedom.” then what’s pro-freedom? Debtor’s prison?

Glenn is responding to a reader questioning how a devout libertarian like him can be so opposed to the bankruptcy bill that would make it harder for those who fail in the free market to mitigate the effects of that failure. The reader’s right: if the free market is really a just and efficient tool that distributes goods according to virtue, any good libertarian should see the existence of bankruptcy law as a reward for bad behavior or even a “perverse incentive,” and staunchly support a bill like this one to further shred that protection net. Protections for debtors are a good idea, and this bill is a trainwreck, because – contra the libertarians – it’s too often the obstensibly free market which fails citizens, not the other way around. Contemporary libertarianism is, dare I say it, bankrupt precisely because it posits a vision of economic freedom which fosters greater economic slavery for the majority by accelerating the race to the bottom, encouraging exploitation, further marginalizing the already vulnerable, and denying the rights and freedoms which enable consumers and workers to leverage demands from employers. As Glenn himself recognizes, a system which leaves someone who goes bankrupt to rot leaves him less free. But so does a system which allows employers to lock their employees inside for the night with impunity, or forces parents to choose between medical treatment for themselves or their children. Debtor’s prison is certainly “anti-freedom,” but so is child labor, so is union-busting, so is social security privatization, so is cutting tax cuts for the rich, and so is the Senate’s refusal to reverse the near decade-long decline in the value of the minimum wage. It’s nice to see Glenn and other conservatives recognize that this bankruptcy bill is a threat to real freedom, but the threat isn’t just this bill: it’s the broader economic agenda this administration is inflicting on America.

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More on Schwarzenegger’s peculiar understanding of special interests:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, hounded by criticism of his fund-raising methods, on Monday added Manhattan to his traveling fund-raising campaign, flexing his political muscle for a crowd of Republicans with big wallets during a dinner and promising protesters they would have no effect on his plans. “When the special interests push me around, I’ll push back,” Schwarzenegger said to cheers and applause from more than 500 people at a $1,000-a-plate dinner. The event, at a midtown hotel, raised more than $500,000.

As Alexander Cockburn writes:

As the nurses barracked him during a speech, he denounced them as one of the “special interests” and said, “I’m always kicking their butt.” This witty response from the breast-grabber got plenty of play, and did the nurses nothing but good. At a January Capitol protest in Sacramento the nurses carried coffins and had a New Orleans jazz group play a death march. During the Super Bowl they flew a small plane over the steroid-swollen Governor’s party at his Santa Monica home. When he was in Washington they took out a full-page ad in Roll Call flaying his record. During a Schwarzenegger speech in a Sacramento hotel, nurses held up a banner saying RNs Say Stop the Power Grab.

On February 15, when Schwarzenegger and his platoons of body guards and flunkies trooped into a screening of Be Cool, 300 nurses demonstrated. Kelly DiGiacomo, 46 years old and 5’2″, a nurse at a Kaiser hospital near Sacramento, had a ticket. She ensconced herself in the fourth row, wearing her nurse’s scrubs. A bodyguard rushed up, and under the pretext of a possible meeting with the governor, led her to a room with a California Highway Patrol cop at the door and began to grill DiGiacomo. A few days later a CHP investigator called. DiGiacomo asked why she should be considered a threat. The investigator replied, “Well, you were wearing a nurse’s uniform.” “Oh, sure, the international terrorist uniform,” DiGiacomo scoffed. Californians scoffed with her when they saw the news stories. At least Bush and Cheney can claim they’re being targeted by hairy men from the dark side of Mecca. Here’s Arnold hiding behind his goons from the woman who cares for you when you’re in the hospital.

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Strom Thurmond’s successor, Senator Lindsey Graham, apparently thought this was funny:

“We don’t do Lincoln Day Dinners in South Carolina,” he said. “It’s nothing personal, but it takes awhile to get over things.”

Steve Gilliard says Graham “is being unfairly attacked” for a perfectly innocent joke about the burning of the State Capitol and that

nothing to apologize for, because every South Carolinian knows he’s talking about Sherman’s March and not slavery.

Really? Every South Carolinan? There’s plenty to fault Lincoln for, be it his racism or his erosion of civil liberties. But for a US Senator from a state which attempted to seceed from the union and fought an extended war against the United States, a war which had little to do with slavery for the North but a great deal to do with it for the South (Apostles of Disunion I’d say makes the most succinct case here), to say of the man who is for most Americans the defining symbol of the winning side in that war – the very man murdered by a confederate havinga hard time “getting over things” in the wake of the war – that the people of his state bear him an enduring grudge is shamefully reckless. Whatever Graham’s intentions, it suggests something to the listener – be he Pennsylvanian or South Carolinian – other than disagreement with military tactics. And one can’t help but wonder whether, when Graham constructs the “We” who don’t do dinners for Lincoln, he means to speak for the descendants of slaves who worked and died in bondage in South Carolina as well.

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Just how bad is the Bankruptcy Bill the Republicans are preparing to pass. Here’s what Noam Scheiber, class war conscientious objector, has to say:

…there is no plausible political rationale for supporting it other than to appease credit card companies. As Paul Krugman pointed out today, the bill makes no exceptions for families wiped out by medical expenses (which make up more than half of all bankruptcies) or for bankruptcy cases involving active-duty soldiers, yet it leaves any number of loopholes in place for large corporations. The political imagery here so obviously benefits anyone who’d oppose the bill you’re left to conclude that the only way a congressman could possibly support it is through a craven and reflexive willingness to do the bidding of big business…Moderate Democrats have been under assault from grassroots liberals lately for selling out Democratic values in their rush to appease conservative interests. I normally think this criticism is highly misplaced, and that moderates have exactly the right instincts when it comes to social issues and foreign policy, even most economic issues. But in this case the moderates proved the liberals’ point for them, which could set back the cause of moderates within the party for months, if not years. It really is a colossal, inexcusable mistake.

If this bill exposes just how little the conservative economic agenda has to do with expanding individual freedom, and just how shameful an abrogation of moral responsibility “New Democrats” are guilty of, I’m of course inclined to disagree with Scheiber that that’s a bad thing. But I’m glad we can both agree that the bill itself is a trainwreck.

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Congress delivers another blow to working America:

Under a deal worked out between Republicans and Democrats, the wage amendments considered on Monday were all but doomed from the start because they required 60 votes to be adopted. It has been eight years since Congress last increased the minimum wage, which now stands at $5.15 an hour. The Democratic proposal to increase the minimum wage by 41 percent, to $7.25, over the next two years was sponsored by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. It was sought by organized labor and opposed by an array of business interests. “The height of hypocrisy will be this afternoon, when those individuals in this Senate say no to a minimum wage increase of $7.25 an hour when this institution voted themselves a $28,500 pay increase over the last five years,” Mr. Kennedy angrily declared shortly before the amendment was defeated as 49 members voted against it and 46 voted for it. “Minimum wage has been flat all these years, but not for the members of this Congress.”

A minimum wage hike is long overdue, as well as overwhelmingly popular. It rewards workers by making work pay and rewards good companies by paving the high road. It should be a centerpiece of the Democratic agenda, and of the party’s case to the American people in 2006.

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A Church Report for our generation:

After clashing with Afghan rebels at the village of Miam Do one year ago, American soldiers detained the village’s entire population for four days, and an officer beat and choked several residents while interrogating them and trying to identify local militants, according to a new Pentagon report that was given to Congress late Monday night. Although the officer, a lieutenant colonel attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency, was disciplined and suspended from further involvement with detainees, he faced no further action beyond a reprimand. The episode, described only briefly in a summary of the report reviewed by The New York Times, was one example of how little control was exerted over the conduct of interrogations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the subject of an exhaustive review just completed by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church, the naval inspector general. The report finds that early warning signs of serious abuses did not receive enough high-level attention as the abuses unfolded, and that unit commanders did not get clear instructions that might have halted the abuses.

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If you’re willing to wade through some (tounge-in-cheek) problematic gender politics, Alek has an encouraging post on the California Nurses’ Associations’ legal victory over Schwartzenegger’s attempt to rollback the staffing ratios they’d won:

So the CNA sued, and for the last two months they have been targeting Schwartzenegger in force. Last Friday, Judge Judy Holzer Hersher issued an injunction against the emergency regulation, and told Arnold that instead of appealing he should just go sit in the back of the class and babble incoherently about steroids like an idiot. It’s possible I was reading between the lines a little there.

The highlight is Nurse Martha Kuhl’s fierce and unapologetic rejection, in a Newsweek interview, of the idea that working people fighting for a real social contract represent a greedy “special interest“:

I spent my day treating kids with cancer. I guess you could call that my special interest.

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Phoebe on the paradigm shift underway:

i think we’ve won significant ideological concessions from the university as well. last summer’s alumnae/i magazine saw levin, in a q&a entitled “yale and the poor” (yes, really), having “mixed feelings” about harvard’s financial aid initiative. levin says, “I wonder whether it is in fact a step forward to say, ‘Now it’s free.’ In my view, families ought to have a stake, however small, in their children’s education.” but now yale has made the step forward (even $5000 forward of harvard) and acknowledged, in terms of policy if not explicitly, that for a family to “have a stake. . . in their children’s education,” they don’t necessarily need to be doling out money. and so yale’s whole messed-up notion of “coinvestment” begins to fall apart.

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More evidence they’re not as “tough on crime” if the offender is white…I mean white collar:

White-collar criminals have failed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and restitution while continuing to live in luxury, congressional investigators say. A Government Accountability Office study released Thursday is the latest in a series pointing to problems with the Justice Department’s attempts to ensure criminals pay their penalties. The latest investigation looked at five cases that resulted in $568 million in penalties and found only about $40 million actually was paid. Because they are ongoing cases, the report did not identify the offenders or give much detail about the cases. All were either high-ranking officials of companies or operated their own business. They pleaded guilty in each instance. Besides restitution, prison terms for four offenders ranged from one to five years, followed by up to five years of supervised release. One offender received several years of probation rather than prison. As of June, all were out of prison or off probation, but three were still on supervised release. All five were wealthy, or appeared to be, before the judgments, the GAO said, but they claimed later they did not have the money to pay full restitution to their victims. Still, several continued living in million-dollar homes, and two took overseas trips while on supervised release, the report said.