It’s good to see Molly Ball taking a deep dive into the Working Families Party. As a veteran of ACORN, I have a natural affinity for the folks who run the organization and I’m always trying to keep one eye on what they’re up to at the moment.
I think one of the more important things you can get out of reading Ms. Ball’s piece is a sense for how effective the party has been in both electing public officials and getting bills passed through legislatures.
Some of the party spokespeople are openly quoted in the piece as seeing the Tea Party as an inspiration, and I can understand what they’re getting at. But I don’t think the comparison is all that apt. For one thing, the WFP predates the Tea Party by twelve years. More importantly, I’m not sure how many victories the Tea Party can truly claim.
Yes, they moved the nation’s politics to the right and helped set a climate that badly damaged the left in the 2010 elections, and again in the 2014 elections. And we can see some real legislative consequences to those victories on that state and local levels, mainly related to guns and access to reproductive health care. But the Tea Party wasn’t really supposed to be about social issues. It was supposed to be mainly about fiscal issues.
On the former, whatever advances the right made on guns and abortion must be weighed against their complete defeat on gay marriage. And, on fiscal issues, the federal government hasn’t been stripped down to the studs but more and more states and municipalities are adopting a higher minimum wage, paid time off, and other WFP priorities.
I think there are couple of things to keep in mind when comparing the hard left to the hard right. The hard left is better at community organizing and they like to focus on concrete objectives. The hard right makes a lot of noise, but it is outfits like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that wind up writing their legislation. The second thing is that the hard left is much more often dealing in reality. The problems they’re concerned with are a lot more grounded than questions about the president’s birth certificate or conspiracy theories about bike paths and terror babies. They don’t flit from imaginary outrage to imaginary outrage. More than anything, this allows them to stay focused and take the time to effectively organize.
It might feel sometimes like the right is dominating things on the state and local level, but take a good look at the product of the Working Families Party. They’re going places.
OT: PHUCK.OUTTA.HERE!!!!
All the time they point fingers at the poor and say
” Pull yourself up by your bootstraps’
for folks THAT DON’T EVEN HAVE A PAIR OF BOOTS IN THE ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOOD…
while, we’re supposed to feel for those who have EVERYTHING?
phuck.that.
Sometimes ‘poor little rich kids’ really are poor little rich kids
Reuters – Tue, 5 Jan 2016 09:06
Jan 5 (Reuters) – The “affluenza” defense of Ethan Couch, a 16-year-old Texas boy who killed four pedestrians while driving drunk, has received a great deal of ridicule, much of it justified. That said, it would be foolish to allow an absurd effort to minimize one teenager’s responsibility for a horrific tragedy to obscure growing evidence that we have a significant and growing crisis on our hands. The children of the affluent are becoming increasingly troubled, reckless, and self-destructive. Perhaps we needn’t feel sorry for these “poor little rich kids.” But if we don’t do something about their problems, they will become everyone’s problems.
One of us has spent about 20 years studying and documenting the growth of dysfunction among affluent youth, and the other has written about one large source of the problem. High-risk behavior, including extreme substance abuse and promiscuous sex, is growing fast among young people from communities dominated by white-collar, well-educated parents. These kids attend schools distinguished by rich academic curricula, high standardized test scores, and diverse extracurricular opportunities. Their parents’ annual income, at $150,000 and more, is well over twice the national average. And yet they show serious levels of maladjustment as teens, displaying problems that tend to begin as they enter adolescence and get worse as they approach college.
Bad parents. They should receive more vilification from society than what is routinely dished out for poor bad parents because they don’t have any excuse.
OT: The Big Lie in the War Against Drugs
Tuesday, 29 December 2015
………………………………………….
No, the war on drugs, since its very beginning, has been about
controlling political power – by breaking up Black communities and the dissident left.
And we know that because the people who have been involved, the
architects and the leaders in the war on drugs, have admitted it – even bragged about it!
Before he died, Nixon counsel and former assistant to the president, John Ehrlichman, told author Dan Baum that:
“The Nixon Campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Didn’t Cuomo play them like a fiddle the last election?
Yes, he did.
Didn’t Cuomo play them like a fiddle by saying that they’d get more by knuckling under to his centrist hegemon than allowing the Republicans an ‘in’?
For example:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/01/10/3737860/new-york-prisoner-education/
Well, if “play them like a fiddle” is the same as “getting the Governor to support and push through policies which have been top priority for the Working Families Party,” then we could use a fucking string section in this country.
Nothing since 12/21. Does this happen every presidential cycle. Polls were reported every 3 or 4 days on average during the fall. Now nothing for over two weeks. I assume this is normal, but curious….
Christmas/New Year’s vacation.
PPP does have a 1/4-1/6 NH poll out. (Not sure anyone pays much attention to PPP) From last PPP poll, not much change — Carson -5, Bush +5, and Rubi +4. Cruz, Christie, Kasich, and Bush all tied up at 10 to 11 each.