Category: Elections

A Correction:

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While still feel that the the government transition in the Ukraine will likely lead to an upsurge in anti-semitism.

The Ukraine has a long and inglorious tradition of virulent Jew hatred, and periods of social unrest lead to an upsurge in bigotry of all kinds.

That being said, Mark Ames, former editor in chief of the eXile, a former Moscow based English language tabloid, knows a LOT more about the former Soviet Union than I do.

One of the things that he knew was that Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, whom I quoted as advising that Jews leave Kiev, is a Chabad rabbi, and Chabad is really tight with the Kremlin.

So, I have to question the reliability of Reb Azman’s pronouncements.

Ames’ thesis is basically that the sh%$ is f%$#ed up and sh%$, and that teasing out alliances and philosophies is simply not a productivity, or as he sums up, “Everything you know about Ukraine is wrong“:

………

Everyone looking for a proxy side to support or oppose in the Ukraine political dynamic will be disappointed. Ukraine politics go by their own rules. Today’s neoliberal ultranationalist could be tomorrow’s Kremlin ally, and visa-versa. Just look at what happened to the Orange Revolution—nothing. To wit:

a) One Orange Revolution leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, wound up turning against her partner Viktor Yushchenko and allying with Yanukovych to strip Yushchenko of presidential powers; later, Tymoshenko allied with the Kremlin against Yushchenko; now she’s free from jail and the presumptive leader of the anti-Yanukovych forces.

b) The other Orange leader—the pro-EU, anti-Kremlin Viktor Yushchenko—wound up allying with pro-Kremlin Yanukovych to jail Yulia Tymoshenko.

c) John McCain has been the big driving force for regime change against Yanukovych, but McCain’s 2008 campaign chief’s lobby firm, Davis Manafort, managed Yanukovych’s political campaigns and his lobbying efforts in the US.

d) Anthony Podesta, brother of President Obama’s senior advisor John Podesta, is another Yanukovych lobbyist; John Podesta was the chief of Obama’s 2008 transition team.
4. Yanukovych was not fighting neoliberalism, the World Bank, or oligarchy — nor was he merely a tool of the Kremlin.

There’s another false meme going around that because the World Bank and IMF are moving in to “reform” Ukraine’s economy — for the umpteenth time — that somehow this means that this was a fight between pro-neoliberal and anti-neoliberal forces. It wasn’t.

Yanukovych enthusiastically cooperated with the IMF and pledged to adhere to their demands. Six months after Yanukovych was elected president, the headline read “International Monetary Fund approves $15 billion loan to Ukraine”. ………

………

The point is this: Ukraine is not Venezuela. This is not a profoundly political or class fight, as it is in Venezuela. Yanukovych represents one faction of oligarchs; the opposition, unwittingly or otherwise, ultimately fronts for other factions. Many of those oligarchs have close business ties with Russia, but assets and bank accounts—and mansions—in Europe. Both forces are happy to work with the neoliberal global institutions.

In Ukraine, there is no populist left politics, even though the country’s deepest problem is inequality and oligarchy. Memories of the Soviet Union play a big role in turning people off to populist-left politics there, for understandable reasons.

So Mark Ames thesis is that the political culture of the Ukraine is largely one of corrupt politicians and oligarchs grasping for advantage.

This does not mean that Jews in the Ukraine are not likely to see harassment, because (as Ames notes) the ultra-nationalist parties were at the lead of the most recent protests, and because the history of that part of the world.

The Shock Doctrine Being Applied Again in Venezuela

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And the major powers in Latin America are aware of this and stop it:

When is it considered legitimate to try and overthrow a democratically-elected government? In Washington, the answer has always been simple: when the US government says it is. Not surprisingly, that’s not the way Latin American governments generally see it.

 On Sunday, the Mercosur governments (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Venezuela) released a statement on the past week’s demonstrations in Venezuela. They described “the recent violent acts” in Venezuela as “attempts to destabilize the democratic order”. They made it abundantly clear where they stood.

 The governments stated:

their firm commitment to the full observance of democratic institutions and, in this context, [they] reject the criminal actions of violent groups that want to spread intolerance and hatred in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as a political tool.

We may recall that when much larger demonstrations rocked Brazil last year, there were no statements from Mercosur or neighboring governments. That’s not because they didn’t love President Dilma Rousseff; it’s because these demonstrations did not seek to topple Brazil’s democratically-elected government.

The US has declared the Chavezista government to be our “Hitler of the week”:

An anonymous State Department spokesman was even clearer last week, when he responded to the protests by expressing concern about the government’s “weakening of democratic institutions in Venezuela”, and said that there was an obligation for “government institutions [to] respond effectively to the legitimate economic and social needs of its citizens”. He was joining the opposition’s efforts to de-legitimize the government, a vital part of any “regime change” strategy.

 Of course we all know who the US government supports in Venezuela. They don’t really try to hide it: there’s $5m in the 2014 US federal budget for funding opposition activities inside Venezuela, and this is almost certainly the tip of the iceberg – adding to the hundreds of millions of dollars of overt support over the past 15 years.

You can go to C&L for a more explicit critique of US foreign policy and our media’s lapdog reporting:

Would it help your perspective if I reminded you Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, that Hugo Chavez nationalized the oil industry even more industries and that powerful interests have never stopped trying to take them back?

There’s an alternate version, one in which the usual suspects (World Bank, IMF) manipulate the currency, drive hyperinflation, cause food shortages and subsequent unrest. Add the former ruling class, once made wealthy by oil industry corruption, whose now-grown children still harbor resentment and anger over what their families lost (much like the members of the Cuban ruling class who fled after Castro) and are leading the opposition.

Netfa Freeman is even less circumspect.

And then you have the attempt to make the thoroughly corrupt Leopoldo Lopez a into a poster boy for a potential revolution.  Despite his role in the 2002 attempted coup, where it appears that he was knowingly involved in the sniping incident that was used as a justification:

Lopez played a key role instigating opposition demonstrators into taking an illegal march route towards the presidential palace, where snipers fired on protesters as part of the opposition’s plan to justify the coup.

See also here for Max Blumenthal’s take on Lopez.

Chavez was to a large degree a product of US Government meddling, but it appears that Obama and Kerry see the solution to any problems therein is more US government meddling.

This is not only wrong, but stupid.

Well, This Sucks!

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How the F%$# did the UAW manage to lose a union election when Volkswagen was their biggest supporter?

Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tenn., have rejected the United Auto Workers, shooting down the union’s hopes of securing a foothold at a foreign-owned auto plant in the South.

The vote was 712 to 626, said the UAW, which blamed the loss on “politicians and outside special interest groups.”

The vote, announced late Friday night after three days of balloting, is a devastating loss for the UAW, whose membership has plummeted from a high of 1.5 million in 1979 to around 400,000 today. Outgoing UAW President Bob King had staked his legacy on organizing a Southern auto plant for the first time.

But the decision is a triumph for Tennessee Republicans like Sen. Bob Corker, who lured Volkswagen to Chattanooga as mayor in the early 2000s. Corker and other Republicans warned workers that the UAW’s presence would irreparably harm the plant, and in recent days he claimed — with little evidence — that Volkswagen would choose not to expand the plant if workers unionized.

How the hell did they pull this off?

This was like shooting fish in a barrel.  VW wanted the union so that they could establish a “works council”.

The UAW had advantages in organizing the Volkswagen plant it probably won’t find elsewhere. For starters, Volkswagen — under pressure from the powerful German steelworkers’ union, IG Metall, which holds seats on the company’s board — decided not to resist unionization. The union’s presence would have also allowed the company to set up a German-style “works council,” in which representatives of both workers and middle management offer advice to executives on how to best run the plant.

“I don’t think this is a bellwether for future success for the UAW,” said Donald Schroeder, a management-side labor lawyer at Mintz Levin, before the results were announced. “The UAW almost has had a free run at unionizing.”The UAW had advantages in organizing the Volkswagen plant it probably won’t find elsewhere. For starters, Volkswagen — under pressure from the powerful German steelworkers’ union, IG Metall, which holds seats on the company’s board — decided not to resist unionization. The union’s presence would have also allowed the company to set up a German-style “works council,” in which representatives of both workers and middle management offer advice to executives on how to best run the plant.

“I don’t think this is a bellwether for future success for the UAW,” said Donald Schroeder, a management-side labor lawyer at Mintz Levin, before the results were announced. “The UAW almost has had a free run at unionizing.”

This is an unmitigated disaster for the American worker.

It Now Sucks Even More to be Mitch McConnell

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Because the latest polling from the right leaning Rasmussen polls has him tied with Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is tied with his Democratic opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, at 42 percent each in a new poll by conservative-leaning firm Rasmussen Reports.

Six percent preferred neither of them, and 10 percent were undecided, according to the survey, which was released Monday.

Rasmussen’s polls came under fire during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles for regularly overstating the standing of Republican candidates.

Note that undecideds tend to break for the challenger. (Happy dance!!)

If I were a Democratic political consultant right now, I would be using these numbers to push Matt Bevin, the teabagger running against McConnell in the primary.

What McConnell has going for him, both in the primary and the general, is the sense of inevitability that he intends to convey.

Drive a stake through its heart.

Well, Duh

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Eric Stern, a staffer for Brian Schweitzer, demonstrates how the NRA systematically ignores its alleged values to endorse Republicans:

………But when the NRA voter guide was published, Schweitzer received an F. He called the NRA to demand an explanation. They claimed they never received his questionnaire. It must have gotten lost in the mail, they told him. Schweitzer faxed them a copy, but they said it was too late.

………

Once again he mailed in his NRA survey, confident of an A (I believe that at the time, an A-plus rating was only achievable by answering “Yes” to the question, “Do you support the right to possess guns in all places, including schools?”).

For insurance, he met with NRA staff in Washington. They assured him that he was likely to receive the endorsement. But then the voter guide arrived, and the NRA had endorsed his opponent.

Again he demanded an explanation. The NRA said they’d decided that Schweitzer’s opponent “should get the benefit of the doubt” because he was an incumbent, whereas Schweitzer had never held office.

………

Schweitzer won that race narrowly, but rose to become a powerful political force in Montana, upending the old order, turning much of the state from red to blue, and pulling in many other democrats on his substantial coattails. He also revealed a distinctive quality: he sought revenge against anyone that crossed him, often without regard to the the political cost of doing so. So he naturally couldn’t resist bad-mouthing the NRA on the Bill Maher show one evening in 2007 when the subject of gun politics was raised, accusing the group of being “a fully owned division of the Republican Party…the National Republican Agency.”

This created an enjoyable situation when, in 2008, running for reelection as a virtually unbeatable incumbent, he notified the NRA that he not only expected an endorsement this time around, but that he wanted Wayne La Pierre, the NRA president, to come do it personally.

The NRA did everything they could to come up with an excuse to not grant the request, but ultimately they blinked. La Pierre, perhaps wary of Schweitzer’s penchant of creating a commotion if slighted, came to Billings in the summer of 2008 for a press conference at which he grudgingly told the TV cameras that Montana gun owners and hunters that should vote for Schweitzer. (Schweitzer’s challenger was already projected to lose by about 30 points, but for good measure Schweitzer rented a giant billboard right across the street from the guy’s campaign headquarters, with an ad boasting of the NRA’s endorsement.)

When the NRA voting guide arrived that fall, there were Montana candidates endorsed for Senate, Congress, Attorney General….but no Governor. Schweitzer called once again for an explanation. They told him that they had no idea how this had happened. The printer must have screwed up. It was a regrettable mix up, and they would try to correct it immediately.

But of course, they didn’t.

Brian Schweitzer is seriously considering a Presidential run in 2016, and the fact that he might have a Lyndon Baines Johnson level of vindictiveness makes me look upon her more favorable.

As Much as I Like Liz Warren, I Wish that Martha Coakley Had Beaten Scott Brown in the Senate Race in 2010

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She ran a truly horrible campaign, but her tenure as Massachusetts AG has generally been pretty positive.

Case in point, her most recent report showing that not-for-profits pay obscene remuneration to their top executives, and proposing changes in corporate governance:

Nonprofit groups in Massachusetts are paying their chief executives huge amounts of money and giving them lavish perks unavailable to most workers, according to a new report from Attorney General Martha Coakley’s office that calls for reform in the way groups disclose executive compensation.

The 92-page study, which covered 25 large charitable organizations in Massachusetts, mainly hospitals, insurers and colleges, found all of them paid their leaders at least a half-million dollars a year in total compensation. And many of the organizations offered their executives an assortment of other benefits, including bonuses, deferred compensation, auto allowances, financial planning, life insurance and other benefits that are more commonly associated with corporate leaders.

Even when executives retire, they often leave with hefty severance or consulting deals that allow them to earn millions more. The executives covered by the report each received between $487,000 and $8.8 million in total compensation each year between 2009 and 2011 — pay levels that Coakley’s office said should cause concern in some cases.

“It is not always clear that large compensation benefits packages are actually necessary to attract and retain talent,” the report argued.

Gee, you think?

Doubtless, there is some politics involved here, Coakley is looking to run for Governor, but when we are talking about tax-exempt organizations, there is a direct governmental interests, because it is the taxpayer who pays for these excesses.

This is Just Nasty

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As you may be aware, Senator John Cornyn has gotten himself a Teabagger challenger in the primary, US Representative Steve Stockman (R-WTF).
Well, Harry Reid’s communications director just Tweeted this:

.@woodruffbets Senator Reid has always felt that Senator Cornyn is someone he can work with on a range of issues.
— Adam Jentleson (@AJentleson) December 10, 2013

Well played, Mr. Jentleson, well played.

It sounds nice, but it is read meat to the ‘Baggers who will vote in the primary.

Austerity for Greeks, Welfare for the Germans

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Following elections, because Angela Merkel’s traditional partner, the FDP was shut out of the Bundestag, she had to form a coalition government with her traditional opposition, the SDP.

As a part of the coalition agreement she has agreed to create a minimum wage of €8.50 and a partial lowering of the retiring age to 63:

It was a “Six-Eye Negotiation” – in German, an “Unter Sechs Augen Gespraech”. Three leaders, and so three pairs of eyes, sat down together in the small hours in a private room and haggled amongst themselves, eyeball to eyeball.

 In the 185-page agreement which resulted, the Social Democrats (SPD) came away with a minimum wage of 8.50 euros (£7.10) an hour, uniformly applied across the country. The counter-argument had been that insisting on the minimum wage in the old East Germany would dent the region’s ability to attract work.

 The SPD’s chief negotiator Sigmar Gabriel also got a lowering of the retirement age and some extra public spending. That may be welcomed by those outside Germany, who have argued that the country is “beggaring its neighbours” by not increasing German spending to match the country’s amazing excess of exports over imports.

 The SPD also secured the introduction of a minimum percentage of women on German company boards.

 For her part, Chancellor Merkel got an acceptance from the SPD that its election demand of higher taxes on the rich would not happen. She also emphasised that the new government would continue to balance its budgets – there will be no move away from the belief that spending is tied to revenue.

I think that there is a fair amount consequences, some intended, and some not, to this.

First, a minimum wage of €8.50 will raise the wages of 17% of the workforce, with much of the effect in the service industry.

When one considers the impact on wages of people whose wages are just above the new minimum wage (probably about €10.00) it means that something like ¼ of the workforce will see a raise from this, which, in the long run may have negative political consequences for Merkel’s CDU.

On the other side of the political consequences, the SDP’s capitulation on higher taxes of the wealthy may play to the advantage of the left wing Die Linke, which is really the standard bearer of the democratic Socialism now eschewed by the “3rd Way” movement of the SDP in recent years.

One of the artifacts of German taxation is that it is fairly regressive, and wages of the bottom 90% have decreased in recent years:

According to a DIW study published last year, wages fell in real terms for all but the top 10 percent of earners in Germany between 2005 and 2010. This had a particularly acute effect on those earning the least. “As a rule, the lowest earners spend the highest portion of their income,” study co-author Karl Brenke explains.

Low-wage workers also end up spending a much higher proportion of their income on mandatory health insurance, as any income above €46,000 in annual salary is not subject to premium payments. Thus, while a senior engineer earning €150,000 a year is only required to pay 6.6 percent of his total income in social security contributions, a laborer who makes only a tenth as much ends up paying 20.7 percent.Low-wage workers also end up spending a much higher proportion of their income on mandatory health insurance, as any income above €46,000 in annual salary is not subject to premium payments. Thus, while a senior engineer earning €150,000 a year is only required to pay 6.6 percent of his total income in social security contributions, a laborer who makes only a tenth as much ends up paying 20.7 percent.

The collapse of the FDP was in part a reaction to this reality, as it is the most Thatcherite of the major parties.

Note also that this coalition agreement is exactly the opposite of the normal prescription to debt crises in the Euro zone: reductions in spending, increases in retirement age, and reductions in the minimum wage.

The next country to receive a demand of austerity from IMF and the Euro zone troika will likely highlight the inherent hypocrisy of such a demand.

Bummer

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Here are the historical US numbers through the years

The proposed regulations on CEO pay were defeated by referendum:

Swiss voters rejected a proposal to limit executives’ pay to 12 times that of junior employees yesterday, a measure that would have gone further than any other developed nation.

 The measure was opposed by 65 percent of voters, the government in Bern said yesterday. Polls, including one by consulting firm gfs.bern, had signaled that outcome as probable. Voter turnout was 53 percent, the highest in three years.

 “It’s a big relief,” Valentin Vogt, president of the Swiss Employers’ Association, said in an interview on Swiss national television SRF. “It’s a signal that it’s not up to the state to have a say in pay.”

 Switzerland is the home to at least five of Europe’s 20 best-paid chief executive officers. Opposition to excessive pay has stiffened among the traditionally pro-business Swiss following the government bailout of UBS AG (UBSN), Switzerland’s biggest bank, in 2008 and a plan — later scrapped — by Novartis AG (NOVN) to pay outgoing Chairman Daniel Vasella as much as $78 million.

 In March, Swiss voters approved the so-called fat-cat initiative that gave company shareholders a binding vote on managers’ pay and blocked golden handshakes and severance packages.

The problem here is that you need to get a foot in the door.

If they you had made it 100x, or 500x, it probably have won, but 12x seems to be too restrictive, even to a rabid liberal like me.

After all, depending on how you count, the ratio of the average worker to a CEO was between 18.3-20.1:1, so the ratio to lowest paid was probably in the range of 40:1. 

Note that the $78 million parachute divided by 100 is still more than $¾ million, so the most extreme examples would be shut down, and we would stop seeing the CEO dick swinging over obscene pay packages.

Victory in Albuquerque

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The abortion criminalization crowd just lost their attempt to pass abortion restrictions through a local referendum in Albuquerque:

Voters here on Tuesday defeated a ballot question that sought to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, delivering a critical setback to an anti-abortion movement that had sought to use this progressive city to recalibrate the national debate around women’s reproductive rights.

The referendum, the first of its kind in the country for a municipality, was marked by record turnout and aggressive tactics by volunteers on both sides, who sought to capitalize on the controversy and passion surrounding the issue to drive voters to the polls. For political strategists, it also offered a chance to test the way their message on abortion resonated among Hispanics, a key constituency that accounts for nearly half of the residents in Albuquerque and New Mexico, and is one of the fastest-growing populations in the country.

“This was a clear counterpunch to the Republicans and right-wingers who came from out of state to push their agenda on us,” Sam Bregman, chairman of the New Mexico Democratic Party, which campaigned hard against the ban, said in an interview.

According to the city clerk’s office, about 87,000 votes were cast in the election, or 25 percent of Albuquerque’s registered voters. The final tally was 55 percent of votes against and 45 percent of votes for the abortion ban.

The ban would have affected the entire state, given that the only two clinics that perform abortion at that stage in the pregnancy are in Albuquerque. One, Southwestern Women’s Options, is perhaps one of the only in the country to openly admit it does abortions after 20 weeks; out-of-state license plates can often be spotted in its parking lot.

Double digit margin, bitches.

Understand that things like politicians using changes in parking requirements are still being used to shut down clinics, which is why Republicans must be actively campaigned against at all levels, whether it is for zoning board, or dog catcher.

These Rat-F%$#s Keep Failing Up

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Now that education privatization advocate (and general failure) Paul Vallas appears to be on the way out in Bridgeport (background here), it looks like he will land on his feet.

It appears that Illinois Governor Pat Quinn will have Vallas on the ticket as his Lieutenant Governor:

The nation’s largest union panned the Friday afternoon announcement that Illinois’ Democratic governor is tapping an education reform lightning rod to join his reelection ticket.

“We are less than thrilled by the selection of Mr. Vallas,” Illinois Education Association president Cinda Klickna told Salon in a Friday email. “As head of the Chicago Public School System, he was known as a top-down administrator who routinely chose confrontation with the Chicago Teachers Union over collaboration.” Klickna’s comments came in response to an inquiry to the IEA’s parent union, the National Education Association. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, who leads the country’s other top teachers’ union, sent Salon a three-word comment on Vallas’ selection: “We were surprised.”

As I’ve reported, Vallas is currently serving as superintendent of Bridgeport, Conn., schools, following past stints helming school districts in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Chicago – each marked by conflict with critics of the bipartisan education reform consensus. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2006 that Vallas was “blasted” by the majority of the School Reform Commission, the agency overseeing city schools, for “his handling of a deficit that will force midyear cuts in the school system.” In New Orleans, PBS noted in 2010, “charters have exploded” from 2 percent to a majority of city schools. In Tuesday school board elections framed by activists as a referendum on the education agenda of Vallas and Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch, a dissident faction grew to a bare majority of the board’s nine seats, putting Vallas’ future there in jeopardy.

People of Illinois, missing Rod Blagojevich yet?

Good Point ………

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Say what you will about the batsh%$ insane wing of the Republican Party, but unlike liberals who seem to invest all their hopes in the Presidential primary they managed to take control of the party:

But the huge reaction to Scheiber’s piece just reminds me that ever since Sen. Ted Kennedy’s 1980 primary challenge to Jimmy Carter – maybe since Gene McCarthy’s insurgency, followed by Bobby Kennedy’s, convinced Lyndon Johnson not to seek re-election in 1968 – progressives have been over-invested in finding a primary campaign vehicle for their hopes and dreams. And until Barack Obama came along, that hadn’t worked out very well.

Even Obama’s emergence is a cautionary tale for Warren backers, because I’d argue that investing the freshman Illinois senator with magic progressive properties was a bad bet. He was never more progressive, ironically, than Hillary Clinton, except maybe on Iraq – and his national security policies can’t make any of his anti-war, pro-civil-liberties backers comfortable that they did the right thing.

Joan Walsh, the author, misses the point here: Obama was never in the remotest sense a progressive.

He lied in 2008, which is yet another reason why liberals play a suckers game by investing too much effort in the primaries.

If you take down an sitting President of your own party, the electoral consequences down ticket are huge.

If you pick off Representatives, and state reps, and board of ed members, and everything including dog catcher, in the primaries, as the (thoroughly repulsive) Club for Growth did, you get results, and these people become front runners when a Senator’s seat opens up, and eventually the bench from where candidates are selected becomes more in line with your ideology.

BTW, while we are at this, don’t give to the DCCC. As Down With Tyranny has repeatedly documented, the Democratic Party in general, and DCCC chair Steve Israel in particular, are determined to reconstruct the Blue Dog caucus, even if it results in fewer seats for the Dems.

Crap. Comcast Wins in Seattle

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Comcast, the evil empire of cable companies (scary thought), decided to dump a huge chunk of change on the Seattle Mayoral election to sabotage Mayor Mike McGinn’s gigabit fiber initiative:

One of Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn’s big policy initiatives has been expanding the quality and quantity of high-speed Internet access throughout the city. A public-private partnership plans to offer higher speeds at lower prices than most broadband providers currently offer. And incumbent providers, particularly Comcast, have invested heavily in defeating McGinn in Tuesday’s mayoral election. While Comcast denies there is any connection between McGinn’s broadband policies and their donations, the company has given thousands of dollars to PACs that have, in turn, given heavily to anti-McGinn groups.

 McGinn’s major opponent, state Sen. Ed Murray (D-Seattle), has committed to honoring the city’s existing contracts for a 14-neighborhood pilot project, but has shown limited enthusiasm about McGinn’s plans to expand the network in the future. So the election could determine whether Seattle residents have new options for high-speed broadband service, or will have to make do with the slower services already offered by incumbents like Comcast.

 McGinn’s broadband initiative

 According to Robert Cruickshank, a senior communications adviser for McGinn, one of McGinn’s core promises in the 2009 campaign was to “develop a city-wide broadband system.” The mayor considered creating a citywide broadband system as a public utility, like water or electricity. But aides say that would have been too expensive, so the mayor settled on public-private partnerships using city-owned dark fiber. This dark fiber was laid down starting in 1995, and the mayor’s office now says there are some 535 miles of it, only a fraction of which is being used.

 In a partnership with the University of Washington, the city put out a request for proposals in late 2012. “The RFP process is not intended to pick one provider,” says Cruickshank, but one company — Ohio-based Gigabit Squared — is currently farthest along. The company is still wrapping up its funding and finalizing plans with the city. They expect to begin offering gigabit-speed service to households with a combined population of 50,000 in early 2014, according to Mark Ansboury, co-founder of Gigabit Squared.

 In June, Gigabit Squared announced pricing for its Seattle service: $45 dollars a month for 100 Mbps service or $80 a month for 1 Gbps service plus a one-time installation cost of $350 that will be waived for customers signing a one-year contract. For comparison, Comcast, one of the primary Internet providers in the area, offers 105 Mbps service in the area for $114.99 a month according to their website. (It’s unclear if there is an installation charge.)

So the solution to the problem is to toss the mayor out at reelection time, so that you can continue to maintain you extortionate rates.

The bummer is that it worked:

Mike McGinn, who was elected mayor in 2009, was denied a second term on Tuesday as voters turned instead to Ed Murray, a longtime state senator and leader of last year’s successful drive for same-sex marriage in the state. It was the third time in just over a decade that an incumbent mayor had lost his job.

With two days of ballots counted in the all mail-in election, Mr. Murray led with more than 55 percent of the vote, enough to give him a victory over Mr. McGinn, according to The Associated Press. Mr. McGinn, 53, who had a reputation for bluster, faced widespread voter disapproval over public safety and transportation even as Seattle’s economy gained strength and created thousands of jobs as it emerged from the recession.

Mr. Murray, 58, who will take office as the city’s first openly gay mayor, pledged to start his administration with a new police commissioner and a more collaborative tone at City Hall.

“Collaboration is not a code word, for, you know, a fluffy approach to administering,” Mr. Murray said in a news conference. In the state Legislature, he said, he was able to build coalitions around gay rights and other issues by including opponents in the discussion. “You make them part of the process, and almost every time I’ve used that method I’ve been pretty successful in moving controversial issues,” he said.

Mr. McGinn seemed in some ways like a mayor from central casting when he took office in 2010: a bike-commuting, slightly scruffy, bearded social liberal and former leader of a Sierra Club chapter.

But he finished second in the primary election in August behind Mr. Murray, which advanced both men to the general election. Mr. Murray then pulled ahead in fund-raising. His prominent role in the battle to win same-sex marriage rights for Washingtonians last year — hugely popular in Seattle — helped him in many city neighborhoods.

And all that Comcast money did not hurt either.

You know, if Osama bin Laden had targeted the cable companies, instead of the World Trade Center, he’d be president of the United States today.

We Have Some Election Results

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First, as promised, Bridgeport F%$#ing Connecticut, where the people trying to prevent a corporate takeover of public schools won:

The city Board of Education slipped out of the hands of Mayor Bill Finch and Schools Superintendent Paul Vallas on Tuesday despite the surprise win of a Republican school board candidate.

The majority of the nine-member school board tipped in favor of the Connecticut Working Families Party.

The winners include Democrats Howard Gardner, Dave Hennessey and Andre Baker, joined by incumbent Working Families member Sauda Baraka and Republican Joe Larcheveque.

………

The race pitted the Democratic party machine against the combined efforts of the Working Families Party, sympathetic Democrats and strong support from the city teacher’s union. To many, more was at stake than control of one the most troubled school districts in the state. Some had pegged it as the epicenter of a nationwide struggle over the control of public schools, a fight against efforts to cede control to corporate interest groups that seek to privatize educations.

Vallas was brought into the district in late 2011 after the local elected board was replaced by the state, a move later overturned by the state Supreme Court.

During the primary, the Democrats who won made it clear they are not fond of Vallas, and the Working Families Party has actively worked to remove him. In a statement issued early in the day Tuesday, Working Families Party Chair Lindsay Farrell made it clear replacing Vallas would be tops on their agenda.

Menwhile, in Virginia, it looks like the marginally less repugnant candidate, Terry McAuliffe, beat Ken Cooccinelli, who ran his campaign against oral sex (only exaggerating slightly):

Terry McAuliffe, a businessman and former head of the Democratic National Committee, captured the Virginia governor’s seat Tuesday, defeating Republican Ken Cuccinelli II, the state attorney general whose conservative crusades made him an icon of the tea party movement.

With 98 percent of the precincts reporting, McAuliffe led Cuccinelli by more than 30,000 votes, or less than 2 percent.

“I’m very disappointed,” Cuccinelli told supporters assembled in a hotel ballroom in Richmond, adding that he was also “immensely proud of the campaign we ran.”

Despite his defeat, Cuccinelli called the election a referendum on President Obama’s Affordable Health Act, saying that the campaign was close even though McAuliffe had a massive fundraising advantage.

“Despite being outspent by an unprecedented $15 million,” he said,”this race came down to the wire because of Obamacare. That message will go out across America tonight.”

McAuliffe was expected to speak at 11 p.m.

Ralph Northam, the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, defeated Republican E.W. Jackson, the Chesapeake minister whose history of inflammatory remarks about gays and abortion became a flash-point of the campaign.

Mark Obenshain, the Republican candidate for attorney general, led Mark Herring by less than 1 percent, with 98 percent of the precincts counted.

Don’t fret, Republicans, the new Attorney General, Mark Obenshain is likely just has insane as Cuccinelli.

In New York and New Jersey, the Amazingly Tall Mayor, and Jabba the Governor both won as expected.

Yes, the Texas Voter Suppression Law is Working

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It just prevented former Speaker of the House James Wright from voting:

Former House Speaker Jim Wright was denied a voter ID card Saturday at a Texas Department of Public Safety office.

 “Nobody was ugly to us, but they insisted that they wouldn’t give me an ID,” Wright said.

 The legendary Texas political figure says that he has worked things out with DPS and that he will get a state-issued personal identification card in time for him to vote Tuesday in the state and local elections.

 But after the difficulty he had this weekend getting a proper ID card, Wright, 90, expressed concern that such problems could deter others from voting and stifle turnout. After spending much of his life fighting to make it easier to vote, the Democratic Party icon said he is troubled by what he’s seeing happen under the state’s new voter ID law.

 “I earnestly hope these unduly stringent requirements on voters won’t dramatically reduce the number of people who vote,” Wright told the Star-Telegram. “I think they will reduce the number to some extent.”

 Wright and his assistant, Norma Ritchson, went to the DPS office on Woodway Drive to get a State of Texas Election Identification Certificate. Wright said he realized earlier in the week that the photo identifications he had — a Texas driver’s license that expired in 2010 and a TCU faculty ID — do not satisfy requirements of the voter ID law, enacted in 2011 by the Legislature. DPS officials concurred.

But Wright and Ritchson will return to the office Monday with a certified copy of Wright’s birth certificate, which the DPS employees assured them would be good enough for the Texas personal identification card, designed specifically for people who do not drive.

 “It can be used for anything, not just voting,” Ritchson said.

 While Wright will be able to vote, Ritchson worried that others of his age may find the obstacles and inconvenience she and Wright encountered so off-putting that they just don’t vote.

Preventing old people, young people, black people, and brown people from voting is the goal of the Texas ‘Phants.

Mission f%$#ing Accomplished.

Can we please give them back to Mexico?

Tomorrow, I’m Going to Write About ……… School Board Elections?!?!!? In Bridgeport F%$#ing Connecticut?!?!?

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Why yes, I will be writing about the returns in Bridgeport, because it is ground zero of attempts by the Education-Industrial complex to turn our school children into profit centers for Wall Street:

Education reform lightning rod Paul Vallas – who courted controversy helming school districts in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Chicago — isn’t on the ballot tomorrow. But a school board election in Bridgeport, Conn. – the latest district to tap Vallas to oversee reforms — could effectively spell his fate. Tomorrow’s vote will offer the latest referendum on the bipartisan, billionaire-backed mainstream education reform movement, and on a multi-year effort by local Democrats – aided by the likes of Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Rhee — to defeat or disempower labor-backed dissenters.

 “As I’ve gone around the country, I always point to Bridgeport as one of the signs that the people can beat the power,” former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education and high-profile reform critic Diane Ravitch told activists on a conference call last month. Tuesday’s election is the latest round in a long-running war over ed reform, and who should shape it, in the largest city in one of the country’s most unequal states.

 For the sake of shielding Vallas and his agenda, activists allege that the city’s Democratic machine has acted indifferent or even hostile to defeating Republicans tomorrow.

 “What’s at stake is the future direction of Bridgeport schools,” said Connecticut Working Families Party executive director Lindsay Farrell, citing issues including testing and class size. “And I think, in a broader sense, the direction of public education in this country.”

As I’ve reported, Bridgeport’s school board became a battleground in 2009, when two of its Republican members were ousted in an election by candidates from the labor-backed Working Families Party. While Bridgeport is overwhelmingly Democratic, by law no more than two-thirds of its nine school board seats can be held by the same party. While the board’s Democrats and Republicans had often seen eye to eye on education, the WFP didn’t. “They were very effective at questioning the status quo,” Bridgeport Education Association vice president Rob Traber told Salon last year, and when Mayor Bill Finch’s superintendent pushed unpopular cuts in 2011, the Democratic machine and its business allies got “afraid that they might lose control of the board.”

Vallas has been failing down for years, practicing pump and dump, where focuses on standardized tests to the exclusion of real educations, eats his seed corn, and is forced out when it all implodes, when he blames the teachers.

All the while, he sells gives the schools to the hedge fund managers to that they can loot the public school systems.

His tenure in Connecticut it gets even worse, because he did not meet the legal requirements to be CEO, so they set up a no-show phony class for him to check off the necessary boxes.

Interestingly enough, following the WFP victory in the Democratic primaries, the Democratic Party establishment appears to be pulling strings for the Republicans:

The WFP notes a sharp contrast between the Democratic Party’s efforts on behalf of its pro-Vallas candidates in the primary, and its approach to tomorrow’s showdown with the GOP. “The Democratic Party put a lot of resources into the mayor’s slate in the primary, and a lot of money,” said Farrell. “We haven’t really seen them doing anything to help the challengers who won in the primary in the general election.” She told Salon that “education budgets are large chunks of money, and you know, we’ve been really stunned by the lengths to which Mayor Bill Finch, and the Democratic Chair Mario Testa, and Paul Vallas will go to maintain power over those budgets.”

 Some Bridgeport progressives take their allegations another step. Retired Judge Carmen Lopez, the local activist who filed the lawsuit against Vallas, told Salon she believes the mayor and his allies were “working to make sure that the Republicans win” because “that’s the only way that Finch could get what he wants, which is for Vallas to stay in power.” Voter Jessica Allen told Salon that City Council president Thomas McCarthy visited her house and, when she asked about education, told her that while “under normal circumstances I would never tell anybody to vote Republican,” in this case “you should be voting for [GOP contender] Larcheveque.” Allen said McCarthy told her the mayor “tried to make these fantastic changes, but everything that we try to do keeps getting blocked …” (Allen, a registered independent, told Salon she thinks “the schools are really screwed up” and “I don’t know what the right answer is.”) But Council member McCarthy told Salon in an email that he was “encouraging my constituents to vote all of Row B, the Democratic line.”

When you consider the proportion of a typical municipal budget that goes to education, it’s clear that there are a whole bunch of politicians in Bridgeport who are siding with the folks dedicated to ripping off the taxpayers.

Yes, I’m also wondering if the Republicans’ attempt to vote Ken Cuccinelli into the Governor’s office, but I really think that Bridgeport is a bigger deal.

The Daily Show Draws Blood

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They decided to cover voter suppression efforts in North Carolina, and the find a precinct chairman who is an unrepentant racist who admits that the new laws are purely for partisan political advantage.

Perhaps, we should say former precinct chairman.

He got canned the day after the broadcast.

I guess that saying that some of the people who were complaining about the barriers to voting were, “lazy black people that wants the government to give them everything,” was not good for his future in politics.

It’s arguable that the above quote was not the most offensive thing that he said.

Even better, this happened just before the DoJ suit against the voter suppression laws is to go to trial.

Why to Tell the Steve Israel and the DCCC That You Will Manage Your Own Campaign Donations

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Because former Blue Dog Steve Israel has as his goal the resurrection of the Blue Dog Caucus or something very similar, even at the expense of the possibility of Democrats taking back the house:

Last week, when MoveOn and PPP released their much buzzed about polls showing how Democrats could pick up many seats, the first thing I noticed was that these were all the Steve Israel seats they had polled. I spoke with them and asked them to poll some of the districts that the DCCC studiously ignores, districts we’ve been covering here at DWT and where Blue America has some great candidates. This morning MoveOn and PPP are releasing new polling data for some of those districts.

Outstanding, at top Blue America races where Lee Rogers is ahead of Buck McKeon (CA-25), Paul Clements is ahead of Fred Upton (MI-06) and Jason Ritchie is ahead of Dave Reichert (WA-08). In other districts, like FL-27, where Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz have actively discouraged Democratic opponents, there is a clear indication that if Pelosi manned up and fired Israel and cleaned out the nest of self serving incompetents who run the DCCC, the Democrats would win back the House hands down in 2014. In many of the districts where there are no Democrats– thanks to Israel’s agenda– voters see no alternative to the GOP incumbent but there is a clear indication that a Democrat could campaign and win. In FL-27 where Wasserman Schultz has been protecting Ileana Ros-Lehtinen for years, if an election were held today, an unnamed Democrat would beat her 47-45%. ………

You can read the rest at the article, but basically, the DCCC will drop big bucks on ConservaDem long-shots, and ignore competitive races where real Democrats are running against vulnerable Republicans.

Latest Republican Innovation: Minorities Only Get 3/5 of a Vote

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It appears that Kansas and Arizona are using a rather twisted interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ruling to prevent people from voting in state and local elections:

Remember this phrase: two-tier voting. You may be hearing more about it.

Officials in Arizona and Kansas are making preparations for elections with two categories of voters. There will be those who provided proof of citizenship when they registered to vote, and will therefore be able to vote in all local, state, and federal elections. And then there will be those who did not provide proof of citizenship when they registered. Those people will only be able to vote in federal contests — if at all.

In both states, the preparations underway are reactions to the Supreme Court’s June ruling in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council, the legal battle over Arizona’s 2004 voter identification law, known as Proposition 200. While the headlines in June painted the ruling as a blow to Proposition 200, officials in both Arizona and Kansas have chosen to focus on the leeway the Supreme Court left them. Kansas State Election Director Brad Bryant laid out the argument in an email he sent to county election officers at the end of July.

“As the Supreme Court made clear, its decision applies only to ‘federal registration forms’ and covers only federal elections,” Bryant wrote, according to a copy of the email provided to TPM. “States remain free to require proof of citizenship from voters who seek to also vote in state elections.”

Using that logic, both states have made moves toward two-tier systems.

In Kansas, whose Secretary of State, Kris Kobach (R), has been at the forefront of the voter ID movement, that system is already up and running.

One of the things that is necessary for democracy to function is for both sides to accept the idea that there are limits in the pursuit of political power.

I don’t know how you make this sh%$ stop, but I am open to suggestions.

All I got is a return of the Fairness Doctrine.