I got this from my brother.
He and his family sent this to my dad.
Click image for full size.
I don’t do Father’s Day stuff with my dad. I do Mother’s Day (Mutha’s Day) with my dad.
It’s kind of an homage about how he was both mom and dad after my mom died.
The city of Missoula, Montana has apparently had enough of mismanagement of their water infrastructure by its Carlyle Group owned private water company, Mountain Water Company, along with the normal private equity hijinks, so they tried to buy it.
The Carlyle Group refused, and so the city condemned the company, and seized it by eminent domain, and now Missoula has won a court victory confirming their right to seize the utility:
Missoula won its legal fight to take ownership of Mountain Water Co. and the city’s drinking water system Monday.
In a 68-page decision, Missoula District Court Judge Karen Townsend said the city “carried its burden of proof” and showed that “its contemplated use of the water system as a municipally owned water system is more necessary than the current use as a privately owned for-profit enterprise.”
“Based on credible evidence at trial, the Court concludes that the object of this condemnation proceeding, the use of the water system, is a public use for which the right of eminent domain may properly be exercised” under Montana law, Townsend said.
The judge said she “considered the broad range of circumstances,” and weighed “the benefits to be derived from the proposed public use against the impairments to the existing use.”
Her conclusion: “The proposed public use is more reasonable” and “proper.”
The city made its case, she continued, and proved that “the taking is a more necessary public use.”
The city did try to purchase Mountain Water Co. from its owner, global equity firm The Carlyle Group, Townsend said, “and the final written offer was rejected.” It is now, she said, Missoula’s “right to acquire” the water system by exercising its power of eminent domain.
Basically, Mountain Water Company is not performing timely maintenance on the infrastructure (after all, some resources have to go toward paying inflated private equity “Management Fees”):
………
The water system pumps groundwater from the Missoula aquifer through 37 wells and 327 miles of water main. The system serves 23,500 customers, with 1,500 of them outside the city limits. The city of Missoula estimates that an investment of $66 million to $95 million is needed to bring the system to industry standards.
- Nearly 50 percent of the mains are more than 45 years old. Twenty percent of the mains have exceeded their useful life.
- While 81 percent of the system is metered, only 40 percent of the water is measured through meters. The average age of the meters is 20 years and will require $16 million to $20 million to achieve industry standards.
- Nearly 75 percent of the service lines are galvanized steel and have exceeded their useful life. The cost to bring the lines up to industry standards is roughly $25 million.
- Rattlesnake Dam and the intake dam have not been maintained and show problems with erosion, slope and stability, requiring $3 million in repairs.
- The water system leaks at a rate of 50 percent. An estimated 8,000 gallons leak every minute, well above the national Infrastructure Leakage Index.
A 50% leakage rate? Seriously? In a locality that is already abnormally dry, and in a world that is drawing down its aquifers at an alarming rate?
And the Carlyle Group thinks that this is all hunky dory?
And then there is the attempt by the Carlyle Group to represent the purchase of a $945.00 coffee maker as a capital expenditure.
Clearly, the private sector is not working the way that all those free market mousketeers would lead us to believe.
Full disclosure: I worked for a few years at United Defense, which was owned by the Carlyle Group, before it was sold to BAE Systems.
H/T Naked Capitalism.
The Pope, and one would assume the Pope’s Peeps, are working on an encyclical about the economy and the environment, and it has gotten leaked.
Has come out strongly in favor or accepting the science of global warming, as well as condemning shot sighted politicians:
Pope Francis has endorsed the science behind global warming and denounced the world’s political leaders for putting national self-interest ahead of action. Now, Catholic priests are gearing up to spread the word.
The 192-page leaked draft of a papal encyclical, published Monday by the Italian magazine L’Espresso, is an attempt to influence the debate before United Nations climate talks scheduled for the end of the year in Paris. Father Federico Lombardi, the pope’s spokesman, said the text was not the final one, which will be officially released midday local time Thursday by the Vatican.
The encyclical, entitled “Laudato si (Praised Be) on the care of our common home,” is a call to action in the form of a letter to the church’s bishops. With fossil-fuel emissions and temperatures at record levels, the spiritual leader of 1.2 billion Catholics is adding his voice to calls to rein in greenhouse gases.
“International negotiations cannot progress in a significant way because of the positions of the countries which privilege their own national interests rather than the global common good,” the pope wrote. “Those who will suffer the consequences which we are trying to hide will remember this lack of conscience and responsibility.”
Francis squarely put the blame on humans, writing that many scientific studies show “the greater part of global warming in the last decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxide and others) emitted above all due to human activity.”
Reducing emissions, he wrote, demands “honesty, courage and responsibility, above all by the most powerful and most polluting countries.”
In the U.S., where public opinion has been split on climate change, the Conference of Catholic Bishops has been holding workshops to discuss the encyclical with its members. A coalition of church groups, the Catholic Climate Covenant, will provide inserts on Francis’ message to go in church bulletins around the U.S. and is e-mailing suggested homilies to priests.
Additionally, this document will a call for independent and rigorous studies of pesticides and GMOs:
On the subject of GMOs Pope Francis states; “It is difficult to give an overall judgment on the development of genetically modified organisms (GMO), plant or animal, for medical purposes or in agriculture, since they can be very different and require different considerations.”
He continues; “Although we do not have definitive evidence about the damage that transgenic cereals could cause to humans, and in some regions their use has produced economic growth that has helped solve some problems, there are significant problems that should not be minimized. In many areas, following the introduction of these crops, there has been a concentration of productive land in the hands of the few, due to the gradual disappearance of small producers, who, as a consequence of the loss of cultivated land, have been forced to retreat from direct production.
“The most fragile among them become temporary workers and many farm workers migrate to end up in miserable urban settlements. The spread of these (GM) crops destroys the complex web of ecosystems, decreases diversity in production and affects the present and the future of regional economies. In several countries there is a trend in the development of oligopolies in the production of seeds and other products needed for cultivation, and the dependence deepens when you consider the production of sterile seeds, which end up forcing farmers to buy (seeds) from producers.”
“No doubt there is a need for constant attention…to consider all ethical aspects involved. To this end it is necessary to ensure a scientific and social debate that is responsible and large, able to consider all the information available and to call things by their names.
“GMOs is an issue which is complex, it must be approached with a sympathetic look at all its aspects, and this requires at least one more effort to finance several lines of independent and interdisciplinary research… as we have seen in this chapter, the technique is unlikely to be able to …self-limit its power.”
To my mind, what is most significant here is that he is clearly laying the groundwork for aggressive push-back against Big Ag, Monsanto and their ilk, as being harmful both to the environment, and to most economically disadvantaged.
I hear wing-nut heads exploding, and it pleases me.
Law Professor and former police officer Seth Stoughton makes the point that needs to be made about both the incident in McKinney, and in policing generally.
He observes that there are two cops on the film, and one gets people calmed down, and other one is Eric Casebolt:
An officer in McKinney, Texas, dashes down a sidewalk, losing his flashlight as he runs past a teenage videographer toward an emergency. Seconds later, the teen with the camera walks up to another officer, one who is standing with a group of kids. “I’m just saying,” the officer is saying in a calm, corrective tone that parents and school teachers everywhere will recognize. “Don’t take off running when the cops get here.”
He thanks the videographer for returning the flashlight, then listens for a few seconds as the kids around him try to explain who was and was not involved in a prior incident. “Okay, guys, I appreciate that,” the as-yet-unidentified officer says. He responds to their concerns—that the police had detained the wrong people—by saying, “Okay, that’s what I’m saying. They’re free to go.” While not casual, the officer is composed. His tone is friendly and professional as he engages with the kids.
Seconds later, another officer, Corporal Eric Casebolt, is shown interacting with some of the same kids. His angry tone and aggressive attitude stand in marked contrast to the first officer in the video. “Get on the ground,” he commands sharply while pulling on a young man’s wrist in a way that looks like he’s trying to force the man to the ground with a painful joint manipulation (technically a supinating wrist lock or, for martial arts enthusiasts, kote gaeshi).
When that proves ineffective, he grabs the back of the young man’s head and shoves him down. “I told you to stay,” he yells, pointing a large metal flashlight at someone off camera. “Get your asses down on the ground.” Like the first officer, he lectures some of the kids about running from the police, but he takes a very different approach. “Don’t make me fucking run around here with thirty pounds of god-damned gear on in the sun because you want to screw around out here.” He is anything but composed, calm or professional.
The two officers in this brief video represent two different policing styles, two different mindsets that officers use as they interact with civilians: the Guardian and the Warrior. As a former police officer and current policing scholar, I know that an officer’s mindset has tremendous impact on police/civilian encounters. I’ve described the Guardian and Warrior mindsets at some length here and here; for now, suffice to say that the right mindset can de-escalate tense situations, induce compliance, and increase community trust over the long-term. The kids interacting with the first officer were excited, but not upset; they remained cooperative. Had they gone home at that moment, they’d have a story for their friends and family, but it would be a story that happened to have the police in it rather than being a story about the police.
………
Officers should also look out for each other, protecting their colleagues not just from harm, but also from lashing out in anger or frustration. Policing can be intensely stressful, and officers should be trained and encouraged to help their peers deal with stressful situations. When an officer is losing his cool, another officer will often be able to intervene, giving the first a chance to collect himself. That type of peer support isn’t part of modern police culture—particularly not when the officer losing his temper is a supervisor and union official like Corporal Casebolt—but it should be.
A short video of officers in McKinney, Texas, shows us the avoidable results of an unnecessarily aggressive approach to policing. But in the same video, we can see a few seconds of policing the way the way it should be done.
Remember the old days, when people called members of the constabulary, “Peace Officer”?
A warrior cannot be a “Peace Officer”. Their job is wage war against the enemy.
Peace Officers do not wage war against an enemy, the protect their fellow citizens.
In antiquity, when a “Warrior” took a town, he was supposed to take any male child that he found, and dash its brains out on the cobblestones.
This is not a proper model for policing.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.
― Richard P. Feynman
Because even if you get Democrats in Name Only into office, it turns out that it takes a lot more money to do so:
Writing for Stars and Stripes and the Washington Post Sunday, Anne Kim, an operative for Wall Street’s deceptively named Progressive Policy Institute (a pro-corporate/anti-worker New Dem outfit that was founded by the DLC to promote neoliberal ideas like NAFTA and the TPP), decries how much more it costs reactionary Democrats– New Dems and Blue Dogs– to run for election than it costs real Democrats. It costs the Democrats who support the Republican/Wall Street agenda double what it costs actual Democrats to run for office. Kim’s research finds that the fake Dems “spent roughly twice as much as their liberal counterparts to win or defend their seats.” That trend is getting more pronounced and she pointed out that for every dollar that the average Progressive Caucus member directly spent to defend his or her seat in 2014, the average right-wing Democrat spent $1.93. By comparison, right-wing Democrats shelled out $1.54 for every campaign dollar spent by liberals by 2012 and $1.65 in 2010.
She doesn’t get into it, but these figures include the way Wall Street-backed conservaDems gigantically outspend progressives in primaries, often with the help of the Democratic Beltway Establishment which has now entirely abandoned its pretense of being neutral in primaries. Let’s look at a few of the most recent examples from the last cycle. Here are 4 notable races that pitted New Dem types who back cutting Social Security benefits against progressives who favor expanding Social Security. In each case, the corporate-backed right-winger seriously outspent the progressive:
- CA-17- Ro Khanna- $4,427,701, Mike Honda- $3,447,979
- CA-31- Pete Aguilar- $2,246,265, Eloise Reyes- $1,029,617
- IL-13- Ann Callis- $1,936,927, George Gollin- $522,126
- VA-08- Don Beyer- $2,688,020, Patrick Hope- $307,599
The New Dem analysis for why they have to spend more than real Democrats never touches on the fact that the New Dems’ conservative policy agenda turns off Democratic primary voters. Instead they claim that “moderate districts are by definition competitive… In 2014, outside groups spent an average of $2.2 million per race in New Democrat and Blue Dog districts, compared with an average of $299,339 in Progressive Caucus districts. All told, outside groups spent $121 million on moderate districts, vs. $20.4 million in liberal ones.” [Keep in mind that New Dems and Blue Dogs and their propagandists like Kim, always refer to them as “moderate” rather than as the conservatives that they are.]
What a surprise. People require a lot more money to vote for a phony Democrat as they do to vote for a real Democrat.
It comes from my choice for Democratic nominee for President, Bernie Sanders:
In the interview, Sanders also indicates that he’d like to see a 90 percent tax rate in the country. After he sarcastically referred to that rate existing under “radical socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower,” Harwood asked him if he thought it was too high. “No. That’s not 90 percent of your income, you know?” explained Sanders, “That’s the marginal. I’m sure you have some really right-wing nut types, but I’m not sure that every very wealthy person feels that it’s the worst thing in the world for them to pay more in taxes, to be honest with you. I think you’ve got a lot of millionaires saying, “You know what? I’ve made a whole lot of money. I don’t want to see kids go hungry in America. Yeah, I’ll pay my fair share.”
I love the bit about, “Radical socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
The whole discussion (it’s informal enough that it’s more of a chat than an interview) with John Harwood, NBC’s Chief Washington correspondent, is well worth a watch.
There’s a breed of pedigreed dolt endemic to Washington, D.C. They determine their opinions socially, not empirically; what “everybody knows” trumps facts any old day. Their notion of tough, hard-nosed realism invariably entails that other people should suffer, from the blithe imperialism that cheers on unnecessary wars to the ‘sensible centrism’ that insists that unnecessary cuts to the social safety net are absolutely imperative. (The occasional safely contrarian view offers some novelty and the gloss of independence without truly challenging the establishment framework.) They remain cheerfully cloistered from the effects of their pronouncements about what the less privileged should be doing (and should be having done to them).
—Batocchio at Hullabaloo
The is commenting specifically about the rush to war in Iraq, but it applies generally.
Read the rest.
Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance
H/t Paul Krugman, who mentions this when he skewers William Daley’s prevarications on the TPP.
In Bushworld, in other words, playing a central role in catastrophic policy failure doesn’t disqualify you from future influence. If anything, a record of being disastrously wrong on national security issues seems to be a required credential.
‘Nuff said.
I ‘m no expert on UK politics, though I do follow it pretty constantly, but pretty sure one problem (not the only one) is that Labour has the early aughts Dem disease. “Not quite as evil as the other guys” is not a winning strategy. It isn’t really about going more Left, though on some issues it could have been, it’s about clearly highlighting the distinctions. You know, making clear just what it is you stand for, whatever the hell that is.
Or, as Harry S Truman put it, “Given a choice between a fake Republican and a real one, the public will choose the real Republican every time.”
And of course, the more Labour comes to be occupied by influential but unrepresentative middle-class professionals, the more contemptuous it becomes of the Other Britain, the lesser Britain, the stupid Britain that won’t obediently vote Labour even though Labour only wants to care for it and nudge it towards health and decency.
—Brendan O’Neill in Spiked, an online current affairs publication in the UK
I find this interesting, because the article describes a sort of progressive contempt for the “common man” that Obama just demonstrated in his Nike speech.
When “We know what is best for you” trumps “What do you need” you get this sort of political malpractice.
I think that Labour, like the Democratic Party, loathes their base, while the Tories, like the Republican Party, are terrified of their base.
Time for the liberal base to get some scalps, because putting fear into the hearts of the professional political class gets results.
Of course, this is an extremely low bar, as the competition is Pamela Geller:
Donald Trump was asked on “Fox & Friends” this morning for his opinion on the shooting outside Pam Geller’s “Draw the Prophet” contest, and he didn’t mince his words.
Brian Kilmeade asked whether he still believed “in freedom of speech, regardless of what they’re talking about — you’ve got to think they could do without being shot, don’t you think?”
Trump replied that it’s “very terrible,” but was heartened that the police acted “very strongly” by killing the two suspects. After blaming the “weak action” of the Baltimore police for the destruction of “over 200 businesses in a single night,” he praised the Garland, Texas police for their handling of these shooters.
However, he quickly switched subjects, saying that “I watched Pam [Geller on Fox News] earlier, and it really looks like she’s just taunting everybody. What is she doing drawing Muhammad? I mean it’s disgusting,” he said in reference to the attempted shootings. “Isn’t there something else they could be doing? Drawing Muhammad?” he went on.
Elisabeth Hasselbeck cut in to say that they’d asked Geller whether there wasn’t some other way they could have exercised their freedom of speech besides this contest, and Geller told her “No, there wasn’t another way, because you have to fight back against this war against the freedom of speech.”
Trump replied by again asking, “They can’t do something else? They have have to be in the middle of Texas doing something on Muhammad and insulting everybody?”
He reiterated his disgust at the attempted shooting, as well as his belief that Geller is taunting Islamic extremists. “What is she doing?” he asked. “Why is she doing it? It’s probably very risky for her — I don’t know, maybe she likes risk?”
“But what the hell is she doing?” he concluded.
So in April, he shamed most of the Republican Presidential candidates over Social Security and Medicare, and now, this.
I do not mean to imply that “The Donald” is meaningful ethics, but rather that the morality of the right wing has descended below his level.
If you do not see this, and think, “I love cats,” you are not truly a cat lover.
A dog lover says, “How can you love cats? They are selfish, vain, narcissistic, and never come when they are called.”
A cat lover says, “How can you Not love cats? They are selfish, vain, narcissistic, and never come when they are called.”
It’s a cat person thing.
Toyota has discovered that robots cannot do it all, and that they need highly experienced experts to maximize the productivity at their plants:
Inside Toyota Motor Corp.’s oldest plant, there’s a corner where humans have taken over from robots in thwacking glowing lumps of metal into crankshafts. This is Mitsuru Kawai’s vision of the future.
“We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them,” said Kawai, a half century-long company veteran tapped by President Akio Toyoda to promote craftsmanship at Toyota’s plants. “When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods, and they could make anything.”
These gods, or “kami-sama” in Japanese, are making a comeback at Toyota, the company that long set the pace for manufacturing prowess in the auto industry and beyond. Toyota’s next step forward is counterintuitive in an age of automation: Humans are taking the place of machines in plants across the nation so workers can develop new skills and figure out ways to improve production lines and the car-building process.
“Toyota views their people who work in a plant like this as craftsmen who need to continue to refine their art and skill level,” said Jeff Liker, who has written eight books on Toyota and visited Kawai last year. “In almost every company you would visit, the workers’ jobs are to feed parts into a machine and call somebody for help when it breaks down.”
The return of the kami-sama is emblematic of how Toyoda, 57, is remaking the company founded by his grandfather as the chief executive officer has pledged to tilt priorities back toward quality and efficiency from a growth mentality. He’s reining in expansion at the world’s-largest automaker with a three-year freeze on new car plants.
………
“What Akio Toyoda feared the company lost when it was growing so fast was the time to struggle and learn,” said Liker, who met with Toyoda in November. “He felt Toyota got big-company disease and was too busy getting product out.”
………
Learning how to make car parts from scratch gives younger workers insights they otherwise wouldn’t get from picking parts from bins and conveyor belts, or pressing buttons on machines. At about 100 manual-intensive workspaces introduced over the last three years across Toyota’s factories in Japan, these lessons can then be applied to reprogram machines to cut down on waste and improve processes, Kawai said.
In an area Kawai directly supervises at the forging division of Toyota’s Honsha plant, workers twist, turn and hammer metal into crankshafts instead of using the typically automated process. Experiences there have led to innovations in reducing levels of scrap and shortening the production line 96 percent from its length three years ago.
Toyota has eliminated about 10 percent of material-related waste from building crankshafts at Honsha. Kawai said the aim is to apply those savings to the next-generation Prius hybrid.
The work extends beyond crankshafts. Kawai credits manual labor for helping workers at Honsha improve production of axle beams and cut the costs of making chassis parts.
Though Kawai doesn’t envision the day his employer will rid itself of robots — 760 of them take part in 96 percent of the production process at its Motomachi plant in Japan — he has introduced multiple lines dedicated to manual labor in each of Toyota’s factories in its home country, he said.
“We cannot simply depend on the machines that only repeat the same task over and over again,” Kawai said. “To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine.”
True dat.
Guys on the shop floor are an invaluable source of knowledge and wisdom.
Uber is at it again.
This time, they are refusing to give rides to people with service animals:
A federal judge in San Francisco has allowed a civil lawsuit filed against Uber by an advocacy group for the blind to proceed.
The case was initially filed in September 2014 by the National Federation of the Blind of California and one individual plaintiff, who alleged that the quasi-taxi company is in violation of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), along with other state disabilities laws.
Uber had initially filed to have the case dismissed, but the judge’s ruling last Friday means the case will proceed.
According to the initial civil complaint, UberX drivers routinely refused to serve blind riders who travel with service animals:Further, UberX drivers across the United States are likewise refusing to transport blind individuals, including identified UberX drivers who repeatedly denied rides to one blind woman on twelve separate occasions, charged blind riders cancellation fees, and abandoned blind travelers in extreme weather, all because of guide dogs.
In total, Plaintiffs are aware of more than thirty instances where drivers of UberX vehicles refused to transport blind individuals with service animals. UberX drivers that refused to transport these blind individuals did so after they initially agreed to transport the riders. The UberX drivers denied the requested transportation service after the drivers had arrived and discovered that the riders used service animals.
In addition, some UberX drivers seriously mishandle guide dogs or harass blind customers with guide dogs even when they do not outright deny the provision of taxi service. For example, Leena Dawes is blind and uses a guide dog. An UberX driver forced Ms. Dawes’ guide dog into the closed trunk of the UberX sedan before transporting Ms. Dawes. When Ms. Dawes realized where the driver had placed her dog, she pleaded with the driver to pull over so that she could retrieve her dog from the trunk, but the driver refused her request. Other blind customers with guide dogs have been yelled at by Uber drivers who are hostile toward their guide dogs.
In its motion to dismiss, Uber argued that the plaintiffs lacked standing, and that as a private company, it is not bound by the provisions of the ADA—an argument that United States Magistrate Judge Nathaniel Cousins found did not hold water.
If they think that Title III of the ADA (public accommodations and commercial facilities) doesn’t apply to them, they are desperately trying to avoid treating their employees as employees, why should they give a damn about things like Sarbanes-Oxley?
Investing with Objectivist psychopaths who think they are supermen who are above the laws of mere mortals who does not appear to me to be a sensible thing.
Alas, reality trumps theory. As we have seen almost every time this thesis has been put into practice, it fails. The tax cuts don’t magically kick the economy into higher gear and the government ends up short of money. Remember former President George W. Bush and his tax cuts? Same deal.
—Barry Ritholtz, on Kansas’ fiscal implosion from worshiping at the alter of supply side economics and tax cuts.
I am referring, of course, to Rahm Emanuel, who won a double digit victory over challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia:
Mayor Rahm Emanuel soundly defeated challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia on Tuesday, capturing a second term in Chicago’s first-ever runoff election and striking a note of humility by thanking voters for “a second term and a second chance.”
The win followed six weeks of a hard-fought, nationally watched second round in which Garcia tried to cast the contest as the latest proxy battle between establishment Democrats and the party’s progressive wing. Emanuel’s overwhelming financial advantage ultimately helped save the mayor as he fought for his political life.
………
With 98 percent of the city’s precincts reporting, Emanuel had 55.7 percent of the unofficial vote to 44.3 percent for Garcia.
It was closer than I expected, but money, and the self defeating bigotry of a significant portion of the Chicago African American community was too big a hill to climb.
I may be a political Little Orphan Annie here, but I do think that Rahm’s mantle has been pierced, and so when the creative accounting that has been obscuring the true state of Chicago’s finances, much of which appear to be in the form of sweetheart deals for his Bankster buddies for complex (and high fee) derivatives of the sort that f%$#ed Greece, collapses, the knives should come out.
At least, I hope that this is what will happen.
I’m bummed.
One of the big problems is that the black community appears to be unwilling to vote for a Hispanic candidate, even if this candidate was a strong supporter of the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington:
Jesus G. Garcia, candidate for mayor, strode down the sidewalk on Monday evening, trailed by a giddy pack of supporters, volunteers and passers-by. They snapped pictures and chanted his nickname: “Chu-y! Chu-y!”
One man did not join in. An African-American who wore a knit Blackhawks hat, he glared at Mr. Garcia from the curb.
“I’m voting,” he said, when asked if he would take part in Tuesday’s election. “But I ain’t voting for no Chuy. I ain’t voting for a Mexican.”
Pressed to explain, he said he was tired of competing with Latinos for jobs. Then he walked away.
The scene exposed a fault line in Mr. Garcia’s campaign to unseat Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Tuesday’s runoff election. Mr. Garcia’s strategy was to build a coalition of white liberals, blacks and Latinos — angered by Mr. Emanuel’s closing of dozens of schools and supportive of a plan to shift development from its wealthy downtown to poorer neighborhoods.
But a Chicago Tribune poll released Tuesday showed Mr. Emanuel with a commanding lead. He not only has large margins among white voters, but a nearly two-to-one margin among black voters, 53 percent to 28 percent. Mr. Garcia has not been able to increase his share of the black vote.
………
Mr. Garcia, 58, who has won election to the City Council, the state Senate and the county board of commissioners, has been one of the most prominent Latinos in elected office here, beginning in the 1980s. If elected, he would be the city’s first Latino mayor.
From the start of his campaign, he spoke of building a multicultural coalition in the spirit of Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor, on whose campaign Mr. Garcia worked.
He has reached out to black leaders, collecting endorsements, campaign donations and promises of votes. And he has focused his campaign on concerns Chicagoans share, including improving public education, a higher minimum wage, reducing gun violence and modernizing mass transit.
(emphasis mine)
Once again, we see that when bigotry to drives the vote, hate voters vote against their own interests. (It kind of explains about 95% of the Republican electoral success in the past few decades)
We already have indications that Rahm Emanuel will double down on those policies which led to this runoff in the first place. It’s why one of Rahm’s big donors is squawking that Emanuel should shut down even more public schools:
The Chicago Teachers Union predicts more school closings if Tahm is re-elected. A major campaign contributor said he should have closed 125 schools, not just 50. This donor, Ken Griffin, is a Republican who also has given to Scott Walker in Wisconsin.
………
Rahm Emanuel’s refusal to seriously pursue any meaningful, progressive revenue solutions for Chicago Public Schools (CPS) funding needs will without question lead to further mass school closings in the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods if he wins re-election on April 7. As Emanuel’s economic policies prioritize the financial interests of billionaire campaign donors like Ken Griffin and other big business supporters, at the expense of public education in Chicago, the mayor is making a clear choice to drive the district into even further dire financial straits that he will use to justify additional school closings.
Griffin, one of the top contributors to Emanuel’s re-election campaign and the richest man in Illinois, has accused Chicago’s mayor of being “lackluster” for not closing 125 schools instead of 50, and recently reiterated to the New York Times that the number of closings, which disproportionately affected African American and Latino students and their families, “should’ve been 125.” Griffin also has claimed that the top 1 percent of income earners have too little influence in politics, which is seemingly why he has backed Emanuel with more than $1 million in campaign contributions. As Griffin’s influence on City Hall grows, future school closings are inevitable if Emanuel is re-elected.
This is a pretty big tell that Rahm wants to continue to privatize public schools, much like his predecessor privatized parking for pennies on the dollar.
Meanwhile Rahm is aggressively fighting the release of emails between him and his big ticket donors. (see also here)
Of course, given the history of elections in Illinois, it may all be moot, as the chairman of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners appears to have gotten lucrative lobbying contracts for his lawfirm, and it appears that he has already pulled strings for Rahm Emanuel allies down the ticket:
If Chicago’s first mayoral runoff in history ends up razor close on April 7, the city will be relying on a purportedly independent arbiter to oversee any recount. But that arbiter, the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, is chaired by a politically-connected lawyer whose firm has received secret city lobbying contracts from incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration. After receiving those contracts, the chairman has already used his power to boost the mayor’s allies against anti-Emanuel challengers in other municipal elections.
Board chairman Langdon Neal was appointed to his position by the Cook County Circuit Court, not by any city official — a structure that is supposed to preserve the board’s independence from candidates for municipal office. However, the laws establishing the election commission do not prohibit Neal from getting contracts from the mayor, whose election he will oversee. How much he has made from those contracts remains a closely guarded secret: the Emanuel administration has denied an open records request for the terms of the deals, refusing to respond to International Business Times within the timeframe mandated by Illinois law.
What’s that Josef Stalin quote again?
I remember, it’s, “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”
He observes the absolute uselessness our foreign policy, and juxtaposes the effects of tribalism in the United States, an which might be the best headline in MoJo this year, Ivy League Eggheads Have Led Us Into a String of Disastrous Wars. It’s Time For Something New:.
Policy intellectuals—eggheads presuming to instruct the mere mortals who actually run for office—are a blight on the republic. Like some invasive species, they infest present-day Washington, where their presence strangles common sense and has brought to the verge of extinction the simple ability to perceive reality. A benign appearance—well-dressed types testifying before Congress, pontificating in print and on TV, or even filling key positions in the executive branch—belies a malign impact. They are like Asian carp let loose in the Great Lakes.
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Then came World War II, followed in short order by the onset of the Cold War. These events brought to Washington a second wave of deep thinkers, their agenda now focused on “national security.” This eminently elastic concept—more properly, “national insecurity”—encompassed just about anything related to preparing for, fighting, or surviving wars, including economics, technology, weapons design, decision-making, the structure of the armed forces, and other matters said to be of vital importance to the nation’s survival. National insecurity became, and remains today, the policy world’s equivalent of the gift that just keeps on giving.
People who specialized in thinking about national insecurity came to be known as “defense intellectuals.” Pioneers in this endeavor back in the 1950s were as likely to collect their paychecks from think tanks like the prototypical RAND Corporation as from more traditional academic institutions. Their ranks included creepy figures like Herman Kahn, who took pride in “thinking about the unthinkable,” and Albert Wohlstetter, who tutored Washington in the complexities of maintaining “the delicate balance of terror.”
………Over the previous century-and-a-half, the United States had gone to war for many reasons, including greed, fear, panic, righteous anger, and legitimate self-defense. On various occasions, each of these, alone or in combination, had prompted Americans to fight. Vietnam marked the first time that the United States went to war, at least in considerable part, in response to a bunch of really dumb ideas floated by ostensibly smart people occupying positions of influence. More surprising still, action intellectuals persisted in waging that war well past the point where it had become self-evident, even to members of Congress, that the cause was a misbegotten one doomed to end in failure.
The modern national insecurity intellectuals subscribe to what Matthew Yglesias derided as, “The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics.”
Basically, like the DC comic book character, the US can do anything, and the only way that it can fail is through a failure of the will.
It is historically and empirically wrong.
It is also batsh%$ insane, and it is the standard wisdom inside the Beltway.
It’s why you frequently hear military leaders repeat the myth that US forces lost no battles in the Vietnam War: (we lost over 70 battles) The lesson that the military learned was that the press needed to be muzzled so as not to lose popular support.
The fact is that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong beat us, but the military, in a stunning display of human nature, blames the American public and the press instead.
In his fine new book American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, Christian Appy, a historian who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, reminds us of just how dumb those ideas were.
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These questions are by no means of mere historical interest. They are no less relevant when applied to the handiwork of the twenty-first-century version of policy intellectuals, specializing in national insecurity, whose bullsh%$ underpins policies hardly more coherent than those used to justify and prosecute the Vietnam War.………
At least since September 11, 2001, and arguably for at least two decades prior to that date, US policymakers have taken these propositions for granted. They have done so at least in part because few of the policy intellectuals specializing in national insecurity have bothered to question them.
Indeed, those specialists insulate the state from having to address such questions. Think of them as intellectuals devoted to averting genuine intellectual activity. More or less like Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter (or Dr. Strangelove), their function is to perpetuate the ongoing enterprise.
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What prompts these observations is Ashton Carter’s return to the Pentagon as President Obama’s fourth secretary of defense. Carter himself is an action intellectual in the Bundy, Rostow, Huntington mold, having made a career of rotating between positions at Harvard and in “the Building.” He, too, is a Yalie and a Rhodes scholar, with a PhD. from Oxford. “Ash”—in Washington, a first-name-only identifier (“Henry,” “Zbig,” “Hillary”) signifies that you have truly arrived—is the author of books and articles galore, including one op-ed co-written with former Secretary of Defense William Perry back in 2006 calling for preventive war against North Korea. Military action “undoubtedly carries risk,” he bravely acknowledged at the time. “But the risk of continuing inaction in the face of North Korea’s race to threaten this country would be greater”—just the sort of logic periodically trotted out by the likes of Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter.
………Let me propose an experiment. Put them on furlough. Not permanently—just until the last of the winter snow finally melts in New England. Send them back to Yale for reeducation. Let’s see if we are able to make do without them even for a month or two.
In the meantime, invite Iraq and Afghanistan War vets to consider how best to deal with ISIS. Turn the op-ed pages of major newspapers over to high school social studies teachers. Book English majors from the Big Ten on the Sunday talk shows. Who knows what tidbits of wisdom might turn up?
We are a tribal society, and the tribe of the Ivy League has run our country for a very long time, the last 4 Presidents were Ivy Leaguers, and they have proven themselves to be incapable of recognizing reality.