Message: I Care

Looks like someone we know is all fired up about the initiative process.

Right About Now Let's Ketchup Horn

I'm in a baaaaaaad mood this morning, and thinking I'll take it out on the political news over my cereal bowl and my goddamned motherfucking coffee cup. That's right, I'm breakfasting at 11:40! Let's go round l'horn:

The Public Option Lives. Wow. | The New Republic
People Power Matters: The Public Option Lives! - CEPR
Ezra Klein - An interview with Sen. Sherrod Brown: 'Reid listened to his senators'
Well, shit. Look at this! For once, popular opinion seems to've trumped Senate slowdown rules, and progressives have leveraged the fraid-y cats and conservatives in their Dem-caucus!

[Of course there's still a long way to go, blah-blah-blah etc. Of course this isn't a single payer plan, blah-blah-blah etc.] Myself, I still take solace in the actual people having actual access to care, and, shit, the evidence that the ostensibly pro-government party is demonstrating that it actually can govern. That's enough to please Foucault and Chris Matthews, people. How about you?

BEGIN SPECIAL 'ELECTIONS' HORN W/I A HORN.
NY-23 race first test of tea party power - Alex Isenstadt - POLITICO.com
I am fizzassinated by this most truly overdetermined congressional election facing voters in NY, the home of fusion voting. So far, Palin, Pawlenty, Fred Thompson and others have endorsed a 3rd Party, Tea Party-induced conservative against the incumbent Republican Dede Scozzafava. Noted moderate Republican (and presumed 2012 chasepack-er) Newt Gingrich has thrown his "reasonable man" weight behind Scozzafava, saying "“If you seek to be a perfect minority, you’ll remain a minority.” I will be watching, and watching close, as these conservatives eat each other's young -- mebbe, just mebbe, allowing the Dem challenger to win the seat for the first time since 1850! Boom!

The Nasty Battle Between Chris Christie and Jon Corzine in the New Jersey Governor's Race -- New York Magazine
Alright listen, if you know me, and if you're going to know me over the next coupla days, you could do worse than to check this well-written survey of the filth-swamp that is NJ politics, and the particularly nasty terrain this election seem's to have staked out for a staging area.

"We" must root for Corzine, without ever really identifying with him - that's politics, chaps and ladies! The incumbent Dem gov KNOWS his own vote has topped out at btw 42-44%, and, thus, that he'll need to a) continue nasty, gnarly, often petty attacks against his GOP adversary Chris Christie, and b) boost the third-party candidacy of one Chris Daggett.

New Jersey is all about this sorta "better to win ugly than lose pretty" ethos, and its Democratic organization is as good at winning as it is, well, very fugging ugly. Corzine is inside of 10% down with a week to go. Can he make it happen?

Tax measure vote deserves civil debate | statesmanjournal.com | Statesman Journal
Welcome to my personal apocalypse, the subject of my dissertation and the symbol of my discontent. This soft editorial summarizes the two sides battlings over Measures 66&67, so you can jump in and join a fella!
END SPECIAL 'ELECTIONS' HORN W/I A HORN.

News: Organized Against Labor - Inside Higher Ed
Teachers' unions uneasy with President Barack Obama - Nia-Malika Henderson - POLITICO.com
Fed up with McEntee - Ben Smith - POLITICO.com
Meanwhile, executives of the bourgeoisie continue to hate them unions!

Mark Sanford on Ayn Rand | Newsweek Books
Seriously?

Pat McCormick on Neil Cavuto Sep2009

Ballot Initiative emo, as promised!!!

OR tax warfare has made the news...FOX NEWS.

Hot, Hot Ballot Initiative Video Action

So begins the Wrestlemania III-style ballot referenda warfare that will define my dissertation research and, sorry in advance, a lot of my blogging in the weeks to come.

The big news here being that Oregon's own Norquist-y, anti-tax Wrecking Crew is evoking that socialist Barack Obama as a voice of marcoeconomic reason! Here's to six more months of escalating cognitive dissonance!

ballot initiative legend Bill Sizemore jailed

(h/t l'oregonian and politicker-OR:)

Sizemore was arrested for contempt of court and ordered jailed by Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Janice R. Wilson until he filled out state and federal reporting forms for charitable organizations. Sizemore’s lawyer said the forms would be filled out as early as this afternoon, which would hasten Sizemore's release.

Sizemore, who generally puts several measures on each ballot, was the author of Ballot Measures 58,59,60,63 and 64 in the 2008 general election. None of the initiatives passed.

You've Gotta Be Bleeping Me

Oh jeepers! Colorado's M54, the anti-union-security initiative we narrowly defeated under the name of M64 here in Oregon, has passed! Note how the authors over at UnionNews seem to've conflated collective bargaining with "no-bid contracts."

Bailout/Election/Labor Redux

Krugman:

There seem to be two prevailing narratives about the bailout plan(s). Both have elements of truth, but are fundamentally wrong.
One narrative is that of the Wise Men and the Destructive Yahoos. According to this narrative, men who Understand What Needs to be Done put together a plan to save the world, but they did a bad job of communicating, and a mob of ignorant people stands in their way.
The other narrative is that of the Evil Plotters and the Righteous Uprising. According to this narrative, the same people who sold us the Iraq war have tried to bully Congress into adopting a plan that is, in essence, a cynical ripoff - a scheme to transfer vast wealth to the rich and cripple the next administration.

What we have here seems like a crisis of legitimacy. In terms of the bailout, one's perception seems to be largely based on whether or not one believes that there is an impending financial collapse awaiting us if we do not act now. I think we have heard compelling arguments from every side of the debate. Certainly I'm not usually one to question Peter DeFazio and Donna Edwards when they get together, let alone Dean Baker, but neither am I likely to expand beyond reason the idea that this is really a timely moment to tip our hand and start spreading the "new New Deal" rhetoric around before we have the 2009 majorities (please! - ed. ) Not only am I unsure about the immediacy of the crisis, anyway - I'm also unsure as to the extent to which Dems would do well to try and pass an expansive, leftward-leaning bill.

At the moment, whole swaths of this country aren't sure if they trust the pragmatism of party leadership in every branch of government. Neither do they implictly trust the principles of Right- and Left-leaning stalwarts who objected to the bill. Meanwhile, the mainstream media and Wall Street speak with one voice (shucks, I'm shocked- ed.), telling us, oh shite, the End is Near. 'Seems like people are either a) having a hard time trusting any of these groups, or b) feeling there's no way any "special interest" would possibly succumb to elevating "the public good" over its own agenda.

So we turn our attention to November - wondering, how will the bailout play out for Senator, President, County Commissioner, and the whole merry band? I am unsure whether my attention to the election stems from the fact that I think I understand that context better than that of finance capital, or whether I think that the election outcome is one that us "people" (union people, for example) have a better chance of influencing.

The fun thing about ballot initiatives is that they allow for the public to enter into dimly ideological debates about public/private, market/state-type questions under the pretense that the partisan interests of Dem and GOP "politicians" are not central to the framing of this issues. Oregon's public employee unions come to the fore of per-bi-ennial (not a word?) "Vote No" campaigns. But they do so not as self-identifying unions, but as members of the public: citizens, servants, Oregonians. Labor is usually "victorious" in striking down what are increasingly called "Conservative Populist" initiatives. One could even contend that they have inured their unions, and by extension, the image of the public sector, to Oregon voters.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten:

We have often been called a "special interest." I will never apologize for that because our special interests' are the students we teach, the patients we care for and all the people we serve.

But one could contend other sorts of things, too. My point is merely to say, even if we grant labor a certain legitimacy within Democratic politics, and even if it attains a quasi-autonomous political identity in initiative states, it can't be a good thing to say that labor's primary interface with the broader public is through electoral politics via television ads, primary season news coverage or the occasional newspaper editorial. If I include get out the vote operations and person-to-person, more "organizing"-ish encounters... then are we pleased with labor's popularity or legitimacy within the society?

God knows nobody seemed to be asking our opinion of the bailout. God Bless the four serious magazines and 2.5 think-tanks that help keep some of our ideas alive in DC, but jeez louise. Is it enough to be seen as a relatively enlightened special interest among special interests? Is there a way around it?

The movement for the Employee Free Choice Act reflects a conversation about democracy within the labor movement that dares to question the NLRB - "Labor's Magna Carta," - and, at its better moments, relegates collective bargaining to a lesser status as just one among many forms in labor's repertory of political acts. The movement to pass the Employee Free Choice Act - over the ideological hysterics of the national Chamber of Commerce, and past the menacing and righteously-outraged Republicans with their "small business" and "secret ballot" fetishes - will necessitate the reassertion of workplace democracy as a popular (hegemonic?) idea. Since its heyday in the middle of the last century, workplace democracy has been steadily, deliberately eroded in form and content. During that same time, electoral politics has suffered low turnout, voter fraud, impeachment and "stolen elections," but it remains the most trusted, most exploited venue in which Americans do democracy.

The Employee Free Choice Act will have to (at least implicitly) critique the sanctity of the secret ballot as a venue for democratic decision-making. Ironically the road to this act of iconoclasm (not a word?) goes straight through Washington, D.C., and by extension, straight through electoral politics. Is that paradox "the point"? I hope not. I'd like to know what you all think of this weird conjuncture in political economy/elections/labor politics, and whether you, like me, dare to think that a small piece of labor legislation, EFCA, might contain within it the seeds for labor's first big, 21st Century "moment"?

"Social Movement" Unionism has proven...

to be an absurd framework through which to understand labor's political identity in the 21st Century, in my opinion.

but some interesting issues come to light as one goes about taking that framework apart. par example, see Paul Johnston's Success While Other Fails; Social Movement Unionism and the Public Workplace (1994):

This does not mean that public workers’ movements will promote a “workers’ state,” abolish capitalism or the state, and so on. Different parts of the public workforce are likely to be implicated on different sides of every great social contest. The important point is that public workers' claims are framed in certain common forms and that these workers rely on certain kinds of strategic resources; beyond that, the significance of a particular movement depends on its historical context. As they frame their interests as administrable public interests, they are perhaps the quintessential “state-making" social movement.

No on Measure 64

it's all about the fidelity on the vocal track, here.

imagine hearing this on a record with no accompanying visuals or text.

Vote NO on Measure 64

"When your child goes to school, they build your future."

NO on Measure 64, Defend Oregon!

"I'm opposing Measure 64 because it's going to make our job of protecting our communities harder."

BI Serenade

Despite what looks like at least ten initiatives/referenda soon to be weighing down Oregon ballots, the Eugene Register-Guard says it's really difficult to collect signatures these days.

Apparently signers have to fill out all their personal information for themselves, and apparently the signature-gatherer has to watch each and every signature be signed. Apparently that's bad.

It's gonna be a great run, this time, btw: anti-immigrant insanity, obscene crime bills, the shifting of lottery revenues away from schools towards public safety, Tort reform, incentive pay for teachers, paycheck deception and further anti-union diddling, etc.

What a horror show. I know Uncle is susceptible to "direct democracy" - particularly cuz it's influenced his Sun River tactics - but I look at this process and wonder, uh, really?!? Just this year alone, there's a slate of initiatives that could turn our greentastic I-5 corridor into Hatebag Alley.

I'll have a lot more to say about this weirdness, obviously - just thought I'd break the ice. Note that the legislature passed the strictures that make the initiative process more difficult. More than being just a left-right, issue-based zone of electoral struggle, the initiative process is a challenge and/or a threat to the statutory authority of the legislative process. Some would say it's a challenge to deliberative democracy in general, but Jurgen Habermas I'm not. In my admittedly dim, crusty but not hungover view, "Deliberative Democracy" can only be fetishized by someone ignorant of liberalism's complicity with capitalist penetration, slavery, patriarchy, etc. I don't think "rational discourse" is an end in itself, so my analysis of the initiative process , hopefully, will always be more than liberal.