Popular Culture and Politics
(Early Warning) According to Friction sources, Two New Mexico electric cooperatives, Continental Divide and Springer, have joined Kit Carson Electric Coop (KCEC) and filed objections to the proposed Tri-State G&T request for a rate increase in January. When a minimum of three coops object, the PRC, according to the law, can hold a public hearing on a Tri-State request. KCEC will probably seek a “cost of service” study from Tri-State. Other issues might include “time of service” rates and green energy maximum uses. It’s a first: for years KCEC has urged other NM Coops to file objections and ask for a PRC hearing on Tri-State’s rate increase requests. The Tri-State behemoth has been characterized as an unregulated monopoly by critics.
Friday Morning Quarterback Club
By now we all know that Barack Obama’s rock star status as a presidential candidate got him elected in 2008. Voters, especially younger voters, undid centuries of prejudice aimed at black Americans. Multiculturalism, whether spawned by sport, movies, music, or decades of immigration helped change attitudes and level the playing field.
White establishment figures, who got left behind during the sixties, continued to follow in the footsteps of Richard Nixon. Nixon initiated the “Southern Strategy” and played the “race card,” a notorious weapon in the GOP’s bag of tricks: Ronald Reagan’s references to the symbolic “welfare queen” from Oakland and H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” commercials featuring a black parolee from Massachusetts. If Bill Clinton was the first virtual “black” President, then Barack Obama was the first real African-American president–though his mother’s parents were from Kansas. Huh?
But the Obama team’s genius in the recent election focused on the community organizer’s ground troops. According to reports, Team Obama broke the back of billionaires, who bought the airwaves and tried to suppress the vote with Jim Crow tactics. Obamanos registered voters and concentrated on swing state door knocking. On election night, rank and file demos were still standing in line to vote—despite the presidential race being called by the networks.
Statistics guru, Nate Silver, who learned his trade in baseball, predicting the success of 2008’s Tampa Bay’s world series champs, turned his exceptional talent for analysis to politics and predicted the results, again, in 2012. In their attempt to salvage a dying campaign, conservative talkers attacked Silver but they can’t argue with the results—the facts, poor things. Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and the rest are on the wrong side of history, as the Republicans in general are just waking up to the changed cultural landscape of the 21st Century.
As this year’s presidential race showed, the economy was at the heart of the issues but voters didn’t blame Obama for the increasing income gap between the haves and have-nots. Contrary to GOP talking points about socialism and welfare, which Republicans tend to utter as if they were the 10 Commandments, democratic voters just want an even break—a shot at a job or the American Dream. But Romney represented quintessential corporate capitalism—exporting jobs to China and creating safe tax havens for corporate clients–welfare for bankers and government contracts for industrialists.
During Obama’s first term, disappointed democrats learned that they must keep the pressure on the President if they want to see more fairness come out of Washington D.C. Though a president rarely produces major change in a second term, the voters must help force the GOP House and Senate filibusterers to pass legislation so that the wealthy pay their fair share of the budget like they did in…the fifties. Tax cuts produce big houses, travel, yachts, and private jets but little in the way of jobs or reduced expenses for college students.
Gov. Jerry Brown persuaded California voters to pass taxes aimed at stabilizing state colleges and universities and other necessary government services. Like Obama’s tag team grass roots voting drive, Money-ball’s Billy Beane of Oakland and the Magician’s Bruce Bochy of San Francisco did more in major league baseball with less dough, outsmarting and outplaying the opposition. You can talk about it, make media buys, sign stars with big contracts like the Yankees but you’ve got to play the game, knock on doors, get out the vote and bring the fans to the ball parks. The images associated with successful pro teams display pluralistic backgrounds and multicultural roots—even as the parasitic right-wing owners dine together behind closed doors on the fruits of labor.
Contrary to popular belief, a human being’s labor should transcend the material value of corporate property rights and the financiers’ inhuman instruments of capitalism. It’s a question of degree: an entrepreneur, a yeoman farmer, and even an artist are all engaged in a form of free enterprise. But the free market is fixed so that the biggies enjoy a lack of “moral hazard.” Both creditors and debtors should suffer when bankers make bad loans—unless the bailout helps right wrongs.
It will take years to remake the American political system and correct the descent of democratic capitalism into corporate fascism, a system overseen by today’s billionaire bandits. Democrats need to keep the pressure on the Republican extremists in the House and Senate, as well as the right wing pundits, who spin tall tales on talk shows. Hats off to Amy Goodman and Rachel Maddow, those left-leaning angels, who speak for the disenfranchised regular folk. According to the politicos, the Big Guy, Bill Clinton, is working on Hilary’s campaign for 2016. Jeb Bush and his operatives are making phone calls to key Republican donors. It’s time.
The Obama irregulars, his young troops, give one hope. The 99% and the 47% outnumber the 1%. The next president of the US of A will probably be a woman—there are about twenty women in the U.S. Senate. Hey, who’s your mama now?