#Up Municipal Election 2022

[anistarrose]

Please don't tune out when you get to the non-partisan section of your ballot this November. First off, where state Supreme Court justices are elected, Republicans are trying their darndest to elect candidates who will destroy reproductive freedom, gut voting rights, and do everything in their power to give "contested" elections to Republicans. Contrast Wisconsin electing a justice in 2023 who helped rule two partisan gerrymanders unconstitutional, versus North Carolina electing a conservative majority in 2022, who upheld a racist voter ID law and a partisan gerrymander that liberal justices had previously struck down both of.

Second, local judicial offices will make infinitely more of an impact on your community than a divided state or federal legislature will. District and circuit courts, especially, are where criminalization of homelessness and poverty play out, and where electing a progressive judge with a commitment to criminal justice reform can make an immediate difference in people's lives.

It's a premier example of buying people time, and doing profound-short-term good, while we work to eventually change the system. You might not think there will be any such progressive justices running in your district, but you won't know unless you do your research. (More on "research" in a moment.)

The candidates you elect to your non-partisan city council will determine whether those laws criminalizing homelessness get passed, how many blank checks the police get to surveil and oppress, and whether lifesaving harm reduction programs, like needle exchanges and even fentanyl test strips, are legal in your municipality. Your non-partisan school board might need your vote to fend off Moms for Liberty candidates and their ilk, who want to ban every book with a queer person or acknowledgement of racism in it.

Of course, this begs the question — if these candidates are non-partisan, and often hyper-local, then how do I research them? There's so much less information and press about them, so how do I make an informed decision?

I'm not an expert, myself. But I do think/hope I have enough tips to consist of a useful conclusion to this post:

Plan ahead. If you vote in person, figure out what's on your ballot before you show up and get jumpscared by names you don't know. Find out what's on your ballot beforehand, and bring notes with you when you vote. Your city website should have a sample ballot, and if they drop the ball, go to Ballotpedia.

Ballotpedia in general, speaking of which. Candidates often answer Ballotpedia's interviews, and if you're lucky, you'll also get all the dirt on who's donating to their campaign.

Check endorsements. Usually candidates are very vocal about these on their websites. If local/state progressive leaders and a couple unions (not counting police unions lol) are endorsing a candidate, then that's not the end of my personal research process per se, but it usually speeds things up.

Check the back of the ballot. That's where non-partisan races usually bleed over to. This is the other reason why notes are helpful, because they can confirm you're not missing anything.

I've seen some misconceptions in the reblogs, so an addendum to my point about bringing notes on the candidates: I strongly suggest making those notes a physical list that you bring polling place with you. Many states do allow phones at the polling place, but several states explicitly don't — Nevada, Maryland, and Texas all ban phones, and that may not be an exhaustive list. There may also be states that allow individual city clerks to set policies.

You should also pause and think before you take a photo of your ballot, because even some states that don't ban phones still ban ballot photographs. But whether it's a photo, or just having your phone in general — in an environment as high-risk for voter suppression as the current one, you don't want even a little bit of ambiguity about your conduct. Physical notes are your friends.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Truthout:

It takes approximately 700,000 megawatt hours of electricity to power Chicago’s more than 400 municipal buildings every year. As of January 1, every single one of them — including 98 fire stations, two international airports, and two of the largest water treatment plants on the planet — is running on renewable energy, thanks largely to Illinois’ newest and largest solar farm. The move is projected to cut the carbon footprint of the country’s third-largest city by approximately 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year — the equivalent of taking 62,000 cars off the road, according to the city. Local decarbonization efforts like Chicago’s are taking on increasing significance as President-elect Donald Trump promises to reduce federal support for climate action. With the outgoing Biden administration doubling down on an international pledge to get the U.S. to net-zero emissions by 2050, cities, states, and private-sector players across the country will have to pick up the slack.

Chicago is one of several U.S. cities that are taking advantage of their bulk-buying power to spur new carbon-free energy development.

Chicago’s switch to renewable energy has been almost a decade in the making. The goal of sourcing the city’s power purely from carbon-free sources was first established by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2017. His successor, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, struck a 2022 deal with Constellation, an electricity supplier, to purchase the city’s energy from the developer Swift Current Energy beginning in 2025.

Swift Current began construction on the 3,800-acre, 593-megawatt solar farm in central Illinois as part of the same five-year, $422 million agreement. Straddling two counties in central Illinois, the Double Black Diamond Solar project is now the largest solar installation east of the Mississippi River. It can produce enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes, according to Swift Current’s vice president of origination, Caroline Mann.

Chicago alone has agreed to purchase approximately half the installation’s total output, which will cover about 70 percent of its municipal buildings’ electricity needs. City officials plan to cover the remaining 30 percent through the purchase of renewable energy credits.

“That’s really a feature and not a bug of our plan,” said Deputy Chief Sustainability Officer Jared Policicchio. He added that he hopes the city’s demand for 100 percent renewable energy will encourage additional clean energy development locally, albeit on a much smaller scale, which will create new sources of power that the city can then purchase directly, in lieu of credits. “Our goal over the next several years is that we reach a point where we’re not buying renewable energy credits.”

More than 700 other U.S. cities and towns have signed similar purchasing agreements since 2015, according to a 2022 study from the World Resources Institute. Only one city, Houston, has a larger renewable energy deal than Chicago, according to Matthew Popkin, the cities and communities U.S. program manager at Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit whose research focuses on decarbonization. However, he added, no other contract has added as much new renewable power to the grid as Chicago’s.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

City council in Kamloops, B.C., has moved to stop the mayor from serving as the city's official spokesperson. Reid Hamer-Jackson has repeatedly feuded with city councillors since he was elected mayor of the B.C. Interior city in 2022. His tenure has seen multiple investigations over an allegedly unsafe workplace, a defamation lawsuit filed by the mayor against a councillor, and the mayor's move to suspend the city's acting CAO in a bid to "change things up." The drama came to a head earlier this month when a provincially appointed municipal adviser issued a scathing report that criticized how Hamer-Jackson treated his council and city staff. It prompted a non-binding 8-1 vote that called on the mayor to resign. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[mariacallous]

In Tonya Williams’ Mississippi family, they all vote. But last year, Williams’ uncle mentioned offhandedly that he hadn’t voted in an election for several years. Shocked, she helped him make a plan.

“We don't miss elections. We will go. If you need a ride, we will go pick you up and take you to the polls,” says Williams.

Relentless, a progressive group focused on relational organizing—individuals harnessing their personal networks to get out the vote—relies on people like Williams to get family members to the ballot box.

Since the 2022 election, Relentless has championed relational organizing, and this year the group is launching a $10.8 million program that will, in part, help pay participants in the program a $200 stipend to get out the vote. The organizers of the program say they plan to build out a network of more than 2 million voters across seven battleground states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

“Relational [organizing] is a way for voters to receive correct, accurate information in this time of unprecedented disinformation, because people trust their friends,” Davis Leonard, chief executive officer at Relentless, told WIRED. “And so the best way to get people accurate information that they are going to trust is from a trusted messenger. And that's somebody that they already know.”

By paying people like Williams, who participated in last year’s Relentless program, the group hopes to reach disenfranchised voters by accessing their personal networks. Relentless is particularly eager to do it this year, because of the amount of election disinformation already present online.

“One of the things we are learning is that the extent to which I trust information that comes to me, is only enhanced by me trusting the person who gives me that information,” says Hahrie Han, a professor who studies collective action and grassroots movements at Johns Hopkins. “And the extent to which I'm willing to be persuaded by someone is also a function of how much I trust the messenger.”

In 2022, political texts increased 158 percent compared to the previous year, according to data compiled by the robocall-blocking app Robokiller. That year, Americans received 15 billion political texts. For many, the content of these texts and other communications is suspect: More than 70 percent of voters say they are concerned about misleading election information, according to a recent poll from the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Relational organizing is “actually communicating in a way that cuts through the noise in the blizzard of information and disinformation that voters are confronted with,” Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said in an interview on Tuesday. “And it's also helping people think through what their most fundamental values call them to do, even if it means voting for a candidate for a party that they haven't supported in the past.”

Relentless uses its own app, Rally, which allows program participants to log their contacts and interactions with their friends. Participants can post memes, text their friends, and throw in-person events over shared interests, as long as the contact is led by the voter and not a campaign. “I just think that everyone needs to know about voting, and this program helped us get it out,” says Williams. “We would meet at a location and then go in that community and get the opportunity to talk to people and see their feelings about voting in Mississippi.”

State parties, municipal elections, and even the Biden campaign have leaned into the idea in recent years.

Last November, the Biden campaign hired its own team of relational organizers to reach disaffected voters in states like Arizona. Around 60 percent of the people this team canvassed were not contacted in 2022, according to The Washington Post.

Other campaigns and political groups have adopted the strategy as well in recent years. When she worked for US senator Jon Ossoff’s campaign in Georgia in 2022, Leonard and her team first piloted their relational organizing program. They were able to build a network of 160,000 Georgia voters in less than a month. In 2020, the Pete Buttigieg campaign cited their work in recruiting volunteers to canvass their friends as one of the primary reasons the candidate won the Iowa caucus.

The GOP has also started to leverage relational organizing at scale. In April, The New York Times reported that Turning Point Action, the political arm of conservative youth group Turning Point USA, was building an app for volunteers to upload their contacts and contact them about elections.

Apps like Turning Point’s are a sign that Republicans are expanding the outreach they’ve traditionally done in churches and other faith-based institutions for decades. “We know that there's a big portion of the right that does a lot of outreach to faith institutions,” Han said. “They're doing relational organizing within the context of a network of people who are embedded within a shared institution.”

Groups like Relentless are betting that apolitical spaces like private Discord servers, group texts, and concerts could become the next frontier in political marketing.

“People know best how to talk to their friends,” says Leonard.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Jair Bolsonaro still shapes Brazil’s political right

Would-be successors are pandering to his fans

ON OCTOBER 6TH voters across Brazil will go to the polls to select more than 5,500 mayors and tens of thousands of city councillors (second-round run-offs will follow at the end of the month). The gigantic municipal vote provides a barometer of sorts for the next presidential election, which is due in 2026. Signs in the run-up are unsettling. Two years after Brazilians booted out Jair Bolsonaro, their inept and dangerous former president, right-wing politics remains in his thrall. An acolyte—or perhaps an imitator—could return Mr Bolsonaro’s movement to power.

For a while optimists had dared to hope that the bolsonaristas were a spent force. After losing the presidential election in 2022 Mr Bolsonaro spent a few months in Florida, moping around fried-chicken shops and occasionally posing for selfies with fans. On January 8th 2023—one week after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the left-wing current president, was inaugurated—supporterswho believed their idol’s claim that the election had been rigged ransacked Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace. Brazilians were appalled. And even some of the extremists, unimpressed by Mr Bolsonaro’s wimpy self-exile, ended up feeling let down.

In June 2023 Mr Bolsonaro was barred from holding public office for eight years for having used state television to cast doubt on the reliability of voting machines in advance of the election that he lost. His problems have only piled up since then. In March Brazilian police formally accused him of forging a covid vaccine certificate. In July they formally accused him of embezzlement in connection with gifts of jewellery and watches from Saudi Arabia. (Mr Bolsonaro denies both these accusations.) Numerous other probes are ongoing, including one examining how far Mr Bolsonaro played a role in stoking the riots on January 8th. The chances of him going to jail are rising.

Yet even if he is a much diminished figure, for the moment Mr Bolsonaro remains a kingmaker for the political right. His Liberal Party is the largest in Congress. This year he has proved able to attract tens of thousands—and sometimes hundreds of thousands—of fans to events, such as rallies where he criticises the Supreme Court, which is overseeing several of the investigations into him (he is pictured above at one such gathering, in September). For weeks he has been touring Brazil to drum up support for the mayoral candidates he endorsed. In 23 of Brazil’s 100 or so largest cities, candidates who have gained backing from Mr Bolsonaro are polling in first place. (By comparison, there are 16 races in which candidates supported by Lula, as the current president is known, are likely to win.)

Continue reading.

[beardedmrbean]

A mayor was shot dead at a restaurant in Mexico on Saturday, the regional prosecutor's office said, the latest politically related killing in the country plagued by violence and organized crime.

Guillermo Torres, 39, and his 14-year-old son were attacked at a restaurant in Morelia, the capital of western Michoacan state, the prosecutor's office said in a statement. His son survived.

He was elected mayor of Michoacan's Churumuco municipality as a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party in 2022, but recently quit the party and publically voiced sympathy for the ruling Morena, according to local media.

Torres is the latest politician to be murdered in Mexico in the run-up to the presidential elections on June 2, in which 20,000 local and federal positions and the entire Congress will be voted on.

Two mayoral candidates were murdered on February 26: Miguel Angel Zavala Reyes and Armando Perez Luna of the Morena and National Action Party, respectively.

Last month, prosecutors in southern Mexico said that mayoral candidate

Tomás Morales was killed in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero.

Between June 4, 2023, and March 26 this year, 50 people have been murdered in "episodes of electoral violence", 26 of them aiming for popular seats, according to a report by the Laboratorio Electoral think tank.

Mexico's drug cartels have often focused assassination attempts on mayors and mayoral candidates, in a bid to control local police or extort money from municipal governments.

Michoacan state, Mexico's main avocado-producing region, is the scene of constant fighting between organized crime groups, including the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Last month, a state police officer was reportedly decapitated and her two bodyguards were killed in a highway attack in Michoacan.

Also in March, three farmers were killed by a bomb apparently planted in Michoacan. That came just days after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador acknowledged that an improvised explosive device killed at least four soldiers in what he called a "trap" likely set by a cartel in Michoacan.

Killings and abductions are daily occurrences in Mexico, where nearly 450,000 people have been murdered since 2006 in a spiral of drug-related violence, according to official data.

[catdotjpeg]

[Image ID: A large group of people are gathered in protest on a sidewalk. A purple banner reading “Stop Cop City” is centered in the front of the photo. End ID.] 

A broad coalition of groups in Atlanta has launched a referendum to give voters a chance to say whether they want the controversial police and fire department training center known as “Cop City” built in a forest south-east of the city.

The effort requires organizers to collect about 70,000 signatures from Atlanta registered voters in 60 days. Then the question of the city canceling its agreement with the Atlanta Police Foundation to build the $90m center can be added to municipal election ballots in November.

The push comes after an estimated thousand people who showed up at City Hall on 5 June proved insufficient to stop Atlanta’s city council from approving about $67m for Cop City. Meanwhile, machines have already begun clear-cutting trees on the project’s 171-acre footprint in South River Forest.

The referendum faces what one organizer called “an atmosphere of repression” – including two activists being charged with felonies last week while putting up fliers, bringing total arrests since December to 50.

The largest group of arrests, on 5 March in a public park in the forest near where the project is planned, was followed by local government closing the park, in effect shutting off tree-sitting protests by “forest defenders” that had gone on for more than a year.

“We’re at the stage where they’ve pushed people out of the forest, they’ve arrested people … they’ve fenced off the forest, they’ve even begun clear-cutting,” said Kamau Franklin, founder of local group Community Movement Builders. “We’re at the stage where the most direct, legal mechanism to stop this project is by referendum.” [...]

...the movement opposing the project has drawn a wide range of people locally, nationally and internationally who oppose police militarization, urban forest destruction amid climate change and environmental racism. Most residents in neighborhoods surrounding the forest are Black.

Most of the organizations driving the referendum are also Black-led, including the regional chapter of Working Families Power, Black Voters Matter and the NAACP. Officials from the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, down to the mayor have consistently referred to opposition against the center as the work of white “outsiders”.

“That narrative is false,” said Britney Whaley, regional director of Working Families Power. “This has been national, but it’s also been community-grown for a few years now.”

Ashley Dixon, an Atlanta-area organizer, has led canvassing efforts to inform neighborhoods around South River Forest about the center for nearly a year. Her team has spoken to more than a thousand people. About 80% opposed the project once they knew about it, she said.

The only academic poll on the issue to date, from Atlanta’s Emory University, showed slightly more Black respondents opposed the project than supported it, with the opposite being true for whites. Atlanta’s population is 48% Black.

The idea for the referendum came from one that succeeded in stopping a spaceport from being built in coastal Georgia, said Will Harlan, founder of Forest Keeper, a national forest conservation organization. “To me, Cop City is the most important issue in conservation in the south-east,” Harlan said. “A referendum is the smartest, most democratic solution … [and] a way to find resolution and closure.”

Although the 2022 spaceport referendum affected a county of only 55,000 people, similarities between the two controversies point to the role voters can play when other efforts fall short.

In that case, local officials “dug their heels in” and stopped responding to press requests or providing transparent information to the public, said Megan Desrosiers, who led the referendum. In the case of Cop City, the Atlanta Police Foundation has stopped answering press requests for at least a year, and the city of Atlanta was recently discovered to be understating the project’s cost to taxpayers by about $36m.

The project is planned on land the city owns that is located in neighboring DeKalb county. Because of Atlanta’s ownership, only Atlanta voters can participate in the referendum. [...]

Organizers of the Cop City referendum pointed to the state’s heavy-handed approach to protesters as a primary concern. There have been 42 domestic terrorism charges to date. A bail and legal defense fund’s members were also arrested and the state added fundraising to its criminal description of the training center’s opposition.

In that context, it took about a dozen attempts at finding a legally required fiscal sponsor for the referendum, which may need as much as $3.5m to reach success, said spokesperson Paul Glaze.

Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter – one of two organizations that agreed to take the sponsorship role – said the recent Atlanta Solidarity Fund arrests were done “to send a message, in hopes it would have a chilling effect. We’re not naive about what the threats are – but we believe our community cares about this issue.”

-- From “Activists push for referendum to put ‘Cop City’ on ballot in Atlanta” by Timothy Pratt for The Guardian, 16 Jun 2023 

[nicklloydnow]

“Donald trump should have seen it coming. He arrived on May 25th at the Libertarian Party’s national convention in Washington, DC, hoping to expand his support, but the crowd mostly responded with boos. Attendees lacked enthusiasm for a protectionist who added $8.4trn to America’s national debt. They also spent the weekend squabbling among themselves. After losing presidential races for more than half a century, the Libertarian Party is facing an identity crisis.

(…)

The most intense divisions are about strategy. The hardline Mises Caucus (named after Ludwig von Mises, a pro-market Austrian economist) has dominated the party’s leadership since 2022 and adopted populist rhetoric. The group was responsible for inviting Mr Trump, as well as Robert F. Kennedy junior, an independent candidate, to speak at the convention. The debate about whether to invite the outside candidates at times seemed more heated than the Libertarians’ own presidential-nomination fight. On May 24th, the convention’s first day, one attendee yelled into the microphone, “I would like to propose that we go tell Donald Trump to go fuck himself!” The crowd cheered.

“I would rather us focus on the Libertarian candidates,” said Jim Fulner, from the Radical Caucus. “I’m fearful that come later this summer, when I’m working the county fair, someone will say, ‘Oh, Libertarians, you guys are the Donald Trump people.’” Nick Apostolopoulos, from California, welcomed the attention Mr Trump’s speech brought—and said his presence proved “this party matters, and that they have to try and appeal to this voting bloc.”

Few believed that Mr Trump won much support. He promised to appoint a Libertarian to his cabinet and commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, who is serving life in prison after founding the dark-web equivalent of Amazon for illegal drugs. The crowd responded positively to Mr Trump’s nod to a Libertarian cause célèbre, but booed after he asked them to choose him as the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee. Mr Trump hit back, “If you want to lose, don’t do that. Keep getting your 3% every four years.”

Mr Kennedy was more disciplined, tailoring his speech to the crowd by highlighting his opposition to covid lockdowns. Even so he received a cool reception. Libertarians want a candidate who will promise to abolish, not reform, government agencies.

The reality is that Libertarians are more interested in positions than personalities. The exception may be the broad admiration for Ron Paul, a retired Republican congressman whom many cite as their lodestar. But at 88 Mr Paul has achieved the difficult feat of being considered too old to plausibly run for president.

(…)

But the party is far from unified. Given the choice between Mr Oliver and “none of the above”, more than a third of the delegates preferred no one. It remains uncertain whether the party’s candidate will appear on the ballot in all 50 states, as several previous nominees have. If the Libertarian candidate has any influence on the presidential election this year, it will be as a spoiler in a close-run swing state.

Mr Oliver’s victory marked a rare defeat for the Mises Caucus. But the re-election of Angela McArdle, a Mises Caucus member, as the national party chairperson is perhaps more important to the future of the movement. Ms McArdle faced criticism for her decision to invite outside candidates to speak. Controversy over the Mises Caucus had led several state delegations to split, and much of the convention’s floor time was eaten up over fights about whom to recognise. The rise of the Mises wing of the party has led more pragmatically minded members to largely give up on the project of advancing libertarian ideas by building a political party.

The party struggles on big stages, such as in presidential, gubernatorial or Senate contests. Yet it occasionally wins municipal elections, leaving some to wonder whether national activism is pointless or even counter-productive. Why would Libertarians invest time in a hopeless race for president when they could direct their energy to fighting a local sales tax or antiquated laws restricting alcohol sales?

(…)

The party faithful believe that national and local activism are not mutually exclusive. Elijah Gizzarelli won fewer than 3,000 votes when he ran for governor of Rhode Island as a Libertarian two years ago, but he argues that the party has a long record of success—so long as the definition of success expands beyond winning elections. He says the party succeeds by shifting the “Overton window”, or the spectrum of political ideas that are generally considered acceptable.”

[theculturedmarxist]

In 2022 and early 2023, a highly publicized petition campaign sought to recall New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell. Louisiana law sets high hurdles for recall initiatives; in a jurisdiction the size of New Orleans, triggering the process requires valid signatures from twenty percent of registered voters on a petition requesting a recall election, and the effort ultimately failed. Nevertheless, the campaign is worth reflecting on for three reasons.

First, it at least bears a strong family resemblance to right-wing Republican attacks on Democrat-governed cities that recently have escalated from inflammatory rhetoric to concerted attempts to disempower, by extraordinary means, jurisdictions Democrats represent. To that extent, the Cantrell recall campaign is of a piece with the many Republican efforts at voter suppression around the country and the right’s broader and more openly authoritarian assault on democratic institutions at every level of government about which Thomas Byrne Edsall sounded the alarm in the New York Times.1 Second, the NOLATOYA campaign illustrates how race can function as a condensation symbol, a shorthand, diffuse, even tacit component of a discourse of political mobilization while not necessarily defining the mobilization’s policy objectives. Third, the character of the campaign, especially in light of the larger tendency of which it may be an instance, and the opposition’s responses also demonstrate the inadequacy of race-reductionist understandings even of the racialist element that helped drive it and the other reactionary initiatives, such as the Mississippi legislature’s move to undercut the authority of Jackson’s elected government.

The recall’s sponsors sought to stoke and take advantage of anxieties about street crime—most conspicuously the waves of porch piracy, carjackings, and homicides that spiked in New Orleans as in many cities during and after the Coronavirus pandemic and lockdown—as well as the prodigiously bad, borderline dangerous condition of municipal roads and streets, a seemingly inexplicable and chronically unresolved breakdown of the city’s privatized sanitation pick-up operation, and the at best inconsistent quality of other public services.2 The campaign also played on hoary, racially inflected tropes such as generic allegations of incompetence and evocations of charges of immoral and “uppity” behavior, for example, in attacks on Cantrell for allegedly having an affair with a police officer on her detail, living at least part-time in a municipally owned luxury apartment on Jackson Square in the heart of the Vieux Carré, and flying first class at the city’s expense on international trade junkets.3 Recall supporters eventually leveled inflammatory allegations of incompetence, hostility to law enforcement, or corruption against the black, recently elected Orleans Parish District Attorney and unspecified judges and suggested that subsequent recall initiatives should target them as well.

The campaign’s titular co-chairs were black: one, Belden “Noonie Man” Batiste, was a perennial candidate for electoral office who received five percent of the vote in the 2021 mayoral primary that Cantrell won with nearly sixty-five percent; the other, Eileen Carter, is a freelance “strategy consultant” who had been a first-term Cantrell administration appointee.4 Its sources of financial backing remained shadowy for months, but disclosures eventually confirmed that more than ninety percent of the campaign’s funding came from a single white developer and hospitality industry operative, Richard Farrell, who, in addition to having contributed to Cantrell in the past, had been one of Louisiana’s largest donors to the 2020 Trump presidential campaign.5 Opponents of the recall argued that the fact that the initiative was funded almost entirely by a Trump mega-donor and its organizers’ attempt to purge the voter rolls in order to reduce the total number of signatures needed to force a new election6 indicated a more insidious objective, that the campaign was a ploy to advance the Republicans’ broader agenda of suppressing black voting and to discredit black officials.7

After much hype, the campaign failed abysmally. Certification of the petitions confirmed both that organizers had fallen far short of the minimum signature threshold required to spur a recall election and that support was sharply skewed racially. The latter was no surprise.8 The campaign originated in one of the wealthiest, whitest, and most Republican-leaning neighborhoods in the city. And, as I have indicated, proponents’ rhetoric—notwithstanding their insistence that the initiative had broad support across the city—traded in racialized imagery of feral criminality, and it too easily veered toward hyperbolic denunciation of the mayor’s purported moral degeneracy and an animus that seemed far out of proportion to her actual or alleged transgressions, which in any event hardly seemed to warrant the extraordinary effort of a recall, especially because Cantrell was term-limited and ineligible to pursue re-election in 2025. The extent to which recall advocates’ demonization of her drifted over into attacks on other black public officials also suggested a racial dimension to the campaign that no doubt made many black voters wary.

A racial explanation of the recall initiative offers benefits of familiarity. It fits into well-worn grooves of racial interest-group politics on both sides. It permits committed supporters of the recall to dismiss their effort’s failure as the result of blacks’ irresponsible racial-group defensiveness to the point of fraudulence and conspiracy, and it enables opponents to dismiss grievances against Cantrell’s mayoralty by attributing them to an effectively primordial white racism linked via historical allegory to the Jim Crow era.9 So, when journalists Jeff Adelson and Matt Sledge estimated that, although fifty-four percent of registered voters in Orleans Parish are black and thirty-six percent are white, seventy-six percent of the petition’s signers were white and just over fifteen percent were black, the finding was easily assimilable to a conventional “blacks say tomayto/whites say tomahto” racial narrative. The authors’ punchy inference that “White voters were more than seven times more likely to have signed the petition than a Black voter” reinforces that view.

By Adelson and Sledge’s calculation, more than 23,000 white voters signed the recall petition compared with roughly 7,000 blacks. At first blush, that stark difference seems to support a racial interpretation of the initiative. Yet that calculation also means that more than 57,000 white voters, for whatever reasons, did not sign it. That is, roughly two and a half times more white Orleans Parish voters did not sign the recall petition than did. One might wonder, therefore, why we should see support for the recall as the “white” position. Signers clustered disproportionately in the most affluent areas citywide, and those least likely to sign were concentrated in the city’s poorest areas. As Adelson and Sledge also note, there are many reasons one might not have signed the petition. Those could have ranged from explicit opposition to the initiative; skepticism about its motives, likelihood of success, or its impact if successful; absence of sufficient concern with the issue to seek to sign on; or other reasons entirely. That range would apply to the seventy percent of white voters who did not sign as well as the nearly ninety-five percent of black voters who did not. From that perspective, “race” is in this instance less an explanation than an alternative to one.

Organizers and supporters of the recall no doubt also had various motives and objectives, and those may have evolved with the campaign itself. Batiste and Carter are political opportunists and, as a badly defeated opponent and a former staffer, may harbor idiosyncratic personal grievances against Cantrell; they also cannot be reduced merely to race traitors or dupes not least because roughly 7,000 more black voters signed onto the recall petition. Farrell and the handful of other Republican large donors who sustained the initiative likely had varying long- and short-game objectives, from weakening Cantrell’s mayoralty to payback for the city’s aggressive pandemic response, which met with disgruntlement and opposition from hospitality industry operators, to fomenting demoralization and antagonism toward municipal government or government in general, to enhancing individual and organizational leverage in mundane partisan politics, including simply reinforcing the knee-jerk partisan divide. And, even if not in the minds of initiators all along, voter suppression in Orleans Parish may have become an unanticipated benefit along the way.

Other enthusiasts no doubt acted from a mélange of motives. Demands for “accountability” and “transparency,” neoliberal shibboleths that only seem to convey specific meanings, stood in for causal arguments tying conditions in the city that have generated frustration, anxiety, or fear to claims about Cantrell’s character. Those Orwellian catchwords of a larger program of de-democratization10 overlap the often allusively racialized discourse in which Cantrell, black officialdom, unresponsive, purportedly inept and corrupt government, uncontrolled criminality, and intensifying insecurity and social breakdown all signify one another as a singular, though amorphous, target of resentment. The recall campaign condensed frustrations and anxieties into a politics of scapegoating that fixates all those vague or inchoate concerns onto a malevolent, alien entity that exists to thwart or destroy an equally vague and fluid “us.” And that entity is partly racialized because race is a discourse of scapegoating.

But race is not the only basis for scapegoating. As I indicate elsewhere, “the MAGA fantasy of ‘the pedophile Democratic elite’ today provides a scapegoat no one might reasonably defend and thus facilitates the misdirection that is always central to a politics of scapegoating, construction of the fantasy of the ‘Jew/Jew-Bolshevik-Jew banker’ and cosmopolite/Jew and Jew/Slav subhuman did the same for Hitler’s National Socialism.”11 The scapegoat is an evanescent presence, created through moral panic and just-so stories and projected onto targeted individuals or populations posited as the embodied cause of the conditions generating fear and anxiety. As an instrument of political action, scapegoating’s objective is to fashion a large popular constituency defined by perceived threat from and opposition to a demonized other, a constituency that then can be mobilized against policies and political agendas activists identify with the evil other and its nefarious designs—without having to address those policies and agendas on their merits.

A Facebook post a colleague shared from a relative long since lost to the QAnon/MAGA world exemplifies the chain of associations undergirding that strain of conspiratorial thinking and its scapegoating politics: “It’s time for Americans to stop hiding behind the democracy dupe that has been used as an opiate to extort American wages to wage war against any country that said no to Rothschild’s money changing loanshark wannabe satan’s cult.” My colleague underscored that the antisemitism apparent in that post was a late-life graft onto the relative’s political views; neither Jews nor Jewishness had any presence in the circumstances of their upbringing, neither within their family nor the broader demographic environment. Antisemitism, that is, can function, at least for a time, as an item on a checklist that signals belonging in the elect of combatants against the malevolent grand conspiracy as much as or more than it expresses a committed bigotry against Jews or Judaism.

It is understandable that the partly racialized recall campaign would provoke a least-common-denominator objection that it was a ploy to attack black, or black female, political leadership. It no doubt was, at least as an easy first pass at low-hanging fruit in mobilizing support. However, complaint that the recall effort was racially motivated missed the point—or took the bait. Scapegoating is fundamentally about misdirection, like a pickpocket’s dodge. A politics based on scapegoating is especially attractive to proponents of anti-popular, inegalitarian agendas who might otherwise be unable to elicit broad support for programs and initiatives that are anti-democratic or facilitate regressive redistribution.12 And the forces driving the Cantrell recall campaign fit that profile.

That it was backed by significant right-wing donors yet failed so badly raises a possibility that the recall campaign may never have been serious as an attempt to remove Cantrell from office.13 If their prattle about accountability, transparency, and responsibility to taxpayers were genuine, organizers should have admitted the failure and not bothered to submit their petitions and thereby avoided the administrative burdens of the certification process—unless forcing that extraordinary undertaking were part of a Potemkin effort to simulate a serious recall campaign. Instead, well after it should have recognized and acknowledged failure, the campaign organization attempted to keep recall chatter in the news cycle by means of coyness and dissimulation regarding the status of their effort and continued to manufacture supposed Cantrell outrages, no matter how dubious or picayune, to feed the fires of salacious exposé of the “you won’t believe what she’s doing now!” variety. When authorities confirmed the magnitude of the failure, including evidence of thousands of obviously bogus signatures nonetheless submitted, organizers fell back on the standard MAGA-era canard in the face of defeat—challenging the credibility of the officials designated by law to determine the signatures��� validity. Notwithstanding the complex motives and expectations of individual supporters, all this further suggests that the recall initiative at one level was suspiciously consistent with the multifarious assaults on democratic government that right-wing militants have been pursuing concertedly around the country since at least 2020.

That larger, more insidious effort and its objectives—which boil down to elimination of avenues for expression of popular democratic oversight in service to consolidation of unmediated capitalist class power14—constitute the gravest danger that confronts us. And centering on the racial dimension of stratagems like the Cantrell recall plays into the hands of the architects of that agenda and the scapegoating politics on which they depend by focusing exclusively on an aspect of the tactic and not the goal. From the perspective of that greater danger, whether the recall effort was motivated by racism is quite beside the point. The same applies to any of the many other racially inflected, de-democratizing initiatives the right wing has been pushing. With or without conscious intent, and no matter what shockingly ugly and frightening expressions it may take rhetorically, the racial dimension of the right wing’s not-so-stealth offensive is a smokescreen. The pedophile cannibals, predatory transgender subversives, and proponents of abortion on demand up to birth join familiar significations attached to blacks and a generically threatening nonwhite other in melding a singular, interchangeable, even contradictory—the Jew as banker and Bolshevik—phantasmagorical enemy.

An important takeaway from the nature of this threat is that a race-first politics is not capable of responding effectively to it. Race reductionism fails intellectually and is counterproductive politically because its assumption that race/racism is transhistorical and its corresponding demand that we understand the connection between race and politics in contemporary life through analogy with the segregation era or slavery do not equip us to grasp the specificities of the current moment, including the historically specific dangers that face us. This is not a new limitation. That anachronistic orientation underwrote badly inaccurate prognostications about the likely political impact of changing racial demography in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and was totally ineffective for mounting challenges to charterization of the Orleans Parish school system and the destruction of public housing in the midst of the city’s greatest shortage of affordable housing.15 Race-reductionist interpretation could specify neither the mechanisms nor the concatenation of political forces that impelled either of those regressive programs. Race reductionists seemed to assume that defining those interventions, as well as the regressive real estate practices commonly known as gentrification and the problems of hyper-policing, as racist would call forth some sort of remedial response.16 It did not.

Similarly, just as assertion that mass incarceration is the “New Jim Crow” does not help us understand or respond to the complex political-economic or ideological forces that have produced mass incarceration,17 criticism of contemporary voter suppression efforts by tying them to those at the end of the nineteenth century does not help us specify the nature of the threat, the objectives to which it is linked, or approaches to countering it. Regarding voter suppression and disfranchisement, even in the late nineteenth century, while a) its point was openly and explicitly to disfranchise blacks and b) there is little reason to doubt the sincerity of the commitments to white supremacy expressed by disfranchisement’s architects, disfranchising blacks for the sake of doing so was not the point either; neither was imposing codified racial subordination an end in itself.

The racial dimension of the reactionary campaign then was also a smokescreen that helped to facilitate assertion of ruling class power after the defeat of the Populist insurgency by attacking blacks as a scapegoat, a misdirection from the Democrat planter-merchant-capitalist elites’ sharply class-skewed agenda, including codified racial segregation, which they could not fully impose until the electorate had been “purified.” From the architects’ perspective, the problem with blacks’ voting was ultimately that they did not reliably vote Democrat. If black voters could have been counted on to vote for the Democrat agenda, committed white supremacy likely would have found expression in areas other than suffrage. Indeed, one facet of Bookerite accommodationist politics at the time—articulated by, among others, novelist Sutton Griggs—was that black Americans’ reflexive support of Republicans had forced Democrats to resort to disfranchisement and that, if principled Democrats felt they could count on black votes, they wouldn’t need to pursue such measures.18 Among advocates of voter suppression today, black voting is in part a metonym for a composite scapegoat that includes Democratic or “liberal” or “woke” voters, all of whom, like the liberal pedophile cannibals, are characterizable as not “real Americans” and whose voting is therefore fraudulent by definition. And propagandists meld the images together in service of deflecting attention from the right’s regressive policy agenda.19

It is instructive that at the same time contemporary rightists commonly tout evidence of support from blacks and Hispanics. Of course, that move is largely a cynical ploy—the lie, straight from the fascist agitator’s handbook, accompanied by a knowing wink to the faithful—to deflect criticism of their obvious racial scapegoating. However, knee-jerk dismissals of that reaction as disingenuous or of black and Hispanic supporters as inauthentic, dupes, or sellouts are problematic. There is certainly no shortage of malicious racism within the right wing, but black and Latino supporters of right-wing politics cannot all be dismissed as the equivalent of cash-and-carry minstrel hustlers like Diamond & Silk or cash-and-carry lunatics like Ben Carson and Clarence Thomas, just as the 7,000 blacks who signed the Cantrell recall petition cannot be dismissed as dupes of the NOLATOYA campaigners. While the percentages remained relatively small, increases in black and Hispanic votes for Trump between 2016 and 2020 indicate that those voters see more in the faux populist appeal than racism or white supremacy.20

What is true of those black and brown voters who are unlikely to see themselves as racists21 is no doubt also true for some percentage of whites who gravitate toward the reactionary right’s siren song.22 I do not mean to suggest that we should pander to the reactionary expressions around which the right has sought to mobilize those people. Nevertheless, I do want to stress that what makes many of them susceptible to that ugly politics is a reasonable sense that Democratic liberalism has offered them little for a half century. Obama promised transcendence and deliverance, based on evanescent imagery deriving largely from his race. His failure to live up to the “hope” he promoted set the stage for an equal and opposite reaction.

Most of all, race-reductionist explanations and simplistic historical analogies are counterproductive as a politics because they fail to provide a basis for challenging the looming authoritarian threat. I have asked supporters of reparations politics for more than twenty years how they imagine forming a political coalition broad enough to prevail on that objective in a majoritarian democracy.23 To date, the question has never received a response other than some version of the non sequitur “don’t you agree that black people deserve compensation?” or sophistries like the flippant assertion that abolition and the civil rights movement did not have a chance to win until they did.24 Recently, a questioner from the audience, someone with whom I have had a running exchange over many years regarding racism’s primacy as a political force, catechized me at a panel at Columbia University [beginning at 1:01:48] for my views on the Mississippi legislature’s attacks on the city of Jackson. There was no specific question; the intervention was a prompt for me to acknowledge that the Jackson case is evidence of racism’s independent power. That interaction captures a crucial problem with race reductionism as a politics. It centers on exposé and moralistic accusation.

But what would happen if we were to accept as common sense the conviction of advocates of race-reductionist politics that “racism” is the source of the various inequalities and injustices that affect us—including the anti-democratic travesties being perpetrated on Jackson’s residents and elected officials? What policy interventions would follow? And how would they be realized? Those questions do not arise because the point of this politics is not to transform social relations but to secure the social position of those who purport to speak on behalf of an undifferentiated black population. Insofar as it is a politics at all, it is an interest-group arrangement in which Racial Spokespersons propound as “racial” perspectives points of view that harmonize with Democratic neoliberalism. For the umpteenth time,25 a politics focused on identifying group-level disparities within the current regime of capitalist inequality is predicated logically, but most of all materially, on not challenging that regime but equalizing “group” differences within it. That anti-disparitarian politics hews to neoliberalism’s egalitarian ideal of equal access to competition for a steadily shrinking pool of opportunities for a secure life.26 And, as has been explicit since at least 2015, when the Bernie Sanders campaign pushed a more social-democratic approach toward the center stage of American political debate, anti-disparitarian “leftism” is a militant ideological force defending neoliberalism’s logic against downwardly redistributive threats, to the extent of denouncing calls for expanding the sphere of universal public goods as irresponsible and castigating appeals to working-class interests as racist.

Decades of race reductionist assertion and resort to history as allegory in lieu of empirical argument and clear political strategy27 have propagated another discourse of misdirection. Insistence that any inequality or injustice affecting black people must be understood as resultant from a generic and transhistorical racism, for instance, shifts attention away from the current sources of inequality in capitalist political economy for reductionist antiracists just as culture war rhetoric does for the right. As the genesis of the “racial wealth gap” has shown, the premise that slavery and Jim Crow continue to shape all black people’s lives and forge a fundamentally common condition of suffering and common destiny has underwritten a racial trickledown policy response that is a class politics dressed up as a racial-group politics.28 The sleight-of-hand that makes capitalist class dynamics disappear into a narrative of unremitting, demonic White Supremacy does the work for Democratic neoliberals, of whatever color or gender, that the pedophile cannibal bugbear does for the reactionary right. Thus race reductionism can present making rich black people richer and narrowing the “wealth gap” between them and their white counterparts as a strategy for pursuit of justice for all black people or attack social-democratic policy proposals as somehow not relevant to blacks and indeed abetting white racists, or attempt to whistle past the fact that the Racial Reckoning produced by the Summer of George Floyd culminated most conspicuously in a $100 million gift from Jeff Bezos to Van Jones and a flood of nearly $2 billion of corporate money into various racial justice advocacy organizations.

The rise of the authoritarian threat should raise the stakes of the moment to a point at which we recognize that this antiracist politics has no agenda for winning significant reforms, much less a strategy for social transformation, that it is not only incapable of anchoring a challenge to the peril that faces us but is fundamentally not interested in doing so. There seems to be a startling myopia underlying this politics and the strata whose interests it articulates—unless, of course, its only point is to secure what Kenneth Warren characterizes as “managerial authority over the nation’s Negro problem,”29 no matter what regime is in power. In that case, the Judenrat is in effect its model, and therefore all bets are off.

[portlandpotholesandpride]

The Stakeholders

The housing crisis in America, particularly in cities like Portland, involves a wide array of stakeholders with varying interests and perspectives. Understanding who these stakeholders are, what they stand to gain or lose, and their positions on the issue is crucial to comprehending the complex web of interests surrounding houselessness and the housing crisis. The most directly impacted stakeholders are those experiencing houselessness. They, along with advocacy organizations such as the National Coalition for the Homeless and local homeless shelters, advocate for systemic change, affordable housing, and improved services. Municipal governments, like the City of Portland, and federal agencies play a significant role in addressing houselessness. Their positions vary and some may contradict, such as, providing funding for shelters and support services to implementing policies such as anti-camping ordinances. Real estate developers and property owners often have a financial interest in the housing market. High property values and rental rates can benefit them and drive rent prices up, though some may support affordable housing initiatives. Local businesses may have concerns about the impact of houselessness on commercial areas and tourism, which can influence their business thus their perspectives on the issue. The broader community holds diverse views on houselessness, ranging from compassion and support to frustration and opposition. Public opinion can often affect government policies and funding. Newspapers, magazines, and online media outlets contribute to the public discourse by reporting on the issue, shaping public opinion, and influencing policy debates (VanderHart 2022). Each of these stakeholders has distinct positions on the problem. For instance, while advocacy groups and unhoused individuals call for more affordable housing and support services, property developers may resist regulations that could affect their profits. Government agencies aim to strike a balance between addressing houselessness and addressing other public priorities. Media outlets often highlight the human aspects of the crisis, while businesses may emphasize economic concerns.

Works Cited

VanderHart, D. (2022, May 13). Everybody hates Portland: The city’s compounding crises are an X-factor this year. opb. https://www.opb.org/article/2022/05/13/portland-oregon-crime-homelessness-gloom-election-politics/

[rosesarereds-posts]

"Move Mabini; A Story of Progress"

The municipality of Mabini was created on May 28, 1953 by the virtue of Executive Order No. 596 of President Elpidio Quirino. Mabini is formerly known as Cuambog that is named after a tree species of the family Dilleniaceae then renamed as Doña Alicia after former President's wife Alicia Syquia was killed. It was later renamed in honor of the revolutionary leader Apolinario Mabini in 1954. Mabini is a coastal municipality in the province of Davao de Oro. Mabini is subdivided into 11 barangays which are the Cadunan, Pindasan, Cuambog, Tagnanan, Anitapan, Cabuyuan, Del Pilar, Libodon, Golden Valley, Pangibiran and San Antonio.

Mabini is a 2nd-class municipality in the province of Davao de Oro. In the last years, by the lead of the former mayor Reynaldo Dayanghirang we have seen the continuous progress and development of Mabini. From the infrastructure projects like the four infrastructure project for the two Sitioa Manasa and Mascareg consisting of a fully furnished Brgy. Health Center, Installation of Riprap, Steel Bridge and Sitil Electricification. An additional two infrastructure project for Brgy. Anitapan the solar street lights and multi-purpose building and road projects. However, last May 9, 2022 Mayor Dayanghiranf lost the position to Mayor Emerson Luego. Mayor Emerson Luego won the People's heart by his campaign and tagline "Move Mabini". Mayor Emerson or most known as Mayor "MM" started the fulfill his campaigns and made his move to develop and make a much better municipality.

Since Mayor Emerson Luego was elected as mayor of the Municipality of Mabini, there have been improvements in the municipality. Mayor Emerson has implemented numerous projects to improve the quality of life of the people living in Mabini. Mayor Emerson had built few establishments to improve the municipality's economy like building a tourist spot, the "Mabini Mountain Ridge" or the "Bikers Camp" the Food Hub and Snack Hub that made people from other municipalities go to Mabini. There also have been a series of graveling work and road repairs, road concreting and revetment/flood control project to the remote areas and barangays who needs it making it easier for the people living there. Many programs were made to preserve the Municipality's environment. At September 21, 2022 the Local Government of Mabini led by Mayor Emerson and DENR Davao de Oro spearheaded the clean up drive at densely populated Brgy. Cuambog and joined the International Coastal Clean up in Mabini Protected Landscape and Seascape. During " Bisita Kadagatan" on July 23, 2022, Mayor Emerson vowed to actively support programs, projects and policies that would lead to the betterment of the protected areas in Mabini. The municipality also participated in some tree planting activities. In terms of agriculture, the Municipal Agriculture Office conducted basic practices and services which Tilapia/ Livestock Seminar, Vegetable Distribution, and BCIC Farmer Insurance. There has been a great progress on people's well-being and welfare as Mayor Emerson creates programs that would be a great help for citizens like "Oplan Ligtas sa Pamayanan" a program by Bureau of Fire Protection, Pre-marriage Orientation, Counseling Seminar, Medical Mission Activities, Housing Programs and many more.

We really can see the increasing progress of Mabini from the newly built municipal office and plaza to the improved infrastructures, better access to education, better access to health services, and clean water. Due to the programs, campaigns, projects, and efforts of the people involved it successfully improved the people's lives and have increased the development and progress of the municipality.

[isen4mlp]

What's a Municipal Light Plant (MLP)?

Massachusetts law, Chapter 164, outlines what a Municipal Light Plant is, how to set one up, and how it works. The basic idea is to set up a body connected to the town, but responsive to its rate payers rather than the town's citizens, to provide municipal services - gas, electricity, cable TV, Internet connections.

In theory, the MLP could offer municipal gas and electric services, as well as cable TV and telephone service. But practically, Falmouth’s light plant was formed to do one thing—to build the town-wide fiber optic network envisioned by its advocates.

Following Chapter 164, Falmouth Town meeting established Falmouth's MLP in two consecutive town meetings (November 2021 and May 2022) by votes of 93 and 88 percent. Subsequently, Falmouth's voters elected a five-member MLP in May, 2023.

Chapter 164 gives the MLP broad authority to make agreements and alliances to ensure network success. But it is not clear from the law whether an MLP has a role to play in a privately-owned network, like the one Boundless is now proposing. Nor does the law prohibit an MLP role in a private deal. For this reason, the Acting Chairman of the MLP, Ed Swartz, appeared before the Select Board on March 25, 2024, to ask how to proceed. The Select Board gave the MLP the go-ahead to continue discusssions with Boundless, and to come back to the Select Board with more information.

At the upcoming town election, on May 21, 2024, there are three vacant seats on the MLP. One seat was due to Chairman Sam Patterson's retirement from politics. Another seat was a one-year seat, and its occupant, Scott Koerner, decided not to run. A third seat belongs to Courtney Bird, one of the original visionaries of Falmouth's network, who is running for re-election.

For more info, see my Falmouth Enterprise, Op-ed, Why Falmouth's Network Needs A Municipal Light Board, from April 14, 2023. And, of course, the text of MGL Chapter 164 is dispositive.

[mariacallous]

Last week, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency took the dramatic step of classifying the Saxony state branch of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as a threat to democracy—a potential first step towards banning it outright as unconstitutional. “There can be no doubt about the extreme right orientation of this party,” declared Dirk-Martin Christian, president of Saxony’s State Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

Although Germany has, in the past, exercised constitutional powers in the name of domestic security to rein in hardcore far-right (and radical leftist) forces, the objects of censure were marginal neo-Nazi parties and associations that had no chance of coming to power—even at the municipal level or in coalition governments. The AfD is a different story. Opinion polls show the AfD as the strongest party by far today in eastern Germany; riding a powerful wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, it has also notched record tallies in western German state elections and is poised to win the most votes next year in the country’s eastern half. It could conceivably wield executive power, should conservatives—such as the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) or the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP)—consider it in their interests to treat the far-right party as a legitimate expression of popular will.

Even though both parties say they rule it out, the option is not so far-fetched: Across the EU, conservative parties have turned far-right parties into governing coalition partners, including in Austria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Slovakia, and elsewhere. In the German state of Thuringia, the CDU, FDP, and AfD, all in the opposition but with a majority between them, now team up occasionally to bypass the leftist minority government.

Suddenly, Germans are seeing images of the political chaos of the interwar Weimar Republic flash before their eyes—the republic that ended ignominiously in the Nazi party’s victory and Adolf Hitler’s takeover in 1933.

This is why the agency’s ruling and a possible injunction against the AfD—the latter a highly controversial and risky option that is nevertheless gaining backers across Germany’s political spectrum—has observers questioning whether the Europe-wide surge of the far right can be stopped or slowed by legal measures.

The strategies pursued by the political class haven’t done the job thus far—on the contrary, the AfD is booming—and there’s a long history of banning extremist parties and associations in Europe, not least in Germany. Since mid-2022, both Germany and France arrested members of far-right extremist organizations involved in the planning of terrorist attacks. Under its autocratic leader Viktor Orban, Hungary, as well as authoritarian-ruled Poland, have been denied European Union funds, and in 2019, Orban’s party, Fidesz, was expelled from the mainstream conservative European People’s Party.

But Fidesz’s ouster wasn’t a prohibition, and the extremists in France and Germany did not belong to parties with representatives in the national parliament. In fact, the AfD is the second-largest opposition party in the German Bundestag after the Christian Democrats (and their Bavarian counterpart), and it says that it wants to come to power—democratically, through the ballot box.

The ruling makes Saxony the AfD’s third state branch to come under this level of red-button surveillance, which can include measures such as the German spy services’ covert observation and even infiltration of the party. All three state-level parties—Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia—are eastern German states with elections scheduled for next year. (In mid-April, the AfD’s nationwide youth organization was also deemed a threat to the democratic order and thus put under surveillance.)

Moreover, in the wake of Geert Wilders’s far-right Party for Freedom’s victory in the Netherlands in November, like-minded contenders across Europe, including the AfD, are expected to perform better than ever in June’s European Parliament election, an event that would have ominous ramifications for the European Union—and beyond.

Much like the rulings on Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, Germany’s intelligence agency declared that leading members and functionaries of the Saxony AfD regularly express racist, Islamophobic, and antisemitic sentiments. It labeled the branch as one with “typically ethnic-nationalistic positions” and said that both it and its national youth organization work in tandem with known neo-Nazi and officially banned movements, such as the Reichsbürger movement.

The Saxony branch has a diverse membership, the intelligence agency found, but the party’s leadership adheres to the ideology of its “spiritual father and leader,” referring to “the right-wing extremist Björn Höcke, who now shapes and dominates the character of the entire state-level party.”

Höcke, the AfD’s high-profile, outspoken party leader in Thuringia, was on the party’s far-right fringe for years. But the party has drifted so far to the right that its standard-bearer is now the 51-year-old Höcke , a demagogue who publicly espouses revisionist theories of Germany’s Nazi past and employs racist slogans against immigrants. He was charged in June with using Nazi slogans at AfD campaign rallies—a crime in Germany, where the use of slogans, propaganda, and symbolism linked to “anti-constitutional” organizations is banned.

German law gives the constitutional court the authority to shut down a political party when it pursues anti-constitutional goals and is in a position to achieve these goals. In 2017, Germany’s highest court chose not to disqualify the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a thoroughly neo-Nazi party both in public profile and programmatically, on account of its diminutive size: The party of 6,000 people rarely breached the states’ 5-percent hurdles to be included in parliament and thus never came anywhere near entering government. This autumn, the constitutional court confirmed the expulsion of a former AfD official as a justice in a Saxon state court for constituting a danger to constitutional norms.

This year, the AfD saw representatives voted into official posts as a district administrator and a mayor (in Saxony-Anhalt) for the first time. Presumably, the AfD’s recent showing in the Bavarian and Hessian elections (15 percent and 18 percent respectively, which makes it the strongest opposition party in the regional legislatures) and polling numbers of twice that in eastern Germany endow it with a size unlike the NPD’s and great enough to pose a legitimate threat.

This, at least, is what a growing number of voices from all of Germany’s mainstream parties argue. Those voices are collecting supporters in the Bundestag, where a majority is required to bring the party before the constitutional court.

One of them is a lawyer and CDU parliamentarian from Saxony, Marco Wanderwitz, who argues that “there’s a good reason why the [German Constitution] gives us the option of banning a party,” as he told the daily Die Tageszeitung, “because a defensive democracy [wehrhafte Demokratie] has to wield very sharp swords against its greatest enemies. I have come to the conclusion that the AfD is now undoubtedly radical right wing. They are up to no good and are serious about it. We’ve got to use all of the options at our disposal to beat them. I’m afraid that without a court-ordered prohibition, we’re not going to be rid of them.”

Living in Saxony, Wanderwitz said, he observes how the AfD and its even more militant counterparts draw in disillusioned people and set a confrontational, aggressive tone. “In the parliaments, the AfD is on our backs every day,” he said. “It has thousands of employees who flood the internet and parliaments with right-wing extremist content 24 hours a day. At events in Saxony, I regularly experience that we’re met with burning hatred; we’re shouted at and threatened. I’m glad that there are loads of people standing between us and them outside the door. It’s something that feels a bit like what I imagine the early 1930s were like.”

Wanderwitz added that he thinks it is conceivable that the AfD garner 40 percent in the eastern elections come September. “What democracy here needs is some breathing space,” he said.

Other commentators shoot back that Germany’s democratic culture and the solid arguments of its political parties can beat back a populist party that spins outlandish conspiracy theories, apes Nazi slogans, and wants out of the EU.

“We can’t give the impression that we’re taking the easier route with a ban procedure because we can’t manage it any other way,” retorted Social Democratic lawmaker Sebastian Fiedler, who belongs to the Bundestag’s subcommittee for domestic security. “Well-functioning constitutional states can’t dismiss the way their own populations vote. We have to offer concepts that are convincing: here and now. Of course, the AfD is trying to attack the state from within, but the constitutional state is resilient.”

Fiedler and his parliamentary peers—not all of whom are opposed to putting the AfD on trial—argue that the state has other means at its disposal to mitigate far-right parties. In November,  all of the Bundestag’s democratic parties passed a  law that deprives the AfD from the kind of public funds that other parties use to finance foundations involved in public education work. They also argue there should be more funding for grassroots programs that strengthen civil society and fight fake news in the Internet. Wanderwitz and Fiedler—and just about all of their colleagues—agree that putting the AfD on trial and then losing would be a disaster, as well as a confirmation for the AfD that the mainstream parties are out to get it, based on the party’s specious rationale.

One of the strongest arguments against such bans is that outlawing a party doesn’t annul its supporters—and sometimes even turbocharges them. The Germans need only to look to Greece to see how the prohibition of a far-right party, the Golden Dawn, did nothing to dent the vote tallies of the Greek far right, which reorganized itself under new parties. Golden Dawn itself was disqualified from running in the election this year not because it was an immigrant-bashing, Holocaust-denying scourge, but rather because its leaders had engaged in criminal business activities.

Nevertheless, the party that captured more than 6 percent of the vote in 2015, when economic paralysis gripped the country, was out of the race. Instead, in June, three far-right parties made it into the national legislature, comprising the Spartans, backed by imprisoned Golden Dawn leader Ilias Kasidiaris, the pro-Russian party Greek Solution, and ultra-Christian Orthodox Niki (Victory). They captured 34 seats out of an available 300 and accounted for more than 12 percent of the vote.

It seems that Germany and Greece—in fact, just about all of Europe—will have to dig further down into their respective legal scriptures and political cultures to get at the  toxins that threaten to imperil their democracies.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Cash and Violence: Organized Crime Fights to Control Brazil’s Municipal Vote

With the second round of Brazil’s municipal elections coming up on October 27, criminal groups are increasingly being caught using new financial methods to sway results in addition to the violence they have traditionally used to influence the political scene.

Brazilian lawmakers reported an unprecedented volume of corruption, vote buying, and organized crime infiltration during the current vote period, the first round of which happened on October 6.

According to the Federal Police, authorities seized more than 50 million reais (around $8 million) in 2024 related to vote buying and the use of money by parties and candidates without declaring it to the election authorities. 

Election-related money seizures from 2020 and 2022, when the country held its last municipal and federal elections respectively, did not amount to more than 10 million reais (around $1.7 million) per election cycle, highlighting an unprecedented level of such irregularities this year.

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[beardedmrbean]

Embroiled in controversy over his position on the Israel-Hamas conflict, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., was subjected to more scathing press that cited local Jewish leaders adamantly opposed to his re-election.

Bowman, considered a member of the left-wing "Squad" in Congress, was the subject of a Jewish Insider piece headlined "No More Bridges to Burn in Westchester," referencing the suburban New York City county that makes up much of his district and is also home to the largest Jewish population outside the Big Apple.

The former junior high school principal is in the political fight of his life against a more moderate Democrat, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, and has even lost the support of some fellow progressives over his criticism of Israel.

According to the Jewish Insider piece, Bowman asked a local Westchester Jewish leader in 2022 whether he had photographs of the two of them together as he tried to rally support for his election. "Do you have pics of us … so I can show the world I’m friends with Jewish people[?]" according to contents of a text reportedly viewed by the outlet.

The Jewish leader told the outlet he had at least one image from an event Bowman attended after a promise to support a House bill favoring former President Trump’s Abraham Accords Mideast peace deal.

Bowman later reportedly withdrew his support for the legislation, and the Jewish leader said the overall situation made him "uncomfortable."

That situation and other content in the piece caused outrage among Jewish activists, including StopAntisemitism founder Liora Rez, who told Fox News Digital it is time for Bowman to "find a new job."

"Jamaal Bowman has consistently made clear in his statements and actions his animus toward Israel and the Jewish people," said Rez, who escaped antisemitism as a refugee from the Soviet Union.

"His hostility to individuals, including his own constituents, simply because of their faith and ethnic background is sickening, and he and his bigoted views deserve no recognition in Washington."

Bowman’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the Jewish Insider piece.

Another local Jewish leader, Rabbi Evan Hoffman, recently told the New York Post he would support Latimer as Jewish constituents are reportedly organizing a "Vote Shabbat" drive to oppose the incumbent.

"Bowman is opposed to Israel and more subtly the Jews in his own district," Hoffman said.

Bowman has spoken out on the BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) movement against Israel, calling it a "nonviolent protest opportunity to hold Israel accountable." Pro-Israel activists consider it conversely antisemitic and an effort to hurt Israel.

Bowman’s opponent, Latimer, has gotten the opposite reception. A February report from The Intercept said support from AIPAC – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – has constituted more than two-fifths of his fundraising war chest. Bowman has, in turn, accused the group of trying to "buy" the race.

Former Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., a fellow progressive who represented the district across the Tappan Zee Bridge from Bowman, notably chose to endorse Latimer this year.

Jones’ former district, now mostly represented post-redistricting by Rep. Michael Lawler, R-N.Y., also hosts a large Hasidic population in Rockland County.

"I’m making this endorsement [of Latimer] to stand up for my Jewish constituents because Representative Bowman and I have very different views on Israel," Jones told the Associated Press.

Bowman’s supporters, however, sing his praises as much as his critics do the opposite. Angela Davis-Farrish, an official with the New Rochelle Municipal Housing Authority, praised the lawmaker in a Politico piece after the introduction of legislation to establish a rent ceiling for certain families on government assistance.

He is also endorsed by New York’s Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America.

The Republican contender primed to face either Bowman or Latimer is Dr. Miriam Flisser, a pediatric consultant who previously served as mayor of Scarsdale.

The district, however, is rated D+20 by the Cook Partisan Voting Index, which suggests that the eventual Democrat nominee is a heavy favorite in November.

[poipoipoi-2016]

I cannot stress enough that we have to hope they lose.

The Federal Reserve has a 2% inflation target which means they deliberately cause recessions and put millions of people out of work any time inflation hits 2.1%. (I admit to surprise the 2022 recession looked as much like the 1947 one as it did)

Previous causes of recessions have been:

The founding of OPEC

The second OPEC price spike

A pork shortage the year after the OPEC price spike

Mortgage rates going up because they raised interest rates in response to those last two things (PS: Wondering why they don't count food and energy and home prices? This is why)

The invasion of Kuwait

Very critically NOT the Asian Tiger crisis, they picked inflation in that one

The startup bubble (which mostly impacted the Midwest).

15% YOY rent inflation in San Francisco because of NIMBYs (which also mostly impacted the Midwest)

They tried to cause one during Trump's tariffs, but municipal bonds blew up first and Powell gave up

COVID wasn't on them

They specifically waited out the post-COVID era, but then Putin blew up 3/4ths of our iron supply and also every single one of our international counterparties.

And it turns out that a 40% payraise coupled with at least a 20% drop in production is called... Fed raises rates until millions of unrelated people lose their job. Again.

NO ONE in America is allowed to make more money unless they can somehow get more productive. Because if they DO, the Fed drops the nuclear bomb.

So they can't win. Because if they win, millions of people need to lose their jobs.

/They've directly impacted the elections of 1980, 1992, 1996 by NOT causing a recession, gave 2000 a heck of a go by not causing a recession and then punishing the wrong guy when he won, and then obviously 2008.

//You can also sort of see my sneaky almost respect for Powell here.

BREAKING NEWS UNITED AUTOWORKERS ARE OFFICIALLY ON STRIKE!!!