Initially when I first heard of Speaker Boehner's comments that he hoped out loud that large numbers of citizens identified in certain demographic groups; namely African-American (12.6%) and Latino (16.3% ) voters, not show up at the polls when speaking at a luncheon hosted by the Christian Science Monitor in Tampa, Fl last Monday:
“This election is about economics… These groups have been hit the hardest. They may not show up and vote for our candidate but I’d suggest to you they won’t show up and vote for the president either.”
I thought it was another in a long line of voter suppression thoughts but then I realized it was the beginning the loser's lament that as the present Republican hierarchy, namely the corporatists and its plutocracy are losing the the inevitable political realignment.
This was confirmed when suddenly Rupert Murdock appeared out of the media swamp in England and tweeted the following statements:
"Election: Romney must draw clear line: offer specific path to restore American dream versus ugly Obama class war with jobs disappearing"
Then continued:
" Election: To win Romney must open big tent to sympathetic families. Stop fearing far right which has nowhere else to go. Otherwise no hope "
But then again what this election is bringing out and exposing is the desperation of the corporatists and their desire to hold on to their plutonomy by how they are reacting to losing the political realignment over the U.S. and its military-economic global empire. The
Citizen United Super Pac has brought billions into the system and still Obama holds an incumbent lead with an economy that remains poor. Till now they have used every secret manipulative political measure including psychological warfare, corruption, and opportunistic means available to an impressionable and uninterested electorate yet now it is in the open and democracy seems to be recoverying and starting to reassert itself. At its height in 2006 someone in the plutonomy brazenly published a memorandum on what they believed the world was and the only risks they perceived in losing their position.
CitiGroup's Plutonium Memo's of 2005-'06, the thing they most fear is the principle of “one person — one vote”.
RISKS -- WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
Our whole plutonomy thesis is based on the idea that the rich will keep getting richer. This thesis is not without its risks. For example, a policy error leading to asset deflation, would likely damage plutonomy. Furthermore, the rising wealth gap between the rich and poor will probably at some point lead to a political backlash. Whilst the rich are getting a greater share of the wealth, and the poor a lesser share, political enfrachisement remains as was -- one person, one vote (in the plutonomies). At some point it is likely that labor will fight back against the rising profit share of the rich and there will be a political backlash against the rising wealth of the rich. This could be felt through higher taxation on the rich (or indirectly though higher corporate taxes/regulation) or through trying to protect indigenous [home-grown] laborers, in a push-back on globalization -- either anti-mmigration, or protectionism. We don’t see this happening yet, though there are signs of rising political tensions. However we are keeping a close eye on developments.
So the statements by the Speaker hoping Blacks and Hispanics will not turn out, or Murdock telling Romney to throw much of the Republican party's base under the bus and the cynical truth of the plutonomy's thoughts towards one person, one vote on context to the tactical political statements of voter suppression efforts by Republican surrogates seeking to improve the prospects of the plutocrats:
Mike Turzai, PA House Majority Leader, June 25,2012,
"Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation -- abortion facility regulations -- in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done," he said to applause at a Republican State Committee this weekend
Former Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer stated in a deposition released in July that a 2009 party meeting included discussion of "voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting.
"I was upset because the political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting." He continues: "They talked about not letting blacks vote ... and minority outreach programs were not fit for the Republican Party."
Doug Preisse, chairman of the county Republican Party and elections board memberwho voted against weekend hours, in an email to The Dispatch. “Let’s be fair and reasonable.”
"I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine."
Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen (Republican) asked the state Supreme Court to reinstate a voter identification law before the Nov. 6 elections.
“While I respect the judicial process and the right to challenge a law in court, it is time for our Supreme Court to take control of these cases,” the Republican attorney general said in a statement.
Colorado’s Republican Secretary of State, Scott Gessler, ordered the Denver registrar not to mail out ballots to any voter who did not vote in the 2010 elections, an unprecedented action.
Such voters were “inactive-fail to vote,” he said, and their eligibility to vote therefore in doubt. Becoming aware of their voting rights being arbitrarily suspended with no notice, and initiating action to re-register in time, Gessler asserted, is the individual voter’s responsibility. That’s their problem, he said.
Had enough,
well the Brennan Center's Voting Law Changes in 2012 report analyzed how a series of laws imposing new restrictions on who can vote and how could significantly change the electoral landscape.
25 laws and 2 executive actions passed since the beginning of 2011 in 19 states [...]
17 states have passed restrictive voting laws that have the potential to impact the 2012 election. [...] These states account for 218 electoral votes, or nearly 80 percent of the total needed to win the presidency.
Of these, restrictions from 19 laws and executive actions are currently in effect in 14 states [...].
This is more than partisan, it is a conspired and concerted effort to institutionalize a change in the democracy. This is much bigger than the Obama Presidency or Democrats holding or gaining majorities in the legislative branches it is a political realignment and that is bigger than the players or who is in control.
under the kos dooddles
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) has often disagreed with his Republican party’s increasingly anti-Latino immigration politics. He once called the GOP immigration policies “short-sighted” and earlier in the year said: “it makes no sense” to pass harmful anti-immigration laws like in Arizona’s and Alabama’s—both ironically authored by Kris Kobach, said to be Romney's immigration adviser. During the RNC Bush publicly stated:
Speaking at a panel discussion at the Republican National Convention, Bush repeated his frequent warning that the party must change its tone, an admonition he has frequently raised about the party’s hardline position on immigration.
“The future of our party is to reach out consistently to have a tone that is open and hospitable to people who share values,’’ he said, adding “the conservative cause would be the governing philosophy as far as the eye could see … and that’s doable if we just stop acting stupid.”
Further he stated:
“there’s a price to pay” for continuing to focus on extreme immigration laws. “You have to show a respect that the louder, angrier voices of the Republican party don’t understand,” Bush added.
When you go under the cover of these statements you recognize a very pragmatic, realistic perspective of power in a democratic society. The only strategy that the previous hierarchy has to maintaining power is to reduce the changing electorate through a tactical approach of voter suppression and disenfranchisement. Ann Romney asserts that:
"...if they [Latino voters] could just get past some of their biases that have been there from the Democratic machines that have made us look like we don’t care about this community."
But alignments just don't happen, they are a result of changes happening and already have happened to the basic demographic, political, cultural and societal makeup of this democracy. The Jacksonian realignment took place after the U.S. had moved its center off the Atlantic Coast over the Appalachian Mountains into Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi. The Lincoln Realignment took place after the U.S. finally expelled the Slave Society, Franklin Roosevelt's realignment like Lincoln's was major and took place after the U.S. had moved from rural to urban and the immigrants influx of the previous thirty years changed the electorate. Reagan's realignment took place as the Baby Boomers moved from the cities to the suburbs changing the dynamics of the American electorate. Now as the nation has grown to be more diverse in its racial, cultural and social demographics where white-male dominate governing policies are embedded in the hierarchy its voting foundations are crumbling.
The corporatists and plutocrats made a deal with the devil some thirty years ago, the rural evangelical vote where they were not concerned in the least of economic issues except to undercut the governments fiscal ability to execute non theological agendas. But the corporatists and plutocrats never paid out on the debt. David Kuo Former Bush Aide: 'Minimal commitment' from the White House
Sadly, four years later these promises remain unfulfilled in spirit and in fact. In June 2001, the promised tax incentives for charitable giving were stripped at the last minute from the $1.6 trillion tax cut legislation to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy. The Compassion Capital Fund has received a cumulative total of $100 million during the past four years. ...
This isn't what was promised.
I served in the White House for two-and-a-half years as a Special Assistant to the president and eventually as Deputy Director of the Faith-Based Initiative.
That is why writing this is difficult.
I take solace in realizing that the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives that now sits outside the White House gates has effected change. The Office has used regulations and executive orders to end overt religious discrimination in the government grant-making process.
But they are a whisper of what was promised. Irony of ironies, it leaves the faith-based initiative specifically, and compassionate conservativism in general, at precisely the place Gov. Bush pledged it would not go; it has done the work of praising and informing but it has not been given "the resources to change lives." In short, like the hurting charities it is trying to help, the Initiative has been forced to "make bricks without straw."
In 2009 David Kou described Bush and Rove this way:
For many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely cynical manipulation. One of Bush's former advisers, David Kuo, has said the President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as "nuts" as soon as they left the Oval Office. But the ordinary Republican base believe this stuff. They are being tricked into opposing their own interests through false fears and invented demons.
Some forward thinking political pragmatists on the Right are already seeing the future.
John Hinderacker of Powerline said after the DNC that American voters are now as corrupted as Wall Street Bankers:
But it now appears that the election will be very close after all, and that Obama might even win it. [...] On paper, given Obama’s record, this election should be a cakewalk for the Republicans. Why isn’t it? I am afraid the answer may be that the country is closer to the point of no return than most of us believed. With over 100 million Americans receiving federal welfare benefits, millions more going on Social Security disability, and many millions on top of that living on entitlement programs–not to mention enormous numbers of public employees–we may have gotten to the point where the government economy is more important, in the short term, than the real economy.
Andrew McCarthy at NRO (National Review) via Mark Kleiman
[T]hinks it’s only “a third of the country” that’s hopeless for the GOP – because for two generations “the campus and the culture” have been ceded to “the progressive post-American left” – and pins some of the blame on the Republicans for not wanting to repeal the entire New Deal right away.
Kleiman than continues:
Still, these two distinguished wingnuts agree that the basic problem is with the voters. Neither of them proposes the Brechtian solution of dissolving the electorate and choosing a new one, but it’s not clear why not.
It’s possible that the billionaires will still manage to buy this one for Rmoney, but the demographic trends mean that the current Republican strategy is politically (as well as morally) bankrupt. At some point, the GOP is going to have to choose whether it’s more important to keep pleasing PowerLine and National Review or to win elections.
So now it is the voters fault, democracy itself is wrong that sovereign, self determinate citizens desire to express their wishes through a vote as to how their future and life will go forward. Especially the fault of those
groups have been hit the hardest, who desire to exercise their
one person---one vote civil right, it is the fault of the candidate chosen by the corporatists and plutocrats who now see an
Obama class war and gain votes from an
open big tent to sympathetic families, before
rising wealth gap between the rich and poor will probably at some point lead to a political backlash as
labor will fight back against the rising profit share of the rich and there will be a political backlash against the rising wealth of the rich. This could be felt through higher taxation on the rich. But now the
short-sided governing philosophy [can't] stop acting stupid, /em> where now a price to pay as voters [can't] get past some of their biases for continuing to focus on extreme immigration laws. So what they got left is voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting where despite respect[ing] the judicial process and the right to challenge a law in court the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine, after all, its the individual voter’s responsibility [t]hat’s their problem, to exercise their right to vote, not government's purpose to protect the civil rights of its citizens. Since in the end it is a plutonomy and many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely cynical manipulation as they believe that “a third of the country” that’s hopeless for the GOP since [i]t’s possible that the billionaires will still manage to buy this one for Romney,. But in the end the demographic trends mean that the current Republican strategy is politically (as well as morally) bankrupt.
And that explains a political realignment. The Whigs were politically and morally bankrupt, as was the antebellum South and its Slave society and the laissez-faire Roaring 20's, Great Society big government and now Reagan Conservatism of supply-side economics. Each time the losing hierarchy attempted to hold onto power with nostelga, obstruction, fear, fighting and even going to war, but nonetheless democracy ruled. This realignment began in 2006, it has taken awhile but now it is fully exposed as on Sept 10th they are already lamenting.
Finally realignment does not take place with one election but through a series of elections where despite domestic economics or foreign crisis, even wars the realignment continues because those in government are addressing the needs and desires of the new majority constituency. It is that simple.