Make Your Day A Slow News Day: Survival Tips for a 24/7 News Cycle
Last week I did a rundown of the news. Today, I am going to revisit that news and give you a “what’s up” about why the recap is important. And, then apply that to a news bit that appeared in this week’s pigfeed. I am going to hit the most important stuff first and then lag into the trivial. Here goes:
Los Angeles Teachers Strike: It happened. The teachers won. The LA strike and last year’s actions across the country inspired other teachers to push hard for smaller class sizes, higher pay, better working conditions, more support staff, greater investment in schools, and an end to school closures. In Oakland, teachers, frustrated with stalled negotiations, are voting to strike. Denver teachers voted to strike, forcing the state and city to deal with the union. Virginia law prevents teachers from striking, however, this week teachers staged a one-day walk out, rallying for better pay and working conditions. Last year’s strike by West Virginia teachers encouraged teachers in other states to act. It also prompted the state’s Republican legislature to pass “pro-privatization, anti-union laws.” So, WV teachers are looking to walk-out again. Indiana teachers have been in a long back & forth with the state legislature, which seems to be going nowhere, so teachers are threatening “action.” And, teachers at four Chicago charter schools have set a February strike date. We are only one month into 2019.
The shutdown: Every time I try to write shutdown it comes out as shitdown, and then auto-correct sanitizes the obvious truth. The why of the shitdown itself is one of the stupidest things ever: A president does not get his way on an expensive, unnecessary vanity project, end stop. A president not getting his way is not newsworthy. Trump’s tantrum is barely worth noting. However, the fallout from the shitdown is real news. The Washington Post has done a good job of going into the damage caused by the shitdown. According to the Post, at Point Reyes, dozens of elephant seals took over Drake’s Beach, taking advantage of the absence of federal park rangers who usually shoosh the seals away by waving blue tarps at them. Parse out your chuckles and feelings about seals and the story is a good metaphor for what happens when the system stops. Individual federal workers all over the government are dealing with their own elephant seals. They are digging through thousands of pieces of correspondence, applications, appeals, grants, and proposals. The mush through the crush is being rushed. Shit will get neglected, shorted, and lost. Every office that fields complaints about workplace discrimination, environmental scoff-lawing, consumer abuse, and financial dirty deeds has more than a month’s worth of cases added to the backload. Shit will get neglected, shorted, and lost. Refugees already grinding through an insanely slow asylum system against the Trump administration have just had months , if not years, added to their wait. People will get neglected, shorted, and lost. Forbes reports that the shitdown cost the US economy $11 billion. The damage to individuals has not been calculated. All this because an allegedly-grown man couldn’t get his way on a useless construction project that was invented to get him to speak about immigration.
Trump stops the EPA from doing its job: Under Trump, the EPA has issued 85% fewer civil fines than they did in the previous administrations. The shitdown might have gutted government for a month, the the consequences an “added bonus” for Trump, but this EPA thing is the real Republican masterplan in action. Forget Trump, Republicans have been trying to keep the EPA and other agencies from doing their job protecting us since Reagan. They finally got a president who doesn’t give a fuck about anything other than himself and is willing to screw us all as long as he can get a few hayseeds and Klansmen to chant “Build a Wall” at him. Any Republican elected president in 2016 would try the same thing. Every Republican elected to Congress in 2016 or 2018 cheers this stuff. Any Republican going forward will try to push it further. And, to be totally fair, “Democrats” such as Michael Bloomberg, Howard Schultz, and Joe Manchin don’t mind this too much. This is how conservatives would like things to go forever. That’s the story.
Covington Catholic High Idiocy: This might turnout to be the biggest nothingburder of the year. A bunch of white teenagers in MAGA garb act like rude, racist assholes to some Native Americans, while attending a right-wing, anti-women’s rights rally, and after mixing it up with a hostile fringe group known as Black Hebrew Israelites. There was a day or two of righteous condemnation of the teens’ actions, and then the Republican public relations machine kicked in, the mainstream media and some liberals got scared and started questioning what they saw with their own eyes, and here we are a week later and Who Really Gives A Crap. The two lessons here — that there is a deep culture of casual right-wing hate that isn’t going to go away, and there is a sophisticated PR operation out there that has a dozen ways to obscure, misdirect, and cover for casual right-wing hate while giving the haters more room to work — have been buried in bullshit and burnout. One week of anger and frustration spent on nothing.
Roger Stone’s arrest: As satisfying as it was to see real-life Scooby Doo villain Roger Stone led off in cuffs what we saw was little more than a celebrity perp walk. What we learned, we already knew. I can’t put much into Roger Stone, as the more I think about it, the more angry I get that sloppy, incompetent, null-charm assholes like him become so damn rich and powerful while the rest of us scrape by. And, centrists wonder why many of us have no problem with a “class war.”
Pence compares MLK to Trump: An absurd aside on the stupidity of the Trump Administration told us absolutely nothing about nothing that we already didn’t know, and it wasn’t even good for a light chuckle.
So, that is the follow up to last week’s news rundown. I recap for a few reasons. One is to remind me (and you) of the importance of looking back. In the days of print newspapers, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, revisiting news was a given for me. I’d finish the day’s paper and dig through yesterday’s news to see if I missed anything. In the Sunday paper, there was often a review of the week’s news. Recapping enabled me to filter out trivial stuff, find underreported news that I missed, and get enough perspective to prioritize information.
Today, we get far more information (or variations on the same info) thrown at us than ever before. It comes at us very fast, like a mob of dim sum carts being pushed around by an army of speed freaks. We see the carts fly by and lunge for whatever we can snatch, often grabbing goo and crumbs, never quite getting that all the carts holds, just the same weird jellies and battered beaks. Meanwhile, in the back of the room, there is a guy standing at a booth all the same stuff (and more) for you to access at your leisure 24–7…and he never asks you to comment on any of his dishes. Recapping installs the discipline that we need to effectively process information, to figure out what is important and what is trivia. Recapping slows things down so that we can see the guy in back and check out the magical glop he has for sale.
So, with that in mind, let’s take a long look at an important story that is flashing in and out of the news. Last August, Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the Anti-Corruption & Public Integrity Act (ACPIA). The ACPIA would drastically limit the power of lobbyists, closing the “revolving door” between government and lobbying firms, the one that every politician decries during election time but never acts on. ACPIA would require the president and vice president to put their assets in a blind trust or sell them off, as well as release their tax returns. It would also prevent members of Congress from holding individual stocks personally (they could hold them as part of a mutual fund or other investment vehicle). Of course, Washington hates the ACPIA. McConnell has vowed to never let it see the floor.
Inspired by Warren’s bill, in January, House Democrats introduced HR 1, a bill that attacks corruption, addresses campaign finance, and expands voting rights. HR 1’s ethics piece is pretty much a mirror of Warren’s ACPIA. The campaign finance section confronts the sleaze brought on by Citizens United. It would require SuperPAC and dark money ops to make their donors public, stop foreign money from being masked by shell corporations which then make quasi-legal campaign contributions, and make social media platforms play by the same political ad rules trad media has to abide by.
HR 1’s voting rights reforms would make Election Day a federal holiday, automatically register citizens to vote (they would have to opt out, rather than opt in), prohibit partisan gerrymandering, stop voting roll purges, and nationalize how elections are run — election rules are now created county by county and state by state. The bill would expand democratic participation by making it easier for people to vote.
In the three weeks since HR 1 was introduced, the Republicans have had time to read it and boy do they hate the thing! Mitch McConnell claims that making election day a federal holiday would “victimize” Americans and that making it easier for citizens to vote is a Democratic “power grab.” The right-wing press is apocalyptic! The Washington Examiner has dubbed HR 1 the “Incumbent Protection Act,” claiming that its passage would violate free speech, allow the feds to “seize control” over political communication, establish “single-party, establishment rule,” “destroy free elections,” and lead to “widespread voter intimidation from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.” No word on if HR 1 would enable the deep state to use Sharia law to take our guns and force Christian bakers to perform late-term abortions for gay couples who refuse to say “Merry Christmas.” And let’s not forget that all this snow makes it perfectly clear that there is no such thing as global warming.
Warren’s ACPIA and the House Dem’s HR 1 are very important pieces of legislation. Ignore those who say that these bills cannot pass. Study legislative history and you find that creating law is a long-term (and on-going) project. While the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was introduced in March 1965, it didn’t pass the Senate until May, the House until July, and wasn’t signed until August. During those months, there were debates and changes and horse-trading and threats and lots of horror business by the right-wing press. There was also a hell of a lot of back history which included other Congressional attempts to unwind Jim Crow laws that were instituted after Reconstruction, as well as all the legislation that came about following the Civil War.
Any history of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 must start (at least) with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (prohibiting slavery — 1865), the Fourteenth Amendment (citizenship to all born & naturalized US citizens, plus due process & equal protection — 1868), and the Fifteenth Amendment (voting rights extended to former slaves and men of all races — 1870). Between 1870 and 1871, Congress passed a series of Enforcement Acts, which outlawed and penalized people who engaged in voter suppression and intimidation.
When Reconstruction ended, white supremacist state legislatures in the South rushed to trash the Enforcement Acts with Jim Crow laws. When racist voting restrictions were brought to the high court, the Supremes backed the racists. Though this went on for decades, African Americans, Asian Americans (who were subject to similar restrictions in the West), and white allies fought Jim Crow. Anti-lynching campaigns were intimately linked to voting rights and economic rights. Labor organizers such as A. Phillip Randolph helped create the foundation for the Civil Rights Movement. African American GIs fresh from fighting in World War I and World War II returned to the states and started agitating for the rights they thought that they were defending overseas. The early 1950s saw the start of protests against Jim Crow.
In 1957, Congress passed the first civil rights act. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Finally, after a series of violent protests, civil disobedience, marches, lobbying, and meetings with politicians, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was introduced and passed.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did not end white supremacy or voter suppression, but it was a giant step forward, one which built upon a legacy of everyday people’s struggle for greater civil, economic, and political rights. It took a long time and lots of energy and blood to get to the Voting Rights Act and, through the VRA, more energy, and more blood, we’ve gone much further.
When you see gay teenagers interact at school freely, proud of who they are, look to the VRA and all that came before it. When you see children of mixed race/ethnicity laughing together, an Afro-Asian American father and an Italian-Argentine lesbian mom looking on while absolute no one sees anything “abnormal” about the scene, look to the VRA and all that came before it. And, when you read news off of your pocket calculator, remember that you are just seeing a snapshot of a much larger scene, one that has evolved over decades and is much more nuanced than what you see on the screen.
The backlash against ACPIA and HR 1 is today’s news. Yesterday’s news was the introduction of the legislation. Go further back and you will see the Citizens United decision, McCain-Feingold, the Ethics in Government Law of 1978, Watergate, and much more. Tomorrow’s news will be the battle against corporate and right-wing backlash to anti-corruption and voting rights. Tomorrow’s news will be our fight to smash the backlash and make these bills law. This is a process. It requires that we step back and recap, that we remove ourselves from the chaos of news now news now. When we back away, we see that under the frantic digital-scape is a world that moves at its own pace. It is a world full of flesh, no zeros and ones. It is a face-to-face world, not a screen-to-screen one. This is the world where you can see the pain on someone’s face when you call then out. This is the world where you can hold someone who is hurt. This is the real world. This is where you will find the truth. It is also where you will find your power.
This piece first appeared in Soriano’s Comment, №49, February 1, 2019. Subscriptions are free. Sign up here. Your monetary support is appreciated.
