This week at progressive state blogs is designed specifically to focus attention on the writing and analysis of people focused on their home turf. Here is the March 10 edition. Inclusion of a blog post does not necessarily indicate my agreement with—or endorsement of—its contents. |
At Blue Jersey, Bill Orr writes—Gov. Murphy’s Budget. Part VI: What he told us:
March roared in like a polar bear, but Governor Murphy added some heat on Tuesday to the political arena. Some of this was because he did not endorse Sen. President Sweeney’s alternate plan to raise new revenue by taxing corporations. Instead Murphy stuck with his original plan to raise monies through a millionaire’s tax. This was one of the few opportunities where Sweeney did not clap his hands. There may be blood on the floor before this issue is resolved.
Murphy began his speech saying, “Eight weeks ago today, I pledged to be a different type of governor. I pledged to create a stronger and fairer New Jersey that measured success not by what we could do for the few, but by what we could accomplish for all nine million of our residents. I invited you to join me in this journey. As promised, this is a budget that is balanced both fiscally and morally. This budget totals $37.4 billion. It makes the critical investments we need for our future.”
REVENUE
- Millionaire’s tax: asking those with taxable incomes in excess of $1 million to pay a little more. This will raise approximately $765 million.
- Carried-interest: we will work to close this unfair loophole that benefits only billionaire hedge fund managers. It. will generate $100 million.
- Sales tax: Increasing the tax back to 7%. The impact of the three-eighths of one percent sales tax decrease has been nearly imperceptible to the average family,
EXPENSE
- Community colleges: We will increase investment by $50 million to help 15,000 students from low-income families attend for free, beginning in the spring 2019. [...]
- NJ Transit: nearly triple funding, an additional $242 million investment, but fixing it will not happen overnight.
At Blue Virginia, A Siegel writes—10th Congressional District Young Women Leadership Program Member Implores Rep. Comstock To Lead On Gun Violence During 14 March Walkout:
At Mclean High School, like so many other schools, a substantial portion of the student body observed a 17 minute silence. After that, some 100 students marched to nearby Lewinsville Park for a longer demonstration with a number of speakers.
Peggy Fox, from the local CBS affiliate WUSA-9, reported on the McLean High School students’ walkout.
Many of the McLean students live in the 10th Congressional District where the member of Congress, Barbara Comstock, has received over $137,000 of NRA donations and a quite solidly consistent NRA A rating (and a gun sense F with a 0% rating from the Brady campaign).
That stark contrast between the students’ passion and their Congresswomen’s political position is clear in WUSA’s reporting. For example, a young women discussing a Langley High School student killed by gun violence is wearing a “Dump Comstock button”. Most striking is the comment from a student who Barbara Comstock featured on her Facebook page:
I’m here because I was a member of Barbara Comstock’s young women’s leadership program.
She told us to stand up for what we believe in and be strong leaders as women.
So, I am challenging her to be a strong leader and listen to her constituents and actually do something about the gun laws so we can all feel safe in our schools.
At Capital & Main of California, Robin Urevich writes—Deadly Detention: Hell in the Middle of a Pine Forest:
Deep in a Georgia pine forest, two hours south of Atlanta, early morning mist rises in wisps over the Stewart Detention Center, a facility run by CoreCivic, one of the nation’s largest for-profit prison companies. The bucolic scene clashes with the tall, barbed wire-topped chain-link fences surrounding the center, and the echoing shouts, crackling radios and slamming doors inside the walls. Technically, the roughly 1,700 men here aren’t prisoners, but civil detainees being held for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as they plead their cases to remain in the United States, or as the government prepares their deportations.
The detainees represent more than $38 million a year for CoreCivic — the government pays the company nearly $62 a day per man. It is the largest employer in Stewart County, one of Georgia’s poorest.
Immigrant rights groups have charged that the conditions here are not only indistinguishable from those in prison, they are downright abusive. In fact, a December 2017 Homeland Security Inspector General’s report expressed concerns about human rights abuses and, last month, Joseph Romero, a retired ICE officer who served as a guard, told Capital & Main that he resigned a supervisor job at Stewart in 2016 because he didn’t like the way people were treated.
“They’re always putting them in the hole — in segregation,” Romero said. “And they manhandle people. They think they can take care of their problems like that.” Romero noted that few officers speak Spanish, so there is little understanding or communication between guards and detainees.
Jean Carlo Jimenez Joseph’s suicide by hanging while in solitary confinement last May and 33-year-old Cuban national Yulio Castro Garrido’s death from pneumonia last December have brought these concerns to the fore.
Jimenez was mentally ill and had been in solitary for 19 days when he died — four days longer than the United Nations Rapporteur on Torture considers torture.
At Eclectablog of Michigan, MItchell Robinson writes—The sinister motive behind Trump & DeVos’ plan to “harden schools”:
The news has been full of reports over the last few weeks on the need to “harden” our schools in response to the seemingly daily onslaught of school shootings in our nation. Many of our elected officials, such as President* Donald Trump and Secretary of Education* Betsy DeVos, have called for teachers and other school personnel to be given firearms training and carry loaded weapons into classrooms–ostensibly to protect their students in the event of a potential tragedy.[...]
The Trump/DeVos vision of our nation’s schools is a truly dystopian one: dreary, dilapidated, locked-down cinder block structures “hardened” with armed security guards, flying drones, grizzly bear fences, and massive banks of metal detectors at every door. Once a person is granted entrance to this fortress they would be greeted with the following scene, straight out of an NRA fever dream:
The school receptionist is apparently the first line of defense against any active shooter. Thus the task force recommends that school front offices be protected with two sets of automatically locking doors, preferably constructed with “ballistic protective glass” like the neighborhood liquor store. Such a set up will allow the front office staff to safely trap a potential shooter like a bug in a window screen until help arrives. The report recommends reinforcing the front desk and side wall with “ballistic steel plating” that employees could hide behind should the shooter get past the entrapment area.
Walking through the halls of this gulag, a parent or other community member would be greeted by pistol-packing secretaries, cafeteria workers, teachers, and custodians, charged with defending their students from potential threats with school-issued weapons and a few hours of district-provided professional development on target shooting and gun maintenance–in addition to their current responsibilities of teaching, feeding, and caring for their students. One shudders to imagine the impact of these “hardening” measures on student learning, student-teacher relationships, creativity, and innovation–all of which have been frequent targets of Sec.* DeVos’ attacks on public schools and teachers.
At BlueMassGroup, terrymcginty writes—Barney Frank Is Right:
Barney Frank recently came out and criticized the candidate running against Congressman Michael Capuano as wasting energy by challenging a good progressive incumbent. Barney Frank is right.
This has nothing to do with whether that candidate has a right to run against Michael Capuano. Of course that candidate has a right to run against Capuano. The question is, is this the best use of the resources of the progressive movement at this particular time in history?
The answer is no.
People sometimes make the blanket statement that more people challenging incumbents is inherently good for democracy. But is this true? It is not.
You can have a wonderful, healthy, primary battle that appears to improve the health of a party, and then end up with a weakened candidate who gets beaten by a Trump-like candidate. If such a victor then dismantles democratic protections, or the civil rights of all citizens to vote, or the social safety net, or public education, how is that good for democracy?
For me, what matters is whether people get better access to health care, a decent job, a decent standard of living, a decent environment, and are protected from terrible public policy. That’s more important than the internal health or vitality of a political party.
So the question is not about whether an incumbent is entitled to an office. The question is, what is the greater good?
At BlueNC, scharrison writes—From the Governor on firearm regulations and school shootings:
This is what responsible leadership sounds like:
In North Carolina, we also need to strengthen the background check system to make our communities safer and keep guns from violent criminals and the dangerously mentally ill. Right now, anyone buying a handgun in our state has to apply for a permit through the local sheriff’s office, a process that includes a federal background check and an OK from the sheriff. This system allows time for appropriate checks to take place before someone can legally buy a handgun. But our law has a glaring loophole since this background check and permit process isn’t required to buy an assault weapon like an AR-15, the weapon used in Parkland. It should be.
Honestly, this seems like a no-brainer. No matter how the right-wing gun-nutters twist, equating an AR-15 with a hunting rifle or shotgun is patently absurd. Hell, you can't even duck hunt unless your shotgun is plugged to only hold three shells, but thirty high-velocity rounds in each clip is "just fine"? Here's more, which will no doubt infuriate the Ammosexuals:
Background checks are an important part of keeping guns out of the wrong hands, but they are only as good as the information in the database. To ensure that we are doing our part to make background checks more effective, I’ve directed the State Bureau of Investigation to undertake a comprehensive inventory of the quality of information our state shares with the federal background check system. If critical information our state should be reporting is missing, we need to know and we need to change that.
Right now, it appears as though the federal government is moving to ban so-called ‘bump stocks.’ If that effort falls through, we should take action in North Carolina to ban these devices, which turn semi-automatic guns into machine guns. This type of accessory was used in the Las Vegas shooting last year to carry out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. We don’t need these devices in our state.
At Green Mountain Daily of Vermont, BP writes—Enabling Donald’s TV news:
It’s not only Fox News that covers Trump’s back. Sinclair Broadcasting, the largest owner of local TV stations in the U.S., is widely known as a champion of right-wing GOP causes. During the presidential election Sinclair and the Trump campaign struck a deal in order to gain favorable media coverage .Recently they started a promotional campaign for their local news outlets to broadcast.
Now Sinclair has tailored promotional spots for its almost 200 local news outlets that seem to mirror parts of Trump’s oft repeated bogus “fake news” claims. Their corporate memo to local stations dictates the promo be scheduled “to create maximum reach and frequency.”
One of Sinclair’s local anchors — who remained anonymous for fear of retribution — told CNN: “I felt like a POW recording a message,” […] On its face, some of the language is not controversial. But that’s precisely why some staffers were so troubled by it. The promo script, they say, belies Sinclair management’s actual agenda to tilt reporting to the right.
CNN reports: The promos begin with one or two anchors introducing themselves and saying “I’m [we are] extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that [proper news brand name of local station] produces. But I’m [we are] concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.”
Then the media bashing begins.
“The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media,” the script says. “More alarming, national media outlets are publishing these same fake stories without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the national media are using their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’ … This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
At Raging Chicken Press of Pennsylvania, Nicole Hallberg writes—Thoughts on Black Panther:
I’ll be the first to say that my thoughts on Black Panther as a white woman are to be taken with a grain of salt. It doesn’t really matter how I experienced the film because at the end of the day, the film wasn’t made for me. And that’s okay. I’m going to share my thoughts on Black Panther anyway because I’m glad I saw it, and I want you to go see it, and I want to talk about the important conversation that Black Panther is allowing us to have right now.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that Black Panther was a triumph. Watching the film made me feel like we were witnessing a victory in place of a string of crushing injustices and defeats that can so easily dominate the conversation about race relations in America in 2018. It wasn’t my personal victory, but it was thrilling to witness nonetheless. I watched the movie in a theater located in a predominantly black suburb outside of Philadelphia, and just witnessing the audience reaction added a great layer to the experience of the film.
The scene that most grabbed me happened early in the second act, during a car chase. (If you don’t want to know anything about the film before seeing it, now might be a good time to navigate away.)
In the car chase, King T’Challa was chasing an ensemble of (white) criminals who were fleeing an auction. Not far behind was the leader of his royal guard, Okoye. At one point, it looks like Okoye is imminently going to crash. At the last moment, she throws her spear, and uses it to stop her momentum and avoid a collision. This is the only point in the whole film that the audience erupted in cheers. I realized that, were this some other movie that was more concerned with upholding the status quo and falling back on old stereotypes, Okoye’s character would have died then. Black women in film are expendable, especially if their deaths can be used to give the male lead something to emote over. But not this time. Okoye saved herself, and the whole crowd cheered her on. It was truly a special moment to be a part of. [...]
At Appalachian Voices, Peter Anderson wrote—A watershed moment in Virginia’s energy politics:
Last Friday, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam signed legislation bringing massive changes to energy policy in the Commonwealth, including a new model for determining electric rates paid by millions of Virginia families and businesses. Written mostly by and for Dominion Energy, the legislation was one of the most hotly contested proposals during the 2018 General Assembly session, receiving unprecedented resistance from lawmakers and grassroots.
In Senate Bill 966, Dominion designed a variety of mechanisms to avoid future regulatory oversight and unfairly pocket hundreds of millions or more of its customers’ money. But due to a groundswell of constituent pressure and hard work by a variety of consumer and environmental advocates, including Appalachian Voices, more and more legislators now are asking: “Should a monopoly utility write the laws that govern monopoly utilities?” The answer of course is “no.”
As Appalachian Voices’ Executive Director Tom Cormons told the Richmond Times-Dispatch: “We will not have democracy when it comes to energy issues until we get past the idea that you can’t accomplish anything without Dominion’s blessing. It’s a new era now, and those who are still carrying Dominion’s water like it’s 2015 are going to miss the boat.”
In 2015, the General Assembly passed the “rate freeze” bill, which stripped the State Corporation Commission’s (SCC) authority to determine the rates Virginia’s utilities (Dominion and Appalachian Power Co.) can charge customers for a period of several years. Dominion’s narrative to legislators was that complying with the federal Clean Power Plan would increase the cost of electric service so much that rates needed to be “frozen” in place to protect customers. It also meant that the SCC could not order Dominion and Appalachian Power to issue customer refunds or lower electric rates. The utilities ended up overcharging their ratepayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
At The Bayou Brief of Louisiana, Sue Lincoln writes—“Of All We Do Here, These Ought to Be the Easiest”
“If we’re going to talk about family values, we should show we actually value families,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said, as he testified on behalf of equal pay and minimum wage bills in the Senate Labor Committee Thursday. “Of all the things we do here, these ought to be the easiest.”
And while the bills advanced to the full Senate for consideration, it wasn’t effortless.
SB 117 by Sen. J.P. Morrell (D-New Orleans) would require anyone entering into a contract with any state entity to comply with the Louisiana Equal Pay for Women Act. That law, enacted in 2013, only covers full-time workers employed by state governmental agencies. It doesn’t cover part-timers, or those employed in the private sector.
Still, there was objection to the new measure from the private sector.
“We oppose this bill because Equal Pay is already the law, and we encourage our small business owners to comply with the law,” stated Dawn Starns, director of the Louisiana chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business.
“Pay inequity is happening, though,” Sen. Regina Barrow (D-Baton Rouge) responded. “Women in Louisiana make 66-cents for each dollar a man makes. For women of color, it’s 48-cents on the dollar. As a woman, how do you feel that’s okay?”
Starns squirmed in her seat, and stammered a bit, clearly discomfited by the question. Then she squared her shoulders and replied, “I’m here representing small business owners, I can’t speak personally.”
At Juanita Jean’s of Texas, Juanita Jean Herownself writes—Ho Hum
Y’all, if you’re a Republican elected official and you haven’t been caught in a sex scandal, you’re just not trying hard enough.
The top leader in the Iowa Senate resigned Monday after a website published video and photos allegedly showing the married lawmaker kissing a statehouse lobbyist.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Dix is married with three children.
And this ain’t his first rodeo.
Last year, Iowa settled a $1.75 million lawsuit for sexual harassment and retaliation with a former employee of the Iowa Senate Republicans, Kirsten Anderson. Anderson said that she was fired as communications director for the Republican caucus in 2013 after reporting a toxic work environment due to sexual harassment.
Dix denied the woman’s testimony and said the woman was fired for incompetence. Republican definition of incompetence in women: the ability to say no.
Yeah, there’s a video.
At Show Me Progress of Missouri, WillyKay writes—Has McCaskill chosen the wrong “bipartisan” issue?
[R]ecent events leave me wondering if [Sen. Claire] might have honed in on the wrong issue in order to prove her non-partisan bona fides. I’m referring to her support for a Republican bill that would once again deregulate banks. As Garry Rivlin and Susan Antilla of The Intercept describe it:
… the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, […] represents the greatest threat to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law since its passage in 2010. The bill would relieve all but the country’s largest dozen banks of increased scrutiny and ease mortgage rules imposed after the financial crisis. It would undermine fair lending rules designed to counteract race discrimination and weaken the Volcker rule, which limits a bank’s ability to make speculative trades with federally insured deposits. …
In spite of the fact that bank earnings have continuously surged since 2010, proponents speciously insist that, due to the act, banks “are suffering and so, by extension, are consumers, businesses, and the economy at large.” Part and parcel of the GOP belief, reinforced by the Liar-in-Chief in the White House, that if you say it, it will be so, reality be dammed.
Many of the red-state Democrats who support the bill, like McCaskill, purport to buy into the argument that Dodd-Frank needs to be revised to help suffering community banks that the law has, they assert, disadvantaged. However, as Rivlin and Antilla report, “A 2017 FDIC report shows that deposits in community banks have grown in each of the past six years. Another report showed that 96 percent of the country’s 5,294 community banks were profitable, as of the third quarter of 2017.” If you’re interested in learning more about the problems with this legislation, including the effect on community banks, noted economist Jared Bernstein spells some of them out here in greater—but not too lengthy or ponderous—detail.