Bill's Big Diamond Blog

Addressing Voter Suppression

With the November election only two weeks away and early voting already started in many states, voter suppression is beginning to raise its ugly head again.  Many citizens are already facing changes in state laws and regulations which make it harder to cast a ballot in the 2008 vote.  

The specter of an electoral result opposed to the will of the people is within our imagining— hell, it’s even within our memory.  Yet the factors which make it possible again are multiplied in 2008.  Voter ID laws have been upheld by the Supreme Court.  80-year old nuns were turned away from the polls in this year’s Indiana primary, all for the lack of official government ID.  Long lines are assured to be a problem in countless poor neighborhoods again, causing untold numbers of would-be voters to leave the polls for work, child care, or out of discouragement after hours waiting on line.

Other voter suppression techniques involve purges of 'felons' from the rolls in states where this task is out sourced and thousands of non-felons are purged because their names are similar to those of actual felons.  Challenges to registrations of homeowners whose houses are under foreclosure have been in the news.  Inaccurate suggestions to students that voting in their university precincts will invalidate their financial aid have been recorded.  

Robocalls warning voters in minority neighborhoods that people with outstanding warrants against them will be rounded up at the polls and police roadblocks near polling places in minority areas have been a fact of life in past elections in some states— and will need to be flagged quickly if they occur this year.  The list of dirty tricks goes on and will now likely include some new wrinkles— electronic voting with unverifiable audit trails provide one avenue of concern.

I write this not to cause cynicism, but to raise the question: how ready is we as an electorate to fight back against voter suppression and to prevent it?   Current GOTV efforts must be accompanied by quick reaction on November 4th—to nail voter suppression in its tracks and to react immediately where it has occurred.

In relevant recent pieces, Glenn W. Smith and Bob Herbert have pointed out that the noise and fury in the McCain campaign about ACORN and voter registration fraud serves to mask a long history of suppression that GOP operatives have made into a tradition.  It’s time we started paying more attention to the huge numbers of legitimate ballots that are never counted or never cast, because voters have been intimidated, bamboozed, or turned away at the polls than to whether Mickey Mouse will attempt to cast an illegitimate vote because a homeless person working for ACORN turned in a fake registration (which was flagged by ACORN itself).

This year, let’s put the focus on what our balloting should be all about— democratically representing all our citizens.

Early Voting Problems in West Virginia Reported

Some distressing stories are coming out of Putnam and Jackson County, West Virginia as early voting has begun in that state.  Staff writer Paul Nyden of the Charleston Gazette reports that a number of voters in these counties complain that voting machines switched votes from their preferred Democratic candidates to Republican candidates before their eyes.  

Selba Ketchum, a 69 year old nurse and her son Chris were among several voters reporting the phenomenon to the West Virginia paper. 

"I pushed buttons and they all came up Republican," she said. "I hit Obama and it switched to McCain. I am really concerned about that. If McCain wins, there was something wrong with the machines.
"I asked them for a printout of my votes," Ketchum said. "But they said it was in the machine and I could not get it. I did not feel right when I left the courthouse. My son felt the same way.
"I heard from some other people they also had trouble. But no one in there knew how to fix it," said Ketchum.

The Gazette reports that Republicans are responsible for overseeing elections in these counties.  In both counties, the clerks say problems are isolated.  They blame mistakes on the voters.

The article did not detail what methods are available to voters to challenge  voting problems in the affected counties.

(h/t Marie Rossi)

Housing Mobility and the New York Times: Not So Perfect Together

Buried inside an article in today’s NY Times about Section 8 housing is a real story. The second half of a piece by Solomon Moore, entitled “As Housing Program Moves to the Suburbs, Tensions Follow,” details anecdotes suggesting that the Antioch, CA police department has engaged in a systematic program to intimidate and evict African American tenants on the federal Section 8 program living in their community.

However, the story’s headline and the emotional thrust of it suggests that tensions in Antioch stem mainly from mistakenly allowing poor blacks to move to the suburbs, not from an abuse of power by local police or seemingly intolerant attitudes on the part of some white residents. With reference to one recent opinion article in the Atlantic Magazine, the piece seems to dismiss past social science data on reforming public housing policies away from high-rise, high-density project developments towards rental assistance for housing in neighborhoods where opportunity already exists.

Reading the piece, I wonder whether the editors of the Times have sat with tenants of Section 8 housing for any period of time. The writer appears to have attempted to cover the story of one tenant and police intimidation. However, as published, the story smacks of an article which was editorially forced into a point-counterpoint mishmash of contextual references.

Readers may want to check out other points of view about the challenge, in an era when few programs are being funded to alleviate poverty, to help poor families find opportunity.

Here are a few places to start:

Phil Tegeler of PRRAC

Inclusive Communities Project

The Geography of Opportunity by Xavier Briggs and William Julius Wilson

A Right to Housing by Chester Hartman

Obama's Speech to NAACP Delivers More Than 'Sister Souljah Moment'

In yet another sign that he intends to win the 2008 election, rather than simply score points with his base alone, Barack Obama “re-admonished” African-Americans over taking personal responsibility and most particularly over parenting issues. What’s more, Obama was received with a standing ovation by conventioneers at the national meeting of the NAACP in Cincinnati for doing so.

Jesse Jackson is probably particularly irked at being ignored for his criticism of Obama for “talking down” to African-Americans, but even in that, Obama has picked a sparring partner who helps him with White voters and with a younger generation of African-Americans who view Jackson as part of the past.

The full speech, however, shows Obama’s less publicized, but more significant comments— and provides the context in which his advocacy for greater responsibility within the community is so well received. Here are some excerpts from the full speech that aren’t being covered much today:

…social justice is not enough. As Dr. King once said,
“the inseparable twin of racial justice is economic
justice.”

…it matters little if you have the right to sit at the
front of the bus if you can’t afford the bus fare; it
matters little if you have the right to sit at the lunch
counter if you can’t afford the lunch. What they
understood is that so long as Americans are denied
the decent wages, and good benefits, and fair
treatment they deserve, the dream for which so
many gave so much will remain out of reach; that to
live up to our founding promise of equality for all, we
have to make sure that opportunity is open to all
Americans.

…When CEOs are making more in ten minutes than
the average worker earns in a year, and millions of
families lose their homes due to unscrupulous
lending, checked neither by a sense of corporate
ethics or a vigilant government; when the dream of
entering the middle class and staying there is fading
for young people in our community, we have more
work to do.

When any human being is denied a life of dignity
and respect, no matter whether they live in
Anacostia or Appalachia or a village in Africa; when
people are trapped in extreme poverty we know
how to curb or suffering from diseases we know
how to prevent; when they’re going without the
medicines that they so desperately need – we have
more work to do.

…We’ll guarantee health care for anyone who
needs it, make it affordable for anyone who wants it,
and ensure that the quality of your health care does
not depend on the color of your skin. And we’re not
going to do it 20 years from now or 10 years from
now, we’re going to do it by the end of my first term
as President of the United States of America.

And here’s what else we’ll do – we’ll make sure that
every child in this country gets a world-class
education from the day they’re born until the day
they graduate from college.

…And if people tell you that we cannot afford to
invest in education or health care or fighting
poverty, you just remind them that we are spending
$10 billion a month in Iraq. And if we can spend that
much money in Iraq, we can spend some of that
money right here in Cincinnati, Ohio and in big cities
and small towns in every corner of this country.

Here's the full speech:

Welcome to Heaven, Jessie

Since the unrepentant Senator Helms had already lived to see an African American nominated for President, all that's left for his spirit now is a trip to heaven—in San Francisco.

Krugman's Blind Spot for Race

If Paul Krugman wants to declare that, “we’re now a different, and better, country,” on racial issues, that’s fine. It may not be exactly true, but we’ll hope he’s got a grain of reality right about the incrementally lessened effect of racism in American politics over the last twenty years. It’s possible that enough of us will pull the lever for a biracial Presidential candidate to elect him to the Oval Office.

What Krugman’s column fails to address, inexplicably, considering his training in economics, is the toxic combination of race and class. America may be ready to elect Barack Obama as our next President— and that’s simply something we could never have seen happen twenty years ago, or even ten. But we still haven’t addressed the race and class segregation that still keeps people of color who have little means out of the mainstream of our economic life. It’s this invisible divide that keeps so many wondering if an Obama Presidency would finally open America’s eyes to the work left to accomplish.

Krugman, in his rush to congratulate our country while minimizing the significance of nominating Obama, says, “We’ve already been transformed.” Obviously, Krugman hasn’t been spending time in the neighborhoods I see when visiting cities all over America. If America had already been transformed, the decrepit public housing projects and dilapidated African-American neighborhoods in every state and every metropolitan area of our country would already be infused with capital to rebuild housing and schools, transportation and business. I’m just not seeing it, Mr. Krugman.

Barack Obama has to look on the sunny side. He’s running for President— and optimism is a quality that Americans appreciate. Obama also minimizes the race issue in his campaign, which he should. Any sane political consultant will tell him to. Obama’s task, however, shouldn’t confuse Krugman about the sad economics of neglect and racism still left to deal with in American life, or racism’s effect in stripping generations of African American children of the opportunities privileged families enjoy.

The Supreme Court recently stood Brown v. Board of Education on its head and outlawed many of the tools needed to address a resurgent segregation in our schools. This didn’t happen because racism has been eradicated. It happened because a majority of the Supremes, appointed by anti-civil rights Presidents, would like to end any redress and get back to helping white people get their kids into the schools they prefer. Krugman should know that.

The City of New Orleans wasn’t left to suffer and drown after Katrina because the President was just incompetent. It was left to its own devices because its plight wasn’t important to the President in the same way it would have been if its residents were whiter, or richer. We all know that, even though the recognition still hasn’t led to a massive infusion of capital to rebuild the Crescent City. John McCain may deliver a speech from New Orleans, but he spent the day after Katrina with President Bush, in Arizona, not running to help the victims.

The kids of Jena, or the relatives of Sean Bell here in New York would be happy to instruct Mr. Krugman about the road left to travel before we can declare racism to be dead in this country. It’s offensive to see a rich white economist, who should know better, minimize the effect that racial discrimination has on the average person without spending any ink on the economics, law, and politics of addressing those effects.

Many Americans, but especially poor people of color, suffer today from a lack of housing, education, and job opportunities. One of the great barriers to getting these issues on the front burner of the campaign this year is race. Maybe Krugman can spend some of the rest of this year’s campaign writing about the confluence of these problems with race. My guess is he won’t.

Memorial Day

I’ve often been asked by people unfamiliar with the traditions of Memorial Day to explain the history and origins of the observance. Usually, my answers are off the cuff and anecdotal. My personal understanding of the holiday comes from my parents and their tradition of visiting the graves of family members who have passed on. It stems from growing up in a small town, where our Memorial Day parade was a fixture, resplendent with the carefully preserved uniforms of veterans marching, from the First World War through the Vietnam conflict then ongoing.

I usually thought of the holiday’s importance to working class families, whose members have filled the ranks of our military in wars and conflicts throughout American generations. What I didn’t yet do was to track the history of Memorial Day to its origins in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

If we trace the holiday back to its first observance, we learn more about history’s habit of being co-opted by the powerful at the expense of the powerless— and we must think again about the role of race and America’s ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery in this particular narrative.

The first observance of what became Memorial Day occurred in Charleston, South Carolina in 1865. The occasion was the convergence on the historic race track there by former slaves and abolitionists. They gathered to honor the Union dead buried there by the Confederacy in a mass grave at what had been the site of a prison camp during the war. The former slaves and their abolitionist brethren “reinterred the dead Union soldiers from the mass grave to individual graves, fenced in the graveyard & built an entry arch declaring it a Union graveyard; a very daring thing to do in the South shortly after (the) North's victory.”

It was three years later, when the same former slaves came back with flowers from the countryside to decorate those individual graves that the first “Decoration Day” was celebrated in 1868. The association with abolition and with the Union’s bitter struggle was basic to the observance. This was so much so that there evolved a separate holiday in the South, a Confederate Memorial Day.

In Pennsylvania, a separate Memorial Day sprung up in 1866, on April 29, to honor the Union dead. It’s clear, however, that the matter of slavery and abolition was still thought to be of importance in the observation until the end of Reconstruction, when the holiday in New York City was declared to be “forward looking,” over the objections of abolitionist heroes like Frederick Douglass. No doubt the relative weight given to the many conscripted white soldiers remembrances ran heavier in the public mind of the moment than the original impulses of the courageous southern blacks who began the tradition.

Over time, the tradition of Memorial Day has been molded into a more general remembrance of soldiers’ sacrifice. The role of equality and freedom for all races has been almost lost in that historical reinvention of the holiday. The additional elements of recreation, of personal and familial memorials, and of the coming of summer have become even more prominent than the holiday’s transformed military honors.

Today, however, let’s also remember the cause for which men and women of color stood up, in a hostile and dangerous atmosphere, to reinter Union soldiers with dignity. As we remember our recent dead, we also remember those Americans who fought not just for American ideals, but to create an America in which the ideal of freedom even existed for all. It’s a battle we must renew constantly as there will always be the impulse to forget the truth when it is convenient.

Sources: Race and Reunion, by David Blight, Adam Cohen, NYT Times, Wikipedia

Another Year Further from Brown v. Board... What Will Next Year Bring?

Yesterday was the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, rendered May 17, 1954. The date reminds us of the attributes that the lawyer who argued the case brought to the highest court as a litigant and as a Supreme Court Justice. Thurgood Marshall showed the determination, vision, and the moral courage so sorely lacking in recent anemic decisions on civil rights matters.

It would be a horror for to Marshall to see the landmark case he fought for so many years to position and win stood on its head this past year in the Louisville decision. But that we had another Marshall, or anyone close to him, on the Court today— to provide some resistance against the segregationist slant of today’s Supreme majority.

A civil rights lawyer I know said last year that any potential nominee to the Court should be immediately passed over if, when asked to name the greatest justices in history, Marshall’s name didn’t pass their lips without hesitation. One has to hope that the next President will feel the same.

This country can’t wait another decade— or two or three— to rectify the miserable residential and educational divide that exists in so many places still in our country. Poor people, always disproportionately people of color, live and school their children in neighborhoods served by poorer schools, housed away from middle class and wealthy communities, where most Americans can’t see the lack of access available to the things they take for granted.

If Marshall were still alive, he’d be kicking and screaming about the Court’s backsliding into a defense of White’s Rights and the priority it gives capital over human rights today. We’d know it was over his dead body that anyone could use Brown v. Board as a precedent to overrule itself.

This comes to mind when one thinks about the kind of justice we might see continued in the coming years. John McCain recently went to Memphis on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination to speak at the National Civil Rights Museum— about how he was wrong to have opposed a national holiday in King's honor. But when it comes to describing his judicial vision, McCain recently posited that his choice for the next nominee to the Supreme Court would be in the mold of Justice Rehnquist, John Roberts, and Sam Alito.

Rehnquist argued for segregated accomodations, Roberts, who clerked for Rehnquist, argued for narrowing voting rights laws under President Reagan, and Alito long opposed affirmative action. Should we therefore believe that McCain would choose to stage the theatrics of supporting civil rights history, while his true intentions are to undermine equal justice under the law? Let's hope this campaign brings focus to what the candidates really believe when it comes to civil rights.

“Half in Ten” — Ending Poverty in America

Today, thirty seven million Americans live in poverty. The poorest 20% of Americans control only 3.4% of the nation’s wealth.

In the 1960’s, the War on Poverty cut the American poverty rate almost in half. Since then, there’s been little emphasis on making further progress in the fight to end domestic poverty. We have actually made negative progress towards economic equality, especially in this decade. It’s hard to believe— in a nation that uses roughly a quarter of the world’s resources, with under 5% of of the world’s population. The lessons of the War on Poverty, which was cut short by the Vietnam War and stymied by the vicious polarization of the country growing out of backlash to the antiwar and civil rights movements, are still there today to be applied to a renewed push to end poverty in America.

Almost 13 million children in America live in poverty in 2008, over nine million workers live under the poverty line. This is unacceptable. There are clear steps we can take to alleviate poverty and begin to make the country whole when it comes to ending it.

Tomorrow in Philadelphia, John Edwards will make a major announcement about the Half in Ten campaign to cut American poverty in half over ten years. The campaign will:

—Elevate and sustain a focus on the situations facing the poor and middle class today

—Build and strengthen an effective constituency to demand legislative action on poverty and economic mobility

—Advance specific legislative and policy proposals that will deliver real benefits to struggling American families

In an interview last week on NPR, Edwards spoke about three individual actions the country can take that will each raise people up from poverty towards realizing their potential:

-raise the minimum wage
-expand earned income tax credits
-provide more access to quality child care for lower income families

To these, I would add that integrated and affordable housing and educational opportunities must be a critical element of any American effort to end poverty. The role of racism and segregation in the persistence of poverty in the United States cannot be overstated.

Towards the end of advancing the goals of the Half in Ten campaign, the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, ACORN, The Center for American Progress, and the Coalition on Human Needs is launching this campaign with Mr. Edwards at its helm.

Look for the announcement tomorrow on your local news outlets, go to the website to sign on as a supporter of Half in Ten, and let your friends, colleagues, and elected officials know you support a sustained campaign to end poverty in America.

Indiana ID Law Upheld/ Hoosiers Will Test Gas v. Environment

Indiana’s Voter ID Law will be in effect for the upcoming primary here. The possibility of a number of poor, older, and minority voters being unable to vote or being discouraged from going to the polls without a holding a current driver’s license or passport here may be significant in a tight race for the Democratic primary. (See earlier post on the possible suppression effects of voter ID laws)

Another significant issue in Indiana is that Hillary Clinton is now joining with John McCain in calling for a gas tax holiday this summer, in an effort to persuade voters that they should be able to drive as much as they’re used to in tough economic times. Whether most voters care as much about the environmental consequences of such a policy as they do about their wallets is doubtful. (One of my Hoosier hosts paid $60 for a fill-up yesterday.)

Barack Obama is risking the high road at a moment when Clinton sees an opportunity in portraying him as an elitist. Interesting… and would be worth some coverage in a general election campaign— if Obama ends up running against ‘straight talk’ McCain. McCain claims to understand that global warming is a serious issue, despite a number of energy policies that look a lot like the Bush Administration’s.

What, if anything, will Al Gore have to say about the gas tax holiday as a campaign issue? Global warming has yet to surface in this race as a serious issue, despite polls showing Democrats and Independents view it as significant…

(see Memeorandum for discussion)