The racial bias of too many elected white judges and state legislators continues to undermine America’s promise of fair courts and representative government. The opening of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial is the occasion of a series of essays by the American Constitution Society, including one by Sherrilyn Ifill about elected judges in Alabama preserving the ways of the Old South. The judges are routinely overriding the decisions of juries in their courtrooms by handing down death sentences, most often in cases involving a black defendant and white victim. The essay points out that in 1957, King proclaimed, “Give us the ballot and we will place judges on the benches of the South who will do justly and love mercy.” But old biases among voters, mostly whites, have yet to be overcome – and society suffers as a result. State legislators across the country, mostly whites engaging in race-tinged fear mongering, are creating new barriers to voting that also have a discriminatory effect and weaken democracy overall. South Carolina recently passed its harsh version of a photo ID requirement for voters, stirring protests and legal complaints. The US Justice Department is at least asking lots of questions before it “preclears” South Carolina’s new law. Strong organizing in the state has put a face on those who will be cheated out of their constitutional right to vote by the guardians of reactionary values – more than 50 years after King’s call to end ballot barriers.
Archive for August, 2011
LOD: Koch-Pope-AFP Money Trail
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011
The video by Brave New Films about the Wake schools controversy is creating it own tussle. The video says Americans for Prosperity, led nationally by the billionaire Koch brothers, spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to promote resegregation and elect a conservative school board in 2009. Dallas Woodhouse, head of the NC chapter of Americans for Prosperity, says these claims are “bald-faced lies.” He says AFP didn’t spend a dime on direct political contributions or for nasty, “electioneering” attack ads, like those it sponsored in 2010 legislative races. However, as Sue Sturgis of the Institute for Southern Studies points out, AFP has been working for years to undermine public education in Wake County and its leaders brag that it deserves partial credit for helping anti-busing parents organize and fan discontent.
The video would be much stronger if it (1) acknowledged the genuine frustrations of parents over student reassignments, year after year, as the school system struggled to keep up with Wake’s incredible growth – ironically caused in part by the school system’s superior reputation; (2) described the investment of Raleigh retailer Art Pope in the multi-year crusade against public education, rather than ignore him for a national smackdown of the Koch brothers; and (3) linked that investment to the manipulation of grassroots dissent into enough momentum to elect ultra-conservatives in Republican-leaning districts to the school board.
Pope’s $15,000 donation to the Wake County Republican Party for the school board election in 2009 is well known, and rather limited, but his investment of $2.2 million through the Pope Foundation to Americans for Prosperity in the past six years seems to have escaped the Brave New Films producers. That’s a lot of money; no wonder Pope is one of the five national board members of AFP. It’s hard to know how much of this money came back to the North Carolina chapter, but it’s significant to see the two periods when Pope’s donations spiked: His foundation gave $425,000 from May through September 2006 when AFP-NC led a fevered, but unsuccessful campaign to defeat a Wake County school bond, and it gave $500,000 in June 2009 as the school board election was getting underway. Following the money, a line repeated in the video, would suggest that the real power behind AFP in North Carolina is not Dallas Woodhouse or the Koch brothers; it’s Art Pope.
LOD: Super PACs Super Donors
Thursday, August 25th, 2011
The Center for Responsive Politics continues to monitor the development of Super PACs, the post-Citizens United creatures that can accept gigantic donations to “independently” support or oppose candidates. CRP says that liberal Super PACs (like those gearing up to support Obama’s re-election) have taken in nearly $8 million in the first half of 2011, with more than 80 percent coming from just 23 donors. Conservative Super PACs (like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads) have pulled in nearly $18 million with more than 80 percent from 35 donors. So that’s $20 million from just 58 donors! Many are listed in the latest report by CRP, with the largest numbers from California, New York and Texas.
LOD: Graphic View of Voter Reg
Wednesday, August 24th, 2011
The John W. Pope Civitas Institute deserves its reputation for biased polling and twisted thinking, but it can sometimes be a useful place to see statistics from a government source presented in a nifty format – in this case, county-by-county voter registration details. (Ironic, right? Civitas roundly trashes the government, including the State Board of Elections, the source of this feature, and then uses the tax-financed government agency’s data for its untainted private purposes. But, of course, Civitas is not wholly private; it’s a tax-subsidized think tank, funded almost entirely by tax-sheltered profits from Art Pope’s Roses/Maxway family corporation, funneled through the John W. Pope Foundation to Civitas. Democracy NC is a tax-subsidized nonprofit, too, and thanks for your financial support!) But back to the nifty format: This presentation lets you quickly see the change in voter registration in your county and across the state; change the dates in the window for a longer view; hover your cursor over the county name to see race and party details; and export data to an Excel file. Statewide, because of list maintenance, there are 60,500 fewer Republicans and 136,000 fewer Democrats registered now than in November 2008, and 91,000 additional voters registered as Unaffiliated.
LOD: Register Early, Vote For Your Life
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011
Here’s an important announcement if you’re connected to a NC high school – as a student, parent, teacher, staff member or administrator. County boards of elections are gearing up to fulfill a new requirement that they conduct voter registration drives in all high schools during September, which is Citizens Awareness Month in North Carolina. Some counties do a good job, but most could use a hand from community volunteers and insiders at the high school. Now’s the time to offer to help! The registration drive provides a unique chance to educate young people about the election process and to foster a life-long commitment to civic engagement. Citizens who are 16 or 17 can preregister by checking an extra box on the registration application; the completed form will be held by the elections board until the applicant reaches the age to be fully registered. Since preregistration began in January 2010, more than 60,000 16 and 17 year olds have signed up. Last week, the State Board of Elections sent a 13-page booklet to all county boards that includes a list of ideas for registration and preregistration drives (page 5). Local planning is just getting underway; use the contact info in the booklet (page 8 ) to call your local elections board and offer to help with activities for September (or call Democracy North Carolina at 919-286-6000).
LOD: Being Double Bunked
Monday, August 22nd, 2011
The NC FreeEnterprise Foundation has two entries that provide a detailed look at the 12 NC Senate members and 28 NC House members who are “double bunked” by the proposed General Assembly district maps for the 2012-2020 elections. Given how the new lines are drawn, the homes of these 40 legislators are placed in districts with a second member. If the maps clear court scrutiny, the legislator will have to choose to run against another incumbent, run for another office, move to another district or not run at all. Some members have already made up their minds, according to the useful analysis.
LOD: Video of Koch vs. Wake Schools
Monday, August 15th, 2011
A powerful new video from Brave New Films documents the Koch brothers’ takeover of the Wake County school system through Americans for Prosperity and the 2009 school board election. It reveals the links to past segregation rhetoric and the upheaval created by the Koch agenda to destroy public education, equal opportunity, diversity in schools. With so much good video and a big target on the Kochs, it leaves out lots of the story, including the crucial link to Raleigh’s own Art Pope, local patron of Americans for Prosperity, member of its national board, leading financier of NC Republicans, and key strategist in the 2009 election. As Sue Sturgis of the Institute for Southern Studies says in the film, “Follow the money, you can see it, it’s real.” Dallas Woodhouse of NC Americans for Prosperity says his group didn’t directly spend money on the 2009 election, although he carefully doesn’t deny organizing support for the winners, their new plan or their allies running as candidates in this year’s important election.
LOD: The Big Lie About Voter ID
Thursday, August 11th, 2011
People with only a hammer see everything as a nail. Three voters caught trying to vote twice in the 2008 presidential election are now being prosecuted by the Wake County district attorney; they were jailed with a felony charge and $10,000 bond. The NC Republican Party and other advocates for a photo ID requirement are delighted with this news, seeing it through their hammer-claw lens as stark evidence that Gov. Perdue was horribly wrong to veto House Bill 351, the photo ID bill. NC Republican chief Robin Hayes is especially happy to jab Perdue with a big lie that will no doubt be repeated over and over – perhaps with the media’s help. The lie buries this core truth: Requiring voters to show an ID would have done ABSOLUTLEY NOTHING to prevent the crime of attempting to vote twice. The alleged cheaters could show an ID when they voted at the Early Voting site, and show it again a few days later when they voted at their polling site on Election Day. They voted in their own names and did not attempt to impersonate somebody else; impersonation is the only fraud H-351 really addresses. Another truth: The current safeguards worked – none of the three successfully voted twice. Their ballots at the Early Voting sites were retrieved and not counted; the system worked, without an ID requirement! This case involves three black Democrats in the NC election Obama narrowly won; the outpouring of hostility is unfortunately predictable. More prosecutions of double voting are in the works. Voter fraud should be prosecuted – the integrity of the election system must be protected. That’s why House Bill 862 is actually a stronger, better bill than H-351. It requires voters to show an ID or attest under penalty of perjury that they are who they say they are AND it provides funds for the State Board of Elections to hire an investigator “to investigate, document, and prepare for prosecution possible evidence of voter fraud, including cases involving voter impersonation.” H-351 is not a serious hammer against fraud; it’s a political sham and those who point to this case as evidence of its value are misled or misleaders.
LOD: Titan’s America: We Know Best
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011
Titan America is back in the news, winning a draft air pollution permit for its proposed cement factory near Wilmington. Citizens in southeastern NC have kept up a vigorous campaign to force the company to play fair, but Titan apparently believes the free market means its competitors should shut up and trust them to do the right thing. The Wilmington Star News says that government officials are largely going along, even though Titan has a record of making misleading statements, if not lying. The NC environmental agency says it “had to issue the draft permit, based on state law and scientific models of the potential impact,” because computer models “showed that plant emissions would not exceed health standards outside the plant’s property line.” But why trust Titan to supply correct information to go into those models? Says the newspaper: “Titan’s actions during this process speak for themselves. In an interview shortly after plans for the plant were announced, Titan officials told the Star-News Editorial Board that it would comply with the new federal standards, even though they had not yet been announced. After the stricter limits were finalized, the Portland Cement Association challenged the rules. Titan’s president is head of that association. More recently, the company filed a slander suit against two vocal critics of the proposed Castle Hayne plant in what has all the appearances of an attempt to bully opponents into silence.” [see video]
LOD: Mystery Donors At Work
Monday, August 8th, 2011
Almost out of nowhere, a Wilmington couple jumped to the top of the list – just below Art Pope and his family – as the largest campaign donors in North Carolina’s 2010 legislative elections. Democracy North Carolina compiled the list of their $242,500 in donations to state political parties and 17 Republican legislative candidates in districts from the coast to mountains. (Many donations are still not in the State Board of Elections’s database because of staff shortages there.) The Wilmington Star News profiled Neil Carmichael (Mike) Bender and his wife Bridgett, and their business partner Jeff Petro, who kicked in another $37,000. They run several businesses, own airplanes, enjoy political access, hate taxes, and they’re ready to contribute heavily in next year’s election. But Mike doesn’t want his picture taken by the Star News. Hmmm. Meanwhile, the secret donor behind a $1 million gift funneled through a shell corporation to a super PAC promoting Mitt Romney’s presidency has been exposed: he’s Edward A. Conard, a financial wheeler-dealer in the firm where Romney once worked. Conard? Bender? Maybe they’re clues to solve the canard of who’s bending our political culture to the breaking point.
