David Koch’s Monstrous Legacy

Perhaps is a result of the better aspects of my Catholic upbringing - something former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan seemingly never internalized - but I was raised to believe each of us has an obligation to leave the world a better place and to have a legacy of having helped others and most certainly not to have a legacy of harming the planet and leaving others more economically desperate. At the time of his death, as a piece in New York Magazine notes, David Koch was worth $42,4 billion - more than anyone can spend in a lifetime and and amount which could have done untold good for millions of people. True, Koch donated to museums and the arts, but his political legacy and the harm done to the environment and the debasement of the lives of countless workers are much more defining of the man who number one motivation seemingly was greed and the amassing of ever more money. Equally disgusting is the toxic political forces Koch funded with his brother that some will argue gave America the nightmare of the Trump presidency, a legacy that continues to harm lives daily.  Here are highlights from the New York Magazine piece:

By the time he died on Friday at the age of 79, David Koch was worth $42.4 billion. He will be remembered for what he did with it. Some people will probably praise his charitable spirit, perhaps even his support for criminal-justice reform, or his skepticism of military intervention. “The vast bulk of Koch’s philanthropy was not political,” Brian Doherty noted in an obit for Reason magazine.

But Koch’s largesse wasn’t free. We are paying for it now, and have been paying for it for decades. Koch’s legacy is a testament to the power of weaponized philanthropy. For Koch did not restrict himself to supporting artists and scientists. He, along with his brother Charles, who survives him, committed their vast family fortune to the construction of a powerful conservative network. We live in the world that he helped build, and it is on fire.

Koch, who ran for office on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980, helped funnel billions into climate-change-denying organizations for decades. His motivation wasn’t a mystery: He did it because he was greedy. Political action to arrest climate change threatened Koch’s business interests. His family originally made its money in oil and gas, and Koch Industries, as Tim Dickinson laid out in a 2014 piece for Rolling Stone, is one of the biggest polluters in the U.S.

The legacy of David Koch cannot be extricated from the work he undertook with his brother. As Jane Mayer reported for The New Yorker in 2010, the brothers were ideologically sympatico, bound together by their disbelief in climate science and their opposition to industry regulation. Their work had massive reach, though their use of shell trusts and foundations can make their money difficult to trace. Mayer, however, has reported much of it out over the years, in pieces for The New Yorker and in her 2016 book, Dark Money.

They donated copiously to the Heritage Foundation, which wraps climate change denial into a broader conservative platform that opposes LGBT rights and legal abortion. They helped establish the anti-regulatory Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and that came with certain privileges; in 2018, Inside Higher Ed reported that the university had given the Kochs a say in faculty hiring. Similar funding agreements also existed at Florida State University and Utah State University. Koch money bankrolled right-to-work groups that have worked for decades to reduce union membership — a goal that has, according to most experts, contributed significantly to America’s increasing wealth inequality.

But what’s bad for workers tends to be good for the Kochs. Unions cut into a corporation’s bottom line; they make it slightly more difficult for lowly businessmen to purchase Park Avenue penthouses worth millions. The same principle of self-interest applies to one of David’s pet projects. Through the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which he founded, the family fortune helped mobilize the tea party movement. The id they unleashed — the naked white nationalism, the anti–big government hysteria, all those conspiracy theories — helped seed the ground for Donald Trump. David and his brother refused to donate to Trump, but he is in many ways the culmination of their work.

David Koch died before he could reap the full bounty of his works. We will not be so lucky. His legacy is poisoned water and dirty air, decimated unions, and Donald Trump. No amount of arts patronage can purify that stain. It is likely not coincidental that the small government the Kochs desire would leave artists and scientists at the mercy of billionaires’ largesse. It’s as if he and his brother wanted to pitch us all on their vision for the world: If we let their companies gobble as much as they could, they would throw us a scrap or two. Never enough to live on; just enough to hold us until the next handout. They would allow us a glimpse of beauty, a mirage of progress, so that we would readily accept a cage.

Protected from consequences by death as his money protected him in life, David Koch is dead.

Sometimes one must speak ill of the dead in the hope that others might not follow a similar path of greed and harm to the world and others. 

Trump/Pence's Ultimate Betrayal of Its Base

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman hits a home run in a column in the New York Times that looks at the ways the Trump/Pence regime - and the Republican Party as a whole - has betrayed and continues to betray its white working class base.  A base that seems willing to believe any lie so long as its racial animosities are pandered to. The latest betrayal is the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court.  While Kavanaugh may provide an anti-gay, pro-Christofascist vote on the Court to the delight of evangelical Christians, he will likely do nothing but harm them economically and help lock in the wage stagnation that has harmed so many working Americans even as corporate profits have soared and the wealthy have claimed a growing percentage of all wealth in America.  Here is Krugman's column:

By now, it’s almost a commonplace to say that Trump has systematically betrayed the white working class voters who put him over the top. He ran as a populist; he’s governed as an orthodox Republican, with the only difference being the way he replaced racial dog-whistles with raw, upfront racism.

Many people have made this point with respect to the Trump tax cut, which is so useless to ordinary workers that Republican candidates are trying to avoid talking about it. The same can be said about health care, where Democrats are making Trump’s assault on the Affordable Care Act a major issue while Republicans try to change the subject.

But I think we should be seeing more attention devoted to the way Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court fits into this picture. The Times had a good editorial on Kavanaugh’s anti-worker agenda, but by and large the news analyses I’ve seen focus on his apparently expansive views of presidential authority and privilege.

I agree that these are important in the face of a lawless president with authoritarian instincts. But the business and labor issues shouldn’t be neglected. Kavanaugh is, to put it bluntly, an anti-worker radical, opposed to every effort to protect working families from fraud and mistreatment.

The most spectacular example is his opinion that Sea World owed no liability for a killer whale attack that killed one of its workers, because she should have known the risks. He has declared the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helps control the financial fraud against working families that played a major role in the 2008 crisis, unconstitutional. He’s taken an extremely expansive view of the rights of business to suppress union organizing.

This is all, by the way, the opposite of populism. The public strongly supports worker protections. The ongoing campaign to take them away is an act of conservative elites, people who have made their careers by carrying water for business interests, and is being implemented in effect by stealth under the noses of voters who thought Trump was on their side.

And this betrayal matters much more for workers than, say, Trump’s trade bluster. There’s growing evidence that wage stagnation in America – the very stagnation that angers Trump voters — isn’t being driven by impersonal forces like technological change; to an important extent it’s the result of political changes that have weakened workers’ bargaining power. If Trump manages to install Kavanaugh, he’ll help institutionalize these anti-worker policies for decades to come.

The GOP's War on Labor Unions Helped Elect Trump

While there is no single explanation for how and why Donald Trump, despite losing the popular vote by a still growing margin, managed to win the Electoral College.   One, as previously noted in a post on this blog, was the rage of evangelical Christians against modernity in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan that led them to support Trump even though I suspect a year or two from now they will be questioning their votes as Trump fails to return jobs to rust belt states. A second reason is that the GOP's relentless war on labor unions is now bearing fruit.  The decline in labor unions accomplished several goals for the GOP: (i) it significantly decreased union ability to get out the vote for Democrats, and (ii) it accelerated the decline in wages that caused the blue collar works to swing to Trump in desperation.  Thankfully, a right to work effort in Virginia was defeated last Tuesday as Virginia remained blue for the third presidential cycle.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this insidious agenda of the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

One of the biggest surprises on election night occurred as Americans watched Democratic strongholds in the Rust Belt turn red. A few in particular—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio—were especially shocking. These states—once thriving manufacturing centers with powerful labor unions—had voted for Democratic presidents for decades. This election, they chose Trump.

It’s no coincidence that these states, with their large percentages of blue-collar workers, were also the backdrop for contentious, Republican-led battles to weaken labor unions, battles that the labor movement ultimately lost in Michigan in Wisconsin.  . . . . This means that unions wind up with less less money and thus wield less influence to get out the vote for Democrats, the party with which they’ve long been allies.  

“Republicans knew this would decimate unions, and now we can see the impact,” says Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island.

Back in the 1980s, unions represented 22 percent of private-sector workers, he says. Now they represent only about 8 percent. Loomis points to two major historical shifts that inflicted major damage to the labor movement: the drying up of manufacturing jobs in the late 1970s as factories moved overseas, and more recently, Republican-led movements to pass laws restricting unionization. This year, West Virginia became the 26th state to pass right-to-work laws, which went into effect this summer.

But it’s not just right-to-work laws that have weakened the labor movement. Unions had tried to stop the impacts of globalization and automatization, Loomis says, but “they were overwhelmed by a bipartisan belief in globalized trade and nobody has taken long-term unemployment and community decline seriously.” Neither Ohio nor Pennsylvania has passed right-to-work legislation, but their industries—and the chance that they would vote Democratic—have fallen nevertheless.

The election results in Nevada reflect a stark contrast. Hillary Clinton won the state with the help of the labor movement, and in particular, with the help of Culinary Workers Union, which put on an aggressive campaign to mobilize its 57,000 members to vote for Democrats. Clinton won by a large margin in Nevada and so did the state’s Democratic Senate candidate, Catherine Cortez Masto. “The key difference is that they were able to organize working-class people to get their votes,” says Loomis.

There is also another key difference: The Culinary Union is mostly made up of Latino workers in the hotel and service industry, a different demographic from the predominantly white factory workers in the Rust Belt who made up the base of the labor movement there and have since seen their jobs disappear.

In the end, it may have been a combination of a weakening labor movement and Trump’s strong anti-trade, anti-globalization message that helped him win the White House.

As I have said, it will be interesting to see if and when Trump's blue collar, low information supporters turn on him when he fails to magically bring jobs back to the rust belt.   

Walker Quits 2016 Presidential Race

Candidly, at times it is hard for me to decide which of the Republican Presidential nominee candidates is the most despicable.  There are so many contenders, almost all of whom spew coded messages of racism, anti-Hispanic bigotry, homophobia and a contempt for women, not to mention an agenda that makes war on the poor and less fortunate.  But certainly, Scott Walker has been among those at the top of my list.  In his war against unions in Wisconsin he has shown himself to be against average Americans and their families, and his ridiculous anti-Muslim and anti-climate change harangues have shown that he's either an idiot or a knowing liar.  Thus, I was most delighted to hear that Walker has suspended his presidential campaign.  Indeed, the most decent thing I have heard him say were the words of his brief statement announcing the suspension of his campaign.  Here are highlights on this welcome development from the New York Times:

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, whose early glow as a Republican presidential contender was snuffed out with the rise of anti-establishment rivals, announced on Monday that he was quitting the race and urged some of his 15 rivals to do the same so the party could unite against the leading candidate, Donald J. Trump. 

Mr. Walker’s pointed rebuke of Mr. Trump gave powerful voice to the private fears of many Republicans that the party risked alienating wide swaths of the American electorate – Hispanics, women, immigrants, veterans, and most recently Muslims – if Mr. Trump continued vilifying or mocking those groups as part of his overtures to angry and disaffected voters.

Still, Mr. Walker’s exit was not selfless: He was running low on campaign cash, sliding sharply in opinion polls, losing potential donors to rivals and unnerving supporters with a steady stream of gaffes, like saying he would consider building a barrier wall along the Canadian border.

Appearing ashen and drained at a brief news conference late Monday in Madison, Mr. Walker said the Republican presidential field was too focused on “how bad things are” rather than on “how we can make them better for everyone.” Without naming Mr. Trump, Mr. Walker issued a plea to fellow candidates to coalesce around a different Republican who could offer a more “optimistic” vision and guide the party to a victory next year that, he admitted with sadness in his voice, he could not achieve himself.

Mr. Walker’s departure is likely to have little impact given the sprawling field. He was competing most aggressively in Iowa, which he deemed a must-win state, but he had fallen from first to 10th place in a recent poll there. He also drew support from less than one-half of 1 percent of Republican primary voters in a recent CNN national poll.

If the demise of Mr. Walker’s campaign underscores anything, it is the increasingly intense pressure that candidates are under to raise enormous sums of money not only for their political operations but also for their “super PACs.”

The need to raise money has had the effect of turning the traditional state-by-state nomination fights into national contests, in which candidates need to prove themselves to donors across the country – rather than merely win over voters in the handful of states that hold the earliest caucuses and primaries. Mr. Walker increasingly tailored his message for Iowans, taking some sharply conservative stands on issues like immigration and same-sex marriage that could pose problems with moderates.

 My analysis is simple: good riddance! 

Potential Rivals Plan to Kill Scott Walker's Candidacy

It is always great entertainment watching Republicans back stab and trash each other.   With the preliminaries for the 2016 presidential elections underway and Scott Walker - a man I find thoroughly repulsive - high in the polls, the other would be GOP candidates are out to savage Walker and destroy his potential campaign.  It's an endeavor in which I hope they are successful.  Walker, to me symbolizes much of what is wrong with today's GOP, and his early demise, if it happens, may be a very positive development. A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the efforts to destroy Walker.  Here are highlights:

The Daily Beast spoke with strategists working with each of Walker’s top rivals to the Republican nomination, granting those who requested it anonymity in order to speak freely about how they are sizing up the field’s first leader.

The 2016 presidential campaign is still in its earliest stages—no serious candidates have even officially announced—and so most strategists said that they had only begun the process of pouring over Walker’s record.

Which is fine since Walker has begun to provide real-time oppo fodder on his own.   No sooner did Walker emerge as the early poll-leader than he ran into a series of stumbles, most notably refusing to answer whether or not he believed in evolution or whether he considered Barack Obama a Christian. He then declined to criticize Rudy Giuliani after the former mayor said that President Obama doesn’t love America, while Walker sat a few feet away.

 “The question for him is, ‘Is he ready for prime time,’ ” said a top strategist to one Walker rival. “He has always been a little cocky, and you are starting to see that being governor of Wisconsin doesn’t necessarily prepare you for storm of a national campaign.”

Republican operatives say they are just beginning to pour over his record from a decade in the State Assembly, eight years as county executive of the relatively liberal Milwaukee county executive and four runs for governor, including an aborted attempt in 2005 and a failed recall attempt in 2012.

Already Walker has been dogged by alleged improprieties regarding campaign finance laws during the recall campaign and a lack of transparency as county executive.

“This is a guy who has literally been in elective office his entire adult life,” said a strategist for one rival campaign. “He has made his living off the government sector, the taxpayer. He has never really, to my knowledge, had any kind of serious existence outside of the public sector.”

That has left enemies in his wake, the Republicans say, and helped turn Walker into a candidate willing to throw sharp elbows at his fellow presidential contenders at a time when the other candidates are still trying to hold the party together.

Now they are getting ready to respond in kind. Several rivals said that the first place to attack Walker was on his conservative bonafides. In such a deep field, evangelical and Tea Party voters looking for fidelity will have plenty of alternatives to choose from if Walker is found to be too soft on immigration, abortion, or gay marriage.

I think you can easily make a line where this guy looks like the kind of person who will say anything to get elected.”

Walker has already come under criticism for recently shifting his position on abortion and immigration. Next up is likely to be his record as governor of Wisconsin. Walker’s constant mentioning of his battles with the unions is already drawing eye-rolls among his rivals, particularly when he suggested that the battle prepared him to take on the Islamic State.

Walker’s early polling leads mean that every stumble will be magnified, while the other campaigns say that their candidates will still be able to make mistakes that go unnoticed.

“Expectations are high, and he is under a microscope,” said Mike Dennehy, an aide to Rick Perry’s campaign in New Hampshire. “I’ve been on both sides in these races, at the top and at the bottom, and starting out at the top can be extremely difficult.”

Scott Walker’s War on the Middle Class

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has made a mess of Wisconsin's economy.  His next mission?  To create a similar mess on a national level and to continue the GOP's war on the middle class.  Walker, like most in the GOP feigns concern over the declining prospects of middle America yet continues to push policies that will accelerate the downward spiral for most of us.  A piece in Salon looks at the damage wrought in Wisconsin that Walker wants to take national.  Here are excerpts:

The Washington Post returned to Wisconsin this past weekend to empty union halls and a depressed workforce. The public employee union law – which barred contract negotiations on everything but base wages and limited annual salary increases to the rate of inflation, forced most unions to collect their own dues rather than having them deducted automatically by the state and mandated annual recertification of affiliates – has been more successful than even its supporters hoped.

In the state where public employee unions got their start, public workers see no need to stay enrolled, since unions cannot by law effectively advocate on their behalf. Membership in the Wisconsin affiliate of the National Education Association is down one-third; the American Federation of Teachers dropped by one-half; the state employees union fell 70 percent.

There are fewer public employees working, too, even though Gov. Walker claimed that the passage of the anti-union law would save jobs. The Wisconsin Budget Project finds that the ratio of public employees to total population is at its lowest level in at least two decades.

That will only continue if Walker gets his wish to turn Wisconsin into a right-to-work state, an effort being undertaken right now in the state Legislature.

[A]ccording to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, median household income in Wisconsin is $51,467 a year, nearly $800 below the national average. And it has fallen consistently since the passage of the anti-union law in 2011, despite a small bounce-back nationally in 2013. The Bureau of Economic Analysis puts Wisconsin in the middle of the pack on earnings growth, despite a fairly tight labor market with a headline unemployment rate of 5.2 percent.

This actually undercounts the problem a bit, because it doesn’t cover total compensation. For example, in the wake of the anti-union law, public employees lost the equivalent of 8-10 percent in take-home pay because of increased contributions to healthcare and pension benefits.

Moreover, the meager earnings growth that has come to Wisconsin has mostly gone to the top 1 percent of earners.  

[A]s Larry Mishel wrote in the New York Times yesterday, “the erosion of collective bargaining is the single largest factor suppressing wage growth for middle-wage workers over the last few decades.” And Wisconsin provides a salient example of that.

[Walmart] like most businesses, makes changes that benefit workers only when its reputation is threatened and poor publicity ensues. That means that worker voices play a powerful role in wage growth.

Scott Walker has taken that voice away from public unions, and effectively the entire Wisconsin labor movement, which finds itself crippled. That has real consequences for middle-class wages. Since Walker wants to bring this policy menu to the rest of the country in 2016, people on Main Streets outside of Wisconsin should take note.

Wal-Mart’s Strategy of Deniability of Responsibility

I noted recently the horrific fire in a garment factory in Bangladesh that claimed well over 100 lives - likely mostly women and children.  One of the principal clients of the sweat shop fire trap is Wal-Mart, a company that has long cut corners on adequate pay for its workers, shifted purchasing from American factories to China and third world nations, and which I am sure applauds the Republican Party quest to gut meaningful regulations on business and block unionization by employees.  In short, Wal-Mart symbolizes the GOP quest to return America to the state that employees faced during the Gilded Age, the excesses of which gave rise to the progressive movement in America.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Wal-Mart's efforts to shift blame and deny responsibility for the horror that happened in Bangladesh.  Here are excerpts:

 

Bangladesh is half a world away from Bentonville, the Arkansas city where Wal-Mart is headquartered. This week, Wal-Mart surely wishes it were farther away than that.

Over the weekend, a horrific fire swept through a Bangladesh clothing factory, killing more than 100 workers, many of whose bodies were burnt so badly that they could not be identified. In its gruesome particulars — locked doors, no emergency exits, workers leaping to their deaths — the blaze seems a ghastly centennial reenactment of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, when 146 workers similarly jumped to their deaths or were incinerated after they found the exit doors were locked.

The signal difference between the two fires is location. The Triangle building was located directly off New York’s Washington Square. Thousands watched the appalling spectacle of young workers leaping to the sidewalks 10 stories down; reporters and photographers were quickly on the scene. It’s not likely, however, that the Bangladesh disaster was witnessed by anyone from either the United States or Europe — the two markets for which the clothes made inside that factory were destined. For that, at least, Wal-Mart should consider itself fortunate.

If this were an isolated incident of Wal-Mart denying responsibility for the conditions under which the people who make and move its products labor, then the Bangladeshi disaster wouldn’t reflect quite so badly on the company. But the very essence of the Wal-Mart system is to employ thousands upon thousands of workers through contractors and subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, who are compelled by Wal-Mart’s market power and its demand for low prices to cut corners and skimp on safety. And because Wal-Mart isn’t the employer of record for these workers, the company can disavow responsibility for their conditions of work.

This system isn’t reserved just for workers in faraway lands: Tens of thousands of American workers labor under similar arrangements. Many are employed at little more than the minimum wage in the massive warehouses in the inland exurbs of Los Angeles, where Wal-Mart’s imports from Asia are trucked from the city’s harbor to be sorted and packaged and put on the trucks and trains that take them to Wal-Mart stores for a thousand miles around.

The warehouses are run by logistics companies with which Wal-Mart contracts, and most of the workers are employed by some of the 200-plus temporary employment companies that have sprung up in the area .  .  .  . Wal-Mart itself was not cited. That’s the beauty of its chain of deniability.

A small band of these warehouse workers has been demonstrating for the past couple of months to bring attention to the bizarrely contingent nature of their employment and the abuses that flow from it. Their numbers were augmented Friday by actual Wal-Mart employees in stores around the nation, calling attention to the everyday low wages and absence of benefits that the vast majority of the company’s 1.4 million U.S. employees receive.

Other discount retailers — notably Costco and Trader Joe’s — pay their workers far more, train them more extensively, have much lower rates of turnover and much higher rates of sales per employee, according to a Harvard Business Review article by Zeynep Ton of the MIT Sloan School of Management. Costco is a very profitable business, but Wal-Mart maintains an even higher profit margin, which it achieves by underpaying its employees.

But Wal-Mart neither pays its own nor takes responsibility for those who make and move its wares. For America’s largest private-sector employer, the emergency exits are always open.

Meanwhile, the Walton family members wallow in billions of dollars of wealth.  They obviously view their employees and those who indirectly work for their company as little better than serfs.

The Fall Out from Walker's Recall Win in Wisconsin

Yesterday's disastrous victory by Scott Walker in the Wisconsin recall election holds many bad omens for Democrats and average Americans who don't drink heavily from the GOP's Kool-Aid cauldron.  The first omen is that money can buy elections via a constant media barrage (some estimates are that Walker out spent Democrats 7 to 1).  Another is that many voters remain with their heads in the sand until the last moment and can be easily duped to vote against their own long term best interests.   The third is that much more effort needs to be focused on winning the votes of moderates and independents.  No doubt Walker's survival will embolden the extremists in the GOP to take the Wisconsin game plan national - something that doesn't bode well for the country in the long term.  Here in Virginia one can only cringe at what the Virginia GOP will try to do during the 2013 legislative session. When will all of this end?  Only when (i) more of the elderly voter portion of the population that voes for the GOP dies off and (ii) younger voters wake up to the poisonous consequences of the GOP economic agenda and vote in full strength.  A column in the Washington Post looks at how Walker pulled out victory yesterday.  Here are highlights:

Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall offers a number of lessons for American politics more broadly.

First, the gender gap can work both ways. Women voted for Democrat Tom Barrett while men voted for Walker. Indeed, Walker’s share of the vote among women was 12 points lower than his share among men. But he carried males by a landslide: 59 percent to 40 percent. Walker lost women much more narrowly, 52 percent to 47 percent. The lesson is that Republicans can survive a rather big gender gap as long as they win men overwhelmingly.

Second, Walker’s heavy early spending clearly helped him. The pre-election polls suggested that Barrett was closing in on Walker in the final days, and he clearly was. The exit poll found that eight percent of the voters said they decided how to vote in the last few days, and they went overwhelmingly for Barrett, 69 percent to 27 percent. The rest of the electorate that decided earlier went for Walker . . . . Money matters.

Third, to win, Democrats need to overwhelm Republicans among moderates. Looking at the vote by ideology, you might imagine Barrett won: he carried liberals by 86 percent to 13 percent, and moderates by 54 percent to 46 percent. Walker carried only conservatives, by 86 percent to 14 percent. But the math added up for Walker

Democrats don’t just need to win moderates; they need to win them by very large margins. Victorious Democratic coalitions are inevitably an alliance of the center with the left. . . . . . Turning out your own supporters is essential. But so is fighting for the pure swing voters.

As a gay American, I continue to wonder at times if simply leaving the USA isn't perhaps the best strategy.   I find the GOP down right frightening and a threat to my well being.

What Makes Virginia Supposedly Business Friendly? The Legal Framework is Hostile to its Residents

Virginia politicians like to brag that Virginia ranks as one of the best states for businesses (a night view of Richmond is at left). Which is true because the interest of the state's human citizens is typically placed far behind the interests of big business. The latest CNBC.com survey of the best states for businesses put the Old Dominion in second place behind Texas, a slight downgrade from grabbing the top spot in 2009. Be it consumer protection laws or equality for all of its citizens - of the human kind, at least - and any number of issues that concern looking after the quality of life and social safety net for citizens, then Virginia's way down in the rankings. A Washington Post op-ed looks at the darker side of this "pro-business" state. Here are highlights:
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Virginia officials such as Gov. Robert F. McDonnell bragged about cheaper corporate taxes, fewer regulations and anti-union right-to-work laws.
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On the dark side, Virginia sucks up to business by coming on as anti-union and anti-gay in the sense that it doesn't provide the same level of recognition and protection for gay couples that Maryland and the District do.
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Another cloud is education. Decades ago, Gov. Mills Godwin had the foresight to beef up the state's community college system and make public colleges such as the University of Virginia and William & Mary world-class. Doing so gave the Old Dominion a much better training base for company employees. The recession and the stubborn refusal to support education by mostly Republican legislators is putting this golden asset in jeopardy.
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As I said before, once our elderly parents pass away, all bets are off in terms of the boyfriend and I remaining in Virginia. Indeed, our remaining in the USA is debatable at present. And in terms of my advice to LGBT citizens or progressive businesses contemplating a move to Virgina? Don't do it.

Southern GOP Ideaologues Drag the Party Downward

UPDATED: An example of the lunacy now gripping the GOP comes from Raw Story which is reporting on Tennessee Republican John "Chip" Saltsman, a candidate for Chairman of the Republican National Committee, who is defending a song containing a racially insensitive term as mere "satire." These people truly do NOT get it. The song:

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[A] musical parody of "Puff the Magic Dragon" entitled "Barack the Magic Negro," sung by Shanklin imitating black civil rights advocate Rev. Al Sharpton, first played by Rush Limbaugh on his syndicated radio show in March 2007.

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Today's GOP is a faint shadow of the once respectable national party it once was. Now, one has to be either a racist, far right religious fanatic, or incredibly selfish and self-centered, caring only about one's tax rates, to belong to the GOP. And the signs are that things are going to get even worse as ultra-conservative GOP members of Congress sit poised to be obstructionists to measures much needed to help turn around the sinking economy. Rather than looking out for the best interests of the country, the increasingly reactionary GOP members of Congress seem more consumed with punishing those they dislike - e.g., the United Auto Workers - egged on by the Kool-Aid drinking GOP base. David Broder looks at the phenomenon in a new Washington Post column. Here are some highlights:

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All the signs are that the stimulus spending will be opposed by congressional Republicans, whose shrunken ranks are increasingly dominated by right-wing Southerners who care not what their stance does to harm the party's national image. The spectacle of LaHood facing off in congressional testimony against those naysayers will dramatize a split that is crippling the GOP.

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The danger became apparent as far back as 2007. With Bush weakened by the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina and the midterm election losses of 2006, a Southern-led revolt killed his immigration reform bill McConnell, unable to stem the insurgency, joined it. The price was paid in the 2008 presidential campaign. Despite his personal credentials as a sponsor of comprehensive immigration reform, John McCain was caught in the backlash of anti-GOP voting by Hispanics. It contributed to his loss of Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Florida and other states.

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The same thing happened this year when Bush supported a bailout for the Big Three auto companies. . . . . the defeat of this legislation at Republican hands will not be forgotten when GOP senators run for reelection in 2010 in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. It will also echo in industrial states such as Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, California, New York and New Jersey, when Republicans try to challenge for Senate and House seats.

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As point man for Obama's stimulus spending, he [transportation secretary, Ray LaHood] now poses the dilemma for his own party in the sharpest possible terms: Will congressional Republicans again sacrifice their political interest to satisfy their Southern-baked ideological imperatives?

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Having formally lived in the Deep South, I do not see much hope for moderation by the GOP. States like Alabama where I once lived have moved further to the lunatic far right over the last 20 years while the rest of the nation has tried to move forward to modernity.