Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
teaparty
Jesse Jackson Says Tea Party Would’ve Opposed Integration, Too
05 months ago
Jesse Jackson said Thursday that the Tea Party’s beliefs are reminiscent of those that opposed federally mandated integration in the civil rights era.
“The Tea Party is not new,” Jackson said at a luncheon honoring civil rights leaders in Washington on Thursday, according to USA Today. “It’s just a new name for an old game.”
Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips responded to Jackson by saying this an attempt to use racism charges to dismiss the validity of the Tea Party’s message.
Writing for Colorlines.com in April, Dorian Warren, a professor specializing in the study of inequality and American politics at Columbia University, made a similar point to Jesse’s. He wrote that the Tea Party’s discussion over the size of government is a Trojan Horse.
Concern over the size of the federal government has been a rhetorical Trojan Horse for conservatives for centuries. The origins of the American right’s hostility to the national government can be found in our young republic’s conflict over the institution of racialized slavery. The debate over whether slavery could exist or expand was the defining conflict in American politics from the founding, and its legacy has continued to shape our political discourse ever since….
[snip]
So the next time you hear the tea party right arguing for “limited government” and “fiscal responsibility” aimed at reducing the budget deficit, do not be deceived. If conservatives were really concerned, on principle, about the national debt, their silence wouldn’t have been so deafening over the first decade of the 21st century, when George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and war-making exploded the deficit. Remember that they are the direct political descendants of those who opposed government’s role in ending Jim Crow, and the ideological grandchildren of southerners who fought a war to protect the institution of racial slavery. That is the political genealogy of the right’s current rhetoric around the purpose and size of the federal government.
Voter Suppression in Wisconsin–a Sign of What’s to Come in 2012?
06 months ago
The nation is paying close attention to the state of Wisconsin this summer because of a series of special elections that offer a preview of 2012 in a key swing state. But voting rights advocates are also keeping a close eye for early indications of how voter suppression can play out–especially with new strict photo-ID laws across the country.
AlterNet‘s Adele Stan yesterday published a story on the shady activities of Americans for Prosperity, a Tea Party friendly group founded by billionaire David Koch, the conservative political activist and vice president of the nation’s second-largest privately held company.
AlterNet’s Adele Stan reports on ballot application flyers being sent to Democrats on behalf of American’s for Prosperity:
“Important Senate Recall Election in your area soon!” announces the ballot application flyer, which was sent to voters in at least two districts where recall votes are taking place on Aug. 9. Applicants are then instructed that their absentee ballots must be received by the city clerk by August 13. The address for the “Absentee Ballot Application Processing Center” on the return envelope is a Madison post office box, 1327, that is the mailing address for Wisconsin Family Action, a religious-right group that is virulently anti-gay, and was a vocal supporter of Wisconsin’s 2006 anti-same-sex-marriage ballot measure, which passed into law.
AlterNet also reports millions of dollars in ad buys are being placed by third-party groups from within and outside the state of Wisconsin.
Last week Colorlines.com’s Jamilah King looked at Wisconsin’s restrictive photo ID law, which is similar to those passed in six other states.
Voting rights watchdogs say this new slate of laws and bills are of a different scale than those seen in previous years and warn that they will disenfranchise young voters and those of color. Millions of eligible voters don’t have the state-issued photo IDs the bills would require, and opponents of the laws say that the costs of obtaining such IDs could be an unconstitutional poll tax.
Debt Deal Casualties May Include College Aid for Poor Students
06 months ago
As the White House tries to spin the rushed debt limit deal into a positive, one thing is clear: The stability it promises is only temporary.
Congress will be voting on a deal where discretionary programs will undergo a 10-year spending freeze–meaning that as inflation increases, programs to help poor folks and people of color will not be able to keep up. And a congressional committee will have to identify $1.5 trillion in domestic and defense spending cuts by the end of the year.
All of this so that the months-long saga of raising the debt limit won’t have to be repeated…until 2013.
One critical program with an uncertain future is the Pell Grant. The program makes college a possibility for many low-income students, even though the maximum award only covers one-third of tuition and the average recipient still graduates with about $20,000 in debt. More than 30 percent of Pell Grant recipients are students of color.
Yet, of the few tenable debt-deal ideas floated over the last week, Republican House Speaker John Boehner’s was shot down by Tea Partiers because it included necessary supplemental funding to the program. House Republicans like Maryland Republican Andy Harris rebelled because, as he said, “I really don’t understand why we’re increasing spending in a bill supposed to be cutting spending.”
Harris really doesn’t understand how Pell Grants work. No matter how much (or little) money is set aside for the program, every student who qualifies for a grant gets one. This means that every few years, Congress must authorize an emergency spending bill to pay the debt the program has incurred, and that’s what Boehner was trying to do–until it became clear that he wouldn’t get votes.
While President Obama has fought to preserve Pell Grants at their current level of $5,500, the deal he struck last night will mean that they’re going to come under fire in the next few months–and now that the Tea Party Republicans have set their sights on the program, its future is even more tenuous.
Montana Republican Denny Rehberg, a member of Michele Bachmann’s Tea Party Caucus, called Pell Grants the “welfare of the 21st century” in April, adding, “You can go to school, collect your Pell Grants, get food stamps, low-income energy assistance, Section 8 housing, and all of a sudden we find ourselves subsidizing people that don’t have to graduate from college.”
“That’s garbage,” says Amy Wilkins, vice president for government affairs and communications at the Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy organization. “What Pell does is gives kids the opportunity to work hard.”
Wilkins says that while Pell is safe for now, there will be two key fights this year that will likely see some Tea Party meddling. First, this fall, Congress must authorize funds to fill the hole that Boehner was attempting to address in his plan. Second, the congressional committee whose job it is to determine the $1.5 trillion in cuts by Dec. 23 will have to decide whether to maintain funding levels for the Pell program.
“Both of those places hold dangers and pitfalls,” Wilkins says. “It’s critical that advocates who work on programs that benefit low-income youth–from Head Start to health care to Pell Grants–come together,” she adds. “This is the opportunity to put some balance in this deficit reduction program.”
The Tea Party Says, Yes, We Can! (Then Actually Changes Stuff)
06 months ago
It’s all about the debt ceiling deal today. I’ll save us some time here on the details of the package by simply quoting Paul Krugman’s lede:
A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong.
For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
We’ll certainly dig in more deeply to the economics of the deal later this week. But what’s most striking to me this morning is how drastically wrong so many people were about what history was being made in 2008. Three years later, it seems the most consequential force entering the American political landscape was not the then-remarkable Barack Obama but, rather, the right’s response to him: the tea party.
There’s obviously no questioning the historic import of Obama’s election and–more crucial, to my mind–the incredible expansion of people and communities who participated in our democracy. Those were certainly revolutionary developments in the moment and, in the long run, may prove lastingly so. But nothing has shaped the terribly consequential times in which we live so much as the tea party’s rise.
Much has been written about the fake populism that has fueled the tea party–the billions in corporate money behind it, the outsized microphone Fox News provides it, the unearned credibility mainstream news media lent it during the health care debate. All of that is now beside the point. What matters is that it has conspired with the Democrats’ caution to lend a small band of zealots control over our economy–and with lasting consequences.
This debt deal will certainly hinder any effort at an equitable recovery–but the White House has been doing that on its own for a while, given its refusal to force foreclosure relief or fight for a meaningful jobs creation initiative. What’s most significant is that it will make that reality normative for many years to come. It is the second half of a one-two punch that the president has twice leaned in to take. First they clobbered government’s ability to move proactively by demanding an extension of George W. Bush’s deficit-creating tax cuts for rich people. Now, they will choke off government’s ability to hold up the economy for everyone else with this deal. All this by holding a few dozen largely junior seats in the House.
There’s little question that the tea partiers in Congress act out of principle, rather than politics. They were more than ready to allow Republican leaders to twist in the political winds until they got their way on the debt ceiling, and more than happy to risk the party’s long term electoral fate with their game of chicken with the White House. Whatever machinations of corporate money and corporate media put the tea partiers on the national stage, they stand in its center with clear moral and ideological bearing. It is a wildly destructive ideology that casts aside the working poor and scapegoats people of color for everything from economic troubles to national security threats. But it is at this point hard to call craven or hypocritical–two adjectives that roll easily off the tongue in reference to both Republican and Democratic leadership.
So the tea party has won yet another game of chicken with both Obama and John Boehner, and they will surely be eager to play again in the coming bouts of brinksmanship this deal sets up. As with all bullies, someone will eventually have to stand up for a nothing-to-lose fight with the tea party. Otherwise, we’ll all be living with their radical, exclusionary vision of America for a long time.
Whoopi Goldberg Rips Bachmann Out for ‘Slavery’ Vow
07 months ago
Yesterday, Whoopi Goldberg began deconstructing why GOP presidential candidate hopeful Michele Bachmann was wrong to sign the “The Marriage Vow.” A large part of her spiel was centered around signing on to a pledge that included negative racial undertones.
The View’s, co-host Sherri Shepherd, pointed out that the first bullet point on the pledge Bachmann signed contained language that suggested black children born into slavery had a better family situation than black children born today.
Whoopi, who was raised by a single mother, quickly jumped into the conversation during the show’s Hot Topics segment. “I am starting to feel like there’s some kind of racial thing going around,” she told her audience, who started laughing. She went on for close to two-minutes discussing why this is so offensive to people of color, the LGBT community and parents everywhere.
“I’m not suppose to automatically assume there’s something racial but damn it I am sick of this crap. Can you people get your act together?! You don’t know anything about how slaves raised their kids or why people were together. Just don’t add stuff like that if you don’t know what you’re talking about. Number 2, y’know white people, black people, Asian people, some of us are single parents, some of us turned out OK with single parents and y’know what? Stop pointing the finger at single parents! I’m sick of people who don’t know what they’re talking about going off!”
Co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who almost always has the most conservative viewpoint on the show, pointed out the slavery bulletpoint was “so bad they edited it out after.”
“The fact that they put it in is enough!” Whoopi quickly interjected.
Haley Barbour’s Out of the GOP Field, But Racist Campaigning’s Here to Stay
09 months ago
It turns out the 2012 elections will be spared Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s folksy bashing of poor black people–or, at least he won’t be offering it as a candidate. He says he doesn’t have a grueling two-year run in him, but a number of reports point to his wife’s open hostility to being enmeshed in national politics. Who can blame her. Even without her husband’s contribution, the 2012 elections are poised to be among the most toxic we’ve seen in years.
Already, we have Donald Trump’s farcical performance as a potential candidate. His outlandish show–yesterday’s act: Barack Obama was too dumb to be in the Ivy Leagues without affirmative action–has revived the spectacle of broadcast news anchors hashing out the president’s citizenship. (These are the same outlets that can’t seem to take Dennis Kucinich seriously as a presidential candidate, but anyway.)
We can and should dismiss Trump’s carnival as the publicity stunt that it is. But it’s also something of a comedic preview for the all too serious campaign ahead. The Republican presidential primaries will feature some combination of hardline Midwestern governors scapegoating poor people and public workers, and hardline Southern governors scapegoating immigrants and Muslim Americans. Whoever emerges as the so-called serious candidate will pander to the GOP’s new tea party base, hoping to neutralize whichever movement celebrity the Koch brothers anoint as a candidate. Birther hysteria may be the least divisive meme we hear.
Nor will it stop at the national level. States around the country are already embroiled in race-to-the-bottom debates as local Republicans attempt to make names for themselves in the national tea party movement. This year’s state legislative sessions have been instructive.
In the South and West, immigrant bashing is the rage. Arizona spent the winter hashing out a series of anti-immigrant bills, including two that would have attempted to nullify the 14th Amendment inside Arizona. Georgia barred undocumented kids from its public universities and readied itself to become the second state to legalize racial profiling of immigrants; dozens of states weighed similar bills. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindahl outdid Arizona’s Jan Brewer when he embraced a bill that would require candidates for federal office to file their birth certificates in order to qualify for the state’s ballet.
In the Midwest, meanwhile, Republican legislators and governors have turned on public workers with a fury. Lawmakers in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio have all directed the blame for the recession and their states’ financial woes not at Wall Street but rather at the cities and workers who have suffered most from it. Wisconsin Republicans’ union-busting efforts drew the most press, but the story hardly ends there.
Michigan, for instance, has handed managers appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder unprecedented powers to take over whole cities and school systems. The governor can declare a fiscal emergency, suspend democracy and appoint the so-called emergency managers with sweeping authority. The managers can now control budgets, close schools, dissolve public unions and even fire elected officials. An emergency manager running Detroit’s public schools has already sent layoff notices to all 5,466 of its unionized employees.
Such public workers are now routinely caricatured by Midwestern Republicans as “the privileged elite,” in the words of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Daniels, who is George W. Bush’s former chief of staff, continues to demur about his widely expected presidential aspirations. Minnesota Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been less shy about his ambitions. And in December he penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling public workers “the most protected, well-paid employees in the country” (a demonstrable falsehood) and asserting, “Ironically, public-sector unions have become the exploiters, and working families once again need someone to stand up for them.”
Daniels and Pawlenty are considered the sober ones in the Republicans’ 2012 field. Because they are sitting governors, they’re the more serious players, the counterweights to the Michele Bachmanns and Donald Trumps. That’s an indication of just how extreme our political landscape has become in the past three years, since the 2008 primary field began emerging. Then, the question was whether a long-shot, but promising young black senator could challenge the establishment’s Hillary Clinton. Today, the question is whether racist scapegoating will be dressed up as fiscal conservatism or parade itself nakedly as anti-immigrant xenophobia.
That shift in political tone is no doubt owing to the fact that the president is a black man, as many have opined. But it’s also a reflection of the Republican Party’s active exploitation of the anxieties stirred among white voters witnessing irreversible cultural and economic changes. That strategy has proven successful for them–the 2010 elections witnessed some of the most divisive campaigning in modern history, and they produced sweeping Republican victories. Republican candidates in campaigns ranging from county sheriff to the presidency will surely deploy it again. Trump is just the beginning.
Will Arizona Have ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ License Plates?
09 months ago
The 2011 legislative season may have wrapped up for Arizona, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still 168 newly approved bills awaiting Gov. Jan Brewer’s consideration.
From the Arizona Republic comes word that one of the bills waiting in the wings is one that would put “Don’t Tread on Me” on vanity plates that Arizonans could choose from. The paper reports that the plate would join nine other specialty plates that promote multiple-sclerosis awareness and hunger issues. Hunger, health and the tea party.
What’s more, money generated from the sale of the plate would go toward tea party groups in the state. Here’s how the revenue from the $25 vanity plate would be split up: $8 would go to the state to cover costs, while the other $17 would go to the sponsoring organization, which, according to the bill, is the “don’t tread on me special plates fund.” The bill was introduced by state Sen. Don Shooter, who’s also the co-founder and president of the Yuma Tea Party. His bill also calls for the creation of a 13-member “Arizona tea party committee.”
The tea party is a purportedly grassroots political movement that officially advocates for smaller government and fewer taxes and strict allegiance to the Constitution. In reality it’s the well-funded and powerful arm of the right wing that, try as it might to deny it, has deep ties with white nationalist groups. The tea party is also way into government, especially if it means advocating Islamophobia; limiting immigrants’ rights; denying Muslims the right to gather and practice their religion; and opposing fair and equitable broadband access.
Republican Sen. Ron Gould pinpointed the supreme irony of tea party vanity plates: “It’s kind of oxymoronical a group that advocates for less government [is] joining in on a scheme to get money through the state,” Gould said, the Arizona Republic reported. Gould voted for it in the end anyway.
New York Rep. Gary Ackerman has since introduced “License Plate Political Slush Fund Prevention Act”, which would take away 15 percent of a state’s federal highway funding if state money is directed to support political organizations.
Last week, Brewer signed into law a bill that requires homeowners associations to give the Gadsden flag, the unofficial tea party flag on which the phrase “Don’t Tread on Me” also appears, the same protected status as the American flag. Brewer has until May 2 to decide on the vanity plates.
Tea Party’s Marilyn Davenport Apologizes for Obama Chimp Email
09 months ago
The Southern California GOP member who sent out a racist email last weekend, depicting President Obama as the child of chimpanzees, has issued an official apology, but does not plan to resign from her position.
In yet another attempt to discredit the President’s legitimacy to hold office, tea party activist Marilyn Davenport sent out the image to fellow party members on Friday, with the words, “Now you know why — No birth certificate!”
Davenport has come under fire since sending the email. The California NAACP demanded an apology and some California Republican leaders called on her to voluntarily resign. Davenport sent out an apology email to her colleagues on Monday, blaming the liberal left for picking up the story, and calling on the “coward” who leaked the story to come forward.
She did not appear at an Orange County Republican Central Committee meeting Monday night, but did issue a statement.
“I humbly apologize and ask for your forgiveness of my unwise behavior,” the statement said. “I say unwise because at the time I received and forwarded the email, I didn’t stop to think about the historic implications and other examples of how this could be offensive.”
Some fellow party members are still calling for Davenport’s resignation.
“The damage to the Republican Party has been by her, and I still think she should resign,” former chairman of the California Republican Party Michael Schroder said, according to The Root.
Orange County Republican Party Chairman Scott Baugh also wants Davenport to resign. “The email is without question extremely racist. Depicting African-Americans as monkey is a longtime, well-known and particularly offensive slur because it denies them their basic humanity,” he said, reported the AP.
But Republicans say that party laws prevent them from voting her out. She can only be removed by a recall before she is next up for election in 2012. The central committee members serve two-year terms and are tasked with fundraising, campaigning, and debating policy for the party. The body’s ethics committee is investigating the incident and will make a report within a week.
“Our hands are tied by the state’s election codes,” Baugh told The Root. “There are only three grounds for removal, but being a racist is not one of them.”
Yes, Again: Tea Party GOP Member Sends Racist Email
09 months ago
A Southern California GOP member sent out an email to fellow party members last Friday, depicting President Obama as the child of apes. It’s just the latest in a series of highly racialized attempts to discredit the president’s legitimacy to hold office.
“Now you know why — No birth certificate!” Marilyn Davenport, tea party activist and member of the central committee of the Orange County Republican Party, wrote under the image sent out last Friday.
Local Republican leaders are now calling for her resignation. While the group’s laws prevent a vote to remove Davenport, Orange County Republican Party Chairman Scott Baugh told the Associated Press that he wants to launch an ethics investigation about the incident and thinks Davenport should step down from the committee. Former Chairman of the California Republican Party Michael Schroder has also demanded her resignation in a CBS interview.
Davenport, however, refuses to resign and instead blasted “the liberal left” for picking up the story and called on “the coward” who leaked the message to come forward, in a second email sent out after news broke.
“I’m sorry if my email offended anyone,” Davenport wrote. “In no way did I even consider the fact that he’s half black when I sent out the email . . . We all know a double standard applies regarding this president.” She also told the OC Weekly, “Oh, come on! Everybody who knows me knows that I am not a racist. It was a joke. I have friends who are black. Besides, I only sent it to a few people–mostly people I didn’t think would be upset by it.”
Schroder said that Davenport had previously defended the racist rhetoric of other Orange County republicans. During Obama’s inauguration, Los Alamitos Mayor Dean Grose sent out an email showing a watermelon patch in front of the White House. She also defended Newport Councilman Richard Nichols, amid controversy regarding his racist comments against Mexicans.
Orange County tea party members were also accused of slinging racist taunts and threats at a Muslim fundraising event last month. And as if anyone still needed proof, late last year the Institute for Research & Education and Human Rights released an official report documenting the tea party’s racism.
Is Michele Bachmann Shutting Down the Government (To Run It)?
010 months ago
Progressives’ favorite punching-bag Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) has kept her name in the news for the last few weeks. CNN reported last month that she’s made formal moves toward the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, and a quick scan shows that she’s the de-facto tea party spokesperson on the ballot, with powerful friends like Muslim witch-hunter Rep. Steve King.
And in recent days, Bachmann’s emerged as a primary cheerleader for the tea party caucus’ intransigence on budget negotiations, digging in her heels on defunding Planned Parenthood and arriving well-armed with the heady rhetoric that she knows her base wants. Andy Birkey at the Minnesota Independent reports on her speech hosted by anti-abortion rights group the Susan B. Anthony List, in which she said why she was advocating for government shutdown:
“For me personally, there were a few of us who voted ‘no’ on the continuing resolution… because it did not defund implementing ‘Obamacare’ because, as you know, ‘Obamacare’ will allow for taxpayer-funded abortions for the first time in history of the nation.”
The Affordable Care Act — or, as Bachmann puts it, “Obamacare” — will not allow taxpayer funding for abortion services. Numerous nonpartisan fact-checkers have called that assertion false, including FactCheck.org and Politifact.
“The next time we vote on the continuing resolution we have to insist on defunding ‘Obamacare’ and defunding Planned Parenthood,” she said. “My opinion is there is a point where you draw the line in the sand and you have a hill where you die on. I think this is our issue.”
As Colorlines’ Shani O. Hilton points out, the Hyde Amendment, which has gotten renewed yearly and has gotten no opposition from Obama, forbids federal money from going to abortion services in the first place. But it’s beside the point–Bachmann’s been allowed to shape the rules of the debate around her own strengths, and facts or no, she’s used her tea party heft to publicly push House Speaker John Boehner into shutting the government down, over an issue that can fuel her career for years.
Bachmann’s propensity for George W. Bush-esque gaffes creates plenty of opportunities for her opponents to take the bait and call her dumb–which, of course, her base perceives as pointy-headed liberals exposing their own sexism. Meanwhile, Dave Weigel at Slate points out that her popularity among Republicans can’t be underestimated, and that at the least, she’ll be a candidate in the tradition of Tancredo, pulling the intra-party debate over to her pet issues and positions.
And with Bachmann pulling the strings? That means the candidates will be answering questions on whole-cloth lies about billions of dollars that Obama secretly hid in Medicare, and about whether Obama is a Christian or a citizen (or neither!), and about exactly how scary it is that her fellow Minnesota representative Keith Ellison is a scary, scary Muslim. And all the candidates will know that the Tea Party will watch their answers very closely.