Left In Lowell

“Patrick Roars to 2nd Term” reads the top headline on boston.com right now.

Patrick’s margin of victory was unmistakable tonight. Considering the problems we face and the tendency of voters to take out anxiety and anger out on the incumbents, deserving or not, beating Baker by around 7 points is a roar, and a resounding endorsement to start his second term.

Considering the mixed results nationwide, I am more convinced than ever that we chose the right state in which to settle. I think our future here is very bright - I only hope we can buck the national trends of obstruction and willful ignorance and economic self-destruction, in our small corner of the world. With four more years, we can really showcase a strong Progressive Experiment and pit it against the regression of the Republicans elsewhere.

Congratulations, Governor Patrick!

All right, have at. I have a little more GOTV I can do then I am heading to the Donoghue aftah-partay.

If you are all really, really good, maybe I’ll attempt to live stream some of the fun…or at least, video it and post it immediately afterward. (I am charging up my phone right now).

Also, if you want to follow what I’ve been up to all day and into the evening, I’ve been tweeting at my @leftinlowell account when I can. You can subscribe if you do Twitter, or, you can follow the most recent posts in the lefthand sidebar or at www.twitter.com/leftinlowell.

UPDATE: Video from Eileen’s speech tonight.

You know what to do today. Go exercise your democratic rights. (Update - find out where you vote and see a ballot preview here!)

Having been so busy lately (teaching, business, etc) I haven’t had much time to post about this election. But suffice to say, I am an enthusiastic NO on all three ballot questions. If any of these pass, we will see a regression in our state, and you will not like the results.

Regarding question one (return of the alcohol exemption) and question three (rollback of the sales tax to 3%), the last thing we need to do in the middle of a time of reduced revenues due to economic woes nationwide is to reduce revenues further by gutting taxes. Yes, math still works the way you were taught in school.

Look, no one loves paying taxes. Everyone would love to have that that $1.25 back on your $20 purchase. However, is that worth seeing more teachers laid off, fewer police, and longer lines at the RMV? We’ve cut the fat, folks, long ago. In fact, Patrick has done a lot to reform the state government - including state transportation department consolidation, which Republican governors have been talking about for years and never accomplished. We’ve started cutting the bone during this recession. Further reducing revenues is suicidal. Forget all the progress we’ve made on jobs, green initiatives, and our kids’ education if we have to cut more essential programs.

With regards to the alcohol tax rollback: don’t listen to the alcohol lobby that you are being “double taxed” on alcohol. What a lot of freaking whining! The excise tax is on volume and is so minuscule, it’s hardly even noticeable - if the excise tax were repealed, prices would hardly change at all. Most other states have a sales tax that applies to alcohol, alongside an excise tax. What the longstanding tax exemption on alcohol was, was a gift and a giveaway. Alcohol is not an essential purchase, so why the hell was it exempt? It should be subject to the same tax that is on all other nonessential goods.

On the sales tax reduction - really, you’re going to save about $3 on a $100 purchase. And remember, sales tax is not applied to most essentials in MA - clothing (unless you buy expensive Gucci) or groceries, for a start. A huge chunk of our discretionary spending budget comes from the sales tax. Is that worth seeing hundreds of teachers laid off? Or unsafe streets? The sales tax cut would be worth a loss of $20 million dollars to Lowell alone, if the cut were applied in full to local aid and Chapter 70 monies from the state. How many city services and school programs do you think $20 million would cut? And since it looks impossible, politically, for Congress to pass another stimulus bill next year, we will be losing the ARRA funding, which has been floating much of our state deficit from reduced tax receipts - our state would be further devastated by the loss of over half the sales tax.

On question 2, the elimination of comprehensive permitting to build affordable housing, also has a regressive result. Of course, many people are frustrated with this law and how it is applied in our communities. However, the repeal of it will have a devastating effect on families who need affordable housing. I don’t have to tell you we have some damned expensive housing costs here in MA. It’s a side effect of our leading-the-nation prosperity. The more people in the middle class and up can afford, the more expensive housing is. The more dense the jobs and opportunity, the more the demand for housing. For those who are in jobs that do not have the same level of opportunity, or for those who are underemployed, disabled, or retired with no savings, the availability of affordable housing is paramount to their survival.

Affecting how difficult is it to build affordable housing in Massachusetts means keeping some families out of the prosperity. That’s not what our state is all about. Maybe the law needs reform (and maybe it doesn’t), but eliminating it is no way to do it. It will only hurt some of our most vulnerable citizens. We’re better than that.

So, I will vote no to all three of the ballot questions. I wish we didn’t have to keep having the same damn debate over revenues and taxes - it’s exhausting to constantly have to defend what is undesirable by any human being. Where’s our ballot question enacting positive initiatives?? But as Governor Patrick has always said, we have to decide what we want government to do, and then decide how to pay for it. Ignoring the reality (and basic math) of the situation to vote for something that feels good now but will hurt us in the long run is just stupid.

Via a friend on facebook, I think this is worth a long full read. It reminds me of Sam Harris’ take on moderate religious people, who, in taking religion off the discussion table, enable the unreasonable far religious right to continue. Only, on the caricaturization of the left, maybe we lefties are actively helping it along.

I don’t begrudge the “coffee movement” or the Stewart/Colbert rally their request for less shrillality - or their satire and humor about it. However, I do have the same worries as Hedges:

The American left is a phantom. It is conjured up by the right wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy. It diverts attention from corporate power. It perpetuates the myth of a democratic system that is influenced by the votes of citizens, political platforms and the work of legislators.

By cartooning ourselves with humor, perhaps we are helping the far right continue the charade of “lefty radicals among us” even though they have no idea what the definition really is.

The loss of a radical left in American politics has been catastrophic. The left once harbored militant anarchist and communist labor unions, an independent, alternative press, social movements and politicians not tethered to corporate benefactors. But its disappearance, the result of long witch hunts for communists, post-industrialization and the silencing of those who did not sign on for the utopian vision of globalization, means that there is no counterforce to halt our slide into corporate neofeudalism. This harsh reality, however, is not palatable. So the corporations that control mass communications conjure up the phantom of a left. They blame the phantom for our debacle. And they get us to speak in absurdities.

Reasonableness in the face of annihilation (of the middle class, of our global climate, of science) is, essentially, rolling onto our backs and letting the loud shouters on the right step on our necks heads. We already know they are capable of it. “Do not go gentle into that goodnight” wrote Thomas. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

If we stop raging in some sort of capitulation to the “be nice, stop fighting” crowd, then we automatically lose. All of us. As Hedges puts it,

The two comics evoked the phantom left, as the liberal class always does, in defense of moderation, which might better be described as apathy. If the right wing is crazy and if the left wing is crazy, the argument goes, then we moderates will be reasonable. We will be nice. Exxon and Goldman Sachs, along with predatory banks and the arms industry, may be ripping the guts out of the country, our rights—including habeas corpus—may have been revoked, but don’t get mad. Don’t be shrill. Don’t be like the crazies on the left.

Moderate, in this country, appears to be a definition of “between the left and the right.” But actual moderate philosophy is quite different. It’s the public option in the health care bill - a total compromise from what is truly “left.” I don’t think you’ll get a single moderate to say we should defund public schools or ignore the problems of global climate change. And yet, when we on the left call for such things, fight for them, we’re called “shrill” by the people cartooning the debate.

I will admit the debate has been cartooned by unreasonable people. However, the unreasonableness is largely one-sided. Let’s call a spade a spade and please, finally, admit this fact.

And remember this: people are not inspired by a vision of moderation and reasonableness. They don’t go out and vote for it, no matter what they say to pollsters. They want leadership, vision, and a sense that the person they are voting for has conviction. And even that this leader will fight for these things.

One final thought:

The modern spectacle, as the theorist Guy Debord pointed out, is a potent tool for pacification and depoliticization. It is a “permanent opium war” which stupefies its viewers and disconnects them from the forces that control their lives.

In the movie Gladiator, Gracchus, a Senator of Rome, says of the tyrant Commodus, “I think he knows what Rome is. Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they’ll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they’ll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the senate, it’s the sand of the coliseum. He’ll bring them death - and they will love him for it.”

Are we still the democratic United States of America? Or are we Rome? I think the jury’s still out on that one. There is coming to our nation a crossroads, one we have experienced in the past. Do we allow the rich so large a chunk of our economy (the greatest since 1928), or do we level the playing field for those not fortunate to be born to wealth? Do we try and salvage some semblance of our world ecology, or do we let global climate change play havoc with humanity in thirty years? Do we lead, or do we blindly follow our corporate masters who gut our freedoms - indeed, coopt them for themselves - while they keep us entertained and distracted by the death and glory of gladiators on the sand?