Political landscape shifted on Tommy Thompson

Don’t let the gray hair fool you. Tommy Thompson is as spunky as ever. But back when he was top dog in Wisconsin, politics was a mere boxing match. Now it’s Mortal Kombat. Can he master the new game?

The state’s longest-serving governor stopped by the Milwaukee Press Club the other day to explain why he would be an “excellent” choice to fill the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Herb Kohl. Like many a politician, the Republican Thompson, who’s 70, made his case with truths, half-truths and exaggerations.

An impressive truth is that in all but 18 months of his 14 years as governor, Democrats controlled the Legislature. Yet, "nobody can't say I didn't accomplish a great deal.” Amen to that. Trouble is, the Republican Party now views as a character flaw playing nice with the other side to get things done.

The former Bush cabinet member did his obligatory attacks on President Obama. Thompson said that, under Obama, the national debt has soared from $10 trillion to $16 trillion – which is a teeny bit less deceitful way to put it than do the Republicans on the presidential campaign trail, who say outright Obama caused the rise. Actually, the lion’s share ($5 trillion) of the increase stems from the continuing impact of President Bush’s economic policies, especially his tax cuts and two wars. In seeking to end the tax cuts for the wealthy, Obama has tried to slow the hemorrhaging, but the Republicans have blocked him at every turn.

Like Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, Thompson is milking so-called welfare reform. Gingrich was speaker of the House when Congress and President Bill Clinton did what was never done before or since – end an entitlement program: Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The replacement was Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which is not an entitlement. The Wisconsin version of TANF is Wisconsin Works.

Thompson boasted that the switch, which indeed he did spearhead, led to a 90% reduction in the state welfare caseload – whch he views as an astounding success. Trouble is, cutting off life support for needy, powerless kids and and their moms takes neither brains nor guts. It just takes a cold heart. The correct measure of success is how are poor families faring. On the streets desperation seems to have only intensified..

Don’t get me wrong. Welfare as we knew it needed reform, mainly because it was losing almost all political support. And the alternative had to be work-oriented. But imbedded in W-2 are wrong-headed policies that reflect a disdain for poor people and keep the program from being the help it ought to be.

When asked about the successful effort to date of current Gov. Scott Walker to eliminate the right to collective bargaining for public employees, Thompson made clear he would not criticize his successor.  “He’s the governor, and I support him. I was not there when he was making his decision based upon the facts and evidence that he had. I’m not going to come now and Monday morning quarterback and say I would have done it different. I probably would have, but I don’t know.”

He gave a similar reply when asked whether he would have sent back to Washington the $810 million Walker returned for high-speed rail from Chicago to Milwaukee to Madison. A rail buff and former chairman of the Amtrak board, Thompson said he supported Walker, but he would have made the Milwaukee-to-Madison leg truly high speed. As it was, he said, the train would have had too many stops to go fast.

I swear I could almost hear Thompson thinking something like this: That kid made some boneheaded decisions, but I have no choice but to support the top Republican in the state.

Once it was not uncommon for Republicans to openly back collective bargaining or high-speed rail. But times have changed. Thompson made note of the new landscape: When he first ran for governor, he was criticized as being too conservative. Now, he said, the criticism is that he’s not conservative enough.

Thompson admitted that the negative tone of today’s politics turns him cold: "We have just way too much of tearing things down in the country,” he said. ”I don't believe in this politics of destruction."

The other Republican candidates are state Assembly speaker Jeff Fitzgerald and former southeastern Wisconsin Congressperson Mark Neumann. The sole Democrat running for Kohl’s seat is Madison-area congressperson Tammy Baldwin

Newt gives new life to Southern strategy

Dear Newt:

Your victory in South Carolina has made me proud. Though we have never met, I have come to think of you as my second son. You were floundering in the race for president until, wisely, you borrowed from my playbook. Some of them “elite” (heh, heh) commentators said my game plan had lost its clout, but you showed ’em. The Southern Strategy – that’s how the eggheads christened my playbook – still has some life in it.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

The way you put that black journalist Juan Wiliams in his place – well, that was just masterful. He was calling you out on your use of the Southern Strategy by your implications that black people lack a work ethic. Not only did you stand your ground, but you also used the question as a platform to attack Barack Obama. The audience went wild. The idea of the Southern strategy is, of course, that you win votes by appealing to white prejudice against black people. Even the way you said “Juan” was masterful; it sounded almost like “Boy.” The audience got the message, if only subconsciously.Your labeling President Obama “the food-stamp president” was a coup. Amazingly, you may have even outdone me in sophistry. The cracks in the free enterprise system widen during bad times. Hence, regardless of who’s president, more people will fall through the cracks into the social safety net, of which food stamps are a part. But saying that Obama has broken records in putting people on food stamps feeds nicely into stereotypes many whites have of blacks.

You doubtless know the story of my first run for Alabama governor. It was 1958, and my Ku Klux Klan-backed opponent, John Patterson, portrayed me as a friend of the Negro, and I lost. With the bitter aftertaste of defeat in my mouth, I swore I would never, ever be outniggered again. And the rest is history. I became the symbol for defiance against integration.

The beauty was the strategy worked up North, too, when I ran for president. Of course, I couldn’t use the N-word, like politicians used to do in Alabama. I just talked about law and order and "sissy-britches welfare people." The audience got the code. I won a third of the vote in the Democratic primary in Wisconsin in 1964.
 

My playbook wasn’t copyrighted, and the Republicans stole it, making in short order the solidly Democratic South solidly Republican and making inroads into white, blue-collar neighborhoods up North.

Some in the media, doubtless old hippies, have said that my playbook will soon run its course because it will start turning off more voters than it turns on – thanks in large part to the dastardly Voting Rights Act and out-of-control immigration. Even Karl Rove, George Bush’s brain, subscribed to that theory. Well, your showing in South Carolina demonstrates the strategy still has juice. Of course, the Confederate flag still flies at the Statehouse. So Republican South Carolinians may be more susceptible to that strategy than their compatriots elsewhere.

I wish you well and will continue to watch with interest your race for the Republican nomination for president. We get Fox News down here. I hope to shake your hand soon. I know a tavern we can go to. The beer is not too horrible.

Yours sincerely,

George Corley Wallace

The torch has passed to a new generation

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The nation’s Occupy movement has picked up the torch that Martin Luther King Jr. once carried to light the path to justice. That was the theme at the King birthday rally this week at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Milwaukee.

"The gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow,” said George Martin, a grizzled Milwaukee peace activist who noted that King was focusing on that gap near the end of his life. “The United States has become the wealthiest Third World country on Earth."

Martin pointed out that the Occupy movement was trying to narrow the wide gap between the top one per cent of personal income in America and the bottom 99%.

Peggy Rozga saw parallels between the youthful Occupy movement in Milwaukee and the city’s NAACP Youth Council, which led a marathon series of open housing marches and other demonstrations in the 1960s. "Milwaukee has a history of young people standing up for justice," said Rozga, a poet and writer and widow of Father James Groppi, the civil rights leader who was adviser to the Youth Council.

Echoing that sentiment, Danielle Meyer of Occupy Milwaukee said of the struggles waged by King and Groppi, “Their movement is our movement.”

Besides King, the rally honored Groppi and Father Matthew Gottschalk, former pastor at St. Francis. The rally’s sponsor was the Milwaukee Justice Coalition.

Meyer accused Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker of giving tax breaks to millionaires while cutting BaderCare, Wisconsin’s health care program for poor people.. Many on Wall Street own several properties while Milwaukeeans lose their homes, she said. The one per cent caused the current economic crisis, she added, but the 99% pay the price.

Angela Walker, legislative director of Local 998 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, noted that, when he was a bus driver, Groppi was president of the union. She said the battleground was no longer Selma or Montgomery. Rather, it was in places like the state capitol, where public schools are defunded and union rights are stripped away.

Khalil Coleman, of the Occupy the Hood movement, called on Milwaukeeans to stand up for justice with action, not just words.

Chance Zombor, of Decolonize the Barrio, warned that the gains of the civil rights movement “are being pulled out from under us.” There is more war and more economic injustice, he said, and even President Obama is a culprit with his stepped up deportations and measures curtailing civil liberties.

Many at the rally marched four blocks from the church at 1927 N. 4th St. to the Martin Luther King statue at Walnut St. and Martin Luther King Dr., where members of the crowd spoke at an open microphone and elaborated on the themes voiced at the church.



Note: The graininess of the photos inside the church is due to technical difficulties. After much debate with myself, I decided that they were worth posting anyway.

Education not paying for young African Americans?

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

CNN rightly noted recently that the unemployment rate for young people had risen to alarming levels. What's even more alarming, however, is how these numbers play out race-wise - which CNN did not touch on.

As the accompanying chart suggests, among 16- to 24-year-olds not currently enrolled in school, a white person without a high school diploma has a better chance of landing a job in America than does a black person with a high school diploma.

In October, the black grad's big brother armed with a four-year college degree only matched the employability of that white person who had not yet completed the 12th grade.

Such black-white disparity has long marked the job front. Still, it's news to many people - likely due to the inattention of the media. The disparity conflicts with the narrative now holding sway across the land: America is post-racial. Blacks don't fare as well as whites in the job market simply because blacks don't have as good of an education as whites - due to either bad schools or the failure of black students to apply themselves.

The figures paint a different picture: Young black people who do the work to acquire the proper credentials have a harder time making it in the job market than young white people with fewer credentials.

The lessons these numbers teach:

• CNN correctly fretted that that the persistently high unemployment rate among young people in recent years is creating a class of adults with no job experience -- which bodes ill for the nation.  Well, that worry doubles with respect to young African Americans, who are being ravaged by unemployment.
• The nation, which preaches that education pays, is failing to demonstrate that fact to black children. The high jobless rate for black high school grads means that many African American kids have older brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, and neighbors and acquaintances who have earned diplomas, but can't get jobs. If children could see that education really does pay, then they themselves would take schooling more seriously and be less likely to drop out.
• It'll take more than better schools and anti-truancy campaigns to close the racial gap in employment. It'll take programs to counter the disadvantage black people suffer in the job market on account of their race - in other words, affirmative action.

Milwaukee still leads nation in black-white jobs gap

Milwaukee remained among the toughest metro areas in America for black people to find work in 2010, according to new federal estimates.

For complete tables, click here.

 

 

Metro jobless rates by race for last year have recently come out, and the black rate for Milwaukee is 25.6%, on its face the second worst rate in the nation. What’s more, the gap between how blacks and whites fared job-wise is on its face wider in Milwaukee than in any other major metro area.

The caution you may hear is because wide margins of error (due to small samples) make the federal estimates fuzzier than the percentage points imply. Thus, the Milwaukee black unemployment rate was likely somewhere between 23.2% and 29.8%, putting Brew City in a statistical 10-way tie for the worst black jobless rate among 53 major metro areas in the nation.

But don’t breathe a sigh of relief, Milwaukee. Almost every year over the last quarter century, the federal data put Milwaukee at or near the top in worst black unemployment  rate and in widest gap between white and black rates – a pattern suggesting the high ranking is no fluke.

Here are some general reasons for that ranking (reasons that admittedly raise more questions than they answer):

Source of data: U.S.Bureau
of Labor Statistics

·         Shuttered factories. It’s no accident that, of the 10 worst areas for black people to find jobs, five – Milwaukee, Buffalo, Detroit, Minneapolis and Rochester, N.Y. – are part of the old northern Rust Belt, where abandoned or reconverted factories only hint at the prosperity that once was. Those factories used to be the mainstay of black employment. Their collapse idled black workers by the legions. Whites, in contrast, were not quite as reliant on manufacturing for their livelihood. What’s more, white blue collar workers had better luck finding new jobs, albeit often with pay cuts, than did black workers.

·         Hypersegregation. No matter how you measure it, blacks and whites live more apart in the Milwaukee metro area than in almost any other metro area in the nation. One historic purpose of racial segregation is to make it easier to discriminate against black people. You could put the “whites” sign over the good water fountain and the “colored” sign over the bad one. Hence, jobs are cropping up mostly in outlying areas, where white people live almost exclusively, rather than in the metro core, where the vast bulk of the area’s African Americans resides.

·         Lack of transit. Many black workers lack the means to get to the new outlying jobs. They lack cars or legitimate driver’s licenses, and public transit doesn’t get them there.

·         Young black brain drain. Anecdotal evidence suggests that young, talented African Americans are steadily fleeing Milwaukee because they feel they don’t get a fair shake from the town’s business community. Indeed, the management of private businesses in metro Milwaukee ranks among the least racially diverse in the nation. The brain drain lessens the pool of black workers who could hold professional or skilled or managerial jobs or start their own enterprises.

·         School ills. Schools that don’t work and students who don’t do the work are certainly factors—but overrated ones, in my opinion. No question, we need to fix the schools and prod students to perform, so that young people will be better prepared to hold jobs. Still, were black high school grads merely to get the same job opportunities that white high school dropouts get, the black jobless rate would decline, and the argument that a diploma pays would gain more force among young people. Nationally last year, among workers 25 years old and up, African Americans with high school diplomas had an unemployment rate of 15.8%, which compared to 13.9% for white dropouts. Now imagine the even greater change were black grads to be treated more like white grads, who boasted an unemployment rate of 9%.

Another reason used to be proffered, particularly by conservative talking heads: the welfare state. Wisconsin’s generous welfare benefits were said to somehow cause high black unemployment in Milwaukee. That analysis ignored one relevant detail: To be counted as unemployed, you have to be looking for work. So if you were lounging at home, eating bonbons, watching “Oprah,” and not looking (the image the talking heads liked to paint), you wouldn’t be added to the unemployment rolls. Still, high black unemployment was among the many ills Wisconsin’s welfare reform was touted to cure.

Wisconsin dumped Aid to Families with Dependent Children and started Wisconsin Works, one of the stingiest welfare programs in the country for needy moms and their kids. Almost all public aid is tied to work. The sky-high black jobless rate persists in metro Milwaukee, nonetheless.

Black activists look inward to solve youth violence

Enough with the hand-wringing. To reduce violence by teens, get involved in their lives.

Rev. Linda M. Words

That’s the message black Milwaukee activists are preaching after last month’s stunner of a shooting. Sharon Staples, hard-working mother of seven, with two more in her womb, lost her life allegedly to teens after she refused to give them her purse, and as one of her sons, 13, watched.

'Don't talk about, ‘Well, I don't know what we're going to do with them,’” Janette Herrera of the Campaign Against Violence demanded at a community meeting Saturday. “The reason you don't know is because you're not involved. Get involved."

The Rev. Nathaniel Stampley invited men to join him this Friday in his group’s fifth walk down streets in Milwaukee’s black community to engage with young people.

Audience at Coffee Makes You Black panel discussion

Strikingly, black activists are aiming their message of involvement squarely at black people, rather than the larger society, which the activists view as hostile. Milwaukee is among the most racist areas in the nation, Stampley said, citing exceptionally wide racial gaps in statistical measures of well-being here (such as unemployment and poverty rates). But, he added, that fact mustn’t stop black men from doing what they must do to reconnect with young people.

"We have got to do our own thing," said the Rev. Linda M. Words of Women Informing the Community. "We need to understand our own issues, what we're dealing with so we can come together and be more productive in our own community."

The Paradign Drumline put on a dazzling show at anti-violence picnic Sunday in Washington Park. In foreground are drummers Tony Hibbler, the director, and Josiah Young.

She added: "I want to say to all my brothers, ‘I don't care how much they beat you down …. Don't look to the left. Don't look to the right. Stay focused on your goal because we love you.’"

She said she once worked in corporate America and “their issues are not your issues.”

Phil Martin Jr. and Marna Windosa

The activists spoke at a panel discussion at Coffee Makes U Black coffee house, 2803 N. Teutonia Ave. The next day the Campaign Against Violence staged its annual picnic and rally at Washington Park.

Stampley, a former Milwaukee County supervisor, said that his group, Kingdom Builders of Milwaukee, was marching at 6 p.m. this Friday from his church, Heritage International Ministries, 1036 W. Atkinson Ave. and would likely walk down King Dr. Up to 25 men have participated in previous marches, Stampley said, and “many wonderful stories” have unfolded. They engaged young people playing basketball on two different playgrounds, he said. They got the young people to join in circles in which the men prayed for the boys and gave them bottles of water.

Janette Herrera

The problem with many teens is the lack of male participation in their lives, Stampley said, “and boys thinking they’re men just because of their size.” In Africa, which he has visited 24 times, fathers and uncles are involved in the lives of boys. But here, many boys lack such involvement and, often as a result, cultural values.

Continuing the theme of self-reliance, Tony Courtney, who emceed the panel discussion, and Ruben Hopkins, who chairs the Wisconsin Black Chamber of Commerce, encouraged the audience to buy from black businesses and to start their own businesses.

Voters bless Dems' flight from Wisconsin

The dust has settled. Two Republican state senators lay fallen in Wisconsin. All Democrats remain standing.

Lessons to draw from the state's historic series of recall elections:

• The flight of state Democratic senators from Wisconsin earlier this year enjoys the blessing of the voters.
• The proponents of returning Wisconsin and America to the days of Herbert Hoover are a force to be reckoned with.
• Hence, true believers of the Wisconsin state motto – "Forward" – must dig in for the long haul.

Robert Wirch

Jim Holperin

On Tuesday Democratic Senators Robert Wirch and Jim Holperin easily prevailed in their recall elections in the Kenosha area and the North Woods, respectively, just as Dave Hansen did a month ago in the Green Bay area. The stated motive of the recalls was to punish Democratic senators for vacating the state rather than vote on Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to strip public employee unions of collective bargaining rights.

But voters were in the mood to reward rather than punish. Remember, not only did they return the three Democrats to office, but earlier they thwarted Republican efforts to get enough signatures to force a recall for five other targeted Dems.

Voters thus displayed sympathy for the Democrats' drastic tactic of leaving the state to delay a vote on Walker's drastic union-busting bill. Republicans like to argue that, in fleeing Dairyland, the Democratic senators abdicated their duty as lawmakers. But voters apparently believe the Democrats were actually doing their duty. Their departure delayed a vote on the bill and thus bought time for public reaction, which came in the form of huge protests at the state Capitol.

Democrats did gain. They had been outnumbered in the Senate by five. [An earlier version of this post had the wrong number.] Now, the margin is just one. But truth be told, they had dared hope for even more: control of the Senate. That Republicans held onto the majority testifies to their tenacity (and possibly to lousy campaign ads on behalf of the Democratic challengers.)

The Republicans are not the party of the future. The ranks of white voters – whence the Republican Party strength hails – is shrinking. Its three-note economic policy – cut taxes on the rich, rules for businesses and help for the poor – leads to disasters (such as the current economic doldrums in which the nation is stuck). And the future will not regard kindly the party's other quaint notions, such as anti-environmentalism. But maybe a party is most tenacious when it's dying.

Perhaps sensing their time is lapsing, Repubican leaders are going all out to extend their rule (for instance, through redistricting and voter ID laws, which makes voting more complicated and thereby a tad less likely, particularly for poor people, older people and students.) And like the Dems, the GOP threw everything it had and then some into the recall battle and succeeded in keeping its losses to just two.

That the Senate didn't turn over is no reason for progressives to lose faith. The political momentum is still theirs – momentum helped by the flow of history.