Friday, January 20, 2012
After a nightmare day traveling around Hudson County yesterday via the public transportation network, I decided to drive to Bayonne today.
I feel a bit like a vampire, only instead of being afraid of day light, I must be home before dark comes.
The newspapers is loaded with disasters, fires in Union City, and lawsuits in Hoboken to reduce the size of a ward the mayor’s ticket can’t win in.
One of the political organizers I knew in the 1960s said that people turned to the courts when they can’t win in the ballot box, letting the courts violate voters’ choices by legal ruling.
This may be the case here with municipal elections always a test of the mayor’s strength, and since the mayor has used the Governor’s office to undo her opponents, why not the court system as well?
We have always found ways to undo Democracy, especially when it inconveniently allows people we dislike to hold office.
Vote suppression can be done in many ways – by negative advertizing, canceling bus service on Election Day or by filing lawsuit in the courts.
But it amounts to the same thing: denying people their right to the representation of their choice.
This is one of the concepts behind Fascism, in which social and political policy is dictated from the top rather than evolving from public discourse.
People aren’t allowed to smoke in public places because new laws restrict where and how a person can exercise what it still a legal activity. People can’t park beyond a certain time because city planners deliberately downsized the number of parking spaces required when construction or reconstructing a residence. People can’t celebrate a holiday because the masters of the city have decided to cancel a traditional event or move it because the mayor or other leaders disagree with the culture it produces. Recently the Obama administration proposed making 100 watt light bulbs illegal, partly in an effort to push a social green agenda down the public’s throat – rather than allow market forces in a so called free market society decide what people want.
I keep hearing about how free we are in America as compared with other countries, but this isn’t exactly true.
Certainly, we’re freer than in France where if you express a bias or prejudice, you can be charged with a crime. But in America, we erode freedoms more nefariously, by getting court rulings to undo our voting rights, to create laws that narrow the scope of our freedom so slowly that like Lobsters in water gradually coming to a boil, we never quite know when our asses are cooked.
In Hoboken, the mayor and her followers file suit complaining about long lines for people trying to vote – after an election in which her administration canceled car service that would have allowed the poorer people in that same ward to get to the polls.
While in most cases the concept of long lines at polling places is a joke -- especially with the percentages of voters at record lows except in national and sometimes state elections, lines are pathetically thin. But in this case, the mayor has a point – when the voting district has many times the legal number of people voting in it.
So the mayor and others filed suit against the election board to make them change it, not bothering to call the election board to learn that this was already in process.
But the real reason may not have anything to do with oversized elections, but the need to expand the number of committee people who support the mayor. By increasing the districts – she proposed the one district being divided into three – which means that the overall committee numbers would increase by four, and if she can get the new districts in areas of that ward thick with her supporters, she can take back control of the municipal democratic organization she lost earlier this year by a very narrow margin.
This, of course, is classic politics.
The mayor may not trust the board of elections to make the division of the district the way she wants, and so she has decided to force the issue by having a court draw the lines instead.
After a nightmare day traveling around Hudson County yesterday via the public transportation network, I decided to drive to Bayonne today.
I feel a bit like a vampire, only instead of being afraid of day light, I must be home before dark comes.
The newspapers is loaded with disasters, fires in Union City, and lawsuits in Hoboken to reduce the size of a ward the mayor’s ticket can’t win in.
One of the political organizers I knew in the 1960s said that people turned to the courts when they can’t win in the ballot box, letting the courts violate voters’ choices by legal ruling.
This may be the case here with municipal elections always a test of the mayor’s strength, and since the mayor has used the Governor’s office to undo her opponents, why not the court system as well?
We have always found ways to undo Democracy, especially when it inconveniently allows people we dislike to hold office.
Vote suppression can be done in many ways – by negative advertizing, canceling bus service on Election Day or by filing lawsuit in the courts.
But it amounts to the same thing: denying people their right to the representation of their choice.
This is one of the concepts behind Fascism, in which social and political policy is dictated from the top rather than evolving from public discourse.
People aren’t allowed to smoke in public places because new laws restrict where and how a person can exercise what it still a legal activity. People can’t park beyond a certain time because city planners deliberately downsized the number of parking spaces required when construction or reconstructing a residence. People can’t celebrate a holiday because the masters of the city have decided to cancel a traditional event or move it because the mayor or other leaders disagree with the culture it produces. Recently the Obama administration proposed making 100 watt light bulbs illegal, partly in an effort to push a social green agenda down the public’s throat – rather than allow market forces in a so called free market society decide what people want.
I keep hearing about how free we are in America as compared with other countries, but this isn’t exactly true.
Certainly, we’re freer than in France where if you express a bias or prejudice, you can be charged with a crime. But in America, we erode freedoms more nefariously, by getting court rulings to undo our voting rights, to create laws that narrow the scope of our freedom so slowly that like Lobsters in water gradually coming to a boil, we never quite know when our asses are cooked.
In Hoboken, the mayor and her followers file suit complaining about long lines for people trying to vote – after an election in which her administration canceled car service that would have allowed the poorer people in that same ward to get to the polls.
While in most cases the concept of long lines at polling places is a joke -- especially with the percentages of voters at record lows except in national and sometimes state elections, lines are pathetically thin. But in this case, the mayor has a point – when the voting district has many times the legal number of people voting in it.
So the mayor and others filed suit against the election board to make them change it, not bothering to call the election board to learn that this was already in process.
But the real reason may not have anything to do with oversized elections, but the need to expand the number of committee people who support the mayor. By increasing the districts – she proposed the one district being divided into three – which means that the overall committee numbers would increase by four, and if she can get the new districts in areas of that ward thick with her supporters, she can take back control of the municipal democratic organization she lost earlier this year by a very narrow margin.
This, of course, is classic politics.
The mayor may not trust the board of elections to make the division of the district the way she wants, and so she has decided to force the issue by having a court draw the lines instead.
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