We now know how Nikki will get the trains to run on time. It is about four “D”s and the P & Qs. The right isn’t lacing their cyanide into Kook Aid in South Carolina. The poison will be carefully dissolved into ice tea sweetened with lots of sugar. This post beings a two week effort to deconstruct our new Republican Governor's on the ground approach to public outreach while there’s still time to slow the rapidly advancing agenda down she was funded to implement.
Image, Right, Rally for a Moral Budget, SC Capital, March 12, 2011.
I have recorded a full HD Video of last night's event. I will follow this overview with a segment by segment critique of what the Governor is doing, linked to the relevant video. What we have here is slick, new and dangerous. The approaches of grade school civics will not support an effective opposition. We may circulate and present petitions until there are no more trees in the woods without result. We can go to forums and ask polite questions and accept answers like these. If we play by South Carolina's cultural and political rules, we will politely and inevitably lose.
Four D's and Our Ps and Qs
On March 16 at Town Hall at the College of Charleston, SC Governor Nikki Haley, the South’s second rate Sarah, successfully managed an hour and a half town hall session, bamboozling a room where liberal, progressives, educators and union people were in the majority, many of them highly experience and educated.
The program began with a video, rather confusingly composed of blurry pictures of locations in South Carolina churned with white paint splatter effects so constant much of the text was difficult to read. The crowd, which almost filled the 300 seat auditorium, watched quietly while a few people applauded and booed certain items.
This video provided the Governor and her considerable retinue of assistants, some of which actually work for private, right wing organizations while functioning as an integral part of her staff, an opportunity to gauge the crowd. It was clear by the video’s end that a tea party pep rally wasn’t going to work in Charleston.
No matter, Haley opened with her planned remarks, taking the soft road to power. She structured her speech around her “Legislative Report Card” plan, which grades legislators on how much they agree with her. The governor thus reactivates the authority figure most familiar to most people, their teachers, and the type of authority decision with which they have the greatest personal experience, a report card.
Plantation Bar B Que and the Lash
Two thirds of South Carolinia’s history was devoted to the maintenance of chattel slavery. Another hundred years focused on maintaining segregation and racial suppression. The entire native population has been acculturated to respect and submit to authority, which has two functional models the Plantation and the Military. Schools are usually plantations. Very few people in our state want to be free. They seek protection from their opponents within a society divided racially, economically and socially.
For the slave or sharecropper, survival requires submission. For the working class white person, only the power of the white ruling class can protect them from the dangers of a negro uprising. The protection requires their support and willing submission to the same power which oppresses their black neighbors. The white upper class brokers the system as professionals, local officials, educators and business people. Finally whoever rules this state (they often prefer to be quite private about it) is as bound up holding all of this together as the lowliest field hand chopping cotton. It’s so oppressive to be on top that many of those people’s children leave the state to escape a lifetime of maintaining a system which allows little opportunity for romance, adventure or creativity. Alcohol and cocaine can only cover up so much.
There are reasons why our conservative, religious state has some of the nation’s highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases, substance abuse, and domestic violence. Few avenues for healthy self actualization are available here, even for the overseer and plantation owner. Haley’s agenda attacks education, the state arts commission and educational television because preventing people here from living a considered, creative life in functional, resourced communities is the core goal of the people who funded her election to reshape life in our small, poor and vulnerable state.
Haley relies on a cultural deference to authority and the superficial culture of politeness which makes it tolerable as core component of her strategy. She understands most people here won’t challenge her answers. The can count on the opposition to listen quietly and let her process move on. The momentary outburst in the State Capital earlier this week was a rare deviation.
South Carolina’s sickness is a communicable disease. The most remarkable change of the last twenty years here is seeing the Boss Hogg culture replicated in come here Yankee retirees by the tens of thousands, women, and members of minorities like the Governor herself. You can be upwardly mobile within the system if you elect to reinforce the power structure. African American Tim Scott can be elected a right wing, Republican congressman. Nikki Haley, of Indian extraction, can become an tea party governor if Sarah Palin will sell her an endorsement. However it’s useful to remember that African American “Captains” actually managed their fellow slaves on antebellum cotton plantations. Maintaining a culture of oppression requires a lot of help from the oppressed.
Haley’s speech revealed a basic strategy. Consolidate power now, promise to get the trains running soon and tell everyone they’ll get their own Volkswagen People’s Car later. The more real a problem is to the average South Carolinian and the more remote in time her commitment to do something about it is, the less specific she gets.
Defer, deflect, delegate, and deceive
Haley used four basic methods to deal with the polite questions she received in Charleston Wednesday night: defer, deflect, delegate, and deceive. It was remarkable to watch how effective this was, even with people who had been injured working for the state and couldn’t access healthcare or who were sinking under the burden of caring for severally disabled adult children with slashed access to therapy.
Defer
Haley proposed to defer resolution of the most important issues facing the state. She said that health care didn’t matter as much as jobs and economic development. Nobody in her administration plans to worry about the your increasingly disabled child’s ablity to see a doctor until after corporate taxes have been cut to zero, the state has scooped out formerly unionized employment from elsewhere and massah has a new BMW. In the meantime the State’s social safety net will be dissolved and you’ll be thrown on the depleted resources of churches and nonprofits, as Haley proposed to get elected. Everything a decent society provides to the vulnerable and children must be sacrificed to the corporate power brokers first.
Haley proposed to add the State’s resources to the Republican crusade to defeat “Obamacare” in the courts, even though other, larger states have already fully funded that effort. Once that’s done, she made vague promises to create options for people in South Carolina to get healthcare. Of course people in South Carolina have options now, however wages here simply won’t support selecting them. Over half the state’s children are now on Medicaid.
If your child needs to see a doctor, if they’re in school now, if your grandmother needs hospice care then the answer is that all of those things will have to wait. Government restructuring, tax cuts for corporations and “driving out cost” must come first. Before then, your child may die, grow up uneducated and grandma may die painfully while wrecking your family with guilt. The power structure’s priorities come first.
Deflect
The Teflon man worked for Ronald Reagan and the South’s Second Rate Sarah is proving to be a hard person to stick anything on as well. She spent large parts of the evening encouraging those present to pressure the legislature to support her accelerated agenda to consolidate power and cut government. She’s happy to acknowledge defects in the state government, eager to collect complaints. One business person complained that their landscape maintenance business in operation for over twenty years was being driven out of business by competitors who were paying their employees under the table in cash. These competitors recruit their employees (economic mobility is the terror of South Carolina employers) and undercut them on bids, while paying no worker’s compensation, unemployment premiums, or income tax withholding. The employer claimed he had been seeking attention from the state’s regulatory agencies for months and that he’s now on the verge of bankruptcy.
Assuming this complaint is true, or that the competition is illegally working menial employees as 1099 independent contractors, the conduct is illegal and has been so under state and federal law for over 40 years. The IRS expects employers to withhold income taxes and social security. It isn’t optional. No one needs to pass a single law to prevent it any more than the state needs a new statute prohibiting burglary.
However Nikki’s answer was to ask for new legislation on illegal immigration even though the state hasn’t managed to fund enforcement of laws on that subject passed over two years ago. She promised to have her recently appointed Inspector General look into the matter. What she didn’t say is, “I’m the state’s chief executive, charged with enforcement of its laws. I’ll see that illegal conduct like this is prosecuted if it can be proven. I’ll be sure investigative and regulatory agencies do their job so that businesses which pay their taxes and see that their employees have taxes withheld are protected.” Nikki probably doesn’t know who the competition is and which checks they may have written to who in the last campaign.
A simple commitment to enforce the state’s laws is beyond her. It’s always someone else’s job, another official, local government, a new appointee she chose not yet responsible for anything or the legislature.
Despite all the noise about transparency and accountability during the campaign, Nikki’s not planning on taking responsibility for anything and won’t be admitting to being responsible for knowing what is going on.
Delegate
All leaders delegate. Nikki Haley can’t be expected to paint stripes on the highways. However when people at the meeting brought her specific problems, she always delegated resolution to someone else. She would neither accept responsibility nor admit impotence. There is a problem locating railroad access to the container port planned for North Charleston. She delegated resolution of that to a combination of local government, ordinary citizens, the State Ports Authority and the Commerce Department. She offered her services as a generalized civic cheerleader for making sure that everyone got around the same table sometime in the future.
If Colleges and Universities are having their funding cut and tuition is rising to levels which South Carolina families earning the state’s low wages can’t pay, it will be up to a committee and the legislature to adopt a new funding formula based on graduation rates, who produces employable graduates and not who has the best football team. She didn’t promise that tuition would be lower, or held to the rate of inflation, she promised that someone else, perhaps with her participation, might produce a new answer.
South Carolina has been using a funding formula for its Universities and other institutions of higher learning for over 30 years. Haley never mentioned it, what was wrong with it or what might be better. Lots of other people may answer those questions, but the issue that really matters, will the young woman be able to afford tuition next fall won’t be answered until the student is safely disconnected from a potential mob of her classmates, waiting tables at some resort at Myrtle Beach, probably being paid under the table and hoping the government is too compromised politically to enforce the law.
Decieve
The Governor did not, to the extent I can determine it, lie last night. Lying is always a bad strategy. Making a provably misstatement of fact opens opportunities to your opposition and destroys your credibility. However, Bush never lied about Iraq being involved in the September 11th attacks.
Unlike the crude approaches of 75 years ago made famous in Mien Kamph and other documents, modern politicians avoid lying themselves. Deceit is now manufactured by distorting the evaluation and perception of reality. Right wing groups pay cash strapped University science and economics departments for useful studies which become fodder for policy proposals they manufacture. Overworked and harried legislators and agency officials then accept those proposals as the product of science and expert preparation. Governors then take the stage of college auditoriums and tell us what they’ve learned. If the truth was excluded earlier, that isn’t their lie.
Using this method, it’s possible to say that there are no unions in South Carolina because workers here are happy with low wages and nearly non existent benefits as the Governor did Wednesday. There are studies containing material which supports that prepared by economists and political scientists. They have been used as raw materials for white papers and policy proposals by the conservative think tanks and groups who actually write proposed legislation.
Of course if you go out and ask working people why they’re aren’t unions in South Carolina you’ll discover that nearly all of them believe, rightly, that they would be fired for joining one, blacklisted, shoved into involuntary mental health treatment, arrested or shot as mill works where here back in the 1930s.. They’ll tell you they’ve been told they’ll be forced to pay onerous union dues. They know no government will assist their efforts to organize. They expect no help from anyone, not their employer, their government, their fellow workers or community. Only messiah can make a difference.
However, they’re free to join a union if they want according to Nikki. Of course, she never admits that she’s doing everything possible to make sure they never have the chance to participate in effective collective bargaining. Her statements are all true, but the freedom she describes leads to continued poverty, not towards the prosperity she promises. She has white papers to back it up. It’s not a lie, it’s just untrue.
In another question, a parent taking care of a severely disabled child said they had been informed that they would be limited to 75 hours of therapy and assistance last year. The Governor said the letter the parent received in January was inaccurate and a letter from the child's doctor could authorize additional treatment.
That's almost certainly true, however the Governor failed to admit the Doctor's letter is probably only the beginning an appeals and application process which might consume huge amounts of the family's already nearly exhausted time and energy and still result in a denial. The family may give up. Even if they win, they'll almost certainly have to fight through it all again the following year.
Even if they do that and prevail, many less educated and capable families won't fight the system. Their children will get less treatment, saving the state money, and die, which saves the state even more. Or perhaps they'll move to another state which provides better benefits to the disabled, exiling future costs. Again, the Governor told the part of the truth which was useful to her and managed to shuffle the embarrassing problem out of the room. The uglier truth won't be discovered for a while. If Mom and Dad, already gray from a lifetime of anxiety, were too polite to angrily challenge the Governor by indicating they've already made the rounds, that rounds out the execution of the strategy.
Haley referred to "driving costs out of the system" repeatedly Wednesday evening. That can include driving people out of the state or into their graves.
What New Beast Rules Us
I have long known the people controlling the right wing takeover of my state are intelligent, well organized and have ample resources. Looting little South Carolina of its resources, labor and environmental integrity is a lucrative proposition. It has attracted talent, none more polished than our attractive, new Governor. I’m informed a million dollars was spent coaching her and developing her campaign last summer, porting the existing stockpile of polling, Astroturf organizing and right wing institutional expertise into her head and administration. She assisted by people from these organizations, young, attractive and clearly intelligent who are on private payrolls. She is the wiling and capable tool of the money, fitting neatly into the arsenal that is their political toolbox.
Image, Right, Protesting budget Cuts in Columbia at the Statehouse.
We are not confronting a cranky ideologue like Mark Sanford with a wandering eye now. A new female Governor who would throw Darla Moore off the University of South Carolina’s board of directors after Moore had pledge donations of over 90 million dollars to the state’s two largest Universities is dangerous. Taking out an internationally respected woman business woman and billionaire who has been on the cover of Forbes Magazine, is an indication of absolute determination to drive competent opposition out of the state and then cut down South Carolina meek, underfunded and conflicted left.
Power can be consolidated into the hands of a Governor who only has to rotate her chair to get instructions from the people working for the right wing groups planning the work. We are in the midst of economic struggle which followed a decade long stagnation. South Carolina is ready for an attractive leader who promises solutions to our crushing problems after we give her powerful friends everything they want.
Such a leader can sacrifice our schools, allow us to eat fish poisoned in rivers no one tests any longer, allow the economy to crush rural healthcare and compromise the independence and capability of our universities. Such a governor can permit four new nuclear plants to export power to elsewhere while South Carolina absorbs the radiation.
When the process is complete, people in South Carolina will be more free than nearly any one else in the nation to select they method by which they work for little, endure ignorance, struggle ineffectively with sickness and live out lives unrelieved by the hope that their government, community or fellow man really cares about them. They will be free to pray to the righteous God, who, like their Governor, knows more than she says, waits to make decisions, doesn’t accept responsibility for what he controls and promises redemption later while permitting suffering for the least deserving now.
The Cheerleader is Mean
It was offensively ironic when the Governor closed the forum by suggesting that we shouldn't criticize our state because it hampers economic development and investment recruitment efforts. She advised us to say good things about our South Carolina, or accept responsibility for it's future problems. We're to be silent about our ineffective underfunded schools which rank near the bottom and our infant mortality, which ranks near the top. This is a useful analog to blaming battlefield casualties on anti war protesters. It's an argument and strategy she clearly committed to applying with force to any critic or opposition, sure to rile up the state's growing legions of economically desperate people.
Love it or leave it isn't new here. I was asked to stay in this state by Republican Governor James B. Edwards in 1977. Now this Governor demands my dishonest voice. My knowledge of this state's problems is the hard reward of a lifetime's experience as an attorney, writer and activist. Most people in this state can't read or understand what I've written here. Many of those who do and agree are too overwhelmed to do much about it.
My 18 year old son is the only person with a functional solution. He's leaving for out of state college and not planning to return. Other's of my friends drink and sleep with other people's wives. Both of those plans are probably better than writing a 3500 word blog on the Daily Kos. However all three of those approaches stand a better chance of working to increase the happiness and dignity of ordinary South Carolinians than what the Governor is proposing.
I will not be them.
Hidden Reality
That reality was hidden last night at the College of Charleston. It may be unstoppable in South Carolina, but if it’s achieved here, it will be headed elsewhere. We owe our state and our nation a competent challenge which isn't deflected by strategies and dodges as simple as those which worked last night.