Year: 2020

Political season is heating up so it’s that time in American life when people lose their minds. This is the time when the fact-free claims about candidates spread like wildfire because who has time to fact check, when you just like the claim because it attacks the candidate you hate.

Please fact check before you post or share. When people post fake claims, it shows me that they really don’t have legitimate reasons for the positions they hold so they have to make shit up. That’s not to say that sharing factual information to explain why you don’t like a candidate is problematic. You should show others how you came to the conclusions you came to, and you should be able to have respectful discussions about those conclusions. It’s no secret that I don’t like Mayo Pete. I have never posted a lie to attack Pete because I don’t need to. I have plenty of reasons why I concluded he would be a terrible candidate, and I invited everyone to fact check me.

But fakery isn’t what this post is about. This post is about helping people tell the difference between an “attack” and a political campaign in which someone is trying to win the democratic nomination.

I’m going to start with examples to show what I mean.

Pointing out that Mayo Pete attended a fundraiser in a wine cave is not an “attack”. It’s a factual statement that Pete himself has made about how he’s going to run his campaign: with lots and lots of corporate money. If you’re a Pete supporter and you see this as an “attack”, you may want to ask yourself why you’re so defensive.

Pointing out that Joe Biden’s bankruptcy bill resulted in an explosion of student loan debt, crippling our consumer based economy is not an “attack”. Biden himself has defended that bill. If you’re a Biden supporter and you see this as an “attack”, you may want to ask yourself why you’re so defensive.

Pointing out that Elizabeth Warren was once a republican is not an “attack”. It’s in her freaking book. If you’re a Warren supporter and you see this as an “attack”, you may want to ask yourself why you’re so defensive and why you’re unable to defend her evolution.

Pointing out that Bernie’s record in guns is pretty bad is not an “attack”. You can examine his voting record for yourself. He’s made some pretty terrible votes on the issue. If you’re a Bernie supporter and you see this as an “attack”, you may want to ask yourself why you’re so defensive.

Now for a couple of examples of attacks.

Now this is an attack. It’s a baseless claim designed to tap into fears. Hillary basically referred to Obama as a child for the better part of a year with no evidence whatsoever.

This is also an attack, although a particularly slimy one:

Hillary’s team put this out there in the 2008 primary, hoping to stoke Islamophobic fears in order to win the election. We know it was Hillary’s campaign because it took them a while to deny it.

Do you see the difference between an attack and running a campaign in which you explain to the voters that you’re a better choice than their opponents?

The two examples of attacks that I gave came from Hillary’s 2008 campaign because they were by far, the sleaziest examples of democrat-on-democrat attacks I’d seen in my lifetime. Truly. I looked at primary campaign ads and articles going back to 1991 and 2008 was by far the worst. If anyone can find an example of anything sleazier, please send it to me.

I get particularly bitchy when I see people with “I’m still with her” in their profiles clutching their pearls and posting articles like this, this, this, and this claiming that Bernie is “on the attack”. There have been dozens of these in just the past week, so the DNC is stepping up their efforts against Bernie. Anyone who voted for Hillary in the 2008 primary, the 2016 primary, or the 2016 general is clearly not offended by political “attacks”, and they obviously can’t tell the difference between an attack and a campaign.

Can we please try and limit the stupid this year? I want all of the candidates to be thoroughly vetted and challenged. And yes, that especially applies to the one I support. We need to be able to tell if they can stand up to scrutiny. Campaigning on differences between your record and your opponents’ is called campaigning. I promise you that Trump’s campaign isn’t going to ignore a single shitty vote any of these candidates took. So better to get it all out there in the primaries.

What I have no patience for is fake outrage, phony claims about a candidate’s record, and reactionary defensiveness upon hearing facts that are at odds with your positions. You have to reconcile those inconvenient facts somehow or revisit your position.That’s how sentience works.

For example I have concluded that in regard to Bernie’s crappy voting record on guns, his position on getting corporate money out of politics will do far more to break the NRA’s stranglehold on America than even dozens of good votes would do. See how that worked? I didn’t deny his crappy record because I don’t like it and I don’t get irate when someone brings it up because it’s true. So I accepted this fact about Bernie, on a topic that’s very important to me and I made my calculations based on my priorities and my own self interest. Without his firm stance on corporate money, his gun voting record would be a deal breaker for me and he would be off my short list.

I did the same thing with Elizabeth Warren’s early life as a republican. Nothing in her voting record in the senate suggests she’s anything but a very progressive democrat (on domestic issues, anyway) so I’m unconcerned about her prior republicanness.

To summarize, facts are not attacks. Even when they’re inconvenient for you, facts are facts and you’re going to have to learn to deal with them like a grown-up. Scaring you into voting for someone with baseless allegations and innuendo are attacks. Making shit up out of whole cloth to damage your opponent is an attack.

Please, for the sake of my sanity, learn to tell the difference. We have an important choice to make here. Let’s not repeat the stupidity of the last presidential election.

No, this post isn’t what you think it is. Okay, maybe it is a little but it’s more nuanced than what you’re expecting.

There’s obviously a pretty big generational divide going on these days between boomers and millennials, Gen Z and some Gen Xers. I’m going to be honest about where I’m coming from right upfront. For at least the past 10 years, I’ve been saying that boomers have been the worst electorate in modern history. WAIT! This is not a slam on boomers post. Just be patient.

The last 40 years have been by far, the worst for the working class since the electorate included women and black people. Wages have been completely flat while productivity continues to rise. There isn’t much of a middle class left, and we’re back to 1929 levels of income inequality. The preceding 40 years were much better for people who depend on a pay check to provide for their families. During that 40 year period, we saw The New Deal, the implementation of Medicare, and The Voting Rights act. Granted, the New Deal left out large swaths of women and African Americans but it helped to create a middle class in America when none had previously existed. LBJ signed Medicare into law and enacted it within one year.

This was an era of bold, sweeping changes that radically changed our country for the better. It was not a perfect era by any means, but it was significantly better than the subsequent 40 years.

The next 40 years were about selfishness and fear. It all started in earnest in 1980 when Americans were given a choice between a president who was telling them to conserve, and a guy who encouraged Americans to take out second mortgages on their homes so that they could have nice things. Prior to Reagan, Americans saved up, put down 20% to buy a house, and then paid off their mortgages for the next 20 – 30 years. And then, they left their fully paid off home to their kids. The notion of using your home as an ATM was not widespread and it certainly wasn’t baked into the culture. But boomers didn’t want to do that. They wanted to have nice things, whether they could afford them or not.

Why? What changed? I have a theory. I’ve always said that conservatism is a luxury item. People get selfish and self absorbed when things are going well. It’s really just human nature. When you have stuff, you become less concerned with others and more concerned with protecting your stuff and amassing more stuff. And naturally, you and you alone are the reason why you were able to get that stuff, so government needs to stay out of the way and let you go about the task of getting more stuff.

None of that is true, but it’s how humans are wired to think. Boomers were the recipients of all of the benefits of The New Deal and LBJ’s reforms, which afforded them the luxury of being selfish and demanding that government get out of their way.

The Silent Generation on the other hand, had to be liberal. Their formative years were The Great Depression. When you grow up in a society where there are no opportunities to succeed no matter how hard you’re willing to work, you want the government to help create the opportunities that you don’t have. The Silent Generation voted for FDR four times because his wide-eyed socialist ways were working in a big way. And you know what happened to republicans after that? They became flaming liberals. Dwight Eisenhower strengthened Social Security (and a lot of The New Deal), increased the minimum wage, created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, created the Interstate Highway System, and increased the top marginal tax rate to 91%. You read that correctly: ninety-one percent. This forced corporate executives to reinvest in their companies and ensured that vulture capitalism like Bain’s business model wasn’t possible. Richard Nixon created the EPA, ended the draft and (get this) passed a universal basic income bill through the house. That’s right, Richard Nixon wanted every American to receive a $10,000 a year safety net. And you know what? 90% of Americans were in favor of it.

This Hunger Games culture that we have now is relatively new, and it started with Reagan’s infamous, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help” mantra. I don’t blame boomers for partaking in the luxury that is conservatism. As I said, I think this is just human nature and I really don’t think they could have turned out any other way anymore than the Silent Generation could have turned out differently than they did.

Millennials, you should know that you would have turned out the same way if you grew up in the same country that boomers grew up in.

I have to digress for a minute to make this about me so that you understand my perspective. My family moved to the US from Iran when I was three years old. My father was a blue collar, (chef) immigrant, Reagan republican. I am part of Gen X. I wasn’t paying much attention to the election in 1980 because I was too busy being ten years old, but I knew that my father loved Reagan. I clearly remember Reagan’s inauguration. It was a split screen of Reagan being sworn in on one side of the screen, and the hostages being freed from Iran on the other side. The narrative that the country was fed (and ate) was that the Ayatollahs were so scared of the b-list movie actor, that they released the hostages before he could do anything mean to them. This was a narrative that my otherwise intelligent, Iranian father believed. As an 11 year old, I found this to be preposterous and knew that an evil and unholy deal had been made to put that image on our tv screens. Years later, a then former Iranian intelligence operative wrote a book in which he stated that Reagan traded arms in exchange for the release of the hostages. Those negotiations were done before he had any authority to make such a deal. That day, inauguration day 1981 was when I realized that I need to learn everything I could about politics.

Believe it or not, lots of immigrants were republicans at that time. They believed in the American dream, which still existed. They believed that if you work hard enough in America, you can achieve anything you want to. And they could, for a little while longer.

And then along came Bill Clinton. Here we had a democrat running on “ending welfare as we have come to know it”. Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound very FDR or LBJish. But again, when things are going well, you have the luxury of conservatively wanting to make sure that no one else is taking your stuff. When he finally managed to reform welfare, the bill was called, ‘‘Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996’’. And this was supposed to be a liberal. Here’s the part of his 1996 State Of The Union address that made my skin crawl:

And with that, neoliberalism became embedded in the American culture and telling the difference between a republican and a democrat became more difficult because both sides agreed that government was bad and corporations know best. The Overton Window massively shifted, The Hunger Games began and America went from supporting a universal basic income to internalizing the idea that if you’re poor, it’s because of some moral failing on your part.

I write all this to let millennials and gen z know that there’s a reason why boomers are the way they are, just like there’s a reason why you guys are the way you are. You grew up in completely different countries. So maybe you can stop with the derisive “okay boomer” and either accept that boomers are from mars and millennials are from venus, or make an effort to communicate in a way that’s relatable to the other generation.

Either way is fine because you, millennials, are finally the majority of the electorate. In the last midterm, gen x, millennials, and gen z outnumbered boomers in voting. You guys are at the helm now, and there’s probably not much of a reason to fight with boomers for much longer. By the next presidential election, they will be almost entirely irrelevant.

And boomers, please stop referring to millennials as entitled or spoiled. That’s honestly a bridge too far for your generation. Millennials have none of the advantages you had and squandered. If you don’t want to hear them and learn why their perspective is so different from yours, at least refrain from talking down to them. You are not going to talk them into the moderate incrementalism that you’ve been trying for the past 40 years, and you’re definitely not going to do it with insults. Maybe you can pass the torch with some graciousness?

Just a thought.

This is going to be a two parter because I have a lot I want to cover. This post will be about his track record in South Bend. Part II will be about just his presidential campaign. I’m not going to get into McKinsey because you can (finally) easily find that information.

I’m going to start with the accomplishments he touts, and I’m going to be as fair to him as I possibly can. This post is going to be laden with links to my sources, so please take a look at what I relied on to make my claims.

He put a lot of money and effort into transforming downtown South Bend. He did stretch the city’s funds and strapped them for years to come, but the result was a 21% increase in property value downtown. This brought in new outside investment so I’m going to go ahead and call this a win for Pete, although the linked article is more nuanced than that.

Now onto Pete’s claims about income and poverty in South Bend. Like nearly all politicians in the world, Pete presents the rosiest picture possible, and gives himself credit for national trends. He was after all, elected in 2012 so the country was still in recession recovery mode. Here’s a good article that takes an objective look at how South Bend fared compared to other similar cities. The short summary is that it’s complicated. His claims include the normal sort of puffery that one would expect from a politician. I’m going to disregard the increase in median income because that increased nationally during that period. One notable thing here is that the poverty rate in South Bend dropped from 32% in 2011 to 20% in 2017. I honestly can’t pinpoint what to attribute that to, but you should know that during that same period, the poverty rate nationally only dropped 2.7%. As of this year, that poverty rate is back up to 25.4%. Maybe Pete gets some credit here. Maybe not. I honestly can’t tell but if he gets credit for the drop, then he also gets credit for the rise.

Here’s one that Pete does get a lot of credit from me for. During his tenure, a lot of investment went into renovating and upgrading a lot of public spaces around South Bend including parks and community centers. I am always a big fan of this type of spending because everyone ultimately wins. It creates jobs, safer spaces, and most importantly; a place where people want to live. More spending on infrastructure and public spaces makes for a more attractive city to live in. I do want to note that this is the only think Pete has done in South Bend that tells me that he may actually be a democrat. Literally everything else he’s done comes from republican ideas of “trickle down” and McKinsey’s approach of “efficiency” (i.e. cut, cut, cut). But this investment is definitely a positive for Pete.

Here’s another thing Pete did that I can’t praise enough. He partnered with a Latino outreach organization (La Casa de Amistad) to create an ID card that undocumented residents of South Bend could use to come out of the shadows. The card itself and all of the administration and costs associated with it is run entirely by La Casa de Amistad so the city has no access to any information regarding the card holders. That was smart. Pete signed an executive order requiring city departments like as police, fire and parks to accept the card as valid ID.

One of the things that Pete liked to brag about was his “1,000 houses in 1,000 days” program. I’m not sure why he’s proud of this, since there was no plan beyond the demolition phase so now there are over 1,000 vacant lots that it appears, will remain vacant indefinitely. Here’s my main issue with what he did here, and it goes back to what I eluded to earlier when I said that it was hard for me to find much evidence that Pete is actually a democrat. This program was 100% republican. The city tore down abandoned homes. So far, so good. For run down homes that were occupied, the city issued fines and deadlines to make repairs. Now, I’m pretty sure that no one lets their biggest investment (and asset) decay because they’re too busy sipping champagne on The Riviera. No, you don’t paint your house because you can’t afford it. There was no investment from the city at all to help with repairs. Maybe they could have done a grant program where the city pays for supplies if the homeowner can find the labor to do the work? With the astronomical poverty levels in South Bend, I’m certain that there is a plethora of skilled labor that could have been tapped. Maybe a very low interest loan program? There are a myriad of things they could have done, rather than to punish poor people for being poor and I’m sure they could have been done for a fraction of what the downtown redevelopment project cost.

Now I’m going to get to the most problematic part of Pete’s record in South Bend. You’ve heard some of this, but I promise that you haven’t heard the details because the main stream media won’t report them to you. At this point, I hope that you noticed that I spend dozens of hours on the South Bend Tribune site to vet Pete. I got about 70% of this story from the South Bend Tribune’s reporting, and the rest from independent investigative journalists who dug up details that the Tribune didn’t have. The Tribune initially derided these reports, but they now cite them so we have a double verification situation here. I first became aware of this situation about 9 months ago via an independent investigative report. I spend literally months cross referencing information that I could verify in the Tribune so this was a long process of vetting for me. I bookmarked some of what I found, and unfortunately failed to bookmark some of it. In the interest of making this post less dense, here’s a link that will get you to all of the articles I read in the Tribune so that you can do your own poking around. Trust me when I tell you that I read every article in that search result. The rest of this post will include links as well.

This is about the firing of Darryl Boykins, which Pete has repeatedly lied about when asked for details. So let me start with Pete’s version: 13 weeks into his tenure as mayor of South Bend, Pete felt that he had no choice but to fire Darryl Boykins (who was the first black police chief in South Bend) because he discovered that Boykins was being investigated by the FBI for secretly taping police officers’ phone calls.

Right off the bat, Pete’s story is curious. He fired a police chief because he heard that there’s an investigation into potentially illegal wiretapping? An investigation. Not an indictment. So I guess there’s no presumption of innocence and no need to wait for the results of an investigation? And on the basis of an investigation, this (then) 30 year old Mayor, in his 13th week in office decides that it’s a good idea to fire (it ended up being a demotion) the first black Police Chief in a town whose black residents make up 1/4 of the population? This already smells funny. He had to know that firing (or trying) the first black police chief was going to set off a powder keg so the risk/reward ratio on waiting for the results of the investigation don’t make sense here.

I couldn’t find any information to indicate that Boykins was ever the target of any investigation, and his attorney claims that the FBI never informed him that he was the target of an investigation. 5 or 6 weeks after Pete tried to fire Boykins, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana announced that their investigation into the wiretap was closed, and that they weren’t going to proceed with any charges against anyone. Let me repeat, this happened weeks after the attempted firing. Weeks earlier, Pete claimed that the US Attorney told him that Boykins and DePaepe would face felony charges if the mayor didn’t make personnel changes in the police department. What the actual fuck? Someone is lying here, and his name rhymes with seat. But it gets worse.

In addition to firing Boykins, Pete fired Karen DePaepe. She was the only other person to hear what was recorded on those tapes. She subsequently sued the city and received a settlement of $235,000. Here’s what she claims (in court documents) are on the tapes, “The documents say that, in February 2011, two white police officers were heard discussing a campaign to get rid of Boykins, with Buttigieg donors acting as go-betweens. In April, the officers say they believe Buttigieg is unaware of the plan, and that they expect the “little fucking squirt,” as one calls him, to win the mayoral nomination. After he does win, a third officer in June reports hearing directly from Buttigieg that “Boykins is done.”

We don’t actually know what’s on the tapes because a lot of effort has been made to keep them from the public. These efforts have come from Pete and the police officers (who are presumably on the tapes). The law suits over the tapes have been going on since 2012. The City Council is adamant that they want the tapes released. The parties blocking the release keep changing slightly but until recently, it was Pete and some of his donors.

Pete has repeatedly said that he doesn’t know what’s on the tapes. Really? No curiosity at all, huh? Once again, this smells funny on its face. As you can see from this reporting, it’s inconceivable that he hasn’t at the very least read transcripts of the tapes. His lawyer definitely has. Maybe someone could translate them into Norwegian to help stimulate his intellectual curiosity?

Let me get back to Boykins for a second. In June, a couple of weeks after the investigation into the wiretap was complete, Pete was asked if he would reinstate Boykin. He replied,  “If somebody makes such a serious mistake, that they bring down a major investigation on their department, they’re not going to be able to keep a leadership position in this administration and they’re probably going to lose my confidence fast”. What? Boykins didn’t make a serious mistake. The wiretap was clearly a mistake and clearly not illegal and may well have preceded Boykins. This guy can’t stop lying.

There’s a lot more to this story that I won’t get into, but if you’re interested you can read this, this, this, and this. And when you’re done with that, you can use the link above to cross reference those articles with the Tribune. Just know that Pete and his campaign have never denied any of this reporting. When asked to comment, they’ve pulled things like, “we won’t dignify these allegations….” That’s a common tool used to avoid making an actual denial, which could become a legal liability later. The dumb ones like Trump deny with abandon, even when there’s video evidence contradicting the denials. The smart ones like Petey “won’t dignify….” so that they can avoid any legal liability if it comes out that they lied.

There’s another incident that helps to establish a pattern of behavior on Pete’s part. This one involves the police chief (Ron Teachman) that Pete appointed after he demoted Boykins. In this incident, there was a brawl at a rec center. A black police officer, Dave Newton went to break up the fight. The allegation is that Teachman watched this happen and didn’t bother to go out and back up Newton. There was an investigation into the incident which produced a report. Based on that report, Pete decided that Teachman did nothing wrong and no disciplinary action was warranted. The majority (we don’t have exact numbers) of the Board of Public Safety agreed that no disciplinary action was warranted. The board President, Pat Cottrell (he’s a retired cop) did not agree. In fact, he so vehemently disagreed that he resigned his position. Huh. As with the tapes, Pete refused to release the report. He said that it was “personnel matter… We don’t disclose personnel records as required by (state) law.”

Pete always chooses opacity over transparency. This has been true of his record in South Bend and of his campaign. It is oily, and really speaks to his character. As it happens, a transcript of the report was leaked and it says the opposite of what Pete says it said. In fact, all of the witnesses who were interviewed during the course of the investigation observed Teachman standing back and failing to back up his fellow officer. All of them. What happened, Pete? I thought that when someone made a serious mistake that creates the need for an investigation, they’ve lost your trust? I don’t know if Teachman is among the racists on the South Bend police force. I don’t know if racism is why he did what he did, but I do know that some form of disciplinary action was warranted here.

The tapes are going to come out. I don’t know if it’s going to be this year or 5 years from now, but they’re going to come out. Until they do, we have to wonder why the cops (who allegedly made a slew of racist remarks on those tapes) and Pete don’t want them made public.

There is clearly a pattern of racism on that police force, and no one including the mayor wants to do anything about it. So when Eric Logan was shot by a cop with a history racism, and Pete’s mea culpa is limited to “I didn’t get it done”, that’s not even in the ballpark of accurate. The murderous cop, like Dan Pantaleo (who murdered Eric Garner) had a history of charges of racism against him. In fact, these killer cops almost always have prior incidents that should raise red flags. In this instance, the cop was promoted by another Pete appointee.

No Pete, you didn’t fail to “get it done”, you perpetuated the problem.

So now you’re starting to see why Pete is polling at zero percent with the black vote.

Stay tuned for part II, which will focus on the fuckery during his campaign.