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Exposed: The Republicans' Southern strategy still works. Here's how liberals can counter it.

2014-07-27T11:19:00.002-04:00

The Republicans' Southern strategy still works. Here's how liberals can counter it.

attribution: St. Louis Post-Dispatch: The GOP can't let go of the 20th century.

>by Ian Reifowitz | Follow for Daily Kos| Mon May 26, 2014 at 03:00 PM PDT| Re-Post|

You've likely all heard of the Republicans' "Southern strategy." As a reminder, here's how its architect, then-Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips, described it in 1970:

“From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”

Writ large, the Southern strategy sought to drum up white resentment toward the "other" in American society, i.e., minorities, and present the Republican Party as the institution that was on the side of the resentful. We know the results: Ronald Reagan's "welfare queen" myth, the launching of his 1980 presidential campaign with a speech on "states' rights" just outside the Mississippi town where three civil rights volunteers had been martyred, an act that a Republican National Committee member from that state had urged Reagan to take in order to win over "George Wallace inclined voters." And then, eight years later, George H.W. Bush and Lee Atwater gave us Willie Horton, a campaign tactic even Atwater recognized later on required a public apology. A wonderful way for the party that loves to wrap itself in the flag to build a strong sense of national community, right?

In the 21st century, there have been some Republicans who have called for the party to abandon its resentment-based strategy and reach out in a meaningful way to non-whites in order to have a chance to win as the voting population becomes less white. Others, however, cling to the bitter ways of the past, but hope to adapt them to a new, more diverse America. Two recently published studies by Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richardson of Northwestern University provide reason for these bitter-enders to keep hope alive.
One found that whites who are presented with data showing that the American population is growing less and less white expressed greater resentment toward non-whites than those who were not given the data. The other study discovered that whites—and this includes liberals, moderates and conservatives across the board—all shifted rightward in their policy positions and their party identification after being given similar information on demographic trends. Maureen Craig explained:

Overall, making this racial shift salient could bring more moderate White Americans into the Republican Party, as well as increase turnout among White Americans who already consider themselves Republicans.

What can liberals do about it? Follow me beyond the fold to find out.

The answer is simple; If Republicans benefit from dividing us by race and increasing white resentment, then we have to do whatever we can to build stronger and better relations across racial lines, in particular between whites and non-whites. How do we do this? There are two main categories of actions we take.
First, and most importantly, we emphasize the common economic interests of the overwhelming majority of people of every race. We emphasize that Republicans serve the interests of the 1 PERCENT, the economic elite, and that dividing us by race is how they distract us from seeing that. Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have long operated from the principle that racial resentment is the true opiate of the (white) masses, the delusion that keeps them in line, worried about dark-skinned "takers" while the elites pass laws designed to help them line their own pockets.

Second, we have to do what we can to help alleviate this white fear of being a minority, the fear that breeds the resentment and the conservatism. This is the part that might seem, at first, to be unnecessary or maybe even distasteful. After all, why shouldn't it be up to fearful whites to change their attitudes? First, it is up to them. Reducing fear and resentment requires action by all sides, not just one.

Second, let's remember that their fear is being ginned up by forces with a lot of money behind them, for a very specific reason. We can get on our moral high horse and cross our arms, or we can fight back by countering that fear with love, with American unity. That's how we win the battle, a battle whose prize is the ability to move our country's laws in a progressive direction, one that will bring about greater justice, prosperity and equality for all, of every race.

Let me be clear about a couple of things. In no way am I suggesting progressives moderate or alter their policy positions, in particular on issues like the fight for racial justice and equality or comprehensive immigration reform. We believe what we believe, because those beliefs flow from our morality as well as our conviction that they are right for our country. Furthermore, I am not suggesting that liberals are out there advocating some kind of "brown supremacy," and that that's what is scaring whites.

All I am suggesting is that, where the opportunity presents itself to talk about fellowship across racial and ethnic lines, we take it. Liberals are already doing this, of course, and we need to keep on doing it. Barack Obama has provided the model, as I discussed a couple of years ago:

Obama addressed these issues most directly in his Philadelphia race speech. On white privilege, he stated: “most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race.” That doesn’t mean he believes that they haven’t been privileged, but that’s beside the point for the purpose of winning their support for his policies. The President also said “to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns—this too widens the racial divide and blocks the path to understanding.” By this point he has, hopefully, established some credibility with the resentful whites he is trying to reach. He has established that he has empathy for their position.

Having done so, Obama can then deliver some truths: “Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.” He added: “these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle-class squeeze.” This, I would argue, is a far more effective way to win white support both for universal measures to improve the lives of working-class Americans and for specific measures to counteract the all too real effects of discrimination non-whites still face.

Berating the resentful among the white working class for their bigotry would, without question, lead any of them who were listening to stop, and to dismiss the speaker as someone who just doesn’t get them. Speaking the way Obama did is far less satisfying – as nuance always is initially – but his election suggests that it worked in 2008. We’ll find out more in November.

As progressives, we must not dismiss the perspectives of white working class voters – even those who express racial resentments – any more than we do the perspective of non-white voters, because we need to win their votes. We have to convince these white voters that their interests lie not in allying themselves with the economic elites against minorities, but in coming together and creating a broad, multiethnic coalition of Americans united. This is the truth, and it is what Obama seeks to do. Such a coalition can be the driving force for real change, for policies that benefit members of all ethnic groups while ensuring equal opportunities for all Americans.

Ginning up white racial fear to win votes for the Republican Party is not only cynical, it can become downright dangerous to our domestic peace. We must present an alternative, progressive vision of America. Our vision is one where fellowship across racial lines triumphs over division, where the government serves the common good rather than the interests of the elite, and where everyone is an equal member of the national community, no one—no one—is more of a "real" American than anyone else.

Spotlight: Are lost IRS e-mails "unbelievable"? Not really

2014-06-28T06:37:00.002-04:00

Are lost IRS e-mails “unbelievable”? Not really

Bad "best practices" in government IT mean that lost e-mails are no surprise.

Former IRS official Lois Lerner giving testimony to a Congressional committee in 2013. The IRS says it can't find her e-mails from before 2011.

>by Sean Gallagher - June 25 2014, 2:30pm EST | Re-Post |

During a hearing held yesterday by the House Oversight Committee, Committee Chairman Darrel Issa said that it was “unbelievable” that the IRS had lost the e-mails of former IRS official Lois Lerner. While Congressman Issa is not generally ignorant on tech issues, he’s clearly not familiar with just how believable such a screw-up is.

The IRS claims that many of Lerner's e-mails were lost when the hard drive on her desktop computer crashed in 2011. In a Monday night hearing, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told Issa and the Oversight Committee that there was no way to recover these e-mails. “If you have a magical way for me to do that," he told Issa, "I’d be happy to hear about it.”

The IRS is not the only federal agency to lose e-mails over the past few years. In fact, despite efforts at many agencies to standardize and improve e-mail by moving to services like Google Apps for Government and Microsoft Office 365 Government, many agencies still run their e-mail like it’s 1999. It’s not just a technology issue—it’s an IT policy issue, a staffing issue, and a cultural issue within government, one that the federal government shares with many private corporations.

Mailbox options

Exchange and Outlook (at least as the IRS implemented them until 2011) are at the heart of the IRS e-mail fiasco. Prior to the Lerner e-mail episode, the agency’s IT department placed a 150MB limit on each users’s mailbox (today, IRS employees have a 500MB cap on their e-mail). To keep mailboxes within size limits, employees were told to archive e-mails locally in Outlook .PST mailbox files—including messages that they thought met the definition of “official correspondence” for retention purposes.

To make sure those important messages were preserved and reviewed for retention, IRS employees were told to print out and file a hard copy of those messages. Lerner printed out at least some of her e-mails, so she appeared to be following this policy at some level.

As contrary to common sense as "printing out e-mails" may sound, it’s an entrenched part of government workflow, particularly with more senior officials. Some career government managers and military officers I’ve dealt with actually have administrative assistants print out their correspondence for them and place it into physical inboxes.

Before the whole e-mail controversy exploded, the IRS e-mail servers were regularly backed up—but the agency’s IT department recycled those backup tapes every six months, thus wiping out older records that had since been deleted.

Bad backups have resulted in congressional controversy before—the Bush Administration lost millions of e-mails from its first three years because the White House recycled backup tapes. More recently, the Army—which began migrating its soldiers and civilian employees to a Department of Defense cloud-based e-mail system in 2010—lost a Medal of Honor nomination in e-mail, largely because the workflow for handling awards used a shared mailbox that e-mails were removed from as they arrived and stored in local .PST files.

Local storage is always risky because predicting how long a set of hard drives will last on a desktop or laptop is something of a crapshoot to begin with. A study by Backblaze found that 22 percent of hard drives fail within four years, with half failing within six. In 2011, the last major hardware upgrade the IRS had made to laptops and desktops was a buy from Hewlett-Packard in 2002, so desktop drives were likely dying like flies.

The IRS also had a contract with Sonasoft to provide document retention services for the IRS’ Counsel Division. Some reports have claimed that the contract included archiving of IRS e-mail. But a company spokesperson said that Sonasoft never had access to IRS e-mail—backup of e-mail was all in the hands of the IRS User and Network Services department and its team of contract IT workers.

Bad history

Some will argue that the IRS could have easily prevented the loss of records with regular enterprise desktop backups and that it’s inconceivable that a government agency would have such incompetent IT management practices. To which the only response is: yes, the IRS has lots of IT management problems. For starters, the IRS missed the deadline to get off Windows XP and is paying Microsoft for extended support while it completes a migration to Windows 7. Back in April, Koskinen told Congress that the IRS needed another $30 million to finish the upgrade to Windows 7—money that it was diverting from the IRS' tax enforcement budget.

A Treasury Department audit last year found that the IRS wasn’t properly performing even fundamental system management functions like software license management for desktops and laptops—something that was potentially causing the IRS to spend millions of dollars unnecessarily. “During the audit period, the IRS did not have an overarching approach for enterprise software governance,” wrote Michael McKenney, the Office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) acting deputy inspector general for audits, in a memo attached to the report.

According to TIGTA’s findings, the IRS was “not adhering to Federal requirements and recommended industry best practices. The IRS does not have enterprise-wide or local policies, procedures, and requirements for software license management. The User and Network Services organization was unable to provide us with essential licensing records for properly managing licenses on 24 of 27 software products reviewed during this audit.”

It doesn’t help any that the IRS budget has been cut further and further over the past four years. Despite a pledge by the Obama administration to reduce reliance on contractors, a significant portion (if not a majority) of the day-to-day IT operations and support at IRS are in the hands of contractors hired under the IRS’ broad Total Information Processing Support and Services (TIPPS-4) contract. Much of the IRS’s management of its support services has been passed off completely to contractors under small business set-asides. Meanwhile, the IRS is seeing a huge turnover in staff, as a significant percentage of its workforce retires and is not replaced.

These are problems agencies across the federal government are facing—lack of internal IT expertise, dependence on contractors, reduced money to pay for contractors due to the ongoing budget wars, and the mass departure of baby boomer employees. Combine that with “best practices” that have long passed their shelf life, and you have a recipe for more than just a few missing e-mails; you have a blueprint for total chaos, of which missing e-mails are only a single symptom.

Here is an excerpt from the Townhall.com June 27, 2014:

New House Bill Would Pay $1 Million Cash Reward For Lois Lerner's "Missing" Emails

The Identify and Recover Sent E-mails (IRS) Act (H.R. 4958) is already making its way through the federal legislature. The following, then, is the joint statement both lawmakers released two days ago, explaining why the bill is both necessary and a serious proposal:

U.S. Representatives Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and Bill Flores (R-Texas) have introduced legislation that provides incentives to find former IRS director Lois Lerner’s missing emails.
"It seems that each time the IRS has evidence that will either prove with certainty its guilt or innocence, the evidence disappears which both common sense and the law indicate the evidence such as emails must have proved the IRS’s impropriety if not outright crimes. It is time the IRS either comes clean, or has a special prosecutor to clean it up. This bill should help in the interim," Congressman Gohmert said.

“I find it very hard to believe that the emails from Lois Lerner are lost and unrecoverable. It is very convenient that the IRS is unable to turn over any of the communications from the central figure responsible for the inappropriate targeting of conservative groups. We will not sit idly by as the IRS continues to work to cover up its blatant abuse of government power,” Congressman Flores said.

“Lois Lerner’s involvement in the planning and execution of beliefs-based IRS targeting can only stay hidden for so long. By providing these incentives we can get people to reveal the hidden truths behind this egregious cover up,” Flores stated. “It is time to hold the IRS’ feet to the fire and for them to come clean about Lois Lerner’s involvement. I remain committed to uncovering the truth and ensuring that all federal agencies are working to serve the American public with integrity and fairness.”

Hum... these people don't have a clue as the breadth and scope of the technological IT [Information technology] field and make-up of a functional operations system; let alone as to how and why system crash. I agree with your summary:

These are problems agencies across the federal government are facing—lack of internal IT expertise, dependence on contractors, reduced money to pay for contractors due to the ongoing budget wars, and the mass departure of baby boomer employees. Combine that with “best practices” that have long passed their shelf life, and you have a recipe for more than just a few missing e-mails; you have a blueprint for total chaos, of which missing e-mails are only a single symptom.

You would think that the greatest country would have and maintain the very best technical IT systems. They need to come into the 21st century and move from the old, out-dated operating systems like Windows NT, XP or whatever systems they are running. As to the debunked IRS scandal, Republicans are just wasting time looking for something to blame the Obama Administration and stroke the conservative base for the up-coming Midterm Election and 2016 Elections. There is nothing there; Liberal groups when through the same scrutiny as did conservative groups base on the wording in the 501 c4(s) tax code.

A 501(c) organization, also known colloquially as a 501(c), is a tax-exempt nonprofit organization in the United States. Section 501(c) of the United States Internal Revenue Code (26 U.S.C. § 501(c)) provides that 29 types of nonprofit organizations are exempt from some federal income taxes. Sections 503 through 505 set out the requirements for attaining such exemptions. Many states refer to Section 501(c) for definitions of organizations exempt from state taxation as well. 501(c) organizations can receive unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, and unions. 501(c)(4) organizations may inform the public on controversial subjects and attempt to influence legislation relevant to its program^[44] and, unlike 501(c)(3) organizations, they may also participate in political campaigns and elections, as long as their primary activity is the promotion of social welfare.^[45] The tax exemption for 501(c)(4) organizations applies to most of their operations, but contributions may be subject to gift tax, and income spent on political activities – generally the advocacy of a particular candidate in an election – is taxable.^[46] An "action" organization generally qualifies as a 501(c)(4) organization.^[47] An "action" organization is one whose activities substantially include, or are exclusively,^[48] direct lobbying or grass roots lobbying related to advocacy for or against legislation or proposing, supporting, or opposing legislation that is related to its purpose.^[49] A 501(c)(4) organization may directly or indirectly support or oppose a candidate for public office as long as such activities are not a substantial amount of its activities.^[37]^[50]

Contributions to 501(c)(4) organizations are usually not deductible as charitable contributions for U.S. federal income tax, with a few exceptions.^[51] Dues or contributions to 501(c)(4) organizations may be deductible as a business expense under IRC 162, although amounts paid for intervention or participation in any political campaign, direct lobbying, grass roots lobbying, and contact with certain federal officials are not deductible.^[52] If a 501(c)(4) engages in a substantial amount of these activities, then only the amount of dues or contributions that can be attributed to other activities may be deductible as a business expense.^[53] The organization has to provide a notice to its members containing a reasonable estimate of the amount related to lobbying and political campaign expenditures, or else it is subject to a proxy tax on its lobbying and political campaign expenditures.^[52] It must also state that contributions to the organization are not deductible as charitable contributions during fundraising.^[52]

501(c)(4) organizations are not required to disclose their donors publicly.^[54] The lack of disclosure has led to extensive use of the 501(c)(4) provisions for organizations that are actively involved in lobbying, and has become controversial.^[55]^[56] Criticized as "dark money", spending from these organizations on political TV ads has exceeded spending from Super PACs.^[57]^[58] Spending by organizations that do not disclose their donors has increased from less than $5.2 million in 2006 to well over $300 million in the 2012 election.^[59]

The use of 501(c)4's has been affected by the 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court struck the part of the McCain-Feingold Act that prohibited for-profit corporations, non-profit corporations, and unions from broadcasting electioneering communications. The Act defined an electioneering communication as a communication, that mentions a candidate's name sixty days before a primary or thirty days before a general election. Through 501(c)4 organizations electioneering communications can since be aired at any time.
[wikipedia]

It's time to get over this notion that Tea Party groups where targets by the IRS...these groups where not the only ones [sic]. The original Internal Revenue Code of 1954 (August 16, 1954) states: (4) Civic Leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare ...In 1959 the IRS changed the wording from exclusively to primarily and here is where the problems began.

Excerpt:

Rewriting Washington on the I.R.S.[MSNBC]

As [Lawrence] O’Donnell has been saying since Monday, the so-called IRS scandal is only the consequence of an older and more basic problem with the organization’s reading of the tax code–specifically, with its reading of Section 501(c)(4), which exempts social welfare groups from paying taxes.

The law defines such groups as “civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.” Since 1959, the IRS has been reading “exclusively” as “primarily.”

“By doing that they made IRS agents judges of political activity, investigators of political activity,” O’Donnell explained in the Rewrite Thursday. “IRS agents were then forced to evaluate just how political a given 501(c)(4) organization might be. And it is very clear that if the words “Tea Party” or the name of any political party at all appears in the title of your 501(c)(4) you absolutely do not qualify for 501(c)(4) status under the law.”

Some politicians, however, still don’t seem to understand the interplay between this law and how it’s enforced.

“We must pass a law that makes it much clearer that the so-called social welfare organizations must make their priority promoting social welfare rather than engaging in politics…From my standpoint they should not have any political purpose, and I would hope we could change the law on that,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi ...

O’Donnell reminds politicians of the real IRS scandal

Get over it...We liberals have the same problem!