Tag: politics

How to protect your democracy in 20 minutes per day

Make ten phone calls every day. Six of them go to your Federal Representatives, who are listed at the end of the article. Three of them go to your State Representatives. One goes to the Governor.

Each Federal politician has two phone numbers: the first in Washington DC and the second at his or her local office. The Governor has one. Your state legislators may have one or two.

It is helpful to have a script for your phone calls. Here is a pattern:

Good morning! My name is (First Name) (Last Name) and I live in your district in (city, town). Please, (representative’s name and title) to (twenty or thirty polite words maximum). Thank you for your time.

If you get a live operator, they may ask for your address (which they can easily get anyway) or to clarify your answer.

Many of us do not have twenty minutes per day. Any call you make to stop the Musk and Trump train from rolling over our rights as Americans is positive.

Senators and Representative for Congressional District 3 in Indiana

Sen. Todd Young
Indianapolis: 317-226-6700
Washington DC: 202-224-5623

Sen. Jim Banks
Fort Wayne: 260-321-7130
Washington DC: 202-224-4814

Rep. Jim Baird
Washington DC: 202-225-5037
Danville, IN: 317-563-5567

Governor Mike Braun: 317-232-4567

Indianapolis: 317-232-4567

State officials

As you may know, Indiana is a severely gerrymandered state. The gerrymander dismembers Greater Lafayette, so that both of our Senate districts extend tens of miles into deeply rural territory.

Find Your Legislators

Even if it seems there is no chance your call will affect the vote, call. It is true that your legislators’ votes on many issues may be predetermined by their donors, their loyalty to MAGA or their opposition to MAGA, but not all of them. It is also true that they can gauge the strength of public sentiment based on these calls, which may dissuade them from voting for the worst of the bills.

Confession of a former bureaucrat

Nine weeks with the Census

Back in 2020, I worked for the Census during the summer and early autumn. It was interesting work and COVID played its tricks. There was so much that I did not know about my neighborhood and the surrounding counties. The stories would be entertaining and instructive, with all sorts of characters and even a climax of sorts…and I cannot tell you a word of them without breaking my oath or courting five years at Club Fed. I asked if I could tell them without identifying information — my coworkers said no.

All Federal employees, even temps, are required to take an oath which follows:

“I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

One-third of federal workers are veterans. In a few cases, challenge coins like those given to members of the military to commemorate an accomplishment are unofficially offered: people use their own money to get the coins designed, stamped and painted. If you received a blood transfusion, chances are very good that a federal worker donated it.

Federal employment is largely believed to be a sinecure, that is, money for almost nothing. Park rangers wrangling tourists away from the cute buffalo and black bears and discouraging them from trying out those lovely hot springs made of battery acid kept at 200 degrees may disagree. Overstretched air traffic controllers may also disagree — we saw what happens if they make mistakes: perhaps a jet sinking into the Potomac with 67 passengers or something smaller crashing into a residential part of Philadelphia, killing six.

The cloud of contractors, multiplying

A recent phenomenon in DC is the swarm of contractors orbiting the place. The Federal government fell into the fad of contracting everything out. Somehow the number of people working as contractors has been so tremendous that the DC area extends into four states now including DC. And where there are contracting firms there are CEOs and their entourages drinking deep from the stream of money headed to the multimillionaires who run the firms and shareholders. The New Republic described DC as a workaday place where the streets rolled up at 10 pm and commuters read news on their way to work — the current DC is a place where parking can easily exceed $100/day and homes worth over a million dollars spread out in every direction.

Research

Related to the contractors is the way that research is done. Most of the research is done far from DC, in hundreds of universities. Typically, a primary: investigator (PI) competes for grants from one department or another. Should they get the grant, the professor’s employer gets a large cut (roughly 50% at Purdue) and a team may be assembled with grad students working as apprentices and postgrads serving as the journeymen, plus supporting actors; the PI supervising a team of research workers. So cut out a department that does research, and jobs disappear from dozens of colleges and thousands of people on modest pay lose their appointments.

Final Notes

And yes, federal employees sometimes have a stick up their butt. They can be extremely doctrinaire and rigid, wedded to the way things used to be (in their minds). In business, failure is expected; in government, it can ruin a career or kill a program, if it is caught so not getting caught gets priority. And like any institution, previous mistakes lead to policies designed to keep the mistake from being repeated, which backfires when the mistakes and consequences are tabulated over a department employing thousands in twelve states leading to pages of rules covering situations that happen once every decade somewhere in the department. Some of that stick is the possibility of embarrassment, career ruin, fines and incarceration should one policy or another be violated or something crash in unexpected, fiery ways.

A last note: the data gathered by governmental agencies is the property of the American taxpayer and citizen. When Musk and his minions make data go away, they rob the American people of what we purchased through taxes.

Unsolicited Advice Column: Demonstrations

On Wednesday, February 5, demonstrations are being planned in all 50 state capitals. They are organized under the hashtag #50501 and so far they are promised to be peaceful. But if everybody is invited to protest, there is no guarantee that the protest will be peaceful.

Bad Actors

Boogaloo Boys

First on my list would be the “Boogaloo Boys” The SPLC describes them as far-right anti-government extremists, though the Boogaloos themselves claim no ideology. During the George Floyd protests, one of them killed a police officer without cause or provocation in California. Others were spotted damaging buildings in Minneapolis just before those riots got hot.

Anarchist Kiddies

“Anarchist Kiddies” is an unaffectionate term from the Chicago area used to describe young people who want to break windows and watch things burn. Some of them showed up in Indianapolis at an anti-Trump rally after the 2016 election, gave a series of speeches at the Capitol while waving anarchist flags (one of them resembling the “Orthodoxy or Death” banner favored by Serb warlords in Bosnia). Then the speeches ended. One young woman lay down in front of a truck bearing a Trump banner who showed up as a counter-protester. The police tried to get her out of the way, but then other protesters started chanting. A Black Lives Matter organizer saved the day by yelling “Black Lives Matter” and leading them away from the scene chanting “Black Lives Matter”. The march around downtown Indianapolis started peacefully, with even a diner in a downtown restaurant applauding. Then an idiot broke a window. While the official demonstration ended at 10 pm with a group hug, the kiddies continued wrecking things and getting arrested.

Agents Provocateur

These folks show up at demonstrations urging protesters to smash things or people. In some cases, they are sent by the parties being protested: an antiwar protest might encourage a government agency to send APs. At Kent State, APs showed up dressed as hippies to get the people of Kent, Ohio nervous so they could justify their actions against the protest that ended in four people dead and a wave of campus riots nationwide. During the 1990s, not a little of the strength behind the KKK rallies that plagued Indiana came from FBI keeping tabs on the Klan. The most recent case of which I am aware would be against the Michigan militia who planned to assassinate the Governor over COVID restrictions back in April 2020.

Backpacks should be considered red flags. They may contain rocks and other things that cause damage. If a person near you is carrying a backpack during a march, chances are that they plan to use whatever is in it and if you are too close to them, remember that police do not get enough range training to hit their targets with rubber bullets and that tear gas hurts!

Other players, for good or ill.

Affinity Groups

A well-organized group of protesters may self-organize into affinity groups of around ten people. Should somebody start damaging things, the affinity group surrounds and immobilizes them. The classic method is taking them to the cops, or if the police are not trusted, duct taping them to a convenient street lamp. (Pulling the AP’s pants down is not necessary and may expose you to charges of sexual assault or battery.) With only a few days of planning time, the February 5 protest cannot be considered well-organized.

If you do not personally know people who invite you to join their affinity group, do not join them. You have not trained with them, and violent anarchists also like to call their groups “affinity groups”.

The Cops

A positive police presence separates protesters from traffic, tries to keep the flow of travel smooth and sometimes gets gruff and shouty. In such cases, don’t take it personally: in a crowd of chanting people, the police need to speak loudly and chances are good they are tired.

The negative police presence was seen several times during the George Floyd protests/riots. For example, Kyle Rittenhouse asked the Kenosha police to arrest him after he shot at the people he said were threatening him, and killed one of them. The Kenosha police refused. He shot again, claiming self-defense and the jury believed him at least a bit. Then there were the police hanging out in Bobby Rush’s Chicago office chilling as rioters looted other stores in the plaza, or maybe the cops who, ostensibly keeping order, beat people up at Ford City Mall at least ten miles from the actual riots.

My experience is that the cops usually do not want violence, at least before the violence begins. The Indianapolis cops were peaceful until demonstrators morphed into rioters at the November 2016 rally. There are always exceptions, and if the cops want violence, they especially want people to react violently! Please do not satisfy such cops.

Be peaceful and nonviolent!

Project 2025 requires a state of emergency to hasten Trump and Musks’ plan to convert the US into an autocracy at the service of Trump and Musks’ favorites. Do not give them this excuse! The US military is incredibly powerful — at the moment some of them are pushing back but when violence begins, they may no longer push back. While violence is wrong for its own reasons, demonstrators growing violent let the power they protest choose the field of battle and the weapons with which they were trained. Most Americans don’t really like violence — your violence becomes the oligarchs’ best recruiting tool.

Final words

The organizers, at best, do not know what they are doing. There were protests on February 1, and asking protesters to come out again four days later is asking for burnout. At worst, they want things to go down violently to bring on a declaration of emergency. The successful Women’s March of 2017 was linked with local organizing for the 2018 elections, consultation with lawful authority and enough lead time for participants to plan their protest and knit those pink caps. By organizing this way, they helped turn the House in 2018.

There is lots to do and if you are free on February 5 around noon, maybe writing your congressman would be a better use of it.

Welcome to the Lafayette Sentinel!

This is the third iteration of the old Tipped Canoe site, renamed to the Lafayette Sentinel.

With the new Administration, people must know what their legislators and leaders are up to at every level. For that matter, most of our lives are lived close to home and most of our interactions with government are with our township, city and county.

A national government may be excellent, but that of a city may be horrible, and Uncle Sam is not completely to blame for potholes in the street or scandals in the Police Department. For example, Donald Trump and Joseph Biden are not to blame for the bizarre behavior of the Wabash Township trustee who tried governing from Florida or whatever mess has taken place in Fairfield Township.

The opposite may be true. Lafayette’s Mayor Roswarski and West Lafayette’s Mayor John Dennis helped us get through the first four Trump years, shielding their cities from some of their problems.

Some problems take place on multiple scales. Greater Lafayette’s beloved weather forecaster, Chad Evans, is facing a layoff from Channel 18 because its owner, Allen Media Broadcasting, has decided to delegate forecasts for our area to The Weather Channel, also owned by Allen Media Broadcasting; it is feared that our local forecasts will be less reliable coming out of Atlanta rather than from the office on Yeager Road. This was made possible by the Communications Act of 1996 because entities far from Lafayette can now own Lafayette media.

So here goes! The Sentinel has its own domain (lafasent.com) (sort of) and, I hope, will someday join other outlets here in Lafayette in keeping you informed.