Monday, November 04, 2024

MARYLAND

Larry Hogan and Race: It Ain’t Pretty



 November 4, 2024
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Maryland Governor Larry Hogan giving the State of the State address in 2016. Photo: Maryland Governor’s Office.


Maybe it’s a small thing but I still can’t get over a line from Larry Hogan’s 2020 memoir. It’s about the first covid death to occur on Hogan’s watch as Maryland governor, the job he held from 2015 to 2023.

“[It was] a Prince George’s County man in his sixties who had underlying medical issues,” Hogan writes. “Terrible news, but you couldn’t exactly call it a surprise.”

It’s those last words – you couldn’t exactly call it a surprise – that disturb me.

This man was a constituent of Hogan’s and likely suffered a painful death, yet Hogan can do little more than shrug his shoulders. And I wonder if that has something to do with this man having been from Prince George’s, a majority Black county. (I wasn’t able to confirm the man’s race or name.)

If this line from Hogan’s memoir was a one-off it wouldn’t have stuck in my craw. But it’s all too consistent with Hogan’s troubling record on race, which has received scant attention over the years.

The election is Tuesday and Hogan is back on the ballot – this time as a candidate for Senate. If he wins, it’ll ensure Republican control of that body.

Since time is tight, I’ll limit my focus to Hogan’s record on race as it pertains to his covid response (which was also scandalous for other reasons).

Anne Arundel ‘Throwback’

From nearly the moment covid struck, it was clear that Black and Brown communities would be hardest hit. With thoughtful and robust interventions, however, the damage could have been lessened. But from the jump, Hogan made clear that he was taking a different approach.

Hogan could’ve tapped a Black official or a sophisticated white one to help localities combat existing disparities and save lives. Instead, Hogan chose Steve Schuh to be his covid liaison to local leaders, a move that left me speechless.

Schuh is part of a crew of Republicans from Anne Arundel County, where Hogan hails from, that run the gamut from retrograde to racist. I reported on these guys back in 2018, when Schuh was running for a second term as county executive, and Hogan for a second term as governor, with the two happily endorsing each other.

In addition to Hogan, that year Schuh also backed John Grasso, an Anne Arundel County councilman running for state senate. “John Grasso is motivated by [one] thing,” Schuh told the Capital Gazette: “He wants to make the community a better place. He wants to help people and animals.”

But Grasso’s Facebook posts told a different story. One post accused former President Obama of being “the bastard child of a bigamous marriage between two Communists,” who grew up to become a male prostitute who “had sex with older white men in exchange for cocaine.” Another Grasso post took aim at the LGBTQ community: “Folks keep talkin’ about another civil war. One side has 8 trillion bullets. The other doesn’t know which bathroom to use.”

Despite these and other such outbursts, Schuh – who Hogan would later tap to be his covid liaison – stood by Grasso, as well as an even more extreme fellow Anne Arundel Republican.

From my 2018 Counterpunch story:

“Up until the eve of his 2014 election to the Anne Arundel County Council, [Michael] Peroutka was a member of the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. Even as a councilman, Peroutka continued supporting some of the group’s positions. It wasn’t until June 2017, just days before neo-Nazi David Duke keynoted the League of the South’s annual conference, that Peroutka finally denounced the group. Six months later, in a party-line vote, all four Republicans on the Anne Arundel County Council elected Peroutka Council chairman, his present position.

“While Hogan doesn’t support Peroutka, he’s not that far removed from him. The governor supports County Executive Schuh, who in turn backs Peroutka, calling him ‘a throwback’ who ‘does not have a malicious bone in his body.’”

Unlike Schuh, Hogan publicly distanced himself from Grasso and Peroutka. Still, Hogan showed up in campaign literature with Peroutka in 2014 and Grasso in 2018 – both times unbeknownst to him, Hogan said.

Unfortunately for the Anne Arundel gang, 2018 proved to be a watershed year in the county’s politics, and Schuh, Grasso and Peroutka all went down to defeat. (Peroutka would briefly resurface in 2022 as the Republican nominee for Maryland attorney general.)

Of the Anne Arundel crew, only Hogan won in 2018, beating back Ben Jealous, the youngest ever head of the NAACP. (When Jealous called to concede on election night, Hogan refused to take the call, then boasted about it in his memoir.)

Schuh, meanwhile, wasn’t out in the cold for long. The month after his loss, Hogan named his ally to a cushy post directing Maryland’s response to the opioid epidemic.

When covid hit, Hogan gave Schuh – someone who’d openly backed bigots – an additional role as the administration’s covid liaison to localities, like Baltimore City and Prince George’s.

Meanwhile, during the first six months of Maryland’s covid lockdown, white suicides fell by almost half, even as Black suicides nearly doubled, according to a Johns Hopkins University study published as a research letter in JAMA Psychiatry.

Black shots

Still, when it came to getting covid shots into people’s arms, Maryland fared well compared to other states. But even here there were issues of fairness.

As embarrassing news stories began to trickle out regarding how whites in Maryland had far more access to vaccines than Blacks, Hogan needed someone to blame.

“We have supply chain issues everywhere in the country,” Hogan said, “but in minority communities the additional problem is people are refusing to take the vaccine.”

With his remark, Hogan wasn’t just “blaming the victim” – as the head of the University of Maryland’s Center for Health Equity put it – he was also lying.

There’s “little difference in reluctance to take the coronavirus vaccine among Black and White Marylanders,” the Washington Post reported at the time.

Even as Hogan blamed Blacks for not getting the shot, he also blamed them for getting too many. “Baltimore City had gotten far more than they were really entitled to,” Hogan said.

“I think our citizens in Baltimore know a dog whistle when they see one,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott responded.

Like father like son

Prince George’s was hit particularly hard by covid. That’s due in part to the county’s antiquated tax structure.

If you were to pick a year when the trajectory of Prince George’s departed from that of its better-off neighbors, it’d be 1978. That’s when Prince George’s then-white majority put the county government in a chokehold by depriving it of tax revenue to prevent the increasing Black population from benefitting from quality schools and other public services.

The 1978 referendum – known as Tax Reform Initiative by Marylanders or TRIM – “passed just as Prince George’s County began a demographic transition from majority-white to majority-Black,” DW Rowlands wrote in a 2020 story for Greater Greater Washington. “A major motivation for its passage was the desire of white voters to limit funding for a public school student body that was becoming increasingly Black and integrated — four years earlier, in 1974, Prince George’s school system had become the largest in the country to be subject to a court-ordered busing desegregation plan. Holding property tax revenue constant while the county’s population was rapidly growing led to severe cuts to many county services and increases to fees.”

One of the leaders of this ugly movement was none other than Larry Hogan’s father, Larry Hogan, Sr., who was the last Republican to serve as Prince George’s County Executive from 1978 to 1982.

Today, this very post is held by Angela Alsobrooks, although maybe not for much longer. If polls are to be believed, come Tuesday Alsobrooks will defeat Hogan and become just the third Black woman ever to serve in the Senate.

Pete Tucker is a journalist based in DC. He writes at petetucker.substack.com

The Democratic Party Still Can Adopt Winning Agendas




 November 4, 2024
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Image by Katelyn Perry.

Over the years, the Democratic Party’s blunders, arrogance and dependence on commercial campaign money and corporate-conflicted political/media consultants have put the two-party duopoly races for the Presidency, the Senate and the House next week into razor-thin elections.

The polls show Democrats in neck-and-neck races with the worst GOP since its creation in 1854. The GOP is led by a delusionary, daily lying, violence-inciting, bigoted, misogynist, serial election denier, convicted felon, and wannabe dictator, Donald Trump, who can’t process information but has openly boasted that he knows more than everybody.

The Party of the Donkey deteriorated years ago and opened the door to unnecessary close cliff-hanger elections.  The Dems wrote off nearly half of the country (the red states) to the Republicans. This abandonment included the prairie states (North and South Dakota) and the mountain states that used to have many Democratic Senators. Now they have only three Senators from seven states.

The next Democratic party blunder was not to support the National Popular Vote drive to overcome the Electoral College. (See: nationalpopularvote.com). This is the anachronism that cost the Democrats two presidential losses — one in 2000 and one in 2016 — even though the Democratic presidential candidate handily won the national popular vote.

Third, the Democratic Party decided to robustly compete with the GOP and dial for the same business campaign cash in return for relenting from progressive policies.

Fourth, the Dems lost the gerrymandering drive in 2010 when they were caught napping against a vigorous GOP drive to control key state legislatures like Pennsylvania and get more GOP members in the House of Representatives.

What should the Dems do for the people in the next four days? Bernie Sanders is the most popular elected politician in the country. Why? Because Sanders, two-time presidential candidate, wants social safety net policies that are well received by working families where they live, work, and raise their families. He has urged Kamala Harris to authentically campaign to raise the federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour for over 25 million workers, raise Social Security benefits, frozen for over 50 years for over 60 million elderly, and raise taxes on the undertaxed wealthy and big corporations (for a hike supported by 85% of the people.) These three measures also appeal to many self-described conservative voters.

So, what does Harris do? She does not campaign with the popular Bernie. She advertises heavily and campaigns instead with Liz Cheney who supported the war criminals Dick Cheney and G.W. Bush in their criminal invasion and sociocide of Iraq taking over one million innocent Iraqi lives and leaving that country in ruins. Liz Cheney, an avowed Republican opponent of Trump, is also a confirmed corporatist. Forgetting Sanders and heralding Cheney is not the way to turn out low-wage voters who make up a good portion of the expected 85 million eligible non-voters in next Tuesday’s election.

Unable to adjust, the Democratic Party keeps pouring billions of dollars into the same mediocre ads showing Trump to be unfit for office. These repetitive video spots by now have reached diminishing returns, as a vote-getter. Almost everyone has already made up their mind on Trump’s deficiencies.

The ads should shift quickly to overcoming an astonishing amnesia by a majority of voters who think they were better off economically under Trump’s term than under Biden’s. They have forgotten Trump’s closing down any efforts to secure full Medicare for All, enact higher minimum wages, and initiate enforcement efforts against corporate crooks squeezing money from the American people. All the while he was early mocking the oncoming Covid-19 pandemic and calling intense climate catastrophes “a hoax.” His deadly delays regarding Covid led to the preventable loss of some 300,000 American lives and worsened the associated recession. The Democratic Party ads have been largely AWOL on this abysmal record while focusing expensively on Trump personally.

Instead of aligning with worker unions and progressive civic groups working to benefit all people, Harris ogles up to big business bosses, thereby jettisoning media and video opportunities to be with pro-party groups with millions of members.

Harris has learned little from Hillary Clinton’s disastrous loss to Trump in 2016. She continues to be supportive of the U.S. Empire and, despite more dulcet tones, is aligned with Bibi-Biden’s massive weapons and diplomatic engagement with mega-terrorist Netanyahu’s genocide of the Palestinians and now the Lebanese.

She cannot even get herself to propose immediate peace negotiations over the Russian/Ukrainian war bogged down month after month with large casualties on both sides. These stands would separate her a little from Biden which would help identify her as her own person.

Vice President Hubert Humphrey, running for the presidency in 1968, declined to break with President Johnson on the Vietnam War. Analysts believe that cost him in the tight race against Richard Nixon because many Democratic voters stayed home.

There is still time to highlight Bernie Sanders’ protections for the people. There is still time to recognize the millions of midnight shift workers who do not see a candidate and would welcome recognition by Democratic candidates – local, state, and national. (See: winningamerica.net/midnightcampaigning).

There is still time to pledge compliance with six federal laws being violated by unconditional weapons shipments to Israel’s war in Palestine. Backed by majority public opinion, she should strongly DEMAND an immediate ceasefire, entry of U.S. humanitarian aid trucks to the starving, dying innocent people of Gaza, and a cessation of the Palestinian Holocaust by the Israeli regime that has already taken at least 400,000 Palestinian lives, mostly children, women and elderly.

If Harris doesn’t advance these policies, she’ll be telling people that she will just be an extension of the Biden presidency. These actions may not be enough to bring out the stay-at-home voters who in the past had voted for the Democratic candidate, but they have a higher probability than just staying the cursed course.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!