Berning CVA

Canvassing in Culpeper VA Sat, Nov 14: Charlottesville Bernie troops provide reinforcements for the local Bernie outpost!

So the blog's been a bit moribund recently, alas!  Why?  Basically, because we've been so busy!  Jasmine & I both applying for lots of part-time work--looks like I'll be an Adjunct Prof of Economics for Piedmont Virginia Community College in the spring semester . . . unless something more compelling comes up before my background check clears.

But much more than professional activities, we've been busy with Bernie volunteering!  Apart from diving into organizational work of the Charlottesville & Central VA for Bernie volunteer group, we've been getting out the word collecting signatures for Bernie to get on the VA ballot.  The state actually has one of the higher bars to getting on the primary ballot (in fact, in 2012 Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum & other Republicans failed to make it on the ballot, leaving the Republican field to just Mitt Romney & Ron Paul).

On Election Day here in VA, when the entire state senate was up for re-election (and where Democrats put up the feeblest of efforts against Republican gerrymandering), Jasmine & I trolled our local polling places with Rachel, another Bernie volunteer, collecting well over a hundred signatures. We also collected a few nasty comments about Mao Zedong as well as accusations of the purveyance of male bovine excrement, due in part to a deficit of wisdom owing to our failure to have been born when Barry Goldwater was running for president.  We later learned that the precinct where we were (Baker-Butler elementary school, our own polling place, though we became Virginia residents too late to vote in the election) is the most conservative in Albemarle County (where Democrats swept the County board of Commissioners elections).  In other precincts around the city & county, our colleagues found lots of people willing to sign for Bernie: over 1,150 just from our Charlottesville group (Bernie apparently needs 5,000 for the whole state).

And even in our precinct we gathered over a hundred signatures and even got about half a dozen names of people local to this part of the county who want to join the offshoot Bernie group we're trying to start: Albemarle North for Bernie.  We have our second meeting this week at a volunteer's house in the beautiful town of Barboursville, where the pretty terrific and famous wine is made.

And we've found other outlets for our enthusiasm for the political revolution--such as the Charlottesville Raise Up for $15 minimum wage rally, where we showed up in Bernie paraphernalia and got to speak to the crowd, and even made it onto local TV, NBC 29 (about 20 seconds in)

and into the local paper, the Daily Progress, where Jasmine was quoted extensively, following her comments at the rally about the insecurity of non-benefit, temporary work, like the adjuncting she did at Colgate.

In general, it's exciting how vibrant a community we've found around here, and how much people like us seem to be accepted into at least certain quite politically active sectors--like the county Democratic party, one of whose vice chairs wanted to have coffee with me after meeting at the polls and invited me to their monthly meeting.

The abundance of dynamic grassroots political and social activism that we've found in Virginia could be due to many factors.  That Virginia is a purple state in flux, where Democrats and others on the left perceive chances to change things in the coming years, may inspire the openness to new actors & allies that they know such change will require.  This itself undoubtedly stems from a huge difference with Central New York: Central Virginia (and the whole state, really) is an area that is growing, on the upswing, and as new people arrive, looking for new opportunities, the ferment only feeds upon itself.  Central New York, by contrast, is decades into a demographic & economic decline, with young people, activists, and entrepreneurs (political, business, or otherwise) often needing to go afield for opportunities if they don't already have a secure place in the region's economic, political, or social structure.  Hamilton, NY has been lucky to attract a notable exception in the past several years in Good Nature Brewing, and its success and planned expansion do incite hope that more people will buck the trend by investing in Central New York, which those who have managed to make a solvent life there know has much to offer.

Of course, Charlottesville is exceptional in many ways, too: one of the wealthiest and most liberal areas of "non"-Northern Virginia, it's a hotbed for all kind of social, artistic, and political activities (and with the persistent delight of Southern courtesy that sets it apart from a Cambridge, MA or Brooklyn).

Culpeper, Virginia, by comparison, an hour up the road towards DC, is neither as prosperous nor as liberal.  Jasmine & I got to experience it yesterday when we drove there with some other local Charlottesville Bernie-supporters to join the lone member of the Culpeper for Bernie group, Earl (see the photo above), in collecting signatures at the farmers' market.  Culpeper is in Virginia's 7th Congressional District (one that's gerrymandered even more Republican than our 5th District) and no surprise it was the most in need of more signatures to be collected for the campaign.  The farmers' market was not nearly as active as what we've seen in Charlottesville, or in Hamilton (even though Culpeper has about 5x the population of the latter!), and it was a scrabble to get many signatures.

Interestingly, we got a bunch of signatures from people who said they're hardly regular Democratic voters, but want "anybody but Hillary" to be the next president.  Depending on which of the current occupants of the Republican clown-car gets nominated for president next summer, a Democratic nomination of Bernie Sanders could well generate a curious new phenomena: the Bernie Republican, foil of the famous Reagan Democrat.  We'll see.

But yesterday's jaunt was important for reasons besides just the signatures: one was helping Earl (and a couple of people who came out of the woodwork as potential Bernie volunteers) shore up his own sense of a movement for Bernie.  If there really is to be major political change in this country, a movement, then it's going to take people moving, at least for a few hours, a day, or a weekend: going physically to places where the movement is not as strong, and spreading the word, wearing the T-shirt, putting a human face to the concept of "Democratic Socialism" (which, after going over it with the chair of economics at PVCC, we decided is really just a brand of Keynesiansm).

And that's why we're here in Virginia, with no jobs, trying to get something started.  I was really excited this weekend by the people we met--vendors in the Farmers' Market who donated parmesan bread to the Bernie volunteers, an African American lady from a local church who's really excited for Bernie (and told us that she thinks her community might be holding its collective nose if Hillary is the name next to "D" on the ballot next fall), several Spanish-speakers who were  not registered to vote, but had clearly never been approached before in this country as members of a civic polity, and even some of the anti-Bernie people who were interested to mix it up a bit.  People like us--not just me & Jasmine, but everybody in the picture above--getting out there, talking to strangers, believing that there's more on offer for America than dynasties, elites who "know better," and apathy of the masses, and putting themselves on the line for something are what it will take to give the lie to the easy rationalization that Bernie can't win (which is in many cases = "we're stuck with the mediocrity we've got").  We can do it--not for Bernie, but for the sake of this country, and a people that need to wake up and realize that they can take back their own democracy.

Labor Mobility in America -or- the Cost of Becoming Virginia Jews

In my CRV, I'm apparently Virginia Jew #5159

Anyone who knows me knows that as a Jew, I could be considered a disappointment.  I wasn't bar mitzvahed, have never practiced the religion, can barely get past "baruch atah adonai . . ." and by the rules of the Mishnah, probably couldn't even count as a Jew unless I converted (my mom was born "Woods").  

But with a name like Daniel Jacob Epstein . . . well?  The Virginia DMV seems to have seen me coming and acknowledged us as members of the tribe (in her Camry, Jasmine Epstein is #5158).  I guess I'd like to think that I'm about as Jewish as Bernie Sanders, and perhaps that's good enough for government work.

Religion is not the topic of this blog post, though: it's about the cost of moving around the country.  

In theories of free market capitalism, resources (capital, labor, land, etc) are put to the most efficient (read: profitable) use when there are as few impediments as possible to their being deployed wherever they will fetch the highest prices.  In the case of capital, we have all kinds of laws, judicial infrastructure, and entire administrative divisions of government (SEC, FDIC, Federal Reserve, etc) devoted to smoothing out the functioning of markets so that the process of moving capital around is easy and cheap.

What about opportunities for labor to fetch the highest prices?  Especially in a country the size of the United States, for people to get the best jobs (which could be the highest paid, or the job for which the enjoyment of the job + the salary & benefits = the best return on the time & effort they put in), they often have to move somewhere else.

Of course, this explains why every ten years, states like New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan get apportioned fewer Congressional reps, and states like Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and California get more.  Indeed, driving through some of the cities of upstate NY (Utica, Oneida, Amsterdam), it's clear that people have been voting with their feet (or U-Hauls) for any number of reasons as the rust belt empties of inhabitants, but better employment opportunity is a big one.

But moving can be expensive--it's a big investment to pull up stakes in search of better opportunity.  Nonetheless, it's the American way: "Westward the wagons" and all that.  And if you're poor, or unemployed, it's not only a good way to improve your economic lot, but it's the key way that free market capitalist economics would prescribe.  And indeed, if a "flexible labor market" (minimizing barriers to people finding the jobs where their labor is deployed most efficiently, whether by facilitating businesses' ability to fire workers whose labor they are unable to deploy efficiently, or by facilitating workers' capacity to leave one situation for another where their labor fetches a better price) works they way that free market economics claims it does, then this process also should promote people getting out of poverty ("up by the bootstraps") and indeed reducing government expenditures on things like unemployment, foodstamps, and other means-tested benefits.

But while making easier to move about the country should have every advantage in a free-market economy, the United States have made it rather costly in a number of ways.

The Commonwealth of Virginia's legislature, for example, has mandated a number of fees for operating a vehicle in the state, here see the ones we paid to become VJW 5158 & 5159:

Title Fees for titling car in VA $10 x 2 cars =	$20
Minimum sales tax on $500 intra-family car sale =	$75
Safety Inspection $16 x 2 cars =	$32
Vehicle Registration 2yrs (w/discount) $79.50 x 2 cars =	$159
Out of State License conversion $32 x 2 drivers =	$64
Grand Total fees extracted from us by the Commonwealth of Virginia DMV =	$350

Now, for me & Jasmine, these fees are affordable, an expected cost of moving to this state in search of better ways to employ ourselves, and one of the reasons we saved up money before making this move.  And in truth, part of the reason we have to pay as much as we did is how privileged we are: a two-car couple (though with teenagers--the CRV is 12 y.o. and the Camry 18--we're hardly the most privileged of car owners), and in fact our second car is Jasmine's old one that we got from her parents for a nominal price (our good fortune).  Titling it under a new name, we had to pay a sales tax of $75 on the $500 purchase price (the tax rate is 4.1%, but there is a minimum payment amount that effectively meant we paid 15%!); had we not had the good fortune for Richard & Linda to let the Camry go for a song, we wouldn't be paying the fees for a second car at all!  And we could have registered our cars for only one year, instead of two, though the multi-year discount meant that latter was more economical, in the long run.

In the end, we could afford all of these fees, but imagine the situation of people with less means, who weren't lucky enough have a job that enabled them to save up like we could.  A family with two working parents might easily need two cars if they each had to work; the fees for operating vehicles in Virginia would be pretty steep for a family with an income of $2,500/mo (the SNAP cut-off--which two minimum wage jobs barely add up to, before taxes).  And why should there be a minimum payment for auto sales tax: if a someone can only afford to buy a car that costs $500 or $1,000, why are they paying the same sales tax as a car that costs nearly $2,000 (this applies even to Virginians who never cross state lines when buying cars).

If Virginia needs more resources to fix its roads and run its Motor Vehicle bureaucracy (where, I have to note, all the people we ran across were kind, helpful, and extremely efficient), why not take them out of income tax dollars paid mostly by people not in poverty, instead of multiplying "fees" that, while they apply to everyone, hit the poor and those who are moving house much more heavily than the wealthy and the comfortable?

As with Jasmine's non-transferable New York Medicaid, the United States are (plural) a pain for poor people: the "federal" system that empowers states to each set up their own special bureaucracies, redundant inspections (the Camry had to be re-inspected for Virginia, even though New Jersey had given it a clean bill of health 'til 2017 just a couple of months ago), and other powers that state governments claim a "right" to makes labor mobility in this country a costly prospect, especially for those in most want of economic opportunity.  Proportionately to income, this is the hardest for the poorest Americans--another way in which the system we have in our country today makes pulling oneself or one's family "up by the bootstraps" most difficult for those at the very bottom of the ladder.