under Northam:

28% of Democrats who won seats in Nov 5 2019 race DID NOT RUN AGAINST ANYONE - they were NOT ELECTED, they are appointed democrat thugs

28% is enough to effect the statewide picture (house and senate)**

that's 70% higher than for Republicans

40% seats went unchallenged or only laughably unchallenged (70% of which were democrat seats)

* school spending has skyrocketed, kids are dumber and more violent despite trillions spent in va, VA's exports and productivity have fallen seriously

* funding doesn't go where it's earmarked - it gets "rolled out" of one fund into another (such as pay raises for loyola dems)

* illegal aliens were allowed to vote by "visiting the county center" and taking an oath (new law resembling California's altered voting laws infact)

** you cannot trust the vote count from a district which didn't allow voting !!! (I INSIST)

GET RID OF THAT HELL BOY FROM GOVERNMENT - get rid of Northham

Under hell boy: Fairfax County has at least 1 supervisor who received METRO money as "campaign donated money" (highly illegal, metro is, of course, government run)

I predict that democrat wins across the state for Supervisors (who do the REAL SPENDING AND ILLEGAL ALIEN DECISIONS) were funded similarly in their campaigns.

THAT MEANS, NO DOUBT, NORTHAM IS A HELL BOY

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we've continually had this ring of theives play this song of "guilt trip - race card - open your wallet"

28% aren't even running for office anymore they are just appointed by thuggery

guilt trip? they are living in masions.

sick of this HELL BOY - get the hell out

The problem isn't the Democrats as much as it is the lazy-ass Republicans who who won't run candidates -let alone competitive candidates- in the areas mentioned. It wasn't just statewide. It was here in Fairfax. Look at the unopposed BOS races in Fairfax.

And, when they run candidates, the Republicans throw-up an unqualified "Hail Mary" candidate who's unelectable. Look at the VA 11th district where they ran a gay guy thinking that would get them a win. Then, they ran an African-American thinking that would work.

Face it, this isn't Joe Ragan's Republican Party anymore...

drop dead democrats

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so much for moral superiority !

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AFTER SO MANY YEARS OF CARPET BAGGING REPUBLICANS ARMING THE NIGGERS IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME SOMEONE HAD THE BALLS TO DISARM THE FUCKING SAVAGES! DIXIECRAT TILL I DIE

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northham is in one way or another funding G2 - for all we know G2 is just in fairfax

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NORTHAM IS A HERO Wrote:
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> AFTER SO MANY YEARS OF CARPET BAGGING REPUBLICANS
> ARMING THE NIGGERS IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME SOMEONE
> HAD THE BALLS TO DISARM THE FUCKING SAVAGES!
> DIXIECRAT TILL I DIE


Careful there, Northam's intentions are supposed to be kept secret. If the NIGGERS realize that the only reason we are banning guns is because of them, they will surely massacre us all!

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Where is the Imperial Wizard these days? He seems to be keeping a low profile

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Human Tripod Wrote:
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> The problem isn't the Democrats as much as it is
> the lazy-ass Republicans

In 2016 I went to the RPV convention in Harrisonburg, VA.

What a goddamned dumpster fire.

These descendants-of-Pocahontas, family-been-in-Virginia-300-years, real-Virginian-dipshits can't even manage to run a convention, yet they run the state (till next month, anyway).

No wonder the state is so fucked up.

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Just about everything sordid and degraded in capitalist politics in America has been on display over the past few days in the media frenzy over Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. Virtually the entire Democratic Party establishment is now demanding Northam’s resignation, although he has so far resisted the pressure.

The firestorm broke following publication of photographs from Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook page, showing two students, one in blackface and the other in a Ku Klux Klan costume. Initially, one of the two was believed to be Northam, and he issued a public apology on Friday.

On Saturday, however, Northam held a press conference at which he denied that he was either of the two students, although he could not explain why the clearly racist images were on his personal page in the yearbook, claiming only that he had never seen the yearbook before.

Northam went on to admit that on another occasion that same year, 1984, after joining the military as an Army doctor, he had worn blackface in a dance competition in Texas, in imitation of the entertainer Michael Jackson. At the time, Northam was 25 years old, a medical doctor and commissioned officer, so his actions cannot be dismissed on the grounds of youth and immaturity.

The yearbook photo surfaced as part of a right-wing campaign against Northam spearheaded by the internet publication Big League Politics.com, run by a former writer for the fascistic Breitbart News website. It followed a similar exposure of a right-wing Republican politician, Florida Secretary of State Michael Ertel, who resigned last week after his photograph in blackface from 2005 became public.

A few days after Ertel’s resignation, Northam became the target of ultra-right vilification for comments made on an interview program in which the governor, a pediatrician before he entered politics, defended late-term abortions as sometimes medically necessary. His comments were depicted as justifying “infanticide” and ultra-right politicians like Senator Ted Cruz called for his resignation.

Then came the publication of photos from Northam’s 1984 yearbook page, and the entire Democratic Party establishment joined the campaign to force Northam out of office. Three top Virginia Democrats—Senator Mark Warner, Senator Tim Kaine and Representative Bobby Scott—issued a joint statement calling on Northam to step down.

They were joined by the black caucus of the state legislature, the Democratic caucuses of the State Senate and House of Delegates, the six other Democratic representatives from Virginia congressional districts, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic National Committee and a host of 2020 presidential candidates.

Virginia state Democrats were particularly concerned because the entire state legislature is up for reelection in 2019, with the Republicans clinging to narrow majorities in both houses. Moreover, if Northam resigns, Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, an African-American Democrat, would succeed him and would be eligible to run for a full term in 2021 with the advantage of virtual incumbency (Virginia is the only state which imposes a one-term limit on its governors).

While the material exposing Northam was dug up by the ultra-right and promoted to serve its political interests, there is little there to surprise anyone familiar with the governor’s social and political origins. He grew up on the eastern shore, the most rural and remote portion of the state, and he followed a career path steeped in conservative traditionalism: Virginia Military Institute, medical school followed by an eight-year stint as an Army doctor, then 15 years in a lucrative private practice as a pediatric neurologist in the Norfolk area.

Northam was a Republican, voting for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. He entered politics as a candidate for the Democrats, however, in 2007, seeking a state senate seat in the Norfolk area. But even after he entered the legislature, state senate Republicans tried to recruit him to their side, telling him that his conservative fiscal views were more aligned with theirs. The only obstacle was Northam’s adamant support for abortion rights, informed by his profession as a medical doctor, which put him out of step with the Christian fundamentalist right.

In 2013, Northam was elected lieutenant governor, serving four years under Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe, then winning the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2017 over a Sanders-backed liberal challenger. He ran a thoroughly right-wing general election campaign, promising to “work with” Trump and avoiding issues of economic inequality or any challenge to the wealth and power of the ruling elite.

But when he swept to victory in November over Republican Ed Gillespie, Northam was portrayed by liberal publications like the Nation as being at the forefront of a Democratic “wave” repudiating the Trump administration’s policies.

The level of sanctimony in the denunciations of Northam by Republicans, Democrats and media pundits is difficult to overstate. The Republicans, of course, tolerate far more blatant racism from President Trump and an array of congressional and gubernatorial candidates than anything of which Northam was guilty 35 years ago. Democratic officeholders and prospective candidates have traded in their hosannas to Northam for imprecations at the flip of a switch in order to pander to identity politics (and disguise their own right-wing support for big business and American imperialism).

As for the corporate media, the Northam affair has served, at least for a few days, as a gigantic diversion. The Sunday television interview programs were largely devoted to the fate of this comparatively obscure state politician, whom not one in a hundred Americans outside the state of Virginia could even have identified.

No need to discuss such issues as the US repudiation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty—bringing forward the danger of nuclear war—or the Trump administration’s preparations to invade Venezuela, or Trump’s threats to declare a national emergency and assume quasi-dictatorial powers if he cannot browbeat Congress into approving a border wall, or the freezing death of workers and students in last week’s cold snap.

And with its images of blackface and the KKK, albeit 35 years old, the Northam affair provides yet another opportunity to portray race—along with gender, sexual orientation and other “identities”—as the fundamental dividing line in American society. Anything to avoid the most important dividing line: that between the ruling elite of billionaires and multi-millionaires and the vast majority of the population—the working class, which is now beginning to move in a class struggle increasingly directed against the capitalist system.

There is nothing to defend in Northam. However, there is something massively fraudulent in the political-media operation launched against him. If Northam is forced out, he will be replaced by someone else, no less right-wing and reactionary, in a ritualist purge that will have no effect on anything of significance, least of all the conditions that give rise to racism.

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Several thousand public school teachers and support staff protested outside of Virginia’s State Assembly building in Richmond Monday to demand improved pay and school funding. Virginia teachers are the latest group of educators to stage walkouts and protests against the bipartisan assault on teachers and public education.

According to the Washington Post, school districts in Arlington, Prince William and Henrico counties as well as the city of Richmond were forced to call last minute school closures due to the number of teachers calling off of work and effectively carrying out a one-day strike Monday. As in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, strikes by teachers and other public employees are illegal in the state of Virginia.


The protests in Richmond take place less than a week after the unions shut down the six-day strike by 33,000 teachers in Los Angeles, the second largest school district in the US. In Denver, the unions called off a planned strike on Monday in Denver after school officials appealed to Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis to intervene. Teachers are threatening to strike in Oakland, Sacramento and other California cities. Internationally, 700,000 teachers and government workers continue to strike in Tamil Nadu, India, while in France educators are joining “Red Pen” protests in support of the ongoing Yellow Vests protests.

Teachers in Virginia were keenly aware that their struggle and demonstration was an expression of this ongoing class movement of workers, which began in earnest in 2018 with the mass walkouts of West Virginia teachers in the state directly next to them. “Get capitalism out of public education!” said one teacher to the World Socialist Web Site Teacher Newsletter. WSWS supporters distributed a statement calling on teachers to form rank-and-file school and workplace committees to take the struggle for public education out of the hands of the corporatist trade unions.


Langa
Langa, a teacher from Chesapeake, said he heard about the strike of 70,000 maquiladora workers in Matamoros, Mexico, from reading the WSWS. “I support Matamoros and what they are doing,” he said. “We are entering a new Gilded Age and it is not only coming to the United States but Mexico, too. These workers have to fight.”

Ana, a teacher from the southern Virginia city of Danville, said her main concern was “the quality of education for students. I want smaller class sizes and the district to be rid of SOLs (standardized testing),” which she explained “serve as a business model for the state to control funding stipulations and phase out teachers.” Janette also explained that the stress of teaching led to co-workers quitting, which “hurts kids too, children need stability.”

Sandra, a college freshman and West Virginia resident who came to support Virginia teachers, told the WSWS she wished “more teachers were able to protest freely, the solution lies here.”

Striking educators in West Virginia, who initiated the strike in opposition to the unions, were sent back to work by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA) and their state affiliates without achieving any of their key demands for school funding and health benefits. “Teachers shouldn’t have stopped and settled for less,” Sandra said.

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam is a Democrat and the party has controlled the governorship in the state for 12 of the last 16 years. Since the 2008 financial recession, successive Virginia state governments have cut over $1 billion from public schools. Over 1,000 such positions stood vacant statewide in the 2016–2017 school year. Despite the state of Virginia having the 12th largest state economy in the country, teachers are paid $8,000 less than the average national teacher’s salary, or 79 percent of the average private sector worker’s pay.


The march was called by Virginia Educators United, which is closely aligned with the Virginia Education Association and its parent union, the National Education Association. Fresh from overseeing the sellout of the Los Angeles teachers—forced to vote on a deal before getting enough time to read it—AFT President Randi Weingarten and NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia were both on hand. They have spent much of the last year trying to prevent teacher walkouts from occurring simultaneously and coalescing into a broader national strike.

At the rally on the state capitol’s lawn, union officials made patronizing statements about the bravery of teachers while seeking to politically bind them to Governor Northam and other state Democrats. “We’ve got a friend in the governor’s mansion,” claimed Virginia Education Association President Jim Livingstone. He repeated the absurd slogan, “remember in November,” used by union officials to short-circuit the struggles of striking West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona teachers in 2018 during the midterm season.


NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia (center) and AFT President Randi Weingarten (next right) in Richmond
Northam, prior to serving as Virginia governor, was lieutenant governor in the Democratic administration of Terry McAuliffe, responsible for successive budget cuts for both K-12 and higher education during his four years in office.

Livingstone and other speakers extolled the Republican-dominated state legislature’s decision, announced during the march, which would provide for a minuscule 5 percent pay raise for Virginia educators. Such a gesture, which the conservative Richmond Times-Dispatch noted would represent “the largest single-year raise for teachers in about 15 years,” would hardly scrape the surface in addressing teachers’ declining real income and the crisis in Virginia’s public education system, bled dry after years of budget cuts.

The real priorities of Northam and other state politicians were on display in a Sunday article published in the British Guardian. Titled “Virginia students learn in trailers while state offers Amazon huge tax breaks,” the publication notes that Northam’s proposed 5 percent pay increase for state educators, totaling $269 million, is dwarfed in comparison to the $750 million in tax breaks offered the web commerce giant for positioning its second headquarters in northern Virginia.

Teachers who spoke to the WSWS also noted the favorable political treatment given to the defense industry and other corporate giants in the state. Janette told the WSWS Virginia “is one of the leading states in the country for the school-to-prison pipeline. The money they put towards putting kids in jail here is ridiculous compared to the money they give to public education.”

Tia, a volunteer teacher’s aide, told reporters that politicians like Northam “use education as a platform to get elected but once they get into office, they always fall short. They don’t listen to their constituents, money goes into the private industry.”

The CIA’s Whistleblower
In recent weeks, there has been a renewed public interest in the figure of the whistleblower. Following a formal complaint by a CIA agent about Trump’s phone conversation with the president of Ukraine, members of both Congress and the Senate moved quickly to act upon it. According to the complaint, Trump asked Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden in exchange for U.S. military aid. House Democrats, led by Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry shortly after the news leaked. Pelosi’s announcement comes after months of House Democrats calling for impeachment hearings. This inquiry has come not as a result of Trump’s abysmal record as President—including his Muslim ban, the concentration camps on the Southern border, or his profiteering off his office—but after the direct threat to the frontrunner in the Democratic primaries.

The whistleblower, meanwhile, has been lauded for utilizing “proper” channels to lodge their complaint. This agent has enjoyed unwavering support from Democrats and protections under the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998. In a statement released on September 26, the House Intelligence Committee said that “Congress must do all it can to protect this whistleblower, and all whistleblowers.” Yet, Democratic Party operatives and the broader liberal establishment were up in arms when Wikileaks published documents that showed the party undemocratically conspiring against Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. Both the Republican and Democratic parties use whistleblowers and leaked documents for their own purposes when it suits them, while denouncing those who make public their own party’s pernicious deeds.

The hypocrisy of the Democratic Party establishment, while jarring, is singularly geared towards preserving American imperialism. Today, a whistleblower is being celebrated because the future of the Democratic Party and the political system is at stake. There is a concentrated effort to make this complaint accessible to all while protecting the agent’s identity.

Contrast this to Chelsea Manning’s most recent arrest and jail term for refusing to testify in the case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was the subject of an international manhunt and was finally arrested this April in London outside the Ecuadorian Embassy after a seven year stand-off. Snowden, too, was instructed multiple times by his supervisors to drop his complaints before he finally went public. It seems naive to assume that whistleblowers who expose the crimes of bourgeois governments will be met with anything but persecution.

Whistleblowers play a crucial role not only in reporting about bad actors within businesses and governments, but also, and more importantly, in exposing how our systems are designed to function in certain ways. They provide us with facts that help us piece together a singular picture of violence, manipulation, and exploitation designed by those in power to maintain hegemonic control. By exposing some of the worst crimes perpetrated by governments, armies, and wealthy interests, whistleblowers can help ever-greater sectors of society reject the status quo and embrace radical alternatives.

During the Vietnam war, whistleblowers and investigative journalists exposed atrocities like the My Lai massacre carried out against civilians in 1968, helping turn public opinion against U.S. involvement. Similarly, whistleblowers and journalists laid bare the gruesome reality of the U.S. military occupation of Iraq when they documented the horrors committed at the Abu Ghraib prison. Showing the crimes of the world’s great powers is heroic work that deserves our unwavering support.

Indeed, one of the first great whistleblowers of the 20th century was none other than the Bolshevik Party which, shortly after coming to power in the October Revolution of 1917, published the then-secret Sykes-Picot agreement—a treaty between Britain and France dividing up the Middle East. With that great act of whistleblowing, the aims of the great powers were exposed for what there were: further colonialism, power grabs, and deception. Working people today, like in 1917, have an interest in exposing the true policy objectives and crimes of governments everywhere.

While the Democratic Party has put its weight behind the anonymous CIA whistleblower today, we should remember that this is the same party that, with bipartisan support, seeked punitive action against much more important whistleblowers. The Espionage Act was passed in 1917 to suppress mass opposition to U.S. entry into World War One. More than 100 years later, it continues to restrict freedom of information and press. In a true democracy, there are no state secrets, much less the inclination to prosecute those who share information regarding actions done in the name of the people.

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