Bacon's Rebellion

Earlier, I forecast a dire future for Hampton Roads. Now it’s time to issue a jeremiad about Richmond. The recession is battering the economy severely. When the wind and rain dies down, the corporate landscape will look very different than it does today.

LandAmerica, a Fortune 500 company that provides real estate-related financial services, is being acquired by a rival. Some observers expect the entire headquarters operation to pack up and leave for Jacksonville.

Electronics retailer Circuit City is on its death bed, shedding thousands of employees nationally and hundreds in the corporate headquarters. Bankruptcy appears all but inevitable.

Packaging company Chesapeake Corp., last time I checked, was on the verge of defaulting on its debt. The stock is trading for less than $1 per share.

Menswear retailer S&K Famous Brands is struggling to survive, with its stock trading barely above $1 per share. The most valuable asset it possesses may be the land where the company located its corporate headquarters years ago, at the junction of Interstate 64 and Broad Street.

CarMax and Media General are hurting big time, although their survival does not seem to be in question…. for the moment.

Pittston just spun off a major subsidiary; the headquarters will be located in Texas. Earlier this year, specialty chemical manufacturer Albemarle Corp. relocated its corporate headquarters to Baton Rouge. A year ago, Wachovia Securities decamped for St. Louis.

Change is inevitable. Along with capitalism comes creative destruction. The old makes way for the new. But where is the new? Where are Richmond’s up-and-coming growth companies — the “gazelles” that create most of the economy’s jobs and economic growth? I can’t think of many. The roster of businesses in the “Companies to Watch” shows that there are signs of entrepreneurial life, but Richmond scores low in national rankings of fast-growth companies like the Inc. 500.

Our community has done a poor job of cultivating the growth of home-grown, fast-growth companies. The Virginia Bioechnology Research Park may have reached a level of maturity that it can begin contributing to the regional economy in a significant way, and Virginia Commonwealth University has potential, but the overall outlook is grim.

It’s 8:07 a.m. and I’m already reaching for the bottle of bourbon.

Congratulations to President-elect Barack Hussein Obama for his symbolic victory. However ill gotten the gains, a black man was elected President of the United States of America. There is no racial barrier to the most powerful position in the world. That’s good news for anyone who imagined there was such a barrier in 2008.

It may be catharsis for some Americans who suffer from white guilt. But, it won’t satisfy Liberals who see the world in their trinity of race, class and gender(s) identity politics. It won’t be enough for the Liberal human secularists who seek socialism, multi-culturalism, national subservience to the U.N. and rule by elites – elected and appointed.

This election was the second spanking of the Republican Party in two years. Establishment Republicans lost. Republican Conservatives have an opportunity to save the United States of America from socialism and liberalism – by leading the Republican Party from 2010 on.

Establishment Republicans governed without courage of convictions and with remarkable incompetence. They lost accordingly. Yet, the conflict of ideas remains.

Where the Conservative ideas were manifested, they were victorious. Traditional, Judeo-Christian – a.k.a. American – marriage of one man and one woman won – even in California. Even Obama emphasized the tax cuts promised to 95% of the people, not the class warfare tax hike. But, it’s only a few election cycles until identity politics can triumph and create the irreversible slide to destroy our American Republic.

Currently, the Nation is 40% Liberal and 40% Conservative (Virginia used to be 35:45 but that is changing fast). The 20% in the middle vote the bread and butter or war and peace issues of the day. That break down by ideas translates into different and rapidly changing demographics. When Whites become an absolute minority by 2042, if the politics of identity keep their currency, the combination of former minorities will always win. Even though a majority of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Africans hold Conservative ideas. Ideas lose to identity and character to color and language if the Democrats win many more elections.

If the Democrats pass an amnesty bill to give the right to vote to 20 million illegal aliens – and more that follow – then the fundamental shift in America happens much sooner. It could happen as soon as 2012 in the key swing states – Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, Georgia, Missouri, Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. There will be no return – unless there is some watershed event of war – international, civil or cultural – faith or economic collapse to bring a unity of ideas held by individuals over group identity. Our American Republic will go the way of all former Republics to end in ruins.

So, the time is now for Republican Conservatives and Libertarians to use the Republican Party to lead all Americans a better future. Now. America has a Munificent Destiny – if we choose to create it. We have a purpose that will carry us through another century of freedom, opportunity, prosperity and as much peace as possible. The rule of law, individual rights and responsibilities, economic freedom and choices, charity and investment at home and abroad – from the human heart of families and communities can triumph.

Conservative ideas of freedom, family, faith, energy and economics are superior to the politics of race, class and gender(s) – and all as subjects to international socialism. But, we have a short window to protect, preserve and forward America as an ascending idea. If future American Presidents are Conservative – without any regard to race or ethnicity – America wins. In 2000 I voted in the primary for a much better qualified Black candidate for President – Alan Keyes. I look forward to voting for the better man and best ideas again.

This weekend national Conservative leaders will meet in Virginia to chart a course forward. I, too, will meet in Virginia with people – peasants not pachyderms – to try to chart a course for Virginia. We will see what ‘The Virginia Way’ can do in the elections of 2010 for federal office and across our Commonwealth in 2011.

Del. David Poisson, D-Loudoun, has introduced legislation that would establish a joint subcommittee “to study the desirability and feasibility of replacing the state motor fuel tax with a mileage-based fee predicated on vehicle-miles traveled in Virginia.”

Needless to say, I am excited to hear this news, as I have been advocating a mileage-based tax for a few years now. For the benefit of newbies to this blog, the arguments for such a tax can be recapitulated as follows:

Fellow bloggers,
Call me crazy, but according to Page 16 in this morning’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, John McCain beat Barack Obama 54,013 to 14,548. Jim Gimore got 54,013 to Mark Warner’s 14,548.

Now how can that be? I thought Richmond would go blue. And each set of Republican victors got exactly the same votes — ditto Democrat losers.

Earth to Tom Silvestri. What happened to your copy desk? Need any help? Could this be even more evidence that the Times-Dispatch is truly going downhill under your management?

Peter Galuszka

My 24-year-old daughter, Sara Bacon, went to the polls in Richmond yesterday to vote. She’d never had much interest in politics before, but she’d made the effort this year to research both of the presidential candidates and make a choice. But when she arrived at the polling station, she was informed that there was no record of her registration. She was not allowed to cast her ballot.

Sara drove downtown to City Hall and talked to someone in the registrar’s office. Here’s her reconstruction of what happened. After graduating from college, Sara had moved out to Wyoming. Because she had no intention of relocating there permanently and thought that she could move back home at any time, she maintained her official residence in Richmond. She kept a Virginia driver’s license, paid Virginia taxes and registered to vote in Richmond.

At some point during her two-year stay in Wyoming, the city sent her a notice to serve on a jury. Sara sent back the form stating that she was living outside the state and unable to comply. Then, without notifying her, the city purged her name from the voting rolls. Sara returned to Richmond in August, staying in her mother’s house where she had grown up and having no basis whatsoever to suspect that she was no longer registered to vote.

Now, the United States is a mobile society, lots of people move, and municipal governments do need to purge their voter rolls. I have no problem with that. I don’t even have a problem with the city’s decision to purge Sara based on her inability to report for jury duty. But I have a very big problem with the fact that the city never informed her that she was no longer registered. If she had known, she could have re-registered when she moved back to Richmond in August. But there was nothing that anyone could do on voting day to fix the problem.

I hear a lot of loose talk on television and in the newspapers about “voter suppression,” usually with the implication that evil forces are trying to reduce the turnout of minority voters. My hunch is that bureaucratic inertia is responsible for supressing far more votes than the machinations of one political party or the other.

The city of Richmond elected a new mayor yesterday — Dwight Jones. He comes across as a reasonable man. Let us hope that he enacts a very simple reform: ensure that voters are informed in writing when they’ve been purged from the voting rolls. Otherwise, taxpaying citizens can add one more reason to move to suburban counties: ensuring themselves the right to vote.

Tuesday night’s triumph for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party is truly a turning point for the nation and the Old Dominion, even though saying so sounds as trite as a newspaper headline.

For Virginia, it was the first time that the state voted for a Democratic president since 1964 and, in doing so; it has expunged a truly ugly chapter in the state’s history.

True, Virginia did elect the first African-American governor in 1989, but in election after election for 44 years, Virginia voters stuck with Republican Party strategies that all too often were based on wedge issues involving racism and reaction.

The trend kicked after 1964 when Virginia last voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. Since then, voting seemed a knee-jerk move against racial integration of society and schools. According to Bob Moser, author of “Blue Dixie:” “It’s true that Democrats were bound to take a hit in the South after LBJ signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964 and 1965, which ended all forms of legal segregation and doomed various schemes – literacy tests, violent intimidation – that had suppressed black registration ands turnout.”

Unfortunately, Virginia then bought into every retrograde political agenda the GOP could come up with. There was Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” which was based on building up a sense of white, working class despair over the tumultuous social and racial upheavals of the 1960s. This was the first organized attempt by Republicans to create a “Silent Majority” that was the real keeper of the American faith, sort of like Sarah Palin telling residents in a small North Carolina town that they were the “true Americans.”

And on we went. When Jimmy Carter carried the South in 1976, Virginia didn’t go with him. The Old Dominion bought into the Reagan revolution hook, line and sinker. Even though Reagan, who had some good ideas, ended up being the tremendous government spender he supposedly despised. Reagan was a riddle of contradictions – a Hollywood actor, divorcee and non-church-goer, who, as Moser points out, cast himself as an authentic, family-oriented and religious guy.

Virginia’s Republican politicians have tried to ride the Reagan wave as far as they could up the beach. Well into the 1990s, we had cowboy-booted George “Aw Shucks” Allen coming after welfare queens and building prisons and having his insulting macacca moment. Former Governor Jim Gilmore made a fetish out of his destructive car tax while making hash of the state’s budget.

With Democrat Mark Warner, the state got a big signal of its momentous demographic shift. Here was an out-of-stater living in Northern Virginia, whose economic boom was drawing in thousands of new people with new ideas, making it big in the free-market that GOPers claimed to so love. No big surprise, but Warner easily crushed Gilmore’s pointless run for senator, giving the state two Democratic senators for the first time in years.

Obama’s story is an almost magical one. He’s a half-white, half-black man who has just won in a state that as recently as 1967, back when I was in high school, made it illegal for different races to marry. Boasting of strong oratory skills and superb campaign organization, he took on old Democratic icons such as the Clintons, beat them and then won in Virginia.

True, it wasn’t a crushing defeat. Obama didn’t take much of the rural state or stubborn conservative strongholds such as my home county of Chesterfield. But big, populous counties that used to vote strictly Republican, such as Henrico, Loudoun and Prince William, went Democratic. More predictably Democratic cities such as Norfolk and Richmond did, too.

Once again, here’s evidence of the demographic shifts that have changed the face of Virginia. And it shows just how badly the Republicans have stumbled after eight disastrous years of George Bush and, after 44 years, just how they are exhausted they are of ideas.

Voters are saying that simply running against abortion, for guns and against immigrants won’t cut it any more. Serving up an under qualified “You Betcha” candidate whose only real asset is her gender won’t cut it, either. The economy is a mess and the financial markets face their worst crisis since the 1930s. We’re still stuck in two messy wars. Luckily, we have a new president whose message is hope and inclusion, not wedge issues. And voters are not stupid.

Peter Galuszka

Fool that I am, I thought I’d beat the crowd to the polls this morning. I showed up at the Tuckahoe precinct voting station in Henrico County around 6 a.m. only to be greeted by a long line snaking out of the building and into the parking lot. I guess a few other people were thinking the same way. Fortunately, the voting proceeded fairly quickly, thanks to the addition of extra voting machines and voting officials. I was out of there 50 minutes later.

Autumn in Chesterfield County has finally taken on its dusky, orange and yellow beauty, just in time for tomorrow’s election which promises to be historic.

Early in the morning, I’ll go down to the rural Methodist Church, slide past the aggressive campaign workers, show my driver’s license and do my duty.

Here in largely white and Republican Chesterfield County, lawns are dotted with blue and white McCain-Palin signs. They far outnumber Obama-Biden ones but there are a few here and there.

There’s also a bit of tension in the air as the McCain supporters sense defeat. Virginia could very well go blue for the first time in decades. GOP conservativism here has morphed into a sense of entitlement in Chesterfield where rich neighbrohoods slip into the old, rural county. To have a nice house and an SUV seems to be a badge of membership in the GOP.

Yet, one can’t shake the nastiness. A few examples:

Not very far from me is the home of a retired African-American minister who is an Obama supporter. His large Obama sign in his yard was ripped down and a Confederate flag was placed in its spot. The police are investigating.

At the corner of a winding road that I travel to take my daughter to her school bus stop, a homeowner has placed a large McCain-Palin sign right on the edge of his property. It tends to block the view at the intersection where you stop at the stopsign. You have to pull your car out a bit to see past the sign. On at least one occasion, someone has taken a razor to the sign, but it keeps coming back.

Sunday afternoon I went to my gym. I was going to do the aerobics machines, then some weights and then a few laps in the pool. Some treadmills have little televisions over them — maybe seven in all. That day, there were two other middle aged men on machine. Fox News was on two monitors — ESPN was on the other.

I picked a treadmill near a screen with Fox. I dislike Fox News since I find its “fair and balanced” coverage anything but. I tried to switch it, but couldn’t. So I shut it off. After I did so, the other two middle aged guys started screaming at me, even though Fox was still beaming from another monitor.

I wondered: is it illegal to turn off Fox News in Chesterfield County? I understand from gym staffers that the TV conflict is especially bad in the early morning when runners one-up each other between Fox and MSNBC.

On Friday, I attended a luncheon at the World Affairs Council in downtown Richmond. The speaker weas the ambassador from France and at my table sat a woman who had recently arrived and was teaching international relations at Virginia Commonwealth Unuiversity. Her family had come from Spain but she had spent a good bit of time at Baton Rouge at Louisiana State University.

I asked her how she liked Richmond. Mixed, she said. When she arrived three years ago from Baton Rouge, she tried to register to vote. Each time ended with a frustrating failure. Finally she went to the main voting registration place. She was told that “We don’t want any illegal imnmigrants.” She told me: “I was outraged, I was born in the states.”

Odd. Here’s a woman, a U.S.-born citizen, with three graduate degrees. She’s obviously intelligent. And she has to endure racist discrimination for no reason. At least immigrant-bashing seems to have died down in the campaign.

But the season is still beautiful. And, tomorrow, I think there’s going to be a big change for the better.

Peter Galuszka

In my new capacity as SVP-publishing at The Boomer Project, one of my jobs is to scan the horizon for emergent trends relating to the sociology and psychology of Baby Boomers and other generations (Silent Generation, GenX and GenY) and blog about them on the Boomer Consumer blog. Those insights, and those culled by Boomer Project principals Matt Thornhill and John Martin from their years of study on the subject, are distilled into columns that run biweekly in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.