by Mona Shaw
"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."
-Emma Goldman
I was a junior in high school when our gym teacher decided to teach us how to play golf. She had acquired an afternoon pass at the local country club where we took turns using a bag of borrowed clubs. Learning to play golf is not only learning the rules or developing the skills to play the game, it requires significant knowledge about the equipment (putters, drivers, woods and irons, etc.) as well the courses where it is played. One can feel quite clever learning and retaining this information then impressing others with all one knows about the game.
It’s a lot like electoral politics. It’s a good game in theory, and offers a fair amount of intellectual gratification to know a lot about it; but at the end of the day, if you don’t have the money for the clubs and the green fees, you don’t get to play.
In the spring of 2008, I immersed myself in a social justice experiment that allowed me to analyze the value of electoral politics in creating positive change. I'd pretty much lost confidence in the process. It wasn't that I found no hope for change within electoral politics. It was that I believed there to be less hope for change to be found at a ballot box than, say, investing the same effort into collecting troll dolls or wishing on a star.
Truth and democracy in Johnson County, Iowa, are like they are any place else. You cannot have a functional democracy without the truth. Unfortunately, in electoral politics Truth is always the first player kicked off the team. The fact that candidates lie, are groomed to lie, and are rejected if they're not willing to lie, spin, hedge, obfuscate, or otherwise deny the truth is so accepted that we now choose candidates based as much on the hope they are lying as on the hope they are not. If I had a dollar for each time I've heard someone defend a candidate's questionable position by saying "Well she/he has to say that to get elected," I could probably afford to buy my very own candidate.
And, the problem with elected officials is that they never stop being candidates. Every remark, gesture, and action is carefully calculated according to how well it will translate into campaign contributions and reelection returns at the ballot box. A candidate's "electability" holds far higher currency than a candidate's character.
The day politics became a career is the day even hope for a functional democracy died. On that day serving the people took second place to keeping the job. And when this happened we began to hold political office and office holders in higher esteem than the People. Our heart is where our treasure is. And treasuring the "job" spawned other treasures or "jobs." From pollsters to pundits to campaign managers to lobbyists to corporate CEOs, new treasures took so much from us that there was no heart left for the People.
The toxic waste brewed by reverence for the "job" has seeped into and hijacked the conscience of the culture-at-large. It has poisoned our souls to the degree that we will spill our last cup of decency before we will sacrifice a drop of sycophancy on the job. We have become so morally frail with this sickness that we will allow not only the children of others but our own children to be murdered in a war that we know to be hideously immoral before we will risk our jobs by publicly offending the powers that allow this to happen.
It is frequently suggested (or at least hoped) that an antidote to the corruption in national politics is deeper participation in local politics. In local politics the stakes are not so high, nor as wickedly entrenched. On the local level you're dealing with people you know rather than personally-detached corporate interests, depraved lobbyists, and the other shepherds of career politicians who prize their own jobs most of all.
The connection between local and global politics is an inescapable reality. As Tip O'Neill's father once advised, "all politics is local," (even though this advice was driven by a desire to win the "job"). Even if local politics holds no answers, it is an elementary template that instructs where we go wrong.
I chose to study this template by running for the office of County Auditor in Johnson County, Iowa. I had witnessed first-hand (while an account clerk in the Johnson County Auditor's Office from 2004-06) how the incumbent auditor had brutally and routinely abused his staff, willfully violated their negotiated labor contract and federal laws, and systematically discriminated against women and people of color. The Auditor's abuse and the suffering it caused wasn't the worst case of human suffering in the world or even the County. Then again, choosing the suffering one will address on the basis of it being the "worst" suffering is a snare that can restrain us from addressing any suffering at all. Plus, this was suffering wrought within County government itself, and if the public officials of the County couldn't practice the principles they espoused within their own ranks, how could they be trusted to engender these for citizens-at-large?
While confronting human suffering within the electoral political process seemed functionally inadequate for, if not contrary to, expressing my personalist philosophy, I couldn't knowledgeably state there was no redress for suffering in the process unless I sincerely tried it.
In theory it should have been an easy fix. And, if the incumbent had been a Republican, I wager it would have been. Johnson County is renowned as the most "progressive" county in Iowa by far. Organized labor, civil rights advocacy, and progressive politics reputedly rule the political scene to the degree that detractors and fans alike refer to it as the "People's Republic of Johnson County." People in Johnson County, after all, were up-in-arms when former Congressman Jim Leach insensitively used mock Native American headdresses as campaign paraphernalia, and they put a stop to it.
However, in this case, the incumbent was a Democrat who self-identified as a "liberal progressive." He was a donor to most women's and human rights causes, made appearances at their public functions, served on area human rights committees, and was one of the first public officials to grace the stage at Iowa City's annual Gay Pride Festival. And, ironically, he had even hosted an international meeting on torture.
Even so, in his official role, he fell far short of "walking the walk." Still, it seemed reasonable to assume that all that was required was documentation or "proof" that a public official, regardless of partisanship, had committed outrageous violations of labor laws and human rights principles in order for a public official to be held accountable and then required to change or leave. Initially, I naively believed that once proof was provided that labor leaders, women's, civil rights, peace and justice activists, and “progress-ive” public officials would insist on the same.
I had towers of documentation compiled over a two-year span. My greatest barrier had not been establishing the veracity of this "proof," but finding anyone willing to look at it. I was repeatedly advised by public leaders or justice advocates that before the matter could be considered that all the existing resources for addressing these grievances must first be exhausted. I took this advice and exhausted every available resource at least once and most more than twice.
A factor that worked against my credibility was despite years of abuse and discrimination, not a single employee had filed an employee grievance. If it were true, they would have, right? While several had complained confidentially to Human Resources as well as staff in the County Attorney's office, they were too afraid of retaliation to confront the Auditor formally or directly. Human Resources would tell us that since these employees would not formally and directly complain, the hands of the County Attorney's Office and H.R.'s were tied from doing anything about it.
I not only filed the first employee grievance against the Auditor. I filed eight. It was more than a little dispiriting to witness a "feminist" assistant county attorney (another Democrat who would later be elected County Attorney) help the auditor identify "technicalities" (typos on filing dates, etc.) in order to dismiss two of these grievances to avoid their hearing. I was told this was personally painful for her since she knew he was "guilty as sin," but that she was just "doing her job." Only one grievance was denied, and one was upheld. The others were resolved because the Auditor's violation of the contract was so flagrant that he capitulated to negotiated remedies again to avoid the finding a formal hearing would obviously bring. (A formal grievance requires that the employee stipulate a remedy. If the employer agrees to the remedy, the grievance is considered resolved. And, while I was the first employee to file a grievance in the Auditor's Office, the trail was blazed, and I was not the last.)
After awhile my Union representative would essentially tell me "You've become almost frighteningly good arguing and winning these grievances. You'll no doubt keep winning most of them. But my time is being swallowed up by this, and there is nothing in the grievance process that can make a public official stop violating the law or even our contract. He can keep violating both. You can keep grieving it. But we can't stop him from doing it again. Eventually he'll find some way to fire you that will stick, and you'll be stopped anyway. My best advice to you is to let this go and find another job." Legal violations by public officials, I was told, are a matter for the State Attorney General to address not the Union or the County.
So, I faxed an outline of my documentation to the State Attorney General (a Democrat) and asked to meet with a member of his staff. My fax was likely still in the printer when I received an email from the Attorney General, himself, declining to meet with me and stating that my concerns belonged in the jurisdiction of federal agencies or with the Iowa City Human Rights Commission. My reply email asking if I could meet just once with someone from his office was ignored. A former deputy in the Auditor's office would tell me later that as soon as my fax had appeared, the Attorney General's Office phoned the Auditor and reassured him nothing would be done with my complaint.
I took the Attorney General's advice and filed a complaint with the Iowa City Human Rights Commission. Without explanation (or even telling me), the Iowa City office, rather than review it themselves, forwarded the 34-page complaint along with several hundred pages of grievance settlements and other documentation to the State Human Rights Commission in Des Moines. Without a single follow-up question or any manner of meeting or conversation with the Commission, after several months and after failing to meet its own required deadline, I received notification that the Commission was "administratively closing" the complaint without an investigation because the information provided was insufficient to proceed. The notice was clear that the Commission was NOT stating that discrimination and retaliation had NOT occurred, but only that they were choosing not to investigate it. No response was given to my concern of a possible conflict of interest in the Des Moines office given that the chair of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission is one of the Johnson County Auditor's closest friends. Even though I had proven that this same friend at the onset of my first employee grievance had, at the Auditor's bidding and with ethical violations of his own, solicited others to bully me into dropping it. The Commission, however, did give me about the only thing it ever gives women who claim discrimination that right to sue on my own.
I had retained an attorney with borrowed money and was ready to proceed until I realized two things.
First, it's simply wrong when Civil Rights protections only work (as is usually the case) if the victim has the personal cash to enforce them.
Second, I didn’t want money. I wanted justice. I wanted the abuse to stop. And there was way through the court system that this could be made to happen. Holding an elected official accountable for violating the law is not a winnable option. Even if I persevered through the two or so years it would likely take to bring my case to court, and even if judge and jury agreed I'd proven my case, the most I could win were the actual damages the discrimination had cost me. Moreover, if the County chose to "settle" by offering a cash payout close to these damages without admitting guilt, I could be forced to accept the settlement. I didn't want money. I wanted justice. I wanted to end discrimination against women and employee abuse in the Auditor's Office. And, there was nothing provided in the Federal Civil Rights Act, the Code of Iowa or any of our courts that could keep a public official from doing it again. And again.
I hauled my full basket of "exhausted resources" back to those I'd first approached. "Well, of course," they said rolling their eyes as if this information were as common as prayer on Election Day, "the only way to hold a public official accountable for labor or civil rights violations is to get them voted out of office." And, so, when no one else would do so, I filed to run against the Auditor.
Support I'd received up to that point was wildly enthusiastic compared to the support I received in the Campaign and led to a rehash of partisan centralism that was itchingly petty and mostly too dull and repetitive to report. The first response came after I announced my candidacy on a Johnson County Democrats for America email list I'd belonged to for years. This list was created to support candidates who championed progressive causes outside the comfort level of the Democratic Party mainstream. The moderator (a former candidate for chair of the Johnson County Democratic Party) responded to my announcement by kicking me off the list because he considered accusing the Auditor of sex discrimination to be a personal attack.
"Just because something is true doesn’t mean you have to say it," he wrote.
Not once did anyone tell me in public or in private that they didn't believe the accusations I'd made. Not once. Direct responses to my candidacy were actually scarce and basically fell into four groups.
● Those who supported me publicly. All six of them.
● Those who would vote for me privately, but not say so publicly. "I'm voting for you, and I admire you, but I can't afford to risk my job, career promotion, tenure promotion, donor base, client base, re-election campaign, merchandising campaign, political career, professional career, academic grade, University Athletic Club status, dating pool, etc., etc., by being publicly associated with you.
● Those who believed the Auditor was guilty but refused to vote for or endorse me because they disapproved of what I'd done or not done about it.
● Those who believed the Auditor was guilty but felt partisan loyalty required supporting him anyway.
All but the first group were lying, if not to me then to someone else. The same way rust is the glue that holds an old jalopy together, lying is the mortar between the decaying bricks of electoral politics. Without lies, the whole machine falls apart.
So, when an Iowa state senator told an employee in the Auditor's Office, "Don't worry, we're making sure you won't lose Tom." The employee wasn't sure if the senator was really that oblivious about their working conditions or shooting a veiled threat toward anyone else who might think to complain about it. In either event, they knew compassion for them was not the senator's priority.
Democratic Party leadership was as irritated as an infected mosquito bite at a flea family reunion to be forced to determine: how to discredit someone who'd exposed one of their own and simultaneously not risk appearing to condone the malpractice I'd exposed. As one labor leader put it, "Mona couldn't care less if this damages the Party's image or threatens the fragile complexities of political relationships that it's taken us years to cultivate."
The first tact was to simply ignore or attempt to quash these allegations from public view.
The local press, paranoid about unlikely law suits, wouldn't even print the allegations in quotes. Party-loyal forum moderators limited the questions to issues that didn't consider them. They did not hide their disapproval when I squeezed as many as I could into 30-second intervals anyway.
The second tact was whispering wrinkled-nose insults that were as amusing as hurtful and that came back to me quickly.
"She's not a team player." (How would they know? We've never played on the same team.)
"If the choice is between a communist and a drunk (alluding to the Auditor's DUIs and driving employees while drunk), you pick the drunk." (It's not just that I'm not a Communist but, given the notorious Vodka consumption by leaders of the former Soviet Union, can such a distinction even be made?)
"If she's elected, she'll use that office to end the war in Iraq." (Well, only if that’s possible.)
The most peculiar criticism was that I'd disqualified myself by being too personal. A party official attempted to explain this to me by pointing out that I couldn't be objective because I had been personally victimized by the Auditor. When I asked him if he might then publicly take up the matter, he explained, although he believed it to be true, he wasn't qualified because he had not personally witnessed the abuse himself. When I asked him who then was qualified to take the problem to the public he said, "That's a good question."
I might have taken the critique of being too personal as a compliment, had I been able to increase any palpable effect of personalism within party ranks. I'd documented that the lives of at least eight women and an African American man had their lives thrown into upheaval from fleeing the Auditor's mistreatment and discrimination, and one woman had even won workman's compensation based on her claim that her health had been damaged to the point she couldn't work because of the Auditor's abuse. Despite the fact that I knew these cases to be the tip of the iceberg, not one single person in a position to do something about the abuses ever came to me expressing personal interest, let alone compassion, for these workers.
Not a single feminist, peace and justice, or labor group or leader came forward to stand up for these workers. In fact, holding more regard for loyalty to power than confronting the abuse of power, a number even publicly endorsed the Auditor. At least two of these leaders privately acknowledged they knew he was guilty. (The fact that I was the only candidate on the Johnson County Democratic Primary 2006 ballot who was not a white, heterosexual man, by itself, tells a story.)
In any event—to them all—the fact that I had publicly said that the Auditor had done these things was more interesting, controversial and disturbing than the possibility, let alone the fact, that the Auditor had done them.
It's a wrenching thing to discover that the worker and human rights protections we've worked so hard to win are worthless to those who need them most. It's sobering to realize that all I've accomplished after a lifetime of human rights advocacy is that I've helped a handful of already over-privileged people get better jobs.
By the time Election Day arrived, I would have been stunned to win fifty votes. Not only shunned by the party in power, I'd run a provocatively unconventional campaign. I'd taken no campaign contributions, printed no buttons or yards signs, mailed no campaign leaflets, held no fund-raisers, ran no newspaper or radio ads, nor reeled in one "big name" endorsement. I put up a web-site and sent out a broadcast email to about 700 people pointing them to it, attended two public candidate forums, and simply told the truth.
I also refused to tout my "professional" accomplishments because it's supposed to be true that any common citizen with obvious intelligence, talent, and conviction should be as eligible to serve in public office as those with credentials only available to the economically privileged. In this context, I surfaced as the only candidate who took my candidacy seriously. The rest were in it for the stunt of proving their electability and scoring the job.
It is necessary to reveal, and for honest justice seekers to realize, that, even on the local level, electoral politics does not make good use of our time. It isn't that you can't help people unless you win. It's that you can't help people if you do. The beast is all belly and devours all heart. Wherever there is heart for healing human suffering lies, however harsh or not harsh that suffering may be, heart is not there. We need to stop looking there. We cannot make change in a temple controlled by the money-lenders and other masters of evil.
Even though I lost the election, I received far more than fifty votes. I received 31% of them. I collected nearly the percentage received by Ed Fallon (a self-identified "progressive" U.S. congressional candidate for Iowa's third district) who went into debt for his race, and as much as a previous candidate who'd challenged the Auditor; both had run full-blown campaigns with "power-house" endorsements and had played by party rules. I received 60% of the vote in some low-income precincts. Not surprisingly, I lost by the highest margins in precincts where mostly affluent, "liberal" Democrats reside.
Hope for humanity lies with that 31 percent, those who see through the lies and are ready to act to end suffering if someone just shows a way. When we treasure them, rather than the electoral political machine where moths corrupt and thieves steal, we treasure justice.
The call for justice isn't for those who have to be talked into it but for those who can't be talked out of it. Change isn’t wrought by holding a high-minded opinion or spending five minutes in a voting booth. Change is measured by the amount of personal sacrifice and human equity we’re willing to put on the line.
Evil isn’t wrought by systems, including electoral politics; it’s wrought by people who have constructed systems to make it easier to commit evil.
Change will not come from coddling or compromising with the masters of war, torture, suffering, and evil. It will come as we, more and more, take the evidence of the suffering they are causing to their doorstep, call them to repentance, and then refuse to leave until their hearts are touched enough that they emerge from their temples and join us in making that change.
This grievance was filed by three employees against a supervisor who was following Auditor Slockett's specific directives.
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