Snapshot from Florida
Andrew Haughton writes: Re. “Rundle: in era of crap, Zimmerman case lurks in swamp of racism” (Thursday). Guy Rundle got pretty close to giving Crikey readers an understanding of life in Florida.
I’ve been there a few times. In 1983 I was in Starke, Florida, which was a small place of around 2000 people then. The local industry is the prison. I was involved in a story about a white man man on death row called Bob Sullivan. He had been convicted some years before of murder and had just about run out of appeals. In the Florida legal system if you take your time you can appeal for decades, but if you keep appealing then in time you run out. We talked to Sullivan in late June that year.
We stayed at the Starke Motor Inn and ate in the local diner, where the specialty was deep-fried gator and cooter, that is alligator tail and turtle. It’s about as good as it sounds. The local band was doing a fair cover of Men at Work.
The superintendent of the prison gave us every access to Sullivan, to the prison and to the execution chamber. The electric chair was a basic strong wooden chair with all the required attachments. We declined the invitation to sit in it. We asked about who carried out the execution and were told that the state advertised for volunteers. The going rate for the job in 1983 was $115 US dollars. It wasn’t a difficult job. Just throw a switch, wait for a prescribed time and throw it again.
On November 30 that year a volunteer threw the switch on Bob Sullivan and collected his $115. You may find this story unsettling. A lot of people in Florida would just say, “so?”
Oh, and in 1999 apparently they installed a new chair.
No thank you to NSD
Peter Wildblood writes: Re. “Tips and rumours” (Friday). Why would Crikey be sorry that Natasha Stott Despoja is not standing for the Australian Democrats? This former Australian Democrat understands that it was she who undermined Meg Lees’ leadership and then artificially engineered a spill of the leadership. She did everything to destroy the Democrats by her unrivalled combination of unwillingness to follow party policy in the interests of making an “interesting” doorstop for the media and a personal behind-the-scenes leadership style that would put Rudd 2007-10 in the shade.
I do wish the Democrats well in their resurrection, however. They will need all the luck they can get.
An Australian welcome
Mary Sinclair writes: Re. “The Rudd Solution: all maritime arrivals to be resettled in PNG” (Friday). From my daughter:
Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore/Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me/And I will never give them visas/And I’ll resettle them in PNG.
Just a few corrections on Peter Wildblood’s flight of fantasy over NSD and the Democrats.
Democrat party policy, enshrined in its constitution, was opposition to indirect taxation which is regressive. The GST was an indirect tax imposed to make the entire community pay for a cut in the corporate tax rate from 36% to 30%. That is, a regressive tax. The support for breaching policy and pass the GST legislation came from four senators led by Meg Lees. The leadership spill, strictly following rules, was called not by NSD but by a petition of members not including her. Meg Lees was rejected in favour of NSD by an overwhelming majority in a ballot of the entire membership nationwide. (Would be nice to see the ALP poll its entire membership for parliamentary leader).
The betrayal by four senators of their party and of the Australian people was the party’s death knell, to be matched at the next UK election by the LibDems.
Why did the democratic constitution fail to curb the rebel senators? Because of its flaws (similar pattern to the Soviet Communist Party) (1) indirect democracy (called “democratic centralism” in the USSR)- rule by committees with committee membership solidarity replacing the voice of the party membership (ii) critical role of unelected, appointed officials (iii) muzzling of inter-member communication across Australia with a censored National Journal being the only means in the absence of email which was then in its infancy.
How do I know? I was an elected WA rep on the National Committee at the time. Where does Peter Wildblood get his story? Dunno – never heard of the guy.