In the wake of an election that finds the Democratic Party with only 3 state governors and state legislatures, as well as a minority in both the House and Senate, something must have gone wrong. Do…
Month: November 2016
Our American History
November is Native American History Month. Last month was Hispanic History Month. Black History month falls in February. The network TV stations all run history tidbits about each group, usually fo…
Source: Our American History
Our American History
November is Native American History Month. Last month was Hispanic History Month. Black History month falls in February. The network TV stations all run history tidbits about each group, usually focused on athletes and celebrities. We’re familiar by now with historical Black figures: Martin Luther King, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, etc. Why do we need separate history months for minority groups? Simply because these groups have been left out of the nation’s history, particularly as taught in our schools.
American history should have a narrative arc that integrates all our citizens. Our history has been imagined and reimagined through the decades, altered by the current level of historical research and the historical perspectives of academicians, all products of their social milieu. The fabric of history is pieced together from various sources and and sewn into a societally approved patchwork. The painful parts of our nation’s past have been whitewashed to exclude slavery, present from the country’s founding until it was officially abolished in 1865, but morphed and supported in the South through the prison labor and sharecropping systems combined with Jim Crow laws and the reign of terror by state and local law enforcement until well into the 1960s. The systematic role of state and local officials, sometimes disguised as the KKK, but more often in full public view was supported by white southern residents and entombed in the courts and judicial system.
So too, the tale of Native American tribes being systematically swindled out of their lands through chicanery, broken treaties and massacred through disease, military campaigns, legally sanctioned murders by ranchers and cowboys has been left, for the most part untold. The true story has been drown in glorification of heroes like Andrew Jackson, General Custer, Davy Crockett and the American Cowboy, all in the name of Manifest Destiny, the doctrinaire support for “the White Man is destined to rule the earth.” The theft of Texas from Spanish Mexico-Remember the Alamo!-has been mythologized to cover the theft of lands from Native Americans and Mexicans.
To the victor goes the spoils, including the right to tell history from the victor’s point of view. The one exception of course is the American Civil War, the bloodiest in our history. They lost and yet the Confederacy was able to accomplish it’s goal exactly, as often stated by various Dixiecrat politicians throughout history. The goal was to continue the region’s agricultural economy with virtual slaves excluded from participation in white society. Even as recently as Supreme Court decisions on the Voting Rights Act in 2016, Dixiecrats, now transformed into staunch Republicans, have continued to deny equal rights under the law to Black Americans.
Confederate progeny have done a fantastic job of recasting their ancestors of heroic fighters for states’ liberty rather than fighting for the survival of slavery, the cornerstone of Southern and, indeed national, prosperity. The fiction that the Civil War was fought for states’ rights defies the text of the articles of Confederation. South Carolina’s complaints were about the threatened abolition slavery and enforcement of runaway slave acts. Nowhere was states’ rights specifically mentioned.
The country is littered with monuments to Confederate heroes. The vast majority of the country’s military bases are named for Confederate generals and devoted racists. Ivy League universities abound with symbols and buildings purchased with funds derived directly and indirectly) from exploitation of African Americans. Yet there is not a single monument to slave heroes who resisted enslavement, even though they too lost their wars. Is it because they killed a few guilty white people in revolt against having their lives brutally destroyed?
None of these things are taught in schools or university general courses. History is better about European immigrants but neglects the racism and bigotry that greeted them. Many don’t like to recall the time when neither the Irish, Scottish, Italian or Polish were considered to be “White”. The sordid tale is worth a whole separate history of bigotry and racism, inclusive of Chinese, Japanese, Mexican and every other non Anglo-Saxon group. But that would be antithetical to my argument here.
We need an American history that includes us all. It may not be pretty, but our history is what it is. The new Civil Rights museum on the Washington mall is a start but it is not enough. South Africa held reconciliation hearings which may have spared its white citizens from total annihilation, given the cruelty of the Afrikaans regime on the overwhelming majority of African and colored citizens. For some reason, Black people the world over seem more forgiving than whites. South Africa has acknowledged its brutal history and tried to move forward in a common effort for the country. Likewise, Australia has tried to come to grips with and apologize for it’s abominable treatment of native aboriginals as has Canada in its relationship with it’s First Citizens.
We need a better understanding as well as exposition of our history, every slice of the pie. The understanding part is easier than the exposition but not without pitfalls. The ascendency of “fact” as a four letter word, succumbing to equation of “belief” as “fact”, will find opposition to history as detailed in original documents as hoax. We are fortunate that many actors were prolific writers and speakers, leaving a trail scattered with their intentions.
Exposition will take a massive and complicated effort, because there are many that don’t want to have their history reframed. These people are opposed to exposing the warts and scars. The very nature of heroes is that they are worshipped, a task made more difficult when one understands that Confederates died in a losing cause, as monstrous as that of Hitler’s Germany. Perhaps they would be reassured if they also understood that their ancestors actually accomplished their goal of subjugating Black people, although that too was monstrous. But acknowledgement would help us all move on. Any historical reframing must come from a neutral window, unladen with “liberal” guilt and hostile accusation. But knowing the past can keep it from reappearing in the future. Given our country’s present divisions, this mission is made more important and simultaneously more difficult than ever.
Where did the democrats go wrong?
In the wake of an election that finds the Democratic Party with only 3 state governors and state legislatures, as well as a minority in both the House and Senate, something must have gone wrong. Does this represent an overwhelming mandate for Trump? Or a mandate for the Republicans, a party after all, that opposed their candidate. In fact, it seems like many Republicans felt that a vote for Trump was voting outside the party. So, is this a contradiction or did the Democratic Party represent disappointment to everyone at all levels? Of course, the picture is complicated because of the complexity of local and regional politics and constituencies. And then there is the larger popular vote for Hillary, which essentially split the country’s voters down the middle.
In our venerable system, we only have a choice of two valid candidates, one from each of the major parties. Often, neither candidate is ideal; most of the time, no candidate is 100% congruent with all of any individual voter’s views. The core of the process is compromise, in other words, the voter prioritizes his/her issues and picks the best agreement, much like choosing two from column A and one from B on a restaurant menu. In the end, it seems to matter little what promises litter the campaign trail; all the candidates promise the world, preferably as vaguely as possible, and then legislate whatever their principal campaign donors want.
Election 2016 fielded particularly unsatisfying choices; poll after poll showed that no one was happy with the options. A racist misogynistic liar versus a well meaning politician dogged by a cloud of scandal/misdeeds for decades. So much of the campaign was waged over character, not the policies, which should be the primary rationale for choosing a president. Even at that, none of the Trump voters seemed to care that 93% of what he said was untrue. There must have been something about Clinton that prompted voters to cast their ballots for a candidate who lied 9 out of 10 times he spoke. Is it any wonder that only 55% of eligible voters voted, down from 64% in the last presidential election.
Hillary Clinton was not a good candidate. She was one that the Democratic party was obligated to offer, given her loss of the nomination to Obama and her previous stellar governmental service. But the popularity of Bernie Sanders was an indication that Clinton did not capture the tenor of the electorate, just as in 2008. The fact that Sanders, mistakenly identified as a Socialist, might have captured the Democratic nomination if it had not been for favoritism from the DNC for Clinton, screamed volumes about the country’s anger born of despair for it’s future. Historically, the “Socialist” label has been a scarlet letter. Parenthetically, Sanders is actually a Social Democrat, a distinction lost on most Americans who know little about either one.
This was the left flank of a populist movement. In spite of the usual democratic reconciliation of primary candidates and the bogey of racist, sexist, persecutorial Trump armageddon, Bernie supporters could not be persuaded to support Clinton. Many just opted to join the 45% of eligible voters who stayed away from the polls. Others voted for Trump, an anathema, where the prospect of ANY change trumped the social democratic slant of Sanders proposals and the ethnocentric Republican rhetoric. At least, that’s the assumption.
The prospect of making history with the first woman President lost significance early in the race. Somehow, Clinton has become such a political fixture that it normalized her presence in a position we’ve anticipated for the last few years. In the highly charged atmosphere of charges and countercharges, the gender card faded. Few people wanted to vote for Hillary just because she was a woman, no matter what. And there were plenty of people who refused to vote for Hillary, just because she was a woman. Many women, particularly among evangelicals, believe that the presidency is a job reserved for men, Angela Merkl be damned.
Hillary Clinton wasn’t inspiring enough to bring out voters who had voted for Obama in 2012. Among African Americans, many voted to preserve the historic Black presidency for another 4 years. But by 2016, having watched the disrespect and animus shown to Obama over the last 4 years, they didn’t feel like they had any skin in the game. Trump was just another white man congealing and openly expressing the antipathy to Black people that most experience daily. Now that Trump let that genie out of the bottle, there is nothing that Hillary is going to do to erase the social acceptability of open discrimination against all minorities. Clinton seemed a particularly unsuitable Don Quixote because her husband’s administration was the architect of mandatory minimum prison sentences that ushered in longer prison sentences for drug offenses involving crack and the development of the prison industrial complex which has led to the highest number of people imprisoned in the world. The prison-industrial complex is the result of the creation of privatized corporate prisons, built to house all the additional prisoners serving longer term sentences that swelled the prison population from 2 million in 1999 to 2.4 million in 2008.
While the evolution of the prison-industrial complex has only recently begun to be discussed outside academic circle
s, it is part of the fabric of the Black community. One out of 9 African Americans know someone in jail or on parole. This is not restricted to the ghetto, it crosses all economic levels. One in six Black men had been incarcerated as of 2001. By age 23, 49% of Black males have been arrested. Blacks working in low wage jobs as well as middle class professionals may be called upon to scramble for legal or financial resources to support friends and relatives.
Unions, another bedrock of Democratic Party support, have been decimated over the last couple of decades. Union membership fell to 11% of the workforce in 2015 from 20% in 1983. [At the height of the union movement in the 1940s, the percentage was about 35%]. In addition, a shift in workplace has occurred, such that now 35% of public sector workforce are union members compared to 7% in the private sector. This shift is a reversal of the proportions in the 1950s with 35% of union members in the private sector. Over the last couple of decades, unions have delivered little to their membership, having become administrative assistants to company management, helping to spoon feed the decline in real wages to members, sprinkled with enhanced benefit packages. In fact, real wages have stagnated since the 1970s in this country. Between 1973-2013, worker compensation rose by merely 9% against a rise in US productivity of 74%. This serious squeeze on the middle class became a noose with the recession of 2008.
The hegemony of union leadership has also suffered. Union organizations seem to have lost the discipline to deliver members to vote union endorsed tickets these days. And with membership down, union PACs have smaller coffers with which to wield political influence. Thus, union interests have fallen down the major party agendas, although anti-trade sentiment floated around as a major theme. Still, it’s not clear how much the unions’ official agendas dovetails with the membership.
Perhaps more important than the candidate was the Democratic message lost in the claims and counterclaims. Perhaps. Sanders would have been unencumbered by the emails and links to the present administration. And Bernie was never off message; he can’t even give an interview post-election without endlessly repeating the same phrases about wages and the shrinking middle class. We don’t know what skeletons his closet held, but they are not Benghazi or emails.
While the Clinton modus operandi is thorough and precise, dry web pages of detailed programmatic plans were no way to inspire an electorate so agitated that a huckster selling a magic elixir could capture their imagination. “Stronger Together” was an appeal to recognize that we are all, Black, white, Asian, recent immigrant, gay, Christian, Jew, female part of the fabric of America, with shared investment in the country’s future. In fact, it is impossible to parse anyone into individual labels, most of us are a sum of multiple categories. Somehow, we have become our disparate labels, clamoring for our individual bubbles to rise to the surface, afraid that at the touch of another bubble, it will burst and we’ll drown in an unforgiving sea. Clinton splashed around in the alphabet soup of identities, halfheartedly trying to grasp Black Lives Matter while embracing the LGBT community, Hispanics and immigrants yet alienating the Christians and hyphenated European Americans.
So there it is. The Democratic party fielded the wrong candidate with a poorly crafted message that didn’t speak to the concerns of the electorate, at least in certain locations. Those locations appear to be the whole middle of the country and the South. But, Clinton still won more than half of the votes, many in those states that racked up electoral college votes for Trump. Clearly, the left and right wings of the populist movement shared concerns even if they disagreed on the causes and ways to address it. In some cases, they feel their interests are diametrically opposed and even that one group is the cause of the other’s problems. What should the Democrats do next? It can’t be more of the same.
A Sunday morning News Review
The network Sunday morning news shows purport to present analysis of the week’s news. They have become platforms for political spin. Candidates, elected officials, campaign staff and spokesmen for the administration rotate across the networks to repeat the latest message, often in the same carefully scripted responses, even when the questions change. The interviewees bob and weave around the facts, “fact” being our newest four letter word. A panel of pundits follow, to analyze interviews and speculate on what it all means. Unfortunately, all this analysis emanates from the TV bubble. The months of misguided election predictions showed how disconnected from people in the street these talking heads are.
Of course, talk this week was all about the evolving administration of president elect Trump. Past administrations have done this quietly. Ever the showman, Trump has orchestrated his meetings in full public view, with the pomp and circumstance of cordoned-off streets around Trump Tower and a CSPAN live stream of the Trump Tower elevator bay. This weekend he moved his base of operations to his New Jersey golf club. In a signature move, he controls his drama by excluding the press, just as one would from a studio set. Ea
ch dignitary poses for a handshake in front of the building, with Mike Pence, in full plastered artificial grin, stepping in for a follow up. Trump has staged his most presidential self for his supporters. And true to his corporate self, Trump’s team has pressured visiting luminaries to stay at his club, the kind of pay-to-play that has been his long standing business practice. He’s even conducting business on the side, meeting with Indian businessmen with whom he’s negotiating a deal. I hope they’re not expecting future government business from this, the America First administration, that’s all about saving American jobs!
Trump, unaware, as he himself said, of the scope of our government, is turning over every Republican rock, to fill an extensive list of positions, at least those leftover once his family members have had their picks. He’s placed his intimate counselors, like Steve Bannon, out of reach of Senatorial approval. The cavalcade of generals is a shrewd move. In military personnel, Trump’s team has found an ideal image of America that his supporters (and Congress) can love. They are heroes who have saved their country; they are party neutral, with no party affiliations. A handy device for the TV screen footers. Even liberals and minorities, many of whom or whose family members have served in the military, may find reassurance in these candidates. Even if none are chosen, the prospects may dampen street protests in the short term as protesters because exhausted under the weight of a realization that they can do little to derail a Trump administration.
On Sunday morning, Reince Priebus tried to sell the idea that this was Trump bringing the country together, reaching out to non-supporters to reassure us that he means to govern for everyone. In fact, Trump was just talking to Republicans and their groupies. His tweet to the cast of Hamilton shouts volumes about how he wants to interact with those who believe his campaign rhetoric and fear for their safety. The Hamilton cast, primarily minorities, exposed their concerns about the Trump/Pence administration at a recent performance. Trump called it harassment and demanded of the cast ”Apologize!” Always quick to respond to any perceived insult, he couldn’t resist his version of a snap: the show’s “highly overrated.”
A president for the whole country would have taken the opportunity to begin a conversation, recognizing the anxiety vibrating from the stage, to reassure all those applauding audience members that their president elect is willing to listen, even when he doesn’t agree. But apparently, that president for everyone wasn’t elected November 8. We elected Donald Trump, a vindictive egomaniac who plans to stick it to the losers. Think Jeff Sessions, as Attorney General, and less aggressive pursuit of racial justice cases or federal investigations of police brutality. Think Bannon and the slickly crafted message that will rationalize monetary windfalls for the rich will siphoning it off from everybody else. When we follow the drift of Trump’s words, we’re screwed. What have we got to lose? A crap load.
One other little thing. In another smoke and mirrors move, the Trump team is touting Trump’s influence in saving a manufacturing plant in Kentucky from a move to Mexico. Ah, fragments of truth fabricated into Trump, The Job Rescuer. Sorry to use the four letter “fact” word, but sometimes you have to call a spade a spade. Fact: Ford had planned to shift Lincoln MKZ production to an existing Mexican facility. Fact: the plan was to increase Escort production in the Kentucky plant in response to record sales. Fact: no jobs were slated to be cut. Let’s recap- no jobs lost, no plant closings, no plants farmed out below the border. The announcement didn’t just bend the truth, it turned it inside out. It’s unfortunate that the real story is unlikely to find it’s way to Trump supporters. It’s probably not breaking on Facebook, Fox News or a Rush Lambaugh topic. This small item has been buried in the conversation about pending administration appointments as well as the Hamilton cast-Trump interchange.
The new line up unfolds
The dust has settled and reality is setting in. Donald Trump will become our next President. In the transition from candidate to President elect, he’s become just another Republican party operative. The promise to change Washington Politics turns out to be more of the same. It could not have been otherwise.
As Trump settles into structuring his administration, he’s tapped into the usual suspects: RNC operatives like Reince Priebus, former Bush administration officials and Congressional supporters, like Alabama Congressman Sessions. 
Campaign surrogates, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie, have been steadily paying their dues for career advancement. As experienced media pundits for major TV outlets, they cocooned their candidate at every turn in a web spun from lies. Where will they land when Trump has shuffled the deck?
Where else could Trump turn to learn how to govern? He’s got to work with a Congress whose many members were supposedly alienated during the campaign. That alienation is only theoretical, since politicians, particularly those running to keep their office, feel compelled to say whatever will massage their base. Their private faces may be quite different. Now that they have retained their seats, they will pursue party and big donor interests above all else. Trump will also have to find someone knowledgeable about national security and available choices will likely be from one of the two Bush administrations. We all want Trump to surround himself with knowledgeable administrators or we could all find ourselves in a soup of economic recession with a side of international wars.
Trump may have been “telling it like it is” on the campaign trail, but confronted with President Obama in the White House, he showed the appropriate deference due POTUS. “It was a great honor to meet with him.” Accordingly, the campaign was just good old fashioned politics. I hope the ears of those Trumpophants who are still clamoring for prosecution of Obama (and yes, there were many) perked up to the hint. After all, the Black guy is gone, replaced by white guys who will take their country back. And for the rest of us, it was a little something.
Trump supporters know that he lied all the time. After all, they heard him make statements that he consistently denied later. They watched him do stuff that he consistently denied later. But they had to believe in Trump’s message or the illusion would have been stripped away. They seem to fall back on a tale of the twisted liberal media bias. Even though they heard him say the words, they argue that their candidate was quoted out of context. Or that he didn’t mean what the media said.
Trump, the high priest of blamers, seized common perceptions of causes for the agonies of the white working class and poor. Using his shallow analysis of global market forces, Trump himself may have been misled; in our current atmosphere where belief equals fact, Trump may actually have believed the hastily assembled statistics fed to him by his campaign staff. But he presents himself as a much shrewder thinker, even though his Wharton degree is never evident in his statements.
In the end, Trump voters were seduced by the show. Trump, the ultimate razzle-dazzler, became a primal scream from the displaced and disappointed. The details didn’t matter. Trump was the instrument to put both the Republican and Democratic parties on notice that people were mad as hell and just couldn’t take it anymore. And so it will be with his transition into office and the early years of his administration. They’ll give him a lot of running room. They believe that politicians are corrupt. If their quarterback is seduced by Washington politics, then their Hail Mary skittered out of the receiver’s arms.
The day after the day after
The sun rose yesterday on a new America. This is what the “post-racialism” of the Obama presidency has wrought. The rise of white rage at the relative progress of minorities with an attendant perceived diminution of white privilege. And the enraged did it by electing an historic first, a candidate with no government or military experience. Not the historic first we were expecting.
Apparently, whites rushed to the polls from every which way. They came from farms and rural areas scattered throughout the country. They came from all the areas that haven’t felt the economic recovery, unaware that the US economy itself has changed and it’s not going back. They came from workers whose industries have closed, not understanding that technology, not foreign flight of production, has increased productivity. Their despair at being left out congealed into a desperate plea for anything else. They were rolling the dice for someone that they didn’t think had the temperament or qualifications to be president. They creatively constructed rationale to excuse his words and insults to those among them. The evangelicals grew to believe that God had chosen this moral philanderer because God speaks in mysterious ways. What the hell? What have we got to lose?
More than anything, Trump voters mourned for the loss of their America, replaced by political correctness and derision of the things that they hold dear, like religion and marriage and the right to discriminate against whomever they wish. All of their true but politically incorrect feelings were driven inside their living rooms, their churches, their bars and restaurants.
Trump deserves credit for gathering the worst aspects of human nature, like resentment, bigotry, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and intense nationalism and rewrapping them in a neat bow of patriotic virtue. He presented them to the less well educated as deep American values [throughout our history they have been] which needed to be marshaled into “making America great again.”
With the charm and precision of TV showman, he sold himself as inspired to be the billionaire defender of the rights of the displaced to a segment of the population who feel disoriented in the world in which they live.
In his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, unlike previous party candidates, Trump presented himself as the “only one” who could save his flock, so reminiscent of past dictatorial movements. Hate groups of all stripes immediately recognized that Trump’s oversized umbrella would shelter them and the KKK and alt-right groups seized the cover. Trump welcomed all comers, because members of these groups have remained outside the mainstream political system.
Trump artfully wove a multi-layered plan to retain the hegemony of the white population as a majority in the country, a status on track to end in 2020. Cut off immigration of Muslims. Send back undocumented Mexican immigrants and build the Wall to shut down illegal immigration across the Rio Grande. On the other hand, immigration from “white” countries can be boosted through visa priorities. Since whites are having fewer children than other minorities, they will have to get busy increasing their numbers, and they can, mostly accidentally, by restrictions to the availability of contraception and ultimately, the gutting if not repeal of Roe v Wade.
The margin of victory shouldn’t be overstated, however. It is not the mandate Paul Ryan wanted to quickly establish by saying it was so. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. And so, voters split 50-50 over their presidential choice.
We have no real idea what a Trump administration will look at. A practiced liar, he may pursue none of his campaign promises. There is one thorny problem to surmount: what to do about his business holdings. Putting the businesses in blind trust for his children to run, as bandied about during the campaign, is not an option that will pass muster. The trust can’t be blind if he knows what’s the holdings are. Trump will likely try to finagle some arrangement that will not force divestiture, but isolating him from his company is vital to erecting a steel wall between government and a private corporation. Perhaps Trump will resign if he can’t negotiate a satisfactory resolution. Worse news indeed. We, women, would need to guard our pelvic organs from Mike Pence’s clutches.
With no clear political philosophy, his rhetoric did not rang true to the cornerstones of Republican policies. It is likely that he will carry through with huge tax cuts for the wealthy and business, for these are his cronies. He has sold trickle down economics, a Republican cornerstone, to his voters because they believe that they can create small businesses and provide jobs. Their dream is that a lucky few will become billionaires like Trump, even if they lack that $1 million loan from a father. They see their business role as supporting others in their communities, magnifying their contribution through churches and charitable giving.
Certainly Congress will move quickly to repeal Obamacare. And then it’s anyone’s guess if there is any replacement to come. It is reasonable to expect a transition period since insurance policies are geared to 12 month duration.
A Supreme Court nominee is also at the top of the list. It’s anyone’s guess who that person will be. We do know that the nominee, most certainly a male, will be conservative and likely young so he can stick around to influence court decisions for decades to come.
His voters may forgive delays in the Wall construction, particularly if manipulated through Congress, either by lack of a bill being introduced or budgetary fighting. Trump will likely already have staged well publicized White House ceremonies rescinding Obama’s executive orders on immigration such as allowing children who immigrated with parents to remain in the country.
Trump is a wild card. He has no idea how to govern a nation. It is not like being a CEO of a business. Make no mistake, Trump has played the underside of politics in the federal and local governments. He has used pay-for-play. But he doesn’t understand that Washington bureaucracy, which has a weight of it’s own, will remain long after he’s gone. The bureaucracy has a leaden brake foot, preventing effective activity.
Trump’s cabinet will have a job on their hands, advising a man proven so resistant to advice and avoiding his meddling. The makeup of his Cabinet remains an open question, but Guilliani and Chris Christie must be at the top of the list. There’s a rumor that Christie is in line for Attorney. That will be tough from the jail cell looming from the Bridgegate scandal. Of course, now that Republicans will be coming to the White House, the prosecutor may be dissuaded from pursuing an inditement.
Trump said last night in remarks to supporters, that it is time for the country to come together. After threatening to overturn our electoral system, he is thrilled to extend a hand to everyone in the country (at least legally) when he is dictating the terms. It’s like the bully forcing his victim to join his gang, so he has a convenient personal punching bag. We shall see who gets the short end of the stick.
Jill Stein Will Not be President
Enough already with the voting for a third party candidate because you’re tired of the status quo. How does a vote for a candidate who apriori will lose change the status quo? Either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be POTUS. A vote for one’s conscience sounds good, but how will it feel when Donald Trump’s corporate friends are laughing all the way to their Panamanian bank with the windfall from the tax cuts while your paycheck is the same as it is today. Or when Obamacare is repealed and your health insurance has been cancelled because of a preexisting condition. In our electoral process, the two major party candidates represent the majority of the popular views. If a third party candidate can’t capture the majority view, then he (and it’s almost always been he with 3 exceptions) can’t capture the presidency. That is the principle of the majority rules. To build a majority requires compromise. Our democracy only works with compromise which boils down to trade-offs. One party gives up a little of what they want to get some of what they want. If you support the Green Party, you’ll have to get out and build popular support for the platform to become reality, because you’ll have to generate a whole slate of candidates to take over Congress. Look, as an African American, I get having to compromise over the candidates, because no one yet has addressed the needs of our community, or that of poor people either. For many years I didn’t vote, because it seemed like Tweedle Dum or Tweedle Dee despite the fact that a lot of Black people died for my right to vote. But over the years, I realized that Reagan and the Bushs have done much to hurt African Americans and other minorities, working people and the poor, not to mention the environment. I do, in fact, have a dog in the fight. The results haven’t been successful on every front but there has been some change. That change has sparked the reaction that is Donald Trump, which almost no one could characterize as positive. Clearly Trumpophants are scared, which explains their vehemence for the return of what they’ve lost, even if it clearly disadvantaged a lot of others- women, minorities, the poor etc. But they are excellent compromisers to accept a candidate whom, they admit, may not represent their values in exchange for the hope he’s going to change their lives for the better.
Frankly, if the race weren’t so close, your vote wouldn’t matter so much. So third party voters, don’t surrender to the pie-in-the-sky argument. If you really want to rock the status quo, vote for the Democratic candidate who can affect it. And don’t forget your local candidates for Congress and city officials.
The email bullshit is over
So just as we suspected, Aberdeen’s emails were [“likely a combination of duplicates and personal missives loaded with gossip and little else” in The fever pitch]. There are still lots of people who need to vote, so will this help those undecided? The Republican right leaners are unlikely to be persuaded to emerge from the Trump propaganda spun from a fabric of lies that insisted that Clinton is about to be indicted for something about endangering national security. Of course, that was far from the truth. Without examining the evidence, it’s not possible to consider indictment, a process which requires a prosecutor to review the evidence and convene a grand jury. None of that was even being considered, since the bulk of the evidence was already examined and the recent Aberdeen’s emails yielded no new evidence of perjury or a national security leak. But the Trump comeback is always that FBI inaction is just another example of a crooked government. The story as covered by politically right leaning press and social media, buries the name Comey in a barrage of opinions about Clinton’s general dishonesty and the collusion of Obama’s government to cover up her misdeeds. After all, there are rumors out there that the FBI had found evidence that Clinton’s server had been hacked, probably bolstered by claims by Guccifer earlier in the year that he had hacked the server. (Just to put that in context, remember the server was operational between 2009 and 2013, in the infancy of regularized hacking and heightened security that is being reported now.) Breitbart has been full of IT experts’ speculation about the certainty of multiple server breaches.
But the importance of Clinton’s honesty is still unresolved among undecided and even some supporters; it involves a queasiness in the pit of one’s stomach that is difficult to shake, although it doesn’t rest with the email scandal but is more centered around Clinton Foundation contributions and influence peddling, which, unfortunately, is just standard political conduct. The number of Congressmen who leave office without becoming extremely wealthy is minuscule; many go on to become lobbyist and industry consultants. The system is what it is and unlikely to change since the main beneficiaries are also those who would have to pass legislation and change Congressional procedures. Trump may bellow about change, but he’s just as guilty of influence peddling because he enjoys the privileges of the rich and famous. By his own account, he attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, contributed to both Democratic [he used to be one] and Republican campaigns and has used influence to nail down construction deals with local governments. Trump has shown a propensity to take business shortcuts that would be exponentially multiplied in the position of POTUS. It’s clear that his philosophical approach to the economy which makes big business supreme will make for enough sweetheart bed hopping to eclipse the busiest hourly rental motel. Add deregulation and tax windfalls and the atmosphere will be jumpin’.
From the perspective of policies and programs in almost every area, the choice is still clear. For those concerned about “fitness for office”, misogyny, racial and ethnic prejudice, the choice is also clear. For those of you worried about a thin skinned narcissist who sees insult in every statement where praise isn’t oozing from every word and can’t help but lash out, the choice is also clear. For those of you worried about the nuclear codes in those orange hands, the choice is also clear. And don’t forget about throwing out that do-nothing Congress we’ve been saddled with. We at least need a change of leadership. Make that choice in a voting booth tomorrow.
The feverish finish
The can
didates are scampering around to Florida and Pennsylvania, Democrats mobilizing their big guns like Michelle and Barack and Tim Kane who gave a historic campaign speech completely in Spanish. Trump must be feeling like a true politician now, visiting 3 to 4 states a day. He could only rouse Melania who spoke recently about a proposed campaign against cyber bullying of children. Never mind that her husband holds the King of the Bullies title. Perhaps she believes that only children are vulnerable and adults can take care of themselves. There is something so arrogant about believing one can hustle a crowd into ignoring one’s own behaviors to decry the same acts in others. Or maybe it’s just reality theater on a different stage for the Trumps. It’s lucky they don’t believe in God and his vengeance.
It appears that the revived email investigation has had little effect, at least because the news cycle has had to urgently move on to cover the candidate’s state hopping in the absence of new information from the FBI. Trump is pounding the theme, calling it the biggest scandal since Watergate. Did he forget Iran Contra? Trump himself may be as unfamiliar with Watergate details as his audience. As a reminder, Watergate was an orchestrated campaign by a sitting Republican president and his staff to sabotage the campaign of his Democratic opponent with dirty tricks and a massive cover up micromanaged by the president himself, including perjured witnesses and destruction and sabotage of evidence. Nixon narrowly escaped impeachment by resigning. There is no comparison with Clinton, who having unwisely used a private server to store State Department emails, has been cleared of criminal activity in multiple email server investigations. And as an added bonus, cleared in numerous repetitive and expensive Benghazi Congressional investigations. 
What, the Republicans have to do something to avoid conducting the business of the country, like confirming the President’s Supreme Court nominee or even just debating bills to wrestle with pressing problems. Billows of smoke have gathered around these emails that are likely a combination of duplicates and personal missives loaded with gossip and little else. People are chomping at the bit for some juicy tidbits to splash over Buzzfeed, but there’s nothing criminal in that. Trump’s predicting that Clinton will be on trial come inauguration day, but the only person we know for sure will be in court come November 28 is the Donald himself when his Trump University fraud trial is scheduled to start. Of course his notorious history of obfuscation with trial delays and destruction of legal evidence may alter the timing. In fact, since he won’t be campaigning, he’ll probably be parlaying some of his deal making skills into a settlement and threatening to follow through with suits against the pussy-grabbed accusers, in an effort to score headlines and preserve media program call-in privileges. The TV networks will no doubt be complicit, in trying to maintain their advertising rates in the stratosphere.
No, the emails shouldn’t amount to much before the election, unless somehow they manage to tip the scales in key states for Trump. Clearly there are others out there trying to assist with that. While Trump bellows about “rigged elections”, he contends that his victory would reflect the true will of the people. True to his reputation of speaking with forked tongue, his supporters have been trying to give him a leg up as demonstrated by numerous reports of vote flipping, the practice of touching one candidate’s name on the voting machine, but the ballot registers the opponent. Numerous incidents have been investigated in several Georgia counties and some states, the apparent result of voting machine miscalibration. Trump has been urging his followers to “vote again” by changing absentee ballots, but one woman in Arizona took him literally, casting two ballots at the poll, for which she was aptly charged.
More worrisome is the looming possibility of intimidating voters. Republicans have spent the last couple of years constructing obstacles to hamper traditionally Democratic constituencies from voting through voter IDs, limiting polling places and shortening early voting. Requiring state issued IDs is reminiscent of the old poll tax, because the process costs money, even if it’s just coughing up $25 for a copy of a birth certificate. North Carolina was meticulous enough to construct their legislation from research into the most efficient ways to keep African Americans from the polls. While the courts have recently overruled the legislation, the short time interval has left some North Carolina voters challenges unresolved and some confused still about eligibility. More ominous than that, is the threat of physical intimidation by the minions being recruited through Trump’s website to observe polling places to ensure that the “right” people are voting. Recent attempts to get the RNC to disavow these shenanigans have been met with denial of responsibility for Trump’s activity, despite the obvious fact that he is the party’s candidate of record.
But the most sinister actors are the legions of alt-right internet agents, some foreign, like Russian and far right Europeans, who are planting memes through thousands of fake Facebook and Twitter accounts, blogs and websites.
No doubt they are the source of fake Twitter ads to text your vote to avoid lines at the polls. These agents are deluging the Web with misinformation, false accusations and photoshopped evidence of misdeeds and trumped up events in an effort to persuade voters that Trump is their man. Their agenda includes pumping up race hate, promoting religious purity, singling out undesirable ethnic groups. Defend against intrusions, preserve your rights, attack, destroy are prominent themes. The Full Frontal TV series has a recent interview with 2 supposed Russian hackers. Is it a comedy skit or based in reality? Comedy or not, the internet activity is real. Trump has actively joined their retweeting chain, his collusion obvious in the appointment of Steve Bannon as campaign executive, a primary operational chief of the alt-right Breitbart News. Seems like Trump is confident in his pronouncements about election rigging because his forces are the major source.
If the most qualified candidate wins, particularly in the Clinton landslide that seemed to be looming before Comey’s letter to Congress, the Donald has previewed a scenario without the traditional concession speech with a barrage of legal challenges. (OK, I’m still holding out hope that the polls are wrong!) Once defeated, Trump can transition to showering the public daily with lies and innuendos broadcasted from a new Trump TV channel steered by his friend and advisor Roger Ailes united with dangerous web based alt-right propaganda. The shattered Republican party will try to glue their Humpty Dumpty back together with endless House and Senate investigations into the previous FBI investigations, the Department of Justice, the State Department, the Clinton Foundation and anything else they can think of. Some Senators are already promising to torpedo any Supreme Court nominees for the next four years! Too busy with sour grapes, Republicans will keep the government in neutral, avoiding at all costs legislative programs that attempt to solve any problems. There is one bill we know Republicans will vote on- repeal of Obamacare. Republicans have voted on a repeal bill during each session since the Affordable Healthcare Act became law, in an effort to deliver on the campaign promise of every junior Congressman to vote against Obamacare. We seem to have forgotten the partisanship that has ruled our legislature since Obama took office. Here’s hoping that Hillary’s victory will be accompanied by a Democratic majority in the Senate, so a few things might get done.
It may be fatigue from a campaign season with two less than desirable candidates, but dark clouds dominate my vision of the future. I’m really feeling a loss of that Hope and Change.
oleblacklady 