A Welcome Mat For A Would-Be Dictator A Prediction From Ten Years Ago

To start with, any news broadcast that says that Hillary Clinton lost the election is promoting a lie,  I heard it this morning on the radio.   She didn't lose the election, she won it by more than two-million votes.   In any other country that would mean that if the man who lost the vote to her by that many votes assumed the office it would define political corruption and his regime would be seen as illegitimate or tainted at best.   So, we shouldn't put up with people saying she lost the election, THE AMERICAN PEOPLE lost the election because our Constitution and many of the individual states are set up so that the loser of the popular vote can become president.   Considering the blatant attempts at partisan vote suppression in states ruled by Republicans, the corruption of this election couldn't be more obvious.  I strongly suspect if another country held such an election and got the result we have, it would go on some State Department list of countries with rigged elections.

Another thing, we really have to stop protecting the United States Constitution which so obviously doesn't protect us from this kind of disaster.  It is in serious need of major revisions that will never be done as long as it is considered a sacred scripture instead of the document cobbled together by slave-owning aristocrats with provisions to prevent democratic rule which would not be profitable to them.  It was born in corruption, it only avoids that on those rare occasions when the Supreme Court has members who value democracy and who override its inherent corruptions.  And, as seen in the Warren Court, even some of those courts institute interpretations that knee cap democracy even as they promote it in other ways.   Our courts, our politics doesn't learn from experience that should have made those revisions in that document over the past two centuries.  The anti-democratic provisions in it are endangering us now.

I wrote in 2006 that if we didn't fix the elections in this country it was just a matter of time before the Republicans would steal another election.   We haven't and they have.

It is clear that Donald Trump is nervous that the results that were announced on election night will be found to be wrong or the result of ballot suppression or any of a number of possible means for Republican governors and state governments to have done for him what Jeb Bush did for his brother in Florida in 2000.  His preemptive lying about 3 million illegitimate votes is part of a clear effort for him to suppress any attempt to look, seriously at this issue before the Electoral College meets.   If, as some have speculated, there could have been computer tampering with those state elections, it could expose his "win" as being the result of not only losing the actual election but rigging by the Republican Party, the party which has openly been doing exactly that since 2010 and which more covertly has done it for decades.


Saturday, October 28, 2006

What If We Dodge The Bullet?

What if they lose? What if the congress investigates the crimes of the Bush regime and those are stopped? What if things go back to normal?

After what we've seen in the past six years, if things can go back to normal it won't be a blessed relief, it will be a disaster. Our recent history proves that we have fatal problems in the foundation of the American government.

Our elections have to be fixed, not just returned to c. 1964. We have to secure the vote, from before it is cast, to counting it, to reporting the results and to their fulfillment. No elections official, secretary of state, or judge can ever be allowed to prevent another legal ballot being cast or counted or made to count. The sleazy behavior we've seen from every level from elections clerk to Supreme Court and the Executive wouldn't be tolerated in a real democracy. A democracy needs it to be an impeachable crime for a Supreme Court Justice to say that a Citizen of the United States does not have a right to vote. That is a fundamental contradiction of the role of the court in a democracy. Anyone who believes that has no place on our court or in our government.

The media, and today that means the electronic media, have to have their self-interested bias exposed and it's pollution scrubbed out of our politics. They have to be forced to perform the public service they promised, including standards of fairness. Broadcast stations must provide real news, including local news, which has to be unbiased and fair. And without diverse ownership of the media, they won't serve the entire public. Women and minority groups have to control parts of the electronic media.

The cable "news" channels have betrayed the public trust even more flagrantly than broadcast, spreading lies effective enough to start the most idiotic and dangerous war of our history. We will pay the cost of their lies for decades, in blood as well as in money.

They also aided the Bush putsch of 2000 and the earlier scheme to remove a genuinely elected President on trumped up charges and lies. Pretending that a rogue cable industry isn't a danger to freedom has to stop. Anyone who defends them on their crimes against democracy is a dupe or a profiteer. Put them under the same public service requirements as broadcast media. Media passes itself off as the voice of the people, then let them show it by putting the public before their investors and owners.

Recent history proves that self-government can't depend on leaving it to chance. Laissez faire democracy dies and the death is never a natural one. It lets the powerful and wealthy swamp the Peoples's voice almost all of the time. The Supreme Court rulings making corporations artificial people made that all the more true

Our government is always presented as being those who hold office , that is where almost all of the pitiful efforts at reform are concentrated. And that hasn't worked. We have the most dishonest government of our lifetimes. Putting patches on the process to make it a level field is unrealistic to the level of willful blindness. Powerful interests have power. They will always win when they have equal access to the process and own the media. The handful of examples where individuals or small groups win over the big guy make for sentimental TV movies, using them as proof that the system works is calculated dishonesty.

If the People are neglected then it all goes wrong. They won't even show up to vote. That step isn't a naive social studies lesson that you stop thinking about after the test in fourth grade. You don't go on to the higher study of civics and leave it behind. There is nothing higher in a democracy than the People, there is no act of government more important than their Vote. Abraham Lincoln, one of the real founders of the country we live in today, gave the formula for it. You know it by heart. He didn't mention the congress, the executive or the high church of the judiciary. He said that the enormous sacrifice of the American People in the Civil War was so that government of the People, by the People, and for the People shall not perish from the earth.

Any aftermath of the Bush II disaster that doesn't include changes to these laws will be just the beginning of the next time. Not securing the Vote, the will of the People; and forcing their own chosen responsibilities on the media, the only guarantee of an informed and realistic Vote, is a welcome mat for the next would-be dictator. Any liberal, leftist, Democrat, independent, even "moderate" Republican who lets two years go by without enacting real electoral and media reform had better beware. It's just a matter of waiting before the same coalition of corporate interests, bigots, oligarches and haters tries again. They might be as slow and stealthy as they were this time, buying up media, using it to spread lies that "more speech" can't drown out. And they'll make their come back having learned from the mistakes they made this time. Like the aristocratic conspirators in ancient Athens, they will be more dangerous than ever.

Along with these two absolute prerequisites to securing democracy there is the necessity for a full and public appraisal of the thefts and other crimes of the Bush II and previous presidencies. There has to be a full program of congressional hearings, done in public, of what has happened. They have to be congressional hearings because that is their responsibility. A commission or blue ribbon panel or other kind of establishment dodge won’t do it. Those are mechanisms for obscuring and stalling. This is a job for those appointed by The People. They asked for the responsibility, no one forced them to run.

There will be a chorus of media and politicians and the Republican talking points network telling us to “get over it”. They are the PR voice of the criminals. We have to be prepared to force these reforms over their constant lies and slogans.

Just going along as we have been is a guarantee that the disasters will continue. We will have to push the next Democratic congress to work simultaneously on all these issues while taking up new business. They are not extras they are the only way we are going to find out how to go forward, to make progress instead of making the same mistakes we have made before.

If the Republican who have created this disaster win a majority next week, the problems will not disappear they will certainly get worse. Giving up before those problems are fixed securely is not an option for us.

Update:  2016.  There has to be a federal law that mandates that all elections for President, Vice President, Senate and the House of Representatives be done on a paper ballot, set out in a uniform way to avoid rigging with the form by a latter day Katherine Harris, the woman who played such an important role in rigging the Florida election in 2000.   There has to be a uniform method of voting for those federal offices that can be taught in elementary school and which is as familiar as a Lincoln penny in its form.  The ballots should be required to be kept in a secure manner so they can be counted and inspected by hand if necessary, there should never be any form of voting for those four federal offices which is not verifiable, computer voting should be relegated to the corrupt past.

Elections Canada, the last time I looked into it, ran some of the most efficient, clean and honest elections there were.  That would certainly be a better model for us than the hodge podge of corruption that our antiquated Constitution and the corrupt priesthood of the Supreme Court allows.

We've had two obviously rigged elections, installing Republicans who lost the popular vote in the past sixteen years.  It is a national shame that we have not done anything to improve our elections, instead the courts have allowed Republican governors and legislatures to make them clearly more corrupt, especially through suppressing votes of Black and Latino and other groups which vote more heavily for Democrats.   That is something that can't be allowed to go unchallenged and any Supreme Court justice who supports their ability to corrupt our elections should be considered to have committed an impeachable offense.   I have only the slightest of threads of hopes that some miracle or some revelation will prevent the clearly fascistic Donald Trump from taking office in under two months.  He is, clearly, the most dangerous man to have ever been handed power by our insanely worshiped Constitution, he is clearly under the influence of a foreign dictator who meddled in our elections as well.   He was also aided by the corrupted FBI under the direction of the criminal James Comey.  

Some of our oldest citizens have seen the country devolve from the being governed by one of the greatest of presidents, Franklin Roosevelt, to being put into the hands of, succesively,  Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and now Donald Trump.   That, friends, is what a country in a nose dive to disaster looks like.

At this point if the Electoral College flipped, something I would normally be against, I'd welcome it because, at this point, it's our last hope, barring a miracle revealing corruption in several states.   After four years of Trump-Pence, democracy won't come back anytime in our lifetimes barring a disaster even bigger than the Civil War.  I suspect millions would die in it, anyone who would hope for that is criminally insane.  I'm not advocating it, I'm predicting it.  It is either that or overt fascism perhaps lasting as long as the Soviet-red-fascist government did.   And, as can be seen in Russia and most of the former "republics" of the Soviet Union, living under dictatorship doesn't provide  a guaranteed education in how to do democracy.

We really have to fix the First Amendment, explicitly calling any "freedom of the press" the privilege GRANTED ONLY IN SO FAR AS THEY SERVE THE PEOPLES' RIGHT TO TRUE AND ACCURATE INFORMATION and allowing people they lie about to sue them with high enough fines to keep them from lying.   I read that someone pointed out to Donald Trump that if the libel laws were in force that he could be sued,  I read that he expressed surprise saying he'd never thought of that.  Well, I have, Donald Trump could never have been more than the shady real estate thug he was if he could be sued for lying.   The cabloids, hate-talk radio and networks that created his public persona would never have done it if they could have been sued by the people they lied about.