Tag Archives: voter disenfranchisement

Working Hard To Take Away Our Vote

Posted on by under History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary, voting rights

For a while over the last two years, our attention was focused on voting rights.  After the false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, states – particularly predominantly Republican states – used the claims as an excuse to pass restrictive laws, allegedly to make elections more secure, but in reality, to disenfranchise the sort of voters who are more likely to vote for Democrats.  These groups include single working moms, Blacks & Hispanics, college students, and low-income families.

I’ve never heard of Robert Spindell before, and unless you live in the state of Wisconsin, you probably never have, either.  Spindell is a longtime GOP activist in Wisconsin, and also the chairman of the GOP’s 4th congressional district in Milwaukee.  He was one of the fake electors who claimed that Donald Trump won in Wisconsin, and he faces three lawsuits for his role in that attempted fraud.  But none of that is why he crossed my radar last night.  Here is what he said that brought him to my attention …

“In the City of Milwaukee, with the 4th Congressional District Republican Party working very closely with the RPW, RNC, Republican Assembly & Senate Campaign Committees, Statewide Campaigns and RPMC in the Black and Hispanic areas, we can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem Vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.”

Bragging about disenfranchising some 37,000 Black and Hispanic voters!!!  WTF???

The information was verified by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel …

“Milwaukee had the biggest proportional decline of any municipality in the county… Some 17% fewer ballots were cast in the city than in 2018, a drop off bigger than other communities in the county.”

Spindell was so proud that he wanted to take sole credit for the decline in voters, claiming it was a result of his “well thought out multi-faceted plan,” that included …

“Biting Black Radio Negative Commercials run last few weeks of the election cycle straight at Dem Candidates, and a substantial & very effective Republican Coordinated Election Integrity program resulting with lots of Republican paid Election Judges & trained Observers & extremely significant continued Court Litigation.”

One conservative commentator, James Wigderson, says that …

“It’s as if the cruelty is the point. If Spindell had been in charge of elections during Jim Crow, he would’ve bragged about literacy tests and poll taxes suppressing the Black vote.”

But the fact is that what Spindell said was just saying what most Republicans were thinking but not saying. Voter suppression has rather fallen onto the back burner of our attention of late, but believe me, friends, it’s still very much alive and well.  In my own state, a new voter suppression bill was signed into law just last month that will make it harder for the disabled and the elderly to vote.  We have no excuse absentee voting, but they are limiting ballot drop boxes to one per county, and demanding a photo ID even from absentee voters, something that has never been required in all my years of voting in this state.  Until now, we’ve only had to provide a signature for comparison purposes and either a social security or driver’s license number to request a ballot.

And if 37,000 people were disenfranchised in Milwaukee alone, then …

Granted, mid-term elections typically draw fewer voters than presidential elections, but still … this one was more relevant than most mid-terms and more people understood the stakes, so … what did happen to those 46 million voters?  Suppressive voter laws, apathy, or something else?

Spindell isn’t the only one working hard to keep voters away from the polls.  The conservative Heritage Foundation based in Washington, D.C., spent more than $5 million in 2021 lobbying for laws to block voting rights.  The foundation has a two-year strategy to spend $24 million in just eight states to press Republican-controlled legislatures to impose strict restrictions on voting, including limits on mail-in voting and early voting days.

Numerous states have either passed or are pursuing even more restrictive measures to disenfranchise certain groups, mainly the poor, Blacks, Hispanics, and college students.  There are many members of Congress, primarily found in the Republican Party, who merely pretend to bend to the will of the people while working to replace democracy with autocracy.  The aforementioned Spindell is but one, and a minor player at that, as compared to the likes of Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan and others who wield some very real power.  Some of those even sit on the highest court in the land, the U.S. Supreme Court.

Last year, Congress had an opportunity to pass significant voting rights legislation, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, but both were blocked in the Senate last January.  I would say it’s time to try again, but with McCarthy et al having taken over control of the House and being genuinely afraid of losing at least 1/3 of their seats if every person 18 and older could vote, it would be a waste of time and money.  Any improvement in voting rights for the moment will have to come at the state level.

Meanwhile, let’s keep this at the forefront of our minds, let’s not miss any opportunity to let our elected officials at all levels know that this is important to us!  The right to vote was better protected 50 years ago than it is today!  And as for Mr. Spindell … the world really does not need people like him.

If You Can’t Win Honestly …

Posted on by under Election 2022, Environmental Issues, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Rants, Social commentary, voting rights

The failure of the United States Senate to pass the two federal voting rights bills that crossed their desks in January has led to nearly every state creating highly restrictive voting laws this year.  Thank you, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, for doing your part to destroy the rights of We the People to have a voice in our government.  In addition to the restrictive laws the states have been passing all year, there is a last-minute scramble to add insult to injury just ahead of the upcoming mid-term elections.  Just a few examples …

  • Just three days after being sworn into office, Wyoming Republican Interim Secretary of State Karl Allred sent a letter asking clerks to remove all drop boxes in the state. “I’m mindful of the fact that there have been no issues reported with the use of the drop boxes in Wyoming, but that does not alleviate the potential for abuse …”  Say WHAT???  There is “potential for abuse” in every single thing in the world, but that doesn’t mean you ban them!!!  There’s the potential that I might throw my coffee cup at someone’s head and give them a concussion, but we don’t ban coffee cups!!!  We don’t ban cars that kill hundreds … thousands of people every year!  Hell, we don’t even ban f*cking guns … yesterday, a 15-year-old child killed five people with a gun in North Carolina, but do you think Congress will act on stricter gun laws?  Hell no!  But this jerk in Wyoming wants to remove all ballot boxes, making it much harder for many to cast a ballot, to use their Constitutional voice in our government, because of the ‘potential’ for abuse!  Ballot boxes are more dangerous than guns???  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
  • Last Friday, the Delaware Supreme Court struck down two recently enacted pro-voting laws claiming they ‘violated’ the Delaware Constitution. The two-page order struck down Delaware’s same-day registration and no-excuse mail-in voting laws. Another blow … a big one … to voting rights, especially for the elderly and the disabled who may have difficulty going to the polls in person and waiting in line, sometimes for hours, to cast their vote.  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
  • In Pennsylvania, Republicans are trying to get 242,000 people … nearly a quarter of a million … removed from the voter rolls, claiming they have moved outside the state since the last election. I find it hard to believe that so many have left the state in under two years and have no clue how they have identified those voters, but I’d bet money that most of the 242,000 voted for a Democrat or two last election and that is the actual criteria!  Other states, such as North Carolina and Wisconsin have similar efforts underway to purge voters.  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
  • Early in-person voting starts in Georgia next Monday, just three days away. Yet, thousands of Georgia voters have already had their eligibility challenged by right-wing activists, empowered by a provision in Senate Bill 202, Georgia’s 2021 voter suppression law that could challenge the voting rights of some 364,000 voters! I guess those right-wingers know that their ‘man’, Hershel Walker, only stands a chance to win if they keep enough voters away from the polls.  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

This is only a sampling of the latest efforts.  Republicans cannot win in a fair fight, so instead they will fight dirty.  Winning is their only goal … if democracy gets in their way, then they will kill democracy.  There was, however, one bright spot in the voting rights’ news from the unlikeliest of sources, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis …

Yesterday, nearly two weeks after Hurricane Ian made landfall leaving behind massive damage to the state, Governor DeSantis issued an executive order allowing Charlotte, Lee and Sarasota counties to implement emergency changes. DeSantis’ order:

  • Allows counties to extend early voting and designate additional early voting locations
  • Gives voters in the three counties the ability to request their mail-in ballot by phone and for it to be sent to an address other than the address on their voter registration
  • Provides for drop boxes to be moved and polling locations to be consolidated as necessary
  • Increases the pool of eligible poll workers to address any shortages

The Midterms Are Becoming More Clear

Posted on by under Social commentary, Political commentary, Re-blogs, Free Press Issues, voting rights, Election 2022

Polls, polls, polls!!!  Everybody (myself included) is glued to the various polls, especially those with the most obnoxious candidates, such as Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz, J.D. Vance, Doug Mastriano, etc.  Remember 2016 … the polls indicated that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in.  Need I say more?  One problem with polls vs outcome is that anybody and everybody can respond to a poll, but not anybody and everybody can or will vote.  Easy enough to tell that telephone pollster that you’re planning to vote for Mark Kelly, but it requires a bit more effort to actually cast a vote.  Another problem, of course, is who is polled.  It doesn’t pay to look at any specific poll, but rather look at an aggregate of the most historically reliable polls, and you might get a pretty good idea of how the nation is leaning, but you still won’t really know how many of those polled will actually make it to the polls!

Our friend TokyoSand over at Political Charge posted about this earlier today, and I thought her words well worth sharing.  Thank you, TS!!!

The Midterms Are Becoming More Clear

By TokyoSand on

In the last week or so, I’ve read probably two dozen articles or essays about what will happen in the midterms in just over 30 days. And there is finally a consensus, if you can believe it. This is what it is …

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Same Tune They’ve Been Playin’ Forever

Posted on by under Election 2020, Election 2022, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary, voting rights

Fox ‘News’ has some of the slimiest people in the industry working for them … ol’ Rupert Murdoch sure does know how to pick ‘em.  The only credible journalist at Fox is Chris Wallace, son of the long-esteemed Mike Wallace, and I often wonder why he doesn’t get a job at a more reputable network.  Among the worst of the lot is Tucker Carlson, a man who would argue with a tin can if it were marked “Democrat” or contained lima beans.

Charles M. Blow has written an editorial for the New York Times that I think bears reading if you want to try to understand the current white supremacist movement by the Republican Party to disenfranchise Black, Hispanic, Asian and immigrant voters.  The current push is nothing new, merely an upgrade of what white supremacists have always tried to do.

Tucker Carlson and White Replacement

This racist theory is rooted in white supremacist panic.

Charles M. Blow

Opinion Columnist

On Thursday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson caused an uproar by promoting the racist, anti-Semitic, patriarchal and conspiratorial “white replacement theory.” Also known as the “great replacement theory,” it stands on the premise that nonwhite immigrants are being imported (sometimes the Jewish community is accused of orchestrating this) to replace white people and white voters. The theory is also an inherent chastisement of white women for having a lower birthrate than nonwhite women.

As Carlson put it:

“I know that the left and all the gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters, from the third world. But, they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually. Let’s just say it: That’s true.”

Carlson continued, “Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.”

The whole statement is problematic. First, what is the third world? This label originated as a way to categorize countries that didn’t align with Western countries or the former Soviet bloc. It’s now often used to describe poor countries, or developing countries, and by extension, mostly nonwhite majority countries.

When Carlson worries about immigrants from the third world, he is talking about Hispanic, Asian and Black people who he worries will outnumber “current” voters. Current voters, in this formulation, are the white people who make up the majority of the American electorate.

Second, and revealingly, he is admitting that Republicans do not and will not appeal to new citizens who are immigrants.

But although white replacement theory is a conspiracy theory, the fact that the percentage of voters who are white in America is shrinking as a percentage of all voters is not. Neither is the fact that white supremacists are panicked about this.

White supremacists in this country have long worried about being replaced by people, specifically voters, who are not white. In the post-Civil War era, before the current immigrant wave from predominantly nonwhite countries, most of that anxiety in America centered on Black people.

Judge Solomon Calhoon of Mississippi wrote in 1890 of the two decades of Black suffrage following the Civil War, “Negro suffrage is an evil.”

Calhoon worried that white voters had been replaced, or outnumbered, by Black ones, writing: “Shall the ballot remain as now adjusted, the whole country in the meantime taking the chances of the rapid increase of the blacks, and leaving, in the meantime, the whites as they now are in those localities where they are outnumbered?”

Calhoon would go on to become the president of the state’s constitutional convention that year, a convention called with the explicit intention of codifying white supremacy and suppressing the Black vote. States across the South would follow the Mississippi example, calling constitutional conventions of their own, until Jim Crow was the law of the South.

The combination of Jim Crow voter suppression laws and the migration of millions of Black people out of the South during the Great Migration diluted the Black vote, distributing it across more states, and virtually guaranteed that white voters would not be outnumbered by Black ones in any state. The fear of “Black domination” dissipated.

Indeed, as extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was being debated in 1969, The New York Times made note of the fact that Attorney General John Mitchell, a proponent of a competing bill, was well aware that even if all the unregistered Black people in the South were registered, their voting power still couldn’t overcome the “present white conservative tide” in the South. As The Times added, “In fact, Mr. Mitchell is known to believe that Negro registration benefits the Republicans because it drives the Southern whites out of the Democratic Party.”

A reporter at the time asked an aide of a Republican representative, “What has happened to the party of Lincoln?” The aide responded, “It has put on a Confederate uniform.”

But now, in addition to Black voters voting overwhelmingly Democratic, there is a wave of nonwhite immigrants who also lean Democratic. And tremendous energy is being exerted not only by white supremacists in the general population, but also Republican office holders, to attack immigrants, curtail immigration, disenfranchise Black and brown voters and assail abortion rights.

One of the surest ways of preventing a Black person from voting is to prevent them from living. As The Times reported in 1970, Leander Perez, a man who had been a judge and prosecutor and “led the last stand against integration” in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, once famously linked Black birth control to racial dominance, stating: “The best way to hate a [expletive] is to hate him before he’s born.”

I would even argue that the bizarre obsession with trans people is also rooted in part in white anxiety over reproduction.

The architects of whiteness in America drew the definition so narrowly that it rendered it fragile, unsustainable, and in constant need of defense. Replacement of the white majority in this country by a more multiracial, multicultural majority is inevitable. So is white supremacist panic over it.

The Week’s Best Cartoons 3/6

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, cartoons, Environmental Issues, Humour, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Re-blogs, Social commentary

I thought perhaps some of the political cartoonists would be standing in the unemployment line once the former guy left and peace was once again restored to the nation.  But, I couldn’t have been more wrong!  The Republicans are keeping the cartoonists just as busy as ever with their horrible attempts to stifle voters’ voices, disregard the pandemic, and more.  Thanks to TokyoSand, we can see the best of the lot all in one place!

toon-1toon-2toon-4toon-5

See All The ‘Toons!

We will fight in the shade

Posted on by under Election 2020, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary, voting rights

Earlier this afternoon, I wrote about voter suppression and the GOP’s attempts to take away the voices of Blacks, Hispanics, and the poor. Our friend Brosephus lives in Georgia and he has written about one of those many attempts in his home state. The blatant attempts to take away our voices are so against what the Founders of this nation envisioned … let’s hope we can stop them in their tracks before the next election! Thank you, Brosephus, for helping us understand the realities, understand just how corrupt these attempts are.

The Mind of Brosephus

Years ago, I got to meet Gerard Butler, and our conversation humorously revolved around this particular movie. He told me about one time sitting next to a woman on a plane who was watching the movie 300, and the woman was oblivious to the fact she was sitting next to King Leonidas himself. Halfway through the movie, he says he tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention, pointed at himself on the screen, and pointed out it was him. We laughed at how people can be so focused on something that they’re clueless about what’s going on all around them.

Georgia House Bill 531 reminds me of that conversation, this movie, and the above scene in particular. So, let me take you on a quick journey through my cortex and see if you agree.

The 2020 election season saw record turnout which occurred in the middle of…

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Consider yourself warned

Posted on by under Election 2020, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Re-blogs, Social commentary

Our friend Brosephus is a mite grumpy today … and with good reason. Once republicans figured out the only way they could win is to cheat and disenfranchise those who are unlikely to vote for the ignoble republican candidates, they they did the inevitable — they cheated. And they are still at it today, even as the electoral college is verifying Joe Biden’s win. And down in Georgia … well, I’ll let Brosephus tell you why he’s grumpy today …

The Mind of Brosephus

I’m just a tad bit grumpy this morning. Maybe it’s due to cabin fever because of my current quarantine status. Maybe it’s due to other things. However, a tweet this morning from Jim Galloway pushed me over the edge and into that deep abyss where the Angry Black Man resides.

For a reference point, here’s three of Newt’s tweets within the past 24 hours.

Why, why, why? It’s a cold in Georgia this morning Newt, w so why don’t you enjoy a nice warm cup of Shut The F**k Up since we’re in a why mood. I’m tired of having to fight tooth and nail to protect my right guaranteed under the US Constitution from these a**holes. I’m also sick and tired of the media downplaying the dangers faced by my community.

This isn’t some new fangled GOP idea either. Remember this guy here?

Or, how about this guy here?

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Voting Rights — CHAOS!

Posted on by under cartoons, Election 2020, Environmental Issues, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

This is our only chance for the next four years to decide who will be the president of this nation, and the Republican Party and its representatives are attempting to curtail our constitutional right to cast our vote.  This year, because of a pandemic that is once again raging out of control, many of us cannot or will not spend an hour or more in line inside a building waiting to vote, nor should we need to.  A large number of us, myself included, requested mail-in ballots and will be voting by mail, or by dropping our ballots off in person at a designated drop box.

However, the United States Postal Service, now run by a man, Louis DeJoy, who has no experience, whose only qualification for the job was the large sums of money he has donated to Donald Trump, is so inefficient that it took ten days for me to receive a letter that was mailed from 15 miles away!  That could be a problem if someone mailed a ballot on, say, October 30th, or even today!  The girls and I took our ballots to the drop box at the Board of Elections, but some people, especially senior citizens, may not have that luxury.

There are numerous lawsuits in many states to expand voting rights, to allow ballots received after November 3rd as long as they were postmarked on or before that date.  Republicans are, naturally, opposed to anything that expands voting rights.  The good news is that people have been voting, despite the obstacles thrown in their way by the not-so-grand old party, and this morning I read that 51% of the number of people who voted in 2016 have already cast their votes this year!  That is truly inspiring … I think it quite possible that in spite of the GOP’s best efforts, we will have record turnout this year.

Here are some of the latest legal developments related to voting rights cases per the New York Times – some positive, others not so much:

Pennsylvania: The state’s highest court has ruled that election officials should count mailed ballots that arrive up to three days after Election Day. Pennsylvania Republicans are trying to get the Supreme Court to reverse the order, so that only ballots received by Election Day will count.

North Carolina: Republicans and the Trump campaign have asked the Supreme Court to block the state’s board of elections from extending the deadline to receive mail ballots. The board has said ballots can arrive until Nov. 12, as long as they were mailed by Election Day.

Wisconsin: The five Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court sided on Monday with Republican officials in Wisconsin, ruling that ballots must arrive by 8 p.m. on Election Day to count. (A lower-court ruling would have allowed state officials to count any mailed ballots postmarked by Election Day and received up to six days later.) In response, the state’s Democratic Party is urging voters to return mail ballots in person — to a drop box or clerk’s office — rather than mailing them.

Nevada: The Trump campaign has sued to stop the counting of absentee ballots in the Las Vegas area, evidently hoping to challenge the signatures on many ballots. Last night, the campaign and Nevada Republican Party filed a separate lawsuit, seeking detailed information on the vote-counting process.

Texas: The state’s top court yesterday upheld a policy announced by Greg Abbott, the Republican governor, which limits each county to a single drop-off box for mailed ballots. The state’s largest county — Harris, which includes Houston — is home to 4.7 million people.

Michigan: A conservative judge yesterday overturned an order by Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, and ruled that people could carry unconcealed guns at polling places on Election Day.

In many of these cases, Republicans have argued that changing voting rules because of the pandemic could lead to fraud (a claim that’s largely baseless) and that allowing ballots to be counted after Election Day leads to confusion and chaos.

Democrats have argued that protecting people’s right to vote, during a national crisis, should be top priority. Democrats have also pointed out that some Republicans have changed their position on the counting of mailed ballots: When late-arriving ballots seemed likely to help George W. Bush in Florida in 2000, Republicans argued that the state should count them.

The Michigan decision is appalling.  Why the hell does anybody need to take a gun with them to vote???  This is possibly the most ridiculous judicial decision I have ever heard and can only lead to trouble.  In my book, anybody being allowed to take a gun into the polling place constitutes potential voter intimidation.  Now, given that the majority of gun-nuts in this country are republicans … does anybody else see a problem here?

If at all possible, my friends, take your ballots to an official drop box, or don your masks and hand sanitizer and vote in person, for I simply do not trust the USPS to get the ballots delivered on time.

In the News: Voting Rights Updates From Around America

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Election 2020, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Re-blogs, Social commentary

Today, our friend TokyoSand gives us some important updates on how various states are working to ensure our right to vote, to have our voice heard and counted, despite the republicans’ best efforts to disenfranchise half of the country! Thank you, TS … great work!

Political⚡Charge

Our ability to vote is under siege by Trump and the Republican party. It’s critical that we pay attention to what is happening so we can push back when warranted, and celebrate the voting rights wins when they happen.

With that, here’s some recent voting rights news:

In North Carolina, a panel of judges denied the Republicans attempt to reinstate the voter ID law. Although some lawsuits are still outstanding, there will be no voter ID required for the November election.

Arkansas voters will see a ballot measure this fall which is seeking to establish an independent redistricting commission to redraw congressional and legislative district lines (which happens in 2021, following the census.) There is ongoing litigation that might take this measure off the ballot, but for now, voters will have the opportunity to vote for it.

In Georgia, two nonprofit organizations have mailed absentee ballot applications to…

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What Makes A Nation Great — Part II

Posted on by under education, Environmental Issues, Global Issues, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

I began this three-part series with yesterday’s post in which I listed some criteria that, in my view, are in large part what makes a country great.  Let’s take a look at how the United States stacks up on some of those …

We have a right to vote, but those who live in poor or minority neighborhoods may find it hard to do so, for polling places may be prohibitively distant, or the hours shortened such that the working person hasn’t the ability to get there.  Restrictive voter ID laws are more likely to disenfranchise poor and minority voters. We’ve seen, in recent months, how hard our ‘leadership’ fights to deny us the right to vote by mail during this pandemic year.  Polling places on college campuses where voters may be more ‘enlightened’ are shuttered.  And, due to gerrymandered districting, every vote is not equal.

A series of Supreme Court rulings between 1990 and 2010, most notably Citizens United v FEC in 2010, made it possible for large corporations and lobbyists to contribute nearly unlimited amounts of cash to political campaigns.  Many of our politicians are in the pockets of various industries, notably the fossil fuel and gun industries, such that the decisions they make in the legislature are not necessarily in the best interests of the people of the nation, but rather of those who pay big bucks to keep them in office.

The U.S. Constitution calls for a separation of powers, a system of three equal branches of government and the responsibility of each to keep the other two honest.  Our legislative branch, Congress, has become so divided by political party that Congress is deadlocked on most every bill.  Checks on the executive office were proven to be null and void on February 5th when the U.S. Senate voted against the evidence, against their collective conscience, and acquitted a ‘president’ who is guilty of crimes far greater than any who came before him.  Even the highest court in the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, is largely divided by loyalty to party.

As for an investment in shared infrastructure … think Flint, Michigan, and the water crisis that began in 2015 and continues to this day.  Need I say more?  More than a few times, states have been threatened with the withholding of federal funds if they didn’t accede to the wishes of the ‘president’.

And justice?  Let’s talk a minute about justice.  If you are Black, Muslin, Hispanic, or Native American, or poor, you might as well leave the room, for the justice that applies to you is different than that which applies to white, wealthy people.  Justice is for the wealthy in the United States of 2020.  Justice is for the friends of William Barr and Donald Trump.  I will pay a heftier price for a minor traffic violation than corrupt government officials will pay for robbing the citizens of this nation of millions of dollars.

Internally, we have a government that is doing everything in its power to deny affordable health care and education to its populace.  We have a government in favour of denying assistance to those in need.  We have a head of government who is racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic.  We have a government that is prejudiced against thinkers, prejudiced against so many groups that I cannot name them all.  We have, today, the wealthiest government in our history, yet their concern for our well-being is next to nil.

What makes a nation great is how well it functions for all the people, not just the few who are wealthy and powerful.  This nation fails that test miserably.  Our government favours those in large industries, gives them tax breaks, while 90% of us struggle to put food on the table, pay the rent/mortgage, and clothe our children.  Our government literally worships wealth and tells its citizens that the wealth of the 1% will somehow “trickle down” to them.  It doesn’t … never has … never will.  The prices of food, housing, and other commodities rise, but our wages do not rise at an equivalent rate, for the wealthy decided they needed to add another zero to their investment portfolios.  No, my friends, this is not what makes a nation great.

A great neighbor helps their friends in time of need.  We, instead, have largely abandoned our allies and instead have cozied up in bed with those bullies who would see the world relegated to only two or three great superpowers.  Our allies needed our help in such things as the Paris Climate Accords, World Health Organization (WHO) and the Iran nuclear agreement … and we turned our backs.

A great neighbor takes care of its home, its neighborhood. They don’t throw their trash into their neighbor’s yard, but that is exactly what we are doing. Science has proven that we are destroying not only our own environment, but that of the entire planet.  Oh, the planet will go on, but much of life on earth will not.  We had only just begun, by 2017, to make inroads in controlling the CO2 we put into the atmosphere, and the amount of plastics and other garbage we put into our landfills and ultimately the oceans that belong to all nations.  Now, all the regulations have been ditched in favour of … again … profit for the few, and we are the pariah of the world for our lackadaisical response to climate change.

In the midst of a deadly worldwide pandemic, our government has told us lie, stacked upon lie, stacked upon lie.  The scientists warned governments early on, yet ours chose to tell us that it was nothing, nothing to worry about, nothing to see here.  The lies added up until today we account for over 26% of the world’s cases of the coronavirus, though we have just over 4% of the world’s population.  And still, our leaders are lying to us, telling us it’s nearly over (it isn’t, not by a long shot), and urging us to put ourselves and our children at risk to grow an economy, though it may cost us our very lives.  The scientists, the medical experts, are being criticized, demeaned, and their voices stifled by a government more concerned with remaining in power than with our lives.

The United States has the highest level of income inequality of all the G7 nations.  The median black household income is only 61% of that of the median white household.  The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, where it has been since July 24th, 2009.  More than eleven years since the minimum wage was raised!  Meanwhile, many of the wealthiest in the nation pay taxes at a far lower rate than the middle-income earners, if they pay taxes at all!  In 2016, the CEOs of the top 350 U.S. firms earned on average $15.6 million.  The annual average pay of the typical American worker, by comparison, was $58,000.

There are other factors, of course, that could be considered, but I think that you can see by this assessment what a long way we have before this country can be considered ‘great’.  Given the divisiveness within our society today, it becomes obvious we are not successfully addressing our problems … a contented nation has no need for hatred and violence.

However, lest you think I am blind to what is actually good in this nation, I will have a third part to this series to talk a bit about the positive, what keeps us from being one of those “shithole” countries, and why there is hope for us yet.  So, I hope you’ll stay tuned for that!