Our Fake Democracy by Timothy Egan
This op-ed in the NYT tells it all:
We tell ourselves stories in order to live, as Joan Didion said. We do this as a nation, as individuals, as families — even when that construct is demonstrably false. For the United States, the biggest institutional lie of the moment is that we have a government of the people, responding to majority will.
Mr. Egan goes on to point out that the “health care” bill currently in the Senate, and the one already passed by the House, represent deeply unpopular policies that will gut Medicaid and push over 20 million people off of “health insurance.” As we have pointed out repeatedly in the past, the United States is the only advanced country in the world that doesn’t have single-payer health care. At the risk of boring you, I will again point out that the US consumer pays almost twice as much for health care as in any other advanced country. A reasonable person would rather pay for their health care in taxes– a predictable, constant amount– than take the risk of being bankrupted by medical expenses. What is more, the tax burden would be significantly less than the average per capita cost of medical care. Rather than choosing the reasonable option, our government is trying to eliminate the small tax that is currently being paid by higher-income persons and trying to take it away from Medicaid.
We do not have a democracy because the poorer you are, the less likely you are to vote. The barriers to voting for poor people can be extreme. First, there is transportation to the polls. One would think that the Democrats would have an organized system for taking poor voters to the polls on Election Day, but they do not. There are a few scattered programs here and there, but nothing organized and country-wide. This is absurd and so elementary that it makes me just scratch my head. For all the money spent on everything involved in trying to win an election, this would probably be the most cost-efficient.
The other problems that constitute barriers to voting are harder to deal with: lack of desire to vote, barriers to registration, lack of “time”, gerrymandering, and so on. Just solving the transportation problem would increase motivation to vote, especially if the transportation effort is advertised.
Many other countries have solutions for those barriers to voting that have made it possible for poor people to vote, and they have more representative democracies as a result. There are also countries with systems that are much worse than that in the United States, but it seems silly to point out that we are better off than the people of North Korea, for example. No rational person would accept our system because it is better than the worst possible system.
The bottom line is that our democracy is compromised, and the consequences could be fatal. A few wealthy people may survive, but they will have blood on their hands.
Comments from a NYT article urging “Let’s Not Get Carried Away” investigating Don the Con:
Gibert Kennedy
Aiken, South Carolina
I agree that made up scandals such a Benghazi corrode our political discourse. However, I don’t think we should minimize the possibility that the Trump campaign worked with the Russians in swinging the election. There are s a lot of serious circumstantial that indicate collusion:
– Trump looks into the camera and asks Putin to find and release more Clinton emails.
– Kushner meets Russians in secret on islands off the SE coast of Africa
– Trump’s close campaign stand-ins Flynn and Sessions lie about their contacts with the Russians
– The transition team (if I remember the sequence correctly) seeks to set up a secret communication channel to the Russians that can’t be heard by other American agencies.
– The strongly pro-Putin characters in the campaign team like Manafort and Flynn, and Page
– Trump won’t release his tax returns.
– Trump is actively hindering the investigation.
– The only person Trump is loyal to is Flynn.These aren’t silly Tweets. These are significant activities that appear to link the campaign to Russia in deceptive ways. Nobody would be investigating if Trump had simply held transparent meetings with the Russians with an agenda to improve relations. This looks for all the world like the Trump campaign worked with a country hostile to the US to get help in winning a campaign. We need to run this to ground.
Franklin
Florida 36 minutes ago
Proof of collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign already exists. Roger Stone of the Trump campaign met with the Russian hacker known as gussifer. Rudy Gulliani of the Trump campaign predicted a “surprize” just before the Democratic Convention started which occurred when the Podesta e-mails were released to the media by the Russian hacker through Wikileaks. A Russian billionaire, who is a Putin loyalist, and his private jet plane were at three separate campaign stops of Trump at exactly the same time as Trump and his plane were in the respective cities. This is hardly a coincidence. The collusion was so evident that when the Convention’s Republican Platform Committee voted to insert a very tough plank on Russia getting out of Crimea, Paul Manaford, Trump’s campaign manager and his staff, interceded with the committee and the tough plank was removed. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Many other Trump campaign staffers met w/ Russian intelligence or Russian nationals as they admitted only after it was reported in the press. Finally, the “why” on Trump’s indifference and denial of Russian interference and collusion can only be fully answered when we learn the degree and extent to which Trump has been financially compromised by loans and bailouts from Russian billionaires. As one of Trump’s sons said, Trump doesn’t need loans from American banks because Russian loans and financing is available.
A piece in the Guardian reports that a man named Richard Burt, who is a known lobbyist for Russian interests, was invited to dinner twice by Jeff Sessions (“Redneck Jeff”) during the 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Burt, who has represented Russian oil and banking interests in Washington for several years, attended two dinners that Sessions held to discuss foreign policy strategy. Mr. Burt also helped write a speech for Don the Con in which he appealed for “easing in tensions” between Russia and America. That speech, given in April 2016, was attended by Soviet Ambassador Kislyak as well as Mr. Sessions.
Unfortunately, when Senator McCain asked Jeff Sessions last week whether he had any contacts with lobbyists for Russian interests, he denied any such meetings. So it seems that either Mr. Sessions has amnesia or he doesn’t care to let people know how extensive his contacts with Russian lobbyists have been. The Russians are extremely subtle, and any American who registers as a Russian lobbyist should be considered a potential spy– or at least, someone who is pushing for Russian strategic interests and at the same time, gathering information that might be useful to his Russian handlers.
Let us be clear. All Americans– both right- and left-wing– are under attack by Russian agents who intend to sow dissension and disunity, confuse us, lower our standard of living, subvert our way of life, and generally interfere with the functioning of American institutions. We are virtually at war with Russia, and the war is being prosecuted with vigor and intelligence by Vlad “the Impaler” Putin, a former KGB agent who pines for the former Soviet empire. The sooner we get rid of the extreme right-wing leadership in our Congress, White House, and state houses that is impairing our government and offering aid and comfort to our Russian enemies, the better. The soonest this can happen in a “smooth”, institutionally sanctioned fashion is November 2018. Until then, the Democratic minority must agitate vigorously, exercise our First Amendment rights, and scream as loudly as we can that we are under attack and Don the Con is an agent of our enemy.
This was located in a web site called “PollHype”– “The Red, White, and Blue Review”– which contains nothing but unabashedly pro-Donald stories, bashing everyone who criticizes the Don:
During an exclusive interview with “Fox & Friends,” Trump blasted the former president and his aides for the organized marches since his victory in the November 2016 election, and for the troublesome leaks that have impeded on his messaging.
“I think that President Obama’s behind it because his people are certainly behind it,” Trump said. “And some of the leaks possibly come from that group, you know, some of the leaks – which are very serious leaks, because they’re very bad in terms of national security.”
While the president doesn’t have concrete evidence proving that Obama is to blame, he’s not the only one who believes that his administration could be the culprit behind these acts.
A former senior intelligence official disclosed to Fox News that he suspects ex-CIA director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper – among other top officials – could be connected to the leaks.
However, the president isn’t too distressed by his shocking revelation, although he doesn’t see an end to these protests in sight.
But I also understand that’s politics,” Trump explained. “And in terms of him being behind things, that’s politics. And it will probably continue.”
The only reason I clicked on it is because it was included in a list of “sponsored” (paid advertising) sites that claimed “These 24 pictures of Donald Trump will change your mind”, illustrated with a photo of the Don standing close behind a blonde, well-endowed young woman– cropped to cut off the area below his chest, suggesting that his hands might be somewhere they should not. Clearly, the photo was intended to lure Donald-haters into clicking on it, hoping to see him groping some young victim. However, the twenty-four photos are all anodyne pictures of Don, including childhood photos, of his family, and of a few business associates. The web site consists entirely of puff pieces plugging Don’s virtues and bashing anyone who dares to criticize him.
So, here’s a web site probably paid for with campaign contributions that came from anonymous sources in large amounts… in service of Don’s re-election campaign, which was declared active on the day he was inaugurated this January last, seemingly ages ago but not even quite five months now. That’s right. Don the Con is accepting contributions to his campaign for re-election. Democrats need to gird their loins and get organized… and above all, get out the vote. And for G-d’s sake, stop clicking on that clickbait!
Irrigation Pumps Behind A Razor-Wire Fence
From the NYT today:
A former senior official said Mr. Mueller’s investigation was looking at money laundering by Trump associates. The suspicion is that any cooperation with Russian officials would likely have been done in exchange for some kind of financial payoff, and there would have been an effort to hide the payoffs, most likely by routing them through offshore banking centers.
As the trolls fighting Don the Con’s fall are saying: “There’s no There there.” Well, the reason we haven’t found the There is that people are trying to hide their complicity in this Russia-Trump collusion. You can’t seriously make us think that we haven’t found the There in six months of investigation because it isn’t there– it’s just hidden, carefully disguised as transactions like the estate that Don the Con sold to a Russian cut-out for an enormous profit (tens of millions of dollars) back in 2008, at the same time that other real estate prices were tanking because of the Great Recession. Remember that Don really stepped up his friendly talk about Vlad “the Impaler” Putin back in 2007; this has been going on for a very long time. In fact, the Russians have been cultivating Don the Con ever since American banks stopped lending to him back in the nineties. They saw then an opportunity to tie Don financially to their coat-tails, and he has been on their payroll ever since. This treason has been going on for a very long time.
From an NYT article about an interview that Oliver Stone did in February 2016 of Vlad “the Impaler” Putin:
“We never interfere within the domestic affairs of other countries,” Mr. Putin says.
Quote of the Day: Anxiety is Normal
From the NYT, in an article about Sarah Feder entitled “Prozac Nation is Now United States of Xanax”:
“If you’re a human being living in 2017 and you’re not anxious… there’s something wrong with you.”
From a New York Times article about the resurgence of left-wing political activism among “communities of faith” and even “evangelicals”:
“The fact that one party has strategically used and abused religion, while the other has had a habitually allergic and negative response to religion per se, puts our side in a more difficult position in regard to political influence,” said the Rev. Jim Wallis, the evangelical social justice advocate who founded the Sojourners community and magazine in 1971.
“Most progressive religious leaders I talk to, almost all of them, feel dissed by the left,” he said. “The left is really controlled by a lot of secular fundamentalists.”
I have some bad news for Reverend Wallis: the “Left” isn’t controlled by anybody. There is no “Left” per se. There is a “Right” called “The Moral Majority” and led by Don the Con. But there is no one politician, nor any one group, that can claim possession of the soul of the “Left.” Even the Democratic Party doesn’t have the allegiance of left-wingers. They wanted Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, remember?
So if I wanted to say that a true Left-wing position includes religious people who are willing to tolerate other faiths and even atheists/agnostics, no one could say that I am wrong. Because no-one has the moral authority to claim that exclusion of anyone who wants to be included is right. So there.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 