Populism and the Electoral Fix

Populism or Fix?

In one of my Constitutional history courses I remember the Professor asking us what one thing in the Constitution most threatened freedom and democracy.  Most picked the various references to slavery, some the 10th Amendment; etc. He then astounded us all by naming the Electoral College! 

And then he proceeded to present the followng argument.  This was in 1974. 

This  is why those who ignore history are fated to repeat mistakes over and over again.  The electoral college was part of a compromise to entice the slave states to join the union; part of the 3/5 compromise.  Because the south had fewer people, even in 1789, the states were reluctant to join a union that already was showing signs of not agreeing with slavery.  So a deal was struck to count each owned slave as 3/5 of a man for representative purposes AND for electoral college purposes.  The result?  The south dominated the Presidency really until the Civil War. One main reason for the Civil War is not just that Lincoln was anti-slavery but he was from the NORTH! 

The truth is one man (women  couldn't vote then) one vote was NEVER part of our Constitution for slavery's benefit.  And that slavery system was the most brutal in human history!

This "compromise" of dubuous worth, was smashed with the Civil War.  But the electoral college, that should have been overturned by the 13th Amendment, was left in (probably to give something to the south).  This was the mistake that could imperil us all!

The result today is an critical  imbalance between smaller populated states and larger populated states.  The winner take all aspect is critical here, along with the minimum electors for example for Wyoming, whose electors  stand for a few people while in California an elector stands for thousands.  So once again we have elected a President who did not win the "popular vote"; what other vote is there? 

And this will become a norm in the future.  The electoral college once again is in a sense being used by white supremacy to continue its sick hegemony in the United States.

In response to the dangers of populism the writers of the Constitution at first proposed to only allow members of state legislatures to vote for President (this method nearly was made part of the Constitution- it continues in the case of neither candidate getting a majority, the House picks the President, the Senate the Vice President...there is an anachronism for you!)  , since the popular vote is too subject to populist whim: interesing since this  system benefited a populist candidate! 

And we are not going to get over it, because this has been planned for years by Republicans, who realized long ago that the population was getting more diverse, especially in urban states, and they do not stand a chance if it wasn't for the electoral college. 

It was just reported that in California BOTH houses of the legislature have a 2/3 majority of Democrats versus a dwindling Republican minority.  This massive imbalance of power is a direct result of a Republican Party who nationally is now governed by a white supremacist who is the opposite of diversity.

In a diverse state, which is the procursor of where the United States is going, the ONLY way for the white minority to prevail is to cheat democracy.  If you don't think it works, look at Apartheid in South Africa, that for years continued a white small minority in power with electoral gimmicks and tricks.  That resulted in decades of repression and near civil war. 

Finally, the 2016 turnout was the lowest on record, which again is a product of voter suppression laws and a deliberate strategy by the Republican  party to rig the thing using low turnout and target "battleground states" to get the magic 270 electoral votes.

It worked, but your candidate now has the problem of NO mandate!  And we are in for it!

The gravest threat to our freedom is the electoral college!!!!!  My professor was a prophet!

It's Called Public Administration

It’s called Public Administration.  And it’s called urbanization and suburb development.  

And what these concepts have done is change the way American’s live. 

“The City in History” by Lewis Mumford, written in 1961, is a work that describes in wonderful literate detail, the development of our urban and suburban lifestyles.

It’s an old book but one of the best I’ve ever read to describe the development of the way we live today in America and in fact, around the world.  I read it long ago when I was getting a Masters in Public Administration.  

Essential to his discussion is the fact that urban and suburban planning by professionals  is essential to life as we know it.

Sounds different from the myths of populism,  right?  We live with a mythological vision of American life that is still stuck in the 19th century.  We continue to wish to find a place back on the farm in an agrarian setting where “rugged individualists” are the heroes. “The Waltons” always comes up as an example of this yearning for the "simple life".   

Our movies, our television dramas, still resort to this convention; that we are happiest with the simple life, on a farm, independent of others with our faithful (God always is involved) family.

Problem is this bucolic vision was just that; a vision.  Even in the frontier, we had to gather together into villages and towns for survival.  The problems of septic cleanliness itself, required village and town development; treated water is the single biggest reason for live expectancy.  

In short, you lived alone in the mythological single family farm, you usually died early and often.  Being down river from a farm means drinking fouled water; and you die.  

Only in banding together was there a chance to survive and a chance to have a decent life.  Only in finding a way to keep from getting cholera could you survive in the 1800s.  

And we have been doing that for hundreds of years.

The fact is in the United States urbanization is the norm.  The vast majority of people live in urban settings with all the hierarchy and infrastructure that is necessary for a healthy lifestyle.

And that means, in sharp contrast to the myths of the rugged individualist, planning and government is a given.  Government bureaucracy is necessary for life itself.  

What we have today, with the phenomenon of the Tea Party, Trump, and modern conservatism is a mythological problem.  A political movement, populist and often delusional, is trying to push us into a reality that is impossible to achieve.  We cannot survive without the bureaucracy they hate so much!

It screams at us to be angry because our government doesn’t work to put us back in the ideal small, agrarian community, where men were men and women were (well slaves).

And there are guns (in the 1800s gun ownership was far below what it is today; ordinary people simply could not afford them) and there was the ideal of the rugged individual and true “freedom”.  

And a gun culture in an urban setting results in a killing field, making areas of cities so dangerous that even the police won’t go into them; a nightmare.

Fact?   Well, the fact is that the bucolic agrarian life never existed in the first place.  The first thing the white Europeans did when they colonized the “New World” was build a fort; that’s right,  a fort.  

And the next thing they did is die in great numbers because the infrastructure they needed to live was back in England.  Only the Indians, who rescued more than one colony, showed  the colonists (who would soon became their killers), how to survive in the hostile New World.

And towns and villages is how they survived, where the WE not the ME was essential to survival.  The towns and villages, soon to become cities, were the way the West was conquered, NOT the small farms.  

Lewis Mumford and other writers of public administration teach professionals how to administer urban and suburban entities.  There is a skill set that provides the government that allows business to prosper, children to grow, and public safety to exist.  It is a skill set.  You need experts to make it work!

Today with the renewal of populism in Trump and the right wing Tea Party types, we see a call to renounce professionals, experts it you will, as somehow part of an elite or establishment that represses freedom.

Fact is it  is exactly the opposite.  Freedom is NOT Free!  It requires planning, safety and infrastructure that allows at the most base level, water that is safe to drink so we all don’t die of dysentery; public safety that fights fire and yes, stops the bad buys from stealing your house.   

Trump constantly tries to persuade  us to mis-trust experts.  

It is no accident that he is a real estate developer.  

Real estate developers have to deal with government regulations all the time.  And often they do everything they can to cut corners to make more money.  Trump is renowned for this.  And sometimes buildings fall down and burn down because of code violations.  And we as home buyers want and need legal protections when we buy a home.  

So there is a tension between public administrators and developers like Trump.  There is a tension between the pubic interest to have safe housing and charlatans who try to rip us off.  

Urban planning and regulations are there are will stay there no matter how much we wish for a return to the “good old days”.  

Trump’s populism is self serving, he is fooling a whole lot of people with a promised reality that is simply not possible.  The elite is NOT the problem.  Our idealism is the problem; it lives is an unreal place.  We NEED experts to help us navigate an increasingly complex urban infrastructure.  

“The City in History” is a great read.  It proves again and again that we NEED professionals to build and maintain urban and suburban centers that are safe and healthy.

Without them, in Trump’s world, we will have chaos!

"Sorry"

“Sorry”, and a shrug of his shoulders.   That was Donald Trump’s pathetic apology to Megan Kelly when she confronted him with her anger about his sexist comments during her moderator debate duties.  She crossed him and he accused her of being on her period.

Trump is the ultimate result of the swing to the right wing that has been going on in the Republican Party for years; and this is fueled ultimately in the age old stimulus of hate and racism. 

You see America did a very bad thing, it elected an African American President.  And that was against the old guard, white supremacy standard  that have plagued this country for over three hundred years. 

I think President Obama and all of us underestimated this.  Certainly “Black Lives Matter” has not.  They see it everyday, as more people of color are gunned down, or jailed for having a broken tail light.

For years conservatives have patiently worked to create this climate of fear and racial hatred.  It has been toward one end, eliminating democracy behind a fascist dictator.

And in Trump, an unlikely candidate to be sure, they have found their man.  Violence and hatred personifies his campaign.  His rallies usually deteriorate into slugfests, with an outnumbered person of color (always outnumbered, white supremacists are too chicken shit to ever act without a huge numerical advantage) getting the crap beaten out of them.

But there is more.  I have a friend who works for a Tea Party Republican in the California legislature.  His Facebook posts are constantly laced with well “researched” attacks on Democrats, but more, on government itself.

For some idiotic reason, Tea Party Republicans think no government is best government:  Not local government, or smaller government, NO government. 

Just a passing understanding of the Weimar Republic failure in the 1920s in Germany will cause alarm here.  It is exactly the same technique Hitler used to destroy democracy in Germany, attacking government itself especially democratic institutions that were depicted as constantly failing.

That is echoed in Trump’s constant charges that America is in decline, that government doesn’t work anymore.

Government doesn’t work?  What political party has blocked every piece of legislation that the African American President has offered.  This always had as its aim, the destruction of the legitimacy of the President and more, the destruction of faith in the democratic process; especially when a person of color is involved.

And they succeeded.  A majority of Americans today feel the country is going in the wrong direction even with record job creation and a recovery from the worse conservative caused recession since the Great Depression.

By doing what the then minority leader of the Senate said right after Obama was elected, blocking everything the President tried to do, the public has been fooled into believing the non action of the government is the President’s fault, not the blockading Republican Party.

And a by-product of this, conveniently, is the destruction of faith in democracy itself,  opening the door for the election of an authoritarian dictator:  Donald Trump.

Conservatives have been working on this for over forty years: beginning with the Prop 13 “Revolution” and culminating in Donald Trump.  It all has been planned by super rich right wing fanatics (the Koch Brothers) and others who will do anything to protect their super rich status; including the destruction of our democracy.

And my friend, whose present cause is slyly using public pension funding woes (caused by the conservative recession of 2008) to defeat a tax measure in Redding that would fund police and fire protection.  He is using the same old bait and switch tactic that Prop 13 used, creating anger in the public at “spendthrift Democratic programs that actually help society” by cutting funding and dramatically reducing their effectiveness.

Prop 13 was so successful in doing this to public education; Prop 13 destroyed the K-16 free public education system in California so effectively that now Charter Schools, Corporate run in an undemocratic way, are wrongly seen as the salvation of public education.  What they are is a mean spirited form of re-segregating the schools, again white supremacy wins out.

So, the trick is, con the public into mis-trusting public institution’s by cutting funding through tax cuts, then inserting private alternatives (private prisons come to mind here) that are run by profit making corporations that use social need to make profits and greatly decline the public trust, safety and confidence in their government.

Conservatives depict themselves as “muckrakers” who are just trying to save public money.   They depict themselves as heroes, working for the betterment of all, saving the public’s money against greedy teacher’s unions and liberal fanatics. In truth, they are working toward a common goal, ending democracy and establishing a totalitarian fascist dictatorship.

If you think I am exaggerating, go to a Trump rally!  Watch and listen to the cues.  American is half an inch from fascism. 

The Fairness Doctrine

“In response, the FCC began to reconsider the rule in the mid-80s, and ultimately revoked it in 1987, after Congress passed a resolution instructing the commission to study the issue. The decision has been credited with the explosion of conservative talk radio in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. While the FCC has not enforced the rule in nearly a quarter century, it remains technically on the books. As a part of the Obama administration’s broader efforts to overhaul federal regulation, the FCC is finally scrapping the rule once and for all.”

So the Fairness Doctrine finally died, and with it democracy itself.

The Fairness Doctrine was an attempt to regulate political speech on radio and T.V.  

It did not apply to newspapers or magazines.

And conservatives hated it.  

Their excuse for screwing up the country every time they got control was the liberal media.  You can hear echoes of that in Trump’s rants about the unfair media.

What we don’t hear about is the fact that corporations own the media.  And corporations are no friend of liberal democrats.

In fact, the Trump phenomenon is a product of the Fairness Doctrine being gutted.  

We had an example of it yesterday.  Trump, who was sagging in the polls, decided to try a Hail Mary and take the foolish offer of a meeting from a politically crippled Mexican President.  So off he flew to Mexico to act Presidential.  Meanwhile Hillary Clinton was meeting with the American Legion,  a tradition that both Presidential candidates do every election.  Usually the American Legion speech is well covered by the media, since it is a major foreign policy speech.

We didn’t hear hardly a thing about Hillary’s speech; which was surprising well received by the American Legion.  

What we saw was a corporate media cover the Trump circus all the way to Mexico and back.  Meanwhile not ONE new policy change was forthcoming from Trump.  He went to Mexico, lied as usual to the sucker President (claiming they did not talk about the wall while the President of Mexico tweeted that they did and Mexico was NOT paying for it).  Then Trump turned right around, after sounding almost diplomatic in Mexico, and fed red meat to his racist rabid supporters.  

In short, he got a full day of “breathless coverage” blocked Hillary from any publicity at all, and “won the news cycle”.  We got absolutely nothing new policy wise from Trump…It was an enormous con!

He also has not bought any real political advertisements to speak of. Why is that?   

Usually this would be a death knell, but without any shred of the Fairness Doctrine left, there is no regulation of balanced and fair coverage of the Presidential candidates.  Trump, an entertainer, figured out a long time ago, that he could dominate the daily news cycle in the absence of any Fairness Doctrine with his lies and bullshit.

And there is nothing any of us can do about it, except turn off the T.V.  

I have a good friend who is a Democrat text me last night asking, “Do you have MSNBC on?”

The reason was Trump was making his Immigration Announcement, which as it turns out was the SAME policies he has been spewing out for over a year…no change, nothing.

It was all a con!    

Meanwhile Hillary goes to the American Legion, makes a major foreign policy address and receives practically no coverage at all.

Look, Trump won the primary doing the same thing.  He is using the huge hole conservatives put in any kind of fairness in political coverage, with greedy media giant corporations, some who are very conservative (Fox and Disney come to mind), who are working openly to elect Trump.  

Democracy requires that all sides can communicate their positions to the public.  Currently the media is fixed to only carry the most conservative messages.  It took a Trump to figure out that he doesn’t even have to buy political advertisements, all he has to do is be a showman, drive up cable T.V. ratings, and even MSNBC carries him 24-7.

And sure enough, the polls are tightening as we hear nothing but about Hillary’s emails and the Clinton Foundation and Trump, Trump, Trump.

The problem is this:  One sided news coverage prompted by political agendas that drowns out the opposition can lead to dictatorships.  That’s right, fascist dictatorships.

How do we know?  Look at Nazi Germany.  The first thing Hitler did when he took power was to get the Reichstag to pass a law making negative press coverage of his actions a CAPITAL offense; that’s right the death penalty.   The second thing Hitler did was burn down the Reichstag, ending even the sham of democracy.

The first thing Trump has done, as he demands that Hillary have a press conference (knowing full well the email faux “controversy” will be brought up by Fox and Friends) is to exclude certain newspapers from even his rallies that don’t follow his party line.   His “Fairness Doctrine” is to exclude those medias that don’t pay him blind attention:  like Fox News.   

With the Fairness Doctrine he could not have done that.   The Fairness Doctrine demanded equal time for example if one political candidate attacked the other.  There was a rebuttal time, similar to what you see when the President gives the State of the Union (by the way there is NO requirement that happen anymore because the Fairness Doctrine is totally gone). 

What we have  now is publicity control by those who seek to destroy our democracy.  We have lost the principle of equal time for opposing viewpoints.  

So as you drone away watching Fox, or even MSNBC, you are watching political whores, who will sell out democracy for a ratings uptick.

And we have nothing to protect us from this; we allowed the Fairness Doctrine to die, and our way of life will die with it.

The Reckoning!

When Is It Treason?

I was the early spring of 1865.  President Lincoln had won re-election in the midst of the Great Civil War.  By this time almost 500,000 Americans were dead nearly 1 million wounded.  1 out of every 5 families in the United States had lost a loved one to the war.

After the war a scourge of illness and even starvation killed thousands more.

And Lincoln told the peace negotiators at Appomadix to allow a mule and a firearm to the surrendering Confederate soldiers.  He allowed Jefferson Davis to flee to Cuba and Robert E. Lee to retire to his mansion in, of all places, Arlington, Virginia.  

And then John Wilkes Booth and a bevy of conspirators killed Lincoln.  

They did it as a conspiracy, not as a spur of the moment thing.  Their aim was to kill the entire Lincoln cabinet, and they nearly accomplished their goal.

Their aim was to restart the Civil War, upend the peace agreement, and continue the killing.  

Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

The entire south had committed treason after all.  And Booth wanted, even was begging with his heinous act, to goad the north into enforcing the Constitituion and come down hard on the south.  His dream was the "south would rise again" and defeat the north.

Of course this was impossible, since by now the Union Army was quite simply the strongest Army on the planet, armed with the most modern weapons and understand what would be the near downfall of mankind: total war.  KInd of like today.

If any of you out there think in your wildest 2nd Amendment fantasies, that you could defeat the U.S. Army, Marines and Navy you are nuts!

The arming of the south and its ability to still betray the constitution through treason was what Booth was trying to instigate.

And he nearly accomplished his goal.  Vice President Johnson  had to endure an impeachment trial for continuing Lincoln's conciliatory position, deciding to not enforce the Constitution and quite frankly hang a third of the southern states traitors. 

Booth quite literally enforced what many foolish Americans today call 2nd Amendment Rights, with means rebel against the United States using guns.

Donald Trump basically did the same thing yesterday.  He evoked the Second Amendment and encouraged people to take up arms against their government in a flat treasonous act!

Nothing more nothing less.

I hear it all the time as an excuse for the lack of effective firearm laws in the United States.  In a democracy, with plenty of peaceful ways to push your political agenda, I hear more and more we need the 2nd Amendment to defend ourselves from our government.  "We need the 2nd Amendment to protect ourselves from our government".  That folks is treason!  Read the damn Constitution quoted above.  Every time you quote your 2nd Amendment Rights in connection with resisting the legal force of the United States your are committing treason!

This is EXACTLY the same thing that John Wilkes Booth said...the same thing.

It is treason folks.  And once again we pass on enforcing the Constitution because "it was a bad joke", or "he really didn't mean it" or whatever.

Fact is Trump, like Booth, was encouraging violence against the United States (have you forgotten that his target is the former First Lady of the United States and there is strong federal law that makes what he said a federal felony).  

It is also treason!

Suicide

Statistics show that violent crime overall has dropped precipitously in the past two decades.  Statistics and observation show that the public’s perceptions of violent crime, including terrorism, is that Americans are at great risk.

In Redding, my home town, the homeless population is perceived as an occupying army, full of violent thugs, who steal and menace.  No data supports that assumption.

It’s fear folks and its being manipulated and propagandized to make you vote and act a certain way.

We have an African American President for the first time in American history, and the calls for action because of run away crime and violence have never been so shrill.  Just yesterday the slogan of Donald Trump changed in one day from Make America Great Again to Make America SAFE Again.  Note  the words.  A small change you say, right.    WRONG!
In 1968 I was a college senior and watched in horror as the country blew up.  The Democrats had destroyed a divided Republican Party in 1964 in the greatest landslide in American political history.  In four short years, thanks to the Vietnam War, and the race riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King,  Richard Nixon was elected President running on a platform of white backlash to the wave of perceived violence within and outside of the United States.

The facts that America was winning the Vietnam War and the violence over M.L. King was constrained was completely lost in the propaganda war Nixon slyly used to convince the nation that there was a clear and present danger to the “law n order” of the United States.

And last night, predictably, here came the “Make America Safe Again” a cynical propaganda response to the Police shootings of late.  Again, they are doing it again!  Why, because it works!

And what was the result of the “law and order” campaign of 1968 and 1972?  Well there was Watergate for one.  And a retrenching of white supremacy that resulted in “A New Jim Crowe” that culminated in rather than a "war on poverty" but a “war on crime” and a “war on drugs”.  And millions of people of color went to prison.

Bill Clinton was able to stem the tide of conservative racial manipulation by becoming a war on crime warrior, passing a host of laws that were  intended to stop the “crack epidemic”, but actually incarcerated a generation of young men of color.  In a very real sense the Jim Crowe laws that the Civil Rights Act and the Voter Rights Acts had intended to end was reborn in even more severity.  In short, white supremacy won. 

Today we see the end of this logic in the “Black Lives Matter” movement.   Racial justice has been reduced from stopping discrimination in hiring and housing to stopping the killing of people.  The difference in context is glaring; in effect civil rights and justice has moved dramatically backward in the face of “law and order”.

Law and order worked to stop the small tide, weak but growing, that was painfully ending Jim Crowe and white supremacy.  It worked then, it will work now.

Why?  Because all white people know in their souls, in the very pit of their stomachs that people of color KNOW.  They know how they have been brutalized over the centuries.  They KNOW what happened to Native Americans.  They know that America was not built on Manifest Destiny of spreading democracy but on stealing land and enslaving people.  They know in their bones that a mammoth injustice has been done and there may be a reckoning.

And it is the reckoning that scares the death out of white people. 

The irony of course is that pure white people are ceasing to exist in America.  In a few short years people of color will outnumber Caucasians.  In fact, this is already the case if you count mixed race people (like myself).
In short, Americans wind of being hateful and afraid of THEMSELVES.
It is not an understatement to say that the split personality of America lies behind our internal struggles to define ourselves.  Our President has written a book and often refers to his mixed race background.  He also has talked about the internal struggles this dichotomy has brought. 

The diversity of America that grows by the day clashes with its white supremacy and law n order legacy.  It is behind the Trump candidacy, thrusting a political novice into running for the Presidency. 
I have remarked on the whiteness of his Vice Presidential running mate.  This may sound inappropriate but I am not so sure that Trump did not do it on purpose. 

This election is all about white supremacy and race.  It is being manipulated into a reaction against the “black guy” in the White House (note why do we call it the white house?) and now guess what, law n order will be the marching orders.  It is not an accident that Trump headed up the birther movement. 

Is this racial politics?  Am I talking racial politics?

You bet I am, because I am old enough to have seen it done in 1968 and 1972.  I have seen the most massive incarceration of Americans since slavery.  I have seen efforts for social and economic justice destroyed by the fear of Americans to face THEMSELVES!

That’s right, face ourselves.  We refuse to acknowledge what is right in front of us when we look into the mirror.  The problem is rather than reach out and love ourselves we once again give into the merchants of fear and hate.

And so the reckoning, ironically, will actually happen.  The destruction of America will not be from outside or from colored thugs; it will be a suicide!

White Supremacy

We don't even start the conversation in the right area:  white supremacy.  We dodge that term, whites, or part whites like me, sweep it under the rug.   
          
Then we read history, not the white supremacy doctored history, but the indigenous people's history, the African American, Asian American history, the NAACP history.

And we find the truth; Manifest Destiny was NOT the spreading of  the democratic dream to the world, it was a land grab and an economic cheat that used slave labor and stolen land to build an economic super power.
In short, our ancestors were either victims of this crime or perpetrators.

Most of us, like me, walk around with both coarsing through our veins.  So we are conflicted from the start.
So what do you do, hate your country?  Or do you hate those who point out the lies?  Or do you ignore it all.
That would be the choice most Americans take.  They ignore, they make excuses they look the other way.
Only a few years ago, many took a more active role and attacked anyone who talked about the lie, jailed them, even worse.
Today it is the culture of silence.  The culture of white "backlash" that supports Trump.  It is angry, that is the usual excuse, because amazingly white middle class men finally have figured out they are getting screwed.

They are angy at the "Blacks" the "Thugs" and want to "Make America Great Again".

Amazingly, they completely ignore what has happened to people of color in our highly unfair ecnomic system.  The standards of living of Native and African Americans have declined MORE than middle class whites.  Some African Americans have improved their lot, but from what?

From the grinding poverty of Jim Crowe America; that is an improvement?

In short, white suemacy is white rich man's supremacy.  And it is firmly in control.  Look at the Republican Party's ticket.

So look the other way, ignore.  But in voting for white supremacy you are cutting your own throat!