Tag Archives: Electoral College

The Usurper versus The Challenger: Trump vs Biden, 1st Debate

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Donald J. Trump and Joe Biden squared off tonight in the ugliest, most brutal, and cringe-inducing presidential debate I’ve ever witnessed. Many older journalists say it’s the worst such debate in U.S. history, at least in the history of television. The majority of observers pointed to one participant in particular for the emotional squalor and mean-spirited bullying, Trump, the man who kept harping upon his belief he “won” the 2016 election for president. Did he? A valid case can be made Trump usurped the American presidency. Trump hijacked the GOP as he bulldozed aside traditional conservatives, neocons, and libertarian Republicans alike. Trump barreled on to lose the popular vote by about 3 million people. The candidate and his Far Right base interfered with the Electoral College’s vetting of candidates, forced the states to ignore third party and independent candidates, and intimidated the Electors to vote for him. Faithless electors rebelled against having to vote for either Trump or the also-unpopular Hillary Clinton. Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party attempted to get votes recounted in controversial states in an attempt to move the EC towards Clinton. The EC certified him the winner, Congress then declares whom the EC certifies as the winner, and then the winner is inaugurated. Trump apparently saw far more people out upon the Mall before him on Inauguration Day than actually existed. And all of this without adding in election tampering by ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin and the Russians. Yes, Trump is the Usurper, the Goliath in the house, and Biden stands firm as the Biblical David, the Challenger with a slingshot firing stones of truths thru Trump’s torrent of lies and distortions.

I’ve never felt such weird, unpleasant anxiety before a presidential debate before. Such debates are politically vital to the campaign, and they’re also regarded more as drama and entertainment rather than a serious debate over policy differences as to what are the best steps to address critical priorities. There was so much more at stake tonight than media-driven personality dramas. Trump pulled out his dirty mob boss attitude while Biden dug into this working class, small town, and suburban roots. Tonight’s clash proved ferocious. We stand at the brink of our own dystopian apocalypse, so if you’re one of those who doesn’t give a rip, wake up! Stop running around so oblivious and pay attention. If and once a fascist dictatorship is established, the tyrant often devours his own minions early on. Are you a minion? Or of the Resistance? Choosing doesn’t make you a “radical.”

The Challenger stood up to the Usurper in the White House tonight. A global pandemic rages as a recession worse than the Great Recession chews up our economy. Human-driven climate change is destroying our habitats. Gun violence, social justice conflicts, a partisan Supreme Court struggle, severe income inequality, an opioid epidemic, homelessness, underemployment, and Black Lives Matter versus the Police rips thru our neighborhoods like wildfire.

Perhaps conflating Trump with Goliath does a disservice to the Biblical giant. The Usurper in the White House built by Black slaves violated debate rules, ethics, morals, and boundaries. Trump demonstrated a stunning lack of respect for anything and everything. The man simply did not give a shit and delighted in throwing metaphorical turds. Trump was dangerously infantile and out-of-control as he narcissistically made the election all about himself even tho he bullied everyone around him including the moderator, Chris Wallace. There were several moments when Trump was so disrespectful and shamelessly rude Mr. Wallace, a prestigious journalist from Fox News who spent years prior with NBC and ABC, would have been justified to terminated the debate and send Trump packing. Either way, the real losers were not only the American people but people from all around the planet who deserved to hear the candidates present their platforms. Instead the world had ringside seats to witness a bully in action as a most unpresidential president attempted to hijack the first debate. 

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Trump Usurped the Presidency when the Electoral College Failed America

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YES, THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE FAILED AMERICA

ABOLISH THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

TRUMP IS A USURPER

Donald Trump usurped the Presidency of the United States of America. He did so by exploiting divisions and corruption within the two dominant parties. Trump ascended to the  Oval Office upon the backs of the Electoral College as the electors failed to properly vet the candidates and failed to vet them independent of party and state pressure. The Electoral College of the United States failed not because Trump lost the popular vote by the largest margin in history to carry 77 more state delegates than Hillary Clinton or anyone else to win the EC vote. Thus Trump was declared POTUS with the assumption the Electoral College did its job. It did not.

The EC failed America and yes, Earth, by failing to do its Constitutional duty. As such the EC failed to consider all of America’s presidential candidates, not just those from the Democrat-Republican Duopoly, i.e. the Two-Headed Snake in bed with the Giant Octopus of Big Business and Bigger Banks. This Duopoly distracts us all with its superficial drama while deep down below “the two heads” the body of the snake quietly and pursues its agenda. This pursuit is nearly unconsciously and habitual as if programmed from long ago. As an expression of Duopoly control, the Electoral College failed to deliberate over the candidates’ qualifications and character. The EC electors failed to even consider any of the strengths, weaknesses, and integrity of any of the women and men competing to become POTUS and VPOTUS to best determine who shall most faithfully execute the responsibilities and carry the burdens of such high offices. If the electors had done so, both Clinton and Trump would most likely have been dismissed as not worthy of the office. Unethical if not illegal practices became habitual over the years to eventually become normalized. What became normalized became established and accepted as “real” and thus “legal.” The Constitution gives little guidance to the otherwise helter-skelter structure of America’s overlapping jurisdictions in regards to the Electoral College.

The EC was designed by wealthy adult White male Capitalist revolutionaries to prevent demagogues and what they feared as those demagogues’ rabid mobs of ignorant and dangerous goons from the so-called lower classes from storming the political process to take over the country. The EC allowed itself instead to be manipulated by the Fifty States and by two corporatocratic political parties to allow Donald Trump to usurp the Presidency. Events since January 2017, a mere four months ago, have cemented the disastrous results of the Electoral College process as yet another example why we must abolish this institution.

Meanwhile, the country’s gone nuts in a world already on fire. It is as if the nation’s mind is seriously afflicted with the political and financial equivalent of toxoplasmosis parasites and brain tapeworms. This is yet another example of a much deeper malaise: so many of our actions arise from fear, hurt, greed, anger, and reactivity rather than from love, forgiveness, acceptance, courage, and responsiveness. This point is acknowledged here and is best served for another time.

The Electoral College of the United States nearly fractured in early January 2017 thanks to the lack of courage and foresight among many electors. The electors allowed themselves to be intimidated by the State regimes to vote for one of the two dastardly primary party candidates. “Nearly fractured” is not the same as “fractured,” obviously, but enough EC electors threatened to vote their conscience for whom they felt would be the best for their state or threatened some kind of mutiny some were removed by their state regimes and replaced with docile and obedient people. Yes, the states suppressed elector independence as well as full vetting of the various candidates.

Imagine being told you would not be allowed to vote unless corporatocratic political party operatives in control of any one of the fifty American state regimes, a corrupt setup that would have appalled those Founding Fathers who opposed political parties in the first place, commanded you to cast your ballot for a particular candidate. And you thought you lived in a democratic republic, albeit a capitalist one, where one puts country before party.

Despite all of the obstacles placed before them, seven electors survived attempts or threats to remove them from the EC to cast their vote for candidates other than the one from their party. None of the seven voted for either Clinton or Trump. They came closer than any of their colleagues to vet at least some candidates. One Republican elector stood up and dared the other electors of the College to vote their conscience to prevent Trump from becoming President. Clinton received 232 Electoral College votes. Trump, however, received 306 votes. Trump carried more states and counties while Clinton carried more of the population who actually voted. None of these hundreds of electors, however, gathered as an actual college to vet all of the candidates and then deliberate amongst themselves for whom would best serve the interests of the American people and their United States. Most of them voted for the political party they represented rather than on behalf of the population of their state. They obeyed the demands and expectations projected by the political machinery and governments of the states, all controlled by the Democrat-Republican Duopoly. Indeed to not do so would have those electors be branded as “faithless electors,” as were those seven “rebel electors.”

Political parties were not supposed to dominate government and political systems. Yet networks of wealthy capitalist oligarchs control two of these parties. As such “their” Republicans and Democrats rule and distort the electoral process. Voting in America is a shameful and asinine mockery of democracy. Instead of voting for one despotic puppet one gets to choose between two despotic puppets cloaked with illusions of liberty, prosperity, and peace for all. The Dem-Rep Duopoly dominates all Fifty States and thus determines for whom EC electors must vote.

Enough electors cast their votes without any attempt to deliberate to thus select Donald Trump as the next President. They did so even tho Trump LOST and LOST BIG by THREE MILLION votes! In an election riddled with accusations of electoral fraud by both sides, too. Ironically much of the current evidence beginning to emerge damns the Republicans altho they’re the one crying fraud the most and the loudest as the Democrats seek to point out Russian interference in the 2016 Election. The United States Electoral College of constitutional, capitalist, quasi-democratic republic thus elected a loser as President. Continue reading →

Civil War in 21st Century America?

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We would destroy ourselves

“Governments without credibility devolve into chaos. … The notion of credibility is why my political preferences don’t align with either of the candidates for president.” ~ Scott Adams

“The spread of fascism in the 1920s was significantly aided by the fact that liberals and mainstream conservatives failed to take it seriously. Instead, they accommodated and normalised it.” ~ James McDougall

Three points must be understood.

  • We in the United States of America are on the edge of civil war. This would be the case regardless of who “won” this election.
  • Few want to see or hear anything about this. Most dismiss it as alarmist rhetoric or far-right wing fantasy.
  • A civil war in a large, developed superpower would be catastrophic for this planet.
  • Let me rephrase what I just wrote, ok: A civil war in the United States of America would be a horror and incredibly stupid, so stupid I want to use the F-word.
  • Here’s another: People don’t want to experience extreme distress. They don’t want to see events race from unlikely possibility to likely probability. Then it’s too late. If more people saw such changes shift from bad to worse they would act to stop war by resolving conflict peacefully.

The United States is the most polarized it’s been since the American Civil War of 1861-1865. As I write these words on the 18th of November 2016, Hillary Clinton is well ahead in the popular vote, Donald Trump is well ahead in the Electoral College count, the Electoral College has not yet voted, the polls predicted Clinton to win, the media declared Trump the winner, Clinton conceded to Trump, and Trump proclaimed himself the President-elect.

Movements are underfoot to both promote and deny Clinton a victory over Trump by having the Electoral College vote align with the national popular vote. Clinton is ahead of Trump by over one million votes with about four million votes left to count. Her margin is expected to increase dramatically.

Both the Democrat and Republican parties are broken even tho their Two-Party Duopoly maintains its dominance over the elections, debates, and state electors to the national College. Independent third party candidates proved insignificant as the majority of Americans were too polarized between Lesser Evils. At the same time about half of legitimate voters even bothered to vote as the election was viewed by so many people as rigged, corrupted, and ultimately irrelevant.

Massive demonstrations were quickly organized in many cities with the majority of the demonstrators peaceful. Initially several of these marches and protests were organized by Socialist Alternative, a small but growing national organization of Democratic Socialists who leverage Marxist dialectical analysis, in conjunction with Socialist Youth and the Occupy Wall Street-inspired Movement for the 99%. Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Oakland, and New York City were the focal points for these protests. Other organizations quickly moved to organize demonstrations, too.

Ongoing protest movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock Sioux against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and the banks financing the corporations behind the pipeline merged with the anti-Trump demonstrations. LGBTQI people marched with those protesting degradation and violence against women and immigrants. Students from high schools and colleges walked out of class to join and in many cases lead the demonstrations.

Allegations swirl around claiming George Soros, a multibillionaire member of the so-called globalist Cabal groups and backer of Hillary Clinton, financed and influenced demonstrations against Donald Trump. So far research demonstrates he hasn’t altho he may do so in the future. He has donated millions of dollars to a broad spectrum of Leftist groups in the past, but most of them are neoliberal groups such as the Open Society Foundations.

Socialist Alternative and its allies, however, rapidly organized most of the post-Election protests on Wednesday 9 November, in multiple cities via social media as they marshaled 40,000 or more people within hours. Socialist Alternative also scorned any help from the billionaire class and refuses to accept donations from Soros and his elitist ilk.

Scattered violence ripples across the nation and appears to be escalating rather than decreasing. The Southern Poverty Law Center recorded 437 reports of “hateful intimidation and harassment” by Trump supporters from the day after the election thru the 14th of November. This includes 20 reports of assaults upon Trump supporters. Most, however, were by White racists and fundamentalist Christians upon other ethnic and religious groups including immigrants and by heterosexuals against LGBTQIs.

Other reports demonstrate a surge in bullying in the schools, increase in police violence, interruptions of work, high volatility in the financial markets, and greater unpredictability across the planet as different nations, corporations, banks, and non-state groups review their options.

Protests in support of the Standing Rock Sioux water protectors, accelerated by Trump’s declared victory even tho he continues to lose the popular vote, have since spread around the nation to include demonstrations against the 38 banks including 17 banks directly financing the corporations supporting the Dakota Access Pipeline across the Missouri River and sacred tribal lands. Many others, however, seek to downplay the violence and bring people back to focus upon peace, compassion, positivity, and finding ways to move forward in spite of deep and ugly divides.

Meanwhile immigration hardliners among the pro-Trump Republican leadership propose the United States use World War II internment camps of Japanese-Americans and Japanese immigrants then in line to be naturalized as U.S. citizens as models to deal with Muslim-Americans today and track Muslim immigrants. Trump is viewed as unstable and continues to elevate White racist, sexist, and anti-immigrant extremists as well as vitriolic anti-environmentalists into positions of power.

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