The American people also learned from the report that Mueller declined to prosecute Donald Trump Jr. because, in plain English, he was too dumb to know that he was likely committing crimes.Of course, poor and working-class people are not allowed such latitude, or given the benefit of the doubt regarding how their emotions or intelligence may have impacted their decision-making and other behavior. This is true more generally for nonwhites, Muslims, immigrants and all those viewed as the un-American “other.”
Category Archives: 2020 Election
Watching the issues, news, events and discourse regarding the WH, Congress, state and local elections taking place in 2020.
Trump’s Man on the Inside at the IRS | DCReport.org
Charles Rettig is Running the Tax Agency for One Reason Only—To Keep His Boss’s Returns Locked Up
“Unless they are too brazen or clumsy, very rich tax cheats with very good lawyers get to deal with their tax offenses behind closed doors. As a criminal tax defense lawyer once told me, “I get paid to save people from indictments for their tax crimes by settling cases before their names go into the public record.”
Source: Trump’s Man on the Inside at the IRS | DCReport.org
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The Cult of Trump
Millions of Black Voters Are Being Purged From Voter Rolls, Often Illegally: Report
Millions of Black Voters Are Being Purged From Voter Rolls, Often Illegally: Report
Residents cast their votes at a polling place on November 4, 2014, near Ferguson, Mo. Photo: Scott Olson (Getty Images)
As the end of Barack Obama’s presidency grew closer, election officials began preparing for the next election. Instead of strengthening the security of voting machines and making voting more accessible to citizens, states did the exact opposite. But they didn’t just make it harder to vote. For hundreds of thousands of registered, eligible voters across the nation, they made it impossible.
Voter Purges (pdf), a new report by the Brennan Center, highlights the systematic purging of voters from rolls by state and local officials around the country. These are not random, isolated cases. It is a methodical effort that disproportionately affects minority voters. Even worse, no one seems to care.
In 1993, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) which was an attempt to make registering to vote easier by offering driver license applicants the opportunity to register to vote. The law also prevented states from purging voters unless they met certain requirements.
But the Brennan report highlights how states have skirted the law and purged voters without punishment. And after the Supreme Court dismantled the requirements for voter pre-clearance with the Shelby v. Holder ruling, states with histories of voter discrimination no longer required federal pre-clearance before purging rolls.
Between 2014 and 2016, 16 million registered voters were removed from state rolls, 33 percent more than were moved between 2006 and 2008. For the election of 2012 and 2016, the Brennan Center estimates that two million fewer voters would have been purged if those states had to apply by the provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
Some of the egregious highlights of the report include:
- In June 2016, the Arkansas secretary of state gave a list of 7,700 names to county clerks to be removed from the rolls because of supposed felony convictions. That list included people who had never been convicted of a felony and formerly convicted persons whose voting rights had been restored.
- In 2013, Virginia deleted 39,000 names from its voting roster. In some counties, the mistakes on the list were as high as 17 percent.
- A federal court halted a purge after Hurricane Katrina after justices found that one-third of the purged names came from a majority black parish in of New Orleans.
- After the Shelby v. Holder decision, Texas purged 363,000 more voters than it did the election cycle before the case. Georgia purged 1.5 million more voters.
- Alabama, Indiana and Maine have illegally instituted the widely ridiculed Crosscheck system (on which Charles D. Ellison previously reported on for The Root) that purges voters without federally-mandated notification.
- In 1986, one Louisiana official remarked that a voter purge effort “could really keep the black vote down considerably.”
- Instead of checking out inequities, Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice has been urging states to do more purging.
Almost every type of voter purge disproportionately affects black voters and voters of color. Some states purge rolls based solely on names but non-whites are more likely to have the same names. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 16.3 percent of Hispanic people and 13 percent of black people have one of the 10 most common surnames, compared to 4.5 percent of white people.
Black and Hispanic voters are more likely to move, often in the same jurisdiction, but voter purges based on address eliminate them from voting. Officials also use “voter caging” which intentionally sends mail to verify addresses in a format that cannot be forwarded, leading to the disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.
African Americans are also more likely to have felony convictions, and elderly and minority voters are more likely to be incapacitated, all reasons for which someone can be purged from a voter roll.
Almost every study ever done on this issue shows that in-person voter fraud is almost nonexistent. Instead, these purges are intentional efforts to restrict voting rights.
Some of the easily-implementable recommendations to rectify this travesty include:
- Public notifications of impending voter purges.
- Making purge lists available to the public, including at polling places.
- Accepting provisional ballots from purged voters.
- Universal voter registration forms and rules.
- Stop using failure to vote as a reason to purge voters.
All of these policies seem like they would be universally-accepted fixes for a flaw in our democracy.
But then again, not having a Russian agent for a President seems like a smart thing too. How’s that working out?
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A Note from OCG
We will now have an alt-right #SCOTUS There is little that we of goodwill can do about it now. It is too late for those who would, who could have to claim their government. We all know something is wrong – it has been for a very long time. When the horse is out of the barn, it is too late to put up a reminder sign to close the door.
#Trump and his GOP puppets are the biggest and most pressing problem, but not the only ones. We are cornered on all sides. A ruthless sheriff is in town and his deputies are everywhere. Poor people have been targeted among the unwanted. Public spaces and tax-rolled law enforcement are now weaponized to dispose of and make invisible, instill fear and isolation to “otherize” those deemed unworthy. Blatant acts of violations of fundamental human rights have become normalized forms of public policy enforcement and oversight.
Protest marches and protestations of any kind will not turn the time. While we idled in our fear of the Muslims, Al-Qaeda and Iranian powers. Wall Street and Washington’s swamp creatures were sucking the very oxygen from the air. Even your vote has been stolen and put up for sale. The GOP stands behind a corrupt and vile President because they know that their fate is controlled entirely by him – manipulation is expensive. The lifetime of emissaries can be fleeting at best.
As we enter the last era of my broadcast career, our message is profoundly fundamental:
1. Exposing wrongs is not the same as righting them.
2. What we knew as America has been forever changed. What we understood about it, remains the same.
3. Governments are not moved by shame. In this era, neither are politicians.
4. If the House is not turned in November, there will be a seismic permanent shift in the infrastructure of the republic. One where there is no undoing.
5. Comrades and allies must be willing to make all kinds of serious sacrifice. If not, our children and grandchildren will be the sacrifice.
We look forward to being back with you in the Fall of 2018. Do we have what it takes to igniting the rights and dismantling the wrongs, to rescue those who don’t know they need rescuing ? I don’t know. We will see.
“Transforming Truth to Power, One Broadcast At a Time”
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The Coming Collapse [TruthDig]
The Coming Collapse
“The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience, like that demonstrated by teachers around the country this year. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age . . .
. . . “The leadership of the party, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez, are creations of corporate America. In an open and democratic political process, one not dominated by party elites and corporate money, these people would not hold political power. They know this. They would rather implode the entire system than give up their positions of privilege. And that, I fear, is what will happen. The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way a bulwark against despotism defies the last three decades of its political activity. It is the guarantor of despotism.” . . .
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 11 books,…
Mr. Fish
Cartoonist
Mr. Fish, also known as Dwayne Booth, is a cartoonist who primarily creates for Truthdig.com and Harpers.com. Mr. Fish’s work has also appeared nationally in The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Vanity…
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Black homeownership is stuck near 30-year lows
‘We haven’t made any progress’: Black homeownership is stuck near 30-year lows
Jani Tillery, 42, is an attorney at the Children’s Law Center in Washington who has been looking for homes since October. She’s made three offers since the end of November but lost to other bidders and she’s having a hard time finding homes in her price range of less than $200,000. (Andre Chung/for The Washington Post)
Jani Tillery thought she would be a homeowner by now.
Her parents bought a house in the Detroit suburbs in the late 1970s while living on a modest income. Her mother was a teacher. Her father worked in the automotive industry. They raised their children in the house and paid off the mortgage. They will probably live there in retirement and possibly pass the house — not only a home with rich sentimental value but also a sizable financial asset — on to their children.
Tillery, 42, hoped this would finally be the year she, too, could buy. She’s a lawyer at a nonprofit in Washington, and she recently got a promotion and raise.
Yet, she says, this part of the American Dream seems out of reach for her, as it is for many other African American workers despite notable strides in other aspects of their finances.
In many ways, African Americans have regained the ground lost during the financial crisis. Many are finding jobs and getting raises.
But the holy grail of homeownership remains elusive. Forty-three percent of blacks owned homes in 2017, according to an annual report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. In contrast, 72 percent of whites did, a gap that has mostly widened during the past three decades.
[A minimum-wage worker can’t afford a 2-bedroom apartment anywhere in the U.S.]
“The overall frustration is, I am a working citizen. I pay my taxes. I’m doing a job to help kids,” said Tillery, whose nonprofit helps children with disabilities. “It’s better for me to own a home. I’m 42. I don’t want to continue renting.”
There aren’t many homes in the area that fall into her price range of $200,000 or less. When she sees a listing she can afford, she either loses out to a buyer who will pay more or waive contingencies or learns that the property isn’t approved for Federal Housing Administration mortgages, which she is relying on because they require lower down payments than conventional loans.
OCG 