We Got Better People Into Office -- Now Let's Push Democracy On Them

I got a voicemail from my friend Henry Gentry this morning in which Henry sang "He's leaving on a jet plane, Trump won't be back again."

His cheery tone sums up how many of us feel, (though don't quit your day job as one of Louisville's finest visual artists, Henry, for a singing career ).

We've won pretty much everything we wanted to -- thanks in great part to Fair Fight, the Georgia-based anti-suppression drive. Just as importantly, Trump won't impose that aftertaste on the Biden-Harris Administration most thought he would. The hideous way he finished his presidency means Trump obliterated his own staying power.

I believe predictions that he would still loom over our government as a Juan Peron-like figure will not come true. Media have overemphasized the fanatic base loyalty to political figures and failed to see that politicians who turn off the middle of the road Americans destroy themselves.

Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are two such people.

Gingrich had the shortest time ever as House Speaker; Santorum was historically beaten by 18 points trying to win a second Senate term from Pennsylvania. Yet, Fox gave them towering figure treatment, with lots of talking head time spreading their hard line sound bites to bind Republican followers and raise cash online for the right.

I believe this tendency to make catastrophic losers into winners will be lessened, as an overall trend away from "playing to the base" in punditry and politics. It took an invasion of the U.S. Capitol to make the un-shameable Fox finally feel some shame.

This solitary 2017 plea 
just may be heeded.

Fascism is still in the U.S. system, just without the very face of fascism at its top. I long said that covert action against democracy in Guatemala in 1954, Iran in 1953, Congo in 1961 and so on will come home to roost and assault the democratic process in the U.S. Those who insisted that there was no serious wrong or negating of democratic values in the CIA overthrowing or attempting to overthrow those states for supposed strategic interests -- that the world just works that way -- have seen overwhelming evidence in the last four years that their casual acceptance of covert action was wrong.

Regarding the 45th president specifically, as someone with no discretion or nuance, Donald Trump does not belong in a democracy. Power must be used with a brake and a steering wheel, not just an accelerator. Those who don't understand this should not be elected in a free society.

The system still needs repairing.

As said above, faceless fascism is still here -- it was the Obama Administration who created ICE and military tribunals for secrecy breaching suspects, and Janet Reno of the Clinton cabinet started house-to-house unwarranted searches in a pilot program in Puerto Rico.

Moreover, the United States is rife with militarized police, false confession machines, secret money ordering legislators around, and a clearly racist and classist national policy of over-imprisoning our people.

Remember how we spent the '70s and '80s being told our justice system was "too soft on criminals?" It was all a fairy tale, one propped up by scary but non-representative anecdotal examples. In truth, during those years 70 percent of the people sent to prison nationwide were non-violent criminals. Only the U.S. among democracies widely imprisons the non-violent, and we had by far the highest crime rates among democracies. I learned this only when being trained to be a mediator in the Victim-Offender Reconciliation Program, not from Walter Cronkite, Sam Donaldson, or Bob Woodward.

The highly paid and degreed pros failed to inform us of this obvious Elephant In The Livingroom about our criminal justice system, but a handful of non-paid socially concerned Mennonite and Jewish justice activists in rural Southern Indiana did.

That afternoon of VORP training in 1984 was my introduction to the need to eschew reliance on the commanding heights of the dominant paradigm and look primarily to the grass roots innovators.

I have come to see that better informed, as opposed to more informed people will safeguard democracy. Those who seek to inform themselves -- as opposed to being plied with information -- can through persistent and undaunted community-based efforts like the VORP restorative justice program make presidents and legislators do what needs to be done. Getting better people in office is just the first step.

We've certainly gotten better ones in -- now have at it!

 

Brian Arbenz, of Louisville, is a resister of fascism and regular letter writer to his senators and representatives, an underrated method that is effective. 

On state ballot questions, voters took the nation considerably leftward Nov. 3

No, Oregonians won’t be running through the streets singing “Tomorrow Never Knows,” but the state’s voters seemed to heed that John Lennon song’s lyrics which sum up drug trips as: “this is not dying” Nov. 3 when they approved controlled medical use of Psilocybin.

That’s the hallucinatory ingredient found in certain mushroom varieties which hippies, rock stars and other drug culture devotees have long sworn can take us to enlightenment, peace, or saber tooth tigers jumping out of walls in “bad trips.”

Oregonians approved ballot Measure 109 by 56 to 44 percent Nov. 3 directing the state to set up, over two years, a system of administering Psilocybin in supervised and licensed therapy sessions.

The campaign for the measure got a boost from a two-year study published in 2020 in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluding that in controlled therapy sessions, depression and anxiety patients can receive help from Psilocybin. The drug is a natural substance similar to the lab-created LSD, and which creates somewhat similar psychedelic mental experiences.

Measure 109 says patients using Psilocybin must be at least 21, among other qualifications. Users will not be allowed to leave the clinics until all mood altering effects have passed, which can take up to six hours.

Voters also approved measure 110, which revamps Oregon’s drug laws to end criminal penalties for small amounts of illicit drugs and expand treatment and recovery programs. It passed by 59 to 41 percent.

The Oregon drug policy reforms are the most influential of several important ballot initiatives approved by the voters in various states in November 2020, most of them decidedly in the progressive direction, but a few toward the right.

Colorado voters defeated an initiative to ban late term abortions by 59 to 41 percent; they voted by 58 to 42 percent to create a statewide program for family and medical leave; and approved by 51 to 49 percent restoring grey wolf populations on designated lands.

The wolf initiative gained momentum when the federal Interior Department in October took the species off the endangered list, raising a sense of urgency to protect the animals. But farmers and ranchers vehemently opposed the measure, saying grey wolves, which were nearly wiped out in the 1920s by hunting, will harm their livelihood and their communities’ economies. Still, the restoration plan approved by voters includes state reimbursement for those who lose livestock to grey wolves.

Is the clunky 1700s method on the way out?

Another close vote by Coloradans Nov. 3 adds their state's backing to a movement launched by the late U.S. Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana to end the archaic Electoral College. Colorado voters voted 52 to 48 percent to have their state join the Interstate Popular Vote Compact. That compact would direct all states to have their electors automatically vote for whichever candidate won the national popular vote for president, making the Electoral College moot.

The Democrat Bayh championed the Popular Vote Compact after leaving office in 1980. His U.S. Constitutional Amendment to replace the Electoral College with the popular vote was tabled or filibustered six times from 1967 to ‘77.

Colorado voters, by a 63 to 37 percent margin, also gave the nod Nov. 3 to a measure reflecting rightist passions, a state constitutional amendment to require voters in Colorado elections to have U.S. citizenship.

As they voted 68 to 32 percent Nov. 3 to create a tobacco and nicotine tax, Coloradans also voted 58 to 42 percent to cut the state income tax. Taken together, those changes may amount to pushing the tax burden more to the poor, called regressive taxation, since cigarette use nationwide has heavily gravitated toward the lowest incomes.

Arizonans pointed the way unambiguously toward more progressive taxation (meaning taxing the wealthy more than the poor), passing the Invest in Education Act by 52 to 48 percent. The act, vocally opposed by many pro-corporate groups, raises the state income tax rate on earners of $250,000 or more by 3.5 percent, which is expected to generate a billion dollars in revenue to boost teacher salaries and make other improvements in public schools.

Illinois voters rejected by 55 percent to 45 percent a proposed amendment rescinding the state constitution’s requirement of a flat income tax rate. The amendment would have allowed a graduated income tax, which could have taken more from wealthy earners.

New Jersey’s state legislature passed and its governor signed a bill in September boosting income taxes on the well-to-do by dropping the level at which the top rate of 10.75 percent is levied. Formerly, New Jersey residents making $5 million or more paid that amount, but now those making $1 million or more will be taxed at that level.

In Virginia, which like Arizona is transitioning from a red state toward blue, voters in the D.C. metro area counties of Arlington, Fairfax and Loudon, voted yes on 13 out of 13 bond issues for health and human services, public safety, public transit, public schools, parks or general capital improvements. "Yes" vote margins were from 66 percent to as high as 81 percent.

Add to this, the much maligned 2016 election featuring a record number of public school tax referenda approved around the nation, and it is clear that Americans are no longer giving a free pass to the tax cut mantra.

Two non-taxation referenda reflecting what could be called anti-big brother feelings passed overwhelmingly.

Michigan voters approved 89 to 11 percent a referendum requiring a warrant to search a person’s electronic data. Georgians voted 75 to 25 percent to curb sovereign immunity, making it easier to challenge through lawsuits the constitutionality of a state action.

Several Georgia supreme court decisions since 2014 had expanded the doctrine of sovereign immunity from lawsuits in cases where litigation had sought to have certain state laws declared unconstitutional.

  

Brian Arbenz is a writer, commentator and activist living in Louisville, Ky. 

How Resistance Triumphed -- And Must Continue

 SCENES FROM AN UNRLENTING POPULAR STRUGGLE 2016-2020

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                                  ____________________________

                          But do complaints to corporations ever get action? Oh, yes!

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The Jo Jo Factor - Could Biden Have Won Without the Libertarian Candidate Running? Very Possibly Not

Was Libertarian Jo Jorgensen 
the unintentional kingmaker?

Though the intangibles make it impossible to prove this with simple math, here is a very conceivable scenario: If Libertarian Party presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen were not on Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona’s ballots we’d be agonizing right now over an upcoming second Trump term.

Those states have a combined 57 Electoral Votes, which, if added to Trump’s 232, would have given him 289 Electoral Votes and left Biden with 256. OMG, the thought of it.

Of course, we don’t have to think of it, except in the context of small parties’ tendencies to push the country decidedly in the opposite direction from which those parties themselves lean. (CLICK to see how a 1984 left walkout in Kentucky made McConnell a Senator.)

If the 1984 McConnell case is obscure, then do Nader and the Greens in 2000 ring a bell?

I was an organizer for Nader's Kentucky campaign in 1996, but was wary of his running four years later, and I supported the Democrats in 2000. And oh what we wouldn’t give to have two Gore-chosen Supreme Court Justices sitting where Samuel Alito and John Roberts sit today.

Of the four battleground states mentioned above, in a scenario whereby Pennsylvania still went for Joe Biden, but the other three for Trump, Biden would have 276 Electoral Votes, a win so thin as to add potency to Trump’s laughably weak legal challenges to the outcome, and subtract potency from a Biden presidency. Not a Trump win, but a much worse situation than the one we’re actually in.

So, let’s take the number crunch tour of these four states: Biden has won Georgia by 14,000 votes (2,472,278 to 2,458,250). To be sure, let’s give credit to the innovative and smart voter drive of Stacey Abrams and her Fair Fight organization -- it worked!

But let’s look at some math as well: Jo Jorgensen won 62,000 votes in Georgia, more than four times Biden’s margin over Trump in the state. The Libertarians historically have attracted voters with liberal and conservative mindsets, depending on the issue. But with marijuana legalization spreading within the major party duopoly, the Libertarians have been focusing on staunch anti-gun control and anti-tax messages, likely presenting many more Republican-leaning voters with an alternative.

Regarding left alternatives to the Democrats, there was no Green Party candidate on the Georgia ballot. As for the possibility that write-ins for Green Howie Hawkins took potential Biden votes away -- forget it, there were just 457 write in votes for president by Georgia voters.

Pennsylvania is not as clear; Hawkins also was not on that state’s ballot. Jorgensen was.

Biden won the state of his birth by 82,000 votes (3,444,794 to 3,362,693). Jorgensen won 79,000. There was a robust write-in total of 6,678 (States customarily don’t release the names of write-in vote recipients unless one of them wins).

Let’s amend our Pennsylvania scenario to see Green Howie Hawkins being on the state’s ballot and Libertarian Jo Jorgensen not being on it. That would likely have tipped the Keystone State to -- I can’t say it, but then I don’t have to.

On to Wisconsin: Biden won the state by 20,000 votes (1,630,716 to 1,610,151), while Jorgensen won 38,000. There also was no Green on Wisconsin’s ballot. There were 7,827 write ins, and Brian Carroll of the socially conservative American Solidarity Party won 5,266 votes.

A Wisconsin race without Jorgensen or the anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia, anti-death penalty Carroll is probably a race Trump wins.

In Arizona, it was close in 2020. Real close:

Biden won the state by 11,000 votes (1,672,143 to 1,661,686), while Jorgensen received 51,000. There was no Green candidate on the ballot, and there were just 551 write ins.

Those numbers spell: “Thank you, Jo Jorgensen,” as do Georgia’s and Wisconsin’s. Maybe Pennsylvania’s, too. But this sounds patronizing to the Libertarians, which is not my intent.

Nonetheless, running for office in a third or small party should be done to pursue a strategic outcome, not just to evangelize the party's doctrine.

Greens could accomplish a lot by visibly running candidates for the U.S. House and Senate. Someone of Ralph Nader or Jill Stein’s level of recognition might be able to win a House seat, or bargain with their votes to make the Democrats be more pro-environmental or pro-economic equity. They could then speak publicly for a slate of Congressional candidates in many states to gain seats and/or bargaining power for the Greens to move the Dems leftward.

Stacey Abrams’ building Fair Fight was a another smart strategic approach, working within a beyond partisan framework to fight voter suppression, an inspiring movement that is catching on nationwide.

But running as a third or small party presidential candidate, as said, should be done eyeing a specific outcome that advances the public policies the party advocates. That outcome cannot be intangibles such as increased visibility or rallying the populace, given the unabated rightward White House policies in the four years after Nader and Stein’s runs in 2000 and 2016.

It must be measured in how many Electoral Votes a candidate believes they can win, and how many coattail Congressional seats for their party their candidacy realistically can generate. If the honest answer is 0 to both, run for Congress instead, or help out with Fair Fight.

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Brian Arbenz is a political activist, observer and commentator living in Louisville, Ky. USA.

Our Dream Has Come True. We Beat Trump. Now What?

Biden won. That’s the reality. No qualifiers. No near slip up at the end that again defied the opinion polls.

The story should not be framed as Trump’s surprisingly strong performance in states where Biden was sure to cruise to a win. That pundit line thrived for a couple of days because it was rural votes that were counted first in Pennsylvania and Michigan. The Philadelphia and Detroit ballots had to be forced out of post offices by judicial Heimlich maneuvers from federal judges.

When all the ballots are counted, Biden will have beaten an incumbent president by 5.3 million popular votes and he will have won more than 300 Electoral Votes.

That’s a walloping, by any historical standard, given the innate advantage of the incumbency. Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush by 5.8 million votes in 1992, and FDR’s ousting of Herbert Hoover during the depths of The Great depression was by 7 million.

Biden’s final win was just about as strong as the polls showed his advantage being in the last two months, though on election night and the next day, media phraseology was all about OMG, here we go again; Joe Biden will write “What Happened, Vol. 2!”

Biden’s final popular vote advantage being smaller than what polls projected simply reflects the normal leveling off of the leader’s margin when actual votes are cast, and that drop never taints a victory or the mandate of the incoming president.

George H.W. Bush led Michael Dukakis by 12-to-14 points throughout October 1988, then won the actual popular vote by eight points. Similarly, Bill Clinton’s lead over President Bush was about 8-to-10 poll points throughout the race, then he actually beat Bush by five points, 43 percent to 38, with a strong protest vote of 19 percent going to Ross Perot.

Unlike in 1976 and 1980, when Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, respectively, held leads of about 30 points after their nominations, then steadily lost ground until they were in toss-up races in the final week, Biden’s 2020 performance was one of consistency -- never slipping during the general election from a solid, but not overwhelming lead.

Along the way, the author posted this meme
to remind voters of the final goal. 

And President-Elect Biden is smart and politically savvy. He isn’t projecting a backing off his agenda because he did not win the coveted Senate majority; he is outlining his plans to use executive orders immediately to reverse dozens of the worst moves of President Trump, Education Secretary Betsy Devos and other extremists in this administration.

Of course, without a Democrat Senate majority, single payer health care and a $15-an-hour minimum wage are not going to become law in the next two years -- but would they necessarily even if the Senate were in Blue hands, or if the Democrats pull to a 50-50 tie after the Georgia run offs in January?

A Democrat majority built on wins in North Carolina and South Carolina the Democrats almost got and/or Georgia wins might well be one which could not count on Senators from those conservative states to vote for a bold progressive agenda. Susan Collins or Mitt Romney might be as willing as southern Democrats to support health care or minimum wage bills.

If a Republican Senate majority does result, as frustrating as that would be to Blue hopes, it may actually offer a form of cover from the spectacle of a Democratic Party failing to get its agenda through its own Congress, something the Republicans succumbed to in 2017.

The next four years are unclear. Will a vastly improved Coronavirus response, a successful vaccine, and economic improvements win the voters’ goodwill, or will the the big corporate domination of our lives still keep us chained to poverty jobs?

For now, let’s appreciate the fact that we longed to truncate the Trump racist, hateful war on empathy, and by standing strong, refuting disinformation, and voting strategically, we did it.

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Brian Arbenz, of Louisville, began resisting four years ago by attending the Women's March in Washington on 1/21/2017. That was just the start, and even with Biden as president our resistance against hate and exclusion must continue.