Tag: Paul Weyrich

The Real Election Interference Threatening Our Democracy

Voting Machine

Ever since the 2016 election, our non-stop news cycles have focused on Russian meddling in our (supposedly) otherwise well-functioning electoral system.

And just lately, President Trump, who denies that such interference helped get him elected, has warned that the Chinese are also about to intervene – this time, he fears, against the interests of his party.

The President’s double standards aside, all such scapegoating ignores the fact that the real interference threatening our democracy comes from within. In fact, it largely originates with Republicans, whose policies have rendered the system entirely dysfunctional and unreliable.

To begin with, I’m referring to their sponsorship of the Citizens United lawsuit. It opened the door to the corrupting influence of campaign contributions from wealthy donors to Republicans and Democrats alike. I’m also referencing The Supreme Court’s striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. The Court’s (Republican-led) 5-4 decision opened the door for laws intended to disenfranchise Democrat-leaning minorities.

Add to this the practice of gerrymandering that renders GOP congressional seats virtually invulnerable, along with widespread voter suppression that discounts thousands of votes in each state and millions nation-wide in each election cycle, and you get an idea of just how corrupt our system has become.

And I haven’t even mentioned refusal to eliminate the Electoral College that has overridden the popular electoral will in favor of our last two Republican presidents – or the entirely hackable voting machines controlled by GOP-friendly operatives like Diebold Election Systems.

And then there’s the most fundamental voter-suppression measure of all – holding elections on Tuesdays precisely during the hours when working-class voters are on the job or traveling to the workplace.

All of this suggests that we must face up to the facts that:

• G.O.P. operative, Paul Weyrich, meant what he said in 1980 about Republicans not wanting everyone to vote (because if everyone did cast a ballot, a Republican president would never again darken the White House door).
• Computerized voting machines overwhelmingly favor that minority otherwise unelectable party by potentially miscounting and/or flipping millions of votes that end up completely unverifiable.

Addressing the problem will entail:

• Getting private money out of the electoral process in favor of public funding.
• Eliminating the electoral college in favor of direct popular vote.
• Abolishing gerrymandering by making redistricting a bi-partisan process subject to the approval of a reformed Federal Election Commission whose goal would be to maximize voter turn-out as well as to increase voter confidence by a transparent certification process.
• Outlawing completely highly hackable voting machines.
• More specifically, implementing a system of universal, automatic and verifiable voter registration and reverting to employment of hand-counted paper ballots.
• Changing Election Day from Tuesday to Sunday, or even establishing a national voting holiday (e.g. from Saturday to Tuesday), with ballots hand-counted by unimpeachable young people like senior Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts on Wednesday.

Failure to enact such changes, especially following the debacles of the presidential elections of 2000 and 2016 is not the fault of foreign interference in our electoral process. It’s the fault of a fundamentally broken system intended to discourage grassroots participation in favor of a minority party. Fixing it will require great commitment and work by us all.

Despite the obstacles placed in our paths, a first act towards repairing the systemic dysfunctions just described will present itself to us on November 6th.

In other words, that first reparative step is to vote the Republicans out of office replacing them with progressive democrats who refuse to take corporate money.

Ava DuVernay’s Film, “13th”: Don’t Miss It!

13th-netflix-documentary

Did you know that the U.S. Constitution still allows African Americans to be legally enslaved?

I didn’t.

That’s one of the many reasons I found 13,th, Ava DuVernay’s new and explosive Netflix documentary, so enlightening and shocking.

Following up on her civil rights drama, Selma, DuVernay’s film dissects the prison-industrial complex and shows how this profit-from-prison system results directly from a little-known clause in the 13th Amendment of the Constitution ratified in 1865. The amendment states:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” (Emphasis added)

Through a series of brilliantly juxtaposed interviews, bold graphics and hip-hop lyrics, the film demonstrates how the 14 words highlighted above led to a chain of events that provided former slave owners with the legal justification they required to retain the tremendously profitable free labor slaves provided the ante bellum South. The events in question:

  • Saw former African chattel convicted of “crimes” such a loitering and vagrancy.
  • Led to their imprisonment and return to chain-gang servitude.
  • Expanded such practice through the passage of modern crime bills that now serve a highly privatized prison-industrial system that massively re-criminalizes and disproportionately incarcerates black and brown-skinned Americans.
  • Reactivated the exception clause of the 13th Amendment to provide free labor for Walmart, Victoria’s Secret, and many other firms.

However, 13th goes much further than exposing past and present forms of legal slavery. It also traces the shocking expansion of the U.S. prison population itself. Forty-five years ago, there were about 200,000 inmates in U.S. prisons. Today inmates number more than 2 million. Although the U.S. has just 5% of the world’s population, it has about 25% of the world’s prisoners.  One in three behind bars is black.

Going even further, 13th connects the general criminalization of African Americans with political strategies that disenfranchise people of color. The connection highlights Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the militarization of police forces, and voter-suppression measures in general.

In Kentucky those strategies end up robbing 22% of African Americans of their right to vote. That’s because law in this state insists on depriving convicted felons of voting rights even after they have paid their “debts to society.”

All of this serves the purposes of right wing racists who admit in the words of conservative ideologue, Paul Weyrich, that they don’t want everyone to vote. High voter turnout, Weyrich has argued, works against the G.O.P.’s chances of winning. So besides disenfranchising former felons, Republicans implement voter I.D. laws, under-supply voting machines to African American communities, and otherwise make it difficult for people of color to vote.

However, Republicans are not the only ones indicted in 13th. The documentary also identifies Bill and Hillary Clinton’s 1990s Crime Bill as responsible for the explosion of prison populations.

Most chillingly, though, 13th fingers the rhetoric of Donald Trump repeatedly presented as referencing “the good old days” when protestors against the measures criticized in the film would be “punched in the face,” and “carried out on stretchers.”

I highly recommend 13th to counter such uninformed nostalgia for the segregated past. I also hope DuVernay’s work will be duly recognized this year at the Academy Awards. (She’s on the short list for best-documentary nomination.)