RSN: Harvey Wasserman | Trump Got Dumped by Paper Ballots, Millennials ... and "Socialism"
30 November 20
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RSN: Harvey Wasserman | Trump Got Dumped by Paper Ballots, Millennials ... and "Socialism"
Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
Wasserman writes: "See Trump flail."
He dreams the Supremes will hand him the presidency. (They could.)
Or that a closed session of Congress will flip him the Electoral College. (It could.)
Each would be a coup against American democracy. Because no matter how loud he screams ELECTION THEFT, Trump lost the 2020 popular vote by more than six million. Only two US incumbents — Hoover and Carter — have lost by more.
The reasons are threefold: paper ballots, Millennials, and what passes for “socialism” in this country.
Paper ballots accounted for as much as 90% of the 2020 totals.
If those votes had been cast on easily-hacked electronic voting machines, Trump could’ve won in a landslide.
The paper ballots came mostly by mail, because COVID made voting in person unsafe.
But the demand for hand-cast/hand-counted paper ballots has been at the core of the Election Protection movement since Florida 2000. Getting a paper ballot to all registered voters is now the gold standard for our democratic elections.
With that comes the need to protect voter registration. Prior to the 2020 vote, some 16.5 million citizens — mostly of color — were stripped from the poll books.
A concerted grassroots effort restored many. But the disenfranchised still numbered in the millions.
By referendum, Floridians restored more than a million ex-felons to the voter rolls, easily enough to have flipped the state to Biden. But Florida’s gerrymandered legislature stepped in to demand they pay fines or fees which were often impossible to ascertain. Thus the Trump cult delivered Florida to the Donald, and meant to do it nationwide.
Then Trump attacked Vote by Mail by sabotaging the US Postal Service. His crony Louis DeJoy wrecked delivery systems to stop ballots from reaching voters. Countless votes were “lost” on their way back to be counted. Trumpers in Texas and Ohio limited drop boxes to just one in at least one county (Harris) with a population of four-plus million.
Republican legislatures piled on to demand impossible applications, traceable affidavit and witness forms, unworkable envelopes, and confusing and contradictory directives.
But Vermont, New Jersey, DC, California and Nevada joined Colorado, Utah, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii in mailing ballots to all registered voters.
Meanwhile, countless Millennials and their Zoomer siblings revolutionized poll work, which had been handled by elders who now feared the TrumpVirus.
Election centers established in twenty NBA arenas and at least two NFL stadiums welcomed those voting in person. As early voting stretched for weeks before November 3rd, Trump’s planned KKK/militia assaults on long outdoor lines rarely materialized.
Thus came a national deluge of paper ballots that could be stored, protected, scanned, electronically tallied, and tangibly preserved for the recounts that have proven paper balloting’s real worth.
Florida’s fast, accurate tally came because it daily processed, scanned, and stored its incoming early ballots, all through early voting. On November 3rd, all that remained were those to be cast and counted on that last day.
Pennsylvania delayed their processing and faced mountains of ballots to count from the end of voting on November 3rd onward. But they still got it done.
Those voting in person often faced touchscreen machines against which EP activists have warned for decades. Had the entire election been conducted on those antique theft devices, an untraceable hack could’ve won Trump the White House.
Instead, when he demanded recounts … there they were, on paper, ready to go. In 80% or more of the nation’s precincts, scanners provided a fast read of the digital ballot images. And the mountains of hand-marked paper ballots remained for the recounting.
In other words, 2020 was an election thief’s worst nightmare. It showed American democracy can rely on 100% hand-marked, digitally scanned (with the images preserved) paper ballots readily retained for recounts.
There will be exceptions for those with special needs.
But with the rolls protected, all states can mail paper ballots to all registered voters. With a restored USPS, they can come back by mail, or in drop boxes, or in person at election centers (including those arenas and stadiums) where early voting stretches at least two weeks in advance of Election Day (which will be a national holiday).
After casting and counting more than 150,000,000 votes this year, we know how to make an election work. Trump’s recount demands have only confirmed the ultimate Truth.
As for his 6,000,000 vote thrashing, thank the Millennials.
US history’s biggest generation HATES the Donald. It voted more than 60% to dump him.
Millennials are some 85 million Americans — history’s most racially diverse, politically progressive generation (except for the next-in-line Zoomers, who mostly can’t yet vote).
It was the tsunami of young poll workers and voters who poured in after the George Floyd marches that washed Trump away.
With only Millennials voting, Biden would’ve won Texas, Florida, the Carolinas, and more than 400 Electoral votes. The Zoomer kids were even hotter to see Trump gone.
Issue-wise it boils down to “socialism.” Millennials/Zoomers — America’s future — like it.
While beating Trump, the corporate Democrats (of course) blew their down-ballot races. They lost House seats, failed to take the Senate, and threw away countless chances to win state legislatures.
As always, they immediately blamed the left, whining that “socialism” cost them the middle-road swing vote.
The Clintons long ago sold the Democratic Party to Wall Street. A hollow fundraising shell, it stands for little, delivers less. In fifty years the Dems have delivered nothing beyond Obamacare to American working families. Then, inevitably, came Trump, at least pretending to care.
The corpDem gerontocracy is set to expire. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (80) and her Senate cohort Chuck Schumer (70) are dinosaurs. California’s Diane Feinstein (87) is yielding her Senate Judiciary Committee leadership.
All must soon be buried by the Millennials/Zs ...
… and by a “socialism” that includes: an end to racism and misogyny, a decent minimum wage, free higher public education, abolition of student debt, universal health care, ends to homelessness, poverty, hunger, and climate chaos, with a Green New Deal to create jobs, cheap energy, and a sustainable planet. Plus money out of politics and an end to empire.
All built around hand-marked/hand-counted paper ballots, mailed to all citizens, counted on digital scanners, with an end to gerrymandering and the Electoral College.
Had the 2020 Dems embraced all of the above and rallied the Millennials/Zs with something beyond dumping the Donald, the upcoming Congress and state legislatures might have been theirs.
Now, with or without them, we fight for a new Solartopian social democracy.
It needs the old guard corporate Democrats to follow Trump out the door.
It demands Election Protection 2024, in all its grassroots glory.
It envisions a diverse, morally just, post-imperial, eco-sustainable, green-powered social democracy, in all its glory.
Let’s do it!!!
Harvey Wasserman co-convenes the weekly Election Protection 2024 ZOOM. His People’s Spiral of US History is at www.solartopia.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci in Washington DC on 30 June. (photo: Reuters)
The US Was Already Setting Covid-19 Records. Experts Say Thanksgiving May Have Made Things Worse.
Cameron Peters, Vox
Excerpt: "Fauci warns that the coronavirus pandemic may still get worse."
he United States’ leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci,
warned in a Sunday
Meet the Press interview that another surge of
Covid-19 cases “superimposed on that surge that we’re already in” might be coming, in large part due to the Thanksgiving holiday.
Public health experts have been warning Americans of the risk of congregating for the holiday as the US experiences its worst Covid-19 surge yet; Dr. Jonathan Reiner told CNN Tuesday that Thanksgiving could become “the mother of all superspreader events.” Despite these warnings, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) figures suggest that more than 1 million Americans traveled by plane last Wednesday alone, the highest number since the pandemic began, and many more likely drove to spend Thanksgiving with family.
Already, the US is setting grim new case records — the surge Fauci referred to — and given it takes an average of five to six days for an infected person to display symptoms, new cases due to Thanksgiving infections could begin appearing late this week.
But, as Vox’s German Lopez explained earlier this month, it may be several weeks before the full impact of Thanksgiving celebrations is understood:
With the coronavirus, it takes some time — days, maybe weeks — for someone to go from getting infected to actually getting tested. Then it can take days or weeks for that person to end up at a hospital with serious symptoms. Deaths can take even longer, if treatment fails. All this data is like light from another galaxy that takes time to travel to our eyes: It’s reflective of infections that happened weeks ago, not today or yesterday.
On Friday, the US reported an all-time high of 205,460 new Covid-19 cases in a single day, according to data from the New York Times. Friday was also the first day ever that the US saw more than 200,000 cases, less than a month after it crossed the 100,000 daily case mark for the first time on November 4. On average, the country has reported more than 162,000 cases a day for the last week.
Despite these grim numbers, Fauci told NBC’s Chuck Todd, “I don’t want to frighten people, except to say it is not too late at all to do something about this.” Basic public health practices, Fauci said — mask-wearing, distancing, and avoiding large gatherings — remain crucial to mitigating the spread of the coronavirus.
President Donald Trump, who himself became infected in early October, has largely ceded the field when it comes to combating the spread of the virus. Trump has repeatedly downplayed the virus and encouraged people to interact with one another as they did before the pandemic, even as Covid-19 ravages the country and Trump’s own White House and presidential campaign.
Since Election Day, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, and presidential son Donald Trump Jr. have all tested positive for Covid-19, as well as at least 10 others in the president’s orbit, according to a New York Times tally.
A number of promising vaccines are on the way
The extent of Trump’s engagement with the issue appears to be a fixation on taking credit for recent good news on the vaccine front.
“Another Vaccine just announced. This time by Moderna, 95% effective,” Trump tweeted on November 16. “For those great ‘historians’, please remember that these great discoveries, which will end the China Plague, all took place on my watch!”
Separately, Trump told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo in a Sunday interview — his first since losing the election — that “I came up with vaccines that people didn’t think we’d have for five years,” an entirely untrue claim.
In short, according to Vox’s Dylan Scott, as the pandemic is “entering its most dangerous period to date, the country’s current leadership — which we are stuck with until January 20 — does not appear to have any plans to do anything about it.”
Trump’s credit-grabbing aside, however, vaccines from AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer — all of which have recently reported positive findings from clinical trials — do present a degree of hope, albeit still distant.
According to White House testing czar Adm. Brett Giroir in a Sunday interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, the US “should have enough vaccine by the end of the year to immunize 20 million Americans, and we have to immunize for impact. But the American people have to do the right things until we get that vaccine widely distributed.”
There are still hurdles left to clear in the vaccine race. As Vox’s Umair Irfan explains, clinical trials still need to conclude, and the vaccines still need to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, though Moderna and Pfizer both hope to receive emergency use authorizations, or EUAs, allowing their vaccines to be used without full approval.
Even with an EUA, however, there are still logistics questions. Irfan explains:
Once a vaccine gets approved, a global supply chain, from the glass vials that hold the vaccine to the syringes used to inject them, needs to spool up to make huge quantities of the vaccine. Manufacturers will also have to ensure that vaccines remain intact and under strict temperature controls from the factory to the hospitals and clinics where they will be used. The process of manufacturing, distributing, and administering a vaccine could take months.
....
It’s also important to remember that a vaccine is not enough on its own to end the pandemic. Measures like social distancing, good hygiene, and wearing face masks will remain essential to control the spread of Covid-19 until a vaccine is widely available. Public acceptance will also be a major issue, and health officials will have to overcome a rising wave of vaccine hesitancy.
All of that is in the future, though — and US Covid-19 hospitalizations are still rising in the present. As of Saturday, more than 91,000 people were hospitalized with Covid-19 — the most ever — and hospitals in some parts of the country are at capacity.
In Wisconsin, increasingly overwhelmed health care workers at the University of Wisconsin published an open letter to residents of the state: “Without immediate change,” they wrote, “our hospitals will be too full to treat all of those with the virus and those with other illnesses or injuries. Soon you or someone you love may need us, but we won’t be able to provide the life-saving care you need, whether for COVID-19, cancer, heart disease or other urgent conditions. As health care providers, we are terrified of that becoming reality.”
As far back as May this year — distant history, in pandemic terms — Dr. Rick Bright, who previously led a US vaccine research agency and now serves on President-elect Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force, warned that “without better planning, 2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history.”
Now, that dark winter looks to have arrived.
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A rally in support of immigrants. (photo: Laura Bonilla Cal/Getty Images)
Behind Trump's Final Push to Limit Immigration
Anita Kumar, Politico
Kumar writes: "Donald Trump is not done with immigration yet."
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Trump rally. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Firing Squads, Poison Gas, Electric Chair: Trump Moves to Expand Ways to Kill Prisoners
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Death by firing squad, electrocution or poison gas? Under a new rule filed by the Trump administration, these methods can now be used to carry out executions for federal death sentences in addition to lethal injection."
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, the Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Death by firing squad, electrocution or poison gas? Under a new rule filed by the Trump administration, these methods can now be used to carry out executions for federal death sentences in addition to lethal injection. The amendment to the Manner of Federal Executions Rule was entered Friday into the Federal Register and goes into effect Christmas Eve. That’s December 24th.
This comes as the Trump administration has already executed eight people in the past five months. Earlier this month, it executed Orlando Hall at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. Hall was an African American man sentenced to die by an all-white jury. Prior to this year, the federal government had not executed anyone since 2003, 17 years ago. Now, in what critics say is a dramatic deviation from historical practices, five more people are scheduled to be executed during Trump’s final weeks in office, three of them just days before President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated, including the first woman in nearly 70 years.
The Death Penalty Information Center reports it has been more than a century since a federal execution was conducted during a lame-duck presidency, in 1889 during the outgoing administration of Grover Cleveland. The Justice Department has not yet said whether it will try to use any methods other than lethal injection for the three executions it scheduled after the new rules takes effect. President-elect Joe Biden said during the election campaign he now supports eliminating the federal death penalty. Biden co-authored legislation in 1990 that expanded the federal death penalty.
For more, we are joined by Sister Helen Prejean, one of the world’s most well-known anti-death penalty activists, the author of the best-selling book, Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty. Her most recent book, River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey. Also with us, Sandra Babcock, faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. We Welcome you both back to Democracy Now! Sister Helen Prejean, let’s begin with you. This was filed on Friday, that the Trump administration, that the federal government can kill prisoners, expanding it to poison gas, firing squad or electrocution. Can you respond?
SISTER HELEN PREJEAN: I think the reason they are doing that is they want to make sure that they can expedite these executions without any court cases about lethal injection. There have been questions about lethal injection, the drugs that are used. This is the fault of the Supreme Court, by the way, which has allowed states to just experiment widely with drugs to kill people, which has resulted in botched executions. It may also come from the fact that autopsy reports, 200 of them, of those who have been lethally injected showed that there was a massive amount of fluid in their lungs, which meant they were drowning. I think it’s the callous brute force of the mentality of the Trump administration that he just believes that he can use force and kill people. He can use violence and force to make his point. There is no need for these executions to happen.
To me, it just reveals a fundamental flaw which has been built into the death penalty from the time that the Supreme Court put death back, in 1976. And here is the fundamental flaw, and the federal executions that we see now really exemplifies it: there was a weak criteria that only “the worst of the worst” should be killed, and nobody really knows what that means. And so there has been wide latitude in determining “worst of the worst.” Or even the assumption that out of all the ordinary murders, whatever that means, there are some who can be targeted as “but this is the worst of the worst.”
So with a weak criteria, it is coupled with that you give complete discretion to pursue death to the prosecutors. It is a fact that if prosecutors do not seek death, people don’t die from executions. So here you have now in the jurisdiction of the federal government, Attorney General Barr, who has the power to seek death, and pursuing it. All he had to do was get a signal from Trump; we gonna start killin’ people. And there has been no way to stop him.
So the fundamental flaw is a weak fuzzy criteria that was never clear in the first place, coupled with discretion of prosecutors. And it exemplifies exactly why we need to shut the death penalty down. You can’t let frail, politically-driven individuals decide “you, you and you are going to die” for whatever political objective they have in mind.
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Renee Johnson outside Bronxwood in September. (photo: Joshua Rashaad McFadden/The New Republic)
"We Don't Even Know Who Is Dead or Alive": Trapped Inside an Assisted Living Facility During the Pandemic
Ava Kofman, ProPublica
Excerpt: "What it's like to stay alive as the virus charts its fatal course through a home for the elderly in one of the worst-hit neighborhoods in the Bronx."
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Former Uber driver Harrison Munala on the roof of his former apartment building, which his wife and their three children were evicted from in mid-August after they fell behind on their rent. (photo: Nichole Sobecki/NBC News)
Uber Made Big Promises in Kenya. Drivers Say It's Ruined Their Lives.
Amanda Sperber, NBC News
Sperber writes: "At first, work as an Uber driver seemed to offer Harrison Munala everything he'd hoped for when he moved from a town in the western part of Kenya to its capital, Nairobi."
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Activists march at the September 2019 Youth Climate Strike in Manhattan. (photo: Roy Rochlin/WireImage/Getty Images)
The UN Canceled Its 2020 Climate Summit. Youth Activists Held One Anyway.
Joseph Winters, Grist
Winters writes: "The coronavirus pandemic delayed COP26, the United Nations' annual climate summit, by a whole year. But it isn't stopping youth climate activists from holding their own Conference of the Parties."
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