Three for Thursday
On Stolen Elections, the Wealth Tax, and Joe Manchin
Elections have never been perfect. But they’ve always been final. Impugn the process and you imperil the nation.
“This election was perfect,” says no one ever. For every election I’ve ever voted in, there have always been sore losers. They’ve complained about unfair media coverage, fake news, ballot-box stuffing, biased re-districting, intimidation at voting locations, unusually long lines, early poll closings, incompetent volunteers, and a myriad of other injustices. Because of these complaints, there have been recounts and litigation. The grievances leveled by candidates who’ve ended up on the short end of the vote count are legend and until this last election, have been mostly benign. Some have been legitimate complaints but the resolution has been fairly swift. Until now. Thanks to the combination of a toxic Internet, an unusually tenacious loser, and a polarized electorate, we’ve put the future of our democracy in play by supporting what would seem to be a false claim of election fraud. Over half of all Republicans believe that Trump won the 2020 election despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They want this election overturned because they think it was stolen.
White House aide Charles Colson said to Nixon about the 1972 election, “We did a hell of a lot of things and never got caught.” Watergate is just one of the many instances where the scales might have been tipped and an election affected by the illegal activities of the prevailing party. There were rumors that Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election because of his dad Joe and Sam Giancana’s meddling. Then there was the case of the hanging chads which no one could have rigged but most certainly changed the outcome of the 2000 Presidential election.
To those asking for a re-do of the 2020 election, I would ask, what’s going to make the next one any more legitimate than the last one? Winning? And if you lose again, will you promote the same election fraud fallacy? Getting re-elected based on the premise that the current system is corrupt seems…weird. And should you win, the losers will use your argument against you. This is a very slippery and dangerous slope. So I would suggest that you accept the results and the recounts and run a better campaign next time. Anything else looks like you’re trying to destroy the same system that you hope will get you elected again and the same one that got you elected the first time. In the end, nobody wins and the foundation of our democracy might suffer a mortal blow.
#2020election, #watergate, #hangingchads, #electionfraud
The rich keep getting richer but they still have a funny relationship with taxes.
The wealthiest 10% of Americans own a record 89% of all U.S. stocks. Whether you believe that is the “American Way”, that it is the right of the industrious and ingenious to acquire that much wealth is a personal opinion. The bigger question is more about how much of that wealth should be used:
This is where the devil is in the definitions and the details. This line, one of the first in the US Constitution, seems to speak to maintaining our democracy.
Maintenance, as defined in Merriam Webster, is:
o the act of maintaining: the state of being maintained: the building has suffered from years of poor maintenance
o something that maintains itself: at least half of them are living parasitically on the other half instead of producing maintenance for themselves — G. B. Shaw
o the upkeep of property or equipment: i.e. the maintenance of the school
In this context, the term maintenance is loaded with user-based interpretation. Substitute other words for maintenance like function, run, operate, or protect and you have the same problem. Words mean different things to different people. For those among us that claim to be “self-made” and succeeded without the government’s help, they believe less maintenance is better. Those who believe that their access to this financial world is severely restricted, want a boost.
The interstate highway system was built by the Federal government in 1956. GM, Ford, Exxon, and their ilk have been making money off of it ever since. The Internet was spawned by the ARPANET which was “built” by the Defense Department in 1969 to help link different government departments to a central communications hub. It eventually became the Internet and access is still free — no one owns it. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and thousands of other companies have made trillions of dollars on its back for decades. Both of these streams of commerce were created using American tax dollars and have since provided for the livelihood of millions of Americans. But they began with American tax dollars.
Do wealthy individuals and companies create jobs? Yes. Do they generate other forms of taxes including income and sales? Of course. But should that absolve them from paying their fair share of taxes? Amazon, one of the world’s most valuable companies, has generated billions of dollars in profits since it was founded in 1994. But it is legendary for its ability to not pay taxes. That doesn't seem right.
If these companies and the people who benefit from them don’t want to pay their fair share (the definition of which is again highly subjective) to maintain our way of life, who do they think should? Where do they think the money to run the “most powerful nation in the world” should come from?
#amazon, #Generalmotors, #Arpanet, #interstatehighwaysystem, #defensedepartment, #onepercent, #usconstitution
Joe Manchin: Representing few, poisoning many. The Senator’s self-interest trashes Clean-Energy’s future
There are 1.7 million people in the state of West Virginia. According to the data provided by the US Census in ”Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2020” :
- Registered voters in West Virginia — 928,000
- Total vote cast in the 2020 West Virginia presidential election — 773,000
A recent survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago finds that “59% of Americans said the Earth’s warming is very or extremely important to them as an issue, up from 49% in 2018.” Only sixteen percent of the people surveyed don’t believe global warming is impacting climate change.
If you apply those figures to West Virginia voters, Joe Manchin is at most representing forty-one percent, or 316,939 of WV voters who don’t feel that the earth’s warming is extremely important to them. Or worse, he’s beholden to his state’s sixteen percent (123,680) of flat-earthers who don’t believe in global warming at all.
So, in the interest of pandering to less than 400,000 people in the state of West Virginia and the few dying coal companies that keep Joe Manchin in his job, the future of clean energy in the United States will again be kneecapped.
Despite what you’ve said to the climate hunger strikers Mr. Manchin, future generations can look to you and your small block of “constituents” for the increasingly toxic and hostile environment that they will inherit.
#joemanchin, #activisthungerstrike, #coalmining
