2 days ago (barry-gander.medium.com)
Heartbreaking pleas that no Party heeds: this is what happens when you ignore voters’ needs.
For the first time, more people are classifying themselves as “Independent” rather than as affiliated with a political party:
The above graphic does not show the full danger of the discontent: almost half of younger voters now describe themselves as independents.
This is the political environment of the future: increasing trends towards independence, combined with a leaning by the next generation toward open appeals from ‘outside’ interests. And with the rise of the billionaire class, there are many elite rich power-seekers who would be happy to step in. Trump was one; it was fortunate for America that he was a moron. The next wealthy Mussolini may be crafty enough to end democracy without anyone noticing.
That is why it is important to funnel the ‘independents” into a movement that they can believe in and can hold accountable for results. A third political party that heeds their needs.
The biggest drop in support is with the Republican Party, which lost one-third of its believers, but even the Democrat lost one-tenth of their number.
Yes, there is a case for saying that the Trump Horror has driven the Republican numbers down, but that is not the complete answer, for it has not led to a rise among Democrats…even the Mango Molester was unable to drive Democratic numbers up.
The Democratic sag may have to do with the lack of appeal of the current President, or it may be related to a more general cause.
I lean toward the latter, because I think there are deeper currents sweeping through the American political system…currents that go all the way back to the original intention and vision for America.
“We The People” opens the Constitution…
Not: “We The Wealthy.”
Let’s be clear from the outset that this new pro-profits attitude is not restricted to America…this is an attitude that pervades global capitalism. “Globalization” spread an infection among all economies — including the allegedly ‘socialist’ economies like China — that workers only existed to give maximum profits to the business owners or national rulers.
Listen to Australian real-estate-mogul Tim Gurner. Gurner is the genius who once said that people weren’t saving enough because they were spending their money on smashed avocado toast instead of banking it. Research found (of course it was done) that you would have to save on eating more than 600,000 avocado toasts to buy a house in New York. (If you saved on eating four per day, it would take you 410 years to save enough to buy that house. In case you were wondering… These are the numbers that count.)
Gurner now says that we need to raise our current unemployment rate of 3.7% by 40–50% to reduce “arrogance in the employment market…There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them. We need to remind people they work for the employer, not the other way around.”
He added that governments around the world are working together to see that the pain level will increase.
That of course triggered a backlash from people like US lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “Reminder that major CEOs have skyrocketed their own pay so much that the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay is now at some of the highest levels ever recorded.”
This crystallizes the big change in social outlook that the champions of business have been engineering since America was founded.
America was NOT founded to promote business interests.
America was founded to promote the interests of every citizen (at the time, that meant white males, but that has come a long way).
How does that stack up against the political interests being pushed today by the two major parties?
The Republicans are about property — they are totally outside the loop of accountability to the cause of America. They are performing treason against the purpose of the United States.
The Democrats stand for people. They too, however, have strayed. They no longer meet the needs that today’s citizens insist on.
When people are asked for the essential political structure they need in order to survive, they are clear:
Healthcare Support: Two-thirds (63%) say that the government should provide health care coverage for all, and more than half view the quality of care as unfavorable. This has been rising steadily for a decade.
Freedom of Reproductive Choice: 80% say abortion should be legal in most or all cases; this has been steady over the past five years.
Economic Justice: 75% would support fairer economic opportunities such as a national paid family leave policy that covers all workers.
Control Over Gun Violence: 71% say gun laws should be stricter, and 60% say there should be a ban on selling assault rifles at all.
Reduction of Corporate Influence: Three quarters of Americans want new laws that would reduce the power of corporations in public life.
Overhaul of the Supreme Court: Two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe, and say it has been captured by Republican interests.
Let’s dive in a bit on the top three pain-points: healthcare, reproductive choice and economic justice.
The U.S. healthcare system is high cost and low quality, says a Harvard study. Despite spending far more on healthcare than other high-income nations, the US scores poorly on many key health measures, including life expectancy, preventable hospital admissions, suicide, and maternal mortality. And for all that expense, satisfaction with the current healthcare system is relatively low in the US. Toxic CEOs blame people for wanting health care, while propping up insurance companies.
One no-nonsense indicator is that the U.S. military does not put up with for-profit healthcare; it is a socialist organization.
There are also massive savings in government spending after implementing Medicare for All. TRILLIONS can be saved. In the US 20% of the GPD is spent on healthcare, v.s.10–13% in the EU. And the general health of the population in EU is higher.
Single payer healthcare is so complicated that America is the only nation that can’t use it.
If one wanted to be even more progressive, you could move beyond single-payer, where the providers are still private firms, to one where the healthcare providers work for the people and no profit is involved. We could probably double the number of people giving care, while dropping the cost.
Average life expectancy in Canada is now 81 years, putting it above the U.S. at 76.6 years (2021). And Canadians have the same poor-diet lifestyle as Americans. I’ll take gravy on that poutine.
Freedom of Reproductive Choice suffered a blow at the hands of an unrepresentative Supreme Court, aided by a President who stood aside as the ruling happened. Frankin Roosevelt, by contrast, threatened to fire them if they got in the way of his “New Deal”. They backed down. Much of the rage in American politics today comes from that event.
Whenever the issue of women’s rights is put to the people for a vote in any of the state elections, the rights have prevailed. The court created a permanent, subjugated role for women into law — to transform them by law — into a perpetual class of second-rate citizens. It is aligned with the religious convictions of the majority of the Court; we are struggling today with the evil of the Trump legacy.
It is the top Cause — beyond an “issue” — for women across the country.
The Red states banning abortion rights and now trying to end no-fault divorce are the same ones that intentionally constructed economic policies featuring weak labor standards and underfunded and dysfunctional public services. These states are economically disemboweling workers. They are trying to claw back no-fault divorce, for example, because it allows a woman to walk away from an unhappy marriage without having to prove abuse, infidelity, or other misconduct. Lyz Lenz wrote in her newsletter, “Maybe 70 percent of women file for divorce because having a husband adds seven extra hours of housework, work that a wife is expected to do.
One publication states starkly:
“Abortion restrictions are planks in a policy regime of disempowerment and control over workers’ autonomy and livelihoods, just like deliberately low wage standards, underfunded social services, or restricted collective bargaining power.”
I have gotten a lot of support for an article saying that the vote in 2024 will be ONLY about re-establishing women’s right to control their bodies. Trump is a side-show. More than 84% of Republican voters do not want the abortion ban. In Red states, voters have repeatedly rejected abortion bans, only to have male-dominated GOP legislatures force them through anyway, even by blocking the rights of voters to weigh in directly. This has nothing to do with moral conviction; it is about control over women.
The ”Republican War Against Women” has not changed since it was adopted in 1980 and used by Reagan and Bush. Even Republican women support moves against themselves…throwback Ann Coulter regrets that women can even vote.
Economic Justice: 75% would support fairer economic opportunities such as a national paid family leave policy that covers all workers.
Billionaires are welfare queens. Walmart closed 60 stores in order to pocket an extra $2-billion. And its workers have to apply for federally-funded healthcare and food. In fact, part of the hiring process at Walmart is showing employees how to sign up for government assistance programs because their pay is so bad. If Walmart paid a living wage, gave their workers health insurance and retirement planning, and then paid an appropriate income tax, they could single handedly improve the economy, stock market and health insurance industries overnight — AND STILL STAY THE RICHEST FAMILY IN THE COUNTRY.
Poverty has gotten so desperate that Walmart is building a police station inside one of its Atlanta stores…retail theft has to be brought under control, after all.
But the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision allows corporations to buy votes.
The richest 1% evade $163-billion in taxes every year. The U.S. has a yacht deduction allowance.
For the Supreme Court, a coalition of more than 30 progressive groups has sprung up calling for structural changes. It is pushing against “an unaccountable, unethical majority on the Supreme Court that is behaving as if the rules don’t apply to them.”
This deep commitment to an anti-abortion position will cost Trump 100 million votes.
He has no idea what’s coming. He is one of the most information-limited people on the planet. His news comes from Fox TV, and he can barely operate a computer. He would have turned Ukraine over to Russia if he had still been President. He understands and admires dictators. He wants to be one himself. But he lost the popular vote by more than 7-million in 2020 — almost double the amount he lost in 2016. And he will lose the next one by more than a factor of ten above that.
In the eyes of his own party leaders (Mitch McConnell) Trump is ignorant, corrupt, incompetent, and unstable.
This is the leader that Wealthy America is counting on to save them from equality.
Trump could get a vote count that would put him in the range of traditional third-party candidates like Jo Jorgensen (Libertarian), who got 2 million votes in 2020.
Economic justice may be coming sooner rather than later.
And we need change that is driven by changing the legislatures themselves, not policies.
Spending to influence policy through federal lobbying alone by the wealthy cost $1-trillion in the first quarter of 2023 — a number that has held steady for almost 20 years. In its infinite wisdom, the Supreme Court declared that unlimited spending by wealthy donors and corporations would not distort the political process. They reasoned that limiting spending violated the right to free speech. They assumed that independent spending cannot be corrupt (!) and that the spending would be transparent (!!). Both assumptions have proven to be incorrect. It overturned spending restrictions that dated back more than 100 years. It triggered the creation of super PACs, which empower the wealthiest donors, and the expansion of dark money through shadowy nonprofits that don’t disclose their donors.
“In a time of historic wealth inequality,” wrote one observer, “the decision has helped reinforce the growing sense that our democracy primarily serves the interests of the wealthy few, and that democratic participation for the vast majority of citizens is of relatively little value.”
A third party that is not in the pockets of the wealthy needs to be voted into power to make fundamental changes.
Green parties — once seen as radical outsiders — have increasingly claimed a place in mainstream politics, especially in Europe. Greens around the world have evolved from single-issue environmentalists into broad-based political parties capable of winning elections and serving at the highest levels of government.
In the past the Green Party has been treated a “fringe”, but now more “independents” are available who could make it into a major alternative. Third party candidate Ralph Nader’s performance in Florida as a ‘fringe’ candidate arguably hurt America, for example, swinging the election to George W. Bush, who claimed the presidency with Florida’s electoral votes by less than 600 ballots. (Nader won 97,488 votes in Florida that year.)
Jill Stein’s total Green Party voters exceeded Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory. In other words, if every Stein voter had voted for Clinton instead, she could have won Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and the presidency.
But a better way of looking at it today is to say that if a traditional candidate like Hillary stepped out of the way to let Jill’s Greens lead a truly responsive party, Jill could have beaten Trump.
The polls also said that Bernie would have beaten Trump. But I am only capable of one dream at a time.
The upshot is that we are no longer a country of strong party loyalties, and the enormous growth of independents is the signal that change is not only possible but achievable.
The Republican Party effectively does not exist; its remnant is a lynch mob of anti-democratic, white supremacists, election deniers and armed militia members.
The Democratic Party can’t guarantee a woman’s right to an abortion or create strong gun regulations. What is the point of carrying it on?
Ignore both those non-representative parties.
Everyone in Federal politics should have to run as an independent or nonpartisan, the way they do in local government, like school boards, mayors, city council seats and for judges up and down the ballot.
Think of a group of candidates selected from among the mayors of American cities and towns…people who are used to politics but untinged by big money.
Then ban all election spending except for an equal amount provided by an elections board.
That’s one way to go about it. All ideas are welcome.
But the crises is urgent; we don’t know how many more election cycles our struggling system can go through! If too many people aren’t behind it, democracy may not seem worth the trouble.
And that would be a horrible mis-judgement for one of the best Constitutions that humankind has devised throughout history…
We have been through the impossible before.
And won.
A Canadian from Connecticut: 2 strikes against me! I’m a top writer, looking for the Meaning under the headlines. Follow me on Mastodon @Barry