Six on 2020 Election(s): ‘We’re going to have a catastrophe’: US faces November election fiasco 2020; Bill Moyers: The One Thing We Should Always Remember About Donald Trump; Trump to accept GOP nomination on 60th anniversary of Jacksonville's 'Ax Ha
philip panaritis
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"The alarm bells have been going off for months, but the election fiasco in Georgia on Tuesday made it clear: America is ill-prepared to hold a fair presidential vote in November, and is dangerously close to having an election disaster.
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The Georgia contest offered the most alarming preview to date of what could happen in November without major overhauls, training and planning. Voters stood in line to vote for upwards of four hours, saying they never received mail-in ballots requested weeks ago. Local officials, forced to consolidate polling locations because of Covid-19, were unable to manage the influx of voters and struggled to operate new voting equipment.
Experts worry that poll worker shortages, long lines and other delays in processing requests for absentee ballots will only get worse in November, when there will be more voters. Since March, voting advocates have been calling on states to prepare for an election like no other, and quickly implement plans that accommodate a surge in voters casting their ballots by mail for the first time as well as robust turnout at the polls.
One estimate places the cost of upgrading vote-by-mail systems across the country at $4bn.
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“We’re just going to have a catastrophe in November,” said Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who studies elections. “We’ve already passed the point of catastrophic failure. It doesn’t get any better if we have two to three times the number of people who are trying to vote in these polling locations.”
Not every primary in the Covid-19 era has been a disaster, and there has been strong turnout in many states as Americans have embraced voting by mail at unprecedented levels. But Georgia was far from the only place where there have been serious election problems.
Voters in Nevada waited hours in line to vote in the state’s primary on Tuesday, even after the state moved to conduct its election largely by mail. Earlier this month, election officials in Pennsylvania and Washington DC struggled to meet the crush of requests for absentee ballots and voters in the nation’s capital waited hours to vote. Voters in Baltimore, Maryland, didn’t get ballots and faced long lines. In April, voters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, waited hours to vote in the state’s primary as the city was forced to condense its usual 180 polling places into just five.
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Most glaring, voting groups say, has been the disproportionate impact the election failures have had on communities of color. LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, told Politico it took her three hours to vote in her majority African American precinct in Atlanta on Tuesday, but she saw no line at a polling place in a predominantly white area later in the day. State officials have launched an investigation into what went wrong in Fulton county, which includes Atlanta.
“Black voters in particular appear especially hard-hit,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which has closely monitored the primaries. “In some parts of the country, it feels like officials are making reckless decisions that are a recipe for disaster.”
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"Note: This video was first posted on January 20, 2017, Inauguration Day for Donald Trump. We have updated its publication date to feature it again because we believe it is important as context for recent events.
In this web exclusive, Bill Moyers and four historians dissect the big lie Trump rode to power: the Birther lie. Nell Painter, historian and Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University; Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School; Christopher Lebron, assistant professor of African-American studies and philosophy at Yale University; and Philip Klinkner, James S. Sherman Professor of Government, Hamilton College discuss the fertile ground on which the birther lie was sown: our nation’s history of white supremacy.
TRANSCRIPT
BILL MOYERS: I’m Bill Moyers. The most important thing to remember about Donald Trump is that he was the same man at 12:01 p.m. Friday after he took the oath of office as he was at 11:59 a.m. before his swearing in. His character: the same. His temperament and his values: the same.
What’s different is that in those two minutes Donald Trump was handed the most awesome power imaginable. He now controls the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal. The Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard are at his command. The FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the IRS, Homeland Security, the State Department, Justice Department, Treasury Department, the Department of Education, the Interior Department — all of the agencies of the executive branch — report, ultimately, to this one man. The world awaits his pronouncements, the markets and the media live by and for his tweets. So here’s the second most important thing to remember about Donald Trump: He rode to power on the wings of a dark lie — one of the most malignant and ugly lies in American history. We must never forget it.
(MONTAGE)
LOU DOBBS (CNN 7/21/09): Up next, the issue that won’t go away: the matter of President Obama and that birth certificate.
DONALD TRUMP (The View, ABC 3/23/11): There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.
TRUMP (The O’Reilly Factor, FOX News 3/30/11): He doesn’t have a birth certificate. Now, he may have one, but there’s something on that, with maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim. I don’t know.
CHRISTOPHER LEBRON: I found that as cynical as I am, I couldn’t actually believe people would actually run with this story. But then the story had legs. And then people like Donald Trump didn’t let it go. And I remember when he was going to prove that President Obama was not American, that he was not able to offer that proof. And even more amazingly, Trump has been able to not only convince himself for the longest time but has been able to convince a not-insignificant portion of the American people that no matter what documentation President Obama provides, he’s not American, which is an amazing thing to have done.
NELL PAINTER: The ground was very fertile for the birther lie, and in fact, if it hadn’t been, somebody could have said oh no, no, no, the president was not born in this country, he cannot be president — and it would have fallen to Earth. It never would have gone anywhere.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: If it were true, we would have elected someone who had no right to run for president, let alone to become the first African-American president of this country, but more particularly it expresses the illegitimacy of a person of African descent as a true American, as someone truly endowed with the capacity to govern this great nation. And that lie is just the tip of the iceberg, though foundational for everything else that flows from Donald Trump’s lips."
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And so on across the highest reaches of corporate America, an outpouring of solidarity with those protesting brutal police killings of black Americans and systemic racism.
But most of this is for show.
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BlackRock is one of the biggest investors in private prisons, disproportionately incarcerating black and Latino men.
Starbucks has prohibited baristas from wearing Black Lives Matter attire and for years has struggled with racism in its stores as managers accuse black patrons of trespassing and deny them bathrooms to which white patrons have access.
Last week, Frederick Baba, an executive at Goldman Sachs who is black, criticized managers for not supporting junior bankers from diverse backgrounds.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes – in the halls of Congress and the corridors of statehouses, in fundraisers and in private candidate briefings, in strategy sessions with political operatives and public-relations specialists – the CEOs who condemn racism lobby for and get giant tax cuts and fight off a wealth tax.
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As a result, the nation can’t afford anything as ambitious as a massive Marshall Plan to provide poor communities world-class schools, first-class healthcare and affordable housing.
The CEOs resist a living wage and universal basic income. They don’t want antitrust laws jeopardizing their market power, thereby requiring consumers pay more. They oppose tighter regulations against red-lining or prohibitions on payday lending, both of which disproportionately burden black and brown people.
Perhaps most revealingly, they remain silent in the face of Donald Trump’s bigotry. Indeed, many are quietly funding the re-election of a president whose political ascent began with a racist conspiracy theory and who continues to encourage white supremacists.
This goes beyond mere hypocrisy. America’s super rich have amassed more wealth and power than at any time since the “robber barons” of the late 19th century – enough to get legislative outcomes they want and organize the system for their own benefit.
Since the start of the pandemic, the nation’s billionaires have become $565bn richer, even as 42.6 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits. Job losses have disproportionately affected black Americans, and America’s racial wealth gap continues to grow.
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The rich know that as long as racial animosity exists, white and black Americans are less likely to look upward and see where the wealth and power really has gone."
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Luciano Lucenti Vielka (10X080)
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