I’m sick of it. The somber press conferences giving us the latest numbers of victims, adding those who succumbed in the hospital to those who died in the classrooms. The law enforcement announcements telling us that this or that aspect of the slaughter is “under investigation” or that they haven’t determined a “motive” just yet. Or later the details of exactly what kinds of weapons were used to commit the crime and create the carnage of bloody little bodies. 

And I’ve also had enough of the endless video images of the flashing lights of police vehicles and ambulances and of the crime scene tape around areas where the murders took place. And the sickening parade of crowds of cops strutting around, conferring, trying to “piece together” exactly what happened, assembling a “timeline” of events and delivering tidbits of news to the press. Oh yes, and the endless stream of video showing them armored and armed with their own long guns, sprinting toward the scene (or were they running away in order to protect themselves?) one hour after the murderer entered the school, too late as usual to prevent the deaths but just in time to kill the “suspect” without putting themselves in danger. 

And my God, how many “law enforcement” entities were involved in Uvalde – six, ten – in this incompetent performance? The town police force, Texas DPS, Border Patrol, County Sheriff’s Department, State Police, Texas Rangers, and even the FBI? And the school district had its very own police force, replete with its own “chief”? There they all were at the series of press conferences, all hapless and helpless, uniformed and uninformed, cowboy hats and cowboy boots, all armed to the teeth, admitting that they delayed for over an hour while the gunman shot a few more and victims bled out and died during the “golden hour” when their lives could have been saved. The tragic story of the one Uvalde teacher who survived, provides a dramatic account of police cowardice and delay.

And a couple of other things about the Uvalde disaster bear mentioning. First, I was incensed to see police officers performing a task better suited to almost any other citizens of Uvalde – that of taking bouquets of flowers, tender loving handwritten notes and signs from mourners and placing them among the dozens of mementos already there. Why the police? It seemed almost sacrilegious to me to have these heavily armed “protectors” who had failed the children and teachers of Robb Elementary, performing such a sensitive and loving task.

And why were they allowed or required to perform this task? Oh, I presume because the areas near the school were roped off, “protected” areas reserved for police “investigation”? Why was this pray tell? If I were a parent of a child killed in this dreadful incident or another school parent whose child had thankfully been spared, I would not want a policemen handling or even touching the memorial my child had thoughtfully prepared to pay tribute to a friend or favorite teacher who had died in this fusillade of bullets. Please, if indeed these areas around the school had to be roped off, the town authorities should have allowed clergy, colleagues of slain teachers or other citizens to perform this solemn duty, not a cop.

And of course the parade of politicians wringing their hands and saying we have to do something, yet always unwilling to do anything at all for fear of turning off the spigots of gun money from corporate and gun rights organization sources supporting their reelection campaigns or offending the armed and tattooed bubbas who constitute the bulk of their voting base. And the endless laments of “this is not who we are” when we know good and well that this is exactly who we are – a nation of spineless fools who allow, no, actually seem to encourage, every idiot and damned fool in the country to own a gun. And I’ve had it with the stupid suggestions for protecting students like “hardening” schools, arming teachers, providing more guards or having “one entrance”. How does that last one work for a fire in the school, Senator Cruz?

And then the endless breast beating by dozens of corporate TV talking heads and commentators, all wondering if this is the last time we suffer such an event, or “what it’s going to take” to get Congress to act.

And then later, the sad pictures and sketches of the lives snuffed out in the bloom of childhood – this one enjoyed art, another had a thing for animals, this child made the honor roll, another was a baseball player. And we begin crying, along with the parents and relatives.

And again, our “comforter in chief”, ever-suffering President Biden, shuffling and doddering among the memorial displays and gesturing about one or another, visiting the bereaved and offering useless public cliches that are supposed to make us all feel better. Oh and thank God, “Dr. Jill” was along too, . And the never ending cliches of “thoughts and prayers”, the flags lowered to half-mast, the “moments of silence” and the candlelight vigils.

I mean, how many of these terrible mass shootings are we expected to countenance before we do something concrete, something meaningful, to stop them. When are we going to pass effective laws to keep guns out of the hands of idiots, fools and the mentally deranged. The statistics are staggering – the only nation in the world with more guns than people – four hundred million at present. Forty thousand gun deaths every year along with 400 mass shootings. And so far in 2022 we’ve had well over 200 mass shootings. And now for the first time more children dying from guns than from auto accidents. The rest of the world is aghast at our stupidity and spinelessness. When a mass shooting occurs in another country they do something about it, but not the US. “Exceptional” indeed.

Frankly I think that doing anything different is impossible anymore in this country. Guns are such an integral part of our lives in the US. Every law enforcement officer of whatever stripe, level or description has to have a gun, presumably as Wayne LaPierre asserted, to be that “good guy with a gun” to stop that “bad guy with a gun”. Actually we’d all be much safer if neither of them had a gun. And furthermore, what did the hundreds of good guys with guns milling about Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas do? Not a damned thing, until it was too late.

I can’t get out of my head the image of a queue of new Border Patrol or ICE recruits, most of course scraped from the bottom of the barrel as these agencies scramble to fill their authorized ranks, all lined up and one by one being presented with their guns, belts, holsters and ammunition. Yes, this is the real badge of law enforcement in America – the power to instantly kill and maim. Honestly, do these creeps really need guns? What are they going to do – shoot some poor immigrant striving to achieve a better life for his family? Shoot some poor mother as she struggles through the currents of the Rio Grande with her children? But there they are getting their guns. This is indeed a major part of the mass killing epidemic in our country – guns themselves and their prevalence, whether in the hands of the “good guys” or the “bad guys”.

The recklessness and randomness with which guns in the hands of the police are fired at hapless and helpless citizens is astonishing. Attempting to run away from the scene of a crime or reluctance or recalcitrance (or inability, as demonstrated when a policeman aimed five bullets at the body of a pregnant woman so instructed) to heed shouted police orders, should not result in execution. Examples of cops acting as judge, jury and executioner are far too numerous to list here but one recent incident which I cannot erase from my mind is this one, in which a poor, confused and probably inebriated immigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Patrick Lyoya, tried to run away from a traffic stop arrest, was tackled by the cop and summarily executed with a single shot to the back of his head.

And there’s our august, brilliant, dignified black-robed justices of the Supreme Court. How do they feel when they know they are responsible too for this carnage – the bloody, lifeless bodies of innocent children in a school. These distinguished “jurists” have opened the legal floodgates for this torrent of guns. They have done so by striking down laws limiting ownership of guns and making it perfectly legal for gun manufacturers and gun rights organizations to buy their own congressmen (see my upcoming article “Screwed by SCOTUS”)

And accordingly our corrupt “lawmakers” in state legislatures and Congress go about the business of making it easier to own weapons of war, making it legal for any moron to carry a gun in public, into a restaurant or department store if the idiot wishes. And our Republican leaders in Congress persist in claiming that the real problem is mental illness and school safety, not the number of guns in our country. As a career educator I deplore the focus on “hardening” schools. Schools need to be open, warm and welcoming beacons to the communities they serve, not cold, austere and forbidding fortresses. And arming teachers, as our genius and wise sage ex-president Donald Trump suggested at the NRA Convention in Houston last Friday is ludicrous. Give me a break – teachers have more than enough responsibility in their increasingly demanding roles. They should not and cannot become armed guards as well. Placing armed personnel in schools has not increased safety but has only made schools more dangerous.

I’m sick of it all. This is not freedom, but tyranny of a different sort. I’m personally tyrannized by the omniscience of guns, the ease with which they can be purchased and the ease with which ammunition to load them can also be obtained. And please spare me all the banal platitudes about “responsible gun owners”. I mean, there’s got to be a limit on this too. How many guns does a “responsible gun owner” need? The same goes for “collectors”.  How many of the 400 million guns in this country are owned by collectors and responsible gun owners or hunters? How many of the murderous killers of children in schools, patrons in shopping centers or supermarkets, music lovers at a country music concert have fallen into these categories. No, there are simply too many guns in this country….period.

Isn’t the primary duty of the state to protect its citizens? And wouldn’t the first among them be those least able to protect themselves – our children? Look at how our country has utterly failed at this primary task. And yet we have far more policemen and police departments per capita “serving and protecting” our society than any other developed country (see my upcoming article “Police State”). And perhaps it’s time to ask why we have so many policemen and why we are not any safer or better protected. Oh yes, the cops are out in droves to “keep order” during times of civic unrest, looking and acting far more like agents of a repressive state than protectors of lives and property. In Uvalde they were out in droves, directing traffic, cordoning off areas, doing crowd control and keeping parents from actively rescuing their children, even handcuffing one distraught mother, doing everything except going after the shooter. And yes, their guns were ever at the ready, to kill and injure. Wherever there are people demonstrating, exercising their constitutional right to “peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”, there are the phalanxes of heavily armed policemen, replete with their weapons and vehicles of war, to “keep order”. Perhaps it’s time to ask what police really do for us, as Natasha Leonard noted in a recent article for The Intercept.

It might be appropriate to close with a grim reminder of what we have become – a nation of mass shootings which keep happening. On May 27 the Washington Post published a grim list of all the names of those who have died in mass shootings since Columbine, replete with telling photographs of ensuing grief and sadness, with the plea we have heard so many times before – Congress needs to pass sensible gun laws. Now.

What on earth do our Congressmen think when they consider this list? Might they think that something is wrong in our country? Something they need to address? My God, there’s Mitch McConnell again at a press conference, flanked as usual by his do-nothing fellow Republican “leaders” Senators Barrasso, Thune, Ernst and Blunt announcing again what they won’t do, deciding what legislation to block and when to use the filibuster. How long are we going to tolerate a Senate where all good legislation voted by the House goes to die?

Perhaps we just need to admit that our nation is in serious trouble. It is in a steady decline, totally unable to arrest its deterioration because its government is controlled by corporations and money and because of its foolish fealty to a constitution long overdue for a rewrite.

From a very early age we were taught about voting and how whoever gets the most votes wins. Oh yes, when running for class president, whoever got the most votes won. And my New Jersey governor won because he received the most votes and the senators and representatives who represented my state in Congress were sent to Washington because they got more votes than their opponents. Thus power is bestowed on those who receive the most votes in an election. 

But wait…why is this not true on a national level? Chief executives in every democracy in the world win and serve their people when they receive more votes than other candidates. In every democracy, that is, except ours. Our former chief executive, Donald Trump, came in second. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, won far more votes that he did. And in 2000 Al Gore received more popular votes than George W. Bush. Yes, the reason Gore and Clinton lost was the dreadful Electoral College with its  state by state “winner take all” rules set up by our genius “founding fathers”. Perhaps if we could have included some “founding mothers” in that august group that wrote the US Constitution, their sense of fairness could have prevailed and our presidents would have been elected with the popular vote. Just think if Gore has been elected instead of Bush. The trillions of dollars and thousands of lives wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan  wars would still be with us. And I am sure we would be leading the world in saving the climate as well, considering Gore’s long held convictions concerning climate change. 

And what if Hillary Clinton had won the election in 2016? Yes, news of Bill prowling around the White House looking for things to do would not have been pleasant. But he could have been appointed by his wife the President to some new position, perhaps  “Ambassador to the World” or something like that, just to keep him occupied and out of trouble. But our government institutions would have been left intact, we’d still be participating in the Paris accords for climate change and the Iran nuclear deal would still be extant. We’d still be serious players on the world stage. And the clown show led by Donald Trump and his entourage of fools and incompetents featuring Ivanka and Jared would not have occurred. And perhaps most important of all, the scourge of the Covid 19 pandemic could have been contained and hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved.

But, because our country is ruled by a minority, the Republic Party and its leader Donald Trump had a grand time promoting disaster in Washington. How has this happened in a “democracy”, where the majority supposed to rule? Let’s take a look.

First of course is the aforementioned “Electoral College” method of electing our chief executive. Ostensibly put in place by our genius Founding Fathers to protect the power of small states, which it indeed does, in fact, this quirk of American presidential elections was put in place to also protect the power of slave states. The “three fifths person” designation for slaves was enough to give slave states enormous power in the Electoral College through significantly increasing their representation in the House of Representatives, even though these hundreds of thousands extra “3/5” people could not vote. 

Also simply giving small state a minimum of three votes in the Electoral College, gave them an advantage. And the recent anomalies of George W. Bush becoming president even though his opponent Al Gore had a half-million more popular votes and Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote overwhelmingly yet losing to Donald Trump, has given the Republican Party tremendous power, even though a minority party at those times. Thus it’s no wonder that recent polls have revealed that a huge majority of Republicans want to retain the Electoral College, whereas a majority of Democrats want to elect our president with the popular vote.

Another negative aspect of the Electoral College is that it reveals the apparent uselessness of voting in certain states and the phenomenon of “swing states” in others. With the statewide “winner take all” character imposed by the Electoral College, if one votes in a presidential election in overwhelmingly Democratic New York or California or in overwhelmingly Republican Wyoming or Idaho, that vote, whether Republican or Democrat, does not matter much, since the result is largely already determined. But in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania or Florida, one’s vote is extremely valuable since the result could go either way. For example, my wife and I could have voted for president in Vermont last November. But why, since the state would vote overwhelmingly Democratic anyhow. So we made sure we voted in our home state of Arizona, which has become a “swing state” and really needed our Democratic vote. The simple result of all this is that is if the president were elected on a nationwide popular vote, every single vote would count and voters would eagerly participate, no matter where they lived. A Vermont vote would be every bit as valuable as an Arizona vote. There would be no “wasted” votes.

The perverse power of Republican minority rule is also exemplified in our Congress and the way it conducts its business. The membership of just one legislative body in Congress, the House of Representatives, is based upon population and is therefore quite democratic. The other, the Senate, since every state gets two senators, is terribly undemocratic, revealing the anomaly of tiny states like Wyoming or South Dakota having just as much power in the Senate as populous states like California and New York. Today, each Democratic Senator from California represents 371 million American citizens, while each Republican Senator from Wyoming represents but 289,000. On a macro level, the undemocratic nature of the Senate is illustrated by the fact that, now divided 50-50, Democratic Senators represent fully 42 million more citizens than the Republican half. In fact, though in control of the Senate many times since 1996, that year was the last that the Republican party actually represented a majority of Americans. Yet Senate Republicans, representing a minority of voters, have effectively blocked a hugely popular minimum wage bill  and passed extremely unpopular tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

Another way that the Republican Party, a minority party, mind you, retains power is through gerrymandering. Over ten years ago, while the Democratic Party was foolishly focusing its resources into ensuring the reelection of Barack Obama, Republicans, led by Karl Rove and financed with millions of dollars from the Koch brothers and other right wing billionaires, wisely set their sights on control of state governments, especially state legislatures, which in most states have the power to draw legislative districts after each decennial national census. So after the 2010 census results, Republican legislatures across the country began some very serious gerrymandering, guaranteeing a growth in Republican House of Representatives seats that would last through multiple elections. So even in the House of Representatives, which is by far the more democratic of our two legislative houses, although millions more voters voted for Democrats than Republicans in 2020, Republicans dramatically increased their share of seats.

In the same way that my own part-time residence in a heavily Democratic state like Vermont renders my vote superfluous – whether I vote Democratic or Republican, either way it’s wasted, gerrymandering strives to render certain votes useless as well, by “packing” or “cracking” legislative districts in order to render them uncompetitive. Cracking involves breaking up groups of voters who usually vote a particular way in order to deny them the power of voting in a block. Packing involves drawing districts in such a way as to concentrate voters of one persuasion or another in such a way as to maximize “wasted” votes or to maximize the power of your party’s voteAnd now in 2021, it appears that Republicans, who again control most state legislatures and who again do so right after a census year, are perfectly positioned to take control of the House of Representatives in 2022, even though their total votes will likely not increase and may even decrease. The Republican controlled state legislatures are poised to take their new census information and very precisely and scientifically, create legislative districts across their states that will enable Republicans to win a majority of House seats with a minority of votes. Their plans are well outlined in this New York Magazine article. Ari Berman states for the article that “Republicans could pick up anywhere from six to 13 seats in the House of Representatives — enough to retake the House in 2022 — through its control of the redistricting process in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and Texas alone”. No need to work hard to earn more votes, or come up with programs or policies that voters prefer – gerrymandering will be sufficient.

And additional examples were offered by NYTimes columnist Jamal Bouie who noted that North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature has passed a new map that would, in a state that is pretty much 50-50 Democratic and Republican, give it 10 of the states 14 congressional seats. In Ohio, a proposed map would provide Democrats with but two seats out of the 15 allotted to it after the 2020 census, only 13 percent of the total. And this in a state that is only slightly more Republican than Democratic. In both cases, these two states would have to achieve blowout, supermajorities of Democratic votes in order to be proportionately represented. Ari Berman’s prediction noted in the previous paragraph is already coming true. And the minority party’s triumph for Congressional dominance has already been determined as noted by a NYTimes article just this week And as if the Electoral College and gerrymandering were not enough, just the transfer of population from several norther “swing states” to Republican strongholds in the south as revealed in the new 2020 census,  will further cement Republican minority strength in presidential and congressional elections.

One might reasonably ask why Democrat-controlled legislatures and Democratic governors are not doing the same thing right now – redrawing districts to make sure that they sent more Representatives to Congress. Well as it so happens, other than present efforts in Illinois and New York, when the Democratic Party controls state legislatures and the redistricting process, instead of drawing legislative districts to benefit their party, it instead tries to establish independent commissions to draw legislative districts. Thus by striving to be fair the Democratic Party is shooting itself in the foot.

Another way that we are ruled by a minority party is through voter suppression.  Presently the Republican Party is doing everything it can to limit the votes of poor and minority voters. Under the guise of “election security”, promoted by the “big lie” – that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election and rampant voter fraud gave the election to his opponent, Republican controlled legislatures and Republican governors are making it more difficult to vote. They are doing so by limiting mail in voting, requiring specific types of identification for both in person and mail in voting,  limiting voting days and a variety of other changes to make voting more difficult. Georgia has even made it a crime to bring water or food to a person in a long voting line. And who does voter suppression hurt the most? Poor voters and people of color, who usually voted Democratic, again helping the minority party, the Republicans.

In addition and much more serious is that many Republican-controlled state legislatures are changing how votes are counted and who does the counting. While typically a state’s voting operation is under the supervision of a secretary of state, some state legislatures are wresting control of elections from state and local election supervisors and placing it directly under their control. If this had been the case in Georgia in the 2020 election, the state legislature could have declared Trump the winner, instead of the steadfast Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger refusing to accommodate Trump as he did. 

It’s important to note that simply because of the way the Electoral College is set up, with it being composed of electors equal to the Congressional delegation of individual states, even without all the shenanigans listed above, the minority party retains a 3.5 point advantage there. And in the Senate, because of each state having two senators and a minimum of one representative regardless of size, the minority party maintains a five point advantage. Thus, even after winning millions more votes that Republicans in 2018 and 2020, the Senate is evenly split and Democrats have but a narrow four-seat advantage in the House.

Yet another way the minority party is limiting the influence of the majority party is through packing the courts with conservative Republican judges, picked from the ranks of the Federalist Society. With the help of then majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump filled over 200 vacancies on the Federal bench, including 53 vacancies on Federal Appeals Courts. This was the highest total of any first term president since Jimmy Carter. And of course this includes the incredible number of three Supreme Court justices appointed by a single one-term president. Amazingly just two Republican presidents who were elected by a minority of the popular vote have appointed four of the justices on the Supreme Court, ensuring a conservative majority for at least a generation. And the Supreme Court, as the final arbiter in election law, has done its best to ensure minority rule, with far reaching decisions on the role of money in elections (it’s “free speech”, not corruption) and in voting rights enforcement, to name but two decisions which have further entrenched the minority party.

And finally, the filibuster, the Senate rule not in the Constitution, enables the minority party in an evenly divided Senate to repeatedly block any legislation it does not like, by requiring a 60 vote majority, very difficult or well nigh impossible to achieve in our evenly divided Senate. Consequently Republicans used it recently to block the Voting Rights Bill, called also the For the People Act, which would have constituted the largest federally mandated expansion of voting rights since the 1960’s. It would have standardized voting procedures in all states, allowing mail voting and same day registration, banned partisan gerrymandering, and limited the role of money in our elections by forcing super PAC’s to disclose major donors and creating a new public campaign financing system. Yet because of the filibuster, the Republicans in the Senate were able to keep the bill from even being debated on the floor. 

So it should be obvious that America is indeed ruled by a minority – the Republican Party. And why? It’s pretty much our lousy constitution which badly needs to be changed. It established the Electoral College, determined that each state regardless of size should have two Senators and a minimum of one Representative. It allows anti-majority rules like the filibuster. It determined that elections, even federal elections, should be a state function and it made Supreme Court justice a lifetime job, subject to the vagaries of old age and death, regardless of who is in the White House or which party controls Congress. All these factors enable one political party, a minority, to effectively thwart the will of the people and wield majority power. If the US is to remain a democracy, this must change. 

I was disturbed by the worshipful reverence implied in the smaller news item inserted into the story of President Biden’s inauguration on January 20 of this year.

Sure, most Americans were happy to see the end of the chaotic, disastrous and disgraceful presidency of Donald Trump and happy to usher in what we all hoped would be a much more deliberate, thoughtful, honest and transparent presidency. Although Joe Biden’s tenure has yet to be judged, the end of Trump’s certainly has caused a national sigh of relief.

And I assume to help make that point we were treated to a dramatically posed and videoed meeting among three of our ex-presidents: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, where we could hear them reminisce and ruminate about the “peaceful transfer of power” in which they all participated and position themselves as contrasts to the last four years. For many viewers and observers perhaps it worked. I mean, who wouldn’t look good next to Donald Trump. Whose administration would not shine when compared to the destructive wrecking crew of ne’er-do-wells who populated Trump’s cabinet – from Betsy DeVos to Scott Pruitt – all bent on destroying that which they were appointed to protect. 

But I had a problem with this video – not with the sentiment expressed by these ex presidents about the peaceful transition of power, which was quite appropriate, but with being reminded as I looked at each one and remembered their respective eight-year presidencies, of how flawed our recent presidents and their legacies have been. The reflective gathering of these three should have been not a celebration but a commiseration. All three have huge black marks on their respective administrations that will define them forever and that history will not erase.

In order – Bill Clinton and his “triangulation” strategy caused no end of misfortune for America. His “middle ground” abandonment of principles of the Democratic Party that got him elected and embrace of right wing policies to ingratiate him with the Republican Party resulted in some disastrous legislation. His crime bill, in the words of NYTimes columnist Charles Blow, “…flooded the streets with police officers and contributed to the rise of mass incarceration, which disproportionately impacts Black men and their families. It helped to drain Black communities of fathers, uncles, husbands, partners and sons….”. 

And then there was Clinton’s welfare reform bill which would “end welfare as we know it”, when he took another page from the Republican playbook by changing welfare to a block grant program for each state, inadequate to begin with, and which assured significant disparity among more and less generous states. His program also dictated onerous work requirements which presented impossible transportation burdens for poor families and, worst of all, ran out at an established point, depositing many one parent and struggling families right back into the gutter of despair and hopelessness from which they were trying to escape and where they remained. 

Then there were Clinton’s clumsy foreign policy forays, which included “Operation Infinite Reach” – the bombing of purported terrorist havens in Afghanistan and a western built pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, claimed to be manufacturing nerve gas. These attacks were violations of international law and failed to achieve anything except enhancing Osama bin Laden’s reputation and strengthening the terrorist resolve that resulted in the disaster of 9/11. Along with his ill-conceived assault in Somalia culminating in the infamous Mogadishu firefight of October 1993, our friend Bill should be forever contrite and repentant.

Another signature bill of Clinton’s presidency was the oft-touted North American Free Trade Agreement, known better as NAFTA, which accelerated the departure of  manufacturing from America to low wage countries like Mexico. Why the hollowed-out cities of Michigan and Ohio with boarded up factory buildings? NAFTA is the reason. The loss of well paid, unionized manufacturing jobs was a huge contributor to destroying the middle class and making the United States the most unequal country among OECD nations. With NAFTA the corporations, their CEO’s and their stockholders got richer and their former employees got poorer.

The corporate takeover of Medicare also began with Bill Clinton. It was during his administration that private healthcare corporations were first allowed to administer Medicare programs to seniors. First called Medicare “Choice” programs, they eventually morphed into the myriad “Medicare Advantage” programs of today, which offer “enhanced” medicare providing additional benefits like dental care, hearing and drug coverage and so on at great taxpayer cost through requiring Medicare to pay a hefty annual coverage cost to private companies, who then profit by limiting coverage (See my upcoming article on this subject).

And then, of course, Clinton’s dalliance with a White House intern forever blemished the US presidency. Yes, one might argue that other presidents had their weak moments too, certainly FDR, Eisenhower and Kennedy come to mind. But Clinton’s were not tastefully hidden but blazoned in the headlines for all of us to see and feel. 

So perhaps President Clinton, standing so dramatically with those two other ex presidents, should have been apologizing to his colleagues and to the American people instead of discussing the “peaceful transition of power”.

Then there was George W. Bush, the biggest failure of all, standing in the twilight with Bill and Barack. He manipulated intelligence and initiated a catastrophic war of choice with Iraq which should be described with terms like “illegal. war crime, deception, lies, immoral, mass murder” that cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives while making the world a more dangerous place. In addition to the money, now calculated by Brown University’s Cost of War project at $1.922 trillion (averaging about $8000 for every US taxpayer) and the lives lost, estimated to be more than 300,000, we left a dreadfully unstable and still struggling Iraq. Plus our friend Mr. Bush gave the ok for “black sites” and legalization of torture, leaving a most shameful and permanent blemish on the character of our nation. Actually, the costs of Bush’s entire “War on Terror”, which would include not only Iraq, but also Afghanistan and military actions in more than 80 other countries all over the globe, and which accomplished little but further deterioration of our reputation, have tallied an astonishing cost of $6.4 trillion and 601,000 precious lives lost. Thank you, George W. Bush.

 And of course, we remember “W”’s disastrous reaction to Hurricane Katrina. It’s really hard to imagine a more detached, uncaring posture in the face of such a huge disaster, but there he was, after interrupting an already disgracefully long 27 day vacation on his Texas ranch, disdainfully viewing the deadly catastrophe from the distance and safety of Air Force One. Then, eventually on the ground and finally trying to lead, he comes out with his immortal statement to inept FEMA director Michael Brown, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”. This dismal performance as president in the face of terrible disaster will long be remembered.

And guess who privatized and deregulated the Texas power grid, severed it from those in adjacent states to prevent any federal oversight, and placed it under the control of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)? Yes, George W. Bush did all this while serving as governor of Texas, calling it “The nation’s most extensive experiment in electrical deregulation” – an extraordinarily expensive and deadly experiment, with Texas residential consumers paying ten of billions more for their power than state’s traditional utilities, most of it going into the pockets of investors, power company CEOs, and the campaign coffers of Texas Republican politicians. And we all know what happened when the changing climate sent a huge cold wave to Texas this past winter – approximately 800 people died and the the state sustained billions in property damage. Thank you for that too, George W. Bush.

So Bush, as detailed in a superb New York Magazine article the “painter”, the “artist”, is trying to launder his reputation and sanitize his legacy with his vapid portraiture. Oh yes, “inspired by Churchill”, he is painting portraits of immigrants, including fellow war criminal Henry Kissinger and marketing a  book celebrating his “artistry” with all the power he can. Why? Does he need the money? Hardly – he’s been a multimillionaire for decades for whom politics and now art have been a hobby. He’s just doing everything he can to make us forget his disastrous presidency and unfortunately we’re mostly going along with him. And George W. Bush, war criminal, had the gall to appear on BookTV being interviewed by none other than his own daughter and expounding  on his new career and book. 

Oh, and let’s not forget that like every good Republican president, “W” also cut taxes for the wealthy in 2001 and 2003 under the guise of “tax relief”, a Frank Luntz term that I illustrated in another article. So George W., paint and pontificate all you want. You will never live down the legacy of being one of the worst, most disastrous of all US presidents.

And good old President Barack Obama, now basking in the riches obtained by he and Michelle’s movie production deal with Netflix and the considerable royalties from the first volume of his presidential memoirs, should be sadly looking back at a failed presidency. Oh sure, he was a distinguished leader on the world stage, might be the most eloquent of all of our presidents, and indisputably was our first black president, but he could have done so much more, were he not locked in the embrace of neoliberal orthodoxy. His vaunted “hope and change” never materialized – we all hoped but nothing much changed. 

Surrounded by advisors recruited from the ranks of Goldman Sachs he chose Wall Street over Main Street, bailing out the very same big banks that caused the financial crisis of 2008 instead of prosecuting them and failed to help the millions who lost their sole store of wealth – their homes. Yes, President Obama refused to prosecute those who caused the crash of 2008, in contrast to the thousands of prosecutions following the savings and loan debacle of the ’80’s and ’90’s and chose instead to bail out the big banks, the real culprits, instead of common people who were losing their homes. And the stimulus finally passed to stop the hemorrhaging of jobs and livelihoods was far too small, causing the recovery to drag on for much too long. Furthermore and very important, this choice fueled an era of populist rage and resentment that infected the country and paved the way for  the election of Donald Trump.

And while all of us hoped for something better, President Obama forever doomed American medical care to be a for-profit corporate “product” by allowing the Affordable Care Act to be virtually written by the health care and pharmaceutical industries. True, it extended “affordable” healthcare to additional millions of people but at the huge cost of government subsidies to healthcare corporations. “Obamacare” – ostensibly a compromise between liberals and moderates, was in reality a giveaway to the already corporatized healthcare industry. And Biden’s much touted “enhancement” of Obamacare and the aforementioned Medicare Advantage programs have tightened corporate America’s grip on American healthcare and have made transition to a much less expensive and far more efficient single payer government run program which would cover every single person in the country from birth to death increasingly difficult and now maybe impossible.

Also, it was President Obama who, perhaps unwittingly, signed the deceptively named Ensuring Patient Access and Drug Enforcement Act, which stripped the DEA of power to staunch the flow of opioid pills outside of normal avenues of prescription and distribution, protecting drug manufacturers and their distributors and making it easier for them to get away with exacerbating the epidemic of overdoses and death. And it’s interesting to note that the bill’s most passionate advocate, Representative Tom Marino of Pennsylvania, was later nominated by Donald Trump to be his “drug czar”.

Plus while president our friend Barack Obama embarked on a series of ill advised and illegal executions, an example of which certainly was the much ballyhooed “capture” of Osama bin Laden, who actually was murdered extrajudicially instead of being brought back to the US to face justice. Yes, our “constitutional scholar and professor” president who campaigned against the death penalty, actually kept a “kill list” and was only too happy to execute any number of Muslims without charges or trials, some of whom were US citizens, along with dozens of innocent bystanders, who likely were deemed mere “collateral damage”.

Another shameful feature of the Obama presidency was his treatment of whistleblowers. Of course, Mr. Obama, boasted of his administration’s “transparency”, promising “a new era of open government”, but betrayed that pledge time and time again, spearheading eight Espionage Act prosecutions, more than all US administrations combined. The Obama administration’s treatment of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, James Risen, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Donald Sachtleben, Stephen Kim and the very latest, Daniel Hale, whose prosecution began under Obama, continued through Trump and will conclude under Biden, was shameful and contrasts shockingly with the preferential treatment of David Petraeus, guilty of the same sharing of government secrets.

When considering the aforementioned, why President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize remains a mystery. Conjecture suggests that this award was perhaps a veiled repudiation of the previous administration, or perhaps some “hope” based on Obama’s overtures to Muslim countries. But it is amazing that so many of his administration’s actions violated the honor of this recognition. Quite contradictory also, especially in view of his promises to work toward a “nuclear-free world”, which probably helped him win the Prize, was his authorization of a trillion dollar program to “modernize” the US atomic arsenal with its 5800 warheads already capable of destroying the world and everyone in it several times over. And, like presidents before him, he continued the coverup of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. In 2009, when a journalist asked him if he knew of “any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons,” Mr. Obama responded, “I don’t want to speculate”, making his efforts to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons to maintain a “nuclear free middle east” disingenuous at best.

I should add that President Obama and his pompous blowhard Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, repeatedly betrayed and damaged my precious chosen profession, public education. Obama and Duncan, both private school products, demonstrated little knowledge of public education and its important role in American democracy and displayed little awareness of the causes of its problems. They continued the detached and useless tenets of George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” involving standards, test scores, competition, and school reward and punishment, simply using different names – “School Improvement Grants” and “Race to the Top”. And both presented charter schools and “choice” as solutions to public school struggles, sucking away precious public school resources and depositing them in private pockets. 

And one more thing – as a dedicated Democrat, I was terribly upset to see President Obama, the leader of my Party, and his dedicated supporters, throw virtually all of their effort and resources into his 2012 reelection, to the detriment of national Democratic concerns. During President Obama’s eight years in office, when Democrats like me could feel some pride in a Democratic presidency, the Party lost more House, Senate, state legislative and governor seats, a net total of 13 governorships and 816 state legislative seats than under any other president. Among the states lost by Democrats were Wisconsin, North Carolina, Iowa and West Virginia, all key to the victory of Donald Trump in 2016. 

And finally, the great humanitarian, President Obama, who so sensitively and eloquently reflected the grief and concern of the nation at at mass shootings in schools and churches, even singing “Amazing Grace” when he “ran out of words”, did absolutely nothing to impede Israeli land theft, settlement expansion and human rights abuses, all violations of international law, during his presidency and worse, sat by while the US funded Israeli war machine killed thousands of Palestinians during the Gaza “war” in 2014 including 551 children and 299 women, while injuring over ten thousand and orphaning more than fifteen hundred children, all the while mouthing the same tired platitude, “Israel has the right to defend itself”. Instead Mr. Obama rewarded this criminal nation by signing a 10 year, $38 billion aid MOU with Israel. This $11 million per day “tribute” to Israel has recently ballooned to $20 million per day as our politicians stumble over each other in their eagerness to “help Israel”. “

So President Obama, enough with your well honed speeches and sanctimonious and thoughtful demeanor and enough with your “presidential memoirs” which gloss over your mistakes and failures. If you really want us to forget, why not impress us by trying your hand at building homes for the poor with Habitat for Humanity like President Carter did, or maybe join Stacey Abrams knocking on doors to expand voting opportunities for poor people of color. Oh, and one more thing –  it was Obama’s EPA that approved toxic chemicals for the fracking industry, that break down into deadly “forever” poisonous compounds called PFAS which threaten people and wildlife through soil and water contamination.

Before publishing this bleak assessment of our last three presidents’ legacies, it might be only fair to consider a few of the best things to emerge from their respective administrations. Hey, it wasn’t all bad.  However, what most consider to be Bill Clinton’s major achievements – NAFTA, his crime bill and welfare reform, I have asserted to be major failures. Yet he can be proud of the first balanced Federal budget in many years. George W. Bush has been lauded for PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDs relief),  a successful humanitarian effort to combat AIDS in twelve African countries. And ironically, what’s commonly viewed as Barack Obama’s greatest achievement, the Affordable Care Act, I include above as a major failure. But he should be recognized for the DACA program, his Consumer Protection Bureau, joining the Paris Climate Accords, the Iran Nuclear deal, reaching out to Cuba and for his active support for LGBTQ rights. But, all considered, in my view the achievements of these three remarkably flawed presidents were far outweighed by their errors, mistakes and failures.

Our country has lost so much since the election of Donald Trump. There has been a flood and a whirlwind of information about him which has obliterated almost everything else. And this is causing numbness. We are dazed, stunned and paralyzed by this torrent of scandal, lies, fabrications and exaggerations emanating from this dreadful administration. We are dumbfounded by the miserable quality of the people appointed (and approved by our useless Republican controlled Congress) to run the departments of our government. Where I used to read the Washington Post or the New York Times for the latest news and opinions about important issues, now almost everything written by their brilliant columnists, liberal, conservative or in-between, is about Trump or one of his advisors or appointees. The valuable emails I receive periodically from Salon, Huffington Post, the Real News, Alternet, Truthout, Truthdig and so on, are now mostly full of Trump stuff. We’re rapidly losing sight of what’s important and drowning in the sea of Trump trash that gets deeper by the day.  Not only the print media is full of this stuff but also cable news: Virtually every show on MSNBC, CNN and Fox are devoted to Trump or something related to his administration. Regrettably and disastrously, we have become inured to the daily transgressions and insults from this president.

 

One of my favorite members of team on “Morning Joe”, which I watch some of on most weekdays while I’m working out, is former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnacle. Mike’s comments on almost any subject are memorable, but most consequential were his comments on Friday May 4 of this year regarding the flood of Trump nonsense in which we are drowning and which has blocked important concerns and issues from our senses.

“We talk about this every day, multiple times a day – just a literal tsunami, a fire hydrant of false information coming from this White House every day. But it’s larger than that and the problem and the threat and the danger is much larger than the White House and us talking about it. It’s what’s happening out in the country every day, people dealing every day – the normalization of lies and deception coming the the president of the United States and those who represent the president. And people get used to it and people slowly turn off and it doesn’t impact people and they are not really caring about the fact that the President of the United States is a liar and that people who represent him lie on a daily basis. This is how democracies die right in front of us every single day – deception and lies become normal.”

Thank you, Mr. Barnacle – I agree completely. Let me add that I myself have had a dreadful struggle with the dissonance of those two words – “president” and “Trump” and am somewhat upset that the two words in tandem now seem to go together, having now heard them hundreds, maybe thousands of times. But please, for the sake of our country, let’s not get used to the rest.

When one takes the time to slow down, pause, think and tabulate the changes in our government, the office of president, the departments of government, to our political awareness resulting from the Trump election, the list is astonishing….and long…..and far too important to  ignore. Let’s take a look for ourselves and then maybe we can put all this aside and concentrate on something else for a change. Here is the list of outrages, significant departures from past practice and procedure, which confound expectations and are in danger of becoming the norm. These are what we have become used to and what is becoming commonplace.

• Hiding personal finances. No president in recent memory has dared to hide his tax returns from voters and citizens. Yet Trump has done exactly this – and we elected him anyhow and we’ve rolled over and acquiesced. If the next president chooses to hide his personal financial dealings from voters, what’s to stop him (or her)? And who knows what these tax returns may reveal? Our president may be a far more egregious money concealer and launderer than his former lieutenant, Paul Mannafort. After all if, as Nomi Prins speculates in her recent article for the Nation –  “There are more than 500 companies in over two dozen countries, mostly with few to no employees or real offices, that feature him (Trump) as their ‘president’”. Why, if money is not being hidden or laundered? 
• Retained control of personal businesses. Donald Trump has not divested himself of his businesses but instead asserts that his children are running them and he’s not involved. Oh sure, we all know that’s not the case, yet he has gotten away with it. He’s first president to do this and there will be more. The door has been opened and will likely never close. Another violation of rules and norms that we have become used to. Oh, and the Trump Foundation is being sued by the New York Attorney General’s office for multiple violations of the law, alleging that the president and his adult children illegally used the private foundation for personal, business, and political expenses.
• Blatant nepotism. Trump has felt absolutely free to hire relatives and assign them to important posts. Not since President Kennedy hired his brother Robert as Attorney General has any president dared to do this. At least Robert Kennedy had some training and ability for his family assignment, unlike Ivanka and Jared. 

• Unfit, incompetent cabinet members. Appointing cabinet members who are totally unsuited for the job – this list is huge – and most were approved by the Senate. Betsy DeVos, enemy of public education and friend of vouchers and exploitative for-profit colleges; Scott Pruitt, enemy of the environment and friend of polluters (now thankfully departed but succeeded by Andrew Wheeler who thinks exactly like him); Wilbur Ross, now fighting accusations of corruption and described by Forbes magazine as “one of the biggest grifters in history”; Jeff Sessions, racist and the first Senator to openly endorse Trump; Ryan Zinke, no friend of National Parks, wildlife refuges, nature preserves or wildernesses but friend of drilling and mining interests; frightening, unstable and excitable specter John Bolton; ignorant Rick Perry and Ben Carson….and the list goes on. These are the “best people” Trump promised. It truly appears that each cabinet member has been given a dual assignment : 1) Undo every rule, every protection that previous administrations have instituted and 2) Do everything that corporations and rich donors want you to do, not what the American people want you to do. This has been illustrated in every single department run by the Federal Government. The Trump cabinet is a wrecking crew, which is tearing apart the edifice called the Federal Government and torching cherished values and beliefs in the process. And not only cabinet members but their lieutenants as well. Guess who at the Department of Interior decides on the efficacy of proposed climate research projects – Steve Howke, a Whitefish, Montana Kindergarten through high school classmate and varsity football teammate of Ryan Zinke, who majored in business, has spent his life working for credit unions and has absolutely no scientific background. The “swamp” is murkier and slimier than ever.

• Violation of security requirements. Required security clearances were not required and conducted for key advisors in important positions – how did this happen? How did they finally get them? What lies and subterfuges were provided by Jared Kushner and others previously denied such clearances? And how about the latest violation of national trust – Tump’s order to declassify confidential communications involving FBI and Justice Department, now withdrawn but likely resurrected in the future.

• Governing by tweet. This is absolutely unprecedented – that a sitting president churns out impulsive insults and outrages replete with misspellings and infantile emphatic capitalizations – and the corporate press excitedly awaits the day’s tweets so that this collection of schoolyard insults and name calling is given legitimacy. For example – “Special Council is told to find crimes wether crimes exist or not. I was opposed to the the selection of Mueller to be Special Council, I still am opposed to it. I think President Trump was right when he said there never should have bee a Special Council appointed because…..,” or the infantile “Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and “smart!” You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!” – yes, actually from the President of the United States. And hundreds, maybe thousands more that are equally or far more embarrassing.

• Ignorance. There has never been a president who has exhibited more incredible ignorance of government than Donald Trump. He has been not only clueless about the duties he was elected to perform but ignorant of history, geography, culture, the arts, literature and the list could go on. And this president has also demonstrated a singular lack of curiosity that makes George W. Bush look like a college professor. At a Black History Month event he commented, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Yes, I know – Mr. Trump has recently appointed Mr. Douglass to the National Security Council but because of criticism, has threatened to remove his security clearance.

• Lies, falsehoods. Yes, all presidents have lied at one time or another when it was politically advantageous. But we have never seen anything like this flood of falsehoods flowing from this White House. From a recent Washington Post – “As of day 558, he’s made 4,229 Trumpian claims — an increase of 978 in just two months.That’s an overall average of nearly 7.6 claims a day. When we first started this project for the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. But the average number of claims per day keeps climbing the longer Trump stays in office. In fact, in June and July, the president averaged 16 claims a day.” With a president like this, lying and other unethical conduct become second nature in the White House and Cabinet. Oh, and Trump just the other day broke the 5000 mark in lies, exaggerations and untruths. And equally as bad – Trump’s lying has provided license for other White House advisors, cabinet members and government administrators to lie whenever they find it convenient. But perhaps most important, we’re getting so used to this stream of falsehoods, what happens when we have a serious crisis and we need the truth – Trump will have no credibility in crisis, which is so essential in a president.

• Laziness. This president is lazy too. He makes sure that he is not scheduled for anything public before 11:00 each day. In late night and morning hours he is watching Fox News and tweeting.

• State television. Speaking of Fox News, this is the first time that we’ve actually had a state television network to telecast sycophants fawning over the president and who actually advise the president. Fox’s `Sean Hannity attends dinner with our President; Fox and Friends’ Ainsley Earhardt, Steve Doocy & Brian Kilmeade are regularly consulted and confided in – Sean, Ainsley, Steve and Brian actually should be listed as cabinet members and approved by Congress.

 

• Egotism and boastfulness. Yes, all president have to be a bit self-centered, or they never could have generated the necessary support for election, but we’ve never seen anything like this – from one of Trump’s tweets: “….Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star…..to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that I would qualify as no smart, but genius….and a very stable genius at that!”

• And, related to this, Trump is the only president in my memory who needs, seeks and feeds on flattery and praise, no matter how false or outrageous.  I am sure we all remember the grossly obsequious behavior of those present at his first cabinet meeting which he obviously enjoyed. And the highly dubious statement made by Trump sycophant, bona fide liar, perjurer, teenage drunk and sexual assailant and now Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh at his nomination introduction – “No president has ever consulted more widely, or talked with more people from more backgrounds, to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination”. Oh, brilliant observation, Brett.

• Unprecedented huge turnover of cabinet members and other key personnel. In just 19 months on the job, Trump had more Cabinet turnover than 16 of his predecessors had in their first two full years. The latest score and comment from an August The New Yorker: “Other metrics make clear the significant changes in Trump’s approach to the Presidency in recent months, as he has become more confident, less willing to tolerate advisers who challenge him, and increasingly obsessed with the threats to his Presidency posed by the ongoing special-counsel investigation. One is the epic turnover rate of Trump’s White House staff, which as of June already stood at the unprecedented level of sixty-one per cent among the President’s top advisers.” And maybe more important, such turnover represents a wholesale decimation of expertise and experience in Federal Government posts.

• Careless and inappropriate personal appearance. This is a first among our presidents. At formal meetings, while other prime ministers, presidents, and officials look neat and statesmanly, with jackets and coats neatly buttoned, take a look at our president – jacket (or overcoat) hanging open, long tie flapping in the breeze. Why? Too difficult to button the jacket across his steadily expanding girth? Don’t know but it looks incredibly sloppy and inappropriate….SAD. And let’s not even count that ludicrous hair, that exaggerated comb-over, not only without precedent among presidents, but probably without precedent, period. Actually, as I mentioned in my article on the subject this preposterous attempt to hide a bald pate is a “comb-up-over-and-back”. And why the fake clenched jaw – protruding lips facial appearance, an obvious effort to appear tough, resolute and decisive? White House personnel tell us that he’s admitted that it’s an effort to emulate Winston Churchill.  Churchill? A bridge way too far, Mr. Trump, give it up!

 

• Inventing his own medical records. In addition to the glowing and likely spurious report penned by former White House physician Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, we have the written word also  of Trump’s former personal physician Dr. Harold Bornstein – “His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary. If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Not exactly your typical medical jargon, is it? Well that’s because, according to Dr. Bornstein, Trump dictated the letter himself. And unfortunately, we still really don’t know anything factual about the president’s health.

• Criticism, defamation and delegitimization and politicization of Federal law enforcement, essential for national security. This president stands alone, completely apart from any of his predecessors, even Nixon, in his disdain for the Justice Department and the FBI. This is extremely dangerous, when these agencies have always been largely depoliticized and worthy of considerable trust, even in the days of J. Edgar Hoover. What could be his most damaging attack on Federal law enforcement and national security is his recent order for declassification of documents related to the Russia investigation. This kind of action by a US president is not only totally unconciouasionable but absolutely unprecedented but in his words, “I have been asked by many people in Congress as you know to release them. I have watched commentators that I respect begging the president of the United States to release them….I have been asked by so many people that I respect, please — the great Lou Dobbs, the great Sean Hannity, the wonderful great Jeanie Pirro.” As noted above, after considerable outcry, this order has been rescinded. But his overall carelessness is still very much there.

• Criticism, ridicule and delegitimization of the press. A free press is absolutely necessary to the functioning of a democracy and the fourth estate in the US, already gagged and muffled by its corporate and capitalist loyalties, was in bad shape even before Trump. His constant use of the term “fake news” has done irreparable harm to the press and we need to be concerned when Trump says, “Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” And a tweet from August 6, 2018 says it all – “The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it’s TRUE. I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People. They purposely cause great division & distrust. They can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!”

• First president with total support from a notorious tabloid, the National Enquirer. This checkout line rag and its parent company AMI did a reliable job of trashing Hillary Clinton and extolling the limited virtues of Donald Trump during the election. Recent revelation of publisher David Pecker’s involvement in buying and quashing select stories is now the subject of investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

• An unorthodox presidency in which emotion, impulse and ego often drive events. For example his roiling feud of playground insults with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his recent virtually ignoring the death of John McCain and his legacy and not displaying the White House flag at half staff, or his petulant removal of security clearances for former CIA Director John Brennan because he had dared be critical of the president.

 

• The only president in memory who has relied upon personal attacks, name calling and ridicule. He began his campaign denigrating his primary opponents with such nicknames as “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, “Little Marco” Rubio and “Low Energy” Jeb Bush and went into the general election with  “Crooked Hillary”, and the refrain which still reverberates at his rallies today -“Lock Her Up”. He has quite unfairly tagged Senator Elizabeth Warren with “Pocahontas” and on and on. His deny, deny, then attack, attack response to his own implications certainly influenced the disgusting final performance of Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee and Trump did not hesitate to mock the sober, brave, forthright and heart-rending appearance of Christine Blasey Ford. And as if these epithets and insults weren’t enough, this president enjoys calling others “stupid”. His attacks against women have been especially virulent – from criticizing the looks of Republican primary competitor Carly Fiorina, to referring to former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman as a “dog” on through to his latest epithet for former paramour Stormy Daniels – “horseface”. We have never seen such behavior from any president in our history but we have come to countenance and even expect it from this president.

• Divisive “weaponization” of the National Anthem and the American flag and of patriotism itself. And he didn’t know the words to either God Bless America or the Star Spangled Banner.  From the Washington Post – “At least four times since becoming president, Trump started to sing — but didn’t finish — songs like the national anthem and ‘God Bless America.’ At the White House ‘Celebration of America’ event….he again sang only a few verses of ‘God Bless America’ before nodding his head to the beat of the United States Marine Band and the Army Chorus. In January, Trump mouthed only parts of the national anthem during the college football national championship.” And of course this has extended into Trump’s condemnation of free speech rights of NFL football players who choose to take a knee during the national anthem prior to their games. NFL owners’ responses indicate ignorance  that this compulsory patriotism called for by Trump is a hallmark of dictatorships. Perhaps we should all view the dramatic, eloquent and totally unifying response made recently by Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourk.

• Rallies. Donald Trump is the only US president in recent memory, perhaps ever, who has continued to hold campaign style rallies periodically across the country during his term. These are unnecessary and only serve to pump up his ego and the fervor of his base. He also wanted a military parade in Washington, a first for a modern president, but perhaps has been dissuaded because of the inordinate expense.

• For the first time, presidential admiration and embrace rather than shunning and disregard for the the world’s autocrats. These include Viktor Orban of Hungary, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and of course, his apparent  favorite, Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Rather shocking, don’t you think, for our “leader of the free world”?

• Unconventional and dangerous disdain for traditional European alliances and international norms. Thumbing his nose at NATO and existing treaties and agreements; abrogation of the Iran Nuclear Agreement, disregarding other signatories, and sowing distrust among our traditional allies; and withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords, all the while prostrating himself and his administration in front of Netanyahu and his AIPAC agents and violating the long honored international status of Jerusalem by moving the US Embassy there. The Trump administration also withdrew the US from the UN Human Rights Council because of “prejudice against Israel”, joining North Korea, Iran, and Eritrea as the only nations not members of this crucial world deliberative body.

• Embrace of conspiracy theories which include assertion that President Obama was not a US citizen, belief in a “criminal deep state” conspiracy in Obama’s administration that planted a spy inside his presidential campaign to help Hillary Clinton, his long held belief in the guilt of the “Central Park Five” despite their now proven innocence, Ted Cruz’s father involved in the Kennedy assassination, to mention a few, all very dangerous since “if the president believes it there must some truth to it.”

• Selection and retention of cabinet members and advisors on the basis of personal loyalty to him, rather than on competence and experience. This is especially obvious in the case of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Trump has tweeted repeatedly about the necessity of Sessions’ protection of him and how his recusal from the Russia investigation has hampered this role. Members of Congress and candidates for office are now treated that way as well, with Trump’s support dependent on their loyalty to him.

• Only president to require non-disclosure agreements. Trump is alone among presidents for requiring White House staff and advisors to sign NDA’s before accepting a position. Why – is there something to hide about White House operations and about presidential day to day behavior?

• Weaponizing presidential pardons. Usually this presidential privilege is exercised when there may be some doubt regarding guilt or a spurious quality to the laws being enforced. Yet Trump has pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio who was tried in a court of law and found guilty of criminal contempt. And to compound this insult to justice, Vice President Pence called Arpaio a “guardian of justice”. Also Trump undermined the rule of law by pardoning political supporter and notorious right wing author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, an unapologetic felon convicted of campaign finance crimes. And now, his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, already found guilty in six of the 12 counts against him, has rejected a deal from the prosecutors, obviously relying on the prospect of another egregious presidential pardon.Trump’s pardon announcement about Arpaio and D’Souza was sharply criticized by New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood, who said it “makes crystal clear his willingness to use his pardon power to thwart the cause of justice, rather than advance it.”

• Disdain for the rule of law. Trump really does view the law as a weapon to protect his allies and strike his enemies. An incomplete list includes suggesting an end to the prosecution of someone he likes, such as Joe Arpaio and the commencement of prosecutions of people he hates like James Comey and Hillary Clinton. Trump defended his indicted personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, by claiming that the government regularly fabricates evidence. Trump has tried to politicize federal prosecutors, firing US Attorney Preet Bharara, and  bringing another, John Huber, Utah’s top federal prosecutor, to the White House to give a speech lobbying for new immigration laws. 

 

• Open violation of the US Constitution. This corrupt president has violated the emoluments clause which reads as follows: “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Unlike any previous president he has retained ownership of his assets but claims he is not involved because he has turned over management of them to his children. His companies continue to make money for him while he is president – his hotels and golf courses are frequented by foreign entities wishing to ingratiate themselves with him. And daughter Ivanka has received 13 Chinese trademarks and provisional approval for eight more for her products since Trump became president. Several lawsuits are underway which should prove without any doubt that this constitutional provision is being violated.

• Only president to be not invited, or “disinvited”, if you wish, to a notable Congressman’s funeral. Before his death, Senator John McCain, expressly requested that the president not be invited to either speak or even merely be present at his funeral.

• The only president who made his money through dubious tax schemes and some instances of outright fraud. Although other presidential fortunes have had rather dubious origins, for example, the Kennedy and the Bush wealth, the revelations in the recent very extensive New York Times investigation about how his father Fred C. Trump managed to pass along close to a half billion dollars to Trump, starting when he was a toddler, demonstrate that the Trump fortune was obtained and transferred using very questionable, even illegal practices.

• Violation of basic humanitarian norms and practices and even condoning child abuse. Trump’s treatment of immigrants at our southern borders is distinguished by the singular cruelty of the separation of hundreds of children from their parents. And true to form, he had to lie about it -the administration was insisting that “it didn’t have a policy of separating families (false), that several laws and court rulings were forcing these separations (false), that Democrats were to blame (false), that only Congress could stop family separations (false) and that an executive order wouldn’t get the job done (also false).” This practice, along with other aspects of dealing with thousands of people seeking to escape violence and death in their home countries, has forever shamed our country. The latest insult to poor immigrants trying to make new lives in the United States is the snatching of green cards if they are receiving any kind of governmental support, including food stamps, Medicaid or children’s health insurance.

• Only president that I know of to be embraced passionately by evangelicals even though he violates almost all of the personal characteristics traditionally valued by people with religious convictions. Multiple marital infidelities, blatant lying, abject dishonesty, total lack of empathy, disdain for the less fortunate, racist, and the list could go on. Trump is a self centered, selfish and evil man. Come on, do the evangelicals consider him “converted” or “saved” or “repentant”? What on earth do they use to rationalize their support of this man? Maybe that Supreme Court majority? Maybe moving the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem perhaps signifying the beginning of “the rapture”?

• Only president to not only disavow scientific findings but to actually take action against them. The grim facts about climate change have not only been repudiated but ridiculed by Trump, whose administration under his direction has rolled back Obama era measures and goals to mitigate its effect, including NASA’s carbon monitoring research program and actually suspending and cancelling climate change research. And of course, Mr. Trump supports drilling for more oil and gas and mining for more coal to burn and dump more deadly carbon into the atmosphere.

• Appears to be totally lacking in compassion and empathy, totally unable to demonstrate any credible understanding of how others feel. These traits were on full display on his visit to hurricane ravaged Puerto Rico where the best he could do is boast about the (poor) US response to the devastation and to toss rolls of paper towels (what the hell were the paper towels for anyway?). More recently this emptiness was on display for the whole world to see during his visits to Hurricane Florence flooded and battered North and South Carolina – “This is a tough hurricane — one of the wettest we’ve ever seen. From the standpoint of water, rarely have we had an experience like it,” Trump said. Trump was handing out meals to hurricane victims and told one person in a car, “Have a good time” as if they were going on a picnic.

Looking back over this article, my fourth about Trump and his administration since he was elected, I find myself consumed by two great fears. Echoing Mike Barnacle’s thoughts quoted in an early paragraph, I am fearful that we are getting so used to the breaking of rules and shattering of norms by this dreadful president that neither the presidency nor our federal government will ever be the same again. Has the embrace of rules and norms been permanently broken? Has the trust in Federal agencies been forever compromised? Has the our press been forever discredited? Have we become so inured to lies and contradictions pouring from the White House that we will not believe or care at all anymore, no matter who is the occupant? The formerly somewhat reliable and steady edifice of the Federal government is now full of holes and is tottering. Can it ever be rebuilt? Will things ever get back to normal? New York Times columnist David Brooks fears that conditions may never be the same. In his words: “The best indicator we have so far is the example of Italy since the reign of Silvio Berlusconi. And the main lesson there is that once the norms of acceptable behavior are violated and once the institutions of government are weakened, it is very hard to re-establish them. Instead, you get this cycle of ever more extreme behavior, as politicians compete to be the most radical outsider. The political center collapses, the normal left/right political categories cease to apply…”

The second fear is that the excesses of Trump and his administration will result in the loss of democratic government, not really very far-fetched if we read Madeleine Albright’s new book, the recent work of historian Timothy Snyder, Zigblatt and Levitsky’s “How Democracies Die” or the recent piece by the Times columnist Paul Krugman. Our already weak democracy, barely on life support, has been further weakened by recent Supreme Court decisions on voting and campaign finance (which, incidentally have done far more harm than anything accomplished or even contemplated by Russia), hobbled by a totally ineffectual legislative branch, and further enfeebled by Trump’s daily assault on the press and the rules and norms essential for democratic function. When you add the blind devotion of Trump’s base, the militarization of police, the glorification of the military and the erosion of trust from steady attacks on the Justice Department and the FBI, it’s not too difficult to imagine the end of what little is left of our democracy. As noted by aforementioned professors Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky – “Because there is no single moment—no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution—in which the regime obviously ‘crosses the line’ into dictatorship, nothing may set off society’s alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.” Neither can we discount the nefarious and dangerous influence of money in our drift toward autocracy. The influence of Koch, Adelson, et al, is not dissimilar to the influence of Germany’s big industrialists in the 1930’s which enabled Hitler’s ascent to power.

If our country somehow survives the onslaught on democracy by this president and the Republican Party, one has to consider what will happen or what has to happen when this nightmare ends and Trump finally goes away. What safeguards can we erect to prevent another Trump from happening? How can we “de-Trumpify” the presidency and our federal government? Certainly, if the Democratic Party reclaims the House this November, this work  can begin with investigations into violations of the emoluments clause, long overdue exposure of his tax returns and multiple investigations into the overall corruption of this administration. 

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently devoted an entire column to the subject of “de-Trumpification”. In addition to echoing the above, she also reports that the process has already in a way begun, with Christine Todd Whitman, the Republican former governor of New Jersey, and Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, announcing that they’d be leading a task force on the rule of law and democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The idea is to figure out which of the norms that Trump has blithely discarded can be written into law or otherwise codified”, Whitman told Goldberg.

“We know we want to take on financial and ethical conflicts. We’re going to take on political interference with law enforcement and the courts, the protection of a free and independent press.” The task force will also look into how Trump’s administration “uses or misuses data and science and how candidates are chosen for government jobs”.

Dr. Brian Klaas, Assistant Professor/Lecturer in Global Politics at University College London and columnist for The Washington Post, in a recent column, suggests the following: 

“Congress should codify countless broken norms into unbreakable laws. For example, it should be illegal for presidents to fire law enforcement officials who are investigating them (absent an independent assessment of professional misconduct). Special counsels should also be legally protected from presidential interference. We also need two new constitutional amendments. First, to declare that the president is not above the law and can therefore be indicted while in office; and second, to ensure that a president cannot pardon anyone that is involved in an ongoing investigation related to the president, their family, their campaign or their business interests. Future presidential candidates should be legally required not only to release their tax returns, but also to fully divest from businesses that pose a significant conflict of interest. Klaas adds that the disgrace of having Trump’s unqualified son-in-law and daughter overseeing huge, consequential portfolios cries out for stronger anti-nepotism laws.”

I certainly agree with the suggestions of Goldberg and Klaas for they do give me some hope, however scant.  But as Americans we need also to consider carefully that if our government is supposed to emanate from the people and represent the people, we have to ask ourselves what kind of people we have become. After all, the Republican Party nominated Mr. Trump and the American people voted for him and elected him. So if we survive Trump and Trumpism, in addition to new laws and new rules to prevent another such political calamity, we really need some serious introspection as Americans. Do we truly believe in democracy? Can we get our noses out of Facebook and our iPhones long enough to thoughtfully consider what democracy requires of us as citizens and whether we are fulfilling those requirements? We have to recover what we have lost with the election of Donald Trump and approve necessary laws and rules and reestablish previously embraced democratic behavioral norms so that electing another president like this will be impossible.

“Our democracy itself is in the crosshairs. Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy and it has become clear that they are the target of our adversaries who seek to sow discord and undermine our way of life.” These words were spoken by the Trump administration’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, in early August 2018. And in recent months, how often have we heard  and speculated about the serious harm that Russia has caused to US elections, that Russia is responsible for Trump becoming our president, that Russia will tamper with the upcoming midterms and somehow again subvert US “democracy”?

Well, guess what – the Republican Party and the US Supreme Court have done far more harm to US elections in recent years than Russia could have ever dreamed of doing. What’s that Secretary Nielsen said -“Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy”? Well, if that is so, why don’t we do all we can to make our elections “free and fair”, instead of corrupting them by making it steadily more difficult to vote and warping election outcomes?

In probably the most important election of our lifetimes, we went to the polls in November 2016 and voted for a new president. Well, at least some of us voted. Depending on what state you lived in, you may have had to present a picture ID which you maybe didn’t have; you may have found  early voting times reduced, lines impossibly long, registration restricted, polling places reduced or locations changed. Or you may have been stunned to find that your name had been removed from the voting rolls. 

What could be more fundamental in a democracy than the right to vote? Isn’t voting the foundation of representative government? Why then do we have a patchwork of voting regulations throughout the states? Why can someone register and vote the same day in some states and not in others? Why do voters have to show a picture ID in some states ? Why are there more stringent residency requirements in some states than in others? Why can you vote early in some states or vote by mail but maybe not in yours? HBO’s John Oliver captures and describes many of these problem in his usual profane and humorous way.

Some additional questions about voting in the United States – why is Tuesday, of all days, the election day everywhere? Why a workday, which places a major burden on working class voters and voters working on hourly contracts who can’t afford to take time off? Why not a weekend day when it would be easier for most people to vote? And why are national elections held in November? Perhaps summer might  be better for everyone. In most of the world’s democracies, voting is held on a weekend day or on a special voting holiday to make it easier for its citizens to vote, but not in the United States, the “world’s greatest democracy”.

All of these questions and concerns, all of these obstacles and impediments to voting have been instituted by us, not the Russians. Republican governors and legislatures have striven mightily to limit the vote, not extend it, because in limiting the vote by requiring a picture ID or limiting locations where you can vote, or other measures, means limiting the vote of minority populations which vote predominantly Democratic. 

And these same Republican governors and legislatures have effectively gerrymandered voting districts in many states, resulting in candidates choosing their voters, rather than voters choosing candidates and thus rendering many districts uncompetitive. The “blue wave” anticipated by many in the 2018 midterms may not happen at all, despite an expected upsurge in Democratic votes. As a recent Times article noted, in 2006 a five and a half point lead in the national vote was enough to pick up 31 seats in the House of Representatives. But now, because of partisan gerrymandering accomplished in 2010, an increase of this size would net only 13. In the upcoming midterms Democrats will need an 11 point margin nationally to win back the House, a very difficult margin to attain.

The corrupt effect of partisan gerrymandering is perfectly exemplified in North Carolina. Republicans in 2016 won 10 of the 13 House districts – 77 percent – despite getting just 53 percent of the statewide vote, nearly the same result as in 2014. The Ohio vote from 2016 provides another example. Republicans won 12 of the state’s 16 House seats with just 56 percent of the vote. Since being gerrymandered by its Republican legislature after the 2010 census, the GOP has won the same 12 seats with Democrats winning the same four seats in each of the last three elections, despite a narrow margin statewide. The pernicious effect of gerrymandering, which really is disenfranchising a sizable portion of a state’s electorate is graphically explained in this Washington Post video.

A different kind of question people may ask is why vote at all? Many vote faithfully like good citizens should but nothing seems to change. In an era of billion dollar campaigns and apparently limitless campaign contributions by corporations, millionaires and billionaires, a person may be rightfully skeptical of what their individual vote can accomplish. Is my Representative or Senator going to heed my call, letter or email or attend to the call, letter or email from Jamie Dimon, Charles Koch or Sheldon Adelson or a member of the armies of  lobbyists representing other corporate interests?  In addition to voter suppression, cynicism resulting logically from these conditions certainly contributes to our disgracefully low level of voter participation in elections, usually around 50 percent.

But political optimists really do believe that the vote can dramatically change politics. After all, the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court could be reversed by a constitutional amendment and such an amendment would be passed by voting. Money could be taken out of politics in the same way if we voted to do so. The ballot could limit use of the media for election purposes as it is in most EU countries. And public financing of campaigns similar to European countries could be established through the franchise. Our useless Congress could again govern and actually pass some helpful laws through debate and compromise, if we placed the right individuals in office through the vote. And gerrymandered congressional districts described above which are responsible for much of our congressional paralysis could be rendered illegal through the vote. 

So the vote, the franchise, the ballot, are fundamental to the functioning of our government and many feel that we should be doing everything we can to make voting easier and get more people to vote. But instead what we doing is making voting more difficult and more complex. Indeed, voter suppression has been called the “Civil Rights Issue of this Era” 

Another perennial voting issue concerns who should vote – a tension set up by the writers of our constitution between the “Hamiltonians” and the “Jeffersonians”, whether the franchise should be  granted solely to the educated and propertied citizens or to everyone regardless of education or wealth. Last year, the New Yorker featured an article  about selected first time voters and who they have chosen to vote for and why. And reading about the guy who was voting for Donald Trump because “Hillary will take my guns away and I need them to hunt every year for my food” made me wonder why the impact of his vote was the same as mine. Yes, historically there have been proposals from time to time to more heavily weight the votes of educated voters over those of the uneducated which seem tempting. However, all considered, I strongly support everyone voting, regardless of education, wealth or social standing. I really do think that  a majority of the population as a whole has a great deal more common sense to ultimately lead us in the right direction than people of wealth and property who will simply vote their narrow interests. The wisdom of the general populace is validated in nationwide polls on such major issues as healthcare, taxation, education, the military budget, to name but a few. In fact if Federal laws were established by national plebiscite, rather than by a congress beholden to big money and special interests, we would likely have a much better country.

Which brings me back to another concern about Election Day. Why on earth is our participation so shamefully low? Come hell or high water, “the most important election of our lifetime”, or whatever, voter participation in the US hovers around 50 percent, and that is for presidential election years. In off-years, voter turnout is far worse, usually 40 percent or so. In 2012, another of the many “most important elections ever”, voter turnout was an anemic 53 percent of eligible voters.  We boast to the world about our “vibrant and thriving democracy”, an example the rest of the world should follow. Well actually based on participation in our democracy, the very definition of the term, our democracy is barely breathing. 

During the 2016 election, there were over 224 million American citizens over the age of 18 in the United States, and yet only around 157 million were registered to vote. And of these registered voters, only 58 percent bothered to vote in this “most important election in history”.

Well again, rather than make voting easy, we seem to do all we can to make it more difficult and more complex. Most people think that to vote in the US is simple – if you are a citizen, if you are over 18 years and registered, you can vote. But in fact, even if you meet this criteria, you may be turned away at the polls. Presently, 34 states maintain laws that request or require citizens to show arbitrarily specific forms of identification and in ten of those states the laws are very strict. So many Americans who do not have the time or the money to obtain these forms of ID are unable to vote. In fact, Wisconsin’s Attorney General claimed that his state’s strict voter ID law was responsible for throwing that crucial state’s electoral vote to Trump in 2016.

Voting integrity is certainly another reason for low turnout. Why should I bother to vote when my vote may be inadvertently discarded by unreliable voting machines run by incompetent officials? Last May the Georgia Secretary of State office reported a precinct in northeastern Georgia as having 276 registered voters ahead of the state’s primary elections in May. After the election it reported that 670 ballots were cast, a quite amazing 243 percent turnout. Later, the numbers were changed to 3704 registered voters, reflecting a likely more accurate turnout of around 18 percent. Who is his right mind can trust a system this faulty? This fall 43 states will use voting machines that are no longer manufactured and consequently for which spare parts are difficult or impossible to find. Thirteen states use voting machines that do not provide a paper record of votes cast. Good luck if machines break down or a recount is needed. Also, Georgia’s entire voting structure, yes, Georgia again, which was outsourced to a private company, Center for Election Systems, was shown to be extremely vulnerable to hackers. If I were a Georgia voter, I’d stay home. Wait a minute, also in Georgia’s Randolph County,  where 60 percent of residents are black and nearly a third live in poverty, announced their intention to close seven of the nine polling places because toilets and parking facilities were declared non – ADA compliant, requiring some voters to take a 30 mile round trip to one of the remaining two precincts. Really now – we are supposed to believe that officials were motivated by compliance compassion rather than voter suppression…..in a mostly black community…..in Georgia?

Another significant source of voter suppression is not allowing ex-prisoners to vote. Over six million Americans were barred from voting in the 2016 election because of “felony disenfranchisement”. In virtually every one of our states, Vermont and Maine being the only exceptions, citizens with a criminal conviction are permanently or temporarily denied their right to vote. So even if people convicted of a crime have paid their debt to society, they are generally stripped of this right of citizenship. And the array of obstacles placed in front of any ex-prisoner wishing to regain this privilege of citizenship is often very difficult to navigate. The seriousness of this type of disenfranchisement should not be underestimated. Florida, which has one of the harshest laws and also some of the most difficult barriers to surmount to regain this right, has had well over a million potential voters disenfranchised in this way during the last several presidential elections. If criminals who had served their term and had their full citizenship restored, it’s quite likely that George W. Bush would not have become president and we would not have had a trillion dollar war in Iraq nor the apparently eternal war in Afghanistan. HBO’s John Oliver discusses this problem in his usually profane and humorous, yet quite effective, manner. Relative to this, because of these laws, one in 40 American adults is ineligible to vote, nationwide, one in 13 adult African-American adults cannot vote. In Kentucky, Floria, Tennessee and Virginia, more that 20 percent of African-Americans are ineligible. It would be interesting to speculate about all the white collar crooks that are never prosecuted, but instead routinely pay huge fines for their crimes and misdeeds. I wonder if they can still vote? Incidentally, we are one of just four countries in the world that enforces post release restrictions on voting, the others being Croatia, Belgium and Armenia. 

A lesser known way that Republicans have succeeded in disenfranchising voters is by preventing people from voting because they owe legal fees or court fines, of course affecting mostly poor (and likely Democratic) voters. Republican legislatures have now passed such laws in nine states with not insignificant effect on voters. For example, in Alabama more than 100,000 people who owe this money, about three percent of the voting age population, have been stricken from voting rolls. These laws are unconstitutional because they really represent a modern day kind of poll tax. Why should owing money to a government agency or being too poor to pay ever be reasons to lose voting privileges? 

Many of these efforts at voter suppression have been conducted under the guise of “preventing voter fraud” which is virtually non-existent. Efforts to prove widespread fraud have been futile, the most recent being Trump’s “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity”, headed by Mike Pence and the perennial king of voter fraud claims who has come up empty time after time, Kris Kobach, former Kansas secretary of state and now candidate for governor. This commission, now thankfully disbanded, had one major objective – to prove that the huge gap in popular vote totals between Trump and Clinton were the result of “massive voter fraud”. The most extensive and painstaking examinations of voter fraud have shown it to be so small as to to totally insignificant. 

The Brennan Center’s seminal report on this issue, The Truth About Voter Fraud, found that most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices. The report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Given this tiny incident rate for voter impersonation fraud, it is more likely, the report noted, that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

Our voter fraud friend, Kris Kobach, was also the author and main proponent of a program called “Interstate Crosscheck”, which stripped voter rolls in participating states on the pretext that citizens were double-registered. Crosscheck has tagged an astonishing 7.2 million suspects, yet no more than four perpetrators have been charged with double voting or deliberate double registration, and even those were likely accidents rather than serious efforts to influence an election.

Interesting how some Republicans have let the cat out of the bag concerning the real reason for voter suppression – Glenn Grothman, Republican of Wisconsin, predicted that the state’s photo ID law should weaken Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the state in 2016; prior to the last presidential election Mike Turzai, Republican leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, predicted during the 2012 campaign that their voter ID law would “allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done”; Don Yelton, a North Carolina Republican Party county precinct chairman, told an interviewer that in 2013 , the state’s voter ID law would “kick the Democrats in the butt”. In 2012, Jim Greer, a former Republican Party chairman, said outright that voter ID laws and cutbacks in early voting were done for “one reason and one reason only” – to suppress Democratic turnout. So it’s perfectly clear why Republicans want to suppress the vote – they want to reduce the poor and minority vote, usually Democratic, so they can retain power, while all the while lying that it’s about voter fraud. 

In the meantime, some states are doing their best to make it easier to register and easier to vote while others continue efforts to repress the vote. Illinois recently became the 10th state, along with the District of Columbia, to enact automatic voter registration. Under the new law, all eligible voters will be registered to vote when they visit the Department of Motor Vehicles or other state agencies. which could add as many as one million voters to the state’s rolls. And at the other extreme, consider Texas, which is pushing relentlessly in the opposite direction. Republican lawmakers there passed in 2011, and continue to defend today, one of the nation’s most restrictive voter-ID laws. Supported by Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott and vociferously defended by Senator Ted Cruz, this law requires a state issued picture ID for all voters but will accept a Texas handgun permit while not accepting photo college ID’s. Good old Texas – it’s easy to see why in 2014 this state ranked 45th in voter registration and dead last in voter turnout.

Incredibly, our own US Supreme Court has exacerbated the the voting problem in the country. Clearly, this “final arbiter” of legislative and constitutional conflict should rule to protect democratic practices and institutions like voting. But as we have seen over the last decade or so, a majority of Justices, their uniform plain black robes failing to obscure their pro-corporate, anti-democratic leanings, have consistently ruled against the vote and consequently against democracy. Starting with the Citizens United decision, which allowed unlimited money to influence elections under the guise of “free speech”, and continuing with the McCutcheon v. FEC decision which removed the limits from individual contributions to political parties and campaigns, our Supreme Court has continued to destroy our democracy. On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act’s requirement that certain states with racist pasts had to have voting changes “pre-cleared” by the Department of Justice. Basically, Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the opinion, this protection was no longer needed because racism was over. “Over”? Come on, we all know this is nonsense – what kind of rose colored glasses is Roberts wearing? And of course, immediately after the decision, a number of these states, including Texas, immediately acted to strengthen voter ID laws to make voting more difficult, especially for the poor and people of color.

The Supreme court has refused to rule on Ohio’s egregiously gerrymandered House districts, allowing the state to continue sending a 75 percent Republican delegation to Congress supported by only slightly more than 50 percent of the vote. Also conservatives on the Supreme Court recently upheld Ohio’s strict method of removing infrequent voters from the rolls, a process that challengers of the law say disproportionately affects poor and minority voters. With its ruling in the case of Hustad v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, the Court’s activist majority in effect gave other Republican secretaries of state a go-ahead to resume the antidemocratic practice of purging fully qualified voters from registration rolls, just like in Ohio.

The Supreme Court also largely upheld Texas congressional and legislative maps that a lower court said discriminated against black and Hispanic voters, saying that the lower court was wrong in how it considered the challenges, and, according to Justice Alito, who wrote the opinion in the 5-to-4 decision, “did not credit the Texas legislature with a presumption of good faith”. The Court sided with the challengers over only one of the legislative districts in question.

On the issue of voter purges, a la Ohio, over the past year researchers at the Brennan Center examined data from 6,600 jurisdictions and found the median rate of purging across the country has risen from 6.2 percent of voters to 7.8 percent since 2008. That jump may seem small, but it’s statistically significant and cannot be explained by population growth. It amounts to an additional four million people being struck off voting lists.

All of this is underscored by a Harvard study that ranks American voting the worst in the western world for free and fair elections. In the “2015 Year in Elections Report”, the Electoral Integrity Project, conducted by 2000 election experts from Harvard University and the University of Sydney in Australia, defines “electoral integrity” as “agreed international principles and standards of elections, applying universally to all countries worldwide throughout the electoral cycle, including during the pre-electoral period, the campaign, and on polling day and its aftermath”. Conversely, ‘electoral malpractice’ refers to violations of electoral integrity.” In a massive study of 180 national parliamentary and presidential contests held between July 1, 2012 to December 31, 2015 in 139 countries worldwide, U.S. elections scored lower than Argentina, South Africa, Tunisia, and Rwanda — and strikingly lower than even Brazil. Specifically compared to Western democracies, U.S. elections scored the lowest, slightly worse than the U.K., while Denmark and Finland topped the list.

Clearly, for our democracy to thrive we need to change our systems of voting. Democracy should not be defined by allowing only those who are capable of figuring out how to get through a complicated system to vote. It should instead be defined as allowing the entire eligible population to vote and have a say in their government.

In order to increase voter participation and revive our dying democracy we need to Federalize all voting laws and make them apply evenly to every single state and to every citizen of voting age.  They should include simple methods of automatic voter registration, removal all voting restrictions and ID requirements, regulation and standardization of methods adjusting rolls when voters move or when they die, establishing a convenient common voting day, standardizing reliable and robust voting machines impervious to hacking, requiring a paper trail for voting, universalizing early voting and voting by mail. 

The removal of cynicism concerning voting and forcing our government to be responsive to the people who put them in office will require another, more difficult set of conditions – public financing of elections, total removal of private and corporate money from politics, limiting time for campaigning, limiting the use of media and making gerrymandering illegal so that every vote counts. It’s likely that we will need to drastically change the Supreme Court to accomplish this or pass a Constitutional amendment. Whether we have the will and the means to do either remains to be seen.

 

 

“Wake Up, Liberals: There Will be No 2018 ‘Blue Wave’, No Democratic Majority and No Impeachment”,
“There’s no quick fix for Trump or our damaged democracy—and the Democrats still look hopeless”
“Beyond Opposing Trump, Democrats keep searching for a message”
“Democrats in the Dead Zone”
“Can Democrats Fix the Party?”

Not a day goes by that I don’t read yet another article about the problems in the Democratic Party – no presidency, neither house of Congress and only a third of governors’ offices and state legislatures – and also not a day goes by that I don’t encounter another exhortation or reason or strategy to “resist” Trump and his agenda. It appears that all the Party can do is lick its wounds, point fingers at who or what they think was responsible for its devastating losses and oppose Trump, all totally insufficient to generate the enthusiasm and the votes needed to take back the House or the Senate in 2018, much less the presidency in 2020. “Not Trump” or “Resist” might be rallying cries for the Democratic Party but they are not strategies for winning.

And despite Trump’s record unpopularity and obvious incompetence and millions of dollars poured into them, the Democratic Party is 0 for 4 in recent special congressional elections. How can this be? While it’s obvious that Democratic victory in these four traditionally solid Republican districts would be difficult, another reason for the losses is simply that the Democrats no longer have a clear message other than opposition to the president and the Republican Congress. The latest disappointment, the contest in Georgia’s Sixth District, the lame Jon Ossoff and his DCCC supporters erred seriously with a campaign right out of the vanilla Hillary Clinton playbook – fight government waste, trim regulations, support Israel, promote “civility in politics”, “personal responsibility”, etc – nothing for the guy who’s working two jobs, can’t pay the electric bill, has a chronically sick kid and a pregnant wife and just had his used car repossessed.

Clearly the party needs to stand for something and truly, when I ask myself what the Democratic Party stands for today I am at a loss. This point was perfectly illustrated in the 2016 presidential campaign when what the standard-bearers of the respective parties stood for were in sharp contrast to each other. The authors of “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign” painfully describe the difficulty the campaign had in even coming up with the reason Mrs. Clinton was running for president. The best the campaign could manage was – “I would have had a reason for running or I wouldn’t have run.” In addition the authors describe a board in the campaign’s Brooklyn office totally covered with sticky notes listing “what Hillary is for” – actually so many that the net result was nothing. So it should be no surprise that the Democratic candidate lost the election. It would seem that at the very least it should be clear what a candidate stands for and why s/he is running for office. And during the the campaign there was never any doubt as to where Hillary’s Republican opponent stood and why he was running. He was going to bring manufacturing and mining jobs back, keep Muslims out of the country, build that wall and “Make America Great Again”.

These thoughts have prompted me to reflect on my own political convictions. Since my early twenties, when I finally shook off the last vestiges of the parental cocoon of Republicanism in which I had been wrapped since childhood, I realized that the Democratic Party best represented what “I am for”:

• concern for the health and welfare of my fellow man;
• concern for the working man and the union that represents him;
• a living wage for a full day’s work;
• limiting the power of corporations and big business and ensuring that they paid their fair share of taxes;
• progressive taxation for individuals with the wealthy paying their fair share of taxes;
• a dignified and comfortable retirement for everyone;
• affordable and adequate healthcare for everyone;
• good public schools and and an education for everyone who wanted it;
• a reasonable “floor” under our society beneath which no one could fall, meaning unemployment insurance, welfare for the poor and Social Security for the elderly;
• a safe and healthy environment through regulation and conservation;
• accepting that we are a nation of immigrants that requires laws that foster a steady flow of new blood and energy from foreign lands;
• a belief that the government can be a force for good in people’s lives;
• promoting the importance of voting, that this right should be guaranteed to all citizens.

It seems that these personal convictions have always been staples of the Democratic Party but if so, why is it so difficult today to shout them loud and clear? Obviously the Democratic Party is ill. Its symptoms are obvious: no clear message, ossified leadership, forsaking its working class roots, selling out to Wall Street, economic issues eclipsed by social issues, writing off the working man and relying instead on the minority vote, representation by corporate Democrats like the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Shumer and Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the “Republicans in Democrat clothing”, cross dressers like Senators Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitcamp. What prescription can we offer to address these symptoms? What can we administer to the Democratic Party to get it well? It doesn’t need some expensive drug to treat or mask symptoms or that produces negative side effects, like identity politics,  cultural issues, opposing Trump or defending Obamacare. What the Democratic Party needs is a robust return to the basics of good health – fresh air, good food and lots of exercise. And what are those for the Democratic Party? A return to the principles articulated and espoused by the greatest Democrat of all  –  Franklin D. Roosevelt.

On January 6, 1941, President Roosevelt gave his “Four Freedoms” speech to Congress, “a vision of the world that would be worthy of our civilization”. He announced simply and eloquently that the United States should dedicate itself to advancing these four freedoms everywhere in the world:

• Freedom of speech and expression, the best defense against the corruption of democracy;
• Freedom of worship, our shield against the forces of bigotry, intolerance, and fanaticism;
• Freedom from want, a commitment to erasing hunger, poverty, and pestilence from the earth;
• Freedom from fear, a freedom dependent on collective security, a concept carried forward with our leadership in the United Nations.

Certainly, the Democratic Party, in reviving and resuscitating itself could start here – embrace of these “four freedoms” certainly compels a robust Democratic response to Trump’s attacks on the press and the environment, his recklessness and ignorance in foreign policy and his racism and bigotry.

Another place for the Democratic party to start should be reviewing and dedicating itself to Roosevelt’s “Second Bill of Rights”, those principles having been included in of all places, the Charter of the European Union. It might be useful to go back to the speech in which they were outlined. In Roosevelt’s words spoken to the nation on January 11, 1944:

“This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:

—The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
—The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
—The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
—The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
—The right of every family to a decent home;
—The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
—The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
—The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.”

Incredibly meaningful meaningful principles, aren’t they? Surely here in the wealthiest nation on earth, we ought to be able to guarantee everyone a home, an education, a decent paying job, medical care and a dignified and worry-free retirement. These are principles that the Democratic Party has forgotten and that if they were embraced anew,  the Democratic Party would regain its rightful place as the party that really cares about people, the party that for decades stood up for the common man.

Everything in FDR’s “Four Freedoms” and “Second Bill of Rights” can be readily extended and translated to what should be the major tenets of the Democratic Party today – including strengthening Social Security, strengthening unions, increasing the minimum wage, and endorsing single payer healthcare. And all of what the Democrats should stand for is supported by the American people. Poll after poll have indicated that most Americans support the principles enumerated above and oppose the cruel Republican agenda of Trump, Ryan and McConnell. The following statistics tell the story:

• 64% are significantly worried about global warning;
• 71% want the US to honor the Paris Agreement on climate change;
• By a ten point margin (49% to 39%) voters polled oppose removing regulations on businesses and corporations;
• Oppose removing regulations specifically intended to combat climate change by a margin of 61% to 29%;
• 58% want federally funded health insurance for all; 85% of black voters and 84% of Latino voters favor placing the government in charge of managing the health care system in the United States;
• a sizable majority — about three in five Americans — say the government has a responsibility to ensure everyone has health care;
• 64% would pay higher taxes to guarantee healthcare for everyone;
• 60% of Americans would favor replacing Obamacare with a federally funded national health plan;
• 74% are opposed to cuts in Medicaid;
• 61% of Republicans and 95% of Democrats would maintain or increase funding for health care in general;
• a majority of Americans support “expanding Medicare to provide health insurance to every American”;
• a plurality of voters support “a single payer health care system, where all Americans would get their health insurance from one government plan”;
• 61% percent of Republicans and 93% of Democrats would maintain or increase spending for ‘economic assistance to needy people in the U.S;
• two thirds of the American people say that the government should care for those who cannot care for themselves;
• 70% want nuclear disarmament;
• 72% want the US out of Iraq and Afghanistan;
• 73% want the government to maintain or increase government support for green energy;
• almost 70% favored Obama’s Clean Power Plan;
• 80% approve of Planned Parenthood receiving federal funds for non-abortion health assistance for women;
• 70% of Americans support a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy;
• 60% of Americans support doubling the national minimum wage to $15 per hour;
• 60% are favorable toward unions;
• 63% of Americans say money and wealth distribution is unfair;
• Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to tax policies that benefit corporations and the rich;
• 90% agree that there are already too many tax loopholes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations;
• 80% agree that it would help grow the economy if the country made sure the wealthiest Americans paid their fair share of taxes;
• voters broadly agree that Republicans in Congress put the interests of corporations and the wealthiest Americans ahead of average Americans;
• 61% say that the wealthy pay too little in taxes;
• 80% feel strongly that Trump should release his tax returns;
• about 80% of voters from both parties want to reverse Citizens United and get money out of politics;
• 70% say that the government should regulate financial services and products “to make sure they are fair for consumers”;
• 79% say Wall Street financial companies should be held accountable with tougher rules and enforcement for the practices that caused the financial crisis;
• a broad majority (77%) says that there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations;
• by a 10-point margin (49% to 39%), voters oppose removing regulations on businesses and corporations;
• 66% of Americans believe there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and the poor, an increase of 19 percentage points since 2009;
• three-quarters of all American adults favored Mr. Obama’s decision to re-establish ties with Cuba;
• a plurality – 39% of Sanders supporters backed Palestinians while just a third backed Israel; support for Palestinians has tripled among US youth;
• 92% favor universal background checks for gun purchases;
• 80% favor letting undocumented immigrants stay here legally;
• 60% favor legalization of recreational marijuana;

So, with the American people solidly behind a progressive agenda, my fellow Democrats, let’s get well. Let’s flush the dangerous and corrupting drugs of Wall Street big money and Clintonian centrism down the toilet and get out into the clean fresh air. Let’s stop supporting already doomed Obamacare, get profit out of healthcare and support Medicare for All; let’s support unions and collective bargaining; regulate big corporations and eagerly “welcome their hatred” as Roosevelt did; let’s support public schools and get corporations out of education; let’s fight to get money out of elections; let’s fight for fair taxation for corporations and individuals; let’s reject the cruelty of the Republican budget and support the Progressive Caucus’ “People’s Budget” ; let’s promote peace, negotiate with our enemies and put the military-industrial complex out of business; let’s support women and their right to control their bodies; let’s reject the influence of the pollsters, idea people, analysts and fundraisers like Neera Tanden, Robbie Mook and John Podesta who helped blow the last election; let’s stop beating around the bush with “identity” messages, “stronger together” banners and advocacy of social issues and get down to the reality of supporting our base with an economic message that will bring our voters together – the original Democratic base of American workers, plus our more contemporary base of minority voters. Let’s support all the traditional Democratic issues mentioned above but let’s wrap them all tightly in an economic message that everyone can support and everyone can understand – President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and Second Bill of Rights. If the Democratic Party is brave enough to do this, to eschew the money and resultant influence of corporations and billionaires and rely on common people as Bernie Sanders so successfully did, we can look forward to a Democratic House in 2018, the House and Senate and the presidency in 2020.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hardly a week passes without a negative Obamacare headline staring at me from the New York Times. The Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare” was passed with great fanfare in March 2010 and was variously labeled as “the greatest advance in healthcare since Medicare and Medicaid” and as the “the most positive thing that this country has done since the civil rights legislation that was passed back in the ’60s.”

The Republican House has voted dozens of times to repeal Obamacare without ever offering a viable alternative. However, it certainly appears that the Affordable Care Act is dying a slow death all by itself without Republican assistance. Look at a few headlines from the last couple of years:

Big Changes in Fine Print of Some 2015 Health Plans

Seeking Rate Increases, Insurers Use Guesswork

Data Shows Large Rise in List Prices at Hospitals

Double Digit Rate Hikes Loom for Obamacare 2016

Sorry, We Don’t Take Obamacare

Think Your Obamacare Plan Will Be Like Employer Coverage? Think Again

Health Insurers Use Process Intended to Curb Rate Increases to Justify Them

Aetna will leave most Obamacare exchanges, projecting losses

Health-care exchange sign-ups fall far short of forecasts

Obamacare Marketplaces Are in Trouble. What Can Be Done?

These news headlines illustrate exactly why I think that the Affordable Care Act cannot continue to exist in its present state: a medical care system intended to ultimately cover everyone and reduce medical costs while relying on corporations whose sole reason for existence is profit.

Michael Moore’s brilliant and prescient film “Sicko”, released almost 10 years ago, made this abundantly clear (by the way, while he is dismissed as a kook by the right, Mr. Moore to me is a sage, prophet and patriot). “Sicko” pointed out that anything less than a single payer program, like “Medicare for all”, any program involving corporations and profit contains the seeds of its own destruction. The medical insurance companies must show a profit and must, like all capitalist enterprises, increase profit and grow. Stasis and balance are not part of the capitalist system. And how does a health insurance company grow and increase profit? By gaining more customers, paying less in benefits or charging more for premiums, a recipe for the failure of any corporate-run effort toward providing universal coverage.

Health care is a public issue and should be a public service like education, highways, water, and electrical service. It should not be viewed as a commodity to be bought and sold. One should not have to buy a health insurance “policy”, as if buying car insurance. Access to affordable healthcare should be a right and should be enshrined among all of our other rights, as it is in European countries. It is interesting to glance back at the “Second Bill of Rights”, proposed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945 and which surely would have been enshrined in the constitution had he lived. One of the articles in this wonderful document is: “The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health”.

It might be useful to consider what health insurance companies do to earn their massive revenue and profits. Well they do essentially what the state bureaucracies operating the Canadian National Health program or the British National Health Service do. They take money from government or private sources and, based on the nature and level of service provided, pass it along to doctors, hospitals and drug distributors. Not very complicated is it? In countries with national health systems, this process is conducted very efficiently and economically. In the US, with United Healthcare, Cigna, Humana, Aetna and a host of other companies performing this simple function, it becomes very expensive because these companies have to make a profit to pay shareholders and to pay their CEOs’ multi-million dollar salaries. Something is indeed wrong with this picture.

So what do you suppose happens at Board meetings or at high level executive meetings in these companies? How do the highly paid “big guns” of United Healthcare or Humana or Aetna sit around their big shiny tables and brainstorm corporate strategy or new products or new markets for future growth? Well, considering what they actually do, they’re embarrassingly limited. A “new product” has to be a new “policy” which provides less service to the consumer or less compensation to the doctor or hospital. A new growth strategy is “how do we get more people or companies to sign up and buy our “product” or “how can we discourage the sick and chronically ill from signing up and encourage more young and healthy people to sign up? Or maybe the best and most simple strategy of all – let’s raise the prices of the health insurance policies we sell. Or better yet, let’s disguise an increase by having the consumer pay a higher deductible and keep the price the same. Or, let’s make the language describing the benefits we provide really confusing and deceptive, surreptitiously raising the deductible or the copay. Or, best of all, since we’re an integral part of Obamacare, how can we squeeze the government for more customers, for bigger subsidies, more money so we can increase profit? These are corporate strategies like none other – no investment in research, invention, engineering, design improvement, raw materials selection, creativity or test marketing. These healthcare corporations must be the envy of all other corporations – my God, they make profit, pay their shareholders, pay millions to their CEO’s for merely performing a simple bureaucratic function and with massive government assistance.

The history of providing healthcare in the US is depressing. While European countries and our neighbor to the north moved inexorably toward government funded universal coverage, effort after effort in the United States failed miserably. Proposals were condemned as “socialist” or “communist” or labeled as “interfering with doctor – patient relationships” or a making doctors “slaves”. President Truman’s valiant 1949 effort to provide a national program failed because of powerful conservative opposition from the likes of Senator Robert Taft who claimed it was “right out of the Soviet constitution”. The American Medical Association opposed the program also, with one of their pamphlets reading, “Would socialized medicine lead to socialization of other phases of life? Lenin thought so. He declared that socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.”

President Johnson’s “Great Society” efforts in the 1960’s led to Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly and the poor, both supported by the medical establishment, but not to universal coverage for everyone else. President Clinton’s efforts to provide universal coverage, led by then first lady Hillary Clinton, also met with failure because of opposition from health insurance companies and the entire rest of the healthcare industry, exerted through intense lobbying of members of congress.

Another important reason that national healthcare efforts failed over the years was because of the growth of employer-provided health insurance and the companies that administered such plans. During World War II when competition for workers was fierce and employers were not allowed to raise wages, expanding employee benefits was the only way to attract workers so companies began to offer health insurance as one of those benefits. Also of course, companies could deduct the cost of employee health insurance coverage as a cost of doing business. So it’s no surprise that over the years employer provided insurance dampened the demand for universal coverage. The provision of employer provided medical insurance also gave health insurance companies the opportunity to become firmly planted in America’s corporate landscape.

Access to good health insurance is a prominent and consuming concern for most Americans. If your employer covered you and you switched jobs, you might lose your coverage. Employers could change the levels of coverage, requiring larger deductibles or copays to maintain the profit margins for the companies administering the insurance. And buying affordable coverage became almost impossible for the self-employed. I will never forget a statement made by one of my favorite nonfiction authors, Susan Jacoby, remarking in her book “Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age”, what an incredible relief it was for her to turn 65 and finally be covered by Medicare. Thank God, the struggles were over – no more worries about medical insurance. One of my brothers, self employed, pays about $25,000 per year to insure him and his spouse and is counting the days to age 65 and Medicare. Another, who receives his medical insurance from his employer, has seen his costs and deductibles rise while his coverage has diminished. And I myself, despite having always worked for employers who covered me and, for an additional charge, the children and the spouse if necessary, the size of deductibles and/or copays was always a concern, as was the cost of drugs required by a family member. And I could still have lost everything I owned if stricken by a catastrophic illness. What a relief for me when I turned 65 and for my spouse when she too became eligible for Medicare, that our worries were over. This is the way it should be for all Americans at all phases of their lives. A Canadian, a Dane, a German, a Frenchman, is simply and logically covered – for everything – no limits or exclusions, from the moment of birth to the moment of death.

The powerful influence of corporations has colored and flavored all recent “advances” in healthcare. First was the intrusion of health insurance corporations into Medicare with “Medicare Advantage” programs, through which they received funds directly from the government to administer and profit from their own enhanced versions of Medicare, further solidifying their positions on the corporate landscape. And the George W. Bush Medicare expansion to provide drug benefits was virtually written by the pharmaceutical corporations, guaranteeing huge profits for themselves through the disallowance of negotiated drug prices. And finally, Obamacare itself was written by the medical insurance companies with the complicity of their congressional lackeys. Retention of private corporations in the program and the exclusion of a “public option” were ways to radically increase the number of their customers at government expense. Like charter schools, the Affordable Care Act became simply another way to shovel public money into corporate coffers.

Obamacare’s invitation to “Come, compare policies and select the one that’s best for you and your family” rings hollow. These “policies” are extremely complex. Who is really prepared to weigh and compare deductibles, exclusions, copays, benefits, networks, costs and the many other variables in a typical health insurance company policy? This complexity is designed to result in one thing – concealment of gradual and incremental cost shifting from the insurer to the patient in order to increase profit, not improve healthcare.

Obamacare’s reliance on the fabled capitalist “market” and “competition” is also chimerical. With insurers now leaving the exchange markets in droves, there will soon be little or no competition. Also, the reduction of insurers into fewer and fewer players through buyouts and mergers will undoubtedly result in market collusion to maintain or improve profit, not competition to improve service or gain customers.

Another problem with Obamacare is administering the mandate requiring individuals to buy insurance and providing the subsidy for those qualified to receive assistance. The “punishment” for not buying insurance, imposed in end-of-year tax returns, is not immediate and therefore not effective. And the subsidies are “tax credits” and whether paid up front or at the end of the year are needlessly complex and confusing. All this complexity is the result of retaining the needless role of private corporations in providing health insurance. And many individuals are opting to remain uninsured and simply pay the penalty.

Many individuals covered by employers or purchasing private insurance prior to the ACA have seen their plans change dramatically, rendering President Obama’s assertion that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s claim that “you can keep your family’s doctor or keep your health care plan if you like it” totally fallacious. What actually happened is that insurers administering employer plans sometimes reduced benefits to match the minimums required under Obamacare or sometimes increased deductibles and/or increased copays. Individual plans also changed shape and size after Obamacare. Many self-employed people or people not covered by employers found plans they had purchased before Obamacare increase in price or reduce benefits.

The claim by Obamacare advocates that “market forces” and “competition” would work to keep prices down and benefits up is also false. When maintaining certain levels of benefits or a low price cuts into profit, those efforts are abandoned. This is why the biggest insurer, United Healthcare, has withdrawn from most state insurance marketplaces and why another healthcare giant, Aetna, has abandoned them altogether.

Obamacare has been reduced to the level that in order to maintain the involvement of private insurers, more government money has to be given to them. And to involve private insurers in the first place, Obamacare is incredibly complex and unwieldy. Just go to the website and take a look at what is offered, how subsidies are offered and so on. Your eyes will glaze over, your heart rate will increase, you will perspire and you will need a dose of healthcare yourself, then and there. And even though you hate your job, you will stick with your present employer because your insurance, no matter how meager, is provided for you. And even though your deteriorating physical condition dictates that you should retire now, you will stagger into work until you are 65 just so you can finally stop worrying about medical insurance. And when you finally do have Medicare, you will realize once and for all how important it is to provide health insurance as a right to everyone, regardless of age, employment, health or income.

Also, another important part of Obamacare, the expansion of Medicaid to cover the poor, was foolishly left up to the discretion of the states. Thus, states whose governors or legislators opposed Obamacare, or likely more accurate, disliked the skin color of our president, rejected Medicaid expansion.

So what to do now? When and how can we look at the provision of healthcare like a grownup nation instead of like an immature teenager, pandering to health insurance companies, and spending twice as much on healthcare as necessary? I am sure that the present difficulties will be handled for now by injecting more government money into the program to prop up insurers’ profits. But only a truly national program, arbitrarily enrolling every American of every age and of every measure of health, will provide a pool large enough that everyone can be covered at a reasonable cost. And the modest tax increase necessary to do this will be more than compensated for by reduced personal costs for each American.

The most recent headline in the Times about Obamacare’s problems, today October 3, 2016, reads, “Ailing Obama Health Care Act May Have to Change to Survive”, introducing an article rehashing much of what I have written above and concluding that inclusion of a public option, dropped during the writing of the law at the behest of private insurers, may now be necessary.

So Obamacare cannot survive as written and surely will die, unless changed completely from what was planned by corporations and their congressional servants. Above I have offered its obituary. Below I suggest an appropriate epitaph:

HERE LIES OBAMACARE
BORN 2010 LIVED BRIEFLY THEN DIED CIRCA 2016
CONCEIVED TO SERVE A PUBLIC NEED
KILLED BY PRIVATE CORPORATE GREED