greg palast: trump lost -- and our most hallowed media didn't tell us

Allan recently shared with me a sobering piece by Greg Palast. It illustrates so much of what is wrong with both the US's fake electoral system and the major media. Palast -- an impeccable researcher -- has run the numbers, and he reveals a simple truth: Trump lost. 

Millions of Americans have had their right to vote stolen through corrupt, antidemocratic, and racist lawmaking. Because guess what? Most victims of this vote-theft are Black.

As in Bush v. Gore in 2000 and in too many other miscarriages of Democracy, this election was determined by good old “vote suppression,” the polite term we use for shafting people of color out of their ballot. We used to call it Jim Crow.

Palast's analysis of this voter suppression may not tell us anything we didn't already know, but seeing the numbers is still stunning. And hearing so many Canadians ridicule Americans for electing this maniac, I feel compelled to share this as widely as I can.

Certainly this was not the first US election to be manipulated by the right wing, but it is certainly the most consequential.

Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.

And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.

Stay with me and I’ll give you the means, methods and, most important, the key calculations.

But if you’re expecting a sexy story about Elon Musk messing with vote-counting software from outer space, sorry, you won’t get that here.

As in Bush v. Gore in 2000 and in too many other miscarriages of Democracy, this election was determined by good old “vote suppression,” the polite term we use for shafting people of color out of their ballot. We used to call it Jim Crow.

Go here to see the numbers and read the rest of the story.

Palast concludes:

Question: If these vote suppression laws—notorious example: Georgia’s SB 202—had no effect on election outcomes, then why did GOP legislators fight so hard to pass these laws? The answer is clear on the Brennan Center’s map of states that passed restrictive laws. It’s pretty much Trump’s victory map.

center for public integrity: a brief history of voter suppression in the united states

This article was originally published by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization based in Washington, D.C., from their excellent series "Barriers to the Ballot Box".

Analysis: New And Age-Old Voter Suppression Tactics At The Heart Of The 2020 Power Struggle

Making voting harder is about grabbing even more disproportionate power and delaying the impact of shifting demographics.

By Matt DeRienzo, Editor-in-Chief, Public Integrity, October 28, 2020

"You will not replace us!"

The words chanted in 2017 by tiki torch-wielding white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, get right to the heart of what voter disenfranchisement tactics are all about in the 2020 election.

Non-Hispanic white people are a shrinking percentage of the U.S. population and won't be a majority within a few decades. They've held on to grossly disproportionate political power and wealth through discriminatory tactics that go back hundreds of years. As that power is threatened in 2020 by demographic shifts and backlash to a deeply unpopular president, the effort to rule from the minority for a long time to come has become more desperate and more brazen.

Slow down the mail.

Speed up a Supreme Court appointment.

Shut down polling places in Black communities. Open up more in white ones.

Stop counting people of color in the 2020 Census so they have less representation in Congress and fewer federal dollars invested in their districts.

Just stop counting the actual ballots. (After all, that tactic has worked before.)

And prohibit government agencies and schools from talking about the parts of U.S. history that reveal the track record and rationale behind these tactics.

You will not replace us.

This is the context for "Barriers to the Ballot Box," an investigation this year by the Center for Public Integrity and Pew Charitable Trusts' Stateline project into what is preventing people from exercising their rights to vote and equal representation.

We started with the Shelby County v. Holder decision, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in 2013 that stripped the federal Voting Rights Act of the "preclearance" requirement, which had required states with a history of racist disenfranchisement to get authorization from the federal government before implementing changes to voting laws or rules.

Politics is about turning "your people" out to vote, not necessarily all people, and there's a long history in both major parties of suppression tactics aimed at staying in power. But in this moment, Republicans' reliance on disenfranchisement of people of color and dog-whistle rhetoric appealing to white voters' fears of the country's shift in demographics is stark.

After Shelby, an immediate tactic employed in states no longer subject to preclearance was closure of polling places in predominantly Black and Latino communities. Texas and Georgia, both previously subject to federal preclearance, led the way.

Texas is ahead of the country as a whole in demographic changes. Non-Hispanic white people are already a minority there, accounting for about 40% of the population. But whites represent two-thirds of the state's congressional delegation and state legislature.

The white Republican men who hold the state's most powerful offices have used an array of tactics to prevent more people from voting this year.

Changing demographics have turned Georgia into a battleground state where disenfranchisement tactics narrowly prevented a Black woman, Stacey Abrams, from becoming governor two years ago. Republican Brian Kemp, who beat her in that race, was the architect of those tactics as Georgia's secretary of state. They included polling place closures, depriving election officials in Black communities of resources, and purging Black people from voting lists.

In her book "One Person, No Vote," historian and Emory University Professor Carol Anderson pierces the narrative that emerged around Donald Trump's election in 2016. Black voters didn't decide to stay home in key battleground states simply because Hillary Clinton's campaign failed to enthuse them.

"Republican legislatures and governors systematically blocked African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans from the polls," Anderson wrote. "Pushed by both the impending demographic collapse of the Republican Party, whose overwhelmingly white constituency is becoming an ever smaller share of the electorate, and the GOP's extremist inability to craft policies that speak to an increasingly diverse nation, the Republicans opted to disenfranchise rather than reform."

In 2008, Barack Obama won Indiana, a bastion of Republican control, on the strength of turnout by people of color in Indianapolis. In response, the state closed early voting centers there and opened more in predominantly white communities.

Twenty states adopted new restrictions on the right to vote following the election of our first Black president. And free from the preclearance check of the Voting Rights Act, states began closing polling places in predominantly Black and Latino communities.

Public Integrity and Stateline journalists spent a year and filed more than 1,200 public records requests compiling nationwide data on polling place locations in 2012, pre-Shelby, through 2020 so local journalists, researchers and academics can track the impact of closures.

We used historic voter files in states such as Louisiana and South Carolina to determine the average extra distance that Black voters have to travel to vote and where voters are subjected to long lines and wait times.

Beyond polling place closures, 2020 voter suppression tactics are modern-day cousins of the white supremacist measures taken to keep Black people from voting in the Jim Crow era.

Then, poll taxes were used to keep Black and low-income people from having a say in elections.

Today, Republican officials in Florida are requiring people convicted of a felony to pay all associated court fines and fees before their voting rights will be restored. Like so many Jim Crow tactics, it was a back door cancellation of rights that had been extended to predominantly people of color — in this case, by the people of Florida through a statewide referendum.

Then, literacy tests were used to keep Black people from voting. The real point was to build so much subjectivity into the standards by which passing the test was judged that local election officials could prevent whomever they wanted from voting.

Today, overly complicated requirements for casting absentee ballots build that subjectivity into the process. Your vote might not count because a local official decides that your signature doesn't match, or you forgot to place your ballot inside an additional security envelope when you sent it in. Some states are allowing voters the chance to correct errors if there's time before Election Day, while others (again, Texas) have ruled that local officials have no obligation to even notify voters that their ballot was rejected.

Then, segregationists used a McCarthyist fear of communism around every corner to fight organizers registering Black people to vote. Today, almost every measure that disenfranchises Black, Latino and Native American citizens is based on a false narrative that voter fraud is a widespread problem or threat.

"These claims of widespread fraud are nothing more than old wine in new bottles," Max Feldman wrote for the Brennan Center in May. "President Trump and his allies have long claimed, without evidence, that different aspects of our elections are infected with voter fraud. Before mail voting, they pushed similar false narratives about noncitizen voting, voter impersonation, and double voting in order to enact laws that reduce turnout and discredit adverse election results."

Some tactics that date back to the era before the Voting Rights Act was adopted in 1965 haven't changed at all.

Taking voting rights away from people convicted of felonies started as a way to specifically target Black men, paired with efforts to aggressively arrest them. Today, some form of felony disenfranchisement is the law in every state except Maine, Vermont and Washington, D.C., and as of 2016 it prevented more than 6 million adults from voting. That's up from about 1 million in 1976 and a little over 3 million in 1996. Black people are affected at a rate more than four times greater than white people.

In the 1960s, civil rights activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee faced jail time for registering Black people to vote, and all kinds of intimidation and violence. In 2020, it's illegal in Arizona and some other states to help people cast absentee ballots. In Tennessee, you can be convicted of a felony and lose your right to vote by protesting for voting rights. And across the country, local election officials are worried that protesters and aggressive "poll watchers," egged on by Trump, will show up at the polls on Election Day and intimidate voters.

It wasn't until 2006, starting in Indiana, that the requirement that citizens present government-issued photo identification at the polls before they're allowed to vote became a popular disenfranchisement tactic, pushed in copycat legislation across numerous states largely controlled by Republican legislatures.

The stated rationale for such laws is the threat of voters being impersonated by people looking to commit election fraud — an all-but-nonexistent problem. A 2014 analysis by Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles found 31 cases of that happening in the entire country since 2000, out of more than 1 billion ballots cast.

New tactics in the Trump era include voter suppression via misinformation, intimidation and psychological warfare, micro-targeted via Facebook and YouTube.

Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, with the help of Facebook's algorithms and demographic targeting capabilities, Russia strategically stoked "racial discord" in the U.S. to help elect Trump.

The goal in targeting Black voters was not to convince them to support Trump — a hopeless cause, in many cases — but to discourage them from voting at all. A Senate Intelligence Committee report found that no category of voters was targeted more by the Russian effort in 2016 than Black Americans.

Trump's own campaign, according to a report by the UK's Channel 4 and the Miami Herald, profiled Black voters with a label of "deterrence" and targeted them with online advertising aimed at destroying their faith in and motivation for voting altogether.

The story of disenfranchisement in 2020 is also one of deliberate inaction in the face of extenuating circumstances.

In March, when in-person voting seemed risky due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump said that he was against federal funding to expand voting by mail. Why? Because, he said, it would increase overall turnout to the point where "no Republican would ever be elected again."

Republican officials at the federal and state level have rejected requests for funding that would help local officials overcome a shortage of poll workers, expand polling places to accommodate proper social distancing and purchase personal protective equipment. Movie star and former Republican California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and others have stepped up to fund these things in some communities at greatest risk for disenfranchisement, but even that has been opposed by some state officials.

Another theme of our Barriers to the Ballot Box project is that disenfranchisement still takes place in all 50 states. It's not just a Deep South problem or a uniquely Republican tactic.

In New York City, long lines at early voting centers led Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to criticize the way the election has been administered in an area that had been subject to preclearance rules. Ocasio-Cortez overcame a powerful party machine to win election two years ago.

Republicans in New Hampshire tried to effectively stop college students not originally from New Hampshire from voting. In Rhode Island, a state dominated by Democrats, one of the strictest photo ID laws in the country requires that a driver's license not be more than six months out of date, a rule that has not been waived even though the state's Department of Motor Vehicles has mostly been shut down since March because of the pandemic.

In Connecticut, also dominated by Democrats, a ban on early voting and other restrictions that disproportionately affect Black and Latino voters are written into the state constitution. It's hard not to wonder how equal access to the electoral process would have shaped policy in a state whose housing and schools are deeply segregated and that has one of the largest wealth gaps in the country.

As states have grappled with these issues in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump campaign and Republicans across the country have engaged in a coordinated legal effort to oppose expansion of vote by mail in particular.

And as with the Jim Crow era, backflips in legal philosophy are possible when the goal is white supremacy. If a Republican state has placed new restrictions on voting, or is refusing to make accommodations due to COVID-19, the claim is states' rights, with wide leeway for local control. But four Supreme Court justices wanted to block Pennsylvania from making decisions about how its election would run this fall.

That's why it ultimately matters not what the Constitution says (a Constitution that doesn't explicitly guarantee a right to vote) if there's a majority on the Supreme Court willing to twist its interpretation or rule from an alternative set of facts. Nor do rules and norms matter if there is a president and Senate willing to break or change them, and a judiciary they've appointed coming up with the legal justification.

How will this play out in the 2020 election?

If early turnout is an indication, especially in states that have actively tried to make it more difficult to vote, disenfranchisement may have prompted a backlash, even in the face of long lines and a global pandemic.

Whether it will be enough to upend this power dynamic, and what can be accomplished in the face of a Supreme Court poised to further erode the Voting Rights Act, is a question central to confronting inequality in America.

all eyes on the united states: election day and beyond: the dark side laid bare

Election day in the U.S. tomorrow. My American family and friends are all quietly freaking out. The whole world is quietly freaking out. 

The massive turnout through mail-in voting and advance polling are very good signs. Thousands who didn't vote in 2016 have already voted in 2020.

Personally, I think it will be an anti-Trump landslide in the popular vote, and a decisive win in the electoral vote. Not that anyone should put any faith in what I believe! In 2016, I told anyone who would listen that the Republican party would never nominate Donald Trump, then declared that there was no way he would be elected. I'm in good company there: no less a maven than Fran Lebovitz did the same. 

The biggest question isn't the outcome of  November 3. It's what happens on November 4th, and 5th, and 10th, and months on, until January 20, and possibly beyond. 

Trump has been inciting his minions to question the legitimacy of the election, and as the results come in, that will only escalate. How will that play out? How will the corrupt, partisan judiciary be activated? How much violence will there be, and who will contain it, and how? How far will Trump go, how far will his troops go, will they be organized? 

New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall astutely plays out some likely scenarios: "How Far Might Trump Go?"

The very fact that we're asking these questions is stunning. It's the first time in any living person's lifetime that a peaceful transfer of power after a US Election Day is not a foregone conclusion. The last time this much instability rocked the United States, a big chunk of the country seceded and declared war. 

It's stunning, yet it's also fully consistent with the country's trajectory over the last decades. This blog is full of declarations that the US is becoming a third-world country, and it continues to tumble in that direction.

No matter how long it takes to quell the violence, no matter how long it takes to get Trump out of the White House, the US has been changed, permanently. And I don't mean changed by Trump. He was merely the agent that lit the match. As a dear friend said recently, "What's most disturbing is that so many of my fellow citizens subscribe to these beliefs".

The darkest depths of the US empire are often not visible to the mainstream. They play out in places like Abu Ghraib and My Lai, on grainy black-and-white lynching postcards. They happen "over there" or in "the past". 

The darkest side of the US has always been visible to its Black citizens, and to anyone willing to bear witness: from everyday occurrences like DWB stops, stop-and-frisks, and summary executions of Black people by police (who are then exonerated), to squads of militarized police blinding peaceful protestors. The economic brutality has been laid bare, too, bringing us spectacles like for-profit prisons and the criminalization of poverty, to name just two random examples. (Good piece on this: Jamelle Bouie, "Don't Fool Yourself, Trump Is Not an Aberration".)

For many Americans, before 2016, these things were invisible, or exaggerated, or aberrations, or history. Now it's all out there. And there's no getting it back in the bottle.

To state the obvious: the toxic stew that Trump incited and ignited -- the economically dispossessed, the profound and intractable racism, the violence, the pathological worship of individualism -- and the rage, the shame, the ignorance that drives all it -- won't go away. But where will it go? How far will it go? 

Only one thing is certain: anyone who says they know what's going to happen is full of shit.

"fine. biden. but this is bullshit."

 

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Donald Trump is the single greatest gift the Democratic Party could ever hope to receive. 

The Democrats have finally achieved their most sought-after position: every thinking person must now vote Democrat, no matter what. They can now run whoever they want with whatever consequences that will have, because the alternative is an existential threat to the country itself. Both parties, of course, have always been an existential threat to other countries, but this time every person living in the Empire is up against it.

And this will be the gift that keeps on giving for as long as the party exists. All hope of organizing and building an alternative has ended, certainly for as long as can be forecast. 

All the Democrats have to do is overcome the vote suppression, election fraud, threats of violence, actual violence, and the Electoral College, and they're safe from democracy and progressive thought forever. It's no small task, but this time, at least, they appear motivated to try.

I thought Trump would never get the Republican nomination. 

Then I thought Trump would never win.

And now, a third thing I thought I'd never see: Joe Biden can become the next POTUS and we'll all be happy and relieved.

* * * *

When it comes to choosing not to vote for either of the ruling parties, I understand most perspectives, because I've stood at all of them at different times.

I was raised in a very progressive household, where the accepted wisdom was to vote for the most progressive Democrat in the primaries, then hold your nose and vote for whoever got the nomination. My father -- the prime political influence of my youth (yeah, the same crap dad you've heard about had great politics, as long as he didn't have to live by them) -- believed that the "democracy in the streets" at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago is ultimately what brought us Nixon, the escalation of the war in southeast Asia, and everything else that came with it.

In my early 20s, I was still arguing that "a vote for x is a vote for x" -- as in, a vote for the third party candidate ultimately helps the Republican get elected.

After Bill Clinton fucked us over, I started seeing the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans as window-dressing, started caring more about building a movement for a new party as more important than enabling the second-worst corporate shills, and voting for the military industrial complex.

Besides, the Electoral College made my vote moot anyway. Voting in New York State, I didn't influence the election, so I could choose a protest vote while working to help elect the Democrat candidate in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the nearest swing states. 

* * * *

And I don't buy, and will never buy, the simplistic myth that support for Ralph Nader brought us Bush, and even more will I never buy that support for Bernie Sanders brought us Trump. 

The blame for Trump lies in many things -- vote suppression, fraud, the Electoral College -- but above all, the blame lies with the hubris, arrogance, and essential antidemocratic orientation of the DNC, which nominated one of the most hated people in modern American political history. 

We can argue all day about why people hate Hillary Clinton and whether or not it's deserved (I personally think she's the American Margaret Thatcher), but the fact is that she is hated and was hated, and she couldn't possibly have won. But the DNC was more concerned with itself and its own existence than with -- well, with anything else.

And then progressives are blamed! Supporters of Bernie Sanders! That is rich. Rather than listen to the clamour of, you know, the voters, ignore them, then blame them.

* * * *

Donald Trump is the single greatest gift the DNC has ever had. 

I've seen nothing to dissuade me from this belief, and everything I observe every day confirms and re-confirms it. Because now there truly is no choice. Everyone who doesn't support fascism must vote for Joe Biden.

Joe Fucking Biden! For crissakes! Joe Biden is everything that's wrong with the Democrats all rolled up into one doddering idiot. He was a ghost through all the primaries, then one day, out of nowhere, he's the man to beat and can't be beat and Bernie who, Elizabeth who? Whatever, the Dems and the media fixed it up and now we want everyone to vote for him, yay!

The one good thing I can come up with about him is that he's preparing to fight for the vote. Thank fucking christ someone is prepared to do that, after fucking Al Gore (who supposedly would be saving us from climate change right now, if not for Ralph Nader -- people actually believe that!) and fucking John Kerry rolled over like two sacks of corporate-funded jellyfish.

And then we will all be so happy and grateful and relieved that Trump is (eventually) out of the White House and we'll be so happy that a Democrat is in the White House and everything will go back to normal. 

Normal invasions and occupations. 

Normal infinitesimally small economic improvements. 

The normal liberal social fiddling and window dressing that bring a few well-placed victories to continue the appearance of progress. Sure, equal marriage is very important, but that heralds a more just society to the same extent that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did.

* * * *

And if we all continue to repeat the lie that progressives and third-party voters brought us Trump, we will never have to worry about the threat of Sanders or anyone like him again. (Sanders, a Democrat, by the way! Not even trying to pretend otherwise, yet we are still so threatened by him?) And I'm told that AOC and The Squad prove that it's not business as usual in the Democratic Party! Say what? Howard Dean says hi. Greetings from Paul Wellstone. From Tom Harkin and Dennis Kucinich. From whoever, they've always been there, the left-leaning Democrats, bringing the left-leaning voters into the fold, serving their powerless purpose. 

I don't doubt their sincerity, and their belief that they can create change. And perhaps something entirely new will happen. If I turn out to be wrong, I'll be thrilled to admit it.

* * * *

In case you're not reading carefully, I'm not suggesting that anyone who votes in the US should do anything except vote for Biden. I personally have not voted in the US since 2004 and I never will again. But those of you who do, this time there is literally no choice.

Fine. Biden. But this is bullshit.

what i'm reading: how to be an antiracist by ibram x. kendi

How To Be An Antiracist is an important, powerful, thought-provoking book. With unflinching precision, Ibram X. Kendi defines the roots of racism and explains how we can work to eliminate it.

The structure of the book is disarming: the explanatory chapters are interwoven with the story of Kendi's personal journey from racist thinking to antiracist thinking.

Yes, the author is Black, and he has had racist thoughts, and has engaged in racist behaviours. 

He spares no mercy for himself as he looks back, cringing at his beliefs -- although understanding the tradition that they grew from. I hope Kendi's openness and his willingness to publicly criticize himself helps more readers approach his ideas with an open mind and less defensiveness.

Kendi believes that our typical conception of racism as a product of fear and ignorance is wrong, and he makes a very strong case for that belief. He shows that racist policies are made by racist people in order to further their own interests. Racism can be unmade, therefore, by antiracists creating and getting others to create antiracist policies.

In Kendi's view, it's a mistake to conceive of racism as a permanent descriptive term, an on/off, either/or state -- "He is a racist" -- as it lulls us into a false belief that we are not racist. He writes:

"Racist" and "antiracist" are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing, in each moment. These are not permanent tattoos. No one becomes a racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other. We can unknowingly strive to be a racist. Or we can knowingly strive to be an antiracist. Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.

Here are a few things I loved about How To Be An Antiracist.

-- Kendi does a great job unspooling intersectionality, the idea that the overlapping of various identities or membership in certain social groups leads to combined privileges or disadvantages. (I strongly dislike the word "intersectionality" and I wish we called this something else, but the concept is very important.) For example, the forced and coerced sterilization of poor Black women is racist, sexist, and classist. It can't properly be seen unless all three factors are acknowledged.

Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, prejudice against skin-colour, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, class prejudice -- all of these can intersect and overlap, and when that happens, the effects cannot be separated. Kendi takes the reader through each group or identity and shows that to be antiracist, one must work on all the other biases as well. Put simply:

To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist. 

-- Kendi frames racism as inextricable with capitalism. He's writing about modern capitalism as it is now conceived. The selling and trading of goods in a marketplace is as old as humanity. Our present-day capitalism bears little resemblance to that benign and extremely human activity.

Capitalism is essentially racist and racism is essentially capitalist. They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one die day together from unnatural causes. Or racial capitalism will live together into another epoch of theft and rapacious inequity, especially if activists naively fight the conjoined twins independently, as if they are not the same.

Calling capitalism and racism "conjoined twins", Kendi echoes Martin Luther King, Jr.:

It means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

-- I love that Kendi demonstrates that the fraud and theft of the 2000 and 2004 US elections were essentially racist. He calls the actions of Kenneth Blackwell, the Republican Chief Elections Officer in Ohio, "the most egregious Black on Black crime in modern US history". Many readers may not be fully aware of what happened in these elections, and Kendi's brief summary will be very eye-opening.

-- Kendi demonstrates the inherent racism and classism embedded in standardized testing. Very interesting!

-- Kendi demonstrates how antiracist policies and an equitable society would benefit everyone, including most white supremacists.

Of course, ordinary white people benefit from racist policies, but not nearly as much as racist power, and not nearly as much as they could from an equitable society, one where the average white voter has as much power as superrich White men to decide elections and shape policy. Where their kids' business-class schools could resemble the first-class prep schools of today's superrich. Where high quality universal health care could save millions of White lives. Where they could no longer face the cronies of racism that attack them: sexism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, and exploitation.

I'm highlighting what I loved about this book, but I'm purposely not trying to recreate Kendi's arguments. I feel that anything I write will be oversimplified and, because of that, too easily dismissed. I want Kendi to make the argument for you. Read this book.

Kendi's previous book was Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction. I have not read that yet, but I gather that How To Be An Antiracist is much more accessible. This book is nothing to be afraid of. It's something to read, and re-read, and ultimately embrace. 

11 things you should know about u.s. presidential elections

Here are some facts about US elections.

There are mountains of evidence to support each of these. If you have doubts, do some homework. This is merely a summary of facts.

1. The Electoral College. Up to 50% of votes in any state are wiped out. Canada has first-past-the-post voting based on ridings (Parliamentary seats), but imagine if all of Ontario was one riding -- 51% and winner take all.

2. Partisan oversight. Elections are governed on the state level, and the person in charge of them represents a political party. There is no equivalent of Elections Canada. Imagine, for example, if Jason Kenney's party ran elections in Alberta, and oversaw vote-counting and potential recounts.

3. Voter suppression. This takes place on a dozen different fronts. In many states, registration is complex and very limited. There are onerous ID requirements. Voters can be and are disqualified based on any number of arcane laws. Voter list are "purged" -- hundreds of thousands of voters dropped from the record. In many Republican-controlled states, voters are purged if the first and last names of two voters match. Middle names are not considered.

Various schemes to reduce barriers to voting are regularly proposed and killed.

At the same time, the one fraudulent voting scheme that Republicans care about -- voter impersonation (undocumented immigrants attempting to vote) -- barely exists.

4. Mass incarceration. Approximately 2,300,000 people in the US are incarcerated. The pre-incarceration income of the prison population is 40% lower than non-incarcerated people of the same age, and "incarcerated people are dramatically concentrated at the lowest ends of the national income distribution". Meaning: poor people are locked up. None of them can vote. (See the Prison Policy Initiative.)

5. Felony disenfranchisement. US states vary concerning the voting rights of former inmates. In some states, former felons regain voting rights after release; in others, the citizen must submit petitions to regain their right to vote (not a straightforward process); and in other states, it depends on circumstance of the crime. Conviction for a felony may result in permanent disenfranchisement.

No other country in the world makes the right to vote so conditional on past convictions. At any given time, approximately 6,000,000 Americans are denied the right to vote because of prior felony convictions. (PS: who is charged and convicted with felonies is not exactly evenly distributed either!)

6. Black-box voting. Nearly one-third of the US states use electronic voting machines that produce no receipt and for which there is no record of verification -- because the system is proprietary, and corporate rights are more important than fair elections. There is widespread and irrefutable evidence that these devices are both highly inaccurate and easily manipulated remotely.

7. Recent and historical stolen elections. The outcomes of both the 2000 and 2004 elections were illegitimate. This was proven beyond all doubt. It was shown to be statistically impossible for so many "mistakes" to all favour one party. After these elections, nothing was changed. This means we have no way of knowing if the 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 elections were or will be fair or fraudulent. There's no reason to assume that a Democrat in the White House is proof of fair elections. (Of course this is not a modern phenomena. One famously stolen election occurred in 1876, for example.)

There are other ways to manipulate elections, too. In 1980, Ronald Reagan's campaign illegally conspired with the Islamic Republic of Iran to delay the release of 66 American hostages, who had been held for nearly a year, until after the election, to ruin Jimmy Carter's re-election chances. Iran agreed, Carter lost the election, and the hostages were released 20 minutes after Reagan finished his inaugural speech in January 1981. And of course, there's Richard M. Nixon.

8. Disinformation campaigns. Trump Inc has taken this to new depths, but simple disinformation campaigns are not new. People may be told that Republicans vote on one day, and Democrats on another. Guess which date is post-election. You can read about the the massive Trump re-selection disinformation campaign in The Atlantic.

9. Party conventions. Both major parties nominate presidential candidates based on the votes of delegates at conventions. The process is neither straightforward nor transparent. Hillary Clinton was the beneficiary of this in 2016, and the world pays for that mistake every day, while understandably angry Americans misdirect their anger at Sanders supporters.

10. Corporate money. It is incredibly expensive to even attempt to be nominated for a presidential campaign. There are no limits to how much corporations can fund candidates. Money is never given freely. There are expectations.

11. Campaign lies and media distortions. In Ontario, potential voters told me that if NDP Leader Andrea Horwath was elected, the price of gas would increase by 15 cents per litre. Where did they get this information? From Doug Ford's TV ads. When it comes to campaign ads, anything goes.

In the US, the media long ago stopped reporting on issues and instead focuses on campaign strategies, ad time, campaign spending, voter perception, and the like. As if campaigns are themselves the issues.

*  *  *  *

And then, after all this and more, a POTUS is selected.

And people around the world wonder how Americans could have done this. They say, Well, they voted for him! They get what they deserve!

And supporters of Anyone-But-The-Evil-Republican blame supporters of More Progressive Candidate.

And the DNC is again confirmed in its unshakable faith that American liberals will vote for anyone with a D after their name, no matter how loathsome their policies.

And millions of Americans don't bother to vote, in a state of frustration or learned helplessness or justifiable cynicism.

*  *  *  *

Many Canadians say that US elections can't be fixed because there are "too many people". This statement defies all logic. Fix a few swing states, rig a few thousand voting machines, boom, you've got yourself an election. What does the size of the population have to do with it?

Scientific American asked, What does a crooked election look like? Writer David Noonan spoke with Peter Klimek, an election forensic researcher.

An even more basic challenge faces researchers who want to use forensic tool kits to analyze U.S. elections — getting the data. "The way elections take place and are administered in the U.S. is not really up to the quality standards in other countries," says Klimek, who tried and failed to apply some of his methods to the 2008 election. "The data quality was not good enough." In most states, access to voter registration data is restricted mainly to the political parties, the candidates and some companies that work with them, Mebane says.

After a 2016 presidential election marred by allegations of foreign meddling, the midterm contest looms amid concerns about voter suppression in Georgia and other states as well as unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud by undocumented aliens. The most unexpected takeaway from electoral forensics may be that it is easier to analyze Russian elections than those in the U.S. "It's really not much work to do this kind of analysis once you've got the data," Klimek says. "With the algorithms we are talking about, it can be done in a couple of hours."

*  *  *  *

Americans interested in working on this essential issue should join (or at least follow) the National Election Defense Coalition. Because, as I used to write regularly in this blog, without fair elections, how can a country be a democracy?

the worst part of trump is not trump

The freak show that is the Donald Trump presidency gives us so many things to lament, and mourn, and goggle at. But for one organization, it is a singular gift, valuable beyond all measure: that is the Democratic National Committee.

For me, the worst part of the Trump presidency is not Trump. It is the enormous setback to -- maybe the death of, in my lifetime -- building a progressive alternative in the United States.

Four decades of deindustrialization, job loss, corporate welfare, and ever-widening income inequality has brought progressive economic ideas to the forefront in the US, and has rejuvenated the appetite for making them a reality. The evidence is plentiful, from the fight for a $15/hour minimum wage to the jubilant crowds that greeted Bernie Sanders at every campaign stop. People are hungry for change, and many people are hungry for change from the left.

Fill in the blanks. A vote for ____ is a vote for ____.

And now we have Trump.

Hillary Clinton supporters -- and of course Clinton herself -- blame Sanders and Sanders' supporters for the election of Donald Trump.

While not surprising, this is as misguided as those who blamed Ralph Nader and his supporters for George W. Bush's installation in the White House in 2004. It has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that both the 2000 and 2004 elections were riddled with fraud and vote-fixing. Florida alone was the product of massive fraud, and the Supreme Court (not the voters) decided the results, something at least one Supreme Court justice regrets. Yet loyal Democrat voters blame Nader -- and they vowed never to let it happen again.

This time, there is plenty of blame to go around, beginning with the corruption and arrogance of the DNC, insisting on running the candidate who was anointed by the party, rather than one who was chosen, you know, by the voters. They did everything they could do rig the results, and when that didn't work, invoked arcane rules that were designed to thwart democracy. When they were caught, the DNC defended their actions. (The lawsuit against the DNC was not dismissed because it lacked merit, but because the judge ruled it was not a matter for the judiciary.)

In the DNC's bubble of unchallenged power, they overlooked one crucial variable: people loathe Hillary Clinton. It doesn't matter why. It doesn't matter if it's based on fact or fiction or how much sexism is or isn't mixed in. Millions of people detest her and would never vote for her, no matter what the choices.

If Sanders supporters chose Trump over Clinton, that's not Sanders' fault. It's Clinton's, and it's the DNC's. But like Homer Simpson, the DNC cannot accept responsibility for any outcome. It's Sanders' fault. It's the fault of you people for wanting to build a movement for economic justice.

Learning all the wrong lessons

Now that we're witnessing the debacle of the Trump White House, the lesson could not be clearer: don't ever dare vote for a third party, or this is what will happen. You must vote Democrat, no matter what. If you dare to start building a viable party on the left, you will move the country even further to the right (even if only in appearance). Millions of anti-Trump voters now believe more strongly than ever that it is their sworn duty to Always Vote Democrat, no matter what. This must be an especially powerful lesson for the young voters who rallied around Sanders.

For decades, Allan and I have referred to "the circus coming to town" as a shorthand for the theatre of  US election campaigns, lending a thin (and getting ever thinner!) veneer of democracy to a corrupt, undemocratic system. This time, the circus never ended. The threat of real change on the left was more feasible than it had been in a long time, so the distraction had to be even bigger and more lurid.

As I was writing this, as if on cue, an Economist/YouGov poll found that 51 percent of Democrat voters now have a favourable opinion of George W. Bush. If Democrat voters feel that way about Bush, any Democrat candidate who can put a sentence together -- anyone who waves the words "woman's right to choose" and "the rights of all families" around -- will get their vote.

The worst part of Trump is not Trump.

The worst part of Trump is the lost hope of building a new party.

* Personal disclosure, to avoid assumptions. Although I am a dual citizen (Canada-US) and am eligible to vote with an absentee ballot, I do not vote in US elections. While I agree with Bernie Sanders' ideas and his platform, I did not support him. Sanders played the role historically assigned to the most left-leaning Democrat in the primaries, used by the party to bring in the progressive vote. There's one in every election. They do their job and are never heard from again. In Congress, Sanders voted with the Democrats 98% of the time.

president trump: what didn't just happen

Since I'm making an effort to put more of my thoughts here, I'm gathering up a bunch of my Facebook posts and responses. If we know each other on Facebook, apologies for the repetition.

I find much of the analysis and commentary I've seen about the recent US election to be quite strange. Donald Trump has been elected President of the United States. That happened. Here's what didn't happen.

1. "The United States is a democracy. The people chose Trump, end of story."

60,467,601 US voters chose Hillary Clinton.

60,072,551 US voters chose Donald Trump.

More than 100,000,000 Americans eligible to vote did not vote.

More than 5 million Americans cannot vote because they are either incarcerated or have been incarcerated, and thus have been disenfranchised.

There has been rampant voter suppression and vote fraud in both the primaries and the general election.

The United States is also a democracy if you close your eyes and stop up your ears.

Some views on winning the vote but losing the election from: The Guardian, The Independent, and The Atlantic.

2. "If only it had been Bernie!"

Bernie Sanders was never, for one moment, going to be the Democrat nominee. He was not leading a revolution, he was not even leading a movement. If he wanted to do those things, he would not have been running as a Democrat, and he would not have voted in line with the Democrats 98% of the time during his Congressional career. His role in the race was to bring in the left-of-liberal vote and that's what he did.

However, if Sanders had been the Democratic nominee, where would he have gotten more votes than Clinton? In Vermont, and possibly in New York and California -- i.e., states that went to the Democrats anyway. Because of the electoral college and the winner-take-all state-by-state system, recent presidential elections come down to a small number of swing states. I see no evidence that a more progressive candidate would have succeeded where Clinton failed in key swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina.

"If only it had been Bernie" assumes that a sizeable number of voters with strong progressive values opted to stay home in large numbers, rather than vote either Democrat or for a third-party candidate. This is possible, but not likely. Voters progressive enough to vote for Sanders likely would have voted to stop Trump.

"If only it had been Bernie" posits that a Jewish socialist born in New York City, a long-time representative of the liberal state of Vermont, would have carried the key swing states. Let's just say this strains credulity and leave it at that.

I do want, have always wanted, a progressive candidate to take on the Republicans, someone who actually offers a different vision of the country's future. By running as a Democrat, endorsing Clinton, and urging his supporters to vote for Clinton, Sanders demonstrated that he was not that candidate and never was.

3. Hillary Clinton is a good, strong, liberal woman of the people, and she deserved to win. She lost because of sexism and misogyny.

There's plenty of misogyny to go around, but the sexism smokescreen isn't big enough to hide Hillary Clinton's monstrous record.

Thomas Frank, writing in The Guardian:

She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something that was taken for granted. . . . And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest. . . .

To try to put over such a nominee while screaming that the Republican is a rightwing monster is to court disbelief. If Trump is a fascist, as liberals often said, Democrats should have put in their strongest player to stop him, not a party hack they'd chosen because it was her turn. Choosing her indicated either that Democrats didn't mean what they said about Trump’s riskiness, that their opportunism took precedence over the country's well-being, or maybe both. . . .

Clinton’s supporters among the media didn’t help much, either. It always struck me as strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial and opinion pages of the nation’s papers, but it was the quality of the media’s enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here’s what it consisted of:
- Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
- Her scandals weren’t real.
- The economy was doing well / America was already great.
- Working-class people weren’t supporting Trump.
- And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate. (See original for links.)

The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the "last thing standing" between us and the end of the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability.

Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch:

The DNC spent more time conspiring to defeat Bernie Sanders, than they did the Republicans. They absorbed nothing from the Sanders campaign, from the issues that resonated with his followers: a corrupt system fueled by corporate cash and militarism, working class people demeaned and ridiculed, the American youth burdened by debt with no opportunity for advancement, blacks and Hispanics treated as political chattel, captives to a party that demands their loyalty yet does nothing for them. The Clinton team vanquished Sanders, paid him off and then marched on arrogantly toward their doom.

Clinton herself showed a singular lack of courage to the very end of her campaign. She couldn't even speak out against the brutalization of tribal people in North Dakota defending their water and burial grounds against the mercenaries of Big Oil. How could anyone look at her silence in the face of those ongoing atrocities and believe that she'd ever stand up for them?

Robert Scheer, Truth Dig:

What you have is a defeat of elitism. Clinton's arrogance was on full display with the revelation of her speeches cozying up to Goldman Sachs—the bank that caused this misery more than any other—and the irony of this is not lost on the people who are hurting and can't pay their bills.

4. People voted for Donald Trump because they are racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and ignorant.

Many Americans are indeed all of those things, and obviously Donald Trump appealed to voters on that level. But Trump was able to fashion those beliefs into a campaign because of the Democrats' abandonment of the American working class.

Sorry to Godwin here, but remember how we all learned how post-WWI Germany was in the throes of a gargantuan economic crisis, and that Hitler was able to blame all that on the Jews, by tapping into a hatred that was already there? Does this not ring a bell?

Do not underestimate the economic crisis in the United States. People are not just unemployed -- they are without hope. No party has been willing to change the laws that allowed corporations to move operations to countries without environmental and labour protections, with an ocean of cheap, surplus labour, and to pay no taxes while doing so. The election finance system ensures that any attempt to change this would result in political suicide. So what used to be the middle class tries to scrape by on sales commissions, retail and fast-food, and what used to be the working class is just plain poor.

For decades Americans have seen their prospects for a decent life evaporate, and the Democrats, once considered the party of the working class, did nothing but help that happen, caring more about its corporate masters than ordinary voters. The white working class was primed ready to see their bigotry legitimized, and their suffering answered with scapegoating. It's much easier to point a finger at "those people" than to do the hard work of rebuilding the manufacturing sector.

Donald Trump didn't invent that ugly stew of bigotry. We all know that. But the Democrats' abandonment of the working class created the anger and frustration, and the vacuum of hope, that paved the way for Trump.

People are suffering. They have been suffering a long time. The Democrats have been ignoring their suffering. And now they -- and the American people -- have paid a very high price.

Joshua Frank, Counterpunch:

...no matter what bullshit excuse Democrats come up with for Hillary's historic embarrassment, they have only themselves to blame. She lost because she deserved to lose. She ran an awful campaign, mired in controversy, and was unable to excite voters to the polls. She believed neoliberalism could carry the day, but she was wrong. The DNC was wrong. The establishment lost because the establishment deserved its fate.

By no means does this imply Trump will overthrow the status quo, it only means the outsider Trump was better able to exploit the boiling rage of middle America. All the workers who were undercut by Bill Clinton's NAFTA. The hundreds of thousands that never rebounded from the Bush recession. Trump provided an outlet of hope for these lost souls – a fabricated hope no doubt, but hope nonetheless – gift wrapped in rage. His mastery of social media, of vindictive and racist rhetoric, helped him gut the provincial electorate.

Richard Moser, Counterpunch:

The Democrats were oblivious to the deep discontent among the American people because that simply does not figure into their clever and cunning calculations. Why should it? Fear, lesser of two evils, scapegoating, palace politics — all these things worked in the past, didn't they?

So all the discontent and unhappiness from years of economic distress fed right into the only other choice. We have the "great two party system" don't we? Both Democrats and Republicans insist there is no alternative. ...

The Democrats run a candidate who spent eight years in the White House, crow about her experience, even when the experience included the fact that Bill Clinton was IMPEACHED and widely viewed as a bum. The Democrats embrace a family dynasty the includes one of the two presidents in all of American history impeached by the House of Representatives. Good choice!

This has to be one of the most amazing proofs that the Democratic Party echo chamber is truly deafening.

Robert Scheer again:

The people Hillary Clinton derided as a “basket of deplorables” have spoken. They have voted out of the pain of their economic misfortune, which Clinton’s branch of the Democratic Party helped engender.

. . . It’s a repudiation of the arrogant elitism of the Democratic Party machine as represented by the Clintons, whose radical deregulation of Wall Street created this mess. And instead of recognizing the error of their ways and standing up to the banks, Clinton’s campaign cozied up to them, and that did not give people who are hurting confidence that she would respond to their needs or that she gave a damn about their suffering. She’s terminally tone-deaf.

So too were the mainstream media, which treated the wreckage of the Great Recession as a minor inconvenience, ignoring the deep suffering of the many millions who lost their homes, savings and jobs. The candidate of Goldman Sachs was defeated, unfortunately by a billionaire exemplar of everything that’s evil in late-stage capitalism, who will now worsen instead of fix the system. Thanks to the arrogance of the Democratic Party leadership that stifled the Sanders revolution, we are entering a very dangerous period with a Trump presidency, and this will be a time to see whether our system of checks and balances functions as our Founding Fathers intended

Make no mistake about it: This is a crisis of confidence for America’s ruling elite that far surpasses Nixon’s Watergate scandal. They were the enablers of radical deregulation that betrayed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s contract with the American people in the wake of the Great Depression. The people are hurting, and regrettably, Trump was the only vehicle presented to them by either major party in the general election to register their deepest discontent. The Trump voters are the messenger; don’t demonize them in an effort to salvage the prestige of the superrich elite that has temporarily lost its grip on the main levers of power in this nation.

Thankfully, the Clinton era is over, and the sick notion that the Democratic Party of FDR needed to find a new home in the temples of Wall Street greed has been rudely shattered by the deep anger of the very folks that the Democrats had presumed to represent. That includes working-class women, who failed to respond to the siren song of Clinton, whom the Democratic hacks offered instead of a true progressive like Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Yes, we need a female president, but not in the mold of Margaret Thatcher.

Scheer, I should note, believes that Sanders would have defeated Trump in a progressive populist versus neofascist populist showdown. If Sanders was not actually a Democrat, I might have believed that, too.

Michael Laxer, The Left Chapter, "The wages of liberalism is Trump":

Much of the worst damage actually happened under Democrats. It should never be forgotten that it was Bill Clinton who helped to destroy the American liberal post-war state. Nor the role the Clinton Presidency played in the passing of sweeping and deeply racist crime bills that imprisoned and also disenfranchised millions of people-of-colour in the United States. . . . .

It was bizarre, as so many apologists for Clinton and the Democrats did, to go on about the alleged achievements of "incrementalism" or Democratic governance when it is easy to prove that the United States has gone dramatically to the right in every meaningful economic sense and when inequality is greater than it has been since the 1920s.

This did not change in any real way at all under Obama, a fact that is easily demonstrated.

Liberals and social democrats have failed workers and people living in poverty so spectacularly that it is impossible to overstate the extent.

This is a day-to-day lived reality for staggering numbers of people and telling those who might well be inclined to support something that rejects what has happened around them that your candidate and party are singularly qualified to stay the course due to their experience over this time in having done so, was both typically liberal and the worst form of political folly. It was a blind and bizarre self-defeating arrogance, that was profoundly, truly, madly, deeply foolhardy in its timing.

(Thanks to Allan for collecting these.)

5. We know what lies ahead.

In fact, we don't. This may have been merely an upset in the polls. Or it may be a sea change in US politics. I don't know what's coming and neither do you. That's why we're all so afraid.

act now: stop the (un)fair elections act

today: call your m.p.! stop the (un)fair elections act!

I trust by now you've all heard about Stephen Harper's latest plan to undermine democracy in Canada, his electoral reform bill that the chief electoral officer of the country has called an affront to democracy.

Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand told CBC: "My reading of the act is that I can no longer speak about democracy in this country." Now, as per usual, the Harpercrats want to pass the bill before it can be properly debated. It was just introduced a few days ago, but could be adopted by the House of Commons as early as today or tomorrow.

The so-called Fair Elections Act would:


- make it more difficult for people to vote,

- would disproportionately impact students and youth, Indigenous people, seniors, people on low-incomes, and people who didn’t vote Conservative in previous elections,

- do nothing to bring to justice the people behind the widespread election fraud in 2011, and

- would actually make it harder to catch perpetrators of election fraud.

The Council of Canadians sent an action alert about this on Friday, and in just 24 hours, an astounding 20,000 people signed a petition calling on Stephen Harper to "investigate and prevent electoral fraud with a truly fair Elections Act". You can sign the petition here.

Now the Council is asking us to (literally) voice our concerns. Today, Monday, February 10, there will be a mass call-in to all Members of Parliament, asking them to take the time to properly study this bill and address its many shortcomings.

If you live or work in Ottawa, you can grab your cell phone and join the Council of Canadians at 12:30 p.m. on Parliament Hill. MP Craig Scott, Official Opposition Critic for Democratic and Parliamentary Reform, will be there to accept the petition.

Everyone else, please take a few minutes today and call your MP. Tell her or him you expect to see open debate on a bill of this importance, and you want to at least see the worst aspects of the bill scrapped.

Click here to find your MP using your postal code.

happy canada day, a/k/a national stop harper day

This week, pollster Nik Nanos revealed that 51.5% of Canadian voters would not consider voting for the Conservative party, compared to 36.4% only seven months ago.

I don't play the national pastime - election prediction - so I won't speculate about if or how this poll will translate on the ground. Whether we'll have to wait until 2015 to get rid of this corrupt, fraudulent, anti-democracy, anti-human, anti-labour, anti-environment, corporate government - and whether Canadian voters will be hoodwinked by another party with almost identical policies but a friendlier face (and famous last name) - remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, all we can do is educate and mobilize. In Egypt yesterday, nearly as many people as live in our entire country were in the streets, demanding the "president" resign. In Brazil, people who live in the vast favelas (shantytowns) joined the massive, ongoing protests that overshadowed the football tournament. Compared to these inspiring examples, the organizing in Canada is microscopic. On the other hand, 2012 National Stop Harper Day saw events in 11 cities; this year that number is 22.

Some sources give June 28 as National Stop Harper Day and July 1 as Save Canada Day; others only use the July 1 date. I'm just glad people are organizing. One way to get involved is to support the Democracy 24/7 campaign. Demand fair elections. That would be a start.

election fraud ruling: demand to know the truth

While everyone's been glued to Rob Ford's crack and Mike Duffy's featherbedding, something even more important happened: the Federal Court confirmed that there was election fraud in the 2011 federal election.

Not just "robocalls" - that diminutive buzzword that the media clings to - but election fraud: a deliberate, targeted attempt at voter suppression. The conservative media has framed the ruling as a victory for the Harper Government^TM, because the court stopped short of nullifying the election results. But the ruling was very clear. Judge Richard Mosley wrote:

I find that electoral fraud occurred during the 41st General Election.

Some important and potentially damning details still have not been revealed. Who had access to the Conservative Party's database? Who orchestrated and authorized the election fraud? Let's join the Council of Canadians in demanding the Conservative Party answer those questions. They won't do it, of course. But let's show them we're paying attention.

Go here to send your letter through the Council of Canadians.

* * * *

The ruling itself could not be clearer. Here are some choice excerpts. (A copy is posted here.)

* "Misleading calls about the locations of polling stations were made to electors in ridings across the country" . . . and the calls "appear to have been targeted towards voters who had previously expressed a preference for an opposition party."

* 247 ridings were affected by fraud complaints.

* There was a "deliberate attempt at voter suppression during the 2011 election."

* "Access to a party’s central database is carefully controlled. The calls at issue in these proceedings are most likely to have been organized by a person or persons with: i) access to the central information system of a political party that included contact information about non-supporters; ii) the financial resources to contract voice and automated service providers to make such calls; and iii) the authority to make such decisions."

* "There was an orchestrated effort to suppress votes during the 2011 election campaign by a person or persons with access to the CIMS [Conservative party] database."

* "RMG [marketing company], at the direction of the CPC [Conservative Party of Canada], called hundreds of thousands of electors and read a message stating that: “Elections Canada has changed some voting locations at the last minute”. This included calls to electors in five of the six subject ridings. The information was factually wrong in that there had been only one polling station change in all of the six subject ridings in which RMG made such calls….It was therefore improper for the CPC and RMG to deliver the message they did, and this should not recur."

* "I am satisfied that [it] has been established that misleading calls about the locations of polling stations were made to electors in ridings across the country, including the subject ridings,and that the purpose of those calls was to suppress the votes of electors who had indicated their voting preference in response to earlier voter identification calls."

As Dr Dawg points out, Judge Mosley came down hard on the Conservative Party's use of the legal system to obfuscate, foot-drag, stonewall, and otherwise impede the democratic process. From the decision:

* "In reviewing the procedural history and the evidence and considering the arguments advanced by the parties at the hearing, it has seemed to me that the applicants sought to achieve and hold the high ground of promoting the integrity of the electoral process while the respondent MPs engaged in trench warfare in an effort to prevent this case from coming to a hearing on the merits."

* "Despite the obvious public interest in getting to the bottom of the allegations, the CPC made little effort to assist with the investigation at the outset despite early requests. . . . While it was begrudgingly conceded during oral argument that what occurred was “absolutely outrageous”, the record indicates that the stance taken by the respondent MPs from the outset was to block these proceedings by any means."

Judge Mosley awarded costs to the Council of Canadians, meaning the Conservative Party has been ordered to reimburse the expenses associated with all that foot-dragging and stonewalling. The Party of Transparency and Accountability strikes again.

* * * *

The Council of Canadians is calling on the Conservative Party to come clean: give us a list of everyone who had access to the national CIMS database and the authority to initiate those calls, and turn over the information to the Commissioner of Elections.

Let's all get on board with that. Take five minutes from your day, and write a letter. Show Stephen Harper that some Canadians are paying attention. Go here to send your letter through the Council of Canadians.

hugo chavez vs lies western media tells us

Linda McQuaig recently wrote an excellent column about the blatantly false portrayal of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in the Western mainstream media. Chavez should be a hero to anyone who cares about social justice, but if your primary news sources are anywhere from CNN to the CBC to the New York Times, you might wonder why millions of Latin Americans mourned Chavez's passing rather than celebrating. You might imagine they were in the thrall of a charismatic tyrant.

I found the mainstream media's description of Chavez as a "dictator" particularly rich, given the US endured at least two fraudulent elections in recent times. Toronto activist Judy Rebick had this excellent letter in the Globe and Mail:

Your front-page article on the death of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez (Death Of A Revolutionary – March 6), calls him “a polarizing dictator.” He was certainly polarizing, as is our own Prime Minister, but Mr. Chavez was never a dictator. Mr. Chavez was elected several times over the past three decades, each time by a significant majority of the popular vote, which is more than we can say for Stephen Harper.

In 2002, Mr. Chavez’s opponents, including the right-wing media, organized a coup against him that was overturned by the massive mobilization of the poor people of Caracas. In 2004, the opposition organized a recall vote, a mechanism created by Mr. Chavez. It failed. In the 2006 election, he won with 63 per cent of the popular vote; in 2012, with 55 per cent of the popular vote.

You may disagree with Mr. Chavez’s 21st-century socialism policies, but please do not describe him as a dictator.

Judy Rebick, Toronto

McQuaig:

Had Hugo Chavez followed the pattern of many Third World leaders and concentrated on siphoning off his nation’s wealth for personal gain, he would have attracted little attention or animosity in the West.

Instead, he did virtually the opposite — redirecting vast sums of national wealth to the swollen ranks of Venezuela’s poor, along with free health care and education. No wonder he alienated local elites, who are used to being first in line at the national trough.
Chavez’s relentless championing of the downtrodden set a standard increasingly followed in Latin America. It explains his immense popularity with the masses and the widespread grief over his death last week.

Yet in the West, he was portrayed as a tyrant.

He was accused of muzzling the press, although anyone who’s ever turned on a TV in Caracas knows there’s no shortage of Fox News-style media outlets carrying a frothy mix of celebrities, U.S. sitcoms and anti-Chavez tirades.

He was also accused of being anti-democratic, even though he won elections which former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and his global election monitoring centre have declared “the best in the world.”

Chavez deservedly came under attack in the West — including from Noam Chomsky — for failing to order the release of a judge imprisoned for allowing a corrupt banker to flee Venezuela with millions of dollars.

But it’s striking to note that the West routinely ignores more serious democratic failings on the part of its allies, including torture and execution in full-fledged dictatorships like Saudi Arabia.

What actually appears to have infuriated the western establishment was Chavez’s audacity in challenging — and scoring some victories against — western dominance of the world economy. 

One such victory allowed Third World oil-producing nations to gain a bigger share of global oil revenues.

Up until the 1970s, the major western oil companies, known as the Seven Sisters, controlled the world oil market through a cartel established at a secret retreat at Achnacarry Castle in Scotland in 1928. The Achnacarry agreement set out in detail how the companies would maintain their lucrative control of oil markets into the future, setting quotas among themselves, never competing with each other and preventing competitors from getting in on the action.

In the 1970s, oil-producing nations in the Middle East and Venezuela organized and managed to replace the Seven Sisters with their own cartel, OPEC, striking a better deal for themselves and sending oil prices soaring. Some enraged westerners were left wondering, “How did our oil get under their sand?”

Read the rest of the column here.

McQuaig is the author of It's the Crude, Dude: War, Big Oil and the Fight for the Planet, among other books. I wrote about her excellent book Holding the Bully's Coat here and posted an extended excerpt here.