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74 Million White Supremacist, Authoritarian-law & Order Americans Jilted

With the Inauguration of Joseph Biden as the 46th President of the United States, ex-President Donald Trump skulked out of Washington D.C. to his Mar-a-Largo golf club in Florida, all but tarred and feathered and run-out-on-a-rail in disgrace, after having become the only American President in history to be impeached twice. In 2021, Trump may yet even have to return to the Capitol to face charges of malfeasance or treasonous behavior while in office.

Yet the reality of this scenario need never have happened if, in a parallel universe, there existed an America with a different U.S. Constitution, never written by white slave owners 231 years ago, who hadn’t buried deep within its sacred text the all but permanent concept of a racist Electoral College that ensured rich white founders of the nation never had to worry ever again about those who weren’t white male property owners or black African slaves who were only considered 3/5ths of a human being.

THE UNIVERSE OF AMERICA’S NATIONAL POPULISM IN FLUX

Trump was found guilty by the US Congress for incitement of insurrection. But now, as the dust of the Republican’s failed coup continues to settle from the horrific events that transpired during the violent siege of the American Capitol, unprecedented since the 1812 Revolutionary War against the British Empire, the burning question arises: what will be the fate of those 74 million, overwhelmingly White Americans, many of whom are diehard white supremacists and authoritarian, law and order-minded Make America Great Again (MAGA) followers of Trump, who, for years, blindly voted for, and marched to the orders of, their strong man leader, unequivocally giving him and his odd brand of ‘democracy’ emotional succor until they even went so far as to finally physically lay siege or morally support the siege of the US Capitol? Are they also to be so charged for treasonable insurrection? What about the legally elected lawmakers in the US Congress who originally signed the petition to challenge the Electoral College’s certification of Biden’s election, or the hard-core House of Representative Republicans, who, even as the tear gas had barely cleared in the besieged US Capitol, still were prepared to throw out millions of lawfully cast votes by Americans in contested battleground states in the hope that, in a desperate last minute coup, they still somehow thought they could overthrow the 2020 Presidential Election results and subvert Biden’s election in Trump’s favor? It was the kind of thing one would expect to see happen in a Banana Republic where the instigators and their minions would have immediately been thrown in some dungeon or, worse, lined up against a wall and shot. But not in America the so-called bastion of democracy. Do they even have to worry about being tried for their treasonable actions or will they simply be given a blanket amnesty in the name of national unity?

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Biden’s avowed intent is to unify America’s deeply troubled and divided land by reaching beyond the harsh reality of Jan 6th, 2021 and extend an open hand across the political aisle in a gesture of goodwill and healing that he naively thinks, as President Andrew Johnson did at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865, that he can or will bridge the existing wide gap of extreme partisan politics that, for decades if not centuries, since the very beginning of “The Great American Experiment in Democracy” have all but been hopelessly separated into two political camps, morally, ethically and ideologically.

Observers of the American political scene have long been distressed by the steady drift in the country towards far right national populism and corporate-financial-political fascism that, in modern times, reaches back to the election of the racist, anti-egalitarian Ronald Raegan in 1980, down through the falsely stolen election of George H.W. Bush over Al Gore who won the popular vote yet lost the right to become the President, due to bogus Electoral College certification skullduggery; and then again, in the 2016 Election, when Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton because of more legal skullduggery, but slipped through the Electoral College’s archaic certification process to become the President. As a result, all the subsequent wars that ensued in the world, all the destruction to the natural world, the environment and climate, all the massacres and mass displacements of humans and their cultures, worldwide, that occurred on their watch might not or probably never would have happened, and the dismal state of so much in the world today would no doubt be a very different reality than it now is.

AMERICA’S ELECTORAL COLLEGE AN ARCHAIC DIVISIVE CONCEPT

This controversy over the use of the archaic, undemocratic Electoral College concept to decide critically-important presidential elections goes all the way back to the very birth of America and its racist, sexist origins when the concept of using a simpler popular majority vote to determine who would be president struck too much abject fear in delegates from white slaveowner Southern states that boasted large populations of primarily enslaved black people, legally considered to only be 3/5ths of a human, as well as the delegates from Northern states that mostly were comprised of smaller populations of primarily white, male, property owners.

So long as the Electoral College still remains the primary mechanism used to certify political elections in America the results will always remain controversial and open to the charge of being rigged, as Trump and many others on both sides of the political aisle have long charged. The full story of how this happened will be fleshed out later.

The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini once declared “Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that one day.” Speaking to the merger of capitalism and the state, Mussolini went on to say, “The definition of fascism is the marriage of the corporation and the state…. Today capitalism is scarcely at the beginning of its story.”

One could so argue from this perspective that a more advanced chapter in this age-old story, is what the world witnessed in 2008, during the financial Wall Street Crash, when enormously rich white plutocrats and corporate capitalists pulled off one of the world’s biggest financial heists in modern history when Wall Street Banksters, working in tandem with co-conspiratorial American and world politicians, pulled off The Crime of the Century; as bold, one could say, as was the failed siege of the US Capitol; when Trump supporters, like modern-day ‘Black Shirt’ street thugs, with the aid of high-level insiders within America’s political infrastructure, tried to pull off a coup.

TRUMP A MEMBER OF THE WORLD’S RUTHLESS LAW & ORDER RULING CLASS

Over the four years of Trump’s illegal, undemocratic presidential tenure, multiple signs already were plainly staring the world in the face for all to see how progressively fascist and divisive the world’s geopolitical scene was fast becoming, that already was writ large in the Republican Party under Trump’s rule. The many ‘nice’ remarks Trump constantly had a penchant to make in his budding presidency about some of the worst of the world’s ruthless dictators and rulers, clearly underscored the fact that Trump himself already was also a member of the world’s dangerous ruling class of ruthless dictators and authoritarian leaders who personified the old saying that, Birds of a Feather Always Flock Together.

For instance, Trump once had a phone conversation with Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte, whose toxic reputation for carrying little about human life was by then well known, as was Duterte’s admitted mass murder of thousands of his people and extra-judicial killings of still hundreds more drug users who were guilty of little more than being pathetic opioid addicts and pushers. During an unscripted moment in the phone call with Duterte, Trump abruptly extended a friendly invitation to Duterte to visit him in the White House. Trump’s aides and his critics alike were immediately left totally stunned by this invite to one of the world’s shadiest figures. Said Christopher Murphy (D-Conn) at the time, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Twitter, “We are watching in real time as the American bully pulpit disintegrates into ashes.”

One week before his invite to Duterte for a White House visit, Trump also took the opportunity to congratulate Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey for his political election victory that cemented his oppressively-ruthless, autocratic rule in Turkey. Trump also often excessively praised President XI Jinping of China while overlooking Xi Jinping’s ever-escalating anti-democratic repression of free speech and political freedoms in China, Tibet and Hong Kong. Trump did the same things with PM Netanyahu and his Likud Party’s apartheid policies against the Palestinian people.

During his 2016 Election campaign, Trump once referred to Saddam Hussein as a, “a bad guy – a really bad guy”. But then, in the same breath, he praised Saddam, saying, “but you know what, he did very well! He killed terrorists! He did that so good! They didn’t read them their rights! They didn’t talk! They were terrorists, Over! Today, Iraq is Harvard for Terrorism!” In response to Hussein using chemical weapons to massacre as many as 5,000 Iraqi, Trump dismissively noted, “Saddam threw a little gas, everyone goes crazy! ‘Oh, he’s using gas!’”

Trump, before and after being elected, often praised still many more viscous strong men dictators, like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, who he referred to as, “a pretty smart cookie, whether it was his uncle or anybody else, he slapped them all down.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, is said by many Soviet observers to have ordered hackers to interfere in the 2016 US. election to help Trump against Hillary Clinton. Trump’s comment to the charge was, “Great move or delay by Putin, I always knew he was very smart.” In fact, Trump hardly ever said an unkind word about Putin but instead, at a national security forces conference in 2016, commented, “He’s a stronger leader than President Barack Obama. You can say, ‘Oh, isn’t that a terrible thing to say! I mean the man has very strong control over his country! Now it’s a very different system, and I don’t happen to like the system, but certainly in that system he’s been a leader far more than our president has been a leader.” When Trump was reminded that Putin has also had journalists and dissenters killed, Trump obliquely replied, “I think our country does plenty of killing too!”

Another controversial leader Trump sought to praise early on in 2015 is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who had used chemical weapons against his own people. Trump commended Assad, “For being a strong leader…..I think in terms of leadership, he’s getting an ‘A’ over our own President Barack Obama, who’s not doing so well.”

Again, to get some sense of how Trump’s authoritarian thought processes ran while he was in office, in 2017, in Montana, Republican Greg Gianforte(R. Mont) was running for the state’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives when he was approached by a Guardian reporter who had a question to put to him about his position on the American Health Care Act. Gianforte shouted at him “I’m sick and tired of you Liberal reporters, Get the hell out of here!”, and then promptly body slammed the reporter to the floor, breaking his glasses in the process. During his court appearance sentencing, when Gianforte was asked by the Committee to Protect Journalists to help find ways to empower the press, Gianforte ducked the meeting. Once Trump learned of the incident, his only comment was, “Any guy that can do a body slam he’s my kind of guy!”

The point behind these few cited examples among the many in respect to how Trump thinks about some of the world’s worst murderers, despots and brutish leaders, they serve as telling examples of Trump’s own preferred ruthless ‘strong man’ style of leadership that was well known in the corporate business world long before he was elected for the first time in 2016. Yet for the 74 million Americans, and the Republican Party’s leadership who unequivocally stood behind their ‘strong man’ leader for yet a second term in 2020, it never seemed to matter. They were never deterred or dissuaded in their support for him, which, if truth be told, says as much about the ruthless mind-set of a vast majority of America’s voters and its political class as it does about Trump himself.

The close results among America’s voters in the 2020 election was a clear indicator of the potential dire troubles that still lies ahead, as it did after the Civil War, that such an enormous number of voters either chose to ignore or overlook Trump’s alarming commentary about so many nefarious American and world political figures that reflected his own flaws as a leader. By the 2020 Election this should have immediately sent off alarm bells in the minds, and shivers shooting up the spines, of every American, politician and security official if they were paying closer attention to the realities on the ground, which obviously many didn’t, or not near enough. Or maybe they were! During the siege of the US Capitol, these wide disparities in Trump’s makeup have been allowed to permeate modern American political and cultural life and became further highlighted when Trump chose to refer to the rampaging insurrectionists as “good people I love”.

When White nationalists and supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 violently protested the removal of the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Trump also downplayed the violence he signaled to his followers there when he simply dismissively declared, “hatred, bigotry and intolerance exists on many sides”, while failing to condemn the bald-faced displays of white nationalism, Confederate and Nazi flags proudly unfurled along with other manifest symbols of racial hatred clearly in evidence. Those in the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) who sought to speak out in favor of upholding America’s more lofty values and time-honored Rules of Law were too often either minimized, ignored or demonized.

The whole point to the thrust of what is being said here is that none of these incidents and anecdotes would ever have happened if, in 2016, when Trump’s first election bid didn’t ever garner enough of the simple, straightforward popular votes of the American people who, by a margin of over 2 million more votes, had actually chosen Hillary Clinton to be the 45th President of the United States.

Which brings this whole argument full circle back to the fact that the faulty Electoral College concept of real democracy must now, once and for all, be utterly abolished and eliminated if the United States is ever to regain its reputation as “The Greatest Democracy in the World”, where the US Capitol and the White House represents what President Ronald Reagan meant, in 1989, when he spoke of the “shining city on the hill, whose beacon of light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.” Reagan might have also added at the time, “where truly free and honest democratic elections are decided by the people themselves.”

THE US. CONSTITUTION WITHOUT AN ELECTORAL COLLEGE; AN AMERICA THAT NEVER WAS

Three important steps must be taken to totally reframe: the U.S. Constitution; America’s political process and create a ‘Shining America’ that never was but still could be.

The first important thing that must be done by the Biden Administration to dramatically reshape the American political landscape is to immediately convene in 2021 a Constitutional Convention to undertake the task of eliminating the concept of the Electoral College and return to a simpler, more straightforward election process, based solely upon the ‘good old’ one vote per human.

The second important step is to totally eliminate the concept of Citizens United and take away unlimited political contributions from the millionaires, billionaires and trillionaires, starting with legal actions at every local level in the nation that will have a better chance of success once a multitude of such cases most assuredly will have to be collectively heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. Now with a new Justice on the Supreme Court, the prospect of reversing Citizens United perhaps may suddenly be larger, more plausible. The brass ring closer within reach, in spite of the matter being still a very complex political one. These first two steps will be addressed in a subsequent article that examines the controversial Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission 5 to 4 decision, when Justice Antonin Scalia was in the majority.

The third critical step to be primarily addressed here is what to do to significantly change or abolish the grossly archaic Electoral College’s authority, within each national presidential election process, to issue a Certificate of Ascertainment, to be tallied and verified in the U.S. Congress before any presidential election is ever considered valid. As already mentioned, this became especially egregious during the ultimate election of George H.W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000 and Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016, when both presidential candidates lost the popular vote but won the ultimate electoral vote. This same result has happened five times in American history: Three times in the 19th century and twice in the 21st century.

In the 21st century this faulty Electoral College concept continues to be a ticking time bomb. If it hadn’t existed in the 2020 Election the contention by Trump and his minions that “the election was rigged” would have been so much ‘hot air’ that never have happened, nor would the siege of the US Capitol, or the now mounting fears of white supremacists threatening to attack the nation’s 50 state capitols to disrupt an orderly transition of government on Inauguration Day, whose menacing presence still remains lurking somewhere in the shadows. Not to mention the by now already all but shattered American belief in the legitimacy and sanctity of its own political system.

This imbalance, which appears to be, perhaps, a growing 21st century phenomenon simply can’t be allowed to continue if the nation can expect to remain indivisible with justice for all under God. Under the provisions of the antiquated Electoral College, the most populous states in the Union (California, Texas, Florida and New York) are grossly under represented while some smaller states (Delaware, Wyoming, Kentucky), are over-represented because they fit into an absurd election formula of what’s called the median population. Hence, an electoral vote in a state like Wyoming is worth more than an electoral college vote in a big state like California. The siege of the US Capitol a particularly-salient sign writ large that this disparity can’t continue.

THE PROBLEM IS THIS: Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution established the Electoral College. For over 200 years, since the inception of America as a nation, any attempt to ever try to amend the US Constitution, considered by many patriots to be a virtual sacrosanct ‘holy book’, has been met with indifference or serious resistance by each succeeding generation of lawmakers. However, Article V provides the mechanics by which an amendment to dissolve the Electoral College is highly possible and most expedient.

Two different means exist to amend the founding document of the U.S. Constitution. The first route is to obtain a 2/3rd’s vote in both houses of the U.S. Congress, followed by the ratification of 3/4th’s of the states. Any plan to scrap the Electoral College via this route probably would not pass, though, in the current highly politicized, hostile political environment.

Why? Because the current Electoral College system already has unfairly benefitted Republicans twice in the 21st century and more recently almost a third time. As a result, Republicans and Republican state governments are incentivized to maintain the status quo of the Electoral System. In the current ridiculous system, this reality will require every Democratic House member to vote in favor of such an amendment, and be joined by at least 59 Republicans and every Democratic Senator to be joined by 19 of their Republican colleagues. GOOD LUCK, is the refrain! Even if such an amendment was ever to pass Congress, its defeat in the states would be highly likely. To boot, even if all 25 of the states that Biden won in 2020 were to ratify such an amendment, nine additional states that President Trump won would also need to ratify it, as well. And another DOUBLE GOOD LUCK to that!

However, something called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), a mouthful, amounts to still another alternative way to go, even within the current governs of the Constitution. The Compact requires states to pass laws that would award the electoral vote to the candidate who wins the popular vote, nationally. Under the current plan, states that join will not activate the Compact in place of the Electoral College until enough states join to total the 270 electoral votes required to elect a president.

Currently, 15 states and the District of Columbia have approved the NPVIC. These states currently total 190 electoral votes. But even if more states were to sign on to the NPVIC, the permissibility of such a cumbersome proposal ever going into effect to replace the Electoral College would, in the end, likely would be defeated by a flurry of lawsuits.

If, in the election of 2000 and 2016, this alternative system had been used to award two electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, and a ‘winner-take-all’ proviso existed where every state would garner what remained, it would mean that in the 2000 election Al Gore would have won the Presidency with 320 electoral votes to George H.W. s Bush’s 211 Votes. Whereas, in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have won the Presidency with 290 votes to Trump’s 241 votes.

The elimination of the Electoral College and a return to a simpler, straightforward popular vote process, combined with the total negation of Citizens United, should be one of the most fundamental, utmost key goals of – and rationale for - the Biden Presidency. In 2016, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both considered overhauling the existing campaign finance system, and Clinton vowed at the time, if elected, to appoint Supreme Court Justices who would vote for the pre-eminent right of the citizenry’s vote over the right of billionaires to simply buy elections.

SO WHERE DOES AMERICA GO FROM HERE

The Republican Party in 2021, that refuses to play by the honored rules of real democracy, may now have no choice but to ultimately go through a dissolution between its growing hard fascist right, pro-racist factions, its democratic, anti-racist, antifa factions, and their mutual corporate vs populist roots; similar to what its predecessor, the Whig Party, had to go through in the 1850’s before the impasse caused by irreconcilable factions of their slavers vs anti-slavers had no choice but to split and go their separate ways. This is what eventually led to the birth of the Republican Party, in the midst of the Civil War, that became known as The Party of Abraham Lincoln.

The Democratic Party, the oldest voter-based political party in the world, and the oldest existing political party in the United States, first formed in the 1830’s and 1840’s, must also now overcome its own dominant, ever-growing ultra-conservative wing of the Party and retrace its historical origins, principles and progressive heritage back to the original Thomas Jefferson and James Madison Democratic-Republican Party of the 1790’s, and then carry forth the spirit and intent of some of their progressive ideals into the 21st century.

Words (3916)

TAG LINE: US Presidential Elections (2000-2020), President Trump’s Impeachment, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama, US Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, White Supremacists, US Capitol Siege, Citizens United, Charlottsville Race Riot, Black Lives Matter (BLM), National Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), Greg Gianforte, Benito Mussolini, Rodrigo Duterte, Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, 2008 Wall Street Crash

Bio Note:

Jerome Irwin is a Canadian-American writer who, for decades, has sought to call world attention to problems of environmental degradation and unsustainability caused by excessive mega-development and host of related environmental-ecological-spiritual issues that exist between the conflicting philosophies of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples.

Irwin is the author of the book, “The Wild Gentle Ones; A Turtle Island Odyssey” (www.turtle-island-odyssey.com), a spiritual odyssey among the native peoples of North America that has led to numerous articles pertaining to: Ireland’s Fenian Movement; native peoples Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance Movement; AIPAC, Israel & the U.S. Congress anti-BDS Movement; the historic Battle for Palestine & Siege of Gaza, as well as; the many violations constantly being waged by industrial-corporate-military-propaganda interests against the World’s Collective Soul

 

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