Stephan: As readers know I live on a rural island in the Pacific Northwest, just a few miles from a picturesque and historic village of about 1500 people. Today I went in to pick up the mail, and as I walked through the village I noticed yet another shop had closed and would not be reopening, the space is now empty. It made me think of the women who had worked in that shop, and from there I began to count up the number of hourly workers in my one little village who are out of work and have been for some months.
Driving home I listened to commentators on npr talking about how Mitch McConnell and the Republicans had put the senate into recess without passing the acutely need legislation to help these millions of hourly workers. All I could think about was: Mitch and the others how could you be so callous, so lacking in compassion? So indifferent to the suffering that is going on all around you? Of course, you are getting your paychecks, aren't you? No stress for you. There are 23 Republican senators up for re-election. Come on America! Vote everyone of these bastards out of office.
Carlos Ponce joins other demonstrators participating in a protest asking Senators to support the continuation of unemployment benefits on July 16, 2020 in Miami Springs, Florida. Credit: Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty
As Senate Republicans headed home for the weekend without extending unemployment insurance benefits or approving other economic relief programs that could help millions of Americans weather the ongoing financial catastrophe of the coronavirus pandemic, progressives and congressional Democrats warned that disaster is on the horizon.
“This whole house of cards is going to collapse,” Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.) warned during a press conference Friday afternoon.
As Common Dreamsreported, the departure of the GOP-controlled Senate for the weekend without a resolution to the benefits questions earned the upper chamber’s leadership a harsh rebuke in a speech from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who called the decision by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to recess until Monday unacceptable.
“The lapse that is being forced on this country right now is because Senate Republicans would not step up,” said Wyden. “The lapse is going to lead to evictions, it’s going to lead to hunger, it’s going […]
Stephan: I am always searching the academic literature for social outcome data -- I am sure everyone who reads SR knows I am a data person first and last. Today in Googling the databases I came across a new study ranking countries on which are best and worst in which to raise a family, and I was appalled at the ranking of the United States. We are really off-the-rails. I urge you to read this article, and then the primary research on which it is based: https://www.asherfergusson.com/raising-a-family-index/.
We must reboot our culture and do so on the basis of fostering wellbeing, not just making profit. We are a very sick nation.
We get an “F” for family.
New York family Credit: Getty
In case you thought America wasn’t experiencing enough turmoil of late, the United States has been named the second-worst wealthy nation in which to raise a family in 2020, according to new research by travel site Asher & Lyric.
“The first time I looked at the data, I was in disbelief,” co-founder Lyric Benson-Fergusson said of the findings in the “Raising a Family Index” (RAFI).
The Los Angeles-based mother of two started the site with her Aussie husband, Asher Fergusson, to help people “stay safe, healthy, and happy at home and while traveling,” per the website’s description.
To determine the most and least family-friendly countries, the couple rated 35 OECD countries (part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development forum) according to safety, happiness, cost, health, education and time.
The US clocked in at an abysmal 34th place, just ahead of last-place finisher Mexico, whose murder rate jumped to the highest in nearly two years as drug cartels have run amok during the coronavirus lockdown. […]
Stephan: Trump and the Republicans are going to try to rig the November election in every way they can. It is highly probable that in your state you are going to have to fight to vote, and to get your vote counted. Now is the time to join an organization working to protect your right to vote and to see that if you do vote that your vote is accurately counted. And it is very important that every one of us vote. Not voting is voting for Trump.
A voter in Michigan. Credit: Shutterstock
It’s official: 1,913,369 ballots were cast but never counted in the 2016 presidential race. That’s from the US Elections Assistance Commission.
And not just anyone’s ballot gets tossed into the electoral dumpster. The US Civil Rights Commission took a look at Florida’s throw-away pile and calculated that your chance of having your vote simply go uncounted, “spoiled,” is 900% higher if you’re Black than if you’re white.
Trump’s call for an army of 50,000 vigilantes is laughable: some schmuck in a Hawaiian shirt and MAGA cap won’t scare off voters of color. But 50,000 challengers, challenging every single ballot for Biden – that could succeed. It did for Trump in Michigan in 2016.
Here’s how Michigan – and so the Presidency – was stolen four years ago.
This little chapter from How Trump Stole 2020 tells you how they did it in 2016 … and can do it again in 2020:
Michigan Michigass
Here’s what you know: In 2016, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes. Officially.
Here’s what you don’t know: 75,355 ballots were never counted. That’s official, too. Just […]
Stephan: We are so close to becoming a fascist autocratic kleptocracy, and so few seem to realize this. My correspondents in Germany though, having lived through fascism, see it all too clearly.
Germans have a particular relationship to fire. The Reichstag fire of 1933 enabled Hitler and the Nazis to scrap the fragile Weimar democracy that had brought them to power. Hitler’s murderous fantasies could now become reality. War, Auschwitz and the German catastrophe followed.
I have known many thoughtful German diplomats over the years, including Michael Steiner, who labored to stop the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German ambassador to the United States. It always seemed to me that their particular passion for freedom, democracy and openness stemmed from the knowledge of how easily these are lost.
Michael Steinberg, a professor of history at Brown University and the former president of the American Academy in Berlin, wrote to me this week:
“The American catastrophe seems to get worse every day, but the events in Portland have particularly alarmed me as a kind of strategic experiment for fascism. The playbook from the German fall of democracy in 1933 seems well in place, including rogue military factions, the destabilization of cities, etc.”
Stephan: I have said before, and let me say again, that when Trump thinks he is going to lose the election he will then retreat into his mental illness and let his sense of vengeance come to the fore. We are watching this happen, as Trump talks about sending tens of thousands of stormtroopers into American cities, as he tells people in the suburbs that they should fear mobs. I have been corresponding with friends in Portland, who tell me there is no anarchy in Portland, the streets are not afire. That what is going on in a six-block area is that Trump's troopers are provoking violence so television cameras can make it seem like the city is coming apart when nothing like that is going on. What is happening is that Americans in Portland who love America and democracy are standing up nonviolently as ordinary Indians stood up with Gandhi.
As Trump goes down he is going to try to take America with him. If you don't want to see America disappear into tyranny you better get involved.
Trump at White House Credit: White House
As President Trump’s poll numbers slip four months before the election, he and his frenzied staff have launched an end game of wild thrashing that could bring further damage to a country they pretend to love.
The closer defeat looms, the more desperate the death throes of a deranged administration. It lunges for levers of power and propaganda. It undermines institutions that stand above politics. It smears physicians who work for the public’s health. It attempts to conceal pandemic data, Soviet-style. It issues absurd decrees to local school boards to open in the fall or else. It dispatches unidentified federal forces to kidnap peaceful protesters. It flails out against measures to ease voting. And these are only the omens. A final spasm—if it is final—seems likely.
Insurgencies, dictatorships, and the like often tend toward untamed outrages as they are backed into a corner and face annihilation. Similar impulses appear ascendant in Trump’s criminal government, where the rule of law is a minor irritation and self-enrichment at taxpayers’ expense is routine. He has shed his White House of responsible advisers, replacing them with cruel dogmatists whose ideology of ignorance is a plague on […]
