KEEPING RACISM ALIVE AT THE POLLS
By Robert C. Koehler
958 Words
There’s almost no such thing as voter fraud, even though the Trump administration — and Republicans in general — affect to be so afraid of it they’ve had to develop a system guaranteed to purge voters from the rolls in enormous numbers.
They’re keeping America safe!
From nothing.
This, you might say, is the elephant in the room, politely unacknowledged even when the Republican system, very much embraced by the Trump administration, is critically analyzed. It’s called the Interstate Crosscheck System, developed by Kris Kobach, Kansas secretary of state and Republican candidate for governor, and its flaws are unavoidably — indeed, grotesquely — obvious.
But before that matters, I think it’s crucial to establish the fact that voter fraud — bad citizens, or worse yet, illegals, voting twice, indeed, driving from one state to another (Georgia to Illinois, say) in order to do their part to swing a national election — is itself a complete fraud. However, trumpeting the fear of such non-existent behavior is absolutely brilliant.
It’s the current manifestation of minority vote suppression. It’s the new racism.
All this is made clear in investigative journalist Greg Palast’s irreverent new documentary, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which takes on Crosscheck and present-day vote suppression, no holds barred, linking modern racism with the old-fashioned kind. In the process, the film lets us know the real value of the right to vote, from the point of view of those who had to fight and die to attain it.
Here, for instance, is author Linda Blackmon Lowery describing her experience on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965 — Bloody Sunday: “When we got to the top of the bridge, then you could really see what was on the other side. And there were white people sitting on their cars with their Confederate flags and their banners. ‘Die nigger.’ ‘Go home, coon.’”
Suddenly she heard a popping noise, as teargas canisters went off all around her. “You couldn’t breathe, you couldn’t see. I ran into this big old thing of teargas. (A police officer) was running behind me with a billy club. (She makes a hand gesture describing being clubbed from behind.) When I woke up they had me on a stretcher, putting me in the back of a hearse. I just jumped up and before anybody could catch me I was heading across that bridge.”
A short while later, the film shows a protester holding a sign: “My vote has been paid for in blood.”
And this begins to create the context for discussing Crosscheck, part of today’s oh so politically correct racist gaming of democracy, which is — let’s be frank — an incredible inconvenience to people in power. It was then and it still is now. What’s a rich, powerful white person supposed to do?
Crosscheck is part of the answer. Kobach’s system is simplicity itself. In order to protect America from the horror of millions of people voting twice (risking prison time for committing this federal offense), Crosscheck collects the names on the voting rolls of all participating states, which at this point is 27, mostly under Republican legislative control, and conducts a computer search for matches, or quasi-matches. Those matches — all the Fred Jacksons, all the Jose Garcias, etc., etc. — become potential double voters. Note: The matching names are first and last only, with middle initials ignored. Allegedly, Crosscheck also compares birth dates, though such data is often missing from voter rosters.
A list of the matches are sent to the participating secretaries of state and state election boards, which can then purge their rolls of these folks. According to Palast, these states have so far removed 1,067,046 voters, not counting Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s recent “purge-frenzy,” removing 591,000 voters’ names in the current election cycle.
Here’s the thing. Most of the matched names belong to people of color. “Jackson, Rodriguez, Garcia, Lee, Kim — these are primarily minority names,” Palast explained. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out this system is unbelievably racially biased.”
In the documentary, Palast points out that 90 percent of Washingtons, for instance, are black. In some states, “20 percent of minority voters . . . are on the Crosscheck list.”
So, as the Washington Post reported a year ago, the Crosscheck method is so utterly slipshod that way-y-y-y over 99 percent of the name matches the system reports to participating states “were unlikely to have anything to do with even attempted voter fraud.” But because of Crosscheck, a huge number of voters, mostly men and women of color, who tend to vote Democratic, will either be denied their right to vote or forced to vote provisionally, which usually means they won’t have their vote counted.
I repeat: There is virtually no such thing as voter fraud — certainly nothing at a level that could actually impact an election. As the Brennan Center for Justice pointed out last year, in its report “The Truth About Voter Fraud”: It is more likely that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”
But keeping Americans of color — those who have truly paid with their blood for the right to vote — away from the polls by the millions, does indeed impact our elections. Look at who got “elected” president!
Palast, hardly content simply to expose this outrage in book and film, has teamed with Jesse Jackson and the two, with the pro bono help of the New York law firm Mirer, Mazzocchi and Julien, have filed suit, under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, with every Crosscheck state to get the names — the million-plus names — of registered voters purged from the rolls. The public, after all, has a right to hold the state accountable for the games it plays.
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Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoic
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TO WRITE LOVE ON HER ARMS
Meets Initial National Suicide Prevention Week Fundraising Goal of $100,000 With Support from KYGO, Hunter Hayes, Jared Padalecki, Brandi Cyrus, Ashlyn Harris, Wells Adams + More
Sets Sights on New Goal of $150,000
Matching Grant: Double Your Impact Today!
World Suicide Prevention Day Video Featuring
Chris Sullivan, Hunter Hayes, Jaina Lee Ortiz, and more
Watch Now: youtu.be/aEzUMnBHHK0
Melbourne, FL - September 12, 2018 - With a few days remaining of their "Tomorrow Needs You" campaign to honor National Suicide Prevention Week (9/9 - 9/15) and World Suicide Prevention Day (9/10), nonprofit organization To Write Love on Her Arms has reached their initial fundraising goal of $100,000. As a result, the organization has raised their goal to $150,000, with these funds being used to provide scholarships for more than 2,000 counseling sessions each year. Thanks to an anonymous matching grant, when you donate today your impact will be doubled! The grant ends Sunday (9/16) or when the full $10,000 has been matched.
Recent support has continued to pour in throughout the week with additional posts being shared by Cleveland Cavaliers player Kyle Korver, actor Jared Padalecki, American DJ Bassnectar, US Women's National Soccer Team players Christen Press and Ashlyn Harris, actress Susie Abromeit, and Norwegian DJ/producer KYGO, who personally donated $30,000 to the campaign, amongst others. Joining them are sites like Billboard, EDM Tunes, Country Music Tattle Tale, Your EDM, Hollywood.com, and more sharing the message of hope and help.
According to the World Health Organization, 800,000 people die by suicide globally each year. That's one person every 90 seconds. Additionally, the CDC recently reported that as of 2016, the suicide rate in the United States has risen 25% in the last 20 years.
People can participate in this year's campaign by joining the conversation on Twitter and Instagram with #TomorrowNeedsYou and #NSPW18, and donating to the fundraising campaign. TWLOHA will directly invest every dollar from the "Tomorrow Needs You" campaign into treatment and recovery.
TWLOHA recently shared an inspiring new video featuring actors Chris Sullivan (from This Is Us) and Jaina Lee Ortiz (from Station 19), country music star Hunter Hayes, writer/artist Morgan Harper Nichols, and singer/songwriter Matt Wertz, along with a number of clips submitted by TWLOHA supporters from around the world. To watch the video, please visit: youtu.be/aEzUMnBHHK0.
To Write Love on Her Arms is a nonprofit dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury, and suicide. It exists to encourage, inform, inspire, and also to invest directly into treatment and recovery. Since its start in 2006, TWLOHA has donated over $2.1 million directly into treatment and recovery and answered over 200,000 messages from over 100 countries. For more information on To Write Love on Her Arms, please visit: www.twloha.com.
In addition to this year's WSPD/NSPW campaign, TWLOHA recently announced three dates of "An Evening With To Write Love on Her Arms." The tour will run from September 18-20, hitting Tampa, FL, Gainesville, FL, and Atlanta, GA, respectively. The evening will consist of Tworkowski speaking, plus performances by two-time National Poetry Slam champion, Sierra DeMulder and musician JP Saxe. Tickets for all three nights are on sale now. General admission tickets range from $13-$15, and VIP tickets are $40, which includes a pre-show Meet & Greet + Q&A. For more information, please visit: https://twloha.com/events/.
For more information on To Write Love on Her Arms,please visit: www.twloha.com
To get involved, please visit: www.twloha.com/tomorrowneedsyou
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U.S. support for the bombing of Yemen to continue, for now
by Kevin Martin
717 words
On September 12, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo officially certifiedSaudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates “...are undertaking demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure resulting from military operations of these governments.” This is required to allow U.S. planes to continue refueling jets for the Saudi/UAE coalition, without which it could not keep dropping bombs on targets in Yemen. Secretary of Defense James Mattis concurred with Pompeo, though congressional legislation required only Pompeo’s say-so.
Anyone who follows international news could be excused for accidentally spitting out their morning coffee at Pompeo’s statement. Among many attacks on civilian targets in Yemen, last month’s bombingof a school bus in a market district, which killed 51 people including 40 children, was among the most horrific, so much so that even Saudi Arabia admitted it was “unjustified.” Of course, the Saudi regime should not be allowed to merely get away with investigating itself (indeed, Human Rights Watch released a 90 page report which is highly critical of the Saudi-UAE coalition’s investigations into its attacks, particularly on civilians).
That bombing, which shocked the conscience of the global community, was only the latest massacre of civilians in Yemen. In 2016, Saudi attacks on a market and funeral hall killed 252 people. In response, the Obama Administration halted the sale of precision guided munitions to Saudi Arabia, citing human rights concerns, but then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson overturned the ban in March, 2017.
The humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen is considered the world’s worst at this moment, with well over 10,000 people having been killed (an estimated 20 percent are children) and 15 million of the total Yemeni population of 23 million considered “food insecure,” according to the United Nations. Add in the planet’s worst outbreak of cholera in some time, affecting over a million people, and one gets a picture of the dire situation since the civil war began in 2015.
The United States is the number one weapons dealer in the world, and Saudi Arabia is our biggest customer, having purchased more than $100 billion in armaments since 2010. The bombs in all three attacks cited above were built by Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturerand the largest U.S. government contractor of any kind, with net sales of more than $13 billion in just the second quarter of this year. It’s not hyperbole to state Lockheed makes a killing, in more ways than one.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Senate attempted to intervene to stop U.S. in-air refueling of Saudi jets and other logistical, intelligence and targeting support. The bipartisan measure, led by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) failed on a procedural vote, 55 to 44. Similar proposals also fell short in the House of Representatives, but peace- and human rights-minded House leaders, led by Reps. Adam Smith (D-WA), Ro Khanna (D-CA), Mark Pocan (D-WI), Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), Jim McGovern (D-MA) and others will soon try againto stop U.S. support for the slaughter, thinking the school bus bombing may have shocked some hearts and may change some minds.
Concerned individuals should contact their House member and demand they support this common sense effort to cease U.S. participation in this tragedy, without which the Saudi-led coalition could not continue and would likely be forced to negotiate more seriously with the Houthi-backed government. Unfortunately, this conflict is depicted as part of a regional Sunni-Shia supremacy struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which supports the Houthis, but the people of Yemen need the nightmare to end, regardless of geostrategic politics.
Another, more long-term action people of conscience can undertake is to ensure one’s investments or other financial instruments do not benefit Lockheed Martin and other weapons contractors profiting from endless wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. Code Pink, Peace Action, American Friends Service Committee and dozens of organizations support the Divest from the War Machinecampaign, where one can find out more about how to divest individual or organizational holdings from the arms merchants. Another good resource, focused on divestment from nuclear weapons manufacturers, which in general are also the largest weapons makers overall, is Don’t Bank on the Bomb.
Divestment is an important long term strategy, and a strong moral statement. However, Congress can act now, and must.
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Kevin Martin, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is President of Peace ActionEducation Fund, the country’s largest grassroots peace and disarmament organization with more than 200,000 supporters nationwide.
