The “Criminal Mind” When It Comes to Income Tax Fraud, Political Crimes and Voting

Meshing headlines about tax fraud and influencing elections

Let’s talk about the kind of frightfully improper influence and interference with our political system and process the criminally minded might be inclined to wield, that we may need to fend off, including actions by those lawbreakers willing to commit tax fraud.  A warning however: This discussion is ultimately headed toward what you may find to be an unlikely turn.

First, we are forever bedeviled by Trump headlines in an increasingly Trump-centric media universe?  Let’s just surrender to the trend and general convention these days by starting with one . . .

There’s a new set of headlines burbling recent days, including in the New York Times, about Mr. Trump and his family being engaged in tax fraud.  The New York State Attorney General is suing Trump’s “charity,” essentially Trump himself together with family members involved, for, as we said, tax fraud.  Mixed into the stew of asserted misuses and self dealing to benefit Trump (using the charity to “settle legal claims against” Trump’s “various businesses, even spending $10,000 on a portrait of Mr. Trump that was hung at one of his golf clubs”) is the abuse of the charity to politically benefit Trump, to “curry political favor” giving control over the charity funds it raised to senior Trump campaign staff, who decided how to use them.  Among other things there was a disguised illegal campaign contribution to Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi.  Not mentioned by the Times in its article is that this was at the same time that Bondi’s office, like the New State Attorney General, was to consider investigating Trump’s sham university.

According to the Times:

The petition notes that Mr. Trump himself signed annual I.R.S. filings, under penalty of perjury, in which he attested that the foundation did not engage in political activity. “This statutory prohibition is absolute.”

The Times accompanied the story reporting the facts with an editorial run the same day drubbing Trump’s so-called charity with its “gifts to himself” calling it “just another of his grifts” and saying that from its pretenses of being “in the public interest” the charity is not “remotely what it purports to be.”

The main Times article includes, with an insert in its web version, an opportunity to read the lawsuit itself, but, as harshly as the Times express its sentiments about Trump grifting, it does not pick up the fraud language itself in those formally stated charges, that the Trump charity has conducted itself in a “persistently fraudulent and illegal manner.”  MSNBC did pick that up however, spicing up its coverage with a worthwhile interview with Trump biographer David Cay Johnston:  New York A.G. files fraud lawsuit against Trump family, foundation.

Johnston remarks that Trump has had two previous income tax fraud trials.

Headlines this last March reported that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner was engaged in illegal activities in his real estate business, regularly falsifying filings for work permits by declaring “that the company had no rent-regulated tenants in the buildings, when in fact they had hundreds.”  This allowed Kushner to gentrify the buildings more quickly and likely subjected tenants to harassment as they tried to live with quiet enjoyment of their premises amidst construction work.  At the time, a lawyer friend of mine (actually a Trump-loathing Democrat) who does a great deal of work for another major developer in New York worried about possible unfairness if Trump’s son-in-law were to be selectively prosecuted for activities engaged that are actually part of a pattern widespread abuse across the city by many, many people in the real estate industry. 

Indeed, amongst the powerful, Trump is surely brazen and perhaps sometimes more extreme, but he does many of the same things that other powerful and wealthy people do that should be stopped when they do them too.  If you have read Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right” you know that the Koch brothers and those in their club of billionaires exerting heavy influence on our national politics using charitable organizations to do so whenever they can.  In New York City where Trump hails from, charities are heavily intertwined with politics and were used by Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who has hoped to be a Republican nominee for president) to secure a third term as Mayor.  Forest City Ratner, a real estate developer, created New York charities for the purpose of developing its Atlantic Yards project and then used one of its charities to run a candidate (Ms. Delia Hunley-Adossa) against the local city council member opposing the project.

The point is that far too many of the wealthiest and most powerful do engage in such abuses.  In fact, they probably often also do cross the line where there should be prosecution and consequences.  Still, how often do we ever see them suffering such consequences?
   
As for such prevalence of abuse, try this for another taste, a very likely tax fraud by Trump where  “the available evidence suggests” that Donald Trump illegally sidestepped paying gift tax by “selling” two Manhattan condominiums to his son at what was apparently barely half their true value in order to masquerade a gift as a business transaction.  According to the Washington Post article reporting it, the “fraudulent failure to file” a gift tax return by Trump if it involves any “overt act of evasion” would make this a serious felony on his part normally entailing the possibility of serious fines and prison.  See: This Trump real estate deal looks awfully like criminal tax fraud, - Two tax lawyers break down the president’s sale of two condos to his son.  By David Herzig and Bridget Crawford August 4, 2017.

Most people reading this probably already have a pretty good grasp that there is much to be troubled by of this nature going on in the world.  But I am headed with somewhere different from what you expect.  I think it is terrible when the wealthy shamelessly cheat on their income taxes.  And it is awful when they change the laws to legalize what should be illegal cheating.  Worse still is the unequal political power and influence wielded by the wealthy by virtue of their retained and accumulated wealth. The so-called charities for which the wealthy take self-serving deductions although they are not true charities are abominable.

Part of what needs to be done is to cut the wealthy down to political size and strip them of some of this out-sized power. . . .  In fact, one of the things that the New York State State Attorney General lawsuit seeks as a remedy in its Trump Foundation tax fraud lawsuit is a court declaration that Mr. Trump’s three eldest children be banned from the boards of nonprofits based or operating in New York or operate in New York.

Nevertheless, in the unlikely case that Donald Trump or any of his minions are convicted of felonies and jailed for such abuses, including as the case may be, unfairly influencing the political system for their own benefit, there is one thing that I would not want to take away from them: Their right to vote.  While I may worry and be concerned about the disproportionate influence their wealth has in the political system,  I am not afraid of their right to express themselves politically by exercising their right to vote as individual citizens. . . . That is something that I would never take away from them, no matter how much their bad actions have connected them to abuse of the political system.   

The idea that Trump might be convicted of a felony may seem like an academic question to muse about, fanciful given that Trump has expressed a willingness to pardon himself for federal crimes, and given that he may actually be able to do so because he is president.  On the other hand, Trump’s violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause (just another aspect of his self-serving, cheating-the-public brazenness) are surely, among other things, grounds for impeachment and removal from office if ever there is ever a congress willing to do so. At that point he wouldn’t be president with pardon power.  Also, his pardon power does not extend to state and local crimes.

All such speculation notwithstanding, this discussion is not really intended to be about Trump himself.  It has been perspicaciously observed that (sorry Bobby De Niro), `Trump negativity,’ facile and in isolation, does not, amount to any kind of coherent world view.  So rather than have this particular discussion be about Trump, it was intended only that Trump provide an easy to identify stand-in reference for what is going on more broadly in our culture and how extreme and flagrant it’s gotten.

With the forgoing as the juxtapatory context it was meant to provide, now let’s move on to what was meant to the key point of this little disquisition in most in need of attention. . . .

. . .  It also concerns someone charged with tax fraud.  It also involves efforts to proscribe as out-of-bounds and illegal that same someone’s attempted participatory influencing of the political system. . .  That effort at political influence is being severely punished.

Here’s how it was reported in the day’s headlines for Democracy Now (emphasis and bracketed insertion are mine):   

In Texas, a black woman sentenced to five years in prison for voter fraud has lost her bid for a new trial. Crystal Mason was convicted of illegal voting in March, after she cast a provisional ballot [A provisional ballot is used to record a vote when there are questions about a given voter's eligibility, and so that whether a provisional ballot is counted is contingent upon the planned verification of the voter's eligibility] in the 2016 presidential election despite having a past felony conviction for tax fraud that prevented her from voting. Mason says she did not know that she wasn’t allowed to vote in Texas due to her criminal record. According to a 2016 report by The Sentencing Project, policies restricting the voting rights of convicted felons disenfranchise more than 6 million people. Crystal Mason’s supporters are demanding charges be dropped, arguing that her conviction was racially biased. This follows a voter fraud conviction in Iowa, where Terri Lynn Rote—a white woman—was convicted of the same crime, after she tried to vote for President Trump twice. Rote was sentenced to two years’ probation and fined $750.

(According to what I have been reading and researching, this article that you are reading will Google higher if I include a link to the New York Times version of the story rather than only giving you the Democracy Now link that Google’s algorithm ranks lower.)

Whatever may happen to the likes of Trump, the Koch brothers, or those of their ilk who have good lawyers and connections if they ever get charged for income tax fraud in the first place, Crystal Mason, convicted of tax fraud, served three years in prison and was still serving out the rest of an even longer sentence on probation when “at the behest of her mother, she went to her local church to vote in the 2016 presidential election.”  Now she is being sent to prison for five more years for wanting to vote.

Within the Democracy Now headline telling of the story the far less serious consequence (in effect just a $750 fine) for the white woman consciously doing a far more execrable thing by voting twice for Trump makes this obviously a racial justice issue.  But with nationwide mass incarceration with arrests, prosecutions and convictions all disproportionately targeting and penalizing people of color across the board for the same or similar crimes, the entire criminal justice system is one giant racial justice issue.  And if race is inherently also politics, which it is, then it is also important to understand this population from a political prisoner standpoint.  That makes it all the more nefarious that these people who have been convicted should be deprived of their votes, and also thus voting power of people of color diminished overall. . . 

 . . . The flip side, of course (see the Ava DuVernay Documentary 13th), is to understand the political thirst of many to take these voting rights away: Arguably, without disenfranchisement of convicted felons, Florida would always be a blue state in national presidential elections.

It needn't be this way.  Allowing prisoners and convicted felons to vote could easily be the rule: Maine and Vermont permit prisoners to vote, and that’s the general rule followed by most countries in the world.  In Europe most countries respect the European Court of Human Rights ruling that automatic disenfranchisements resulting from convictions are against human rights, that a presumption of universal suffrage should obtain unless the government can specifically rebut it.  The United States is an outlier in placing the most voting restrictions on those convicted of crimes.

The logic is very thin for saying that loss of voting rights should be an automatic consequence of felony crime convictions.  The basic argument is usually: “If you aren't willing to follow the law, you can't claim the right to make the law for everyone else.”  That sort of side-steps the big-picture parallel that in a system that’s ever more rigged, when the privileged elite of our country “aren't willing to follow the law,” they do change the law with dismaying consequences “for everyone else.”

Conversely, those who do not see this as a basis to strip voting right point out the lack or proportion or relationship:

The argument rests on collapsing “the law” into a single entity: Because I violated a law, I am no longer allowed to affect any law, even if the law I violated was relatively trivial and the law I’d like to oppose is, say, a repeal of the First Amendment.

And what about unjust laws, laws that so arguably ought to be broken as a matter of conscience by whistle-blowers like Pvt. Manning or Edward Snowden, those who protested the Trump inauguration, or laws that are civilly disobeyed as Martin Luther King, Jr. suggested because they were in need of the repeal that only the visibility of civil disobedience would bring.  And how many of us have follow all laws strictly every day of our lives never erring?

That then is the juxtaposition offered. .   Tax fraud?  Criminally convicted?  Wanting to do something frightful to influence elections? . .  I am very afraid when Trump, the Kochs and the rest of their club manipulate our electoral systems, including when that manipulation extends to such things as income tax fraud concerning foundations and charities deployed for such purposes, but I would never seek to deprive them of their right to vote as individuals if they ever get convicted for such exploits. And I don’t fear their votes!  Conversely, Crystal Mason’s persecution for “voting while Black” will likely send a discouraging message to other potential voters of color and is part of an overall pattern of racially discriminatory voter suppression. . .  Why is that being allowed to happen?: Because the individual vote of Crystal Mason and the 6 million other United States citizens who might rise and vote along with her if duly re-enfranchised are feared by those in power seeking to prevent our elections from more democratic outcomes. 

The Good News Is That There Are Books You Can Delve Into To Reflect Upon Life In Fascist Dystopias. The Bad News Is Whether What Your Choice To Do So Says About You Gets Communicated To . . . And Could You Consequently Lose Essential Freedoms?

Donald Trump's assumption of the presidency has everyone reading about life in dystopias.  His meeting with vote-suppressing meister Kris Kobach. . . Would you like to read about real life?

G-Damn!  Three featured New York Times articles in on virtually the same subject in just three days. .  What books Americans are reading! . . .

. . .  It must be pretty important!

And it is!  It is important to know that Americans are reading!  And what the multiple Times articles all tell us is about the incredible surge of Americans now choosing to read novels about fascist dystopias.

Three NY Times Articles About The Sudden Popularity of Books About Fascist Dystopies Tell Us  . . .

Below are the Times articles with some extracts.  Please not that I have bolded to supply, in one small respect, some emphasis.  (Enjoy the overall repetitiveness of these articles overall.) 

•    Uneasy About the Future, Readers Turn to Dystopian Classics, by Alexandra Alter, January 27, 2017

"The Handmaid's Tale" is among several classic dystopian novels that seem to be resonating with readers at a moment of heightened anxiety about the state of American democracy. Sales have also risen drastically for George Orwell's "Animal Farm" and "1984," which shot to the top of Amazon's best-seller list this week.

Other novels that today's readers may not have picked up since high school but have landed on the list this week are Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel, "Brave New World," a futuristic dystopian story set in England in 2540; and Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a satire about a bellicose presidential candidate who runs on a populist platform in the United States but turns out to be a fascist demagogue. On Friday, "It Can't Happen Here" was No. 9 on Amazon; "Brave New World" was No. 15.

The sudden boom in popularity for classic dystopian novels, which began to pick up just after the election, seems to reflect an organic response from readers who are wary of the authoritarian overtones of some of Mr. Trump's rhetoric.

* * * *

. . .  Since the inauguration, sales of the novel ["1984"] have risen 9,500 percent, according to Craig Burke, the publicity director for Signet Classics, a paperback imprint at Penguin. . .

* * *

"It's a frame of reference that people can reach for in response to government deception, propaganda, the misuse of language, and those are things that occur all the time," said Alex Woloch, an English professor at Stanford University who has written about the roots of Orwell's political language. "There are certain things this administration is doing that has set off these alarm bells, and people are hungry for frames of reference to understand this new reality."

•    Why `1984' Is a 2017 Must-Read, by Michiko Kakutani, January 26, 2017

The dystopia described in George Orwell's nearly 70-year-old novel "1984" suddenly feels all too familiar. A world in which Big Brother (or maybe the National Security Agency) is always listening in, and high-tech devices can eavesdrop in people's homes. (Hey, Alexa, what's up?) A world of endless war, where fear and hate are drummed up against foreigners, and movies show boatloads of refugees dying at sea. A world in which the government insists that reality is not "something objective, external, existing in its own right" - but rather, "whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth."

"1984" shot to No. 1 on Amazon's best-seller list this week, after Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to President Trump, described demonstrable falsehoods told by the White House press secretary Sean Spicer - regarding the size of inaugural crowds - as "alternative facts." It was a phrase chillingly reminiscent, for many readers, of the Ministry of Truth's efforts in "1984" at "reality control."

* * *f

Not surprisingly, "1984" has found a nervous readership in today's "post-truth" era. It's an era in which misinformation and fake news have proliferated on the web . .   sow doubts about the democratic process.

•    George Orwell's `1984' Is Suddenly a Best-Seller, by Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, January 25, 2017

George Orwell's classic book "1984," about a dystopian future where critical thought is suppressed under a totalitarian regime, has seen a surge in sales this month, rising to the top of the Amazon best-seller list in the United States and leading its publisher to have tens of thousands of new copies printed.

* * * *

Prof. Stefan Collini, a professor of intellectual history and an expert on Orwell at the University of Cambridge, said that readers see a natural parallel between the book and the way Mr. Trump and his staff have distorted facts.

* * * *

“That kind of unreality that is propagated as reality is what people feel reminded of, and that’s why they keep coming back.”

It’s great that there are books, recognized classics, that you can delve into to think more deeply about the thought control, lack of freedom, lack of democracy, and lack, even lack of reality, that is possible in fascist dystopias.  Reading such books you may even find tools to deal with such dsytopias and to stave them off. . .

The Bad News: What Reading These Books Tells. . .

But there is a flip side.  Have you thought about the bad news, about how reading those very same books could actually cause you to loose your political freedoms and political rights?  Have you thought that it might deprive you of your right to elect the president?  Deprive you of your right to elect any of the government officials who are supposed to represent you?

Consider this: Your choice when you read these books will say things about you (just as those articles in the Times wanted to make that exact point) and think about who that will be communicated to.

Certainly you have noticed that when you shop for something online everyone seems to know exactly what you have been shopping for?  You shop for underwear, a new refrigerator, a certain kind of electronic equipment, or even a medicine, and all of a sudden the advertisements and a emails are following you around suggesting to you and reminding you about how, where and when to buy that underwear, that new refrigerator, that electronic equipment, and the medicine you were interested in.. .

  . . Since I have been researching this article Hulu is following me around with an ad telling me to watch `The Handmaid's Tale.' 

Amazon Says. . .

The little bit of emphasis I provided with my bolded text above called attention to how the purchase of these dystopia books involved, in all the instances being cited, sales that were being kept track of by Amazon, which despite having opened its very first brick and mortar store recently, does almost all of its selling through the internet.  Amazon is also a huge monopoly, increasingly vertical in multiple respects, able to use the data it collects to undercut its own sellers, which, because it should therefore be subject to anti-trust actions, puts it in a significant and inextricable relationship with the federal government.  What kind of relationship exactly does Amazon have with the federal government?: Well, for one thing, it’s head, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post, which has a powerful lot to say about the stature of all the government officials who regulate Amazon.

Amazon says: “Customers Who Bought [Orwell’s `1984'] Also Bought-  `Brave New World' by
Aldous Huxley,  `Animal farm: A Fairy Story,' by George Orwell, `It Can't Happen Here,' by Sinclair Lewis.”

Amazon says: “Customers Who Bought [Sinclair Lewis’ `It Can't Happen Here'] Also Bought-  `1984,' by George Orwell,  `Brave New World,' by Aldous Huxley, `The Origins of Totalitarianism,' by Hannah Arendt, `The Handmaid's Tale,' by Margaret Atwood, `The Plot Against America,' by Philip Roth.”

AND customers Who Bought Orwell’s “1984" and Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can't Happen Here” also voted for. . .

Running The Electorate Through A PRIZM That Divides Into A Spectrum. . .

What begins with commercial marketing soon migrates to the political realm.

In his recently published “The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble To Get Inside Our Heads,” author Tim Wu writes about the revolution in advertising that occurred in the 1970s with the advent of PRIZM* (Potential Ratings in ZIP Markets).  It was a way to profile Americans for targeted advertising that, computers doing the sorting, used public census data about the U.S. population spread throughout the nation’s newly created ZIP codes to go beyond the simplest categorizations (“young or old,” “male of female,” “black or white,” “Northerners vs. Southerners”) and subdivide and geographically locate forty characteristically distinctive identified “clusters” or “subnations,” not one United States, “all calling the same continent home.”

(* Not to be confused, despite the ominous similarity of name or potential similarities, with the National Security Agency PRISM surveillance program that whistleblower Edward Snowden made famous that collects data from at least nine major U.S. companies, including,Google, Microsoft, Apple, Skype, YouTube, AOL and Yahoo.)

Wu explains that PRIZM could be used so precisely for marketing maneuvers that in 1982 the Coca-Cola company was able to introduce Diet Coke, its new diet cola, without cannibalizing the sales of TaB, the diet cola it already had on the market.  It did so by avoiding, “advertising Diet Coke in Tab clusters, and even began mailing TaB drinkers coupons for their preferred cola, so as to neutralize any collateral damage.”  In this regard, Wu tartly observes:

It was entirely in keeping with the ultimate claim of PRIZM that you could say different things to different people and win them all.  And it goes a long way toward explaining the system’s later importance in politics.

Tim Wu's book: "it goes a long way toward explaining the system’s later importance in politics."

From "Microtargetting" to "Nanotargeting"

With computers and the data we now collect about people, political marketing and targeting of potential voters has gone a long way beyond PRISM.  On a segment of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” broadcast in July, well before the presidential election, Barry Bennett, a former adviser to the Trump campaign and the former campaign manager for Ben Carson, explained to NPR host Robert Siegel the phenomenal precision with which the electorate can be sliced and diced for political action, selective communications, get out the vote operations, etc:

SIEGEL: What about other aspects of, you know, what had been modern political campaigning - microtargeting specific groups, a get-out-the-vote operation, having staff out there? You think it's all going to be proven to be obsolescent in this cycle?

BENNETT: No. No, I think that, you know, what we used to call microtargeting - I guess what we have now must be nanotargeting because we've gotten so much better at it. And we now have personality scores on the voter file. I - not only can I tell if you love or hate guns, but I can tell you what emotional response I can elicit from different kinds of messages.

SIEGEL: This is all to decide whether I'm worth working on to get me to the polls...

BENNETT: Yes.

SIEGEL: ...Or calling up again.

BENNETT: Whether I want you to vote - go vote or whether I think you're a lost cause. So - I mean, all that has really, really progressed. But I can now target you through Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or even Snapchat because we know a lot more about you. I mean, we used to be very proud that we had, like, 50 sets of data points on you. Now we have 8,000, 9,000, 10,000. And, you know, we can go through every tweet you've ever made and append that to the voter file.

(See: Former Trump Adviser Gives Closer Look At A Non-Traditional Campaign, July 11, 2016.)

It’s frightening enough that U.S. voters can be selectively misled with nano-tailored lies and misrepresentations.  Its frightening too that these lies can be efficiently injected into your little bubble of consciousness through Facebook which acknowledged that during the last leg of the it changed its algorithm to allow more false news favorable to Trump, frightening that there were armies of Twitter bots, a superior one in Trump’s case, to target you for such communications.

Banishing Unwanted Voters

That’s frightening enough, but what’s more frightening is that after a campaign has communicated with you through all the various means at their disposal, and once they have decided it’s not “worth working on” on you to get you “to the polls,” that it’s not worth “calling up again,” and when the decision they have made about whether they “want you to vote” is that they don’t want you to vote. . . . Well, you need to understand that means are being undertaken to ensure that voters, in fact, don’t vote, or that, if you do vote, your vote is not counted.

There are all sorts of ways to neutralize the voters whose votes are not wanted.  Some of the nasty old traditional ones involve deceptive practices like distributing in a neighborhood where you don’t want people to vote, flyers with the wrong date for an election (maybe only in Spanish), or incorrectly informing people like students that they can’t vote.  It can involve insanely long lines to votes in those neighborhoods where voters are to be stymied while there are short lines in neighborhoods where voting is encouraged.  Voters can be suppressed through voter ID laws that become even more effective at discriminating between who can and can’t vote if motor vehicle registration/drivers license/ID offices are shut down in poor and ethnic neighborhoods and if you allow gun licenses to serve as voter ID.

The neutralization of votes can also sometimes show up in the exit polls.  It's because so many of the ways to neutralize votes involve not counting the votes of people who, overcoming other obstacles, believe they actually they succeeded in voting, and whose votes should have been counted, that investigative reporter Greg Palast who specializes in these issues (with many others agreeing with him) thinks that Donald Trump, who lost the popular vote by about 3 million, also did not actually win the electoral vote.  And that, according to a PBS Frontline documentary, is apparently what Trump’s own campaign experts and the nation’s top Republicans believed too.

What spoils things so that the cast votes of voters don’t get counted?: Voting machines so broken or deficient that they are incapable of counting votes is one maneuver.  Such machines get deployed in the particular neighborhoods where votes are to be squelched.  Trump ostensibly won the state of Michigan by just 10,704 counted votes, but Palast calculates that there were more than 75,000 votes in Michigan that went uncounted mostly in “historically Democratic” Detroit and Flint, Michigan, majority-black cities.

Palast in his research, investigation and reporting also focuses in on the voter purges using a Republican-launched company called Crosscheck of thousands, entering the stratosphere of six digit territory,* that converts into uncounted provisional ballots the votes targeted for elimination of voters with Black, Hispanic, Asian and Muslim names.  These eliminations are pretexted on claims the eliminated names, across many different states with Republican governments, are similar enough to suspect either double registration and voting, or voting by convicted felons.**  Palast’s review of the documents and interviews of the perpetrators of these schemes (watchable in his film “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy”) demonstrate the pretexts to be farcical.  As intensely as Republicans loudly crying wolf have searched they have found virtually no evidence of voter fraud (which is punishable by a significant federal sentence of five years in prison.). . .virtually no evidence.

. . . As of now, Trump is fielding new pretexts for purging: suspected non-citizenship, or unacceptable Muslim beliefs.

(* 449,922 voters purged in Michigan, 589,393 purged in North Carolina, 270,824 purged in Arizona.)

(** With an unprecedented level of mass incarcerations, discriminatory in nature the rules against those convicted of felonies voting is a significant disenfranchisement of black voters in itself.)

And finally, as voting forensic expert Jonathan Simon has been covering for fifteen years there is the question of unverifiable voting machines, such as in Pennsylvania that can be hacked and all too likely have been.

Trump Team And Exit Polls Agree In Concluding Trump Did Not Win The Election 

All of this adds up to a huge difference between the counted votes and the probably now more accurate exit polls, which is why those agreeing with Mr. Palast think Trump didn’t actually win the election and why even Trump’s own experts apparently agreed.

The Frontline documentary, “Trump Road To The White House,” is flawed in ways that I someday must write about, but its beginning quoting experts from the Trump team is telling:

    NARRATOR
On Election Day, Donald Trump and his senior campaign team were huddled at Trump Tower.
    KATY TUR, NBC News
They went into election night believing that they were going to lose.
    NEWS REPORTER
As the polls close across the country.
    NARRATOR
AT 5 o'clock they received the first exit polls.
    NEWS REPORTER
We're counting down to the first poll closings right now.
    DAVID BOSSIE, Trump campaign adviser
 When we got those early returns, the exit polls, and I actually got it about 5:01, we all had a little bit of a gut punch.
    NEWS REPORTER
If Trump wants to win, he's got to hold onto Florida and North Carolina.
    FRANK LUNTZ
In state after state he was so far behind that I knew that he was going to lose, because the exit polls don't get it wrong.
    TONY FABRIZIO, Trump campaign pollster
We were getting crushed in like Michigan, Pennsylvania. I mean just- and so, from like 6 o'clock on, you know, we're all like, "Oh my god."
    NEWS REPORTER
And look at all these wins we're projecting for Hillary Clinton right now. Take a look at the electoral map now Hillary Clinton is taking the lead.
    NARRATOR
It seemed to confirm what the media and political establishment had been saying for months.
    NEWS REPORTER
Hillary Clinton has a lead in North Carolina.
    NARRATOR
Donald Trump never had a chance.
    NEWS REPORTER
And the Clinton campaign is increasingly confident about.
    FRANK LUNTZ, Republican pollster
Every senior Republican that I talked to, with only one exception, thought that Trump was going to lose.
    NARRATOR
But as the votes were counted in Florida, a surprise.

Yes that’s Republican pollster, Frank Luntz saying: “In state after state he was so far behind that I knew that he was going to lose, because the exit polls don't get it wrong.”

Myths of "Divided Half" of Nation Supporting Trump And That "The Russians Did It"

Along with Times reporting on popularity of dystopian classics, an image of the D.C. Womens March, over one million strong

Nevertheless, Donald Trump was proclaimed the victor in the election.  What, the Tea Party suddenly grew in size and took over the nation?  How so?  Even with the Kochs footing the bills, the Tea Party's biggest ever muster was maybe 70,000.  In contrast, we recently saw millions pouring out across the country, and in Washington D.C. (not to mention the rest of the world), in profound and urgent dissatisfaction with Trump.  The Women's March. The D.C. March alone was almost certainly over one million marchers.

Six of the demonstration cities, clockwise from upper left: Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Denver, Boston, New York City, Austin

Six more of the demonstration cities, clockwise from upper left:Montpelier, San Jose, Asheville ,St. Paul, Indianapolis, San Diago

We have been offered new mythologies to explain the incongruous election result: i.e. that the country has grown exceedingly divided with a huge rise of White nationalism (even as Obama’s, our black president’s, outgoing approval ratings is 58%, the highest favorability rating of any president in 24 years, while Trump’s incoming ratings are the lowest, reported as low as 32%.), or that the Russians “hacked” the election.  Either of these perhaps both absurd excuses for how Trump got pronounced winner of this election is a distraction from the main issue.*

(* Ironically, one of the Times articles quoted above about how `literarily' Orwellian our current plight is, while citing the issue of "fake news," cites as settled truth the Russian interference in our presidential election, which largely unsubstantiated reports may itself involve an unhealthy dose of fake news- emphasis supplied: Not surprisingly, "1984" has found a nervous readership in today's "post-truth" era. It's an era in which misinformation and fake news have proliferated on the web; Russia is flooding the West with propaganda to affect elections and sow doubts about the democratic process.)

Trump Telegraphs More Voter Disenfranchisement To Accompany Increasing Voter Dissatisfaction

It’s increasingly obvious that Donald Trump’s vociferous claims that the popular vote was stolen from him are motivated with the goal of obscuring the reverse: The electoral vote was stolen.

In this regard, even the NY Times, in its tepid grey way, is now giving some notice to an essential thing it and the rest of the media have been regularly neglecting to keep front and center reporting about the election: That voter purges were one of the ways the electoral vote was stolen, and, with Trump’s cranky complaints about too many voters voting against him, the likely plan is to engage in a lot more of these disenfranchising voter purges.  Here from a Times editorial (emphasis supplied):

 Mr. Trump is telegraphing his administration's intent to provide cover for longstanding efforts by Republicans to suppress minority voters by purging voting rolls, imposing onerous identification requirements and curtailing early voting.

 "This is another attempt to undermine our democracy,” said Representative Barbara Lee of California. . .

    * * * *

Voter suppression initiatives have grown increasingly common since the Supreme Court invalidated a central provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, making it easier for local authorities to tweak election rules in a manner that disenfranchises particular groups of people.

Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department aggressively fought these efforts. Lawsuits filed by civil rights advocates and the Justice Department led a federal appeals court in 2013 to strike down a North Carolina voter ID law that justices concluded had been designed to target African-American voters with "surgical precision." Litigation in a similar Texas case is now on hold, pending guidance from the new attorney general.

See:  Editorial- The Voter Fraud Fantasy, by The Editorial Board, January 27, 2017

Despite the nod in this editorial, the Times, the paper of record, has done virtually no reporting about either Mr. Palast’s work (unless you roll back decades) or about Crosscheck coordinating Republicans to eliminate voters from the 30 controlled states.

Jim Crow Hatching Eggs

Two similarly themed cartoons by Brooklyn's Mark Hurwitt, both equally eloquent

It’s not just similar names of people who sound like they are likely minorities that these data bases used for purging are keeping track of; Palast in his film points out how the data bases also list whether voters are black or white.

The purging and other forms of voter suppression have been widely recognized as an extension of the old Jim Crow barriers to voting while black.  That’s reason enough why Palast calls Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State from Kansas who is one of those most principally responsible for the deployment of Crosscheck, “Mr. KKK.”  Kansas, (the third “K”) is the home state of the Koch Industries (the nation’s second largest private company with “Kansas and the Kochs being linked nearly inextricably”).

From Palast's: “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy”- Tracking Koch money through to Kobach.

In his film, Mr. Palast follows a money trail from the Koch brothers (Koch, Donor's Trust, Numbers USA, Farmers Branch Texas, Kris Kobach) to trace $100,000 through to Kobach.  He also traces the flow of Koch money through to the Heritage Foundation promoting Crosscheck and the pretextual bases for it.

In his film, Palast reviews a Heritage Foundation brochure, "Does Your Vote Count," toting the work of Crosscheck

Kobach has defended his ties with “The Social Contract Press (TSCP), a group classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a white nationalist publishing house.”

It is a short step, a micro-millimeter from “we don’t want you to vote because you are black, Asian, or Muslim,” to “we don’t want you to vote because you think that people who are black, Asian, or Muslim should have their votes counted.”  And none of this is far away from “anyone who disagrees with us should have no say in running the government.”

Gerrymandering To Neutralize Your Vote based On What You Read

Before we move on, there is another way in which the votes of undesirable voters can be naturalized: Gerrymandering.  Because of gerrymandering, the composition of the House of Representatives does not mirror the electorate. In 2012, the Democrats got 1.4 million more votes (counted votes) than the Republicans for the House of Representatives and yet could not take control of the chamber. This puts the Democrats at a horrible disadvantage, something that is rarely mentioned and not clearly explained by papers like the New York Times.

Once again, everything the manipulators know about you from your ethnicity to the increasingly available micro variables indicative about how you think, like the magazine subscriptions you order for your reading, can be used in calculating whether they want to neutralize the effect of your vote. David Daley,  the publisher of the Connecticut Mirror, is the author of a new book on gerrymandering, titled “Rat-f**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy,” has explained what current technology means in the regard (emphasis supplied):

Gerrymandering, over the years, has certainly been a bipartisan game. Both sides have done it for a long, long time. However, the difference here really is the technology. What you have right now is a program called Maptitude. It is a - an extremely powerful program. It comes preloaded with all of the census data, with all of the demographics and ethnicity and economic data you could possibly imagine. Then you can add on to that all of the public record data sets, voting records. You can add on to it a cloud's worth of consumer preferences, of magazine subscriptions, of ZIP Code data. This wasn't the case in 2000, it wasn't the case in 1990. It certainly wasn't the case in 1810. A partisan mapmaker right now has so much information in front of them that they can draw lines that are essentially unbeatable for a decade.

See: On The Media- How the Election Is Actually Rigged, Oct 21, 2016.

If they know enough about you and your neighbors to peg you as undesirable voters, then about the only way you won’t suffer the neutralizing effects of gerrymander is if you live in a community that is just too homogeneously interlinked for them to draw the lines they way they would like.

This gets us back to those people reading books about dystopian fascism.  Haven’t those book readers now self-identified themselves, at least to Amazon, as part of a national subset who would, in certain eyes, constitute undesirable voters?   People, who for instance might be likely to “think that people who are black, Asian, or Muslim should have their votes counted.” . .

. . . And, if you have gotten at least this far reading this article, you probably do “think that people who are black, Asian, or Muslim should have their votes counted.”   Thus your reading of this article probably also identifies you to certain people as someone undesirable to vote- (Sorry. Too bad you looked!)

How Fascist Governments Look Askance At The Readers of Books

The reading of books has always had a touchy relationship with totalitarian regimes.  In this day and age the ability simply to monitor what books are being read is probably an initial first stage satisfactory in and of itself especially when coupled with the ability to regulate voting.  But in countries like Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Pinocette’s Chilean dictatorship (supported by the Unites States), books that had content that was perceived to be threatening were banned and burned.  Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451" dystopia conceptualized a government that banned all books as being too intrinsically likely to the stimulation of individualist thought.

All communications, not just books, are important to authoritarian governments because the government wants to control the messages.  In “Fahrenheit 451" the populace, not reading books, pays constant attention to large viewing screens taking up entire walls displaying government promoted broadcast media.  Most of our media broadcast on the public airwaves, skimpy on real news (like the minimal reporting about Crosscheck by the Times) come to us via a few corporate conglomerates with plenty of government interrelationships.  The corporate mainstream media was certainly complicit every step of the way into getting to the final declaration that Trump had somehow won the presidency.

The latest update about doing away with net neutrality and other FCC rules to protect the public?

Trump and comrades moved first day to rewrite and eliminate information from government websites, including the eradication of available information about global warning and climate change.  The information flowing through to us is likely to become much more constrained if the predicted move to dispense with net neutrality under the Trump administration succeeds.  In that case, the flow of information from the corporate conglomerates is apt to be prioritized above all else.

And here is another thing to think about when it comes to our modern day computer existence where our parallel virtual selves exist electronically in the new social media agora where bouncing electrons supplant physical contact: It's not just your vote that can be squelched, it's you voice that can be squelched too.  With surveillance and social media interaction the government has the tools to tamp down and see to it that the message does not get through from those who are influencers and who might cause others to vote a way they would not like.

Surveillance And Libraries

Indicative of how important what people may be reading in books is, in 2006, it was revealed that there had been a longstanding fight secretly going on since the initiation of the PATRIOT Act with the government wanting to surveil libraries and librarians resisting.  The fight was secret because the librarians were subject to a gag order not to reveal what the government was seeking to do.  Librarians were the first to ever win a fight against the PATRIOT Act, protecting the libraries as zones of privacy.

Perhaps, you’d like to repair to your local public library if you want to read novels and other books about fascist dystopias, especially if you think that Amazon, with nothing to stop it, would be too likely to pass your information on to the government?  The problem is that the fight about surveillance of reading in the libraries has continued.  Further, the introduction of digital books (Amazon is the unquestionable leader in that field) and computer interfaces for accessing books, which may be increasingly kept off site, results in a more recent sort of de facto end run around the victory for privacy it was announced that librarians had won in 2006.  Point of disclosure: I am co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries and have testified on this exact subject before the New York City Council (video also available).

Beyond surveillance, digital books and their content also have a creepy impermanence: The content of digital books (like material on the web) can be altered even as your read them and, as famously happened with Amazon's deletion of George Orwell's "1984" from the tablets of people Amazon had sold them to.

The Role Surveillance Plays In Authoritarian Societies

On Thursday, February 2nd Amy Goodman on Democracy Now asked journalist and author Andrea Pitzer to “describe the role mass surveillance plays in authoritarian societies.”  (Pitzer, who writes about “lost and forgotten history,” is the author of the soon to be out “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,” i.e. those of the Holocaust, in the Philippines, Southern Africa, the Soviet Gulag, detention camps in China and North Korea, Guantanamo.)

Responded Pitzer:

Well, over time, we've seen that it's very hard to have an authoritarian or a totalitarian society, a state that runs, without a secret police. And you can't-what you need the secret police for is to gather information secretly. The surveillance techniques and abilities that we have today are really unparalleled in history. And while we can't yet be sure what the Trump administration's motives are, what they have at their disposal is far greater than what was had in Soviet Russia, in Nazi Germany. I'm thinking in particular of Himmler complaining that he had trouble keeping track of all the people he needed to, because he needed so many agents. But when you have the kind of technology that we do, you don't need as many people, if you have the right tools to use. And so, the ability to gather that kind of information and then potentially use it, domestically or on foreigners who happen to be here, I think is something that's worth paying attention to and to be concerned about.

The Unholy Amalgam of Surveillance, Profiling and Voter Suppression (And White Supremacy)

Now, with the ascendancy of the Trump administration to power, we see new thresholds apparently about to be crossed in terms of combining surveillance, profiling and voter suppression.  There has been widespread worry already about Trump's appointment of Steve Bannon, variously described by the new-fangeled euphemism of "alt-right," "white supremacist" and "Nazi," to the National Security Council while demoting and limiting the participation of the director of National Intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
 
At the same time the Washington Examiner reported that Trump was likely to appoint the vote-suppressing Kris Kobach with his white supremacist associations to a high position, possibly as secretary, the actual head of, Homeland Security, which engages in a substantial amount of surveillance.  He didn't get the position of secretary but is still up for a high position that could be at Homeland Security.  Kobach was previously at Homeland Security.  He was one of the people in place under Attorney General John Ashcroft ready to spring into action after 9/11 when his job, according to Esquire reporting about his voter suppression effort, was "weeding out foreign travelers in the wake of 9/11-and Kobach's program was so deeply involved in racial profiling that it was shut down."  And to be clear about pedigree, in the spring of 2001, prior to 9/11 Ashcroft was focusing programmatically on the suppression of theoretical double voting and felon "fraud."

Trump meeting with Kris Kobach, prospective appointee to Homeland Security.  Insert on left is close up of Kobach's photographed document with profiling, voter suppression plan.

In November Kobach met with Trump and the Daily Kos ran an article Be afraid, very afraid: Kobach plan as Secry of Homeland Security, by VaallBlue, November 21, 2016 warning that, "Kobach made no effort to hide what he proposed to Trump if he becomes the new head of the DHS.

Mr. Kobach met with president-elect Sunday, November 20th. Standing smilingly beside Trump Kobach held under his arm documents clearly visible and thus photographed that referred to plans about tracking and persecuting Muslims, building a wall and, apparently voter suppression with "a plan to issue regulations about voter rolls along with amending the National Voter Registration Act."  And "Kobach's plan refers to some use of the Patriot Act with some action taken to 'forestall future lawsuits.'"

A converging overlap of surveillance, profiling and voter suppression is deadly to democracy, particularly when those with an agenda are motivated toward the obvious extreme abuse it portends. It means that you can lose your vote when that can simply by reading about fascist dystopias. . .  It's not just that neutralization of your vote that can be effected by boxing you into a gerrymandered district based on what you read, as now is already obviously done.  Although you may be reading this here for the first time, current technology is such that your choice of reading material can target you for having your specific vote purged.  There is nothing to prevent Amazon from passing that information along (he/she read "1984" and "It Can't Happen Here") to a campaign.

And the powers of the government when it comes to such surveillance are even greater.  You can't even go to a library (where increasingly the administrators may want you to read your books more expensively, electronically on Amazon) without serious concerns that the government won't surveil you there too as you try to read these books in privacy.

In 2007 Kris Kobach bragged in an e-mail message sent to state Republicans in Kansas about the party's accomplishments that year, including that “To date, the Kansas GOP has identified and caged more voters in the last 11 months than the previous two years.”  In response to criticism, Christian Morgan, executive director of the Kansas Republican Party, asserted defensively that “caging voters” was “just a term of art,” explaining that `what the party has done is try to identify voters and their views on certain issues,’ “We cage that person's information,” he said.  Then when the election comes around, the GOP will . . .  

The wise axiom "just because a thing can be done, doesn't mean that it should be done" is a longstanding one.  Unfortunately, I am afraid it is an axiom not taken to heart by many of those engaged in the rough and tumble of politics for whom I think the operative concept is that `anything that can be done will be done.'

In Brooklyn, Green Party Holds Voting Justice Even With Palast and Stein

On left, Jabari Brisport Green party candidate for City Council 35th district, Jill Stein middle and Greg Palast on right.  From coverage by Cat April Watters at Hot Indie News.

I had a chance to meet Mr. Palast just recently.  The Green Party in Brooklyn set up a Voting Justice panel discussion of the uncounted votes that featured Mr. Palast and Green Party presidential candidate and vote-count-litigant-challenger Jill Stein (available via a now posted live Facebook stream -47,000 views the last time I looked).  It was the evening of Groundhog Day. Perhaps the Green Party set the discussion up on Groundhog Day for symbolic effect?: With the goal that we don't get into a loop of repeating events where this kind of injustice happens over and over again, self perpetuating and locked in?

From the video stream. Jill Stein at the event.

Mentioning the example of Mr. Kobach I asked the panel (about 1:27 in the video) about the threat of combining voter suppression, profiling and surveillance, all aligned in one package.

It was Jill Stein who replied (at 1:52:43):

Let's see, voting and surveillance: Yes absolutely the surveillance is really awful, problematic. There's all kinds of links between them. In the same way we have to democratize our vote, I think we have to put massive limits on surveillance. And it's not rocket science about how we do that. We really need to stand up and protect our right to privacy and the need for due process and for warrants. . . . We see Trump doing this so blatantly now, trying to just scare us all into thinking, you know we have to lock the Muslims out, and they try to justify it by talking about how scary it is.

Well, the bottom line is that we do not achieve security by building walls: We achieve security by establishing justice. If you want peace at home you need justice abroad. We need to push back this mythology that the only way to be secure is through surveillance. We don't achieve security through surveillance.

It was Benjamin Franklin, I think, who said: "Those who would sacrifice freedom for the sake of security will wind up losing them both."

And that's what's happening!: So we have to say no to both of those intrusions.

Where The Heck Are The Democrats On Protecting Us?

You may ask: `Where are the Democrats? Why isn't Hillary Clinton sounding the alarm? Why did Hillary Clinton jump in to challenge the vote counts only after Jill Stein and the Green Part were already doing so and readily raising millions in a matter of days to do so?'

Most of those attending the Jill Stein, Greg Palast event seemed to concur in a ready answer that agrees with my own: The Democrats are more than a little bit pregnant with vote purging that occurred on their home ground.  In Brooklyn, the borough of New York City where the Groundhog Day Voting Justice panel was held, more than 200,000 Brooklyn democratic voters were, under suspicious circumstances, purged from the voting roles almost certainly helping Hillary declare a triumph over Brooklyn-born Bernie Sanders. And with the Democratic National Committee actively working against Bernie sanders we saw in multiple states the same "red shift" in exit polls with Hillary Clinton (like Trump in the general election) incongruously getting a greater proportion of the votes than people said they cast for her.

Oh, and as for that "Russian hacking"?  Jill Stein said that night: "I 'haven't seen convincing evidence of of the Russian hacking. . . .  I was not looking for Russian hacking, but any hacking, or tampering and not limited to bad guys overseas."   I think that most of those in the room that night agreed that "Russian hacking," while an emotionally satisfying gambit to let Americans off the hook for Trump's so-called election, is just a distraction from the accountability than needs to be demanded of the people who really, in all likelihood, are responsible for stealing the election.

The Drumbeat To Delegitimize Trump And Why It’s Scary

Drumbeat headlines- Click to enlarge

First, before we proceed, let it be understood that nothing you are about to read here should be interpreted to mean that it was a good idea that Donald Trump should have been elected, nor endorse the idea that it's good that he should be taking office.  Further, what’s written here should not be interpreted to accede to the notion that we even know for sure that Trump actually won the election. . . .

. . .  Conversely, irrespective of whether Trump actually won the election, it's obvious that Hillary Clinton could have run a much stronger campaign in what should, after post mortem, have been an indisputably unlosable election for any Democrat running against Trump.  That's any Democrat, including Bernie Sanders who the polls always said would have done much better in a match against Trump.

That gotten out of the way, we note here that there is a drumbeat to delegitimize Trump as the president-elect and as the president if and when he probably takes office.  It is a surreal next act following a surreal election.  It is, for reasons we’ll discuss, scary. . . very scary.

How is Trump being delegitimized? Let’s count the ways:

    1.    The Popular Vote Gap.  At last count, Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump in the popular vote count by about 2.9 million votes (2,864,978) or 2.1%, “which means that Donald Trump will be the president who has lost the popular vote by the widest margin in history,” and “one of the lowest percentages of the popular vote since Republicans and Democrats have been competing in the two-party system.”   The mathematics of how that is possible sidle up to another issue, how peculiarly interesting it is that Trump won by the very slimmest of margins (against expectations) the electoral votes of certain states like Michigan where he won by a mere 10,704 votes.  Overall, a thin critically placed spread of just 80,000 total Trump votes over three states, put Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in Trump’s electoral column.

    2.     Highest Ever Negatives.  Gallup gives the president-elect such high negatives, a 55% unfavorable rating, it’s nigh on to double that of previous president-elects during what is typically a honeymoon period.  Just days before the election his unfavorability was even higher at 65%. And, “Even within his own party, Trump is the least popular president-elect in recent history.”

    3.    Conflicts of Interest as Constitutional Bar To Office.   Trump was still weeks away from office and people were already vigorously arguing that his conflicts of interest and the way he is expected to handle them (appointing family members in on his government dealings to oversee his continuing business operations and eschewing the use of a blind trust) will violate the Constitution’s emoluments clause.   Doubtless the problem is staggering in a probably insurmountable way, but what did people think they were ever going to do if multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg had ever been elected president?

    4.    Russian Hackers Come Out of the Woodwork.   Now that the election is over we are being told with screaming headlines, one per day, appearing on the front page of the New York Times (with other media following suit) that we know that Russian hackers worked behind the scenes, `a foreign power interfering with the integrity of our U.S. election’ (like we can’t screw with the integrity of our elections well enough on our own) to give the election victory to Trump.  And Trump undermines himself, not looking like a good American when, during the election, he actually urged the Russians to hack Clinton.  New York Times and other coverage has quickly analogized this to Watergate (and we all know what happened to Richard Nixon as a result of Watergate) and to Pearl Harbor or quasi-close cousin to a cypber`Pearl Harbor'  the Russians stand ready to deliver.  The last time we were hearing comparisons to “Pearl Harbor” was with 9/11 and to complete that loop there were already those (like Frank Rich) who had compared America and its feelings of vulnerability on 11/9 to 9/11.  The level of certitude on the part of the New York Times and its copious flow of column inches turning into pages with suddenly available facts is frightening since there are reasons to believe (damn if Trump isn’t right about some things) that we don’t really know what we can for certain know about this and that it's still quite possible that whatever hacking was done was by people that only wanted it to look like “Russians.”  It’s worth remembering that, long before we actually voted, there was a steady drumbeat of anti-Russian stories with which Hillary was aligning herself.

    5.    Shuck the Electoral College?  Two moves have recently been afoot to bypass the Electoral College.  One was the campaign for Electoral College electors to defect, “go rogue,” be faithless and not vote to install Trump in the presidency in recognition of whatever reason you want to cite (fill in the bank- Russian Hackers, etc) of the unprecedented unsuitability of Trump for office.  The other (driven to a new fervor no doubt by the declaration of a Trump’s victory so out-of-whack with the popular vote) is the call for ending the Electoral College because, as a New York Times editorial calling for its demise says: “By overwhelming majorities, Americans would prefer to elect the president by direct popular vote.”   The drumbeat message: If the Electoral College shouldn’t be our system then Donald Trump should be our president.

    6.    Trump Already Envisioned Out of Office, Impeached?  Whether or not Trump, in all fairness, won the election, Michael Moore was acclaimed immediately after-the-fact for his skill at prognosticating that Trump would be declared the winner, together with a set of reasons he identified why.  So people have been doubling back to Moore to hear him prognosticate something quite remarkable: He predicted (we now know wrongly) that the Electoral College would not vote to install Trump.  Although not exactly consistent, this resonates with another new Moore prediction that could cause similar excitement: That Trump won’t finish his term, either resigning or being impeached.  This is remarkably akin to Trump in the last days running up to the election envisioning, his supporters calling for, Hillary being impeached if/when elected.   By that token, with a sort of weirdly brilliant conversness Trump seems to be somewhat inoculated from such premature crystal-balling of his impeachment by pundits such as Bill Maher reacting to the Trump camp Hillary statements, lecturing that `presidents can only be impeached for what they do after they take office.’   Trump also has an insurance policy against his impeachment (one the media was late in covering): The fact that by the reckoning of most of Trump’s adversaries, Mike Pence, the vice-president who would replace Trump, is far worse that Trump (as well as the “antithesis of everything” Trump told his supporters he was about.)

    7.    Trump Wasn’t Actually Elected- Count the Votes.  Hillary wasn’t raising it (because she feared Trump vengefully “putting her in prison”?), but independent Green Party Candidate Jill Stein did, and when she did, Hillary signed on: The votes should be recounted- Who says that Trump won at all?  Just before Thanksgiving Jill Stein started raising money to finance recounts in states where suspect slivers of counted votes consequently assigned those states electoral votes to Trump’s column and in just a few weeks raised over $7.3 Million from an army of small donors to support the effort.

It doesn’t help the optics for the Trump presidency that Trump defenders and Republican state officials were fighting tooth and nail against the recounts in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, making it seem certain there’s something they’re desperate to hide, some fatal change that could come from a recount of the votes.   Trump won the state of Michigan by fewer than 11,000 counted votes, but more than 75,000 votes there went uncounted mostly in “historically Democratic” Detroit and Flint, Michigan, majority-black cities.  That is reportedly, in part, the result of “ballot-destroying” voting machines discriminatorily sent to those areas.  Because of bankruptcy Republican state officials have “direct control of the government’s spending in Flint and Detroit.”  And, “in Wisconsin, where, for example, there were many, many votes, thousands of votes, lost in the Milwaukee area, another African-American-heavy area.”  In the words of reporter Greg Palast describing the Republican rush to shut down the recounts: “Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, here in Michigan-we may be way north of the Mason-Dixon Line, but the elections are still run by Jim Crow.”  The vote in Florida, with a Trump lead of counted votes of 112,911 has also been questioned. Meanwhile, for fifteen years Jonathan Simon, an expert in voting forensics, has been raising issues about the unreliability of our modern voting machines, their hackability, who owns and controls them and the increasing “red shift” between exit polls and the results counted by these machines that point to significant problems.  Results in North Carolina thus come into question too.  Further, according to Simon, the same sort of “red shift” was evident in the Democratic primaries (but not the Republican primaries), indicating another possible election flaw: Trump should have been running against Bernie.  Ironically, Trump is again somewhat inoculated against charges of election fraud with that same sort of bizarre jujitsu conversness whereby Trump’s allegations before the election that the election would likely be rigged were loudly refuted by pundits all around the mainstream media refusing to consider that our election could lack integrity. Even now, the same people worrying vociferously about the “integrity” of our elections when it comes to “Russian hackers” eschew this more fundamental “homeland” issue.

    8.    The Election, With Significant Voter Suppression, Just Wasn’t Fair.  Politics is dirty and rough and tumble, but no matter which way you slice it, this election, the first since the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, exemplified significant voter suppression and just wasn’t fair.  That voter suppression may also, to an extent,  help explain some of the exit poll discrepancies.   There was, among other suppression measures, a multi-state coordinated Republican-managed voter purge using a company called Crosscheck:  449,922 voters purged in Michigan, 589,393 purged in North Carolina, 270,824 purged in Arizona, in each case many multiples of the Trump margin of victory.  Those voters improperly purged had to resort to voting by provisional ballots, but even if they did so, their votes were not counted if they were actually purged, improperly or not.  If you had a black or Latino name that was similar to the name of someone else in your or another state you might have been one of the voters purged.  It isn’t just money in politics; the list of ways the scales were unfairly tipped when it comes to access to the polls or a fair election is long, too long to dwell upon here.  (And, no, we are not going to get into Facebook's changing of its algorithm during the last leg of the election to allow false news favorable to Trump or Trump's superior army of Twitter bots or helped to be launched.)

    9.    Donald Trump’s Willful Delegitimizing of Himself.   Once upon a time in a presidential election (1928) what was promised was “a chicken in every pot.”  Now, what the nation sees with the appointments Donald Trump is making is “a fox in every henhouse,” thus engendering the sinking feeling that there “ain’t gonna be no hens in anybody’s pot if this keeps up.”  His appointments are provocatively in-your-face to the point that he virtually dares the country not to take him seriously, or to trust him at all.  Scott Pruitt, a self-described “leading advocate” against the Environmental Protection Agency's policies, to head that agency?  Rick Perry, who couldn’t remember the Department of Energy as one of the Federal Agencies he wanted to do eliminate, will now be the head of that department?  Jeff Sessions, too racist to be a federal judge, as Attorney General? (And maybe Trump’s “unpresidented,” yes, Freudian slip, “unpresidented” tweets top off that challenge.)  It’s almost like Trump is joking.  Nor are these appointments consistent with what he promised his supporters during the campaign: “draining the swamp” by filling it with multiple alligators of Goldman Sachs pedigree?   And then there are Trump's military generals. .  Democracy Now points out that on the campaign trail Trump was dismissive of the generals (“I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me”).  But now, with the appointment of at least four military generals, Mr. Trump is appointing “more generals in his cabinet than any president since World War II.”  Maybe it’s not exactly “Seven Days in May” (courtesy of the Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling). .   But that would jump us ahead to another point.

“Don’t normalize this!”: After the election there was a widespread shock-and-awed sense of surreal disbelief and this was the mantra that sprang up.  The sentiment it expresses obviously aligns with all of what has already been covered above, and the mantra could, in itself, be yet another addition to the listed delegitimizing drumbeats despite how generally it’s accompanied by the acknowledgment that Trump is technically now the president-elect. . . .  Unfortunately, much of the mainstream media is quickly falling into the trap of doing exactly this normalizing with even the PBS NewsHour deciding `foggily’ that Trump is just not “traditional” rather than outright “abnormal” in a profoundly abject way (similarly, that Jeff Sessions euphemistically “has a `record’”).

There is now also, abroad in the land, a pervasive deep-seated dread we rarely associate with rulers expected to succeed.  Your dread could be related to science.  If you happen to believe in science, then you almost certainly believe that the planet faces an existential issue, climate change bringing us to the verge of a cataclysmic erasure of life as we have known it.  Rather than retrench and look for solutions, Trump with his appointments would step on the accelerator to speed us faster into this void.

Your dread could also pertain to the seeming disintegration of our basic relationships to each other as Americans.  “Not My President” became the chant of spontaneous demonstrations around the country.  And politicians have had to offer words to the very worried about “sanctuary cities,” islands to be safe from Trumpian policies, but how safe is that?: The federal government could retaliate by, for instance, cutting New York City’s budget by 7-8% (though not as much as NYC sends to the federal government in taxes), just the way that Republican-controlled state governments (in power through gerrymandering) are now shutting off funds to liberal cities until those cities change social policies the Republican don't like.

Conversely, with respect to the other end of the spectrum, we heard reports everywhere of extremists apparently emboldened to bigoted crimes against Jews, Latinos, Muslims, Gays and African-Americans, the posting of swastikas, etc by Trump’s election and hate-speech rhetoric.  Women also have cause to fear whether they will be harassed . . .

Frighteningly, we are told, (including by Hillary Clinton in her concession speech): “Our nation is more deeply divided than we thought.” And apparently 77% of Americans believe it.  That seems horribly unfair to say when Clinton herself got, according to the counted vote, such an unusually large percentage of the popular vote.  It also forgets the bizarre way we seemed to have found exactly the right two candidates to divide the public during this election.  Would this claim of “division” have been the epitaph of a Bernie Sanders/Donald Trump election?. .

. . . But now, not believing in our commonalities, we find ourselves almost expecting to be lawlessly at each other’s throats.  And that is what is scariest, because that kind of lawlessness is the formula for the introduction of martial law.  Even more frightening is to think how many people would be inclined to reason that martial law would be superior to letting the surveillance state we already have be Donald Trump's tool.

You can almost guarantee that any military cabal taking over the country would peddle itself as being more moderate, more centrist, kinder, gentler and more representative of the Unite State people than Trump.  (Probably less “kinder and gentler” with the Russians though.)  With fewer generals in evidence than Trump now has in place that might even have enticing believability.

You can imagine also that the military taking over might explain that it is too dangerous for the United States not to be mobilizing and protecting itself from the threat (including the military threats) of climate change.   That would be ironic since in all ways the U.S. Military is the worst polluter in the world.

Bill Maher recently said a couple of things that were pretty edgy even for him, a politically-commenting comedian who can back off from statements claiming them as `jokes.'   He said that he viewed an incoming Trump administration as lawless, capable of and inclined towards intentional harm to the American people.  He also, on another occasion, said that because the people of the USA are “stupid” (and we face apocalypse) that a despotic elite should simply anoint a technocrat as president.

Is the abandonment of democracy becoming an acceptable meme?   It’s being reported via the New York Times that in various countries around the world, countries that are now democracies, there have been startling drops in the percentage of people who say that `it is essential to live in a democracy.’  The drop gets much steeper with younger generations.  Perhaps the drop is not so hard to explain, especially for the younger generations, if you consider that fewer and fewer people might now consider that they are actually living in a true democracy and find, as they look around the world, that they don't see many countries with true democracies that they could and want to move to.

Maybe you missed you post-Thanksgiving reading: Above from the New York Times on November 29th- Percentage of people who say it is "essential" to live in a democracy

A report on this to be published in the January issue of the Journal of Democracy using data from Freedom House, a watchdog organization that measures democracy and freedom around the world, says that since 2005 there has been a decline in global freedom (perhaps actually dating since about 9/11?- the data says“the number of countries classified as `free' rose steadily from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s”).

According to the report, a critical indicator that a democracy is likely to fail is increased support for “`antisystem parties and movements' - political parties and other major players whose core message is that the current system is illegitimate.” . . . The drumbeats against Trump?

According to the New York Times on this:

Support for autocratic alternatives is rising, too. Drawing on data from the European and World Values Surveys, the researchers found that the share of Americans who say that army rule would be a “good” or “very good” thing had risen to 1 in 6 in 2014, compared with 1 in 16 in 1995.

Would our democracy be missed?  Would our mainstream press tell us its demise was `unfortunate'?  The mainstream press didn't care enough about our democracy to pay attention to the real issues in this election cycle.  There might be few to tell us we should note democracy's departure at all.  . . .  In the future, rather than celebrate how great a democracy our country has been, we could celebrate instead how great a military power our country is and has always been!

Deep breath. . .  let's pause a moment.  Whether or not you are yourself beating one of the drums delegitimizing Trump in these times that are so frightening (and we do not say such drums are not worth beating), before anyone else gets invited to take custody of our country, before anything like that happens, let's have some clear-eyed consideration of exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.  Maybe, by doing so, we can get back to a democracy that works.