2020 Archives

Posted at Raw Story on Dec. 30, 2020

Trump’s indifference and racism kills 1 in 1,000 Americans

How is it that in Australia it's 3 out of every 100,000 people, and in New Zealand it's 1 out of every 200,000 people, but here in America we're dropping like flies? Chalk it up to Republican racism and a libertarian indifference to the notion of society.

Posted at Raw Story on Dec. 16, 2020

America’s survival depends on bankrupting the Republican Party

It’s time to defund the GOP, and there’s precedent and strategy for the effort. The need to cut the party’s access to both private and government money is seen in the reaction by some extremist Republicans to news like a New York State lawmaker’s proposal to make vaccination against COVID-19 mandatory. Predictably, the far right is freaking out. “Freedom!” they scream as they run around maskless, assaulting their fellow citizens with potentially virus-laden breath.

Posted at The Nation on Dec. 16, 2020

Talk Radio: Democrats Can’t Win if They Don’t Play

Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Donald Trump?” asks the headline in The New York Times shortly after the election. Weirdly, that article—and hundreds like it purporting to explain the previous 2016 election—lacked even a single mention of the roughly 1,500 right-wing talk-radio stations that saturate every corner, no matter how remote or rural, of America.

Posted at Alternet.org on Dec. 16, 2020

Mitch McConnell is holding your community hostage until corporations are able to kill you without consequence

Probably the most under-reported story of the year has been how Mitch McConnell is holding Americans hostage in exchange for letting big corporations kill Americans without any consequence. Mitch took you and me hostage back in May, when the House of Representatives passed the HEROES act that would have funded state and local governments and provided unemployed workers with an ongoing weekly payment.

Posted at Raw Story on Nov. 25, 2020

Republicans are helping Trump destroy the country before Biden takes office

Donald Trump‘s treason extends far beyond his efforts to damage Americans belief in our form of government, our elected democratic republic, that Trump’s oligarch buddies in Saudi Arabia, Russia and China also regularly disparage. Trump’s also actively damaging the ability of the incoming Biden administration to aid Americans during the Trump Depression, and to get the virus in check. In this, he has help from Steve Mnuchin and Mitch McConnell.

Posted at Raw Story on Nov. 24, 2020

Will Biden and the Democrats take on the biggest challenges of this generation?

Tens of millions of Americans are going hungry right now. Today. But Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans don’t give a damn, because they only exist to serve their billionaire donors. Almost 20 million Americans will lose all their unemployment benefits the week after Christmas, but Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans don’t give a damn, because they only exist to serve their billionaire donors.

Posted at Raw Story on Nov. 18, 2020

The ‘freedom’ America’s billionaires are selling is literally killing us

America’s rightwing billionaires comfortably hang out on their massive estates, giving instant Covid tests to their live-in servants, while using the word “freedom“ to describe their lifestyle in the rightwing media they own or support. The headline yesterday over at NewsMax reads, “No Masking Biden’s Disdain For Freedom” and one at RedState references “Covid Tyranny.”

Posted at Common Dreams on Nov. 16, 2020

This Election Was Rigged

It turns out that Donald Trump was right: the election was rigged. He would know, of course, because he and Lewis DeJoy were the ones who rigged it. Historically, “conservative“ (e.g. “white racist”) efforts to rig the vote were almost entirely focused on preventing people of color from voting. For almost a century, this involved literacy tests, guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar, and other low-tech, blatant strategies.

Posted at Common Dreams on Nov. 3, 2020

This Election Proves the Need for a Right to Vote

America needs an absolute right to vote, like most other major democracies. One legacy of slavery is that our Constitution does not contain an absolute right to vote for all citizens who have achieved the age of majority. Our property rights are totally intact. If the government wants to take away your house or your car because, for example, you didn’t pay your taxes, they have to go to court to do it.

Posted at Common Dreams on Oct. 29, 2020

Was April 7, 2020 the Day That Sealed the Fate of America?

On April 18, Bob Woodward recorded Jared Kushner saying that Trump had taken control away from the doctors and was going to open the country back up. So what might have provoked that? What was happening right around that time? Trump’s official national emergency declaration came on March 13, and most of the country shut down or at least went partway toward that outcome. The economy crashed and millions of Americans were laid off, but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration.