Don’t Forget to Vote! Twice!

Yes, I want you! To Vote Twice!

United States President Donald Trump has told people in the state of North Carolina to vote twice in this November’s election! He has suggested to voters that in order to test the voting system they should send in a vote by mail postal and then go vote in person on Election Day just in case.

You know just in case you’d like to take a chance and commit a Federal crime punishable by a 10 thousand dollar fine and 5 years in the federal pokey. “Let them send it in and let them go vote,” he told North Carolina broadcaster WECT-TV…(and let them have a piece of cake too!)

And then, just to be clear about what he wanted U.S. voters to do, (in case you thought you’d heard him wrong) he tweeted the next day: if people vote by post they should also go to the polling station “to see whether or not your mail-in vote has been tabulated” and then vote in person if necessary.

And then when President Trump’s comments were put to Attorney General William Barr, he said it was unclear what the president meant!?!

WTF? How is anything that the President says ever unclear? He usually repeats himself, then smiles and waves, later retweets it on Twitter and then goes on FOX News and repeats himself on camera and in front of a microphone… and several million witnesses!

And our Attorney General, the ultimate arbiter of law in our country, doesn’t understand what he means when he speaks in English, tweets in English and repeats himself on TV????? How does he do his freakin’ job if he can’t understand what people say?

Our POTUS tells us to go break the law of the country that he is President of and our Attorney General when asked for a clarification says, Duh, I dunno? And both of these “law and order” statesmen have already sanctioned committees and investigative bodies to look into our election laws and practices to see if there was any fraudulent hank panky going on…and came up with…

Nada! Zilch! Nil! Zero! Bupkis! Zip! Sweet Fanny Adams! Nothing at all.

And yet when Speaking at the Republican National Convention last month, The President claimed “there’s tremendous fraud involved” with postal voting and that “we have to be very, very careful”.

But these claims have been strongly and repeatedly debunked by experts. Ellen Weintraub, the commissioner of the Federal Election Commission, responded at the time that “there’s simply no basis for the conspiracy theory that voting by mail causes fraud”. In addition, numerous nationwide and state-level studies over the years have not revealed evidence of major, widespread fraud. And according to a 2017 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, The rate of voting fraud overall in the US is between 0.00004% and 0.0009%.

In the 2016 US presidential election, nearly one quarter of votes were cast by post, and did you hear then President Elect Donald J. Trump complain about that?

Nope! Nada! Zilch! Bupkis! Zip! Not a goose egg nor a dicky bird…

Yet both our President and our Attorney General continue to float completely baseless hypothetical and nonsensical theories in which thousands of ballots and voters will appear from out of nowhere. THE LEADERS OF OUR COUNTRY are deliberately and maliciously undermining our normal and legitimate election procedures and dismissing any criticism of them as delusional.

And! Our President has already stated the the only way he can lose this election is if it is “rigged” and that there is “no way in which the Democrats can legitimately win” and that if they do win he is “not sure that he will accept the results”!

The 2 top authoritative figures in America are mocking America not trying to make it great! And no one seems to care? And their Republican minions think it’s outrageously patriotic for them to be so dismissive of American institutions, traditions and laws! All while making America great again???

I just don’t get it. It seems as though The POTUS and The AGOTUS are rooting against America, doing their best to divide the citizens of the United States and hoping to create chaos in our country come November no matter what the outcome of the election may be.

They couldn’t be doing a better job of undermining America’s values and constitutional principles than if they were actually working for a foreign government. Maybe they are? If they aren’t then they certainly are putting together a fantastic resume for their next job interview…that is if they lose!

How could they possibly win when they are openly displaying their dirty tricks, dirty laundry and dirty tactics in front of the entire world and their sycophantic, gullible minions to see?…And they still want to see what was in Hillary’s emails?! What could Hillary possibly have emailed anyone, friend or foe, that could have possibly compromised America as much as these 2 men openly do on a daily basis?

If this carnival show is picked up for another season ladies and gentlemen…and it is just that: a grotesque circus of perverse entertainment… just unplug your television sets, sit quietly and wait for the sky to fall on Democracy, Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, apple pie and George Washington’s Holy Ghost…because I can’t seem to shake this horrible feeling that it will truly be over.

Finished! fini! The end! cancelled! The fat lady will belt out her big finale! goodnight sweet prince!…and God bless us…everyone.

The Children’s Crusade

Once upon a time in America, if you were a politician, you could be assured of losing the voters confidence and/or your job just by refusing to acknowledge or by merely implying that America’s children weren’t the most important and precious resource that out country has.

And once upon a time in history over 800 years ago as the story goes, A young man began to preach in either France or Germany; claiming that he had been visited by Jesus, who instructed him to lead a crusade in order to peacefully convert Muslims to Christianity.

Through a series of portents and miracles, he gained a following of up to 30,000 children and led his followers south towards the Mediterranean Sea, in the belief that the sea would part on their arrival, which would allow him and his followers to walk to Jerusalem.

Unfortunately That did not happen and the children wound up being sold to two merchants who gave them free passage by boat to Tunisia where they were then sold into slavery… or in another version of the story, died in a shipwreck.

Although much of that story may be part myth, part legend  and part history many historians came to believe that they were not all children, but multiple bands of “wandering poor” in Germany and France who were part of a social upheaval: the downtrodden and disenfranchised in search of a “cause” so to speak…

The Children’s Crusade occurred in 1212 and at that time the words used to describe the travellers or crusaders were “parvuli” or “infantes” which were words that scholars have come to interpret as being words that The Church at that time used to describe “wage workers or labourers” who were young and had no inheritance and who were also “powerless”… and as a consequence, expendable.

However, today in modern times it is early September of 2020, or 808 years later, and once again we are about to embark on another children’s crusade as we send our youngest and most powerless children back to school during the midst of the Covid-19 Pandemic.

And they are being sent on a mission to save America from itself…asked to bravely go out into the world together in large groups to basically…send America back to work and to lead Americans back indoors and to return the economy to a sense of normalcy in an effort to…see what happens.

Are our children, as some say, immune to this terrible disease? Or will they catch it in large numbers like grown ups do and fall ill? Perhaps they will contract the virus but feel no effects and be no worse for the wear? Maybe they will bring it home to others in their family and spread the disease to loved ones who will too get sick but suffer a worse degree of illness than they, the carriers, do?

We just don’t know because while we suspended school and large social gatherings last March to avoid the spread of the Covid-19 virus, we have done nothing to hinder the virus from lying in wait for our, and our children’s return.

And thus, their “crusade”, if you will, begins. And why must we send them to schools and colleges en masse? Because who is to watch the children if they stay home? For our 2020 modern society is now based on work and capitalism where mothers and fathers alike go out into the working world to earn money to keep the economy growing… and one cannot grow the economy with children in tow.

And so, they go…to school…to learn…but mostly to be watched by teachers who are also child care-takers, an extra job also necessitated by the rise and popularity of capitalism. Alas, no one is home anymore, at least among the “wage workers” who are young and without capital.

But sadly teachers are wage workers also and many cannot go to work and watch the children of others when they have to leave their children at home.

And even though more than 97,000 children in the U.S. tested positive for the coronavirus in the last two weeks of July, findings, compiled by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association, included data from 49 states, meaning the number of infections could be even higher.

Health Officials have long warned that the true coronavirus toll may be much higher than reported due to insufficient testing and the lack of symptoms in many people who are infected. And with over 6 million confirmed cases in the U.S. with more than 500,000 of those cases being children there is no way of knowing what will happen next.

Yet still we plan to send our “les infantes” out on this crusade… except this time we are actually sending real children out into the fray! (along with teachers and support staff and other wage workers) Some actually want to go, some are choosing to stay at home and still others are being forced against their will and better judgement… But Will their sacrifice breathe life back into our economy or will our hopes and dreams be dashed on the rocks of poor judgement and greed? 

I can’t believe I’m saying this but…we shall see? To paraphrase an ancient Greek philosopher’s maxim:  We are sending our hearts out into the world…unguarded.

Good luck and Godspeed to the crusaders… and us all!

The Beginning of the End?

Beginning this month, September 2020, The Trump administration will begin deferring payroll taxes for all eligible federal employees over the objections of unions and other employee groups, who have labeled the plan as “chaotic and confusing.”

The Agriculture Department’s National Finance Center, which processes paychecks for about 600,000 employees across 160 agencies, issued a notice indicating that it would implement provisions of an August presidential memorandum to defer the taxes, which fund Social Security, until the end of 2020.

The deferrals will be temporary and last until the end of the year and apply to all federal employees making less than $104,000 per year. In the short term, those federal workers will see an increase in take-home pay, but they will also be required to pay that money back next year when they fill out their annual tax returns.

Unless: The President, as promised should he be re-elected this fall, continues to issue executive orders extending the payroll tax deferral.

But The Trump administration has not provided information to federal employees about the implications this deferral will have on future tax obligations or on their future Social Security benefits or if they will have to pay penalties and interest on the money as required by the IRS should they be required to return the money to the SS fund.

You know, should someone else be elected President this fall.

Meanwhile, The Social Security Administration’s Chief Actuary, Stephen C. Goss, released a letter warning that should President Trump’s plan to terminate Social Security’s dedicated funding be extended and applied to all workers who pay into the fund, it will destroy Social Security long before the President’s second term is up.

 

Goss’s letter states that if Social Security’s funding were terminated, as Trump has repeatedly proposed and promised if he were re-elected,  that Social Security’s Disability Insurance trust fund would be depleted by 2021, and the Old Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund would be left “with no ability to pay benefits” after 2023.

Thus by instructing the IRS to continue deferring the collecting of Social Security contributions for up to a year, and then continuing to do so each year with executive orders, he can fully defund and destroy Social Security’s disability insurance all by himself, provoking an immediate crisis that could force Congressional legislation cutting benefits or privatizing the program.

At the very least he is beginning this month to deplete the Social Security Trust Fund by syphoning away the payroll taxes of 600,000 federal employees from the fund whether those federal employees want to or not!

In the meantime…The 2018 Supplemental Poverty Measure found that Social Security benefits keep more than 27 million people out of poverty every year and that refundable tax credits do the same for almost 8 million people. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, known as food stamps, also keep an estimated three million people from becoming poor.

And yet all of those programs and now Social Security are being rolled back, cut back or depleted by this President’s efforts and proposals. So if we add 38 million people to the poverty rolls by cutting or eliminating these anti-poverty measures to the already 40 million Americans living in poverty now… we’ll have a whopping 78 million citizens living below the poverty line.

That’s would be about 24% of the United States population or the highest poverty rate ever recorded! Historically, the official poverty rate in the United States had ranged from a high of 22.4 percent when it was first estimated for 1959 to a low of 11.1 percent in 1973.

So our 45th President of the United States in his effort to “make America great again” is at this very moment downsizing the Post Office (the oldest institution in the USA) towards an eventual closing. Fighting the Affordable Care Act at the Supreme Court level in the hopes of having it eliminated from the law of the land. Defunding American cities that he does not like. Mocking our national voting system, the cornerstone of our democracy. And now Beginning the process of depleting our Social Security Trust Fund until it is empty and/or useless…

and one other thing…

It’s not even a secret!

It’s a promise!