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| Potus |
I try hard to be less obsessive about American politics; a little
easier in this relatively Trump-free period. My horror at his person
and his personality and his politics has reduced in intensity as his
exposure has been reduced and his power, diminished. The profound
gratitude for his relative absence from the stage is coupled with
relief at the policies of the rather more grown-up Biden
administration. However, my interest in American politics continues
despite good intentions, as I witness what seems to be the withering
of democracy in that benighted country, always pronouncing itself as
the greatest while showing, day to day, its entrenched racism and
appetite for corruption in the search for political power. One
State’s example will suffice before I move on with the vow to
donate no more time and space on this blog to American politics!
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Anti-democratic reverberations
from Trump's Big Lie. |
Georgia
ran one of Trump’s “rigged” 2020 elections with alleged
widespread voter fraud for which no evidence emerged. Following
Trump’s example that no evidence means you can just make up
alternative fiction providing it is destructive, this week the Georgia Legislature passed a
flurry of measures aimed at protecting the integrity of their
elections by restricting voting access, primarily aimed at black
voters. The proposals directly target the methods used in the run-up
to the 2020 election to increase the black vote. Limiting early
Sunday morning voting, for instance, is a direct attack on
“Souls
to the Polls”, a ‘get-out-to-vote’ exercise led by Black
churches. A CNN analysis found that black voters made up 34.6% of the
voters who cast early ballots on the three weekends preceding the
election; these would be
eliminated under the new proposals. The same
bill prohibits free food and drinks from being served to those
standing in the apparently endless queues waiting to vote;
volunteers
frequently served pizza and chips to voters waiting to vote at
predominantly Black precincts in the Atlanta area. Who knew that the
battle to reduce the black franchise would importantly involve the
humble pizza?
The
legislative package which passed in the State Senate, [it must be
said, by “a narrow majority”], would also repeal the
so-called ‘no excuse absentee voting’, a method used by
1.3 million Georgia voters in last November’s election. I think
absentee voting means postal voting for which no excuse is normally
needed in democracies; it is simply an alternative way to vote which
has in-built safeguards. Repealing this absentee voting measure is
deemed advantageous to 65+ white voters while being disadvantageous
to millions of black voters. It takes a certain dedication, and
perhaps panic, to custom-build this degree of cynical manipulation into the electoral process. AND astonishingly, to do it in the full glare
of publicity in the comfortable knowledge that white voters in
Georgia approve. Mass white protests are not expected!!
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Demonstrators chained together outside the
State Capitol building. March 2021. |
While
these [and other] Georgian, presumably Republican, measures suggest
that truly democratic voting available to all, means that Republicans
believe that they cannot easily win fair elections in the future.
Martin Luther King, son of the famous father, suggests that more than
250 legislative measures, currently being hastily assembled across 43
states, are a more “sophisticated” version of the Jim Crow
practices which prevented black voting in the past. If passed, almost
nationwide, these anti-democratic ‘rules’ would certainly reduce
the black vote by providing sufficient obstacles to ensure voter
apathy. So now we see how the “greatest democracy in the world”
operates! Voting suppression aimed at blacks through lawful means.
Let us hope that Biden & Co manage to enact counter measures
nationally which protect, and encourage, the black vote. Surely at
some point, all those red-faced, angry people in MAGA hats which
really read, Make America White Again, will begin to
understand that America’s future is indeed, multi-coloured. And
perhaps ALL Americans will realise that their democracy is currently being
degraded possibly beyond repair.
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| Lt Gov. Geoff Duncan [centre] |
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| Stacey Abrams. |
I now
read of Hope appearing in Georgia! A leader of the Georgia business
community, Andrea Young, said that her group would block all voting
restrictions with appeals to the State’s corporate interests. “
As
a business community, you can’t talk about racial justice and then
stand by and let voting rights be pushed back,” she told
a CNN interviewer this week. Georgia’s Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, [no
lily-livered liberal one would assume from his website] who normally
presides over the Senate, left the chamber Monday during the debate
to signal his opposition to ending no-excuse absentee voting and to
demonstrate his own stated belief that simply modernising and
updating the franchise system would be preferable. And there is, of
course, the redoubtable Stacey
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Abrams, CEO of Fair Fight Action, the
voting rights group which she founded and grew with fanatic energy!
Her intentions are to go as far as the courts and Congress in the
search for franchise fairness; a large part of the Democrats’
recent election successes in Georgia can be attributed to the
Herculean efforts of Stacey et al over several years and it is their
successes in November 2020 and January 2021 that are causing the
unseemly panic to restrict black votes in Georgia [and far beyond].
As voting rights attorney, Marc Elias said on the Rachel Maddow show, on Tuesday last, “in Iowa, in Arizona, in Montana, in Florida, in Texas, in
Missouri, in Georgia …..” democracy is under threat in many
states through legislation leading to voting suppression.
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| Absentee Ballot Application. |
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| Voting line somewhere in Georgia. |
