Biden Surges, Bernie’s (sadly) Toast

The Democratic Party electorate has swung mightily towards what they consider the safe candidate, never mind that nearly All the polls I’ve seen showed Bernie beating Trump by a larger margin than any other candidate. Anything can happen yet, but President Sanders is a very slim possibility.

With Biden there’ll be no change in America’s endless wars, no relief for the long-suffering Palestinians, no relief from crushing student debt and only minor tweaking of health care and its attendant outrageous medical bills which are the cause of most bankruptcies in the US. He’ll fiddle around while the planet burns, advocate for cutting Social Security as he has for the last 40 years and protect his billionaire buddies from paying their fair share of taxes. However, Bernie has set the stage, he’s brought to the forum all those programs Americans desperately need and made them topic of the day, made it impossible for the so-called moderates to ignore. On Biden’s own initiative, during reasonably normal times, single-payer health care would be a non-starter, but exceptionally, decidedly, not normal times are ahead.

The tanking of the stock market and the plunge in oil prices precipitated by the sharp fall in economic activity caused by the Wuhan virus, not to mention how overvalued it had become will erase Trump’s ‘great economy’ blather and his stunning incompetence in handling the virus will doom his reelection chances. That will also lead to turning the Repug party into a faint remnant of its former self.

By the time old Joe takes the reins of power in nine months the country will be in a shambles. The virus will cause a major breakdown of America’s for-profit health care system. Currently less than 500 people have officially contracted the virus, but that figure would be a lot larger if more people had been tested. Adequate testing isn’t happening now because of the ineptitude of the administration and can’t happen at any time if some people have to pay thousands of dollars to get tested. And if it hits hard? Wuhan with a population of 11 million had to set up places with 4 to 5000 additional hospital beds.

Alex Azar, Trump’s man at the FDA, first said, many people might not be able to afford a vaccine when developed. He quickly walked that back, but really, who’s going to pay for it? Is the US government going to cover all coronavirus costs? If not, large numbers of people will go without treatment and merely infect a lot of others. Those people with their ‘great’ health plans who don’t think good insurance is important for all citizens, will have nowhere to hide.

The virus will also require many people to get locked down in quarantine, thus losing their income and since 40% of Americans don’t have $400 in savings in case of an emergency a monumental crisis will ensue.  A lot of people, including Trump, think I’m overreacting, we shall see.

Boris Johnson, the 43.6% Wonder.

The recent landslide election of Boris Johnson in the UK bears a very strong resemblance to Trump’s election in 2016. For one thing, his margin was provided by traditionally working class Labour voters switching parties much as Trump’s winning of old, white, uneducated – meaning less than a 4 year degree – men gave him the presidency. Similar to Trump losing the popular vote by 3 million and winning the office by only 80,000 votes in three states, the total vote for Johnson’s Tory party was 43.6%, hardly a resounding popular mandate.

In fact the combined vote for Labour and Lib Dems added up to almost exactly the same 43.6%. When you consider the Scots are traditionally leftish, if there were no Scottish National Party, their votes would have made an easy majority for the non conservative side.

Johnson’s big push for Brexit was the determining factor for many otherwise Labour voters. The largely uneducated small-town working-class were big Brexiters. While there are many political divergences between the US and UK, people who vote Democratic in America; the young, minorities, women, urbanites, is reflected in the Brexit vote where the young, London, the other big cities, Scotland and N. Ireland all voted to remain.

In both cases the culprit is voting systems which do not truly express the will of the majority. The US Electoral College is heavily weighted towards the small states. Each state gets one electoral vote for each senator and representative, but Wyoming with less than 600,000 people gets the same two senators, thus the same two electors, as California with 40 million. In the UK it’s more a result of dividing the vote between many parties that allows a winner of only 43.6% of the vote to garner a landslide.

UK voters had the opportunity to set up a more representative system a few years back. One of the conditions the Lib Dems placed on joining a coalition with Conservatives was a vote on proportional representation. Unfortunately both major parties campaigned vigorously against it and it lost. It was Labour’s loss since a coalition of Labour, Lib Dem and SNP would have easily constituted a majority in this election.

One other factor in the Trump/Johnson wins was the weakness of the opposition candidates. Some of the weakness was well deserved in Clinton’s case since she’s not a likable person and her politics was decidedly corporate. But a lot of it wasn’t since the Repubs have been harassing the Clintons from day one. The impeachment of Bill over lying about a blow job was an outgrowth of a special investigator the Repubs set up over a failed real estate development in which the Clinton’s lost $90,000, small potatoes, a nothingburger, simple harassment. In spite of a lot of people despising her she still won the popular vote by a wide margin.

Corbyn has been consistently slandered for his position wanting a fair deal for the Palestinians. All the crap about anti-semitism and sympathizing with terrorists comes directly from his opposition to Israeli apartheid and oppression of the Palestinian people. His unabashedly leftist policies also laid grounds for fearmongering from the right. Still, in a system of proportional representation he would be the PM not Johnson.

Ironically, one of the outcomes of Brexit is likely to be Scotland exiting the UK. The big talking point against independence in the past referendum was that Scotland would be kicked out of the EU. I never understood why the EU would make it hard for Scotland to join on its own. At any rate among other things, that was a part of why it failed.

Now Johnson says he won’t allow another referendum in spite of the landslide victory of the SNP winning 48 out of 59 seats. Regardless it’ll happen one day for sure, Scotland voted very strongly for remain and will be very unhappy leaving. Also voting sentiment shows that it’s likely that N. Ireland will opt to join Ireland, They’ll prefer staying in the EU rather than leaving with the rump UK.

Personally, I think the UK will petition to rejoin the EU after about 5 years. In a second referendum as proposed by Labour, remain would’ve won. But it’ll good to leave and get the demons out, Brits have been complaining about the EU and demanding special privileges from day one.

Girl Power, Omar and AOC

It’s been heartening to see young people taking the lead in changing the world and it’s the girls who’ve been most prominent. The latest is 16-year-old Greta Thonberg of Sweden who led a student strike for the climate last year.

She started by taking off one day a week of school to protest climate inaction and was quickly followed by many others in Sweden and elsewhere and propelled into prominence. She was given a seat at the recent COP24 climate talks in Poland where she said, “You say you love your children above all else – and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes. Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis.” She hit it on the button there. The world’s leaders are thinking of climate change as a political problem where you tweak a bit here, compromise a bit there and it all works out, but you can’t tweak science, you can’t compromise with the facts, the reality of what’s happening in our world.

She also had a seat at Davos’ World Economic Forum where the top shelf, crème de la crème of the world’s political and economic elite gather once a year. She pulls no punches: in a luncheon forum she was given the mic. “We are facing an existential crisis, the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced. If everyone is guilty, then no one is to blame, and someone is to blame… Some people, some companies, some decision makers in particular know exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money, and I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.”

She’s an unlikely leader since she’s a diminutive, unassuming and soft spoken person. She’s no charismatic firebrand and yet through her perseverance and will she’s become a powerful spokesperson of the younger generation and for all of us trying to push our leaders into action.

Next up Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi. About a year ago then 16 year old Ahed slapped and kicked an Israeli soldier in response to one of them shooting her 15-year-old cousin in the face at close range with a rubber bullet. Doctors saved him, but his face and skull are clearly distorted. She and her family have been activists for a long time. When she was 12 a picture of her trying to punch an Israeli soldier was widely circulated online. As a result of her actions she spent 8 months in prison for assault, incitement and obstructing soldiers. Her mother also was sentenced to 8 months for incitement since she always encouraged her daughter to fight the oppression of occupation. The thing about Ahed is she doesn’t look the part of the evil ‘other’; those pesky Palestinians keeping the Chosen People from their rightful biblical inheritance of all of Greater Israel: she’s got blue eyes and long curly blond hair. Oppressed no less, since regardless of the small amount of self-government allotted to the Palestinian Authority, Israeli soldiers can break into any Arab house in the West Bank at any time of day or night.

The cousin meanwhile was forced to sign a statement attributing his distorted skull to falling off his bicycle. Did the Israeli official(s) responsible for obtaining that demonstrably, ridiculously, absurdly false statement feel his troops exonerated for the crime of shooting that kid in the face? Did it make him(them) feel good to force such a deceit? Did it matter that nobody in the world would believe such a gross falsehood? No, didn’t bother them a bit. Lying is nothing, they’ll stoop to the lowest levels to achieve their goals, including murder and crimes against humanity, like in the recent targeting of Gaza protesters where hundreds died and tens of thousands were maimed in largely peaceful, unarmed protest. Anyway, he’s just an Arab kid throwing rocks at the occupying power so he deserved it.

Israel likes to tout itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, but that’s a fantasy since there’s no such thing as a true democracy with different classes of citizenship. Even the Arabs of Israel proper who make up 20% of its population are discriminated against with vigor, much like blacks in the American segregated south. Like in the old south where schools were separate but black kids received far less per capita from the state than white kids, Arab kids in Israel are severely shortchanged with funding. Israel decides what can go in their textbooks and what holidays they can observe.

In the West Bank where about 3.5 million Arabs and 500,000 Jews live there are separate highways only for Jews and needless to say they’re much better quality than the much more numerous Arabs use. In an area the size of Delaware, America’s 2^nd smallest state, there are more than 500 checkpoints that Palestinians have to go through, often just between neighboring villages. Very often they are kept waiting for no other reason than to harass and humiliate them. Oldsters are not exempt from their mean-spirited treatment and often forced to wait in the hot sun or inclement weather for an hour, neither are pregnant women, who more than once were forced to give birth on the ground because they were prevented from going to the nearest hospital in time. How do they live with themselves? How did they get so hardhearted?

Just recently an Arab family in Jerusalem who’d lived in their home for 67 years, three generations, were evicted because a Jew had owned the property back before 1947. Imagine what kind of  lowlife, unfeeling cruelty it takes to do that and then cheer when Jews move right in. Israel is an apartheid state of the first order.

Jews can go to Israel from anywhere in the world and be automatically accepted as citizens, but if an Israeli Arab marries someone from outside Israel proper, the West Bank for instance, they can’t bring their spouses into Israel. I’ll not go into the many ways that Israel betrays the precepts of democracy and shows its total absence of a sense of shared humanity, fairness and equity, of empathy for the plight of others, that’s’ clear to anyone with a trace of those feelings within them. Israel’s Jews have traded their souls for real estate.

Quoting from Ahed. “I’m not the victim of the occupation. The Jew or the settler child who carries a rifle at the age of 15, they are the victims of the occupation. For me, I am capable of distinguishing between right and wrong. But not him. His view is clouded. His heart is filled with hatred and scorn against the Palestinians. He is the victim, not me. I always say I am a freedom fighter. So I will not be the victim.”

As she says, they can no longer distinguish right from wrong, They’ve forsaken their moral compass for material gain. They use wrongs perpetrated against them in the past to justify the wrongs they are committing today. But that never works except on the basest level. And it’s no longer working in the diaspora. American Jews are increasingly upset and repulsed by Israel’s actions. It’s a dastardly, rogue nation. Of course wherever you go there are good people fighting for the right side, the side caring about, working for human rights, dignity and equality, but in Israel they are few and far between.

Then we have Malala Yusefsai, Pakistani girl who at the age of 15 was shot in the head by Islamic fundamentalists for campaigning for girl’s education. She was rushed to the UK and spent a long time in treatment. She survived to become a world renown activist and youngest ever Nobel Prize winner. Despite persistent death threats she had the courage to go right back into her quest for educating girls.

It’s easy to be down on Islam for its backwardness regarding the place of women in society, but denigration of women is part of every fundamentalist religion and is a mark of every backward, unevolved culture, though admittedly Islam seems to be going through an extreme phase. As Ahed stated so clearly, the group on top can only see its side while the one on the bottom can see both and knows which is right and which is wrong.

So those crazies in Pakistan who fear women being educated and thus more able to take care of themselves are willing to kill to maintain their dominance. It was the same between slaveowners and slaves or whites and blacks in the segregated south. In most places it was against the law to teach slaves to read. In the old south blacks were considered inferior, thus not able to gain much from education so were denied adequate funding and thus the white’s beliefs became self-fulfilling prophecy.

Thomas Jefferson, revered American president and statesman was also a heartless slaveholder. When it suited his finances it seemingly didn’t bother him to sell off a male slave even when the man had a wife and family. No question of who was right or wrong there. So it is with the tension between men who seek to continue their dominance and women who seek equality. Especially in backward cultures, women and in this case girls, have to fight for the simplest rights.

Moving on to adult American women, but still young, we have Ilhan Omar, 37, one of the first two Muslim women elected to the US congress. She created a stir and accusations of anti-Semitism for decrying the power of Israel focused lobbies in Congress and for asking why she was supposed to pledge allegiance to a foreign government in regards to BDS; the Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement aimed at Israel’s reprehensible policies of land theft and colonization of the West Bank.

In 26 American states it’s a crime to support BDS. It isn’t a problem to boycott Saudi Arabia for it’s awful human rights. It isn’t illegal to boycott North Carolina because of its bathroom law that said transgender people had to use the bathroom of the sex they were born with, but it is illegal to boycott Israel, an act which is blatantly unconstitutional. The first amendment guarantees the right of free expression. Besides, criticizing Israel has nothing to do with being anti-Jewish. (The word anti-Semitism is a misnomer. Semites are people who speak Semitic languages which includes Hebrew, Arabic and others so anti-Semitic really doesn’t fit.)

Democratic leadership quickly prepared a bill to censure her, but were forced to back off because of outrage from the progressive left of the party. At last there are people in the US congress willing to stand up for fairness and human rights for everyone.

Finally we have AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the rising star of the Democratic party. At 29 she’s the youngest woman to ever serve in congress. Within a very short time she had the most twitter followers of anyone in congress, now at 2.7mil. Just 9 months before being sworn in to office she was waiting tables in Manhattan, though if you get your ‘news’ from the rabid right wing you’d think she was a billionaire. They’ll go to great lengths to make up shit about her, like recently a FB post which claimed that a rich man who lent her $9000 was given a job on her staff as payback. Yeah, sure, rich people take jobs paying peanuts just for fun. They published a fake nude photo of her, they tried to get at her by publishing a dance video she made in college. In response she made a short video of herself dancing into her congressional office. Really stupid shit, but she scares establishment Democrats as well because she truly represents the people.

All of the positions she’s taken which the punditry, the mainstream media and establishment Dems call radical and impractical have widespread backing of the public. Her signature proposal, a Green New Deal garners 80% approval, Medicare for All, 70% including a slim majority of Repubs. Tax the rich, free higher education, $15 minimum wage, hold fat cats responsible, all supported by a strong majority of Americans. Yet establishment Dems are lining up to try to take her down. If they succeed they’ll take down the party as well because the people are aching for change. Another weak corporate-sponsored compromiser will turn them away in droves, though even Daffy Duck would probably beat Trump next time.

Midterms Final Stretch

Some righties are expecting a red wave this election, which is quite delusional and seems to come from them only reading fake news. There are several indicators of just the opposite.

For one, almost all special elections that’ve happened this year have either been won by Dems or they’ve way outperformed expectations and that’s including electing a Dem senator in Alabama, a super red state.

The Kavanaugh thing turned a very large gender gap to a chasm. Before the hearings it was 24 points, after it went to 30 points with 63% of women voting Dem, 33% voting Repub. Also there are many women running for office, most of them Dems, to further bring out the women’s vote. 50% of men choose Repubs over 45% to Dems.

Almost across the board Dems have raised more money than Repubs, sometimes far above. For instance, Beto O’Rourke, Democratic senate candidate in Texas raised a record breaking $38 million in the third quarter, all of it from small donations while the incumbent, Ted Cruz raised only $13m. Money isn’t everything – Beto is trailing in the polls – but it helps to get the message out. The message this year is health care; a majority of Americans rate it as the number one issue. And 70% now say they want Medicare for All and that includes 52% of Repubs. To non-Americans Medicare is single payer socialized medicine for those over 65.

Half the money Dems have raised is going to health care related ads. The big issue is getting coverage with pre-existing conditions. Before Obamacare insurance companies would routinely jack up premiums to exorbitant levels in those cases. Now Repubs are lying, saying they want to protect that coverage even while they’ve been voting to end Obamacare. People know the Repubs have no ideas except to destroy what little was gained by Obamacare.

There’s been a tremendous surge in interest by young people who are overwhelmingly liberal. In Texas, and some other states registration of young people is up 500%. Those people probably haven’t shown up in the polls since they generally only count likely voters or registered voters. Minorities who also heavily trend towards Dems are also registering in large numbers.

Right wing terrorism is also going to turn people left. Trump is trying to deflect from the certain outcome of his violent rhetoric with stoking fears of a migrant invasion, but most Americans are decent people and they’re repulsed by those hate-filled Nazis.

Finally the stock market is jittery. |Almost all the spectacular gains of the past year have been erased, the indices are back where they were on Jan 2.

The House and state level races are trending strongly left and the polls all point to big gains.

The only exception is the contest for the Senate; that’s a special case and it’s difficult for Dems this year. Senators are elected for 6 year terms and about 1/3 are up for election every two years. This year 26 Dems are up but only 8 Repubs and 10 of the Dems are in states that Trump won. It’s very likely the Repubs will hold on to the Senate, but in any case the current 51R, 49D division won’t change much.

States with small populations are overrepresented in the Senate. Wyoming with less than 600,000 people gets the same two senators as California with 40,000,000. As an illustration, the 51 senators who voted for Kavanaugh represent about 130 million people, the 49 who voted against represent about 190 million.

When the colonists were first negotiating forming a union they talked about representation based only on population. The small states objected, figuring rightly, that they’d have no power in that arrangement so the framers of the constitution compromised by giving each state 2 senators. The equal representation by state sorta makes sense since the colonies were sovereign and all gave up a lot to join the union. I would tweak it some to increase representation for the big states; say a state with at least 10m people would get an extra senator, with more than 20m would get 2, etc. That would even things up just a tiny bit.

Some elections are predictable, others like this one hold some very wild cards. Back in 1960 I worked for a special bank on Wall Street. I was in the lowest pay category earning $48 per week, which believe me was not easy to live on in NYC back then. One of the perks of the job was a free lunch served to us rather than cafeteria style. Everybody was assigned to a table and so people of varying backgrounds were mixed together.

It was during the Kennedy election and one of my table mates told a story about the Truman, Dewey election of 1948. All the way through the campaign Dewey was strongly favored to win and this fellow backed him – of course, he was a Republican banker – all the way, but when he got into the voting booth, he voted Truman. The Repubs were extremely confident: there’s a famous photo of Truman holding a Chicago Tribune front page with the headline Dewey Wins!

It’s never good to be too sure and in this election especially I expect a lot of voters who are normally Repubs will be motivated by all the crazy shit going down to switch over, sometimes at the last minute.

It won’t be long now.

Kavanaugh

Kavanaugh is the crown jewel in the Republican’s treasure box; an angry, privileged, bulldog-partisan white man on the Supreme Court. His performance before the senate committee was disgusting, petulant, snarling, sniveling, childlike and peppered with lies, half truths and insulting behavior towards Senate Democrats. In no way the demeanor of a judge, let alone on the nation’s highest court. He was playing to the rabid Repub base: angry white men who feel threatened by modern changes like gay rights, minority rights and especially empowerment of women.

According to them (I’m including Repub women of course) it’s all a partisan plot on the part of the opposition to defame an honorable man with false allegations and that the Dems are paying those women to come forward. But really, Ford is a professor, not some average Jane, and she mentioned the incident to her therapist five years ago. They say maybe it wasn’t Kavanaugh who tried to rape her, like she’d forget something like that.

It’s all the Dems fault, yet he was rejected by the American Bar Association, hardly a partisan organization and his approval rating is among the lowest of any nominee since polling began. He’s a hack. Trump wants him in there because he’s said he doesn’t believe a sitting president can be indicted while in office or even questioned. That is exact opposite what he believed back in the 1990s when he worked for special prosecutor Ken Starr in the investigation of a small potatoes, penny-ante failed real estate deal in which the Clintons lost $90,000. During the investigation in which they were looking for any kind of dirt to snag Clinton with, Kavanaugh would leak details to Repub senators, making it easy for them to catch him lying about a consensual blow job.

Did he have a change of heart, or does he change his mind for whatever advantage he can grab?

Before the whole Kavanaugh thing there was a 24 point gender gap with women favoring the Dems. This can only stiffen the resolve of women and sympathetic men to bring change on Nov 6. Susan Collins, Repub senator from Maine, who touts her independence, was a potential vote against Kavanaugh. People in her state set up a funding site before the hearing to raise money to defeat her should she vote for Kavanaugh. If she voted against the money was going to be returned to donors. Before the vote it had raised $2 million, after her vote for him the site crashed with so many donations coming in. Maine is a small state so that’s a lot of money. She’ll be in big trouble in 2020 when she’s up for reelection.

Before this year Supreme Court nominees were subject to Senate filibuster, which goes back to the birth of the country. Basically, there’s no limit on how long a senator can speak, so if one or several feel really strongly about legislation or before this year court nominees they can talk endlessly to try to stop legislation from going forward. Some decades ago the rules were changed so that 60 senators could stop debate and move the chamber on to voting. The sixty vote rule insured that nominees couldn’t be too extreme. Repubs axed the rule to get their extremist in the court.

But it ain’t over yet, the Dems are very likely to take the house November 6^th and they will begin hearings on Kavanaugh and bring up the dirt the Repubs tried to hide. The ABA is going to do further investigating and there’re lots of people out there who despise him who will also be looking to search out his lying and malfeasance. Lying under oath is an impeachable offense; he did it multiple times. It’ll come back to haunt him.

Trump, Slayer of the Republican Brand

It’s really for the best that Trump, the orange-spray-tanned bombastic buffoon, is now occupying the White House. There are lots of reasons why that happened, not least of which being that Clinton was a tainted candidate. That taint wasn’t always her fault, the Repubs have been hounding and harassing the Clintons ever since Bill appeared on the scene. It’s worth remembering how Bill got set up to lie about a blowjob. Repubs set up a special counsel to investigate a penny ante, small time, failed land deal in Arkansas in which the Clintons lost $90,000. Big deal, huh?

So even two years after the election, when Trump holds a campaign rally, his supporters chant, Lock Her Up. The Repubs held numerous hearings targeting her and came up with nada. There’s no there, there. But she’s the great bogyman, so insulting her is always a MAGA crowd pleaser. Even though she’s totally out of the picture, they can’t give it up.

She also turned off the Dem base by getting rich off of making speeches at $250,000 a pop to the very banksters who brought the US economy to its knees. She called single-payer health care unrealistic, said it was never going to happen. That in spite of it being wanted at the time by more than 80% of Democrats and a majority of the country overall. Now that Bernie has brought the idea to the fore, it’s polling has surged to 70% approval and that even includes 52% of Repubs.

She waged a faulty campaign in which she never stopped in Wisconsin and Michigan where she lost by the tiniest of margins. Even so she still won the popular vote by almost 3 million. Trump is only in office through the quirks in America’s presidential election system where small population states, mostly rural and mostly conservative, have outsized power.

She also used the power of the Dem establishment to undermine Sanders and in one case, that of Massachusetts, she actually stole the primary. In that state, which has thousands of precincts, every one using paper ballots went for Bernie, every one using machine ballots went for her. The odds of that happening by chance are close to nil. I know people who are normally Dem voters who were so turned off by her and the Dem establishment’s shenanigans, they hater her and couldn’t possibly vote for her. The main stream media also played a part in boosting Trump and sinking Bernie’s campaign. In the year before the primaries were finished ABC’s nightly news program devoted a total of 80 minutes to Trump, 20 seconds to Sanders in spite of Bernie having the biggest turnout in his rallies of any candidate. He would’ve beat Trump in a flash. Today he’s still the most popular politician in America.

Moreover, as I’ve been predicting for a long time, if the contest is close, Repubs will steal it or in this case scam it by suppressing the vote. The harder you make it to vote, the fewer Dems who will participate. That worked in Michigan and Wisconsin where Trump won by 10,000 votes and 27,000 votes respectively. In Wisconsin it was calculated that 300,000 people were prevented from voting by a new voter ID law. Michigan was similar. Voter ID laws are totally unnecessary, in a study of one billion votes cast there were found to be only 31 fraudulent votes. In one case a woman in her nineties, who had voted in every election from the time she was first eligible was unable to produce proper ID. Georgia this year is a case in point of trying to scam the election. Now that a black woman is running for governor, the Repubs in a small rural county where a lot of blacks live, decided to eliminate 7 out of 9 polling stations. They were forced to walk that one back after howls of protest.

If they are going to win outside of deeply rural states, they have to do it that way since they are a dying breed, well not dying exactly, but speedily declining. If only white people had voted in the last election, every state but two would’ve been won by Trump… what a horrifying thought… and profound thanks to the greater powers that minorities are now exercising the balance of power. America is now about 35% minority and they keep having more babies than whites. Moreover, young people are overwhelmingly liberal as are women who vote more than men. There’s now a 24 point gender gap in how people vote. Women get the pussy-grabbing thing and they don’t like it.

There’ve been several big surprises in Dem primaries this year with people of color and especially women staging big upsets. Democratic voters are rejecting milquetoast Dems who are beholden to the corporations and content to tweak the rules just a bit in favor of the people instead of the wholesale change that is truly needed.

While Trump is wildly popular with Repubs, recently garnering almost 90% approval, they make up only 25% of the electorate. Among the population as a whole, he’s down to 36% in some of the latest polls. That’s the worst for any president since Nixon and far less than Clinton during his impeachment process where he never went below 50%.

His base are True Believers, nothing he says or does can shake their devotion to him. He boasts that his poll numbers are surging when they’re actually diving, but everything negative about him is fake news to them, so they reject reality.

Let me point you to a seminal little book called The True Believers. It was written in the sixties by Eric Hoffer, who was a New York longshoreman at the time. He describes certain types of people who are so entranced and emotionally overwhelmed by causes or beliefs they easily and sometimes abruptly switch between groups that are totally opposite, like between Catholicism and Marxism. Closer to the point, a perfect illustration is how evangelicals, who very fervently believe in all things Christian and good, are simultaneously in love with Trump who represents the antithesis of almost all they believe in. Those are Trump’s people.

Almost everyone else isn’t fooled for a second and they’re tired of his lying, his petty insults directed at everybody who criticizes him, his closeness to the alt-right and its Nazi fellow travelers, his boorish behavior, the number of people close to him going down like bowling pins for corruption and perjury and the list goes on.

If Hillary was in the White House the Repubs would make it near impossible for her to do anything. No matter what good it might bring they’d put every roadblock they possibly could to stymie her efforts. Look at their effort to repeal Obamacare. It’s a plan that was originally dreamed up by the Heritage Foundation, a very conservative think tank and put into place in one state by Romney, a Republican governor. It was designed by Obama to be a very weak and half-assed approach to health care to get the approval, or at least, not opposition of the pharma and insurance companies. It did make some advances in stopping insurance companies for denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, preventive care is fully covered, it increased the number of people who have coverage but still leaves 30 million people without health care, so really just tweaks.

The knee-jerk Repub response was to make a political point of opposing everything Obama did, so the Repub house voted to abolish Obamacare more than fifty times in the last year of the Obama administration knowing he would veto any such legislation. Now that they totally control all three branches of government, they not only haven’t repealed Obamacare, but two years after the election the few ideas they have for health care would only take away the coverage that many people now have or offer seriously degraded policies that don’t hardly cover anything. It’s worth noting that medical expenses are responsible for majority of all bankruptcies in America and a large percentage of those were people who did have insurance but couldn’t manage the copays. A rotten system by all measurements and one that costs more than any other country.

The billionaire Koch brothers, rabid right wingers, had a study done by one of their think tanks for the purpose of slamming Medicare-for-all (for non-Americans, Medicare is public health care for people over 65). When the report was published, the media was quick to highlight the scary total cost over a ten year period of $32 trillion. However buried in a chart at the end of the study was the fact that it actually saved $2t over current expenditures and considering the slant of the writers it’s certain that they minimized that number. What I’ve heard is a $4 to $6t saving.

Americans rate health care their number 1 priority and they know it isn’t the Repubs who will fix the system. There are still quite a few conservative Democratic holdouts not with the program, in spite of very favorable poll numbers.

The only thing they have accomplished is tax cuts for the wealthy when a strong majority of Americans want the rich to be taxed more. Climate denial, loosening of pollution rules, a proposal that utility companies be forced to burn coal even when renewables would be cheaper, the list of malevolent actions goes on.

If Repubs don’t embrace Trump they risk the bile of his virulent supporters, the same people they’ve been stoking up for anger and hatred of all things political for decades. They’ve managed to do very well with that program, but it’s coming back to bite them in the ass.

It looks very good for the Dems to take back the house this November and possibly the senate all thanks to Trump. With a normal Repub in the White House they could’ve continued on their merry way screwing the people without a lot of those people realizing that. With Hillary able to veto their horrors they couldn’t accomplish their dirty deeds, so they’d merely scream Lock Her Up every two minutes.

Without Trump being so god-awful bad and so blatantly representative of all that’s wrong with their sleazy policies, the Dems might’ve had rough going this time, though Bernie would’ve won easily had he been on the top of the ticket. Still, he would’ve faced massive opposition in a Repub controlled congress, so it’s better this way; that is, letting Trump thoroughly trash the Repub brand so when Dems do take over congress, it’ll be with the momentum of real ideas and real change.

Lots more to say, but gotta move on…

Intransigence in Politics.

Let’s start with Hafez Assad of Syria. When the Arab Spring came to Syria in 2011 with peaceful demonstrators marching for basic freedoms and democracy, he labeled them all terrorists and brutally suppressed them, just as he and his father before him had suppressed all dissent. For a lot of strongmen, once they have power, they find it impossible to give it up. Holding on is an ego thing, self-aggrandizement, puffing themselves up to claim wealth and power. There’s also, I assume, a fear of retribution for their many misdeeds and reckoning regarding their amassing of wealth through greed and corruption. As long as they remain in power the millions keep rolling in. If they are deposed, they may find themselves in prison.

Assad has been fighting for seven years to stay in power. So what has he accomplished for his country? To start with half a million dead, 12 million people displaced, part turned into refugees, part internally. Finally large areas have been completely destroyed. It will take a generation to repair the damage. All for one man’s ego.

Assad is an Alawite, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, which made up about 18% of Syria’s, pre conflict population. 80% were Sunnis and as it happens in nearly every society, the party in control keeps most of the spoils for themselves. Opening the country to more freedom might’ve allowed for a peaceful transition, since Syrians are educated and the society secular, but by basically saying to the demonstrators, Bring it on, Assad, brought out the worst in the form of radical Islamists who took over large swathes of the country and, in the case of Islamic State, were arguably worse than him in regards to human rights. They will be totally vanquished at some point, but in any case the country will be left in an awful state.

I don’t believe a violent insurrection is possible here, though many people are, to put it mildly, extremely distressed and disgruntled about the country’s current political situation. The opposition took 45% in the last election in an amazing turnout of 86%, a better turnout than almost any western country. The opposition no longer exists through a tactic called lawfare. As long as you control the government, you can devise laws that target your opponents and put them out of commission.

There’s also not a small matter of threats of violence the leadership has made against any who demonstrate against a ruling party win at the polls. The big guy said he’d be willing to kill 100 or 200 people to prevent demonstrations. As a result, opponents have been laying low, but they haven’t forgotten and have only been pacified on the outside: Inside many are seething. When you need to take another’s life to maintain power you are playing God, which, if it doesn’t come back to haunt you in this life, will punish you in the next. (Forgive the religious tone, sometimes I can’t help myself.)

Memories of the Khmer Rouge are still fresh in many people’s minds and we have no radical groups to threaten the peace, no malcontents itching to blow things up. In that way we are blessed: no ethnic tensions, the country’s Muslims are completely peaceful.

When 92-year-old Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe was forced to step down, peacefully but unwillingly, he had been the longest serving leader in Africa. He remained in power partly from his legacy of being an original fighter for independence and the usual vote-rigging, intimidation and beating of opposition figures: The kind of chicanery practiced all over the world by tin-pot strongmen as well as the US and some other places in the developed world.

At the time a lot of people compared him to our head man, who’s now the longest serving leader in Asia, wondering if the same fate would befall him and while there were some parallels; long serving, autocratic, eccentric impulses and strong opposition, there are great divergences.

Most importantly, Mugabe practically destroyed the Zimbabwean economy. He’s probably most famous for a staggering inflation rate of 69,000,000%. A friend from there showed me a 50,000,000,000 dollar note, but the highest one was a cool one trillion, that’s 1,000,000,000,000. But then at a certain point the people began refusing that funny money and demanded something of value. The government was then forced to use the US Dollar.

He indulged in a lot of racial politics, always blaming the substantial white population and colonialism for the country’s problems. For instance, he set up a land redistribution scheme, which, in itself, I don’t consider a bad idea considering the country’s colonial past, but what really happened was productive white farms were parceled out to military men and cronies who knew nothing about farming and production plummeted. The country went from one of Africa’s breadbaskets to a basket case. He clung to power until essentially the whole country rose up and said, Time to go.

In contrast, our big man, has led the country into being one of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world. As a result a lot of people have risen out of abject poverty and their lives improved. No matter what else he’s noted for, a lot of people appreciate that part of his rule.

An extensive patronage network helps him survive. For instance, we have 3000 generals here. In contrast, the US with 1000 times the budget has 500. It’s a good chance that a lot of our top guns drive luxury vehicles of higher status than America’s generals. That, added to a similar padding of many government offices, constitutes a lot of loyal people to back him up.

Another factor in our success is the country’s openness to the world. Making it easy for people from all over the world to settle here has brought income and innovation and world culture.

Our currency is pegged to the USD and in the 16 years I’ve been here it’s never strayed more than 5% from 4000 to a dollar. Having a stable currency and use of the dollar has been a big boost for development. The country’s leaders would really like to change that, to dedollarize, but can’t for many reasons. Eliminating the use of the dollar would allow them to manipulate the local currency, which has its good points but also sometimes leads to problems, Zimbabwe being the best example.

Speedy development looks good and adds to GDP, but not all development is beneficial. The country has a mania for converting urban wetlands and public park space to development. In the latest example a 1600 meter public walkway on the river in Phnom Penh just south of the Japanese bridge is going to be sold off for development. In a city where only 1% of land area is public and much of that is inaccessible traffic circles or small areas surrounded by traffic, every loss is a bad idea. It’s the same in the countryside. Large areas of national parks and wildlife refuges have been converted to plantations. There’s not much that’s natural left in some parks.

A Chinese company was given 40 kms of coastline in Ream National Park near Sihanoukville for a reportedly 2 billion dollar resort development. If history is any guide, the resort will, to all intents and purposes, be off limits to non-Chinese. Here in Kampot all the main tourist spots are jammed at every holiday; traffic gets backed up for kilometers. Now that wealth is coming to our country and many people have cars there is pent up demand, they want to get away from the crowded city and enjoy a little of the countryside and its fresh air. Maybe Ream wasn’t used much when the concession was granted, so it wasn’t considered much of a loss, but now it’s clear if the park had been developed with locals in mind it’d be crowded now. A resource for all citizens has been reserved for privileged others.

It’s hard to talk about political intransigence without mentioning Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. He took over from Hugo Chavez when he died in 3013. Chavez was the first indigenous leader of Venezuela and he did wonders in bringing people out of poverty and creating a fairer society. At the same time he was reviled by the country’s establishment and mercilessly denounced by the US, regularly referring to him as a dictator when he won every election by a large margin. What he did was break the hold of the right-wing establishment on the country’s politics. Meanwhile he was revered by the people. The right wing opposition demonstrated against him on a regular basis only because they were pissed that he won the election.

What he didn’t do was diversify the economy to be less dependent on oil so when the price crashed there wasn’t the cash to keep all of its programs going. If you then try to keep them going by printing money without reserve, the whole monetary system goes haywire and the result is an inflation rate of about 17,000%, prices double every month. If you then try to keep basic food staples cheap while inflation is raging by setting prices, and those prices are below the cost of production, well then manufacturers will stop producing. The average Venezuelan has lost five to ten kilos in the last couple years because food is simply not available. This in a country with the world’s largest oil reserves and great natural wealth.

When the people soured on his leadership and the opposition won 70% of the seats in the country’s legislature, he stripped the assembly of its powers. He’s jailed opposition leaders and acted autocratically. He obsessively clings to power, refuses to accept the will of the people and continues to drag his country down. He has given socialism a bad name. No matter your ideology, at a certain point practicality has to reign. You can’t maintain your socialist stance while people aren’t getting enough to eat.

We too have a leader who clings to power which is fine as long as it’s legitimate; that is, earned through the ballot box without using legal artifice to eliminate your opposition, without threats and intimidation, without rigging the vote or the system.

It gets silly when the government goes after a woman who threw a shoe at a ruling party sign and subsequently put it on social media. She fled to Thailand, was returned at government request and is now in jail. You have to be really insecure to be frightened of a thrown shoe. Putting her behind bars and punishing others whose only crime is to object or dissent is no way to win hearts and minds, but it is a way to crystallize opponents resolve.

Excessive time in office tends to cause leaders to do silly things, to forget simple norms. When our number one saw pictures of himself being burned in Australia prior to a trip there he said, If you burn my picture, I can beat you (paraphrasing). Maybe he forgot he didn’t have the same prerogatives in a foreign country and had to walk his comment back after it created an uproar.

Finally, there’s a feel good story from Malaysia to end this essay on political intransigence. Mohammed Mahathir who ran Malaysia for 20 years until the early 1990s has made a surprise comeback at the age of 92. While he was in power the country made great economic strides, but he was quite autocratic also and put much of his opposition out of commission. He began as partners with Anwar Ibrahim but when he and Ibrahim had a falling out and Ibrahim challenged him at the polls, Mahathir used trumped up, politically motivated charges of sodomy to put Ibrahim out of commission. He spent 6 years in prison and was quite severely beaten at times, to the point of causing permanent damage.

Meanwhile, when Mahathir retired about 20 years ago, Najib Razak, took over. Mahathir’s victory over Razak in the latest election ended one party rule by UMNO – United National Malays Organization – that had been maintained since independence in the sixties. They had kept their power by giving special privileges to the 60% Malay Muslim population and by establishing an electoral system heavily weighted towards rural voters where Malays are concentrated.

Just a few years ago it was Razak’s turn to jail Ibrahim on sodomy charges. Whether or not you thought the charges of sodomy were plausible the first time, the second time was a farce. A big strong young man claimed he was abused by an old, small and frail Ibrahim.

Meanwhile Razak engaged in corruption on a massive scale. His 1MDB development scheme wound up losing 13 billion dollars of state money and seven hundred million dollars appeared in his personal bank account… a gift from a Saudi prince was his laughable claim. All that was too much for Mahathir so he reconciled with Ibrahim, who was still behind bars, to challenge Razak and won. Mahathir immediately pardoned Ibrahim and has promised to step down within 2 years and let Ibrahim become president. Some people see Mahathir’s working with and freeing Ibrahim as an act of atonement for wrongs committed. Taking a person’s freedom for personal gain is another one of those bottom-of-the-barrel karmic lows.

I can’t end this essay without a mention of China. President Xi Jin Ping, not long after starting his second term, decided to change the constitution to end term limits. They had been in place since Mao’s time to prevent the rise of an all powerful individual. But Xi wants to rule forever so he brought together the country’s rubber stamp congress to change the rule. Not surprisingly the change was approved, and also not surprisingly, the vote was 2995 to 2 with 3 abstentions. When the tally was announced almost the entire assembly cheered wildly. I mean, who’s going to publicly go against an all powerful leader. The kicker is that the words term limits were censored in the country’s internet search engines. Such a momentous change and the people aren’t even entitled to ask about it.

Just a few words before I close about Xi’s social credit system. By 2020 every Chinese will be rated according to their social merits. Good grades in school, follow all the laws, visit your parents regularly, you get a good score. Bad grades, demonstrate (against pollution for instance), break the laws, bad score. Currently in China there are 11 million people who are banned from air travel and another 4 million who can’t even ride trains because, in the eyes of the state, they are bad people. Talk about Big Brother.

Elections 2017 – Cambodia, UK, France

On June 4 Cambodia held a general election for commune leaders and councilors. Cambodia holds elections on two levels only, communes and the national legislature, which will take place next year. Everything in between; province and city leaders are all appointed by the ruling party.

The entire country is divided into 1646 communes, both urban and rural. In America we’d call them neighborhoods except here they have a lot more responsibility. That’s where people go to get ID cards and official papers stamped, for instance, so they do have an impact on people close to home. However, they don’t have a lot of power and over the commune leader’s head is a representative of the ruling party. They also don’t have much in the way of funding, being dependent on the central government for any public project.

In the election just passed the ruling CPP Cambodian People’s Party won 1158 communes, the opposition CNRP Cambodian National Rescue Party won 487. One commune was captured by a minor party. This was a loss for the ruling party from the last commune election when they won all but about 30 communes.

The actual vote in Cambodia was much closer with the CPP getting 51% and the CNRP getting 44%, the rest going to minor parties. The opposition does better in Phnom Penh where communes have more people than in rural areas. Those vote totals aren’t much different than the last general election in 2013, still it marks a real challenge to the ruling party’s control. Also some of the contests ran on local issues so might not reflect exactly on the people’s mood as a whole.

Several points stand out, the most remarkable being an astounding turnout of 86%. This is all the more exceptional considering that registration closed last October and many people had to return to their home towns to vote. And since the government created a new voter list for this election, everybody had to register anew. It was also the first time people were allowed to vote where they work, but not everybody was able to change their place of registration.

In contrast Oregon has one of the best turnouts in America. They make it very easy to vote. All voting is by mail, there’s no waiting in line to vote. You can register the day of the election. Every time you go to the Dept of Motor Vehicles they ask you if you want to register. With all that they still can’t beat Cambodia at 86%. The Cambodian people are committed to and passionate about the democratic system.

With some few exceptions the election was considered free and fair, for Cambodia a real achievement. However, while the election itself went off smoothly and peacefully, election observers consider the election to be tainted by pre-election media control and threats of violence on the part of the CPP. The PM went off into his usual threats of civil war and chaos if he doesn’t get reelected. Some of it is pure politics, the scare factor. Teresa May’s approach in the UKs election was similar… You must stay with us for stability and strength or else you’ll get a dangerous man like Jeremy Corbyn.

Some of it you have to take at face value. He has threatened to ‘eliminate’ 100 or 200 people if they try to run a revolution on him. His Defense Minister threatened to ‘smash the teeth’ of anybody who doesn’t accept the result in next year’s general election.

Okay, I got that, but what if he actually loses in a free and fair election? He and his crew actually believe that mayhem will follow the loss of the CPP. After 30 years in power would he graciously accept defeat?

He wants the legitimacy of elections and risks economic chaos if he stages a coup against a duly elected government. At least for a while, there would be sanctions, international pressure and general opprobrium. He’d wreck the very stability he runs on. The CPP has greatly increased prosperity over their long reign and people see great improvement in infrastructure and other facets of government, but displacement, land-grabbing, and widespread impunity and corruption are rankling to the masses.

Sometimes no matter how good a political situation might be, after 30 years people get tired and want to try something new. Also there are storm clouds on the economic horizon. Overbuilding of structures tailored for the upper classes in the capital will cause a general crash in property values, at least in the short term. Cambodians are heavily indebted to microfinance institutions, some 88% of rural Cambodians have borrowed from them. With interest rates so high many can only afford to pay interest and never pay the loans off. Any economic slowdown would cause many to default. I also think dependency on loans from China for many projects puts the country in a tenuous position.

The opposition on the other hand stuck to the issues, corruption, decentralization, money for communes. They have to be nice, otherwise the courts will come after them with a vengeance. But what about the people? There were some for sure who heard the CPPs message and felt pressured to vote for ‘stability’, but clearly most people said, meh, I’ll vote for who I want. A lot of people, in this case 44%, weren’t going to be cowed no matter how serious the threat. When popular activist Kem Lay was gunned down last year in suspicious circumstances mourners were told there could be no march. People defied the authorities and 200,000 showed up. They take their rights seriously.

The big election next year will be the test of how far democracy is allowed to go. Jailing and harassment of the opposition might achieve its goals in the short run but will only strengthen the people’s resolve and resentment of the ruling party’s ham-handed tendencies. It’ll be fascinating to watch.

Meanwhile, elections in the UK have created a miasmic morass of uncertainty and confusion. First there was PM David Cameron pandering to his right wing by holding a referendum on the UK leaving or remaining in the EU. It was a vote he was sure was going to be for staying, but instead went for Brexit. Personally, I think it’s dangerous to base such a momentous decision on a single plebiscite: it should’ve required two votes, especially since the vote was close, 52-48.

A lot of people on all sides of the political spectrum are angry at the status quo. Neoliberal policies born in the Thatcher/Reagan era have transferred wealth and power from the 99% to the 1%. The last time inequality was as extreme in the US was in 1929 and we all know how that turned out.

The same goes for the UK. Cosmopolitans and youth in the cities, as well as Scotland and N Ireland voted to stay. It was small town and rural voters who carried the referendum, people nostalgic for a long past past.

Teresa May who took over as Conservative PM when Cameron resigned after the Brexit vote saw an opportunity a couple months back when polls showed her riding high and called for a special election. She had said she wouldn’t call an election ahead of the one scheduled in the regular sequence of things, but couldn’t resist when polls showed her gaining 100 seats in Parliament.

Jeremy Corbyn her opponent was widely derided in the press and by his own Labour MPs who, being staunchly centrist and pro-business, wanted nothing to do with his leftist populist message. However rank and file Labour party members voted for him as leader by an overwhelming majority: this was seen by the establishment as a death knell for the party’s chances in the next election.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to the vote. The more people saw of May, the less they liked her, for Corbyn the exact opposite happened. Instead of a blowout in favor of the Tories, they lost seats and their parliamentary majority. It was a disaster for the party and a big dose of uncertainty going forward for the nation. The electorate was much less divided this time compared to the last election and both major parties gained a lot of votes. Conservatives went from 37% to 44%, Labour went from 30% to 41%.

As in the Brexit vote, young voters were extremely one side in their preference for Labour. All May could offer was her ‘Strong’ leadership along with austerity, hardship and feed-the-rich tax policies, whereas Corbyn talked about free college tuition, taxing the wealthy, nationalization of the railways and more national holidays. As to the last, the UK has only 5 national holidays, less than any other EU country. More time off to enjoy life was his message… imagine that.

Free tuition was also one of Bernie Sanders’ campaign planks. As in the US his opponents talked about that as if it were some impossible pie-in-the-sky populism, so lets look at that more closely.

I don’t know the details regarding the UK, so I’ll stick to US as an example. Bernie’s free tuition proposal for all public higher education would cost $69 billion per year based on the current number of students. American corporations have more than 2 trillion dollars stashed overseas to avoid paying taxes on it. If they were good corporate citizens (bwahahahaha, have you ever heard such a thing?) brought the money back and paid the 35% corporate income tax rate, that would amount to about $700 billion or enough to pay for the program for 10 years. Wealthy Americans have $20 trillion dollars in assets, if you tax that wealth at 1% you’d raise almost 3 times as much as the annual cost of the program. Just the 10 richest Americans could pay for the program for 5 years and each still have tens of billions to play with.

The program would actually cost more since a lot more people would be able to afford an education, but it would still be a pittance compared to the excessive wealth strewn about in the elite. And really, is it better for society to have the superwealthy wallow in their riches or educate everyone who wants? Cost is not the problem, our priorities are.

Corbyn represented a clash with the establishment and spoke to simple truths. He’s the real thing and youth especially knew it and responded.

Meanwhile May having lost her parliamentary majority has got a hell of a problem on her hands. She gets first crack at forming a new government, but she needs the help of a smaller party. Unfortunately, the only potential partner is a far right party in N. Ireland, but it’s not a good match. She may not be able to form a stable government, which job would then fall to Corbyn.

The other great point of confusion brought about by her loss is the beginning of Brexit negotiations. She campaigned on the idea of a hard Brexit, a complete break with the EU, but many Brits, maybe a majority would prefer a soft Brexit. If they had the option to vote again they might even decide to stay.

I think the Brexit vote will ultimately turn out for the best. The UK has always tried to stymie European cooperation and integration and frequently tried to exempt itself from EU wide policies. Brexit will be a grand experiment. It’s all in flux now, but if the exit goes through, I predict within 5 or 10 years they’ll be asking to join again. With more humility and respect for the whole project the next time.

Finally, France has a new president. Emmanuel Macron came from nowhere one year ago with a new party to sweep the presidential field and elect a majority in parliament. Once again the old-guard centrist parties were vanquished in favor of a totally new voice. In this case he’s decidedly centrist, but with a youthful twist. Not only that Macron himself, at 39, is the youngest French president in modern times, but the youth vote carried him to victory. And even in his very short time in office he’s shown himself to be a strong forceful leader.

His major goal is the reform of labor laws that discourage hiring and firing. In past attempts unions came out in force to thwart that goal but with a new mandate and control of government there’s nothing to stop change now. I have great sympathy for the working class but in this case it protects people who are already working while discriminating against those who aren’t. It also protects underperformers while leaving the young out in the dust. The only mitigating factor in today’s cutthroat world would be a generous safety net to cushion job losses and insecurity.

It is heartening that in all three contests mentioned it was the youth who were forward looking and progressive, the voice and direction of the future, giving hope that politics can change.

As a final note I’d like to bring up a voting system variously called preference, ranked choice or instant runoff, a system currently used in Ireland and Australia. France just held 4 votes in one month. Both the presidential and legislative elections required runoffs for contests in which no candidate achieved a majority. By the fourth vote, voter fatigue pushed turnout down to 40%.

Instant runoff guarantees a majority on the first ballot. The voter chooses candidates by ranking their preference, first, second, third. If there’s no majority winner, the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and their second choice votes are divided up among the remaining candidates. This happens until a candidate gets a majority. For instance, if I were voting in the UK under that system, I’d always vote Green first. It doesn’t matter that I know the Green candidate has no chance of winning because my second choice would be Labour. If the Conservative (or another party candidate) won a majority in the first round, then it didn’t matter who I voted for. If another party didn’t win there’s still a chance my second choice might win.

Instant runoff eliminates the spoiler role minor party candidates play in electing the voter’s worst choice, like the way that votes for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in 2000 helped elect GW Bush. There are lots of reasons why Gore lost the presidency, but the Green party vote for Nader was undoubtedly one of them. With preference voting the Dems and Greens would work together instead of slamming each other.