Fluid ImaginationFrom Democrats, Here’s How To Lose in 2022. And Deserve It.
The rules are not separate from the issues. If you want effective Covid response, if you want robust gun violence prevention, if you want a strong economy, then you need a true American democracy.
Yesterday, an outgoing, one-term President continued to feed the anxieties, fears, and anger of his most committed followers and directed them to take their grievances to the Capitol building, where our elected representatives were following their constitutional duty to certify the election of a new President-Elect.
In response, the crowd of mostly white Americans marched from their rallying point towards the Capitol carrying flags celebrating their “dear leader” and the lost cause of defeated traitors, where one can only imagine they expected to be stopped by a strong show of force from the Capitol police, the District police, and the National Guard.
Instead, some of the police opened the gates. While some drew their weapons to protect the House chamber once the Capitol had been breached, other police officers chose to pose for selfies or chose to help older members of the mob with the building’s difficult steps.
Did Trump’s mob expect to breach what should have been one of the most secure locations in the United States? How could they have? The Capitol police is made up of more than 2,300 officers and civilians and has an annual budget of roughly $460 million, which is more than the entire city of Atlanta. Additionally, the media had reported earlier in the week that the Mayor of Washington D.C. called in almost 350 members of the National Guard to provide crowd support. And then of course, you had the District police, and while they’re not responsible for protecting the Capitol, they are responsible for maintaining order in the city.
As they marched toward the Capitol, members of the mob should have rightly expected to run into some resistance.
But they didn’t. So they kept walking, scaled walls, broke windows, wandered the halls, and took selfies on the floor of the Senate. Civilians and police officers were injured in the chaos, and at least four people died, including one by gunfire [UPDATE 1/8/21: With the death of Capitol Police officer, Brian Sicknick, the death toll of Wednesday’s insurrection has risen to five].
Had the Capitol’s security forces done their job, this would have been just another example of an assembly of citizens standing outside of the institutions of their democratically-elected government seeking redress for their grievances (grievances based on a mass delusion, but grievances nonetheless).
Instead, we had a mob damaging and looting the People’s House, and acting to influence the policy of our government by intimidation.
Everyone involved should be held accountable for their actions. The President should be removed from office immediately for inciting an insurrection against the authority of the United States and giving comfort thereto. The Sergeants at Arms of the United States House and Senate and the Chief of the Capitol Police should be fired for incompetence. The DoD officials who “denied a request by [the D.C. Mayor]” for the National Guard to restore order in the Capitol ought to be charged with causing or attempting to cause “disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty by any member of the military of the United States.”
But as I said at the beginning, let’s not overdo it. All government officials who had a hand in this insurrection ought to be held accountable. All identifiable members of the mob ought to be held accountable.
But this is not the end of the Republic. Insurrections have happened before. They will happen again.
From How Mitch McConnell Has Changed The Senate:
The fundamental conflict in American politics is whether we will, going forward, be a true multiethnic democracy, or whether we will backslide into something closer to minoritarian rule. The crisis McConnell has forced can play out in many ways, some of them terribly destructive. But the certain path to backsliding is simple inaction, in which the status quo persists, minoritarian rule perpetuates itself, and the 20th-century understanding of the US Senate is used to choke off multiethnic democracy in the 21st century.
I haven’t posted for over a month. I’ve posted articles in other places, but nothing here on Fluid Imagination. Part of the reason had to do with my job. During the last month, I wrote, built, and launched a new website for my school, and before that, I spent most of my free time developing the second-quarter schedule for all of our staff and students. You see, along with teaching, I’m also an administrator and marketing person, so things can get a little busy.
But a lot of things have been happening over the last month: sexual predators facing the music, President Trump’s administration circling the drain, Congressional Republicans stealing trillions of dollars from the future, the potential loss of Internet freedom, and so much more. Here’s a quick recap of what I’ve missed.
First and foremost is the continued outing of powerful sexual predators, assaulters, and harassers. While we can all applaud the takedown of powerful sleaze bags, in my own life, I’ve seen the #metoo movement help individuals come out against their not-so-famous assaulters. Several months ago, a person I know had fallen victim to a sexual predator, but with all of the shame around the issue, they had not gone to the police about it. Following the publicity around these other cases though, and the way the predators have actually seen some consequences from their actions, the person I know gained the confidence to press charges against her perpetrator. What we’ve seen on the news is just a drop in the bucket, but if the (apparently) changing perceptions of assault victims continues towards belief rather than doubt, the world might actually improve a little bit.
Next, of course, is the way Comrade Trump’s administration continues to flounder in light of the Russia investigation. Without a doubt, the best explainer of all this stuff has been the Twitter feed of a professor of law and journalism at the University of New Hampshire, Seth Abramson.
America needs to understand what Flynn's December negotiations with the Russians *were*:
Flynn—Trump's top national security advisor—was negotiating whether the Kremlin would be REWARDED or PUNISHED for violating U.S. national security by trying to steal the election for Trump. pic.twitter.com/5tRRhgaXHJ
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) December 3, 2017
If you’re not following Abramson on Twitter, get on it. The guy deserves a Pulitzer for the work he’s been doing.
Then, of course, there’s the incredible distribution of wealth from the 99% to the 1%, also known as H.R. 1: Tax Cuts & Jobs Act, which according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office will increase the deficit by $1.437 trillion over the next 10 years. The Senate snuck this thing through in the most ridiculous and cynical manner possible, and every relatively moderate Republican ought to be ashamed of themselves (the other Republicans are long past the ability to actually feel shame).
Along with reporting on that increase in the deficit, the CBO reports that “it is not practicable for a macroeconomic analysis to incorporate the full effects of all of the provisions in the bill…within the very short time available between completion of the bill and the filing of the committee report.” In other words, this bill is not only messed up from a content perspective, but from a process perspective too. By now, you’ve heard that this 400+ page bill was passed before anyone had the time to read it, and that the bill itself still contained handwritten amendments since they wouldn’t take the time to print out the changes.
Next, there’s the announcement from the chairman of the FCC that they’d like to repeal the rules that protect net neutrality. This is an incredibly colossal mistake, putting the freedom of the Internet into the corrupt and greedy hands of Comcast, Verizon, and others.
One member of the FCC, who posted in Op-Ed in the LA Times under the headline, “I’m on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality,” writes, “There is something not right about a few unelected FCC officials making such vast determinations about the future of the internet…Before my fellow FCC members vote to dismantle net neutrality, they need to get out from behind their desks and computers and speak to the public directly…When they do this, they will likely find that, outside of a cadre of high-paid lobbyists and lawyers in Washington, there isn’t a constituency that likes this proposal.”
Nobody but the telecoms want this bill. No real human being has complained about having an open internet that allows low-income individuals to access the same websites as high-income individuals, and mom-and-pop and startup organizations to access the same audience as multinational corporations such as Microsoft and Google.
No one wants this policy change. But because the FCC is run by a former Verizon employee, the policy change is going forward. And that sucks.
So…that should bring us up today. Hopefully, my next post won’t be another month from now.