Politics The Postal Service, Voting, and Covid

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wizenheimer

wizenheimer

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I've been harping on this for months:

trump and his evil dipshits have a main election strategy, and that piggybacks on top of the long-standing R strategy of disenfranchising minority and democratic voters by gerry-mandering, killing voting locations in D area's, bullshit voter ID laws; and throwing voters off of voting roles. All justified by the blatant lies about insignificant voter fraud

the newest strategy is to defeat vote-by-mail, early voting, and absentee voting by again, lying about fraud AND, trying to shut down the US postal service to take advantage of the pandemic:

* " Donald Trump is doing everything he can to kneecap the U.S. Postal Service, and the American Postal Workers Union wants to be sure everyone knows how high the stakes are. The Postal Service is not just responsible for prescriptions and letters from grandparents during a pandemic and basically every damn thing people in rural areas need shipped to them; American democracy itself is at stake.

With coronavirus likely to still be a major concern in many states come November—thanks, Trump!—more people than ever will be voting by mail. But in California, where voting by mail is already an established practice, more than 100,000 ballots in the March primary were rejected because they weren’t postmarked in time. “We are very concerned, and we want the public to be aware,” APWU President Mark Dimondstein warned, pointing to the possibility of bigger problems in November.

In Virginia, as many as 5% of ballots were rejected because they were postmarked too late. The Postal Service needs the resources to process these ballots quickly enough to get them counted, but Trump—who has made his fear and loathing of mail voting more than clear—wants the opposite.

Reports are spreading that Trump’s new postmaster general is issuing direct orders that would slow down the mail, while in at least one state, postal workers say their state postmaster is going even further to create delays. This all comes against a backdrop of Trump saying things like “The Postal Service is a joke” and making clear that he thinks voting by mail would make him lose in November.

Trump’s hatred of the Postal Service isn’t just about vote by mail, though, and it isn’t just Trump. The Republican Party has long wanted to destroy the USPS for multiple reasons, chief among them that it’s an example of government working well for even the little people (and wildly popular as a result) and that postal jobs have been a critical part of building a Black middle class in the U.S. for generations. Republicans—with too little pushback from most Democrats, it must be said—badly weakened the USPS. Coronavirus has been a major blow, and instead of helping to boost this incredibly important public good, congressional Republicans have followed Trump in blocking aid. That they can weaken safe access to the vote in November is just a bonus to the Republican way of thinking." *

this remains trump's best chance of winning in November and that's to do everything he can to insure that millions of Biden votes either go uncounted or aren't cast at all

everybody who believes in democracy should be alarmed and enraged about this strategy....and the startegy is real, and it's obvious
 
Trump will try every anything to win. He will cheat at all costs, and then say the Dems cheated when he loses.

Voters need fill out and mail ballots in as soon as they get them. For those voting in person, stand in the lines as long as it takes. Make sure your voting registration is up to date. We need this son of a bitch out November 3rd.

Every Dem in office at local and state level needs to make sure there are enough machines and voting locations for their people. Can't let the Republicans disenfranchise voters. Dems need to go all out.
 
BigGameDamian said:
Click to expand...


So uhh... Im confused. He said "no other president"

Then said "the only president in 51 years"

I'll believe the price drops when big pbarma actually loses money. But since this person doesnt care about antthing but money, I'll assume theres a loophole to get them money.

Never believe trump. Hes never given us a reason to. That fucking idiot.
 
Chris Craig said:
Trump will try every anything to win. He will cheat at all costs, and then say the Dems cheated when he loses.

Voters need fill out and mail ballots in as soon as they get them. For those voting in person, stand in the lines as long as it takes. Make sure your voting registration is up to date. We need this son of a bitch out November 3rd.

Every Dem in office at local and state level needs to make sure there are enough machines and voting locations for their people. Can't let the Republicans disenfranchise voters. Dems need to go all out.
Click to expand...

nah, don't worry, chill, it'll be all good. Bidens got this in the bag. Just vote your conscious!
 
EL PRESIDENTE said:
k thx
Click to expand...

I mean, it's a hell of a philosophical quandary, isn't it? You know you're conscious, because you experience it, but how do you know anyone else is? You can't experience their consciousness. And that goes double for people on an Internet forum, where there aren't even bodies to wonder about being empty husks.

So, considering all of that, your vote of faith in our consciousnesses is actually pretty profound and meaningful.
 
Minstrel said:
I mean, it's a hell of a philosophical quandary, isn't it? You know you're conscious, because you experience it, but how do you know anyone else is? You can't experience their consciousness. And that goes double for people on an Internet forum, where there aren't even bodies to wonder about being empty husks.

So, considering all of that, your vote of faith in our consciousnesses is actually pretty profound and meaningful.
Click to expand...

So what you are saying is you're just a bot with no conscious? ;)
 
OLD ARTICLE

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencehunter/2012/08/06/elections-are-a-fraud-if-you-vote-youre-wasting-your-time/#3bbd02e86b6b

Elections are a fraud. If you go to the polls, you are wasting your time, or worse, deluding yourself that you are actually making a difference.

From this, it follows that if you are making campaign contributions or donating to front groups who spend your money on behalf of candidates, you’re wasting your money, or worse, diverting your resources away from political action that actually could make a difference. There’s more to political life than elections although you wouldn’t know it from Karl Rove’s brave new world of perpetual campaigns.

Take it from someone who worked as a Republican apparatchik for many years inside the Washington machine, the American political system is an exercise in mass deception and mass delusion. Elections stupefy the people and give political cover to what Will Rogers called “America’s only native criminal class” (viz., Members of Congress) to commit all manner of felonies in the name of the public interest.

Voting legitimizes the criminal enterprise called government, and it makes voters a party to the crime. And to top it off, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the major party candidates. If you believe otherwise, watch this video.

American elections are a game played between the forty-yard lines, kept carefully within narrow bounds where the two establishment political parties can trade offices back and forth without changing a thing and without endangering their political duopoly.

The establishment parties wail about how difficult it is to cut spending and balance the budget but neither of them puts forth serious proposals to reduce the size of government by, say, bringing the troops home and dismantling the military-industrial-security-state complex; by eliminating all public sector pensions, including their own, and cutting bureaucrats’ salaries and eliminating cabinet departments.

They insist on continuously raising the national debt and giving reckless and corrupt bankers guarantees and bailouts rather than making them eat their losses and take the haircuts they deserve. The permanent political duopoly never gives serious consideration to measures that would restore Americans’ freedoms and personal privacy, such as eliminating all forms of sovereign immunity and holding elected officials, judges and bureaucrats to the same standards as ordinary citizens and requiring all public officials to abide by the same laws as everyone else. It never enters polite Washington conversation to consider subjecting federal laws and regulations to a ballot initiative in which the people have the opportunity to repeal them. Super majority voting requirements to check passionate majorities are fiercely resisted. And it is beyond the pale of social propriety in Washington for candidates of either establishment party to propose repealing the income tax and making the dollar as good as gold by ending the Fed and outlawing fiat money creation by the government or a central bank.

Instead, the parties play the Washington Monument game, conspiring with each other to eviscerate earned Social Security and Medicare benefits from retirees rather than keeping the terms of the deal the government cut with today’s seniors back in the day when they were still working and producing and paying taxes to support the programs. It’s the oldest bait-and-switch gambit in the world.

Class warfare too is a favorite Washington game as the permanent establishment parties stoke envy and jealousy among the people, turning Americans against one another so the hoi polloi don’t turn against them. They deceive people into believing the tax increases coming down the pike will only land on the rich. It’s such a tawdry lie but no politician ever lost money betting on the gullibility of the American voter. It has all played out innumerable times before. They tell the country they just want the rich to pay a little bit more but everyone ends up paying a whole lot more.

The promise of elections is that they establish an efficient negative feedback loop through which the clashing of competitive electoral forces reveals previous errors, elucidates the truth and validates the will of the people by selecting for public office candidates who are capable of and committed to solving pressing public problems.

But it turns out, most of the problems are self-inflicted by the very politicians who demand that voters empower them to fix the mess they created. Quite the opposite of their promise, elections set up a nasty positive feedback loop that legitimizes the destructive acts of the political class. Winning an election is a license to make a new mess under the guise of cleaning up an old mess that career politicians made before the last election. They are perpetual mess machines.

That’s because elections are the very opposite of adversarial legal proceedings and competitive markets. Election campaigns ignore what’s important and obsess over trivia and minutiae. They are theatrical sword fights, not true competition of the marketplace. Election campaigns create their own reality rather than revealing objective reality. They formulate public opinion and distort public perception rather than discovering peoples’ preferences through the clash of competition. They manipulate people’s preferences rather than satisfying them. American politics is a political matrix, a virtual reality World of Political WarCraft. But, the consequences are only too real.

The entire American political system is based on a false syllogism that runs something like this:
  • If you make campaign contributions and work your butt off for political candidates, then
  • You can elect the “right” people to office, and then
  • The candidates you elected to office will be committed to the policies and values you hold and, therefore
  • The candidates you elected to office will promote the “right” laws and regulations and appoint the “right” bureaucrats and judges and, then
  • The “right” laws and regulations you donated money and sweated to see adopted will be enacted into law, and the law will be interpreted and implemented the “right” way by the “right” judges and bureaucrats, and therefore
  • You should make large campaign contributions to and work long hours on behalf of and vote for candidates who promise to change the world the way you want to see it changed. QED—or rather, LOL
To anyone who still buys this crock of malarkey, I say, “Remember John Roberts.” Elections don’t change a thing, and if they did, as Emma Goldman once said, they would soon be illegal.

Anti-abortion advocates take note. You are illustrative of the electoral scam being run in America today. You will never elect the “right” candidates to appoint the “right” judges to overturn Roe v. Wade; you will only succeed in rewarding the same lying politicians and enriching the same PACs and political operators behind them who’ve been running this scam for the last 40 years. Elections don’t work, and you better find a new strategy if you hope to stem the tide of abortions.

Mr. and Ms. American voter: You’ve been had.[/QUOTE]
 
EL PRESIDENTE said:
OLD ARTICLE

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencehunter/2012/08/06/elections-are-a-fraud-if-you-vote-youre-wasting-your-time/#3bbd02e86b6b

Elections are a fraud. If you go to the polls, you are wasting your time, or worse, deluding yourself that you are actually making a difference.

From this, it follows that if you are making campaign contributions or donating to front groups who spend your money on behalf of candidates, you’re wasting your money, or worse, diverting your resources away from political action that actually could make a difference. There’s more to political life than elections although you wouldn’t know it from Karl Rove’s brave new world of perpetual campaigns.

Take it from someone who worked as a Republican apparatchik for many years inside the Washington machine, the American political system is an exercise in mass deception and mass delusion. Elections stupefy the people and give political cover to what Will Rogers called “America’s only native criminal class” (viz., Members of Congress) to commit all manner of felonies in the name of the public interest.

Voting legitimizes the criminal enterprise called government, and it makes voters a party to the crime. And to top it off, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the major party candidates. If you believe otherwise, watch this video.

American elections are a game played between the forty-yard lines, kept carefully within narrow bounds where the two establishment political parties can trade offices back and forth without changing a thing and without endangering their political duopoly.

The establishment parties wail about how difficult it is to cut spending and balance the budget but neither of them puts forth serious proposals to reduce the size of government by, say, bringing the troops home and dismantling the military-industrial-security-state complex; by eliminating all public sector pensions, including their own, and cutting bureaucrats’ salaries and eliminating cabinet departments.

They insist on continuously raising the national debt and giving reckless and corrupt bankers guarantees and bailouts rather than making them eat their losses and take the haircuts they deserve. The permanent political duopoly never gives serious consideration to measures that would restore Americans’ freedoms and personal privacy, such as eliminating all forms of sovereign immunity and holding elected officials, judges and bureaucrats to the same standards as ordinary citizens and requiring all public officials to abide by the same laws as everyone else. It never enters polite Washington conversation to consider subjecting federal laws and regulations to a ballot initiative in which the people have the opportunity to repeal them. Super majority voting requirements to check passionate majorities are fiercely resisted. And it is beyond the pale of social propriety in Washington for candidates of either establishment party to propose repealing the income tax and making the dollar as good as gold by ending the Fed and outlawing fiat money creation by the government or a central bank.

Instead, the parties play the Washington Monument game, conspiring with each other to eviscerate earned Social Security and Medicare benefits from retirees rather than keeping the terms of the deal the government cut with today’s seniors back in the day when they were still working and producing and paying taxes to support the programs. It’s the oldest bait-and-switch gambit in the world.

Class warfare too is a favorite Washington game as the permanent establishment parties stoke envy and jealousy among the people, turning Americans against one another so the hoi polloi don’t turn against them. They deceive people into believing the tax increases coming down the pike will only land on the rich. It’s such a tawdry lie but no politician ever lost money betting on the gullibility of the American voter. It has all played out innumerable times before. They tell the country they just want the rich to pay a little bit more but everyone ends up paying a whole lot more.

The promise of elections is that they establish an efficient negative feedback loop through which the clashing of competitive electoral forces reveals previous errors, elucidates the truth and validates the will of the people by selecting for public office candidates who are capable of and committed to solving pressing public problems.

But it turns out, most of the problems are self-inflicted by the very politicians who demand that voters empower them to fix the mess they created. Quite the opposite of their promise, elections set up a nasty positive feedback loop that legitimizes the destructive acts of the political class. Winning an election is a license to make a new mess under the guise of cleaning up an old mess that career politicians made before the last election. They are perpetual mess machines.

That’s because elections are the very opposite of adversarial legal proceedings and competitive markets. Election campaigns ignore what’s important and obsess over trivia and minutiae. They are theatrical sword fights, not true competition of the marketplace. Election campaigns create their own reality rather than revealing objective reality. They formulate public opinion and distort public perception rather than discovering peoples’ preferences through the clash of competition. They manipulate people’s preferences rather than satisfying them. American politics is a political matrix, a virtual reality World of Political WarCraft. But, the consequences are only too real.

The entire American political system is based on a false syllogism that runs something like this:
  • If you make campaign contributions and work your butt off for political candidates, then
  • You can elect the “right” people to office, and then
  • The candidates you elected to office will be committed to the policies and values you hold and, therefore
  • The candidates you elected to office will promote the “right” laws and regulations and appoint the “right” bureaucrats and judges and, then
  • The “right” laws and regulations you donated money and sweated to see adopted will be enacted into law, and the law will be interpreted and implemented the “right” way by the “right” judges and bureaucrats, and therefore
  • You should make large campaign contributions to and work long hours on behalf of and vote for candidates who promise to change the world the way you want to see it changed. QED—or rather, LOL
To anyone who still buys this crock of malarkey, I say, “Remember John Roberts.” Elections don’t change a thing, and if they did, as Emma Goldman once said, they would soon be illegal.

Anti-abortion advocates take note. You are illustrative of the electoral scam being run in America today. You will never elect the “right” candidates to appoint the “right” judges to overturn Roe v. Wade; you will only succeed in rewarding the same lying politicians and enriching the same PACs and political operators behind them who’ve been running this scam for the last 40 years. Elections don’t work, and you better find a new strategy if you hope to stem the tide of abortions.

Mr. and Ms. American voter: You’ve been had.
Click to expand...

"Old article" and very highschool freshman. It has the sound of someone's first realization that there's corruption in politics and the need to make everyone see it. Yeah, we know there's plenty of corruption in politics. The person who can invent the first political system that outlives its creator and remains corruption-free forever will be humanity's preeminent genius.

That still doesn't mean elections are meaningless. While Democrats and Republicans conspire on some things, their policy differences have pretty huge effects on the lives of a lot of people. While judges don't always vote the way the party that put them in place would like, judicial appointments have a very clear effect on court cases and court cases affect many people's lives too. It's naive to think that any party entirely or even largely has your best interests at heart, but it's equally naive to think that who's in power has no effect on American society and a huge number of lives.
 
eh, waste of time/effort.

most individual presidential votes are invalidated anyway due to the electoral colleges. my vote won't matter either way since I'm in California.

Whatever happens, happens. Fuck it.
 
EL PRESIDENTE said:
my vote won't matter either way since I'm in California.
Click to expand...

That's true, for state-wide elections and the Presidential election. There's a lot of ballot initiatives, some of which will matter (I mean, in 2018, there was a gas tax initiative that would have affected you, at a minimum).

That said, I'm okay with low turnout from conservatives. Not that you're necessarily a conservative, but I'm not really a "everyone get out and vote!" person. I want people who share my priorities to get out and vote!
 
EL PRESIDENTE said:
Whatever happens, happens. Fuck it.
Click to expand...

Whatever happened to "we must burn it all down!"?

C'mon man, you are a revolutionary! Would Che Guevara have said "Whatever happens, happens. Fuck it."? Would Robespierre? Would Trotsky?

"The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall."

barfo
 
barfo said:
Whatever happened to "we must burn it all down!"?

C'mon man, you are a revolutionary! Would Che Guevara have said "Whatever happens, happens. Fuck it."? Would Robespierre? Would Trotsky?

"The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall."

barfo
Click to expand...

I'VE MATURED QUITE A BIT THESE LAST 4 YEARS.
 
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