Trump Corruption

One of the more ridiculous political truisms that is not in fact true, is that uber-rich politicians somehow can't be bribed or otherwise corrupted. The rationale seems to be that since they already have more money than they could ever spend in 100 lifetimes, they don't need any more and would laugh at attempts to buy them. Of course this isn't how the 1% think. Money is a way of keeping score, of amassing even more power, and there is never enough. Trump has taken political graft and corruption to new depths. Here are a few examples.

• The so-called Board of Peace is a private organization masquerading as a government agency. It sprung from the negotiations to end Israel's bombing of Gaza and is supposed to not only be tasked with rebuilding Gaza, but promoting peace throughout the world. Participating nations are required to pay a membership fee of $1 billion. The board is chaired by Donald Trump in perpetuity. Not the president of the United States, but the individual, the person, Donald Trump. He has ultimate control of the funds and veto power of any board actions. 
• The presidential pardon power has never been free from controversy, and presidents of both parties have rewarded their friends and allies, but under Trump it has sunk to a system where any criminal with access to enough money can "contribute" and be pardoned, released from prison and absolved of any consequences of their crime. 
• Trump family, friends and allies are benefitting by being awarded lucrative no-bid contracts
• Qatar gifted the United States a plane that will be refit as an Airforce One, which will be transferred to the Trump library after his term ends
• He's continued to charge the Secret Service full price to lodge his protection detail when he stays at his own properties. 
• The creation of Trump branded crypto currencies has facilitated bribery — just but a few million in TrumpCoin!
• Cabinet members "coincidently" have made large donations to his PAC's
• Criminal and civil investigations against his donors have been dropped
• Allegations that insider trading of energy stocks have been tied to changes in the conduct of the Iran War have been suggested

That's only part of it, but I think you get the idea.

Trump has turned the United States Treasury into his private piggy bank and made bribery the default policy position. 

They Don't Want You To Vote

There's a saying known as Blackstone's ration that it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. We can apply this to voting thusly: It's better that ten non-citizens vote than one citizen be disenfranchised. Make no mistake about it the Republican Party wants to make it more difficult for you to vote. This isn't just about gerrymandering, although gerrymandering is a big part of it. 

The elites who run the modern Republican Party are not concerned about what the voters want. In fact they believe that they know better than the voters. The blue collar Americans who support Republican social warfare and its attendant bigotry and misogyny are merely means to an end. When in power they do little or nothing to benefit that demographic. What they are concerned with is holding on to the power that they have. The biggest obstacle that they have to that objective is changing demographics.  Slowly but surely the white Baby Boomers who constituted the largest bloc of voters are dying off. Younger whites tend to have lower birthrates than minority and immigrant groups. Even though no one demographic group is monolithic, the tendency is for Black Americans, Hispanics and first generation children of immigrants to vote for Democrats. Most of the voter suppression strategies executed by Republicans over the last decade have had an outsize effect on Blacks and Hispanics, and therefore Democrats. 

One of the favorite methods that Republicans use to suppress voting is voter I.D. requirements and its cousin, proof of citizenship requirements. Asked without any background or context, most people would say that they think voter I.D. is a good thing — who could object to requiring people to prove who they are before voting? The problem is that it's a "solution" to a problem that doesn't exist. The amount of fraud that involves someone pretending to be someone else to vote is infinitesimal. And any attempted fraud is caught somewhere in the system that is designed to do so. The rest of the problem is that many of the recent voter I.D. laws have been paired with closings of DMV offices (where most people get their identification) and restrictions on the types of I.D.'s that are accepted. Laws requiring proof of citizenship to vote are relatively new. They're also a "solution" in search of a problem. It's already a requirement that a voter be a citizen. Kansas passed one of these laws in 2012. This article outlines what a nightmare it turned into, including the disenfranchisement of around 35,000 Kansans. I suspect that was the point. 

Here in Nebraska we are seeing how even referenda that we voted for has been watered down, slow-walked, or effectively overturned by the legislature. Several states that had outgoing Republican governors being replaced by Democrats saw the Republican legislature reduce the governor's powers. Trump and his Republican allies are pushing for federal laws to restrict mail-in and early voting. Every action that they take, while not technically taking away anyone's right to vote, incrementally makes it harder to vote, effectively potentially disenfranchising millions. 

Of course the current gerrymander mania is getting the most attention. The unprecedented mid-decade redistricting fueled by Supreme Court decisions unmoored from fifty years of precedent and hard-to-deny racial gerrymandering disguised as partisan jockeying is designed to do one thing: engineer the system so that some votes simply don't count. Think about who shouts the loudest that we're not a democracy. Some people want you to vote, some don't. 

"I know who I'm voting for—but what about all you zombies?" *



* Apologies to the late great Robert Heinlein