Activism

If you want some insight into the problems that current campaign finance laws create, the Vermont Democratic primary for the U.S. House may prove instructive. Windham County Senator Becca Balint and Lt. Governor Mollie Gray squared off in what proved to be a lopsided race. Balint handily defeated Gray. If Balint wins the general election she will be the first woman and first openly gay member of Vermont’s congressional delegation.

According to VT Digger, ” …LGBTQ Victory Fund, which spent just shy of $1 million on Balint’s behalf in the race, had recently benefited from a $1.1 million donation from Nishad Singh, a top executive at the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. The political action committee’s financial disclosures make clear that the lion’s share of the outside spending supporting Balint’s run came from Singh’s donation.”

The legislation just passed by the Senate, the Inflation Reduction Act, has been sold by Democrats as something that will save seniors a lot of money for prescription drugs. They are all puffed up about how the Medicare program will finally be able to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical manufacturers. It is too little too late and worse than putting lipstick on a pig.

Forty nine million Medicare beneficiaries have bought into the flawed Medicare D program that provides coverage for prescription drugs. The program was created to support the drug and insurance industries. Medicare is only a middleman because enrollees have to pay premiums to insurance companies just for the privilege of being able to buy drugs at outrageous prices.

If someone does not sign up for the program as they initially enroll in Medicare they are forced to pay a penalty. There are many other punitive aspects to the program but, for some people who take more than five or six medications daily, it may save them a little money.

You don’t have to be a lawyer to come to the conclusion that there is enough evidence to convict Donald Trump on a number of charges. If he were a less prominent citizen he would have been found guilty by now and would be sitting in a jail cell.

But our criminal justice system does not provide a great deal of equality when it comes to prosecuting and punishing people who break the law. The more money and influence you have the less likely you are to be punished.

The hearings being conducted by the January 6 committee are providing the findings of fact that are needed to prosecute Trump. The committee is doing much of the work that the justice department needs to be done to move forward with a case. They are doing a good job of showing how Trump and his allies planned an insurrection to seize control of the government in an attempt to subvert the constitution and the rule of law.

The current U.S. Supreme Court majority has created an institution that has little regard for the world we live in. Recent decisions by the court make it clear that they want to reconstruct a world that existed in 1788 rather than provide guidance for a world in the year 2022.

When supreme court justices hide behind the original wording and intent of the constitution they deny all of us the possibility of living in a world that has evolved since the founding of this country.

In a recent article in The Nation Louis Michael Seideman provides a perspective on the supreme court that makes it clear just how flawed the court is as well as pointing out that the U.S. Constitution has become irrelevant to the way we live today.

July 1, 2042- Twenty years after Roe v. Wade was overturned the Unites States is in the midst of a boom in the construction of women’s prisons as well as a revival of the warehousing of young children in orphanages.

Although the Supreme Court, as well as a majority of states, outlawed abortion women have continued to have the procedure done despite the legal consequences. When the law first changed there was a surge in abortions throughout the U.S. because the mechanisms for punishing those who defied the law were not well established.

As states changed their abortion laws and developed procedures for punishing women who had abortions, as well as those who provided the service, law enforcement agencies began to arrest women, nurses and doctors in numbers that were unanticipated. Thirty five states also passed laws that made it illegal for women to go to a state where abortion is legal if they live in a state banning abortion. The Supreme Court upheld states’ rights to punish women crossing state lines for abortions.

I have been writing weekly commentaries for 28 years and I am beginning to realize that the time has come to think outside of the box. All those words may have had some impact on the world. People have learned a few things, but I remain impatient for the kind of change I would like to see.

So I have decided to try something new. I will write what might be called wishful thinking news stories, not fake news. These will be stories written in a news format that describe how the world might be if we made some of the changes that many Americans would like to see.

It usually happens when a president is elected. His politics are antithetical to mine and I wonder how my country could have elected such a person who will set the U.S. on a bad course. I harbor thoughts of leaving the U.S. and moving to a place that is more aligned with my vision for a better world.

But there are so many political, economic and social changes happening in this country now that I am feeling the same unease I felt when the Bushes and Trump were elected. It has nothing to do with Biden, although I would like to see better positions on a number of issues.

I have come to accept the fact that the U.S. political process is so broken that it will never be fixed in my lifetime or in the lifetime of many more generations.

There is something programmed into the human psyche that hopes for a better world than the one we have. Hope is important.

The problem is that what some people think makes a better world can be at odds with what others think. That is the world as it is.

When the pandemic unfolded it looked as though the leaders in this country were finally beginning to understand how dysfunctional our health care non-system is. It became clear that those at the lower end of the economic ladder did not have access to the same level of health care as those with more resources.

A strong culture of lying has developed among world leaders as well as the people who support them. That culture is growing and it is able to turn lies into a pseudo-reality by repeating them so often that people start to believe them.

It might seem reasonable to believe that as the human species has evolved it would move in a direction of embracing the truth.

That has not happened.

When Hitler was committing atrocities too much of the world stood by and did not do enough to protect the 12 million people whose lives became just one of the horrors of war. People who survived the Holocaust try to keep the memory of those events alive because they don’t want that kind of horror to play out again.

What we are witnessing now in Ukraine is the systematic brutality and elimination of a population of people deemed to be expendable by Putin and the Russian war machine. We are able to see the images of what war does to people and places at a level of detail never before possible and that should be enough to force world leaders to act to stop the Russian war machine.