What is to be Done? (to Save US Democracy)

If they wish to save democracy, the leadership of the Democratic Party must start actually leading, showing more (some?) courage and genuine outrage, and never compromising with authoritarians.

The Trump administration violates the law and constitution on a daily basis. The argument that as the minority party Democrats are helpless is bogus. The Republicans have never been helpless when in the minority. They have used every mechanism possible, fair and foul, to stop, slow down, amend, and derail Democratic measures. 

Democrats, at least the leaders and corporate Dems, have been too nice. They are playing by the rules of a game their opponents have changed beyond recognition. The old game is over. If the leaders of the Democrats can't lead, they should get out of the way. Only radical action can impede Trump. Democrats must stop cooperating with him and his henchpeople. Do not vote for any Republican measures that advance his authoritarian agenda.

To be worthy of their name, Democrats must join with other  democratically minded people and propose a measures designed to protect and advance democracy, as well as reverse the anti-democratic measures of recent years.

I have drawn up what I call the People's Charter for the USA. It derives its name from the democratic program drawn up in the UK in the 1830s. It had six points or demands. Five became law. My charter is longer but I believe American citizens should demand all of them.  

• 1.       Abolish the Electoral College, a thoroughly anti-democratic institution. People in other countries find the Electoral College bewildering and idiotic. Because it is.
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• 2.       Prohibit gerrymandering. Create an independent, non-partisan commission to draw up boundaries of congressional constituencies. This is done in other democratic countries.
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• 3.       Overturn the Citizens United decision of SCOTUS. It is responsible for hugely increasing the influence of big money in elections. Nothing like this exists in other democracies.
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• 4.       Prohibit political ads. They are virtually useless as information, misleading or untrue, insulting, and damned annoying. Prohibited in most democratic countries.
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• 5.       Introduce proportional representation or ranked voting to end the stranglehold of the corrupt two-party system. Some people will argue that this would make efficient government impossible. Ask yourself, is what we have now efficient? 
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• 6.     Make the Senate representative of the country. It gives the less populated states as a group more power than the highly populated states. California with 40 million people and Wyoming with only half a million have the same number of senators. This is grossly undemocratic.
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• 7.       Make voting simple, safe, and convenient. Voting is an obligation. It should not be a survival test, torture, or a danger. Eliminate voter suppression of all kinds. Other democratic countries do not try to limit the number of people who vote. They encourage voting. 
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• 8.      Fund public education adequately and fairly. Public college and university education should be free or cheap, as it was when I went to college and university in the late 60s and early 70s. Why are we short-changing our children and dumbing down our voters? 
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• 9.      Establish a national, affordable health care plan that covers everyone. The present for profit system is a disgrace and an international laughingstock. The system costs the US twice as much as in other developed nations, and the results are worse in terms of mortality and morbidity. Scores of millions are uncovered or inadequately covered. Health insurance must be affordable, universal, and disconnected from employment. The present system turns many workers into virtual serfs tied to their jobs.
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• 10.       Require the payment of a living (not minimum) wage for all adult workers. Why should workers have to have two or even three jobs to make ends meet?
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• 11.     Reduce the period between the election of the president and the inauguration to two or three weeks, preferably less. This would have minimized Trump's ability to create havoc after the "stolen election" of 2020. In the UK and many other countries, a new administration generally takes over immediately after the election. This can be done because the parties have already selected the members of the cabinet and other ministers.
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• 12.     Reform the judiciary. Judges should be selected by professional bodies, not by presidents and Congress. This includes the Supreme Court, whose bias towards Trump is flagrant and dangerous. Justices of the SCOTUS and all judges should serve fixed terms, not for life. They should operate according to a code of ethics established by an independent board of legal and political scholars. 

Effective, fair federal gun control is imperative. I did not include it under these reforms but it would follow if they were implemented. Not possible? Check out other democratic, developed countries. 

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Finding a Scapegoat for Pandemics: Black Death to Trump Virus

Ever since Donald Trump stopped calling Covid-19/coronavirus a hoax, he has been engaged in an age-old response to disease epidemics and pandemics: finding a scapegoat. Rather than accept his own incompetent response to the pandemic (impossible), he has engaged in blaming a host of nefarious villains. 

Trump's scapegoats have included everyone who "failed to warn him" or "created the virus." The list is long and grows longer by the day: Democrats, immigrants, the "Lamestream" Media, the Chinese, Obama, Hilary, and the World Health Organization (WHO), and Dr. Fauci. Trump, of course, is not alone in scapegoating. Some of his supporters blame all of the above, plus Bill Gates, libruls, commies, gays, single sex marriage, and Jews.

The word "scapegoat" derives from a practice described in the Bible (Leviticus 16). The original scapegoats were actual goats. A rabbi would symbolically load up a goat with all the sins of the community and send it into the wilderness. Goodbye sins.

In more modern times, a scapegoat is usually a person or group of persons blamed for a disaster. The disaster might be a famine, an earthquake, floods, or as in the current case, a deadly disease. Throughout history, people have tended to blame "others" for mysterious deaths, especially on a large scale. The scapegoats have included people of different religions and cultures, minorities, "witches," heretics, women, and the poor.

European Christians often blamed Jews for epidemics, notably during the Black Death of the 14th century. Then and in later outbreaks, Christians claimed the Jews had poisoned the wells. Mobs killed thousands of Jews. Yet the plague was never called the Jewish Disease. 

Nor was it called the Chinese Disease. The plague probably originated in China, but few Europeans were aware of that in the 14th century. In more recent times, Westerners have accused the Chinese (and Asians more generally) for epidemics and pandemics. The 1890s cartoon below, from a San Francisco newspaper, condemns the city's Chinatown and Chinese immigrants as the source of malaria, smallpox, and leprosy. 

  
In 1900, whites in Honolulu and San Francisco blamed the Chinese community for an outbreak of plague in their cities, the first ever in the United States. The entire Chinese population of the two cities was quarantined and demonized. In Honolulu, an attempt to use fires to purify the air and burn out the plague resulted in wildfires and the destruction of 7000 homes in Chinatown. (Below: Quarantine line around Chinatown, Honolulu and fire there, Jan. 1, 1900)

In the USA, many people blamed Jews for the 1892 cholera epidemic, which coincided with the arrival of a large Jewish migration from Russia. Americans also blamed Irish immigrants arriving in the 1830s and 1840s for cholera and other diseases.

In the 1980s, many people blamed gays for the AIDS epidemic. The original name for the disease, GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) did not help. Later, many Americans accused Haitians as the source.

The disease for which blame has been most shared is syphilis, which first broke out in Europe around 1500. The Spanish, who appear to have been the first to experience it, blamed Native Americans, and that remains a common view. Tahitians called it the British disease after Captain Cook's visit in 1769.

The English called it the French Disease, the French called it the Italian Disease, and the Italians reciprocated. The Dutch called it the Spanish Disease, For the Russians, syphilis was the Polish Disease.Turks called it the Christian Disease, the Japanese the Portuguese Disease. 

After the Civil War and emancipation of the enslaved, many Americans viewed syphilis as a black disease. Nearly everybody blamed "loose women" but rarely did anyone blame loose men. Everybody knew that most human troubles originated with Eve and Pandora.

Scientists (especially the mad kind) are another favorite scapegoat for diseases. They have often been accused of producing killer microbes in their labs, then releasing them on the world either intentionally or from absent-minded carelessness. Americans accused Chinese scientists of cooking up the Covid-19 virus. The Chinese government accused American scientists of the same thing. 

A popular explanation among conspiracy theorists, mainly in the US, is that the Chinese 5G network is the culprit. Another is that Bill Gates created it.