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Why we aren't getting any stimulus

1. America's retirement system is woefully inadequate for the majority of Americans. After paying 13.4% of their income into Social Security, the average American doesn't have any money left over to save in an index fund. This means the majority of Americans both struggle in retirement and have no rainy day fund for if they lose their job before they retire.
2. Amway and other Multi-Level Marketing scams donate billions to the Republican Party.
3. Betsy DeVos becomes the Secretary of Education to undermine our education system. The DeVos family made their billions from Amway. By having fewer college graduates, Amway has more people they can prey upon. It also gives this predatory industry a voice at the table of every cabinet meeting.
   
4. America hits a recession and the Federal Government provides only a one time payment to average Americans. The $4 trillion stimulus package ($6000 per capita) mostly goes to large companies.
5. Small businesses have to lay off their employees, and many shut down permanently.
6. Millions of Americans are out of work and without any money saved due to our inadequate retirement system, regressive tax code, and lack of aid to average Americans. Because of this, millions of Americans are looking for anything to pay their bills.
7. Multi-Level Marketing companies target the millions of Americans who are unemployed and unable to pay their bills, knowing full and well that they will make BILLIONS off of people struggling, and that it is going to be a long time until our economy restructures due to a lack of a functioning government.
8. Wages are driven down and for a time the largest companies who got bailed out are able to pay lower labor costs.
9. Banks don't have money to lend out to new businesses, slowing the growth of our economy, keeping the competition for labor at a minimum, which drives wages down.
10. Small companies are going to have a hard time finding customers without any stimulus boosting our demand curve, making starting a business a daunting task. Getting investment without customers is impossible.
    

I despise every company whose business model is built on harming people.

Thank God we avoided Hillary Clinton's emails.

In November we will choose whether we will elect a man who is downplaying the extent of the damage of this epidemic, and using this opportunity to eliminate the competition for the businesses he and his cabinet own.

Our alternative is to vote for the man who was Vice President when health care was expanded to include disabled Americans.

Remember to vote for Joe Biden in November.

General Lee was no hero

Ike was wrong about General Lee. Lee was a slaveholder and had no loyalty to these United States. As soon as Virginia seceded from the Union, Lee saw nothing wrong with being the leading general in the war which killed more American soldiers than any other war.

He was a veteran of the Mexian American War, but in my opinion when he decided to lay arms against his country because of his conflict of interest as a slaveholder, he lost all honor.

If I had an array of men responsible for killing more American soldiers than any other, General Lee would have to be on that list.

Ike having a picture of General Lee in the White House is a slap in the face to every family like mine who lost loved ones defending the United States in the Civil War.

Respect the troops.

https://youtu.be/mOrtOlU8f9Y

Jen Perelman for Congress

On January 20, 2005 George W. Bush was sworn in for a second term. He had successfully eroded our civil liberties with the PATRIOT ACT, gotten us into an oil war with Iraq, and was already starting to rattle sabres with Iran. Virginian Terry McAuliffe was the chair of the DNC during this election. The Republican party gained another 4 seats in the Senate for  a total of 55 seats and another 5 seats in the House for a total of 232 seats. Terry McAuliffe was then replaced as the chair of the DNC by Vermonter Howard Dean. In 2006 we got the House, along with 6 governorships, and in 2008 we got the first Democratic trifecta since 2 January 1995. The future looked very bright. We had a young and popular President who supports universal health care, free community college, and expanding AMTRAK. If this wasn't good enough, he also was the first person of color in the office. He preserved more land than any other President in history, and he wouldn't have been able to do any of that if it wasn't for Chair Howard Dean's leadership. We had a majority of State Legislatures, briefly had a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, and over 300 seats in the House. Howard Dean had done a phenomenal job of historic proportions.

In a fairly unorthodox move, he stepped down after providing the biggest victory for progressive politicians in American history and he was replaced by Virginian Tim Kaine. A few things went very wrong at that point. Democratic politicians who did not cooperate on major issues, including health care, education, and transportation, were not held accountable for their votes by the party. As a consequence there was no party unity on major issues and the Republicans got a majority of governorships in a census year as well as a majority in the House. By doing this, they were able to gerrymander many different states, guaranteeing continued Republican dominance of the House for the next 8 years.

Kaine rightfully stepped down after that defeat which he had engineered. He engineered it by continuing to support Democrats who stepped away from the party line, which made a lot of voters feel like there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. By giving them that much leeway, he significantly weakened President Obama and many voters, myself included, feel betrayed to this day. Tim Kaine significantly contributed to the animosity of the Democratic National Committee by Progressives by allowing too much leeway for members of Congress. We live in a country which uses first past the post, and because of this we have a two party system. We don't have a third party to hold conservative Democrats accountable. If he had held Democrats accountable by guaranteeing that they will be primaried if they do not support the President, they would have towed the line and we could have gotten a majority in 2010 by expanding our turnout.

He was replaced with Floridian Debbie Wasserman Schultz. She followed Tim Kaine's strategy which follows four major tenants:

1. Do not support state legislative races. They need to raise money first on their own in order to get any support. This is what I heard from my party leaders in my local legislative district.
2. Members of Congress have almost complete leeway in how they vote. If a Democrat votes against the party line, oh well.
3. Do not rile Republicans. This means if they decide to gerrymander states and erode federal laws regarding voting rights and other critical laws, that is their right in our Jacksonian democracy. Do not exercise our power to bring rogue states in line with Federal law using the courts.
4. We must appeal to the median voter.

In 2014 we lost the Senate as a result of these policies, and as a direct consequence of Wasserman Schultz's utter incompetence and fear of doing something meaningful, combined with having Tim Kaine as Vice President, whose biggest legacy is the Speakership of both John Boehner and Paul Ryan, Hillary Clinton lost the Presidency in 2016. As a consequence of the actions of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh are probably both going to be on the Supreme Court until around 2050.

After working in politics for 5 years, my conclusion from talking to thousands of voters is that median voter theorem is complete bullshit.

Also, a consequence of having some political experience under my belt is I believe very strongly that every inaction when you are in a position of power is itself an action.

She is still in the House today after engineering the election of Donald Trump through her cowardice. I do not believe she is qualified to be a canvasser for the Democrats or any left of fascist initiative after her gross incompetence and negligence put us in this situation.

Fortunately, for the people in her home district, there is a fantastic opportunity to end the career of the person who put Donald Trump in power through her actions. Over the last week on her twitter account, Jen Perelman has endorsed paid family leave, has spoken out about moderates trying to rehabilitate the image of the war criminal George W. Bush, she is the co-chair of her local League of Women Voters, and an attorney.

But most importantly, she did not engineer the election of Donald Trump.

If you are able, please donate to her campaign today https://secure.actblue.com/donate/jen2020.

If you are able to donate or not, please follow her on her Twitter @JENFL23.

These are the 10 things people don't realize about elections

George Washington

1. First Past the Post comes with several major flaws. It creates the spoiler effect which means that with more than two candidates no candidate can win a majority, and this can lead to politicians getting elected who most of the voters oppose.

2. The only system that is worse for people than First Past the Post is a delegate system. This is what we use for the Electoral College and Presidential Primaries. Delegates are worse because they make the minority vote in states have no say in the general election outside of Nebraska and Maine. Even within Nebraska, if you are in the minority in your congressional district, your vote has no impact on the national result. This is contrary to the idea of one person one vote, which is the fundamental principal our democracy is based on.

3. There have been 4 times in American history where the next President lost the popular vote. The first time was with John Quincy Adams versus the genocidal maniac who had an unhealthy addiction to duels, Andrew Jackson. The second time was Rutherford B. Hayes being defeated by Samuel J. Tilden in 1876. The third time was when Al Gore beat George W. Bush. The 4th time was when Hillary Clinton became the first woman to win the popular vote, in 2016. To date, no woman who has been nominated to their party has lost the popular vote for President

4. The Electoral College was formed to defend slavery. If slaves had not been counted as 3/5 of a person, than abolitionist President John Adams would have been elected over known rapist slaveholder Thomas Jefferson in 1800. The Electoral College defended slavery again in 1824, and millions of people were held in bondage for 60 more years because of that most peculiar of American Institutions.

5. The American Primary System was completely reformed in 1972. Before then, most States didn't have a popular vote for the Presidency at all, and the Presidential candidates were selected by party insiders. In 1972 that changed and soon everyone had the opportunity to vote for the Presidential Primary.

6. The Presidential Primary drives down turnout. The Presidential Primary is detrimental to American democracy in several ways. Combined with the peculiar institution of the Electoral College it fully shuts out third party voices and gives significant power to those who are already well connected. It starts in two of the whitest states in the United States, and by the time most people have voted, many candidates have already dropped out. It makes America's election season last over a year, unlike any other country. This draws on the American psyche, distracting from what our government is currently doing, distracts from local races, and is bad for Democracy.

7. America's original system was more similar to the Parliamentary systems of Europe. The first thing that people forget is that Electors weren't originally locked into the votes of the People. Similar to a Parliamentary system where the ordinary person has almost no say at all on who their head of government will be. Whereas in the UK the Prime Minister is elected by Parliament, our Electoral College is equal in size to Congress (until the 23rd amendment which granted the District of Columbia 3 electoral college votes) and the electors were decided on a state by state basis. The Marshall Court in the early years of the United States significantly moved us towards a more centralized government, particularly with multiple decisions that moved power from the States to the Federal government.

John Marshall

8. America didn't vote for our Senators until 1913. Until then they were elected by our State Legislatures. In the early days you had to own land to vote at all in most states. Suffrage in the United States has been constantly expanding ever since independence, and the movement now for universal absentee voting and ranked voting, is just continuing that American tradition of constantly expanding freedom further. Being the first modern democracy with the oldest extant Constitution in the world gives us a unique standing among the world's democracies in terms of what has been tested and tried here first, or has been adopted from abroad.

9. In 2004 Howard Dean broke against tradition by focusing on small donors and extending his social media as a major campaigning tool. Until this time, Democrats had focused substantially on bigger donors. Howard Dean soon became the Chair of the DNC after his failed Presidential bid. As chair his leadership gave Democrats the Senate, then the house, and then Barack Obama used the same strategy to win the primary and then win the general election in a historic landslide, becoming only one of two men since 1960 to win a majority of the popular vote twice. Politics has taken a long time to adopt content marketing. Politics has taken a long time to adopt content marketing. There is a huge opening to become a dominant player in this subsection of the market this November with legislative and congressional races happening across the United States, and also in other democracies. This could be the year that this changes. Since Howard Dean focused on smaller donors in 2004, this led to Barack Obama leading a successful grassroots campaign in 2008 which led him to win the Presidency. Content marketing could be the next major political innovation in politics which determines who wins and loses campaigns. HieroFlux is ready to be the company which leads the way in this sector. Focus on legislative and local races has significantly increased over the last 10 years, and out of 7,383 state legislators in the country, there is a lot of room for an increase in marketing in this area which will determine winners and losers in the election this November.

10. America is right now going through a significant shift in our election system. For the first time in history, multiple states used ranked voting in the Democratic Primary and 2020 will be the first Presidential election in history where one state will use ranked voting. Ranked voting ensures that every vote counts as long as the voter fills out their ballot properly. Many other states have growing FairVote movements today to continue to improve our elections, so that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from this Earth.

Published using Hieroflux