Fairfield County Democratic Forum

In the face of the hundreds of bills Republicans have introduced into state legislatures to make voting more difficult, and the bill to protect voting rights, S.1, in the Senate, Heather Cox Richardson gives us the larger historical context:

"What is on the table this week is a bill that carries outsized weight for its role in our democracy. In 1854, Democrats pushing the Kansas-Nebraska Act cleared the way for the spread of human enslavement to the new western territories and the subsequent domination of the federal government by elite slave owners. In 1890, Republicans backing the Federal Elections Bill tried, one last time, to protect Black voting before voter suppression ended it for the next seventy years. In 1965, Democrats and Republicans together agreed to end racial discrimination in voting.

In 2021, once again, Congress will be voting on a measure that will define who we are."

June 19, 2021 Yesterday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, made good on his threat to defund the legislature after Democrats walked out on May 30 in order to deny the Republicans the number of people they needed to hold a vote on a bill that dramatically reworked Texas elections.

"In practical terms, it doesn’t matter whether a political figure is genuinely delusional, or whether that person is lying for political gain. In other words, whether or not Trump believes the lie doesn’t matter. The effect is the same....

Such embrace of insanity creates a cycle in which the Republican Party (1) sheds itself of non-believers, (2) finds ways to keep the true believers riled and engaged, and thereby (3) unhinges itself more thoroughly from reality, which (4) makes the Republican Party increasingly dangerous."

The Rise of Conspiracy Theorists - Teri Kanefield As usual, this post started out as a 15-minute video. You can see it here. Harvard Prof. Daniel Ziblatt, one of the authors of How Democracies Die, talks about what he calls the “conservative dilemma” which is this: How can conservatives win national elections with unpopular economic policies? T...

Not a long read, but a clear statement about what workers, and labor, are up against:

"Not only that: if the investors' position is short-term, looking for the highest yield over a single quarter or even less, the fact that higher wages will lead to long-term advantages, like worker retention and productivity, is irrelevant to the investors' interests.

That's the quiet part: between workers and investors, there's a zero-sum game. Forty years of anti-labor policies (undermining unions, workplace protections) culminating in the "gig economy" all-out assault on the idea of employment itself have papered over this core truth."

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