Every week I quote Stalin: “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”
IMHO we won but.....Republicans and Russian psy ops intimidated a lot of would be voters and the count was corrupted to get the result they desired, as you have doicumented, Thom.
I think his downfall may be that many Congressional Republicans did not sign up to be members of the axis of evil.
They are Republicans. They ran with him. But their consituents and especially their donors dictate what they do. We only need 3 House members to trigger everything. Shared government. They won't become Democrats.
I think it takes a lot of negotiating. The least common denominator is national security. On Friday, Heather Cox Richardson documented that Mike Turner (R.AL) and Roger Wicker (R. MS) complained about National Security. Lots more have called Trump a liar on Putin/Ukraine. I published the letter I got from Rick Scott. Thom Tillis. Murkowski. Many more.
Jerry Weiss has identified a number fof candidates and we have 3 Cuban American MAGATs here who have recently discovered they are DEI and many of their donors and consituents are upset. We have more Canadians here than some Canadian provinces -- most with dual citizenship.
Hoefully behind the scenes there is discussion about shared government. Hakim Jeffries can offer chairmanships of key committees to Republicans.
Legally concession means nothing, but publicly, psychologically, propaganda (psyops) wise concession means everything.
IMO, Biden has been absent almost the whole four years, If not mentally absent (doddering old man suffering from early Alzheimers, dementia or a stroke), he was groomed in the Senate to be an ameliorator, bipartisan, friends across the aisle, politics was never about principle, politics is about re election and padding your wallet.
Biden was known in the Senate as the senator from Wall Street.
Delaware is the state in where 600 of the US most powerful and influential corporations are chartered, financial, insurance, chemical petroleum and even defense.
That's because of the Charter wars, that started when J D Rockefeller advertised that he would move his corporation to the state that presented the most favorable corporate charter law.
NJ won that battle, but Delaware saw what happened, and came up with an even better Corporate Charter Law, and voila we have this small state with large out of sized influence, I imagine it is the same for NJ, and that is why we get the Menendez and Chris Christies.
1885, Standard Oil of Ohio moved its headquarters from Cleveland to its permanent headquarters at 26 Broadway in New York City. Concurrently, the trustees of Standard Oil of Ohio chartered the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey (SOCNJ) to take advantage of New Jersey's more lenient corporate stock ownership laws.
As a former American and now an Australian I can observe that our lawmakers are forced to listen to their constituents more because we all vote. Our political course does not swing so wildly left or right because of this. But our system of government is more parliamentary in nature where the PM is the leader of the party who gets the most seats. Ironically the PM can change in the party room behind closed doors, and often has in recent decades. People vote therefore for the party whose policies they prefer rather than for a personality for head of state. This makes it easier to avoid cultish voters as MAGA voters are. We are just as proud to vote as Americans and it is made easy to do so.
I've watched every episone of Total Control and IMHO Australia even with mandatory voting is more like the US than western Europe. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9318588/
Great idea! But what if the voting electronics really have been manipulated and your vote won't be recorded right? Under those circumstances compulsory voting would just be a smoke screen, right? electiontruthalliance.org
Maybe we will have compulsory voting in the 4th Reich of the Rich. Trusk will want to know who doesn't like them, so they can punish, like Trump is punishing Governor Mills of Maine, for defying him.
Yep, I read it too, that is why I mentioned it. HCR is just one of my sources of information and inspiration.
You are right about all votes in communist countries are almost unamimous, 100% is to obvious, so it is usually something like 95%, but not just communist countries Daniel, there are only three such left, Cuba, NKorea and China It is autocracies, and they are legion., even pseudo democracies like Pakistan, Hungary and now India.
In Iran you have a mullahcracy, ruled by ayatollahs, and a figurehead president elected, supposedly, by popular vote, and even he is approved by the mullahs before he gets on the ballot.
Afghanistan is a total theocracy, and my educated guess is that Syria will be that way too. HTS is an offshoot of Al Qaeda and is already showing it's theocratic tendencies.
Compulsory voting would impress upon people the importance of involvement and participation. But would it re-enforce the recognition that people need to be informed to have an idea of which way to go and how to use their opinion to bring improvements? Would more people have voted for Trump last November had voting been mandatory, or would more people have voted for Kamala Harris? With the screwy Electoral College, would it have mattered, either way? Oddly, compulsory school attendance was not on the list of things people are required to do. But of course, minors are not real people, and they do not deserve to be treated as autonomous individuals with bodily freedom, intellectual capacity, a right to privacy and the opportunity to spend time in rumination and contemplation without adult interference, or the dignity of enjoying the privilege of defining education for themselves, without coercive curricular intervention imposed through official channels. Maybe that has something to do with why Americans are so adamantly resistant to the concept of compulsory voting. Maybe they are getting tired of being behavior modified and pushed around. Maybe it never was a democracy in any real sense.
You just can't help yourself can you Robert,what started out as good comment, degenerated into your pet peeve. I am so sorry that you had such a bad experience in public school.
But the alternative to compulsory public funded education is mass illiteracy and ignorance.
1930 was the last year, the US Census asked if the person was able to read and write.
1940 on it asked if you attended school, college
Fronm 1950 onward they don't even ask that, they assume everyone had a minimum education
By our lights Robert, if you can't afford to tutor your children, they are doomed to illiteracy and ignorance.
Presumably, you are suggesting that one state should experiment with either or both compulsory voting or voluntary schooling. That is certainly good thinking. But we should be careful what we wish for as they say. In the current environment, the paternalistic reactionary Republicans would be quick to turn any modification into a big advantage for them somehow. If you require people to vote, you can probably make an argument for literacy tests or mandatory viewing of the Fox Nuisance channel or some other ludicrous thing.
With schooling, we have plenty of experience with homeschooling and “free schools”, as well as a wide variety of alternative schools which frequently take the outcasts and rejects from public schools. The concept is proven by documentation and success stories, although somewhat different measures typically apply which emphasize life satisfaction and psychological adjustment along with income and higher education degrees. With regard to "laboratories for democracy, public schools are clearly not that while free schools are all about democratic process as a rule. The reality is that the free schools are elitist because there are always only a limited number of low-income students because good schooling costs money and someone has to pay when the state is not footing the bill.
I represented school districts for several years. States do have compulory education laws.
Once upon a time SCOTUS ruled that "wealth" was a "suspect criteria" under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Maybe it should be. Our districts were reimbursed by the state on a reiprocal to tax receipts. In orther words, the poor districts got proportionally more.
IMHO the education act was the greatest thing that happened to schooling un US history. What is now IDEA gives superior rights via an IEP. Started with the Handicap Act of 1973.
I'm also the same guy who represented townships in Pa where we sold parts of the local district to Amish under Wisconsin v Yoder, so that their kids wouldn't have to "immerse" with the general population.
If I were king, every kid would have an IEP. In some states that is true in all public schools.
I you are a rich kid, you can afford to be tutored. Under Chapter 1 (or Title 1) of the education act and IDEA, if you are poor and need it, you are entitled to be tutored.
Your reply, if it was directed to me is not making sense to me. I think you may have misinterpreted what I was trying to say. I wrote about a state experimenting with voluntary attendance as the exception to the rule. I am too well-aware that every state has attendance laws (I object to the term "compulsory education" however, since that is an obnoxious oxymoron). I have no quarrel with the info about the attempts to guarantee schooling to every child equally, which idiot Trump is doing his utmost to eliminate. The squirrel I referred to is our friend who appears to be senile or suffering from delusions of grandeur. If you reread what I wrote, I don't believe you will find any argument against what you wrote.
"...public schools are clearly not that while free schools are all about democratic process as a rule." What BS. You think it's fungible. Most are all about profits.
I explained how state reibursement worked in Pa. In essence, Chapter 1 levels the field.
All politics is local and in some states, the taxpayers will not fund public education. Likwise there is a big dispaity among school districts. Our district in Pa had a grant writer who was able to get us several novel educational programs. We had a special reading program, begun in the 1940s.
The tujtion for most prep schools is more than most Ivy League colleges and the outcomes are worse than most public schools in places like theDC suburban schools. The parents of the kids in the prep schools can afford to buy their kids' way.
I used to live in Maryland where the local schools were part of the International Baccauleaurate program. Same here with some of the Miami Dade schools. These are public schools. We have many innovativative public school programs, magnet schools, some that provide college credits for high school students.
In DC. a program pays tuition to practically and schjool that accepts a DC kid.
I don't know what you mean by "free" schools. Most of the charter and prep schools maintain extreme dicipline. Some are actually disiplinary schools. Think reform schools.
The most common arguments about charter schools are that: Charters steal kids and money from traditional public ISDs. Charters are selective and operate like private schools. Public charter schools don't enroll students from historically underserved families.
Because of Chapter 1, DEI and affirmative action, our kids had another leg up....Looks like Musk will kill those probrams.
But where I live (home of JEB Bush, the father of charters in FL) most of the charters have failed...miserably. Also I know for a fact he didn't send his kids to them.
Wow, please take a chill pill. It looks like you are assuming that I am talking about all private schools when I refer to "free schools". Are you not familiar with Jonathan Kozol and the free school movement which was big in the 1970's and 1980's? They probably have only about 100 or so schools in the US today. They have nothing to do with charters, vouchers, or competing with public schools for funding. Thom has talked about the school in Boston, I believe. They have a democratic structure which usually includes allowing students to have real decision-making ability. We were talking about compulsory voting, and I mentioned voluntary school attendance as an alternative to compulsory schooling to illustrate a point. How did we end up with all this back and forth?
It will never happen as long as republicans can stand in the way of compulsory voting. They want fewer, not more, people to vote, which is why they always engage in voter suppression. The only way we'll ever have appropriate , meaningful voting laws is to get republicans out of power--but that would require an informed, educated, intelligent electorate, and we are a long way from that.
Vanessa your comments are all too true. Seventy seven million people voted for him in large part because they bought his lies that he would make their lives better, lower prices, and make them safer. Most of the 77 million voted against themselves that doesn't speak to a informed, intelligent electorate.
And 90 million people didn't vote at all, a lot of them because they wanted to flip the finger to Biden and Harris, and look what that has wrought them, They climbed the ladder of the impaling pole and sat on it's point to spite the Dems.
As Thom has reported many times: Paul Weyrich (Republican strategist) said:
"I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down
Any citizen should be able to vote by mail and then use drop boxes as well as a means to return their paper ballot.
Your county clerk and their staff are VERY important. Everything can be done off the internet, but what is happening when they report the vote count to the state?
So very happy that you share your platform with Greg Palast when you can, Thom!
Compulsory voting, I'd love to see it. Actually I'm a bit worried I'll never be allowed to vote again. Trump is throwing people out of the country without due process. Would it surprise anyone if he decides to take our voting rights away? Dictators don't like fair elections and they don't leave power willingly.
I have long believed that citizenship requires participation. Voting is central to that participation. Without participation we have a bystander public, and we know where that has led. You are required to pay taxes for the privileges of living here and benefitting from government services. You are free to renounce all these services, but you may as well live in a cave. I believe the standard tax deduction should be linked to your obligations as a citizen, the primary one being exercising the hard fought right to vote. Some will call this overreach, even fascist; but this overreach pales when compared to the corporate overreach of campaign finance, which manipulates voting through the bombardment of public good airwaves that propagandize and distort policies that will have future impact on the public--this impact concentrated in the candidate who has enough resources to actually run for apolitical office. Corporate fascism is a fact in the USA, all for the sake of insuring deregulation. Voting is the final vestige of a free society. It is a requirement, no different than paying taxes, getting a license, a passport, and other socital obligations. This requirement, when not fulfilled, should have a penalty.
I don't mind paying taxes, it is the cost of living in a civilized society that provides essential services,of course there is waste and fraud. government is run by humans
What pulls my chain is the libertarians,l the wealthy, the plutocrats, the technocrats, the oligarchs whose fortunes were made precisely because people like me paid taxes to build the roads, bridges, safe airways, safe food, safe travel, and the education needed to build and maintain all of this infrastructure, and provide the social safety net, needed to motivate us to build and maintain this social infrastructure.
They are free loading, welfare queens, who because they have money are able to purchase the police power of the state that we thepeople built, to keep their foot on our necks.
If only we could convey that to the MAGA base, When Trump said he would drain the swamp, we liberals were thinking of the lobbyists, and corporate reps that staffed the various cabinets
But Trump , the Republican party were talking of civil service, and even many civil service bought that,thinking that it was sloth in the adjacent cubicle, not them.
And Fox, etc perpetuated the myth of the deep state swamp, and sadly no talking head on MSNBC, even bothered to educate it's left leaning viewers.
Trump didn't drain the swamp he stocked it with 'gators and pythons.
I never believed for a second he would drain the swamp. He is the biggest croc in the swamp, and as such he’ll even eat his children. Most frightening is that he is clinically insane—a veritable Mad King. As for MSNBC, only former Republican Nicole Wallace comes close to deconstructing the dark epistles of Trumpism, as she has consistently had guests on who actually point out what you are saying.
I agree Nicole was a Republican and had a role on George Bush's staff, so she knows what is going on
Ari Melber is a lawyer and is playing it safe, he is very careful with his words and what and who he approaches. He doesn't want to be targeted by Trump
Chris Hayes is a mlquetoast.
Ayman Mohelydin is a righteous Muslim, you can tell that his primary interest and concern is the welfare of the Ummah.
Al Sharpton, frankly a DEI hire, his race is his identity, it was quite obvious when he couldn't bring himself to say anything negative about Eric Adams, in fact he came damn close to apologizing for or defending him.
I loved Joy Reid, she went for the groin, but that was too much so they dropped her.
Rachel is great at what she does, but she takes one morsel, often a side trip, and like a bulldog she chews it to pieces. She is quite pedantic while she excoriates her topic of the day.
In truth I get all of my news from the many substack emails I get every day, if I turn on the TV in the afternoon, I find that I already know what they are talking about in depth.
Yeah, dumping Joy was a blunder. Lost a lot of respect for MSNBC. Love Rachel, but you are right, like a media Newsferatu, she drains the blood out of every story. Still, a national treasure compared to the rest. Do you read "Fear & Loathing" substack. Pretty good writing. Cheers, William.
Add to this the realization that to “vote”, all one has to do is SHOW UP! The actual vote is not part of the calculus. It makes not voting a statement. But more people are likely to write in choices or pull levers or push buttons and thereby increase the validity of vote counts.
Wow, I didn't know that Stalin had said that. Thanks Daniel! In terms of the election, I'm becoming more convinced that the 2024 presidential vote was corrupted. So what do we do now?
I think we should do anything and everything to make voting easy, accessible and universal. However I have a problem with compulsory voting. I don't really think it is a great idea having those who don't want to vote do so only because they face a fine. Will they really take voting seriously. Will they turn in blank ballots. Will they vote eenie, meanie, minie, Moe. We have enough stupid voters already. Perhaps with compulsory voting formerly non-voters will educate themselves and become informed...but I kinda doubt it. It is really sad that so many take Democracy for granted or feel alienated from the process. It is not like we vote every day. Depending where you live it is every other year or perhaps every year. Surely we can do better than we are doing. I don't really have the answer as to how we get more folks to participate, but I am a little uncomfortable with compulsory voting. That being said...maybe it is worth a try.
Every week I quote Stalin: “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”
IMHO we won but.....Republicans and Russian psy ops intimidated a lot of would be voters and the count was corrupted to get the result they desired, as you have doicumented, Thom.
I think his downfall may be that many Congressional Republicans did not sign up to be members of the axis of evil.
https://jerryweiss.substack.com/
But those republicans are obsequious cowards who will never stand up to Trump. That's why we're in this mess.
They are Republicans. They ran with him. But their consituents and especially their donors dictate what they do. We only need 3 House members to trigger everything. Shared government. They won't become Democrats.
I think it takes a lot of negotiating. The least common denominator is national security. On Friday, Heather Cox Richardson documented that Mike Turner (R.AL) and Roger Wicker (R. MS) complained about National Security. Lots more have called Trump a liar on Putin/Ukraine. I published the letter I got from Rick Scott. Thom Tillis. Murkowski. Many more.
Jerry Weiss has identified a number fof candidates and we have 3 Cuban American MAGATs here who have recently discovered they are DEI and many of their donors and consituents are upset. We have more Canadians here than some Canadian provinces -- most with dual citizenship.
Hoefully behind the scenes there is discussion about shared government. Hakim Jeffries can offer chairmanships of key committees to Republicans.
Yes Daniel, and Kamala rushed to the microphone to concede 4 pm on Nov 6th, while the votes wee still being counted. That tells me a lot.
There were still contested Congressional races. And if there was new evidence of voter intimidartion and/or fraud, that concession meant nothing.
I'm still upset that Biden/FBI did not report on the extent of irregularities.
Legally concession means nothing, but publicly, psychologically, propaganda (psyops) wise concession means everything.
IMO, Biden has been absent almost the whole four years, If not mentally absent (doddering old man suffering from early Alzheimers, dementia or a stroke), he was groomed in the Senate to be an ameliorator, bipartisan, friends across the aisle, politics was never about principle, politics is about re election and padding your wallet.
Biden was known in the Senate as the senator from Wall Street.
Delaware is the state in where 600 of the US most powerful and influential corporations are chartered, financial, insurance, chemical petroleum and even defense.
That's because of the Charter wars, that started when J D Rockefeller advertised that he would move his corporation to the state that presented the most favorable corporate charter law.
NJ won that battle, but Delaware saw what happened, and came up with an even better Corporate Charter Law, and voila we have this small state with large out of sized influence, I imagine it is the same for NJ, and that is why we get the Menendez and Chris Christies.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Google AI
1885, Standard Oil of Ohio moved its headquarters from Cleveland to its permanent headquarters at 26 Broadway in New York City. Concurrently, the trustees of Standard Oil of Ohio chartered the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey (SOCNJ) to take advantage of New Jersey's more lenient corporate stock ownership laws.
Standard Oil - Wikipedia
This is a great read Thom. Highly recommend it to everyone.
As a former American and now an Australian I can observe that our lawmakers are forced to listen to their constituents more because we all vote. Our political course does not swing so wildly left or right because of this. But our system of government is more parliamentary in nature where the PM is the leader of the party who gets the most seats. Ironically the PM can change in the party room behind closed doors, and often has in recent decades. People vote therefore for the party whose policies they prefer rather than for a personality for head of state. This makes it easier to avoid cultish voters as MAGA voters are. We are just as proud to vote as Americans and it is made easy to do so.
I've watched every episone of Total Control and IMHO Australia even with mandatory voting is more like the US than western Europe. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9318588/
Great idea! But what if the voting electronics really have been manipulated and your vote won't be recorded right? Under those circumstances compulsory voting would just be a smoke screen, right? electiontruthalliance.org
Maybe we will have compulsory voting in the 4th Reich of the Rich. Trusk will want to know who doesn't like them, so they can punish, like Trump is punishing Governor Mills of Maine, for defying him.
Covered again today by Heather Cox Richardson who is a Mainer.
All I can say is that in virually all Communist countries, the results are unanimous.
Yep, I read it too, that is why I mentioned it. HCR is just one of my sources of information and inspiration.
You are right about all votes in communist countries are almost unamimous, 100% is to obvious, so it is usually something like 95%, but not just communist countries Daniel, there are only three such left, Cuba, NKorea and China It is autocracies, and they are legion., even pseudo democracies like Pakistan, Hungary and now India.
In Iran you have a mullahcracy, ruled by ayatollahs, and a figurehead president elected, supposedly, by popular vote, and even he is approved by the mullahs before he gets on the ballot.
Afghanistan is a total theocracy, and my educated guess is that Syria will be that way too. HTS is an offshoot of Al Qaeda and is already showing it's theocratic tendencies.
Compulsory voting would impress upon people the importance of involvement and participation. But would it re-enforce the recognition that people need to be informed to have an idea of which way to go and how to use their opinion to bring improvements? Would more people have voted for Trump last November had voting been mandatory, or would more people have voted for Kamala Harris? With the screwy Electoral College, would it have mattered, either way? Oddly, compulsory school attendance was not on the list of things people are required to do. But of course, minors are not real people, and they do not deserve to be treated as autonomous individuals with bodily freedom, intellectual capacity, a right to privacy and the opportunity to spend time in rumination and contemplation without adult interference, or the dignity of enjoying the privilege of defining education for themselves, without coercive curricular intervention imposed through official channels. Maybe that has something to do with why Americans are so adamantly resistant to the concept of compulsory voting. Maybe they are getting tired of being behavior modified and pushed around. Maybe it never was a democracy in any real sense.
You just can't help yourself can you Robert,what started out as good comment, degenerated into your pet peeve. I am so sorry that you had such a bad experience in public school.
But the alternative to compulsory public funded education is mass illiteracy and ignorance.
1930 was the last year, the US Census asked if the person was able to read and write.
1940 on it asked if you attended school, college
Fronm 1950 onward they don't even ask that, they assume everyone had a minimum education
By our lights Robert, if you can't afford to tutor your children, they are doomed to illiteracy and ignorance.
School attendance is a state matter. As of today, so is voting.
If the states are the laboratory of democracy, start with one state.
Robert prefers illiteracy and ignorance to compulsory education. That puts him in league with Trump, Musk and libertarians, a lot of MAGAts as well.
Presumably, you are suggesting that one state should experiment with either or both compulsory voting or voluntary schooling. That is certainly good thinking. But we should be careful what we wish for as they say. In the current environment, the paternalistic reactionary Republicans would be quick to turn any modification into a big advantage for them somehow. If you require people to vote, you can probably make an argument for literacy tests or mandatory viewing of the Fox Nuisance channel or some other ludicrous thing.
With schooling, we have plenty of experience with homeschooling and “free schools”, as well as a wide variety of alternative schools which frequently take the outcasts and rejects from public schools. The concept is proven by documentation and success stories, although somewhat different measures typically apply which emphasize life satisfaction and psychological adjustment along with income and higher education degrees. With regard to "laboratories for democracy, public schools are clearly not that while free schools are all about democratic process as a rule. The reality is that the free schools are elitist because there are always only a limited number of low-income students because good schooling costs money and someone has to pay when the state is not footing the bill.
Did you notice a squirrel in the vicinity?
You're talking to the wrong guy. Bullahit.
I represented school districts for several years. States do have compulory education laws.
Once upon a time SCOTUS ruled that "wealth" was a "suspect criteria" under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Maybe it should be. Our districts were reimbursed by the state on a reiprocal to tax receipts. In orther words, the poor districts got proportionally more.
IMHO the education act was the greatest thing that happened to schooling un US history. What is now IDEA gives superior rights via an IEP. Started with the Handicap Act of 1973.
I'm also the same guy who represented townships in Pa where we sold parts of the local district to Amish under Wisconsin v Yoder, so that their kids wouldn't have to "immerse" with the general population.
If I were king, every kid would have an IEP. In some states that is true in all public schools.
I you are a rich kid, you can afford to be tutored. Under Chapter 1 (or Title 1) of the education act and IDEA, if you are poor and need it, you are entitled to be tutored.
Your reply, if it was directed to me is not making sense to me. I think you may have misinterpreted what I was trying to say. I wrote about a state experimenting with voluntary attendance as the exception to the rule. I am too well-aware that every state has attendance laws (I object to the term "compulsory education" however, since that is an obnoxious oxymoron). I have no quarrel with the info about the attempts to guarantee schooling to every child equally, which idiot Trump is doing his utmost to eliminate. The squirrel I referred to is our friend who appears to be senile or suffering from delusions of grandeur. If you reread what I wrote, I don't believe you will find any argument against what you wrote.
"...public schools are clearly not that while free schools are all about democratic process as a rule." What BS. You think it's fungible. Most are all about profits.
I explained how state reibursement worked in Pa. In essence, Chapter 1 levels the field.
All politics is local and in some states, the taxpayers will not fund public education. Likwise there is a big dispaity among school districts. Our district in Pa had a grant writer who was able to get us several novel educational programs. We had a special reading program, begun in the 1940s.
The tujtion for most prep schools is more than most Ivy League colleges and the outcomes are worse than most public schools in places like theDC suburban schools. The parents of the kids in the prep schools can afford to buy their kids' way.
I used to live in Maryland where the local schools were part of the International Baccauleaurate program. Same here with some of the Miami Dade schools. These are public schools. We have many innovativative public school programs, magnet schools, some that provide college credits for high school students.
In DC. a program pays tuition to practically and schjool that accepts a DC kid.
I don't know what you mean by "free" schools. Most of the charter and prep schools maintain extreme dicipline. Some are actually disiplinary schools. Think reform schools.
The most common arguments about charter schools are that: Charters steal kids and money from traditional public ISDs. Charters are selective and operate like private schools. Public charter schools don't enroll students from historically underserved families.
Because of Chapter 1, DEI and affirmative action, our kids had another leg up....Looks like Musk will kill those probrams.
But where I live (home of JEB Bush, the father of charters in FL) most of the charters have failed...miserably. Also I know for a fact he didn't send his kids to them.
Wow, please take a chill pill. It looks like you are assuming that I am talking about all private schools when I refer to "free schools". Are you not familiar with Jonathan Kozol and the free school movement which was big in the 1970's and 1980's? They probably have only about 100 or so schools in the US today. They have nothing to do with charters, vouchers, or competing with public schools for funding. Thom has talked about the school in Boston, I believe. They have a democratic structure which usually includes allowing students to have real decision-making ability. We were talking about compulsory voting, and I mentioned voluntary school attendance as an alternative to compulsory schooling to illustrate a point. How did we end up with all this back and forth?
It will never happen as long as republicans can stand in the way of compulsory voting. They want fewer, not more, people to vote, which is why they always engage in voter suppression. The only way we'll ever have appropriate , meaningful voting laws is to get republicans out of power--but that would require an informed, educated, intelligent electorate, and we are a long way from that.
Vanessa your comments are all too true. Seventy seven million people voted for him in large part because they bought his lies that he would make their lives better, lower prices, and make them safer. Most of the 77 million voted against themselves that doesn't speak to a informed, intelligent electorate.
And 90 million people didn't vote at all, a lot of them because they wanted to flip the finger to Biden and Harris, and look what that has wrought them, They climbed the ladder of the impaling pole and sat on it's point to spite the Dems.
As Thom has reported many times: Paul Weyrich (Republican strategist) said:
"I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down
Austria
"Austria requires a valid reason for not voting and will levy a 1,000 schilling fine for violations, the equivalent of approximately $70 USD."
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-mandatory-voting
I spent some time in Europe, and was amazed when I found out voting was mandatory in Austria.
I don't like-like it, but I'd vote for it.
Any citizen should be able to vote by mail and then use drop boxes as well as a means to return their paper ballot.
Your county clerk and their staff are VERY important. Everything can be done off the internet, but what is happening when they report the vote count to the state?
So very happy that you share your platform with Greg Palast when you can, Thom!
Oregon is vote by mail only, and it is a really good system. Wish it were nation-wide.
Compulsory voting, I'd love to see it. Actually I'm a bit worried I'll never be allowed to vote again. Trump is throwing people out of the country without due process. Would it surprise anyone if he decides to take our voting rights away? Dictators don't like fair elections and they don't leave power willingly.
Love it. Make it easy vote by mail.
I agree.
I have long believed that citizenship requires participation. Voting is central to that participation. Without participation we have a bystander public, and we know where that has led. You are required to pay taxes for the privileges of living here and benefitting from government services. You are free to renounce all these services, but you may as well live in a cave. I believe the standard tax deduction should be linked to your obligations as a citizen, the primary one being exercising the hard fought right to vote. Some will call this overreach, even fascist; but this overreach pales when compared to the corporate overreach of campaign finance, which manipulates voting through the bombardment of public good airwaves that propagandize and distort policies that will have future impact on the public--this impact concentrated in the candidate who has enough resources to actually run for apolitical office. Corporate fascism is a fact in the USA, all for the sake of insuring deregulation. Voting is the final vestige of a free society. It is a requirement, no different than paying taxes, getting a license, a passport, and other socital obligations. This requirement, when not fulfilled, should have a penalty.
I don't mind paying taxes, it is the cost of living in a civilized society that provides essential services,of course there is waste and fraud. government is run by humans
What pulls my chain is the libertarians,l the wealthy, the plutocrats, the technocrats, the oligarchs whose fortunes were made precisely because people like me paid taxes to build the roads, bridges, safe airways, safe food, safe travel, and the education needed to build and maintain all of this infrastructure, and provide the social safety net, needed to motivate us to build and maintain this social infrastructure.
They are free loading, welfare queens, who because they have money are able to purchase the police power of the state that we thepeople built, to keep their foot on our necks.
We need a 1789.
I very much agree with you. Corporate welfare is anathema to promoting the general welfare.
If only we could convey that to the MAGA base, When Trump said he would drain the swamp, we liberals were thinking of the lobbyists, and corporate reps that staffed the various cabinets
But Trump , the Republican party were talking of civil service, and even many civil service bought that,thinking that it was sloth in the adjacent cubicle, not them.
And Fox, etc perpetuated the myth of the deep state swamp, and sadly no talking head on MSNBC, even bothered to educate it's left leaning viewers.
Trump didn't drain the swamp he stocked it with 'gators and pythons.
I never believed for a second he would drain the swamp. He is the biggest croc in the swamp, and as such he’ll even eat his children. Most frightening is that he is clinically insane—a veritable Mad King. As for MSNBC, only former Republican Nicole Wallace comes close to deconstructing the dark epistles of Trumpism, as she has consistently had guests on who actually point out what you are saying.
I agree Nicole was a Republican and had a role on George Bush's staff, so she knows what is going on
Ari Melber is a lawyer and is playing it safe, he is very careful with his words and what and who he approaches. He doesn't want to be targeted by Trump
Chris Hayes is a mlquetoast.
Ayman Mohelydin is a righteous Muslim, you can tell that his primary interest and concern is the welfare of the Ummah.
Al Sharpton, frankly a DEI hire, his race is his identity, it was quite obvious when he couldn't bring himself to say anything negative about Eric Adams, in fact he came damn close to apologizing for or defending him.
I loved Joy Reid, she went for the groin, but that was too much so they dropped her.
Rachel is great at what she does, but she takes one morsel, often a side trip, and like a bulldog she chews it to pieces. She is quite pedantic while she excoriates her topic of the day.
In truth I get all of my news from the many substack emails I get every day, if I turn on the TV in the afternoon, I find that I already know what they are talking about in depth.
Yeah, dumping Joy was a blunder. Lost a lot of respect for MSNBC. Love Rachel, but you are right, like a media Newsferatu, she drains the blood out of every story. Still, a national treasure compared to the rest. Do you read "Fear & Loathing" substack. Pretty good writing. Cheers, William.
Add to this the realization that to “vote”, all one has to do is SHOW UP! The actual vote is not part of the calculus. It makes not voting a statement. But more people are likely to write in choices or pull levers or push buttons and thereby increase the validity of vote counts.
Now I’ve got it:
Every week I quote Stalin: “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”
Gotta get people on YOUR side recognized as vote counters to count WITH possible opponents!
I can’t find my way back to read the quote 😲!
I note you did not "like" the Stalin quote.
Seems another reason that should favor compulsory voting is that it would do great damage to the people who do voter suppression.
Wow, I didn't know that Stalin had said that. Thanks Daniel! In terms of the election, I'm becoming more convinced that the 2024 presidential vote was corrupted. So what do we do now?
I think we should do anything and everything to make voting easy, accessible and universal. However I have a problem with compulsory voting. I don't really think it is a great idea having those who don't want to vote do so only because they face a fine. Will they really take voting seriously. Will they turn in blank ballots. Will they vote eenie, meanie, minie, Moe. We have enough stupid voters already. Perhaps with compulsory voting formerly non-voters will educate themselves and become informed...but I kinda doubt it. It is really sad that so many take Democracy for granted or feel alienated from the process. It is not like we vote every day. Depending where you live it is every other year or perhaps every year. Surely we can do better than we are doing. I don't really have the answer as to how we get more folks to participate, but I am a little uncomfortable with compulsory voting. That being said...maybe it is worth a try.