Month: October 2018

“I’m a Child of Immigrants. And I Have a Plan to Fix Immigration”

“Neither Democrats nor Republicans will like it. But it would be humane, it would adhere to the rule of law, and it would work.”

Sonia Nazario is the author of Enrique’s Journey, is a graduate of Williams College and holds a master’s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She received an honorary doctorate in 2010 from Mount St. Mary’s College. She has twice made the same journey those in “the caravan” are making, traveling the length of Mexico with Central American migrants.

Ms. Nazario’s fix, as she outlines in her article (same title as this post) is, finally, an adult, compassionate, and common sensical approach to the “immigration problem” as we’ve come to call it. It’s a problem of our own making, and we will have to be the people who “fix” it. We need to listen to what she has to say.

Voter Suppression? It’s real. It works.

The issue of voter suppression has exploded during the past month or so because of some flagrant suppression efforts in Georgia where the Republican candidate Brian Kemp, now the Secretary of State, but running for higher office, has put more than 53,000 voter registration applications in limbo. As Ari Berman says in his article How Voter Suppression Could Swing the Midterms in Sunday’s New York Times (2018-10-27), a number of states are placing obstacles in the way of would-be voters at a time when many states are experiencing new voter registrations at an all-time high.

Here’s a discouraging quote for us living in Texas:

“Nowhere have hopes for high Democratic turnout collided with the reality of suppressive voting laws more than in Texas.”

And this:

“Texas has the most restrictive voter registration law in the country . . .”

Berman’s article, though fairly short, is full of insightful facts about how one “One man, one vote,” is far more an ideal we have to continue to fight for, than a reality we already possess.

“The greatest liar hath his believers . . .”

This morning’s New York Times editorial page carried this article by Jennifer Finney Boylan of Banard College, Colombia University in which she quotes Jonathan Swift (1667-1745):

“The greatest liar hath his believers: and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.”

The article was about the destructive power of lies, and the shocking potential destruction that can be wrought by “deep fakes,” a unique production of our digital age. Deep fakes are lies that deceive the eye and ears via digital manipulation of photos, videos, and documents so that they appear to deliver a message other than what the original intended. Donald J. Trump and his minions are adept at this, and they are continually taking advanced courses from the true masters of deception and lies, the Russians.

All of this is to say, that today, more than ever (the lies of Swift’s era over 300 years ago took weeks to travel to their targeted ears and eyes) when a lie travels a global course in seconds, a believed lie can be acted upon to disastrous results, before truth can be ferreted out. To that point, here’s the rest of Swift’s quote, the sentence immediately following the one Boylan cited above:

“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect . . . .”

More than ever, all of us today need always apply “critical thinking” to all we hear and see.  In a world where lies are so convincingly presented, citizens who cherish their democracy need to be educated, and involved, and vote. If we aren’t and don’t, there’s no certainty we’ll have our democracy long, and no reason to believe we deserve it.

Beauty and insight in a fragment of a forgotten sentence.

I’ve kept journals for decades, and recently while going through one nearly twenty years old, I came across this splinter from a forgotten sentence I’d jotted down, source unrecorded. There was only this penciled note: “I think from a newspaper article, or magazine article . . . an unexpected phrase of poetic beauty.”

“. . . the bitter precision of life’s small heartbreaks.”

It seems to me, that in the grand scheme of things, whatever it is, it’s no mistake this phrase survived for us to think about.

How the “ruling class” frame their assets to the rest of us.

We’re all familiar now with Mark Zuckerberg’s unceasing and hypocritical paen to the sacred interactions of loyal Face Book users, and how their interactions on his platform will make their lives so much better. Well, I recently came across the following tweet, it’s origin long-lost to repetition, that gives the lie to Zuck’s magnanimity:

“‘Community’ is a hell of a euphemism for his database.”

For further reading on this subject of “the ruling class”, here’s an article/transcript of a podcast interview with Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.

There’s something wrong with this picture . . .

In the entire history of the United States Supreme Court only one justice has been
a) nominated by a president who didn’t win the popular vote
b) confirmed by a majority of senators who collectively won fewer votes in their last election than did the senators who voted against that justice’s confirmation

Yes, of course, Justice Kavanaugh. The minority won over the majority.

And then there’s the instance of Justice Gorsuch. The 54 senators who voted to elevate Judge Gorsuch to the Supreme Court had received around 54 million votes, and the 45 senators who opposed him got more than 73 million votes.

Therefore, 58 percent of the voters chose senators who voted against Gorsuch, and 42 percent of voters chose senators who voted for Gorsuch. And yet Gorsuch took his seat on the Supreme Court. Once again, the minority won over the majority. So, if you’ve always believed that in American politics the majority rules, you’re mistaken.

Five presidents have now taken office after losing the popular vote.

No Democratic president has ever taken office after losing the popular vote.

And justices nominated by Democrats have never been confirmed by such narrow margins as Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. Of the four liberals currently on the court, all received 63 votes or more, from senators winning and representing clear majorities of their votes.

Yes, there’s plenty wrong with this picture, and I’ll write more about it in future posts.

See Michael Tomasky’s article in the New York Times from which I got these figures. And see an academic article by Kevin McMahon of Trinity College.

JOLT-ing history, one vote at a time

It’s hard to tell by looking at today’s headlines in the news media, but America is changing, and as always, it’s changing the most for the next generations. How that change looks, and how it happens, is largely up to people with vision. Not always powerful people in the traditional use of the word “powerful”, but people who are powerful because of the strength  of their dreams and vision.

Cristina Tzintzun is the woman on the right in the picture above. She is the founder of JOLT, a voter registration nonprofit in Austin, that is focused on increasing young Latino voter participation. Cristina knows a few things: *Texas has one of the lowest voter participation rates in the country (3rd from last). *Nearly 40% of the state’s population is Hispanic, and are expected to become the majority as early as 2022, and maybe 2020. *In the next decade 2 million Latinos will turn 18, and 95% if them are U.S. citizens, eligible to vote.  *Latinos have the lowest voter turnout of any ethnic group in Texas. *If the Latino majority-minority, soon to be majority in Texas, can be persuaded to vote in reliably large numbers (when they vote they generally tend to vote Democratic), they can, and will, shock the political system in Texas, and soon the entire country. There have been many articles on the changing demographics in the U.S. explaining why this will happen.

The political establishment knows this. Read ‘The trauma for a man’: Male Fury and fear rises in GOP in defense of Kavanaugh, that ran in the New York Times, October 1. (To date, it’s received nearly 13,000 comments, surely among the largest number of comments in the paper’s commenting history.)

If young Latinos can take Texas out of Republican hands, they will shift the entire electoral map of the country.

But there are challenges: The No. 1 reason Latinos don’t vote is their high level of cynicism: *most don’t know that their votes matter, *most don’t even know that they are the majority, or soon will be in Texas, *most don’t trust politicians, and *most don’t believe that their vote matters.

That kind of self-defeating thinking has to change if the future is going to change. Tzintzun and her fellow JOLTers intend to make that happen. It’s their dream, and their vision.

Read Tzintzun’s story here. Read how current Texas politics blocks Hispanic voting here.