Awakening an Insidious Evil: Why Trump Has Made a Farce of the SCOTUS Ruling on Voting Rights Act

by Nomad

Three years ago, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court declared that times had changed when it came to race and voter discrimination. Justice Roberts hadn't counted on the cynical tactics of Donald Trump.

On 24 June 2013, in the case of Shelby County, Alabama b. US Attorney General Holder   the Supreme Court struck down one of the key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The following day, the "deeply disappointed" President Obama issued a statement in which he called the ruling "a setback" but not the end of efforts to eliminate voting discrimination.

This landmark Civil Rights Era legislation was instrumental in ensuring that discriminatory practices based on race were finally and completely abolished. One problem that had faced legislators and justices was the question of states rights vs. federal authority. 

The 1965 legislation ended that. After the enactment of the law, certain states, mostly in the South, were required to submit any election law changes for federal approval. 

The reason was basic. 

Free and fair elections were too important to be left to whims of the local governments which, minorities claimed, was infested with both open and covert racists. On those states, federal oversight was required to ensure fair elections.

The 2013 decision split the high court along ideological lines, five to four.  The New York Times reported:

At the core of the disagreement was whether racial minorities continued to face barriers to voting in states with a history of discrimination.

Conservatives on the Supreme Court said that the need to maintain strict federal oversight was in 2013 a thing of the past. 

In the Words of Justice Roberts

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. who wrote for the majority explained that our country had changed. When the Voting Rights Act was enacted, attitudes on racial discrimination were very different.  The chief justice concluded that 

times have changed: the formulas that govern singling out one state from another for different treatment, which once "made sense," have lost their relevance, and "nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically."

Not-so-Funny Money: A Short Tale of Bitter Litter in Mississippi

by Nomad

According to a local Mississippi paper, a day of hard labor pea-picking for eight Pontotoc County inmates was interrupted with another request. They were called to pick up loose $100 bills scattered about Highway 9 North.

A Dash for Highway Dough

It must have seemed like a delightful diversion, a dream come true. However, all was not what it seemed.
The abandoned cash was just a film prop, and each bill- though convincing from a distance- was emblazoned with words "For Motion Picture Use Only."

Where exactly the fake cash originally came from was unclear. Pontotoc County Sheriff Leo Mask speculated that somebody must have been hauling theater equipment. A movie reel was also found along the road.
An investigation is ongoing and the sheriff department will keep the fake loot until somebody comes forward to claim it.

Mark Twain and the Eternal Mystery of Politics

by Nomad

Lying Game: How Fake Online Polls are Used to Deceive and Energize Trump Supporters

by Nomad

Frankly, it's hard to be shocked by right-wing manipulation of the truth any longer. We have seen the nominee of the Republican casually and constantly lie about his Republican opponents throughout the primaries and then after the convention about his Democratic rival.  

PolitiFact keeps an open file on Trump's misleading or untrue statement and updates it every few days. 

Even so, there are still times when you learn things that defy imagination. Things that reveal a kind of corrupt mindset alien to most Americans. 

The Untruth is Out There

I saw one of these naughty things yesterday. On Facebook, somebody posted a link which claimed that the liberal pollsters were conspiring to hide the truth: that Trump was going to win by a landslide. (In fact, nearly every poll, even what people considered right-leaning, show quite the opposite. Hillary Clinton has a substantial or conclusive lead and Donald Trump is trailing badly.)

And yet, according to one Facebook commenter I saw, the truth is out there and you just need to know where to look. He or she pointed out an August ABC News which clearly "proved" that Trump held a commanding lead. And not by a couple of points but by a full 70%. 

Furthermore, the two independent party candidates, with Stein at 12% and Johnson at 11%. 

Crooked Hillary Clinton? 

A mere 7%.

Well, shiver my flapjacks! That damned liberal media is at it again. 

Astoundingly newsworthy, what? For Trump supporters, it must be seen as a ray of truthful light during an uninspiring monsoon season.

Scapegoat: How Trump Misleads Angry American Workers on Immigration and Wage Stagnation

by Nomad

Economic experts for both sides of the political spectrum tell us that Donald Trump is dead wrong to blame wage stagnation on flawed immigration policies. That hasn't stopped him searching for scapegoats and misleading the angry American Workers.

During his lengthy acceptance speech at the Republican convention, the Republican nominee Donald Trump blamed lower wages for American workers on immigration.

He said:

Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers. We are going to have an immigration system that works, but one that works for the American people.

The speech was filled with an eighteen-wheeler full of balderdash so a statement like that probably went unnoticed. However, stirring up middle-class resentment like that is exactly how Trump managed to rise to his precarious place in American politics. 

Wage Stagnation and the Plight of the American Worker  

It is true, wage stagnation is not something that Trump just made up to win votes. It is real and it is causing widespread hardship due to income inequality. Wages have simply not kept up with the cost of living. Add to that the general expansion of non-wage benefits, fall in the price of consumer goods and rise in the price of services, such as education and healthcare and you have a lot of home-grown misery out there.

Lawrence Mishel, one of the authors of a series of recent reports from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI)

"Since the late 1970s, wages for the bottom 70 percent of earners have been essentially stagnant, and between 2009 and 2013, real wages fell for the entire bottom 90 percent of the wage distribution."

The report also pointed out that the Great Recession of 2008 didn't create this problem. It only compounded and exacerbated an economic effect that stretched back some 30 or more years.

Most importantly, the report finds that wage stagnation is not an accidental thing. Policy makers have created (or at least, allowed) the problem of wage stagnation.  A very wealthy minority with undue influence in Washington were allowed to rake in enormous profits based on frozen wages and increased productivity. 

Trump casually blames immigrants for the problem and yet cannot supply any evidence for this idea. And in turn, his working class fans seem oblivious to the peculiar fact that they are listening to a billionaire acting like an authority on low wages. For some reason, they believe that this man can actually sympathize with the plight of the American worker. There's a lot of suspension of disbelief going on, it seems.

So perhaps it is not all that extraordinary that Trump can get away with blaming undocumented workers. That's something that President Obama attempted to make clear in his State of the Union: 

Immigrants aren’t the principal reason wages haven’t gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns.

Experts argued that Obama was too forgiving when he used the phrase "the principle reason." That was wrong. There was no relationship at all between wages and immigrants, Obama's critics said.
If one wishes to find the real reasons for wage stagnation, there are plenty out there.