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Mitchell Zimmerman: Democrats would be stupid to try ‘to work with’ an increasingly depraved GOP

A QAnon emblem (upper left) is raised during the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol by Trump cultists.  The extreme-right, bogus-conspiracy-based QAnon group has become a particularly violence-prone part of the Republican Party.— Photo by El…

A QAnon emblem (upper left) is raised during the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol by Trump cultists. The extreme-right, bogus-conspiracy-based QAnon group has become a particularly violence-prone part of the Republican Party.

— Photo by Elvert Barnes 

Trump supporters/cultists at the “Unite the Right’’ rally  in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12, 2017

Trump supporters/cultists at the “Unite the Right’’ rally in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12, 2017

Via OtherWords.org

Unity and bipartisanship sound wonderful. But can anyone explain how “building bridges” to today’s GOP will get anything done?

Republicans now demand “unity” even as many embrace the big lie that President Biden stole the election from Trump — and even after some cheered on the attack on the U.S. Capitol that killed five.

But the bigger difficulty is that there can be no reasonable compromise between those determined to confront the crises America faces and those who deny that the problems exist — and have indeed aggravated them.

Consider the key challenges: climate change, racial injustice and the coronavirus pandemic.

Climate change is upon us: violent superstorms, rising seas, flooding, wildfires, new diseases. But the differences between Democrats and Republicans are not about the best ways to reckon with climate change. They’re about whether climate change is real at all.

President Trump, with support from the rest of the Republican Party, called climate change a “hoax,” actively promoted fossil fuels, and reversed every step taken to stave off climate disaster. There is no “working with” the party that is working directly to worsen the problem.

Likewise for racial bias in American life. This past year massive, multiracial protests against racist police violence and impunity swept the nation, and much of white America finally accepted that racism and white supremacy are ugly realities.

But not the GOP. The Trump-led party cozied up to the “very fine people” who unleashed racist violence in Charlottesville and to the racist street gangs Trump urged to “stand by” until he could fire them at the Capitol.

Promoting white racial resentment has been key to the Republican playbook for decades. So don’t ask the fox to work with the farmer to keep the chicken coop safe.

Finally, should Democrats look for middle ground with Republicans in responding to the pandemic?

Donald Trump made the lethal, worldwide contagion a partisan issue when he claimed it was another hoax and instructed his faithful to fight mask-wearing and social distancing. He developed a movement dedicated to sabotaging the COVID-19 response, threatening public health officials, and demanding businesses reopen whatever the human cost.

Even as Republicans promoted the “liberty” of Trump’s followers to infect others with COVID-19, they opposed strong action to help those tens of millions of Americans facing lost jobs, foreclosure, eviction, and hunger.

Why are Republicans so set against our government protecting us from the consequences of the coronavirus? It’s not really about deficits, which they happily exploded with tax cuts for the rich and bloated Pentagon budgets.

Their real fear is that President Biden’s big response might actually work. They’re counting on Americans continuing to suffer, which may bolster Republicans in the next elections.

So forget about working “with” Republican political leaders.

“Unity” to solve our key problems isn’t possible. Nor is it necessary. Instead, the Democrats should exercise their power without begging for support from Republicans.

Voters gave Democrats the power to put their program into effect. They should seize the opportunity to move boldly, with or without the losers. The voters will get to see how that works out and decide in the next election whether they like what they got. That’s how democracy works.

America desperately needs effective government. If it is “partisanship” for the Democratic Party to provide that without the pretend cooperation of Republicans, let’s have more partisanship.

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning.

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Mitchell Zimmerman: Republicans are traitors to democracy

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From OtherWords.org

Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the judgment of the American people might just seem like denial. But in denying the legitimacy of more than 78 million votes against him as of Friday, Trump and leading Republican politicians are implementing a design more sinister than poor sportsmanship.

Trump and his party have declared war on the fundamental principle of American constitutional democracy: When incumbent lose an election, they leave office. A peaceful transfer of power follows.

Republicans know full well that Biden won. Republican as well as Democratic election officials from across the country confirm there’s no evidence of voter fraud. The election was not stolen.

Nonetheless, Trump and Republican politicians are scheming to persuade tens of millions of Republican faithful that our elections cannot be relied on and that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.

In doing so, they are undermining the bedrock of American democracy: trust in peaceful elections in a constitutional order. And they demonstrate their animosity to electoral democracy itself.

Trump himself made his views all too clear before the election, when he repeatedly refused to agree he would accept it if he lost. His excuse was that mail-in votes were going to perpetrate a massive fraud. Consistent with that fabrication, he now asserts he won the election.

Voting by mail is allowed under the law of every state in the union, and citizens have voted that way for decades without fraud or other issues. In all their lawsuits, Republicans have presented zero evidence of even remotely significant fraud.

Trump’s insidious rhetoric on the election won’t stop Biden from taking office, but it’s not harmless. For if the election was “stolen,” the hate groups Trump asked to “stand by” could well take it as a signal to move against the new government and its supporters.

Of course, this is not the first time Trump and the GOP have disputed the legitimacy of a Democratic president. When Barack Obama became the first Black president, Trump built his political career trumpeting baseless claims that Obama was born abroad and wasn’t a U.S. citizen.

And it’s not the first time they’ve fomented violence either.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump routinely encouraged violence against peaceful protestors at his rallies.

This summer he defended a supporter who shot and killed two anti-racist protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And he lauded the “passionate” nature of two young men who, citing Trump’s policies, beat a 58-year-old Mexican American man with a metal pole.

Trump retweeted a video in which a supporter says, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” And when a caravan of Trump supporters, some armed, menaced a Biden bus in Texas, reportedly trying to drive it off the road, Trump expressed his delight.

American democracy is a flawed instrument. Still, imperfect as it is, it’s worth saving — and the majority voted to save it from Trump’s creeping authoritarianism. But the danger is not over, because the party that lost has turned to challenging the foundation of our constitutional democracy.

What could more openly display contempt for democracy than crowds of Trump loyalists, echoing the demand of the great man himself, chanting “stop counting votes!”

Our election has been decided — by the lawful civic engagement of over 150 million Americans, peacefully casting ballots, nearly all of them already counted. A clear, plain majority gave their votes to Joe Biden.

Donald Trump and those who promote his lies and his refusal to yield to the voters are traitors to our Constitution.:

Mitchell Zimmerman is a lawyer, longtime social activist, and author of the thriller Mississippi Reckoning.

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Mitchell Zimmerman: COVID crisis shows endless liar Trump only cares about Trump


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Via OtherWords.org

“Captain,” said the first mate, “we just crashed into an iceberg — the hull’s been breached!”

“An iceberg. Deadly stuff,” said the captain. “Still, let’s play it down.”

“What are your orders? We must warn the passengers.”

“I’ll make an announcement… Attention all passengers, this is your captain speaking. We’ve encountered some ice, but we have it very well under control. We’re doing a great jobNo need for you to change your routines. Over and out.”

“Should we ready the lifeboats?” asked the mate.

“Nah. Let’s just show confidence. I don’t want to create a panic.”

The deceiving and self-flattering captain of the scenario, leading his passengers into disaster, seems fictitious. But he’s all too real: except for the references to ice, everything the captain says above are things that President Trump has actually said about COVID-19.

Tragically, that’s America in the age of pandemic. Over 6.5 million cases of coronavirus. Around a thousand deaths per day. An economy in ruins.

But Captain Trump is still at the helm — and Americans are still needlessly dying — because he still prefers “playing it down” to uniting us behind the tough but necessary measures that are called for.

For months, Trump urged resistance to the precautions epidemiologists recommended, crusaded against the lockdown, and minimized the lethal threat, even claiming the coronavirus was “totally harmless” in 99 percent of cases.

He knew this was false: “This is deadly stuff,” he privately told journalist Bob Woodward in February.

Even as Trump publicly ridiculed the use of masks and encouraged followers to defy social distancing, he knew the virus was spread through the air. “It goes through air,” he told Woodward. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed.”

Trump claimed publicly that coronavirus was “like the regular flu,” but he told Woodward that he knew otherwise. It’s “more deadly than even your strenuous flu,” Trump told the journalist — more than five times as deadly.

Trump and his falsehoods are responsible for most of America’s 200,000 coronavirus deaths to date. How could it be otherwise? How could anyone think thwarting the epidemic response prescribed by doctors, scientists, and public health leaders would not have deadly consequences?

Turn back to January.

A dozen presidential briefings warned Trump of the coming pandemic. The Health and Human Services Department secretary twice told Trump the contagion was looming. Trump’s trade adviser wrote a memo in January warning of a “full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”

Trump claims he refused to act because he feared panic.

Avoiding panic is all very well. But if you’re telling passengers they don’t need to get in the lifeboats, you’re responsible when they start drowning. In reality, Trump cared more about not “panicking [the stock] market” — which he saw as key to his re-election — than about the lives that would be lost.

By late February a White House task force recommended aggressive steps, including stay-at-home orders. But when a Centers for Disease Control leader warned the public that a pandemic was imminent and “disruption to everyday life might be severe,” Trump threatened to fire her.

“The risk to the American people remains very low,” Trump proclaimed instead.

It was mid-March before Trump yielded to reality.

The cost of Trump’s delay? Columbia University epidemiologists concluded in May that had the lockdowns begun just two weeks earlier, “the vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83 percent — would have been avoided.”

But they weren’t. And the 1 million people who were needlessly infected, thanks to Trump’s indifference, then went on to infect others, and those in turn still others. Meanwhile the president kept up his campaign against the steps needed to bring the pandemic under control.

No precise reckoning is possible, but there’s no doubt a majority of our cases and deaths might have been avoided but for Trump’s lies, neglect, and sabotage. 


Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller
Mississippi Reckoning.



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Mitchell Zimmerman: Be sure your name 'sounds white'

A New York Times obituary for Julian Bond, the civil-rights icon who passed away last month, described the late leader as a “persistent opponent of the stubborn remnants of white supremacy.”

Remnants? Hardly.

Notwithstanding the hard-won gains of the 1960s, race relations in 21st-Century America are still characterized by white supremacy.

Half a century after employment discrimination was outlawed, for example, the median household income of white Americans is over 70 percent greater than for black Americans. The causes are complex, but whites are plainly advantaged.

One recent study revealed that job applicants with first names that sound “white” get called for interviews 50 percent more often than those with the same resume but names that sound “black.” Even white men convicted of felonies are more likely to get called back than young black men with no criminal records.

When they do land the job, black applicants are routinely offered positions at lower salaries than comparably qualified whites.

Discrimination in lending, meanwhile — especially before the housing crash — pushed black Americans into burdensome subprime mortgages even when they qualified for better mortgages. That made them much more likely to lose their homes in the Great Recession.

These factors help explain why the median net worth of white households is 13 times greater than the median wealth of black households.

Our educational system is part of the problem. Since housing discrimination disproportionately confines children of color to poorer neighborhoods, they’re much more likely to attend underfunded schools. Even within school districts, the whiter the school, the more experienced the teachers.

Given all these inequities, the prejudice African Americans face in the criminal justice system is grimly predictable. Indeed, the mass incarceration of black people plays a key role in maintaining the system of white advantage.

For example, white and black people use and sell illegal drugs at about the same rates. Yet African Americans are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession — and 10 times more likely to go to state prison for drug offenses.

Discriminatory practices play out through the entire criminal justice enterprise.

Police stop black people with disproportionate frequency, and these encounters aremuch more likely to be fatal than when whites are stopped — even when the victim is unarmed. Black teens are shot dead by cops at 21 times the rate of their white counterparts.

Even in mundane cases, prosecutors are more likely to let white suspects off with community service instead of criminal charges than similarly situated blacks, and whites get better plea bargains. Judges and juries sentence blacks more harshly when they have darker skin.

The result? A startling proportion of African Americans end up with criminal records that effectively remove them from the competition for good jobs. And a disturbing number end up dead.

If asked, most whites now reject the idea that African Americans are inherently inferior. And they’re less likely to be caught uttering racist epithets. But ending white supremacy will take a lot more than improving our manners.

When “circumstances” eliminate non-white contenders for decent employment, safe housing, and better schools, it’s easier for whites to maintain their historic dominance. Even if we never asked anyone to discriminate on our behalf, we whites are the silent beneficiaries.

It’s an unofficial form of affirmative action for white people. No wonder Black Lives Matter activists and other people of color are organizing to disrupt the established state of life in the United States.

If America is to “be America again,” as the black poet Langston Hughes prayed, they’d better succeed. White supremacy has no business carrying on for another century.

Mitchell Zimmerman, a lawyer, worked with Julian Bond as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. Distributed by OtherWords.org

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