Defending Democracy in the USA with the Wisdom of the Vote and Maximum of Voter Turnout
USA Big Business-plus, Press, Youth, Labor, Women, People of Color, Offspring of Past Immigrants, & New Immigrants, Read and Heed:
Big business, and mid-sized and small business too, do not fund or donate to the campaigns of authoritarian, anti-democracy political candidates running for political office, most especially those of US president, governor, and their vice-president or lieutenant-governor running mate, and legislators of the federal and state legislatures, as it is their tendency or compulsion and ambition once they are in office, power, to squat or entrench themselves there as despots and try to enlarge their power limitlessly and make their personal will the chief law, superseding constitutional and statutory law. Currently, they largely do this by voter suppression tactics: Block the Vote: How Politicians are Trying to Block Voters from the Ballot Box | ACLU, Voter suppression | Definition, History, Examples, Bills, & Facts | Britannica, The Top Five Voter Suppression Tactics - Rantt Media, 50 Ways to Disenfranchise or Suppress Voters ⋆ Reclaim Democracy!, Stacking the deck: How the GOP works to suppress minority voting | Berkeley News, How Republicans are trying to prevent people from voting after ‘stop the steal’ | US voting rights | The Guardian; and in the not so distant past they did so by Jim Crow terroristic beatings, jailings, pretext or not vigilante and mob hangings, shootings and home and church burnings and bombings of African American voter and voting-rights and civil rights activists in southern former Confederacy apartheid-system, white-monopoly-rule-and-rights states prior to the 1964 federal voting rights act of the US Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson and in recent times by also GOP-supporter political scammer disinformation and intimidation campaigns by robo phone calls, fliers placed at residences -- if not also postal mailers -- and billboards against African American and Latinx voters and legally eligible voters.
Business, regardless of large size, money and power, will not be spared from their expectations and demands for submission and allegiance to their will, if they can have their way, as you witnessed with former such POTUS Donald Trump who publicly lambasted large corporations he had personal issues [apparent feuds and vendettas] with and against, and, in some cases, in doing so, he thereby diminished the value of their stock, Amazon and 16 other companies Trump has attacked since his election (cnn.com), 62 businesses Trump has targeted on Twitter (yahoo.com). In the case of then-CEO Jeff Bezos of Amazon Corp., Trump attempted illegally to have the US Postal Service charge higher rates on emphatically, publicly emphasized Amazon-sent packages, if not its so sent mail overall, and on those of unspecified, unemphasized other online retailers, than the uniform schedule of rates charged to all other businesses for the delivery of their packages or mail overall, Trump claims Amazon is ripping off post office, but it's complicated (cnbc.com), Trump wants Postal Service to charge 'much more' for Amazon shipments | Reuters, Trump Criticizes Post Office for Charging Amazon ‘So Little’ - WSJ. The then-US Postmaster General told Trump that the US Postal Service could not [legally] nor would she [attempt to] do such a thing. In addition of significance, Trump fired or indicatively stressed into resigning as his top presidential staff, while publicly disparaging them thereupon or thereafter, a series of theretofore educationally and occupationally highly accomplished and notable persons, Tracking turnover in the Trump administration (brookings.edu), as well as publicly diminished and attempted to upstage his top COVID-19-related medical-MD experts, Trump officials interfered with CDC reports on Covid-19 - POLITICO, The Trump Administration and the COVID-19 crisis: Exploring the warning-response problems and missed opportunities of a public health emergency - PubMed (nih.gov).
State of Florida authoritarian Governor Ron DeSantis, narcissistically full of himself, the equivalent of crap, is engaged in such a nonsensical and asinine dominance-and-submission protracted attack, feud and vendetta against Disneyland/World in the state of Florida because the CEO of Disney Company publicly criticized and apparently will not implement as policy in Disney Company as a private enterprise the anti-homosexual and anti-transexual ideological "Don't Say Gay" policy prescriptions and dictates of sissy/ish white-boots-wearing (Oh, so gay!) Governor DeSantis (Ron DeSantis' White Boots Steal Focus As Ian Recovery Continues | Across Florida, FL Patch) that have been imposed on the state government of Florida. When he initially failingly attempted to deploy his legal powers as governor of Florida to administratively strip Disney Company in Florida of its previous status as a distinctive self-governing municipal district in Florida, What’s the story with Disney’s own government in Florida? – The Mercury News, by declaring himself, Gov. DeSantis, to be the new sheriff in town, regarding the Disney Company municipal district, and appointing his own administrators (state board of directors or supervisors) over it, in order to punish its CEO and Disney Company for the CEO's sociopolitical independence from DeSantis, quite like a peeved mobster boss occupying the state of Florida's office of governor, DeSantis publicly mused, suggestively threateningly, that he could have a prison built next to Disneyland/World in Florida, which in any honest market analysis, if it were to happen, would be bad for business for Disneyland/World of Florida, and cautioned the Disney Company CEO in a press conference that he was exploring a [legal] way to undo his failure to take control of the Disney Company municipal district and then to take control of it, DeSantis threatened to put a prison next to Disney, but it may not be as scary an idea as he thinks — and in fact small Florida towns could probably use it way more (yahoo.com), Disney sues Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over control of Reedy Creek (nbcnews.com), Disney v. DeSantis judge called Florida governor's law 'dystopian' (yahoo.com). Such conduct by state of Florida Governor DeSantis and its GOP supermajority legislature rightly, as described by critics, looks like the weaponization of incumbent politics by the politically dominant GOP in elective government leadership office. Moreover, it looks like it could be misused as a means of tacit intimidation and extortion, to negatively persuade and extract, via the power of fear and political intimidation (in using Disney Company and pending successive GRU Company, in a Democratic Party-dominant community with a similar district in Florida, as examples of the state of Florida's GOP governor's and supermajority legislature's discretionary ability to legally harm companies that won't pay to play the game of political payola), political and financial supplication and ingratiation to that legislatively super-dominant GOP political party and Governor DeSantis from other companies that are similarly state-government zoned in Florida through their company lobbyists and their other channels of likewise political schmoozing for their companies to stay safe with their like zoning status.
Regardless of what his plausible reason given later is for essentially taking over governance of the Disneyland/World municipal district, municipally developed and self governed by Disney Company since circa 1967, after Disney Company filed a lawsuit to challenge the vote of Gov. DeSantis' newly appointed state board of directors/supervisors of the Disneyland/World theme park district to and that did procedurally nullify, possibly illegally, a binding vote and decision by a prior state board of directors for the Disney theme park district to extend or renew long-term Disney Company's municipal self governance of the Disney Company theme park district, it evidently is not and should not be confused with the ostensible real reason for the nullification, which was already expressed by DeSantis in DeSantis' menacing words stated in the hereinabove said press conference referring to the Disney Company CEO and Disneyland/World. DeSantis' and the state of Florida GOP-supermajority legislature's action in undertaking to do the same, following the Disney Corp lawsuit, to another economic or industrial self-governing utilities-zone district in Florida, whose state board of directors or supervisors and community are predominantly politically populated by constituents of the Democratic Party in a renewable-energy utilities enclave in Florida, Florida House passes GRU takeover bill with majority vote. What happens now? (yahoo.com), is indicatively meant to give the appearance to the public of Florida and the future court of law handling the Disney Company lawsuit that DeSantis' action against Disney was not one singling out Disney Company and of maliciousness against Disney Company, but was one based on political-economic philosophy, while leaving significant Republican and fossil fuels-related such business/industrial, etc., districts unaffected. Throughout Florida and the other states of the USA and the local governments within them it is a common practice for them to grant incentives, tax breaks and subsidies to major and major-growth-promising businesses to locate, invest, build or lease/rent, set up shop and hire in their states, cities and towns -- most visibly lately, like major and high-profile computer, online and financial tech, bio-medical, engineering, space, EV-manufacturing, solar, wind and biomass, and tourist entertainment companies as well as sports teams, etc. Audacious hypocrisy and blatant roguery by Governor DeSantis it has got to be in his contradicting his sanctimonious politicoeconomic philosophical justification for politically going after and taking control of Disney's previously self-governing Reedy Creek improvement district and the largely Democratic Party voter-populated GRU improvement district, subscribed to clean, renewable energy power-supply sources and development in replacement of fossil fuels sources, by his patronizing thereinafter, as Florida governor, at Florida taxpayer-public subsidy of and state-government-employee payout support of and management commissions or fees to, respectively, a yacht company and NYC Wall Street pension investment and management firm favored by him, as reported in the news articles of the following click-on hyperlinks: Forget Disney. Ron DeSantis Has a Surprising New Target (msn.com), Gov. Ron DeSantis awards Pensacola $3.9 million for American Magic HQ (pnj.com), BROKEN:
Florida pensions invest with “Friends of Ron” donors (washingtonpress.com), DeSantis
Allows Anti-“Woke” Giveaway To Big Wall Street Donors (levernews.com), DeSantis Offering Companies Incentives to Use Florida Ports Amid Backups in California (newsweek.com) , DeSantis
Signs Bill Shielding Musk’s SpaceX From ‘Spaceflight Entity Liability’ (yahoo.com), A
closer look at Elon Musk’s opinions on social issues (yahoo.com). The therapeutic prescription for Ron DeSantis' foul character condition is a brain laxative, craniocolonoscopy and such enema, or a periodic regimen of these, long term. (Also check out these news articles, though there are more, unlisted at this time, on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: DeSantis agency sent $92 million in covid relief funds to donor-backed project (yahoo.com), Gov. DeSantis signs controversial bill that allows use of radioactive material in Florida roads | Florida News | Orlando | Orlando Weekly, DeSantis'
anti-DEI law creates 'chilling effect' among faculty, staff (yahoo.com), PEN America, Penguin Random House Sue Florida School District Over 'Unconstitutional' Book Bans (publishersweekly.com), Ron DeSantis's Antiscience Agenda Is Dangerous - Scientific American, This
Publisher is Fighting Back Against Ron DeSantis - TheStreetThis
Publisher is Fighting Back Against Ron DeSantis - TheStreet, Woman
criticizes Florida’s new mandate to teach Asian American history in schools as
promoting the ‘model minority’ myth (yahoo.com), Congressional
Democrats claim DeSantis' elections police unit, FDLE is unconstitutional: What
we know (yahoo.com), DeSantis,
who blamed diversity initiatives for Silicon Valley Bank's downfall, pushed for
rollback of bank regulations under renewed scrutiny | CNN Politics,No,
Diversity Did Not Cause Silicon Valley Bank’s Collapse - The New York Times
(nytimes.com), Marine
who put homeless man in deadly chokehold is 'Good Samaritan', says Ron DeSantis
(yahoo.com), Gov.
Ron DeSantis To Send More Than 1,100 Agents to Texas-Mexico Border (yahoo.com), Ron
DeSantis is sending Florida law enforcement and National Guard members to the
Texas border (yahoo.com), DeSantis
says he’ll consider pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, including Trump (yahoo.com).)
Any state governor, like DeSantis, and legislature, like that of Florida, that mandate/s the abolishment of policies and practices in their state institutions and educational and honest-history curricula specifically of diversity, equity and inclusion of the fair presence of members of its various demographic populations or subpopulations historically excluded or unrepresented or misrepresented and marginalized or maligned therein, is/are acting against democracy and acting antidemocratically to foist a demographically homogenous or selective, unequal and biased as well as exclusionary state government system on a heterogeneous population. These authoritarian, antidemocratic-in-practice elected government leaders call requests or demands for, and denunciations of their abolishments of, state government policies for diversity, equity and inclusion of fair and merit-based members of the different demographic populations, implicitly nonwhite people and women in general, of the state in the employment of the state as "woke" and in representationally fair and honest social studies and history courses in the state's schools as woke and the unacceptable, and offensive to white school children and their parents (white people), Ron DeSantis Pushes Florida Bill to Protect White People From 'Guilt' About Racist Past (newsweek.com, teaching of propaganda (but not so for the traditional and long-the-standard monocultural teaching of USA history that is white-centric and sanctifying of white people, New Florida teaching standards say African Americans received some ‘personal benefit’ from slavery - POLITICO), declaring about all of it: "Florida is where woke comes to die," under their prejudicial and discriminatory elected-state-government retrograde-US-history, Jim Crow leadership.
If the oligarchists among you were to have your way and succeed in overthrowing democracy and our bill-of-rights constitutional government in the USA, certainly, as in the case in the other authoritarian governments of the world of now (like PRC China, Russia, North Korea, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, etc.) and historically (recently like formerly Hitlerian NAZI Germany, Stalinist Soviet Union-Russia and fascist Mussolini Italy, Franco Spain and Salazar Portugal), you, including right-wing media Fox News-Fox Corp, OAN and Newsmax, etc., would exist at the mercy, whim and fiat of the despot and his sycophantic authoritarian regime and would have to swear and render unrelenting allegiance, including obedience, favors, gifts and financial, to him and his rulership regime at all levels. Their spouses, children, other relatives, close friends, paramours and cronies would be societally privileged and get and hold tenured, overpaid prestige jobs as spoils-system and nepotism employees, or such ghost employees, in your businesses and organizations and the nation's public institutions. Where authoritarianism is established, the despot and his authoritarian partner political ruling class rule over big business, business in general, and the wealthy class, or oligarchs, regardless of how great their wealth is, as they please, and jail, imprison and kill them, likewise, if they feel uncomfortable with or offended by them.
And business and the wealthy would need to be taxed strongly under an authoritarian regime, with no tolerance for dissent or lobbying against it or for tax-code loopholes and breaks, in view of the large-scale collective wealth reduction and impoverishment of the former middle and under classes with the elimination of citizen constitutional rights (like the 1st amendment rights to free speech, assemble/organize, petition/protest, of religion/religious belief, or not, and affiliation, of the press/news, information and other communications-content, including entertainment-content, dissemination and publishing), the minimum wage and the social safety net and the consequential anemic and deficient tax production capacity for the regime resulting from these, to support the lifestyles of the rulers of the newly established USA-MAGA caliphate and its federal, state and local governmental subdivisions and infrastructure as well as its internal and external superpower military-police-industrial-SciTech superstructure complex.
As historically has been the case, there also would be periodic or constant purges of a changing percentage of underbosses and apparatchiks at all levels of government within the regime itself resulting from the fallout of natural interpersonal personality and psychological-turf conflicts, personal one-way or mutual animus, interpersonal rivalries and power struggles, loss of favor, becoming an outcast, and failure to meet performance demands. Same untimely flows of turnover of personnel at the different levels of government of the regime would be initiated from the top to show unquestionably which is the top tier of government leadership and command and who in it is the incontestable ultimate boss and commander and for such to instill and enforce -- by means of inducing a perpetual state of job- and career-loss insecurity, fear and worry, thus induced obsessive-compulsive-disorder-based systemic, mass paranoia, throughout the regime -- the exhibition of complete public and private loyalty and conformity on the part of all members of the regime to the regime and its despot, as well as to thereby, via such an always-concerned and mentally and emotionally on-edge (neurotic) needily-compelled and committed-to-cooperate regime, marshal the whole of the regime to hone the maximal operational efficiency of the regime in subserviency, sociopolitical promotion and glorification of the person and public image of competence, accomplishment and effective totalitarian control, vis a vis the authoritarian nation-state, of the hallowed despot-overlord of the regime. The cohering, stabilizing and fortifying force within and of the regime (its glue) is the prospective and regularly obtained real reward of a retirement pension and fringe benefits for an uncomplicated, compliant, dedicated and loyal service career by members of the regime to the regime and its leader, which is earned ongoingly by a majority of the regime members, high and low. If this sounds crazy, indeed, it is, and nightmarish, but is the reality in authoritarian, antidemocracy regimes, much like what USA society witnessed in the former POTUS Trump administration during the Trump USA presidency.
Employee-class people, not of the political class, under such regimes not only do you lose your democratic rights but you have no labor, or labor-related, organizing and negotiating rights, and often have from a negligible to no social safety net or entitlement or right to an old-age and infirmity, or disability, retirement pension, public or private, across most occupations.
In an aside point, all of the despicable and reprehensible brazen and hush-hush treatment and discrimination of the past accorded to women, especially young women and debutantes, and girls, as well as in a sexual reference to apple-of-the-eyes boys and male teens (sex-object prey male youth), on the part of society and morally double-life exploitative and abusive adults, particularly socially or institutionally powerful or revered adults, historically these typically, but not exclusively, being adult males, would be reinstated, relative to and dependent upon the social, wealth and power status of the offender and the same of victims, with impunity or degrees of it for the offender, regardless, internally to a race or ethnicity, of the race or ethnicity of the victim, except when the offender is a nonwhite transgressor, or especially an alleged black transgressor, against a white victim, Does Photo Show DeSantis 'Grooming High School Girls with Alcohol as a Teacher'? | Snopes.com, [Exclusive] [PIC] Ron DeSantis Accused of Attending Drinking Party With Students At High School Where He Taught - HillReporter |, Main events in E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit accusing Donald Trump of rape | Reuters, Trump’s civil rape case: what is he accused of and what happens next? | Donald Trump | The Guardian, Donald Trump liable in civil sex abuse case of E. Jean Carroll (usatoday.com), Ali Alexander Accused of Soliciting Nudes From Teen Boys (nymag.com). Also, wholesale and comprehensive unaccountable police and firearms-enabled death-and-terror-squad racist-white-mob brutality and killings of black men, women and children and terroristic, destructive attacks on their communities would shortly be reinstated, as a start, under the new USA-MAGA authoritarian regime. With people of color expunged from particular cities and states of such society, the likes of these same terrorist folks and those of their, for the most part, underclass, would become the compelled new grunge-class and subsistence-wages workforce, including agricultural produce-picker/harvester field workers, and associated socially problematical and inmate class in them of the USA-MAGA authoritarian society. Foreign export, import, currency, investment and military trade and political relations between foreign ancestral nations of racial and ethnic populations in the new USA-MAGA authoritarian society so discriminated against or expunged undoubtedly would tremendously suffer or collapse altogether.
Gun cultists and crazies, in support of authoritarianism and autocrats as government leaders or rulers, would have to lose all of their guns, not only their mass-casualty-combat guns but also and even their home-protection and hunting guns, to the authoritarian state for it to preclude, if not also beforehand and afterward to quell, armed resistance, bolting, rebellion or opposition and rivalry, whether large or small, or dispersed or concerted, or sporadic or constant, or overt and/or covert, to it and the potential overthrow of it. It is the military, versions of a Gestapo, assorted police forces, political bosses and selectively licensed persons, for the most part, that and who have access to firearms under authoritarian regimes. Most foreign governments also restrict who can own or possess firearms and the types of firearms that can be owned or possessed by their citizens and subjects. The scheming despot politician may lead on his gullible, dupe populist gun-aficionado support base into believing that the population would continue to have, as well as would have maximal, gun-ownership rights under his regime, but such rights would be temporary under the establishment of the authoritarian regime, in aiding the overthrow or phaseout of our traditional bill-of-rights constitutional democratic-republic form of government and society, but thereafter they would be incompatible with the durable stability, security and survival of his regime and its effective totalitarian rule.
(The horrific epidemic and contagion of gun-violence massacres and mass woundings in the USA will go on and on and on and on...with the legal and easy access to these guns of mass injury and slaughter for as long as they remain prevalent in the USA population and will increase in frequency and scale proportional to their proliferation.
Thoughts, prayers and condolences have not resurrected or healed the killed, wounded and maimed victims, nor paid or pay their funeral and related medical bills, nor support those who are thereby disabled and unable to earn a living and/or family-supporting income, nor have they stopped the gun-violence mass victimization carnage.)
We each in the overwhelming majority in the USA have a vital interest in supporting, protecting and guaranteeing our E Pluribus Unum democratic bill-of-rights constitutional republic, our constitutional democratic republic, even if we do not like one another's social and cultural values, ethos, mythos, music, taste in sports and/or preferred sports team/s, food and drink choices and cuisine, education, political party, ideology, religion, socioeconomic or social class, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity or race, etc.
People whose parents, and you who directly, came to and settled in the USA in flight from authoritarian regimes, when you qualify to vote by birthright or by naturalization as a citizen of the USA, do not vote to elect to or to retain in political office and leadership in the USA authoritarian-politics people like those from whom your parents or you fled, as they, when they are elected to political governance office, will attempt to impose authoritarian, despotic rule, with themselves as the political power squatter and ruler, wherever they hold power, locally, statewide or nationally. A narcissist with and in power at the helm, or in climbing to the helm, ultimately can hardly be controlled by others without force because as a narcissist he or she is self centered and selfish to the utmost -- that is, egocentric and/or egomaniacal, or a megalomaniac -- and with the power at and of the helm.
