Wealth gulf

I mentioned yesterday that the election canvassers in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, refused to certify the vote. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported the rest of the story. The two GOP members of the Board of Canvassers are William Hartmann and Monica Palmer. Hartmann’s Facebook page is filled with racist and homophobic images. Palmer supported protests against the actions of Dem. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and made clear her refusal to certify was for racist reasons. Well, there’s a fun couple! They offered to certify the county except for 80% black Detroit – including a 95% white community that seemed to have more voting issues than Detroit. Democratic activist Ned Staebler, who was a part of the public Zoom meeting, had a few things to say:

I’m not going to try to change your minds. I’m just going to let you know that the Trump stain; the stain of racism that you William Hartmann and Monica Palmer have just covered yourself in, is going to follow you throughout history. Your grandchildren are going to think of you like Bull Conner, or George Wallace. Monica Palmer and William Hartmann will forever be known in southeastern Michigan as two racists who did something so unprecedented that they disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Black voters in the city of Detroit, because they were ordered to.

Somewhat after that, and after lots of other complaints, the GOP members agreed to a compromise. They would certify the vote and ask the secretary of state to audit the election – which won’t change the vote totals. Minutes after the compromise vote the nasty guy tweeted his praise for their refusal to certify. His timing is a bit off. There have been no tweets in response to the compromise. If the county board refused to certify, the state board would have stepped in, or the courts. There was no chance Michigan would not go for Biden. John Stoehr tweeted a thread about Staebler’s speech. Stoehr wrote that the speech I included above came after Staebler outlined the many ways in which Hartmann and Palmer were wrong and that they were choosing to be wrong, choosing to benefit their favored candidate and not the country. Only after evidence based persuasion didn’t work did he launch into political rhetoric – notice he started with “I’m not going to try to change your minds.” Stoehr wished more Democrats would make the leap from persuasion to righteous rhetoric. It is time to move beyond the details of the immediate skirmish and ask are Republicans loyal to the United States or not? Confrontation usually isn’t the way to go – unless we’re confronting fascism. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported that Joe Biden fears full inquiries into the nasty guy’s crimes would serve as a distraction from his agenda to unify the country. If I remember right, that’s similar to what President Gerald Ford said about his predecessor Richard Nixon. Both Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi can shape how the nasty guy’s crimes are investigated and prosecuted. However, there’s a big difference between Nixon and the nasty guy. Today there are crimes against humanity (ripping children from parents, allowing a quarter million die of COVID) and assaults on democracy. These crimes cannot be ignored. If they are the next autocrat will surely be more competent than the nasty guy. Part of Biden’s healing needs to include lessening the fascism that runs through conservatives. A big thing Biden can do is hire great people for the Justice Department, then rebuild the wall between Justice and the president so he can’t be accused of using it to attack personal enemies. Laura Clawson of Kos reported on new Census Bureau data from 2017 that says it isn’t a wealth gap, it’s a wealth gulf. One glaring set of data is comparing median wealth for various groups. White people: $171,700. Asian Americans: $157,400. Hispanics: $25,000. Blacks: $9,567. I calculate the median black wealth to be 5.6% of the median white wealth. Yeah, that’s a gulf. Clawson wrote:

This is the kind of inequality that Republicans go to the mat time and time again to preserve, and Democrats need to be more willing to really try to erase, through tax policy as well as proposals like consumer protection, debt-free college, fair housing, retirement savings, and baby bonds—but in the end, the racial wealth gap also shows why the time for reparations has not passed.

A quote for the day:

Most world religions denounced war as a barbaric waste of human life. We treasured the teachings of these religions so dearly that we frequently had to wage war in order to impose them on other people. ~~Jon Stewart

Hunter of Kos reported on the latest, dangerous antics of Louie Gohmert, Rep. from Texas. Gohmert spoke to the Million MAGA March, at least to the part near the White House, saying that “this was a cheated election and we can't let it stand.” Hunter wrote:

And in perhaps what passed for an acknowledgment that an armed coup by red hat-wearing bozos would be, ahem, unpopular with the general public, Gohmert was quick to point out that "only about 30%" of American colonists supported that previous revolution. You don't need a majority in these matters, after all. You just need enough ammunition.

Yeah, a House Republican advocating for the overthrow of democracy. Leah McElrath quoted a tweet from Lara Seligman:

Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, himself a former Green Beret, announces that he has directed the Special Operations civilian leadership to report directly to the SecDef. This puts Special Operations command "on par with the military services for the first time."

McElrath added:

This appears to give Trump control of Special Operations forces directly through his Cabinet, bypassing the Pentagon altogether.

Referencing a story from the Department of Justice McElrath tweeted a quote:

A former Army Green Beret pleaded guilty today to conspiring with Russian intelligence operatives to provide them with United States national defense information.

Then she quoted a tweet from Axios:

U.S. Special Operations Command is quietly purchasing access to vast troves of real-time location and user data from commercial apps that focus on everything from dating services for Muslims to weather reports, according to a new Vice investigation.

This is scary. In a much more pleasant story Leah McElrath tweeted a thread about a documentary about pre-historical Britain:

One expert was asked to when she would date the beginning of civilization. I thought she was going to say agriculture or something like that. What she said blew my mind. What she said was: evidence of bone-healing. She talked about how anthropological evidence of healed bone injuries showed the true origin of human community, of the capacity and willingness of human beings to give care to one of their own when that person was unable to “contribute” in the ways we tend to value so highly. In other words: The capacity for caregiving is the foundation upon which civilizations have been built. Not engineering or agriculture or religion. Caregiving. Then think about where we are. If we are unable or unwilling to give care to those in need, can we say we are still a civilization? At best, I would argue our failure to value and provide caregiving is evidence we are a civilization in decline.

The issue is bone-healing in particular because a person with a broken bone is incapacitated and not productive for a significant amount of time. The alternative is to leave them to die. Zakia Dimassi tweeted a cool image she described as:

The most detailed model of ONE human cell to date, obtained using x-rays, nuclear magnetic resonance, and cryoelectron microscopy data sets. Most recent estimates put the number of cells in one body at around 30 trillion. Written out, that's 30,000,000,000,000.