Gerrymandering us into a Fascist State

"Little known fact: Although voters cast 1.7 million more votes for Democratic candidates than for Republicans in U.S. House of Representatives races in 2012, according to the Federal Election Commission, Republicans gained a 234-201 majority in the House."
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Gerrymand...-141028-82.html

As detailed in this astute article click here by Danny Weil, the SCOTUS decision on Citizens United immediately prior to the 2010 census allowed the Kochs to buy many state legislatures, turning them to Republican majorities and starting a new wave of gerrymandering. In infamous North Carolina, the most gerrymandered state in the US, it was not the Kochs but an oligarch named Art Pope who bought the state legislature with the goal of gerrymandering the state to ensure eternal Republican victories. The demographics of North Carolina had shifted over the years toward the Liberal end, with northerners retiring to the mountain and shore areas. Pope wanted to negate the votes of the northern interlopers, and he succeeded. (Then there is Texas, which has not been out of court in a decade, relentlessly fighting for its ever more restrictive voter ID laws designed to disenfranchise African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics, students and retired people.) The Rs are not "better at it" than the Ds. Thanks to millions in cash from the foreign invaders, the Koch brothers, the state legislatures were bought wholesale. Republicans seized power immediately prior to the census, when redistricting was possible, and they gerrymandered the crap out of them. See the map, but that is the majority of states. New York just voted by ballot proposal to end gerrymandering for all districts. Some states have done this (California, and Florida eventually, but not for the 2014 election). But the majority of states are gerrymandered by the R party and will remain so until the next census in 2020; so that electing a D to any seat in Congress in a state controlled by a Republican state legislature is a practical impossibility. That is why in the five states that voted by ballot proposal for minimum wage hikes, the same voters voted FOR representatives who vigorously oppose minimum wage hikes. In south Miami Dade the population of 99% retired people ended up voting for a representative who wants to end Social Security and Medicare. That is what gerrymandering does. In the 2012 election, Republican obstructionism so outraged voters that House majority leader Eric Cantor nearly lost his seat. But he didn't. Gerrymandering made that an impossibility. (He lost to a tea party candidate in the June 2014 primary and now works as a lobbyist for a Wall Street investment firm at a salary of $ 3.4 million per year.)

As well stated in Weil's article, " Republicans have alienated women, Latinos, African Americans and college students and are unable to win elections based upon demographics; so they fix elections. Vote suppression now appears to be an integral part of their election strategy. This includes a variety of tactics, such as Voter ID laws, voter ID laws which do not allow the use of College ID's, shortening early voting periods, moving voting polls off college campuses and voter role purges. All of this is accompanied by intimidation."

The Republican party has no constituency left anywhere in the nation and cannot be elected to any office based on their regressive policies. So they rely on dirty tricks: gerrymandering, rigging computer voting machines, touch screen vote flipping, enacting restrictive id requirements, purging millions from the voter rolls by phony and illegitimate means, enacting laws that make registering new voters a criminal act ( Acorn, destroyed by a Republican scam, had one main purpose - to register voters. The League of Women Voters, around since the 1920's, disbanded in the face of state laws that made registering voters criminal if you got an apartment number wrong ), pouring billions in corporate money into negative ads, and finally, sending phony letters to the homes of the less educated voters warning them that if they vote they can be convicted of voter fraud and imprisoned, letters that instruct them that election day has been changed to a week later and so on. In an act of arrogant and outrageous desperation, Georgia Secretary of State, Republican Brian Kemp threw the registrations of 40,000 new voters into the garbage and claimed they were lost. That is beyond fraud, but there are no prosecutions for these acts on the state or federal level.

I have no love for the D party and consistently vote Green. But the Republican party is a dinosaur that refuses to see that it is extinct and so steals power by nefarious means. My prediction is that after the next two years of fascist rule by the Kochs and Art Pope and the other oligarchs, once everybody can set fire to their tap water and the Sears Tower collapses because of fracking-induced earthquakes, once the internet is so censored that none of us will be able to access OEN in a timely fashion, the country will be screaming for Bernie Sanders. He is the only candidate with the balls to end this horror show.

Back in 2012 I published a satirical piece on future headlines that would appear at OEN. Many of those listed items may turn up over the next two years, so you might want to take a look at it.

(Article changed on November 8, 2014 at 08:59)