Today’s News: Sponsored by the Letter R, as in Republican, Racism, Rape, and Rapacity
President Donald Trump makes it easy to forget that he’s merely a symptom of what ails this country. Don’t fall for the trap of thinking him being defeated in 2020 or impeached or hauled off to jail will stop the spread of the disease that enables him.
This weekend’s comments aimed at Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), suggesting they should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came" is a fine example.
Of course it’s racist. Of course it’s reprehensible. And of course just about nobody on the right side of the political divide will say jack sh*t about it. Keeping America White, Male, and Afraid could easily be a campaign slogan for the GOP in 2020.
https://twitter.com/propublica/status/1150790177498943488
Immigration is the hook Republicans have chosen for keeping their fear-based constituency motivated in elections. The rest of the institutionalized racism in this country continues unabated as long as fear is a pillar of their program.
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1150790110427979776
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln could rise from the dead to submit a plan for a reason-based humane system of asylum/entry and Senator Mitch McConnell would make sure it never got a hearing.
My point in making the above statement is that it’s a waste of time to focus on expecting a path to compromise. It’s not enough to just get rid of Trump. The whole gang and their corporate backers need to go. The ‘middle voters’ theory of politics being peddled in the mass media falls apart any time it undergoes serious scrutiny.
https://twitter.com/Haleaziz/status/1150790064521113600
The second part of the hydra headed monster is misogyny. The political battleground reactionaries have chosen for this fight is abortion. Limited access to birth control won’t be far behind.
And in everyday life, the ultimate mechanism for control of women is violence.
Revelations connected with the belated arrest of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein will continue for a while, demonstrating the widespread dehumanization of women at the top of the economic and political food chain.
Congressman Duncan Hunter’s attempt (which he might win on appeal) to characterize his philandry as a legit part of legislating is yet another expression of this point of view.
Yeah I know, #MeToo isn’t all men. It’s a systemic issue enabling violence and therefore control of women. And it’s very effective.
Here’s just how bad it is: 49 out of every 50 reported rapes in the United States do not result in a rapist being taken off the street, as this remarkable article from the August edition of the Atlantic Magazine demonstrates
Each year, roughly 125,000 rapes are reported across the United States. Sometimes the decision to close a case is surely correct; no one wants to smear an innocent man’s reputation or curtail his freedom because of a false report. But in 49 out of every 50 rape cases, the alleged assailant goes free—often, we now know, to assault again. Which means that rape—more than murder, more than robbery or assault—is by far the easiest violent crime to get away with.:.
...Most rapes, of course, are not committed by strangers. Eighty percent of the time, the rapist is someone a woman knows—they met at a party or a bar; he’s her colleague, friend, mentor, coach. So police saw little reason to send off those rape kits: The man’s identity was never in doubt. But the Cleveland study illuminated another insight—one that shows the tragic consequences of failing to test “acquaintance rape” kits.
Historically, investigators had assumed that someone who assaults a stranger by the railroad tracks is nothing like the man who assaults his co-worker or his girlfriend. But it turns out that the space between acquaintance rape and stranger rape is not a wall, but a plaza. When Cleveland investigators uploaded the DNA from the acquaintance-rape kits, they were surprised by how often the results also matched DNA from unsolved stranger rapes. The task force identified dozens of mystery rapists this way…
...Of the more than 200 sexual-assault cases [Austin, Tx] police referred to prosecutors from July 2016 to June 2017, eight resulted in plea agreements, but only one case went to trial. The victim was a man.
Rape kits aren’t tested. Cops don’t believe victims. Prosecutors only want the most winnable cases.
And then there are the 22 women who have accused the President of the United States of sexual assault or misconduct. It took 25 years for rap singer R Kelly’s string of abuse and pedophilia to actually get him off the street.
All these examples are just small bits of a puzzle that includes domestic violence, job discrimination, and routine harassment.
The final part of this hydra saga is foundational. The currently in vogue phrase for describing this oppression is economic inequality.
Here’s a symptom:
https://twitter.com/Baxamusa/status/1150491122256371714
Stated simply, the elevation of the marketplace as the ultimate arbiter of governance is at the heart of all this. The need for greed has become all-consuming. It fosters (just as it always has) ‘otherism’ and the demand for continuous financial growth underlies the destruction of the planet currently in place.
Yes, folks, I’m talking about our current flavor of capitalism. Things don’t have to be this way. And we don’t have to line up the guillotines to change the course of history. But we do have to be honest about where change needs to start and finish.
So it’s not just Trump. Every single elected official in the United States needs to be judged by the standard of “We, the people” rather than “I got mine, so screw you.”
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https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1150562519318257664
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Email me at DougPorter@WordsAndDeedsBlog.com