U.S. National

Over 200 people have quickly signed a new petition in Charlottesville, Va. at http://bit.ly/cvillepeace

Almost all of the signers are from Charlottesville.

The mass marches against racism and police brutality have changed us all.

But they’re not enough.

All these gatherings need voter registration tables with detailed information on how to save the election currently scheduled for November 3.  

Too many uprisings have shaken the nation, then faded away. 

We all must vote. But this year, there’s much more to do. 

Stripped voter rolls, a sabotaged vote by mail system, a flipped vote count … these chokeholds can kill American democracy. Come November 3, unless we act, we can’t breathe.  

Millions of election protection activists must work every precinct, county, and state election center. Grassroots networks must protect how this election will be conducted. Our very survival depends on making sure there’s a national vote this fall that truly reflects the will of the American people.

That means dealing with 2020’s “election protection trinity”:

Registration rolls  

Sixteen million Americans have been stripped from our voter rolls. We need to get them re-registered. 

Already we’ve seen, as a result of people taking to the streets in the United States:

On Sunday afternoon, four candidates for the Democratic nomination for Congress in Virginia’s Fifth District held a debate — or really more of an amicable forum in which they didn’t much try to distinguish themselves from each other. I had blogged about them some weeks back when John Lesinski seemed the best among them to me based purely on their websites. Now, Cameron Webb seems the best of the lot to me, though I’m thoroughly underwhelmed and still largely guessing in the dark.

Vote by Mail will decide the 2020 election. Trump and 50,000 of his armed backers will try to say otherwise.

But VBM could turn us forever from hackable touch screens to paper ballots. To make that happen, election protection activists must overcome Vote by Mail’s many vulnerabilities to make mail-in paper ballots an instrument of real democracy.

The odds are long, but the chances are real.

“Guns aren’t just a danger in and of themselves,” writes Noah Berlatsky at Quartz. “They enable a policing philosophy built on violence and forced compliance, rather than one founded on respect, trust and consent. That philosophy affects every police interaction, even those that don’t involve actual shooting.”

The 2020 TrumpVirus pandemic that is killing so many of us today has deep roots in World War I and the Woodrow Wilson Influenza that killed 50,000,000 back then.

Along with mass death, both viruses have brought fascism to America. To avoid a full-on replay, we need to know how.

Like today’s TrumpVirus catastrophe, the global pandemic of 102 years ago was almost entirely avoidable. It was not an innocent accident or Act of Nature. It spread from the fascist decisions of one man: Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson was elected president in 1912 as a liberal democrat. He sold himself as a man of peace. But he was (like Donald Trump) a KKK-supporting White Supremacist. In 1915, for no good reason, he sent US troops crashing into Mexico City to “teach a lesson” to “our little brown brothers.”

The 12-18 states that will decide the presidency this fall are already being primed for voter suppression and election theft by the Trump GOP. Our ability to overcome will decide the fate of the Earth.

Donald Trump is in the White House because in 2016 the vote count was stolen in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania (plus, most likely, North Carolina and Florida). Hillary Clinton won the election nationwide by 2.8 million votes. But she and her corporate Democrats did and said nothing about the theft of the Electoral College in those key states.

At great personal expense the Green Party’s Jill Stein did go into WI, MI and PA with Bob Fitrakis and other activist/attorneys to demand recounts. All three states showed massive fraud on Trump’s behalf. Clinton was almost certainly the rightful winner of their Electoral votes—-and thus the presidency. But she killed the recounts, then attacked Stein and the Greens.

Every night gunshots lullaby me to sleep

In ruins of abandoned buildings

the broken glass is

where we bottle up all our

broken dreams. . . .

Hold the dream with me, as it breaks loose from Jameale Pickett’s poem. Something beyond the insane dance of crime and punishment is happening, at least this year, this moment, in Chicago’s high schools. Young people are getting a chance to excel and become themselves, as more and more schools find and embrace common sense, also known as restorative justice.

The funding is fragile, precarious, but some schools in struggling communities are figuring out how to break the school-to-prison pipeline, even though the system as a whole remains wrapped up in suspensions, expulsions, zero tolerance and racism.

“The Obama administration on Wednesday urged school officials to abandon unnecessarily harsh suspension and expulsion practices that appear to target black students,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported recently.