National opinion: Something worse than gerrymandering

The Supreme Court wants to go back to the days when there were ways to keep blacks out of voting booths. Then, we had things like property ownership requirements and literacy tests. Today, we have attempts to restrict mail-in voting, voter identification requirements, and many other tricky ways to get the job done.

The court will probably soon rule that it’s okay to break up black and brown communities into smaller chunks and allocate them to Republican-dominated voting districts in order to take away any usefulness of their votes. Let them vote all they want! They will never get their way!

However, this kind of immoral and undemocratic “gerrymandering” will not do even the great majority of whites much good because there is an even more devious and evil process going on behind the scenes to take away middle-class white votes as well. The wealthy 1% class, and the hyper-wealthy .1% class have been slowly buying up exclusive and forever political power in America.

Republicans have given up on republican government, where the people consent to the laws by electing representatives to Congress, where laws are made. Republicans are being converted en masse over to autocracy and even monarchy, where the one despotic ruler and one uber-wealthy class of aristocrats make policy decisions in favor of whatever puts more money in fewer hands.

Those who have the money make the policies, period. Today, the economy and the stock market are still floating and not sinking because the hyper-wealthy are spending like crazy on luxury items while everybody else is pinching pennies and going into levels of debt they can never get out of. Their debt will keep them slaves to the wealthy class forever more.

The wealthy class is so rich it just buys up candidates who promise to never again vote to raise income taxes and inheritance taxes and luxury taxes on the rich or income taxes on corporations.

The rich are slowly implementing policies like the president, Senators, and wealthy tycoons can do no wrong. They are immune to prosecution. Either that, or they can buy their way out of accountability by endlessly appealing their cases until the courts just let them off their crimes, like what happened to Donald Trump with his three or four different kinds of felonies. Punishment for white-collar crime becomes effectively abolished in America so that, as the President says, “They can do whatever the hell they want.” That’s what he and his friends have been doing their whole lives, and now it is time for it to be encased into law for the first time in America.

Most politicians want nothing other than money, power, fame, revenge. Most used to want to serve the interests of the people, to help them be empowered with community decision-making ability. Not anymore. The illicit money available in public office, known as emoluments, and the concentration of decision-making power are both so considerable that national offices, and many state and local offices, corrupt their occupants very quickly. This can happen because the citizenry is so occupied with all their entertainments that they don’t care what happens in the public sphere. They are no longer determined to hold bad behavior accountable. For example, America has never impeached and removed a president from office, like ancient democratic Rome did frequently.

It may be too late to stop the monarchy movement, but for those who want to try, I will tell you the only effective way it can be stopped or reversed. It will require hard work and lots of education. We need honest and sophisticated civics and history education in schools, of the kind that makes it clear to youth that monarchy and aristocracy have always led nations straight down to hell like where nations lived during the Dark Ages in Europe. The people then had no education, few rights, little to no money, lived as serfs on the farm property of wealthy barons, and did all their manual labor for them for a pittance. Sounds like a place where we want our children to end up?