Trump got fewer votes in an election where millions were denied their right to vote. Republicans control the House of Representatives through gerrymandering, not votes. Democrats got millions more votes for Senators but Republicans have the majority. Nonetheless, Republicans are going to try to force through radicals changes in how our government operates and who is operates for. Much of this will clearly at the service of Dirty Energy.
Big oil has control of our government now. Donald Trump nominated Oklahoma attorney general, Scott Pruitt, to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). How oil-dominated is this nomination? See the Hill, Former Bush EPA head blasts Trump’s pick:
Pruitt has sued the EPA under President Obama over most major environmental regulations and has been a top crusader against the Clean Power Plan and the Clean Water Rule. The Republican attorney general is a close ally of the oil and natural gas industries and doubts the science of climate change.
“He obviously doesn’t care much for the agency or any of the regulations it has promulgated,” Whitman said. “He doesn’t believe in climate change; he wants to roll back the Clean Power Plan.”
When a Bush administration official opposes an oil-company choice, it’s bad.
It gets worse. Why not just go straight to the dirty energy source? Just in the last couple of days, Trump nominated Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State. The head of Exxon? Really?
Then there is Former Texas Governor Rick Perry for Energy Secretary. He is currently on the Board of Energy Transfer Partners. You know, the people who are trying to put the Dakota Access Pipeline across sacred native land.
How did we get here? Is this what We the People really wanted for ourselves?
GOP Got Fewer Votes, Even When So Many Couldn’t Vote – “A Conspiracy In Plain Sight”
Democrats got more votes – across the board. But Republicans and oil companies and giant corporations and billionaires control the government. Wait, what?
Richard Eskow explains a huge part of what happened, in While Democrats Chase Russians, Republicans Keep Rigging Elections at OurFuture.org,
It’s a conspiracy in plain sight. It came out of the woodwork as soon as the conservative Supreme Court majority struck down key portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Two hours after the ruling was announced, Texas’ Republican Attorney General issued a statement re-implementing a voter ID law and redistricting plan that had been blocked because they targeted voters of color.
A recent analysis showed that photo ID laws have had a drastic effect on democracy. They’ve reduced the Latino vote by 10.8 percent and the mixed-race vote by 12.8 percent. They doubled the participation gap between whites and Latinos, to 11.9 percent, and nearly doubled the participation gap between whites and African Americans, to 8.9 percent. They reduced Democratic voter turnout by 7.7 percent…
But wait, there’s more.
Gerrymandering Keeps GOP Control Of House With Fewer Votes
Then there is Republican “gerrymandering” – rigging congressional districts to keep control. In 2014, for example, Gerrymandering Rigged the 2014 Elections for GOP Advantage (Moyers & Company), (click through, there’s even charts)
In Pennsylvania, one state in which the GOP drew the congressional districts in a brazenly partisan way, Democratic candidates collected 44 percent of the vote, yet Democratic candidates won only 5 House seats out of 18. In other words, Democrats secured only 27 percent of Pennsylvania’s congressional seats despite winning nearly half of the votes.
… A similar dynamic played in North Carolina, another state in which GOP control in 2011 created intensely partisan congressional boundaries. In the 2014 midterm elections, Democrats in North Carolina secured only three out of 13 seats (23 percent of NC’s congressional delegation) even though Democratic candidates in that state won about 44 percent of the vote…
The next one is a killer,
In 2012, the first congressional election after the last round of gerrymandering, Democratic House candidates won 50.59 percent of the vote – or 1.37 million more votes than Republican candidates – yet secured only 201 seats in Congress, compared to 234 seats for Republicans.
Fewer GOP Votes For Senate, Too
Republicans also control the Senate with far fewer votes than Democrats. Look at the 2016 results, as USA Today explains in, Democrats won popular vote in the Senate, too,
In results that are still preliminary, 45.2 million Americans cast a vote for a Democratic Senate candidate, while 39.3 million Americans voted for a Republican.
It’s the same in other election cycles, as well. WaPo on 2014 election results, Senate Democrats got 20 million more votes than Senate Republicans. Which means basically nothing. And 2012, Bloomberg, Republicans Win Congress as Democrats Get Most Votes. In 2012 Democrats got about 10 million votes for Senate.
Ten million more votes here, 20 million are votes there… But today Democrats have 48 Senators, Republicans 52.
Speaking of rigged, remember the 2000 election, when the Republican Supreme Court installed Bush with that raw power play? Remember the results, too: war, no action on climate change, financial collapse, 60,000 factories moved to China, accelerated inequality…?
That’s a dirty way to get control with fewer votes. So is the Electoral College. The expressed will of We the People, not so much.
Dirty And Dark Results
And then there is the dirty and dark result of rigged “elections” that aren’t really elections at all. George Zornick writes at The Nation, in Trump’s Transition Team Is Dirty, and It’s Dark
Seventy percent of Trump’s landing team members have some corporate affiliation, according to an analysis by Public Citizen. There is a former lobbyist for Pepsi and agro-giant DuPont on the landing team for the Department of Agriculture. The Department of Justice (DoJ) landing teams are stocked with white-collar lawyers who work primarily to defend corporate clients from DoJ actions. A former vice president for defense contractor Boeing is on the Department of Defense landing team, along with several other people who work in defense contracting or other private military companies.
The game is rigged for the dark and dirty wealthy few. We have to change this.
People’s Action Says Resist
George Goehl, the co-director of People’s Action, a national progressive grassroots advocacy organization, issued the following statement:
“President-elect Donald Trump has put Wall Street executives and billionaires in charge of the federal government. Today, he added Big Oil CEOs to his corporate-controlled toxic stew.
President-Elect Trump promised to drain the swamp, but he has just proposed to fill it with two more corporate alligators who will exploit taxpayers to make more money for the billionaire class at the expense of the rest of us. Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, don’t care about the interests of everyday people, including the people who voted for Donald Trump.
“Trump’s nominees will spark waves of buyer’s remorse throughout the Midwest and Rust Belt. One month into his transition, increasing number of his supporters see he is a fake economic populist – and a very real con man.
With the well-documented warming of the planet reaching dangerous levels, these are precisely the wrong people to place in these positions of public trust and global power. We will do everything in our power to make sure they are not confirmed to the new administration.”
Accompanying Goehl’s statement:
People’s Action has a history of working with everyday people to win climate justice and protect the planet. We’ve collaborated with the Native Organizers Alliance in recent months to halt Energy Transfer Partners’ construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. We’ve also worked with our state affiliates to advance the Clean Power Plan and ensure equity for low-income communities and communities of color.
Since Donald Trump’s election, we’ve held actions around the country to resist his plan to reverse the movement toward sustainable energy, equity and climate justice.
So here we are. Radical changes coming, the will of We the People notwithstanding. We need to organize, protest, resist and most of all apply pressure to politicians. For the sake of the planet, we must resist. We the People can’t let them get away with this.
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