It Took a Pandemic to Show Us That.....

truth in exchange for favorable TV ratings and polls, making money, or winning an election. If uncertain, vet what you doubt at www.snopes.com/, www.politifact.com/, or any fact-checking site that you trust. 
    Congressional oversight of the financial rescue process is required more than ever. It must be conducted in a manner that prevents mismanagement. “Who gets the money? How do they have to use it? Is it a grant or is it really a loan?” are all legitimate questions that taxpayers are entitled to ask and should expect answers from honest politicians. 
   Handing out big bonuses to undeserving, irresponsible executives and doing stock buy-backs that occurred during the last bailout form the 2007-2008 financial melt-down cannot happen again, but it looks like it already has. Several very large corporations have been shamed recently into returning millions of financial rescue “grants” inappropriately applied for. With the most-recent tax breaks given to large corporations, many are already flush with cash and will survive while small businesses who operate month-to-month, may not survive at all. The idea that bailout and tax-cut monies, if given to corporations, it will “trickle down” is proven folly. What does occur is yet another shift of wealth, consolidating more of it into the hands of the very few.

     It took a pandemic to show us that we need to become more empowered - The time is right to institute major voting reforms in the United States. How about declaring a National Voting Day and not require voters to take off work (and possibly lose a day’s wages)? Or what about passing federal legislation to protect and harden the election process from foreign and domestic interference? Eliminating the gerrymandering of voting-districts is a great idea. How about standardizing methods to record votes with full and accurate audit capability? Providing adequate numbers of polling locations based upon voter populations would avoid long lines? Finally, how about instituting voting-by-mail immediately so that it can be used in the 2020 election. Now, during a pandemic, where social distancing demands us to maintain 6 or more feet apart and wearing masks, voting-by-mail makes so much sense. And any question of it leading to massive vote fraud is in itself questionable. 
      Absentee ballots have been submitted by millions of Americans serving and deployed in the military, the Foreign Service, those living abroad working for American corporations for decades. Today, five states: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, now have all-mail elections, with ballots being sent to every registered voter without having to request one. States like Arizona and California, allow voters to add themselves to a permanent list of mail voters. It is a fact that even the commission tasked by the current administration to investigate their claim of rampant voter fraud in the 2016 election, actually found NO evidence of any voter fraud at all! And didn’t the President, his wife, and his press secretary, all vote by mail in the 2018 mid-year elections? It must be safe, then. And curiously, while the current administration and leaders in the U.S. Senate firmly believe that it is entirely up to the states to fund, protect, and execute their own elections process, they seem intent on not allowing any state to implement mail-in voting, using the false fear of massive fraud as a justification. 
     Rather than making it more difficult to vote, eliminating polling locations forcing long lines and thus, discouraging voters from voting, suppressing the vote through unlawful purging of legitimate voters from the rolls, and reshaping voting districts that favor one party over another, we should look to our political parties to work legitimately and honestly hard to win our vote by convincing us of their strengths and abilities and the merits of their policies. 

    It took a pandemic to show us all of that………..