what's more to know about the US Postal Service shitshow?

 

Comrades,

It comes as no surprise that the Orange Guy from Twitter should order his henchmen to strangle the time honoured US Postal Service of funds to commit widespread voter disenfranchisement across every one of The Great 50 states. Never mind that the Post Master General is a "Trump mega-donor" in the form of the bald, beady-eyed, cat's-arsed Louis DeJoy. A third rate apparatchik who wouldn't know which way is up on a postage stamp. Anyone who's seen that first class movie about voting, Lincoln, will know that that particular Republican President wasn't averse to flinging the odd Post Master's comfortable life-time sinecure in the way of wavering voters in Congress on the slavery question. So if "The Party of Lincoln" has been into vote buying from day one, why should vote denying be any different? And this was back in the day when the Post Master General was a cabinet position, on the same level as say, the Secretary of War. It wasn't until 1971 that Richard "Tricky Dicky" Milhous Nixon decided that the PMG would no longer have a seat in the inner circle. Until now.

Everyone knows at least a little of the storied history of the mail in America - the Pony Express and all that - but never mind that the USPS is now a gargantuan, no doubt Byzantine, bureaucracy. The accusations by acolytes of The Donald that there is too much waste and mismanagement are probably true. How can there not be with 30,000 post offices, half a million posties, and a mind boggling 142 billion items delivered last year? Show me any other vast, complex public service that doesn't have the same problems. But to rob it of $25B in the Time of Corona is not only plain mean & vindictive, but the Fascista don't even bother to disguise the fact that it's all been carefully designed to prevent as many Black Democrat voters as possible from having their valid votes counted. Electoral hanky-panky knows no bounds, but this one's close to taking the biscuit for bald faced blatancy and bastardry.

And it's never been easy to vote in The States. Ever. Election day is always the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November after all. Schemes for voter disenfranchisement have been around since the Miracle of Democracy kicked off in the USA, it's all part & parcel of the caper. Every state has different rules. Some allow anyone to cast a "mail-in ballot", in other states (like Australia) you need a valid excuse to lodge a postal vote, while in six states postal voting is all but impossible because of the number of flaming hoops you have to jump through to get an exemption from turning up on the day. It's the same for in-person pre-poll voting - different everywhere. Voting in person is no less difficult - not enough polling stations is a common complaint. Sometimes the booths are all but inaccessible - you have to more or less hike there. Some Supervisors of Elections who may or may not be on the take indulge in simply not printing enough ballot papers for the number of registered voters - so polling stations close early when they run out. In some states you need photo ID to vote, others you don't. And, you can also casually roll up on the day only to find you have been struck off the electoral roll for not paying a fine or some other kind of minor misdemeanor, or indeed for no discernable reason at all. Some states even routinely pull tens of thousands of voters off the rolls simply because they haven't voted for a while. You have to be eternally vigilant that you haven't been rubbed out, as there's no obligation on the state to tell you.  Gerrymandering is rife and who knows how much ballot stuffing goes on - but the one thing that everyone knows is that co-ordinated postal vote electoral frauds are extremely rare. Vlad The Impaler of the Kremlin certainly swung a helluva lot more votes the way of his best pal DJ Trump! in 2016 than any postal voting scam will ever deliver to Uncle Joe in 2020. And in any case, it wouldn't come close to the 176,000 names (and counting) of Covid19 victims who are now very conveniently unable to vote on account of their deceasedness. Then again, dead people have been voting in elections since the Dawn of Time. What a shitshow.

And of course, there is nothing more to say about that dead-set opportunist snake and former Master of the Dark Arts, Steve Bannon, being yanked off a luxury yacht owned by some billionaire Chinaperson bobbing somewhere around the coast of Connecticut mid-week, and being cuffed for wire fraud by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Fraud? Nice irony. For the love of Sweet Weepin' Jesus Upon The Cross it couldn't have happened to a nicer fraud.

It doesn't need to be this hard, but "it is what it is" - for every person, man, woman...

 

never again

Comrades,

Amid the panic and confusion of a world wide pandemic, it's very easy to forget that today is the 75th anniversary of the dropping of Little Boy on Hiroshima. My dear departed father, an RAAF fighter/bomber pilot at the time, went to Hiroshima in the early 1960's simply because he wanted to have a look. He held no animosity against the Japanese whatsoever, but certainly knew all about the power of a bombing run. He never spoke openly about the war, because I think as he got older he rejected it and was uncomfortable with his role in it. And they were still atmospheric testing at Maralinga when I was born in 1957 just 700 miles away, for Chrissake.

My views on The Bomb are well known - fascinated and repulsed by it, perhaps in equal measure. I've been banging on about it in these pages for decades. Someone was once looking at my bookshelves at home and asked me "I know you are utterly opposed to nuclear weapons and war in general, so why do you have so many books about it?" I replied "Know your enemy".

Of course, the horrors of Hiroshima - and then Nagasaki - were small beer indeed compared to what followed - the development of the H-bomb, 2,476 known nuclear tests, and of course the biggest muthafukka of al time...the Russian test that got way out of control...Tsar Bomba on 30 October 1961. That shocked the world into the realisation that "mutually assured destruction" (MAD) was right here, right now - and the concept of the end of the world at the push of a big red button would be with us forever.

Tsar Bomba was really beyond imagining at 1,500 times bigger than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined, and 10 times more powerful than all the munitions expended during World War Two.

Nuclear disarmament will never be achieved in my lifetime, but there was great joy for me when the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize "for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons."

Of course the Yoof of Today have no idea what it was like in the Cold War and have no fear of these things, but back in the day (late 1970's) when there were actually demo's calling for the world to be rid of this hideous scourge, I used to march proudly under the DRINKERS FOR DISARMAMENT banner as it was a natural fit for a reformed Trot and notorious pisspot. And even in my current teetotal status, I remain a fully paid-up member. I'm in there somewhere...

Hiroshima. Never again. Ever.

"clinging to the floating debris"

Comrades,

"Oh, my dear old Donald, what is it that you've done this time?" DJ Trump! is having paroxysms after being told he can't postpone his own re-election...I'll give him one thing, tho' - the Master of Spasticity is quite mesmerizing, which probably accounts for his enormous popularity:

https://64.media.tumblr.com/5c06b05cde6b1f2431a599918b864366/d54f502d9c2dde5e-a4/s640x960/6d90e0024f141e5a19d9aabdf8ca4d897a85a289.gif

It's a lucky thing for the Miracle of Democracy that the putrid red herring the Trumpotus threw out there was viewed with distaste on both sides of the aisle, who rejected out of hand the unprecedented - now there's an overused word in these uncertain and difficult times - idea of postponing a US Presidential election. Let's face it, it doesn't matter how crooked! rigged! fraudulent! dishonest! ridiculous! the poll is. In the all the history of all the world, all elections are, in one way or another. Vote buying, ballot stuffing, bagmen on the take, polling stations burnt to the ground, no ballot papers to be found, a legion of dead folks voting, strong arm tactics, ballot boxes found in dumpsters, endless arguments about counting irregularities, stand over men, one-armed voting machines, my God! even just the concept of mail-in-voting and every other electoral hanky panky in the book - and much more - are all par for the course here, and the Bozo in Chief knows it. At least there's no shady preference deals in this one, but it all goes way back. Even Ol' George Washington lost his first run for elected office, a seat in the Virginia Assembly in 1755, because he failed to provide enough booze to lure the required number of punters to the polling stations. He didn't make that mistake again, delivering 144 gallons of rum, punch, cider and wine to the booths the next time round, winning a vote for about every half gallon of lunatic soup. That's not to mention other candidates who were allegedly heard to thump tubs and shout "free hams for everyone!". So what if the pure fantasy of millions of people voting while ineligible comes true? There sure as hell are millions of eligible voters who can't/couldn't-be-fucked-to/won't-on-principle cast a ballot, with voter turnout historically pushing it to make 50%. It's trite to say that Uncle Joe will win in a canter, if only he can turn out the "black vote". We've all heard of Jim Crow, but ask any voter of colour in The South just how difficult it is to register and then find a way to get to and then be allowed into a polling station let alone anywhere near a ballot box, even to this day - widespread systematic black voter disenfranchisement is institutionalised in The South. There is no such thing as a Federal Electoral Commission, it's all down to each individual state while the actual mechanics of voting are handled on a county level of which there are 3,141, and they're all different. The POTUS has zero control over it. In theory. Chaos theory. And The Donald loves nothing more than chaos and control. The time-honoured divide and rule principal.

Never mind "Build That Wall", the Orange Bloke from Twitter campaigned in 2016 on a "jobs and growth" platform which has now long exited the poop shooter in a grand fashion and glooped down the s-bend due to the current difficulties. In a perfect world The Donald would be cactus three months out from the election, just on the strength of tens of millions of unemployed alone, who unfortunately for the DJ! - do still have the vote. By rights, a Drover's Dog could be the next President of the US if the 'Never Trumpers' had their way. But don't count yr chickens - stranger things have happened - and we all know what they are. Hillary? Is anyone listening to the deplorables? Fanatical supporters of The Donald are rusted on so hard even WD40 won't shift 'em. But it struck me the other day just how far up shit creek the paddleless incumbent is, with death, misery, and deprivation all around him when a news flash came through on the Bush Telegraph in the corner of the lounge room with the ticker-tape reading that California had become the first state to register more than half a million novel corona virus infections. To put it in perspective, Australia's only just gone past 18,000 cases. California has a population of 40 million, Australia 25 million - you do the math. If the great city of Melbourne, in all its glorious squalor and godlessness, is now considered a "disaster zone", what then of America? Pushing a quarter of a million fatalities by the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November? That's not at all fanciful thinking given the exponential nature of the plague. It's a massacre. The Boomer Remover has well & truly replaced the Grim Reaper. 

Nelson Mandela Memorial Lecture, 19 July, 2020.