Throwaway Culture: Americans Disregard Citizenry Essentials

Garbage in Garbage Out: Clowns, Candidates and Candidacy, non-Debates and Questionable Sponsors

What goes for leadership in America is pandering. But pandering is not leadership.

American crooks and clowns who present themselves as leaders or potential leaders not only pander to factions (name your flavor); they also pander to the wind. 

Wherever the wind blows, they go for the moment—a period of 

• political theater 
• televised electioneering 
• character assassination commercials 
• Pinocchio in a cascade of self-made crises. 
  

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andering is the design of a self-centered man (or woman). Pandering is never about human rights more generally, about rights of the citizenry, the community, the society; not about domestic or national security; nor, worst of all, about responsibility.  Dare I add self discipline? 

There is a difference between individual “rights” of the private person, and individuals’ community responsibilities for the whole. Personal “rights” (selfishness, factionalism, individualism) must end where the health of the whole is at risk, or is likely to suffer harm.

A Wall Street Journal journalist today on “The Brian Lehrer Show” focusing on last night’s non debate made perhaps a slight but important error when she characterized the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) as “nonpartisan.” For all intents and purposes, though it advertises, erroneously, as “nonpartisan,” this corporation is partisan (partisan x2).

In practice, there is no bipartisanism in the United States, particularly in U.S. public officials’ thought and practice; and as passed on to their followers and sycophants.

I

n day to day reality, evidenced in successive congresses and administrations, there exists a single political party. Call it what you like—the corporations’ party, the war party and war industry party, the arms trafficking party, the pandering party, the party of plutocrats or kleptocrats. Nevertheless, the parties calling themselves “Democratic” and “Republican” are one political party—unfortunately, accepted by the majority of the American people as two parties, simultaneously ruling out “second” or “third” parties.

We are locked in a regressive status quo because Americans are like children with teddy bears, Santa Claus, and other fictions and fantasies.

Media, politicians, commerce, and other influential entities, in the process of serving their own purposes, use Americans’ intellectual laziness—a weakness, which is largely, though not entirely, the fault of substandard (under- staffed, -budgeted, -resourced, -supplied) U.S. schools and institutions of learning.  These influential entities’ manipulation of Americans effectively disables the proper functioning of the body politic, and the functioning of a truly constitutional or representative democracy.

M

aking of a Participatory Citizenry (forgotten)

Carrie Chapman Catt and League of Women Voters

Carrie Chapman Catt was an American Woman Suffrage leader who campaigned for the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. In 1920, approximately six months before the Nineteenth Amendment gave women (some women) the right to vote, Carrie Chapman Catt co-founded the League of Women Voters, which was created in a merger of National Council of Women Voters (founded by Emma Smith DeVoe), and National American Woman Suffrage Association (led by Chapman Catt). The League of Women Voters, originally for women only (until 1973), “aimed to help newly enfranchised women exercise their responsibilities as voters.”

The League today has state and local chapters in all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands, and Hong Kong. Though the League of Women Voters supports

“a variety of progressive public policy positions, including campaign finance reform, universal health care, abortion rights, climate change action and environmental regulation, and gun control, it is officially an American nonpartisan civic organization that “neither supports nor opposes candidates or parties.”

In her lifetime (January 9, 1859 – March 9, 1947), Carrie Chapman Catt served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1900-1904; 1915-1920). In 1919, she led many “voteless women” to pressure Congress to pass the constitutional amendment giving them the right to vote, and convinced state legislatures to ratify it in 1920.

She founded the League of Women Voters in 1920 and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (later named International Alliance of Women) in 1904. In the first half of the twentieth century, Carrie Chapman Catt was “one of the best-known women in the United States,” entered on “all lists of famous American women”

U

.S. Presidency: Candidates Debates 1976 – 2020

The League of Women Voters

“wanted to create one space where candidates would have to answer substantive questions about their plans for governance without the distractions of roaring crowds and hecklers,” a space in which voters could see and hear candidates “outside the partisan context of conventions, rallies and advertisements” or campaign commercials.

The League of Women Voters chose the topics and the debate panelists and created a structure based on ensuring equal time for each candidate.

The League in 1976 sponsored the televised debate between President Gerald Ford and Democratic Party challenger James “Jimmy” Earl Carter. The event occurred after a hiatus of sixteen years, since the presidential debate of John F. Kennedy and Richard Milhous Nixon debates.

The 1976 event drew a television audience of nearly 70 million Americans.

President Carter in1980 objected to Independent candidate John Anderson being given a platform in what he believed should be a debate with only the Republican contender, Ronald Reagan. The League held its ground and Anderson participated with Reagan. Carter withdrew.

Because of partisan intrusion, wrangling and toxicity, the League of Women Voters in 1984 withdrew its sponsorship of the presidential debates.

“In a stinging press release, the group’s then-president Nancy M. Neuman said that ‘the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter.’”

 

The campaigns of President Reagan and Democratic challenger Walter Mondale in 1984 had rejected “100 proposed debate panelists before agreeing upon journalists who suited them both.”

 

The presidential campaigns of Vice President George H.W. Bush and Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis in 1988 drew up “their own set of rules,” which included denying follow-up questions, and choosing people to fill the audience.

Neuman commented on the deterioration of the debate process  

“It had become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim was to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and honest answers to tough questions

“The League had no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.”

E

nter

The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), formed in 1987 by partisans, chairs of the two major U.S. political parties, Republican and Democratic, though the group pretends a nonpartisan status. On its website, CPD describes itself as a District of Columbia incorporated “private, not-for-profit, nonpartisan corporation to ‘organize, manage, produce, publicize and support debates for the candidates for President of the United States.”

The Commission fails to disclose names of its funders but declares that it “obtains the funds required to produce its debates every four years and to support its ongoing voter education activities from the communities that host the debates and, to a lesser extent, from corporate, foundation and private donors.”

Exclusivity prevails unlike the LWV: Democratic Participation, Differing Ideas Barred

The Commission (effective in 2020 election cycle) declares that “no candidate or nominee of a party receives an automatic invitation.” Under its established rules, a candidate who receives its invitation to debate must:

• Be eligible under the U.S. Constitution (age, native born, period residence) to hold the office of President of the United States

• Appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to have a mathematical chance of winning a majority vote in the Electoral College

• Have a level of support of at least 15 percent of the national electorate, as determined by five (CPD pre-selected) national public opinion polling organizations, using the average of those organizations’ most recently publicly-reported results at the time of the determination. (“The polls to be relied upon will be selected based on the quality of the methodology employed, the reputation of the polling organizations and the frequency of the polling conducted.”)
  

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n her Newsday commentary reflecting on the most recent presidential candidates (non) debate spectacle, Los Angeles Times culture columnist and critic Mary McNamara concludes this way.

• Perhaps we should consider a return to the original intent of the presidential debates.

• Perhaps “the rules and agreements should not come from the campaigns.”

• Perhaps the rules and agreements should come from a nonpartisan host dedicated to serving not the candidates but the American people; not serving up entertainment, but serving with essential information.

• Perhaps it is time “for women to take charge, again.”

Indeed, serious, able, civic, caring women!

 

 

Sources and news pegs

The Brian Lehrer Show “VP Debate Recap; 30 Issues: Religious Freedom and LGBTQ Rights; Local COVID-19 October 8, 2020 https://www.wnyc.org/story/the-brian-lehrer-show-2020-10-08

Hear callers respond to the vice-presidential candidates' debate between current Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris, plus analysis -- first from Tarini Parti, politics reporter at The Wall Street Journal, and then from Christopher Cadelago, national political reporter for Politico.

Emma Green, staff writer at The Atlantic covering politics, policy, and religion, explains why LGBTQ rights and religious freedom are often in conflict, and whether they can peacefully co-exist.

The Governor's plan to partially shut down parts of Brooklyn and Queens amid several localized outbreaks has left residents of the boroughs with some confusion. Jake Dobkin, co-founder of Gothamist where he's been the de facto numbers-cruncher-in-chief for all things COVID-19, and WNYC reporter Jessica Gould clarify what the plan means for New Yorkers, and particularly what it means for kids who live or attend school in the designated shutdown zone.

The Brian Lehrer Show produced by WNYC. Airs weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern, archived online.  

Newsday “Presidential debates worked a lot better when women called the shots” opinion Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times (TNS) October 3, 2020 https://www.newsday.com/opinion/commentary/presidential-debates-league-of-women-voters-donald-trump-joe-biden-2020-presidential-debate-1.49997166

The Commission on Presidential Debates: An Overview https://www.debates.org/about-cpd/overview/

League of Women Voters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Women_Voters

Carrie Chapman Catt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Chapman_Catt

 

Insight Beyond Today’s News, CLB - © All Rights Reserved

 

Woman Suffrage: Writers’ false representation as “Women’s” Suffrage

History’s documents “Woman” Suffrage

W

oman Suffrage Struggle: pre-Abolition 1840 through (nonwhite womanhood excluded) 1920 Nineteenth Amendment

Woman Suffrage Timeline (1840-1920)      

• 1840:  World Anti-Slavery Convention (London, England) bars Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton from attendance          

• 1848: Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton convene the first United States Woman’s Rights Convention (Seneca Falls, New York). Stanton writes “The Declaration of Sentiments,” setting out the agenda for decades of woman’s activism.      

• 1849: California’s state constitution becomes the first to extend property rights to women. [Women were denied property rights and making legal contracts in their own right]       

• 1850, 1851: Worcester, Massachusetts, is the site of the first and second National Woman’s Rights Convention, allies with the US Abolitionist Movement; the latter year, at the Woman’s Rights Convention at Akron, Ohio, former slave and suffragette Sojourner Truth delivers her “Ain’t I a woman?” speech.      

• 1852: Clara Howard Nichols presents to the Vermont Senate a major Woman Suffragist issue, women’s property rights. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (aka Life among the Lowly) is published.     

• 1861-1865: Woman Suffragists turn efforts to Civil War effort.    

• 1866: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony form the American Equal Rights Association “dedicated to achieving suffrage for all, regardless of gender or race.”         

• 1868: Woman’s club movement begins in New England; in Vineland, New Jersey, 172 women cast ballots in a separate box during the presidential election. US Senator Samuel Clarke Pomeroy (former New Englander and New Yorker, mayor of Atchison 1858-1859; member of the free State convention at Lawrence 1859, president of relief committee during Kansas famine in 1860 and 1861; after Kansas is admitted into the Union, US April 4, 1861-March 3, 1873) introduces the federal woman’s suffrage amendment in Congress. Under the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified) “citizens” and “voters” are defined, exclusively, as (white) man. 

• 1869: American Equal Rights Association thrown into conflict over the Fourteenth Amendment and proposed Fifteenth Amendment to enfranchise Negro males, and avoid question of Woman Suffrage; ♦Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony establish separate New York-based National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) to achieve the vote via US Constitutional Amendment and to push for other woman’s rights issues; ♦Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, et.al establish Boston, Massachusetts-based American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) to press for Woman Suffrage via individual state’s constitutional amendments; ♦Wyoming territory organizes with a Woman Suffrage provision.       

• 1870: Fifteenth Amendment gives Negro men the right to vote, and NWSA refuses to work for its ratification, advocating a Sixteenth Amendment dictating universal suffrage, resulting in Frederick Douglass’s break with Stanton and Anthony.          

• 1871: Victoria Woodhull argues, in a speech before the US House Judiciary Committee, for Woman’s right to vote under the fourteenth amendment.   Anti-Suffrage Party founded. Congressional debates were held over national woman suffrage; “women ‘remonstrants’ organized in opposition” to Woman Suffrage using “traditional rights of petition and remonstrance to influence legislators;”  Almira Lincoln Phelps’s open letter to the New York Times positing that “the feminine ‘silent masses’ opposed woman suffrage, a measure agitated in the regrettably revolutionary tradition of ‘female Thomas Paines.’” “Anti-Suffragism in the United States” by Rebecca A. Rix April 10, 2019 Woman Suffrage series post at National Park Service https://www.nps.gov/articles/anti-suffragism-in-the-united-states.htm     

• 1872: Various women are arrested for illegally voting; Sojourner Truth appears at a polling booth in Battle Creek, Michigan, demanding a ballot to vote, and was denied. ♦ Abigail Scott Duniway convinces Oregon lawmakers to pass laws granting a married woman’s rights, such as starting and operating her own business, controlling the money she earns, and the right to protect her property if her husband leaves.

• 1874: Annie Wittenmyer founds Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) that becomes an important proponent in the fight for Woman Suffrage [one of the strongest opponents to woman’s enfranchisement: the liquor lobby].

• 1876: Frances Willard assumes leadership of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.            

• 1878: Woman Suffrage Amendment is proposed in the US Congress [the 19th Amendment passed 41 years later is worded exactly as this 1878 Amendment.             

• 1887: The first vote on Woman Suffrage is taken in the Senate, and defeated.      

• 1888: National Council of Women in the United States is established to promote advancement of women in society.   

• 1890: Formerly separated NWSA and AWSA merge to form the National American Woman Suffrage; its first president, Cady Stanton, in a movement that focuses on “securing suffrage at the state level.” ♦Wyoming enters the Union with a state constitution granting Woman Suffrage, but the South Dakota campaign loses. ♦American Federation of Labor declares support for woman suffrage.

• 1890-1925 pre- and post-war, Panic of 1893 economic depression, pre-1929-1930s Great Depression aka “The Progressive Era”: Various classes and backgrounds of women enter public life; roles expand, political women increase; Woman Suffrage enters mainstream politics.          

• 1892: Olympia Brown founds the Federal Suffrage Association to campaign for woman’s suffrage.         

• 1893: Colorado adopts woman suffrage.      

• 1894: 600,000 signatures are presented to the New York State Constitutional Convention to bring a Woman Suffrage amendment to the voters, lost      

• 1895: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s publication of The Woman’s Bible drives another wedge among Woman Suffragettes.            

• 1896: Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Frances E.W. Harper among others found the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.♦ Utah joins the Union with full Woman’s Suffrage. ♦Idaho adopts Woman Suffrage.          

• 1903: Women’s Trade Union League of New York, an organization of middle- and working-class women dedicated to working women’s unionization and Woman Suffrage is formed by Mary Dreier, Rheta Childe Dorr, Leonora O'Reilly, and others.

• 1910: Washington State adopts Woman Suffrage. ♦First Suffrage parade is held in New York City organized by rhe Women’s Political Union.       

• 1911: Wealthy, influential women, Catholic clergymen, distillers and brewers, urban political machines, Southern congressmen, and corporate capitalists form the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS), its leader Mrs. Arthur Dodge.       

• 1912: Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party supports Woman Suffrage, the first time support comes from major political party at the national level. ♦ Twenty thousand suffrage supporters join a New York City suffrage parade. ♦ Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona adopt Woman Suffrage.      

• 1913: Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC is the site of the first major suffrage spectacle organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

• 1914: Nevada and Montana adopt Woman Suffrage. ♦National Federation of Women’s Clubs (membership of more than two million women throughout the United States) formally endorses the suffrage campaign.   

• 1915: NYC suffrage parade sees a march of 40,000 women dressed in white carrying placards with names of states they represent.          

• 1916: Jeannette Rankin of Montana is the first woman elected to the House of Representatives. ♦ Congressional Union (later known as the National Women’s Party) forms, borrowing strategies from the radical Women’s Social and Political Union of England          

• 1917: Woman Suffrage passes in New York; in Arkansas women are permitted to vote in primary elections. ♦ Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman elected to Congress, is formally seated in the U.S. House of Representatives         

Also in 1917: National Woman’s Party leader is jailed in a mental ward’s solitary confinement “as a way to ‘break’ her will and to undermine her credibility with the public.”            

National Woman’s Party picketers are charged with obstructing sidewalk traffic and sentenced to up to six months in jail; later released unconditionally in response to public outcry and an inability to stop National Woman’s Party picketers’ hunger strike.

• 1918: Representative Rankin opens debate on a Suffrage Amendment in the US House of Representatives. The amendment passes but fails to secure two thirds majority in the Senate. ♦ Michigan, South Dakota, and Oklahoma adopt Woman Suffrage.          

• 1919: The Senate passes the Nineteenth Amendment and the ratification process begins.

• 1920 (August 26): Three quarters of state legislatures ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Woman (except Negro woman) in America gains full voting rights.        

Women under the Nineteenth Amendment are guaranteed the right to vote in all states of the United States; however, in practice the same restrictions prohibiting “poor or non-white men” from voting; prohibited “poor or non-white women” from voting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_States 

National Women’s History Museum 205 S. Whiting Street, Suite 254, Alexandria, Virginia 22304 womenshistory.org

http://www.crusadeforthevote.org/woman-suffrage-timeline-18401920    

OBSERVABLE AGE-old

C

ontempt for Woman

Man pretends the honoring of mothers by means of selling pushing marketable greeting cards and flowers. But what is required to become mother is the subjection of woman to man and the further demand that she produce a man child to further the tradition of contempt for woman.

When the woman made mother fails to emit a male child or no child; or when she doesn’t raise perfect children (with or without a husband, rarely a house helper in the house), she is further castigated and demeaned.

In further denigrating and disempowering woman, man demands not only that she subject herself to him; but having so splayed, he forces her to bring his seed (fit or not, assured a future or not) to fruition.

Except perhaps in worlds of indigenous women (even there where oilmen and other predators  plunder), woman (as also mother) is degraded at every level in virtually every sector of the world, east, west, north, south.

Not every woman becomes or chooses to subject herself to the hood of “MOTHER.”

Even when woman climbs that steep hill to what is, or seems like, success, she is required to make allowances for man (boys will be boys), often subjecting herself in hiding, often suffering unending acts of disrespect by men, and by compromised women, women who are unsteady, for whatever the reasons—insufficient images, education, knowledge, experience, training, innate courage, sound principled character—in their position, and fearful of losing place or position.

Over the years since that momentous revolution of woman, mass media controlled by man have clamped onto labeling Woman Suffrage “women’s” suffrage, which is a deliberate inaccuracy.

W

oman, often misrepresented by men and women, says something entirely different from women.

“WOMAN” asserts an essential, innate, empowered agency of WOMANHOOD.