In 2009 Obamacare went to the House and Senate to be voted on. Not one RepubliCon voted for it in the House or Senate, not one, but 34 Democrats voted against it and it still passed and was signed into law in March of 2010. We got what we believed would be the road to to a universal single payer health care system, boy were we wrong!
After it was passed and went into law, RepubliCon’s voted over 50 times to repeal it but were not successful. Some RepubliCon governors even refused to implement it in their states, then blamed Obama for their constituents health problems.
After 5 years of RepubliCon obstruction the rates started to rise because there wasn’t enough young people opting to purchase the minimum coverage to keep rates stable. They also rose because of the fact that RepubliCon lead states continued to find ways to not implement it which kept a significant amount of people out of the market, yet they blamed the rate hikes on Obama.
Seven years in a row; 50 plus votes to repeal comes out to 7 plus votes a year, all the while they’re actively trying to sabotage it on the state level, and it stood even with a majority RepubliCon Congress.
Now its 2017 with a RepubliCon held White House, Senate and House of Representatives, and they still cant find enough votes to repeal Obamacare because they cant get all their members on board a fix that the CBO has shown to be a disaster that would leave 14 million people uninsured next year, with an additional 10 million added over the next 10 years.
Premiums would still rise 15 to 20 percent before they eventually become 10 percent lower. What hasn’t been discussed is, would that be 10 percent lower than the cost right now, or 10 percent lower than the 15 to 20 percent rate hike? You see what I’m getting at here right? Ten percent lower than the 15 to 20 percent increase means that the rates would rise 5 to 10 percent after the repeal, which means that they’re selling us their usual RepubliCon bullshit. Luckily it didn’t pass.
Whats really crazy is that the so called president has decided to say that its the Democrats fault that it didn’t pass, which is partially true, but he’s trying to spin it and say that they didn’t give him any of their votes as if they should have. This is the so called presidents way of diverting the attention away from the fact that he lost bigly, as he would say, and it wasn’t because of Democratic obstruction, it was at the hands of his own party. He has a majority in the House and Senate but couldn’t muster up enough votes to get it through the House. Obama lost 34 Democrats and still got the bill signed into law with Not One RepubliCon vote, read that again, Not One.
So explain to me why 45 needs to have Democrats to help him out! President Obama reached his hand across the aisle for 8 years trying to get members of the Get Out Party (GOP) to help govern this country and they refused to do anything significant because of their hatred of him. They’re leadership stated that their only mission was to make him a one term President, and obstruct anything he tried to accomplish.
They stopped his attempts to fix the infrastructure, they blocked his jobs bills, they fought against solar, they shut the government down, and so on and so on, all in an effort to make him look incompetent and make sure that his legacy wouldn’t be great.
Then as soon as they won the White House they immediately went into action to try to erase anything and everything that he did in his 8 years as President, but now this so called president is whining about not getting any help from Democrats, GTFOH!
The Unspoken War
BETTER KNOWN AS THE WAR ON CIVIL RIGHTS
This election is quite possibly the most important election of our lives and if you’re going to participate in this Representative Democracy, you need to read this.
In 2008 a curious thing started to occur, a large swath of people appeared seemingly from out of the blue to voice their heinous opinions about race and race relations in this country, Up until then it was a part of the underbelly of the USA’s existence for the past 40 something odd years.
It stretches back longer than that, but I’m just going to take it from end of The Civil Rights Era.
These people became the Tea Party and now the Alt Right Movement, and there entire agenda is to overturn the legislature of The Civil Rights and Affirmative Action Movements that helped Blacks achieve a small modicum of success in this country.
They were emboldened by the rise of a Black man smart and capable enough to challenge a white man to the highest seat of power this nation has to offer. Why does this uppity nigger think that he can do something like that? If it wasn’t for those damn Civil Rights theres no way a nigger would have ever thought he could do something this preposterous. We need to go back to the good ole days, The days when them niggers knew their place, the days when they couldn’t vote, the days when we could beat and kill them indiscriminately for being Black. The good ole days!
And here we are with the culmination of all that anger and vitriol because we dared to vote a nigger into the white house! And his name is Donald Trump, the figurehead of the movement closer than I would have ever believed to becoming the fucking President of the United States of America, I can do nothing but shake my head.
How is it possible that a misogynistic, racially biased, xenophobic entertainer is capable of doing something like this, unless there’s a very large sum of people that fit into those categorizations that are willing to vote for him. This is the only way how!
So now that we are here, we need to really evaluate whats actually on the table this election. If you can walk away from this article and not vote to keep our Civil Rights in tact, we will soon be a nation at war within ourselves, because Black people, Mexicans and women are not going back to the good ole days, because those days weren’t good for us. It was only good for the misogynist, the waist and the xenophobic!
Voting Rights
They’ve been steadily trying to whittle away with voting rights over the past eight years because trends are showing that the GOP are losing ground with young voters in unprecedented numbers. This means that the future of the party is at stake, so they needed to find a way to stop the youth from voting them out in droves in the coming years.
They’re doing this by trying to make them more cynical about the election process, which helps to depress the voter turnout amongst the youth.
They’re also finding ways to suppress votes by challenging the legitimacy of some peoples voting credentials, while finding ways to make it more difficult to vote for others by making harder to get the very credentials needed to vote in the first place. They know that if you have to jump through too many hoops to get credentials to vote, a nice percentage will forgo the process altogether and become apathetic to the process in general, which lowers the vote totals for minorities and the youth.
The reason why they know these things will effect minority and youth turnout is because we are the ones being targeted by these new voting laws, that have been proven to work.
Women’s Rights
Women’s rights have been under fire for longer than Obama’s presidency, but those trying to scale back their rights began to become more vocal under the Black POTUS as the Tea Party rose to prominence.
These people claim that they’re operating under religious freedoms, and certain things are against their religion; like abortion, and they claim that they’re the family values people, yet a lot of the ones in power have cheated on their wives multiple times and been divorced multi times. Because nothing says family values like cheating on your wife and then divorcing her for the person you cheated with, good ole GOP.
Through all these claims you start to see a pattern start to emerge.
I can cheat but you should hold fast to your marital values. I can send my mistress to get an abortion, but you should by no means ever get an abortion.
Equal Pay for Equal Work is off the table, back in the good ole days women count even vote or work, thats when things were at there best, unless you were a woman.
They’ve collectively made it harder for a woman to exercise her reproductive rights by defunding Planned Parenthood, and shutting down offices across each GOP held state.
Plus they don’t want to give women paid parental leave or extra time off after having a baby! This all on the ballot come Nov 8th!
Immigrant Rights
Now check this out, the very people that don’t want to increase the minimum wage, that use illegal immigrants in the workforce so they can pay them below minimum wage, and keep the salaries lower for the rest of America, actually lay claim to wanting to keep illegal immigrants out of the country. And some don’t want any immigrants to come here at all, legal or illegal, regardless of the fact that they are first and second generation immigrants themselves.
So if they don’t want to pay higher wages but they’re going to kick all the immigrants out so those jibs can go to Merican’s, ask yourself this, how much will they be willing to pay you to do the job that an illegal immigrant did for $5, which helped keep the job at just around minimum wage for others? Do you think they’re going to pay you top dollar for that job, hell no! They’re going to say that the industry standard for that type of job is right around minimum wage, and if you want a raise they’ll find someone else for that entry level position.
Therefore wages won’t go up because they get rid of the undocumented, they’ll stay the same or even go down because the GOP leaders have already started to implement right to work laws.
Workers Rights
In several GOP held states they have been implementing Right to Work laws. The name of the law makes a person fill like they’re ensuring our right to work and earn a living. But the laws are actually to benefit corporations.
It gives them the ability to get rid of unions, and without unions corporations wouldn’t have to give workers benefits or raises, unless they felt like it, and because of rampant corporate greed, we know that most of them would opt out of doing so.
They claim the unions make the cost of hiring go up, therefore they cant stay competitive in the marketplace. And if they cant stay competitive they will have to shut doors and fire people.
So they coined the law as Right to Work to so it would sound like they were giving you something. You have a right to work, right! But what it does is give corporations the right to set salaries at the lowest wage and not give you any benefits for a job that used to have higher pay points and other benefits.
Now remember that a lot of GOP, Tea Partiers and Alt Right political groups down think that there should be a minimum wage, so if they control the House, The Senate, the Supreme Court and the White House, plus 30+ governorships across this nation, what do you think will happen.
In 2008 Barack Obama came into the White House with a Senate and House majority and thats when he got his signature piece of legislation passed The Affordable Healthcare Act. So what do you think trump and his cohorts would do with a stacked Congress and House? What would be Trumps signature piece of legislation?
Health Rights
The Affordable Healthcare Act was meant togged the ball rolling toward a single payer system like the on Bernie Sanders campaigned about. It hasn’t reached its true potential because a lot of the Republican governor held states refused to implement it within their states. This lead to less coverage which lead to higher premiums than expected, which has lead to the Affordable part of ObamaCare being axed from the original plan, now its just high priced health insurance, just like the GOP wanted.
If corporatist like Trump gets in office he’s going to repeal it and I guess, replace it. But with what? Do you think that the party that didn’t want universal healthcare, the one that fought tooth and nail to make sure it didn’t live up to it’s promises is going to replace it with something that will lower the prices? Of course not, they’re not going to enact legislature that make it where insurance companies didn’t hit their profit projection, its not going to happen! Its back to fending for yourself while insurance premiums rise anyway, there just wouldn’t be any protections built in!
Constitutional Rights
The Supreme Court is the most important thing on the ballot this year because a conservative leaning Supreme Court would be in place to strike down any dissent from the liberals and progressives when the constitutionality of these laws are challenged, or uphold new quasi constitutional laws are put in affect!
Think about this, the appointment of a ninth justice is so important to the GOP that they have literally refused to do their constitutionally bound duty of selecting another member for almost a year now.
If they believe that the appointment is that important, then you should believe that it is too. If we fail to appoint a liberal justice to the seat thats vacant and to another possible two that could become vacant in the next four years, we could end up with six conservatives on the bench vs three liberals, and that can be a disaster for all things Civil Rights based in the coming years.
These are all things that we will be voting for on Nov 8th, and The Supreme Court has the power to strike down or uphold them as laws of the land!
We can stop the constant attack on our voting rights, on women rights, on workers rights, nonimmigrant rights and on our health rights, by electing Hillary Clinton as the next President, we are electing someone that will fight to keep the hard fought advances of the Civil Rights Movement.
Plus we can start the process of ending mass incarceration, of adding more regulations to truly tackle banking reform, and start working on college loan reform and free college for all, but every single thing I just wrote about will go the way that the GOP wants it to go if Donald Drumf gets in office.
Hillary Clinton may not be the best politician for the job but she’s the best one on the ticket that has a chance to win. So the question to you is, are you willing to bet your future on GOP led reform or Liberal led reform? Im going with Liberal all day and everyday after that, conservatives have shown what they’ll do if they get in office, just look up Brownback, Rauner, Pence, Walker, and Pawlenty to name a few, and see how they have and still are running their states into the ground, and taking the middle and lower class down with them!
Still Serve and Protect!
Over the past few years I’ve heard an echo growing stronger and getting louder every time a Black man is shot by a police officer, and its not what you think. It’s not #HandsUpDontShoot, it’s not #JusticeOrElse, and it’s not #BlackLivesMatter, it’s “if we don’t stop killing each other, they wont stop killing us”!
This disturbing trend is becoming more and more commonplace on social media sites every time a Black man is murdered by a cowardice piece of shit racist cop. Every comment thread will have some racist white person saying he got what he deserved and a bunch of ass backward negro’s saying that if we don’t respect ourselves why should they respect us.
Well for one, it’s their job! They’re supposed to Protect and Serve the public; nowhere in their job description states that they need to RESPECT us first. Nowhere in their job description states that they are the judge, jury, and executioner. But it does state that they are supposed to apprehend suspects and let the prosecutors present a case where the jury determines if they’re guilty.
They are supposed to respect the law, and if they do that they’ll never kill someone that is not trying to kill them first! And the incidences that bring about anger and protest are the ones that are clearly known to be police acting as the judge, jury and executioners.
But what’s strange about this is that this usually only plays out when the murdered individual is Black! We rarely ever see a white cop playing all the roles when it comes down to a white individual, for some odd reason they RESPECT the law and lives when the person looks like them. Over 80% of all white people that are murdered are murdered by other white people! They kill each other all the time, but we never see white people saying that cops wont respect white lives as long as white people don’t respect white lives.
Why do you think that is?
Well I’ll tell you, its because even though white people kill each other all the time, those same white cops still RESPECT white lives, its evident because they don’t kill white people at the same rate that they kill Black people! So us respecting ourselves, and Black on Black crime has nothing at all to do with why some cops don’t RESPECT our lives!
They don’t respect our lives because they are racist and they believe that a Black life is not as valuable as a white life, plain and simple! It’s been like that since we were stolen from our homeland and shipped around the world as slaves! There’s no way we can change that by RESPECTING ourselves! As long as there are racist who infiltrate police departments, it doesn’t matter what we do, they’ll continue to kill us if they can keep getting away with it.
There’s been no time in our history where our RESPECT for one another stopped racist white people/cops from killing us. They simply don’t care about that, they just hate Black people and when given a chance to harm one they will, especially when they can hide behind a badge and the “fear for their lives”. And as I said the only way they will stop doing it is if they are held accountable, and even then some will still do it!
WHAT WE NEED TO DO IS STAY VIGILANT IN EXPOSING THEM; KEEP OUR CAMERAS POINTED AT THEM AND NEVER ACCEPT THE OFFICIAL STORY!
DEMAND THAT ALL EVIDENCE BECOME AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC!
DEMAND THAT ALL COPS WEAR BODY CAMS!
DEMAND THAT ANY OFFICER CAUGHT CUTTING OFF A BODY CAM DURING AN INCIDENT BE FIRED IMMEDIATELY!
DEMAND THAT A FEDERAL LAW BE PASSED SO THAT EVERY PERSON IN THE U.S. KNOWS THAT IT IS LEGAL TO RECORD POLICE OFFICERS AS LONG AS THEY ARE NOT IMPEDING ON THE SCENE, AND REMAIN AT A SAFE DISTANCE!
African + American =
For some time I’ve considered writing a post about this but never found the motivation to actually sit down and start writing, but the other day after addressing a post on Facebook and getting the typical response from so called “conscious” black dudes, I decided to finally pen this post.
So here’s the thing, Black people in this Country, the United States of America, have no true identity! We are the homeless, we are the disenfranchised, we are downtrodden, the oppressed! We seek to belong to something greater than this existence that we have right now in this place, in this space and time. We long for the glory days of our ancestors as if that is all we ever had or ever will have. But I tell you that right here, right now, is all we have and will ever have, here in this country in this space, and in this time. Nothing else! The past is gone, yet it resides within us, and the future is yet to come, but it also resides within us. So with what we have right now, which is the past, the present and the future within, we should be able to create a future similar to our once glorious past!
But in order to get there, we need to come to a realization, one that will piss a lot of you off and others will accept wholeheartedly, and have no problem with.
And that realization is the cold hard fact that the descendants of slaves, with African blood flowing through their veins, that we call African Americans, are Not Africans! Neither are we truly Americans!
We are an amalgamation of these things, these nationalism’s, these concepts, and these ideologies, and because these ideologies are viewed as opposing ideologies, our programming tells us that we need to embrace one or the other, not both. This programming is taught to us by our parents as children, “right vs wrong”, “good vs evil”, “if you’re not with me you’re against me”, and re-enforced in church as the “you can’t straddle the fence” sermon. We’ve always been taught that you have to pick a side, and if we don’t, we’re the one in the wrong, there is no neutral position in life. But this is wrong when it comes down to the African/American debate! I chose to use the examples above to show how the thought process is indoctrinated into our psyches as young African American children, not to debate good and evil or right and wrong!
This is why when we’re confronted with two seemingly opposing ideologies we quickly pick sides. Our programming says its either one or the other, and you will always pick the side of your highest understanding, the one that instills pride in you, which is actually the one that makes you feel the best about your Self. Therefore when one has to choose between African/Black, and American/White we choose to identify with the African/Black first. Those that don’t choose Black first have been considered to be the sellouts and coons back in the day therefore the “real Black man or woman is the one that embraces Africa over America! These so called conscious Black people lay claim that there’s no middle ground even if your mother was white and your father was Black, you must self identify as Black, ask any biracial American. But what they don’t seem to understand is that that very understanding is what the white man, or massa had during slavery, the one drop rule! And if you choose your white side, you’re considered a sellout, a coon, and a host of other derogatory names that seeks to take away your Blackness. And even if you don’t identify as white, or if you have two Black parents but don’t identify with being African, you’re put in the same category, because you have to pick a side, and if you’re not on their side then you’re against them, simply because you’re not with them.
So here we are in 2015 claiming to be conscious Black men but that conscious thought is built directly off the slave traders understanding of who we were to be in this country. The slaves were never meant to be Americans, and generations down the line we are too far removed from our African ancestors, that we are not Africans either, we are an amalgamation of the two. We are now a new people, a people manifested from the remnants of a great race that saw itself decline to the point of colonization and slavery to finally be back in control of our own destiny once again!
Malachi Z York called us NuWabians, some say we are the Moors, Hebrew Israelites, Egyptians, but I say we are all and we are none, therefore we must create a new understanding, a new people.
You can call yourself and African, an African American, or just a plain ole American, that’s up to you, but I will from this day forward, address myself and those in this diaspora in the US, as Afrimerican!
Afrimerican: A people forged from the lowest point of mans existence as slaves, that fought to be free, earned that freedom and began to build. We have fought those that oppose us for over 400 years and we have made great strides. Our birthing pains have been great and there are still more to come. But we must understand and incorporate into our thinking that those that fight against and resist change will always end up on loser’s side of history, it’s inevitable. Therefore we will always be victorious in our quest to change the things that ail our people, it just takes time!
My Nigga “The Documentary” is now Live on Kickstarter!
My Nigga “The Documentary” is about the usage of the word Nigga by people of non-black races because of it’s proliferation in hip hop! Check it out here.
I decided to do a documentary talking to people of other other races about why they feel like it’s ok to use the word Nigga when addressing their friends and put it on Kickstarter to see if it was something that the people wanted to see. I believe they do so check it out and pledge a few bucks to help us achieve our goals. Heres the trailer!
Thanks in advance!