Fair enough.
Please find below an article I wrote. I sent it to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. That is to say: I gave them the opportunity to prove me wrong about something.
None of them would print it, even as a lowly op-ed piece.
In pain English, they censored it. Or tried to. Thanks to the Internet and Ello, you can read it.
THE GEORGE FLOYD AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION
Black Lives Matter and other protestors against racism continue to make the same fatal mistake. Symbols of power are confused with real ones.
To achieve real justice, enduring institutional-structural changes are necessary. The powers that be know, over 90% of the time, no institutional changes will be forthcoming from demonstrations -- which is why they glance out their windows at the marchers below, shake their heads, look at their watches...It will all blow over soon...
So, what would a real change look like?
For starters, stop attacking statues and Aunt Jemima, and start attacking institutions that hurt and belittle Americans.
Top priority: get rid of the Electoral College.
The Electoral College vote, not the popular vote, elects the president. The College is a creature of the Constitution (Article II, Section 1) and the 12th Amendment.
The College is easily understood. It is based on senators plus house members. Thus, New Mexico, which has three congressional districts and two senators, has five Electoral College votes. The calculation for the nation: 435 (representatives) + 100 (senators) + 3 (Washington; D.C.) = 538 total Electoral College votes.
The College´s origin is rooted in slavery. In the 1780s the Founding Fathers could not agree on how to elect the president. Rich Southern planters were unhappy with all proposals. They looked around and saw their states were short on population. "Real" population, that is ...
The South had plenty of slaves. In 1790, slaves were 39% of the population of Virginia, 43% of South Carolina. Unfortunately for the rich planters, slaves did not count for electoral purposes because they were considered to be subhuman.
If only there was a way slaves could be counted as humans but not "really," the planters' dilemma would be solved.
This "compromise" resulted. A slave = 3/5 of a human being. That way, the South could puff up its population numbers, get more House congressional districts and more Electoral College votes -- all without giving slaves the right to vote.
The deal was cut, the impasse broken, the Constitution passed. But there was a terrible price to pay. The Southern planters forced America to live in an as-if world -- to act as-if the 3/5 formula was morally right and factually true.
Today, slave owners are -- legally at any rate -- gone. The Electoral College persists because oligarchs want it. They invented it; it is their hole card. If the little people out there in a fit of barnstorming stupidity or outright madness vote for Noam Chomsky for president, the College can stop him from taking office.
With the exceptions of Nebraska and Maine, the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College allows someone who loses the popular vote for president to be elected anyway, by winning the Electoral College vote. That blatantly anti-democratic outcome was executed by Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.
What is far more important, however, is that 20 other presidential elections were so close that the loser of the popular vote could easily have won the White House.
The last major vestige of slavery in our Constitution, the Electoral College is a spectacle that should have been shut down years ago.
It is the dead hand of the dead past.
The reason the four newspapers tried to bar the article from public view it is that it takes a serious step in a very serious and new direction: transforming the recent nationwide rage over police brutality and murder into concrete, institutional changes. Those changes are what the mass media fear most, dread, live in terror of, in short are dedicated to preventing.
Let´s go ahead and call those media what they are -- what I have always called them:
Pimps for the system.
There you have it, Mom. It is a system they defend -- despite all their jumping up and down and pounding on the desk about being until-death-do-us-part, give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death fire-breathing torch.bearing equal rights advocates -- but do not understand.
I would not pursue this matter were it not for a simple fact. Our next post, "Donald Trump´s Game Plan" will show the mass media´s ignorance is as monumental as it is tragic -- in fact, devastating..