Originally passed by the House of Representatives in 2019 but torpedoed by the Republican-controlled Senate, the For the People Act would expand voting rights including for former felons, curtail partisan gerrymandering, strengthen ethics rules, limit money in politics and implement the DISCLOSE Act, and make Washington, D.C. a state—among other reforms.
The new survey, conducted by the left-leaning think tank Data for Progress and the advocacy group Equal Citizens, found a majority of self-described Democrats, Republicans, and independents support the For the People Act."
-->The people are certainly for this bill to democratize the voting process and get big money out of politics. But the nation's corporate controlled media is not. The NYT did not even carry this story, nor did most of the mainstream media.
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Common Dreams:
"Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan on Tuesday sent a letter to House and Senate leaders in which she and nine colleagues argued against expanding the national security state and further curtailing civil liberties in the aftermath of the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
'The Trump mob's success in breaching the Capitol was not due to a lack of resources at the disposal of federal law enforcement, and in this moment we must resist the erosion of our civil liberties and Constitutional freedoms, however well-intentioned proposed security reforms may be,' the lawmakers wrote in the letter, which was endorsed by Demand Progress, Free Press, Win Without War, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
'We firmly believe that the national security and surveillance powers of the U.S. government are already too broad, undefined, and unaccountable to the people,' added Tlaib."
-->The whole question of eroding civll liberties doesn't really bother the NYT too much, and it didn't cover this warning by some members of Congress. Our newspaper of record has always come down on the side the security state. Just look at its coverage of Julian Assange.
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The Guardian UK:
"The Capitol riot wasn't a fringe 'uprising'. It was enabled by very deep pockets. That siege was just one battle in a decades-long assault on democracy, funded by billionaire donors and corporate interests. ...
Last year, the secretive and influential Council for National Policy (CNP), which author Anne Nelson describes as 'connecting the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives,' called for state legislators in six swing states to reject Joe Biden’s election victory. CNP leaders were scheduled to speak at the rally on the morning of 6 January, where Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol.
Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, which has contributed millions to the Republican Attorneys General Association (Raga), [was] listed as one of the participating organizations in the rally. Raga’s fundraising arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, sent robocalls encouraging Trump supporters to march on the Capitol ahead of the 6 January rally, at which the former chairman of Raga, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, spoke. But major donors to Raga include not only rightwing bogeymen like Koch Industries, Walmart, or the Adelson family but also household corporate names like Comcast, Amazon and TikTok.
Likewise, although Koch Industries is the single largest corporate donor to Republican representatives who pledged to try to overturn the election results, the next biggest contributors included defense companies like Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon, as well as tech (Amazon) and finance (Goldman Sachs) and insurance (Aflac), according to the Center for Media and Democracy."
-->The NYT didn't cover this story of the deep pockets behind Trump's violent coup against the US Congress. We have to read about such things in a foreign newspaper.
