Why should I be a Democrat anymore?
I am an American citizen who immigrated to the United States in the late 90s and I am a registered democrat. I voted for Joe Biden because I hoped that he will be the president for the poor and the middle class by following Obama’s legacy by focusing on Socio-Economic Reforms and will try to make education and healthcare affordable for all. I thought that he will stand up for human rights around the world and build a better relationship with America’s partners around the world to address critical issues like the pandemic and global warming.
I am now 100% devastated to see where the Biden administration is taking us as a nation. Our Country is now more divided , Inflation is through the roof, Covid killed more Americans under his presidency than Trump’s, growing distrust in Democratic institutions, insane border challenges, and increased violence against people of color. On top of all these, the American public education system is facing unprecedented staff shortages, affecting mainly minority and poor school districts. There is a mass exodus of teachers which is affecting the quality of education at all levels and crippling our schools and colleges. Teachers are upset and frustrated about how unsafely and unfairly they are treated and compensated in this inflated economy, making most of them leave their jobs and pick up other professions. The same thing is going on with American Law Enforcement. Cops are leaving their jobs because of low morale, high scrutiny, and low pay. Cities are getting plagued with high theft and high crime rate because of this. Cops, Teachers, Healthcare workers were the frontline fighters during the Pandemic, and this is how you reward them? Where did all the trillions of dollars spend to address all these issues go? Most of these people followed their passion for their profession over money.
You cannot make the lives of the American people better by spending trillions without any real targeted plan or approach. US spent around 4 trillion dollars to address Covid . Please see the usaspending.gov link below which categorizes the agencies which were given to spend the 4 trillion.
https://www.usaspending.gov/disaster/covid-19?publicLaw=all
Quoting Washington post on this $4 trillion Covid Spending.
" This avalanche of U.S. grants and loans helped the wealthy and companies that laid off workers. Individuals received about one-fifth of the aid. More than half, or 2.3 Trillion went to businesses which in many cases were not required to show they were impacted by the pandemic or keep workers employed. The $651 Billion in Tax breaks often went to companies that laid-off people. Companies that received money from the $670 billion Paycheck Protection Program were not compelled to use it to protect paychecks-and many didn't. $884 Billion, roughly one-fifth of the money went to help workers and families. Only 16% of the money was allotted to fighting the Health crisis including testing and contact tracing. " Please read the Washington Post article below for further details.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/business/coronavirus-bailout-spending/
The 20% of the money which was sent out as assistance to American workers was even given to families working from home making 6 figure salaries annually. Many of these people or businesses were never really impacted by covid and didn’t need any government assistance. On the contrary, Did all this spending helped Covid’s Front line fighters like the Health care workers, Cops, Teachers, Ambulance drivers, Cleaning staff, Grocery workers, and Waste Management workers? These were the people who make sure that our system didn’t break during the Pandemic. These are the people who protected us risking their lives. The only thing this mindless massive spending did is the inflation because now these corporations are competing to take that extra money people have in their hands by jacking up the prices? This is simple economics. With more money added to the system, Prices go up with the increased demand and so does inflation. This is how the Billionaires in this country added 70% extra to their wealth during the Pandemic which equates to around 5 trillion dollars. The wealth gap between the majority and minority communities also widened, especially for Black Americans. The Pandemic triggered real estate boom did not help the Black Americans either because more than 50% of them rent. Only 45% of the Black Americans own a house and the home values in black neighborhoods only saw a small change in their home value when the white neighborhoods saw their home values double. This was an addition to the pre-pandemic home value disparities which already existed between white and Black neighborhoods. Pandemic showed us how unfunded, unequipped, and understaffed the schools in black neighborhoods were in the country. So if an African American parent wants to buy a home in a neighborhood with a good school so that his/her kid can have a better future, this economy has shut the door for them for a long time. How can a Democrat-run government do this to their main base which elected them to be the majority in the house and Senate?
Biden Administration never understood that this is a global Pandemic either. Our CDC and FDA officials continued preaching how great the mRNA vaccines were in efficacy compared to the other vaccines the third world was using. FDA even discredited the Vaccines like AstraZeneca by not approving them citing health concerns. FDA shouldn’t have discredited a vaccine-like AstraZeneca which is used by billions of people in the poor and developing countries because those countries don’t have the means to buy the expensive American mRNA vaccines or have the extreme cold chain infrastructure the mRNA vaccines need for distribution. Around 185 countries around the world are used the AstraZeneca vaccine for their people. Discrediting it citing health reasons or calling it low efficacy turned away many of those poor people from getting vaccinated. This was a global fight against a pandemic and US should have been making the AstraZeneca vaccine and distributing it to the world instead of discrediting it
When covid wasl wrecking our lives averaging around 1500 deaths a day, social media companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter are competing on how best they can divide us as a society by spreading fake news using their AI-powered algorithms and making billions in Ad profit out of it. We needed a leader to stand up against these anti-social elements and their lobbyists and put an end to the monetizing of the toxic content they host. These are the people who are spreading misinformation on the Pandemic and vaccines among us. They even helped people to coordinate and execute January 6th insurrection which was an open challenge to our democracy, lawmakers, and democratic institutions. We are in a dire state where our kids can’t even go to school without fear because of the so-called social media challenges which issue threats like mass shootings and bomb threat announcements. Some platforms also make students steal things from School toilets and vandalize bathrooms and post those videos online. Please see the CNN News link below. Nowadays the main thing the new generation has in their mind is how to make a social media post viral. For them, it does not matter how despicable the content is, it must go viral so that they can make some money. These Social media sites are becoming breeding grounds for Anti-Social collaboration even among kids to execute evil ideas. The deepfake videos which are spreading on these social media sites are causing suicides, riots, religious tensions, political destabilizations, financial turmoil across the world affecting many lives. Social Media Companies should be charged criminally if the content they host causes or incites any type of damage or violence against any people or intuitions.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/18/health/devious-licks-tiktok-challenge-wellness/index.html
Apart from all these, the whole world saw how the Biden Administration flushed Afghan dreams down the toilet and pushed Afghanistan into the stone age by equipping the Taliban with American arms, which will oppress the Afghan people and destabilize the entire region for decades to come. The Sanctions imposed against this nation after the US withdrawal has created a serious humanitarian disaster. As per the UN article below, “23 million afghans are in desperate need of food out of the total 38 million population in that country. 14 million kids are hungry, around 3.2 million children are acutely malnourished, 1.1 million children are at risk of dying because of severe, acute malnutrition.” On top of all these Taliban is denying basic human rights for women and girls including a rise in child marriages, exploitations, and denying education for them. These are the girls who dreamed of becoming something in their life a year ago.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/11/1106142
Do the Biden Administration and the Democratic legislators understand the gravity of all these? Their failures will pave the path to another big Trump comeback which has already started. It will throw us into the dark ages of complete failure of Democratic institutions and the oppression of the unprivileged including people of color. The last time Trump started putting his loyalists in government from Top-down and that’s why he could not alter the election outcome even though he tried. But this time, Trump is replacing the state and local officials from the bottom up with his loyalists through elections. Also during his presidency, to an extent, he turned the Judicial branch in his favor including the Supreme Court. More than a quarter of currently active judges are Trump appointees with only a very small percentage of nonwhites. He is even bringing the conservative news channels under his total control, by making all the moderate news anchors who spoke against him quit those news outlets. Recent departures of Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith from the Fox News Channel are the best examples. Most of the Republican Senators and representatives who spoke against him are not seeking reelection because they know that Trump will make sure that they won’t even survive their primaries. He is replacing them all with his loyalists. If there is another Trump term, what will be the future of those dreamers and legal and illegal immigrants who are already stuck in the current flawed immigration system for decades waiting for a pathway to Citizenship? What will be the future of Obamacare and millions of people who desperately depend on it? He will get rid of Obamacare for sure with another term and a republican majority in Congress. There is not going to be any John McCain’s left in the republican party to show thumbs down to protect it.
President Biden’s approval rating is too low now mainly because of how he handled the pandemic economy. It favored the wealthy and caused inflation because the money which is being pumped into the economy is going directly to the wealthy. The mistakes he did with Immigration, Domestic and Foreign policies alike were startling. So far, he made things worse for many Americans who put their trust in him, especially the minority who elected him. Failure was not an option for Biden - Harris Presidency because millions of people trusted them blindly when they elected them. With everything going on currently, it seems like the Biden Administration will throw us under the bus as they did with the Afghan people with another Trump term and Trumplican majority. For the upcoming mid-term elections and 2024 election, we should put some smart, decent, and highly qualified Democrats in front like Senator Amy Klobuchar and Stacey Abrams. If Senator Ami Klobuchar and Stacey Abrams can work with the leftists of the Democratic Party and find a common ground on Policies, that’s all the Democratic Party needs to win in the upcoming elections. If Stacey Abrams can turn the ruby-red state like Georgia into a democratic win, she can do anything. Unpopular leaders with tainted public images should distance themselves from these elections as much as possible because their presence, failures, ethical baggages, and low energy will turn off the Democratic momentum and scare independents away. That’s what we learned from recent Governors elections correct? Also, populist leftist leaders in Democratic Party should turn their rhetoric down because most of the American people don’t see any prospects in the unrealistic policies they advertise.
This is a time when we needed a good leader not only for the US but for the whole world as well to control the Pandemic and deal with the largest existential threat humanity is facing which is global warming. Both require global leadership. When it comes to global warming, the international community is saying, this will be our last-ditch effort to save the planet and they look towards the US for leadership. Why doesn’t this country has someone passionate like Mia Amor Mottley of Barbados representing the United States in the Climate Summit to address global warming?
American Presidency is a commitment to the millions of people in this country and to the billions around the world who seek help and leadership go through these unprecedented times. When Kamala Harris became the vice president, we were all very proud mainly because of her Indian roots. Now she has become the biggest disappointment. She was given an opportunity to fix the immigration and she ruined so disgracefully forgetting that she is also the daughter of immigrant parents. A few weeks back, I read the news that she never even knew that there would be new coronavirus variants like Delta and Omicron until last month. Like I said earlier, scientists were screaming from April of 2021 that it was inevitable that there will be a vaccine-evading variant. I don’t know who she was listening to.
When someone speaks out about the injustices, the easy way to make them look bad in the American system is to call them socialist or Anti-American. That’s what these old Politicians like Grahams, Grassley’s do to stay in power. Any of what I am saying below is not the so-called Socialistic agendas. We all know that communism and Socialism were utter failures that created more poor people and created a ruling class that had its ugly clutches on all the governmental institutions.
Giving an opportunity to everyone to educate and succeed in life is not socialism or Anti-American. People need to understand that America is still a segregated, divided country in every aspect of life. Our society, schools, cities, states, and the country are all segregated racially and economically. When most of the minorities in this country live in and around crowded cities, the majority live in the rest of the country. You just need to look and the American electoral map to figure this out. If crimes and quality of life is the issue with minority, joblessness and opioid addiction is what’s affecting the majority. You cannot improve the lives of American people without a fast and affordable public transport system which we lack and the modernization and training in the manufacturing sector. When it comes to education, if our K12 public school system is still segregated, the problem with our higher education is affordability. Americans need to understand that the real division within our country is class-based. The Ultra wealthy with the help of lobbyists is influencing our politicians and dividing us based on race. This is being done so that the power and influence they have in our system will prevail and prosper for generations to come. That’s why the social and infrastructure modernizations that this country badly needs never materialize. Trillions of dollars are spent on public assistance with no real plan to make sure that it benefits the people who need it the most. We cannot live as a first-world country with a third-world mindset. We needed a Covid Pandemic and a Trump to show us the inequalities and divisions within this country. Covid Pandemic exposed all the socio-economic inequalities, disparities, and vulnerabilities with the minority in this country. Trump showed us how fragile the American democracy is and how divided we can be. He showed us how someone like him can alter the minds of people in masses to blindly follow him just by inciting fear about the minority in this country. He even redefined what truth is, As per him it’s not something you see or hear. Isn’t that scary enough for Americans to rethink their positions? He also showed us how a whole party can be taken over and make the senators and Representatives fear for their career if they show any kind of disloyalty to him. He showed us how badly we need term limits for Senate, house, and judicial positions so that in the future no one person can make these elected officials so submissive by bargaining on their career and future. We were one vice president away from a complete overturn of an election outcome and a Capitol take over by an angry mob even threatening the lives of senators and representatives. Future leaderships should put focus on fixing the divisions with an open mind, controlling everything which divides us like political populism and Social media. We are in a state where our democratic institutions are under attack because of all these bad elements. If we don’t have good, decent leadership to get us out of this, this country will fail. Neither the republican nor democratic Party should entertain the extreme positions within their party whether it’s Trump or the Squad in the Democratic Party. Both of these entities feed on each other. They both inject fears in the other side and push them more towards the right or left. We know that Trump’s Immigration policies like the Muslim ban, attacks on the Affordable care act, calling immigrants people from shithole countries, denial of the climate crisis, and his reluctance to deny white supremacy, etc scared the people on the left. At the same time, The Squad’s policies like defunding police, abolishing ICE, Open borders, etc are equally divisive and scare people on the conservative side including the moderates in the democratic party. These are only helping Trump to expand the base and possibly help him to win the next elections. In the last election, he got around 74 million votes not because of how conservative he is or how good of a Christian he is. He got those votes because he portrayed himself as the last standing against the so-called liberal socialistic democratic agendas which would ruin the future of the majority in this country, cause social anarchy, reverse racism, high crime rate, wealth redistribution, etc. As per him, the democrats are going to demonize the white people and destroy all the cultural monuments Americans cherish, and make people feel bad from the inside. This is not the time to teach Critical race theory in schools or talk about defunding the police. That’s why we need people who can find common ground on policies and unite the American people. Not push them further apart. During Trump’s presidency, Democrats were all focused on how to throw him out of power. Starting with the Russia investigation. Muller that, Muller this and then Muller Nothing. Then the failed Impeachment attempt in the middle of pandemic knowing that it’s not going to be successful with the Majority they have in Senate. Then another failed impeachment Drama after he left office. Now they are focused on prosecuting Trump for the January 6th insurrection, We don’t need a committee for that, We all saw how Trump made those possessed supporters of his march to Capitol like zombies and caused the riots. But if you are intending to prosecute him for his actions, you may cause another Civil war in this country. First, he might try to delay all your attempts using his own appointed judges and if nothing works, he will play the Victim card and incite riots similar to Jan 6th across the country. Most of His ardent supporters are all gun owners and it may turn into armed conflict across the country. Just like Covid, the minorities in this country will take the brunt for it because most of us don’t even own a gun. This is what you want to do to a society that is getting ravaged by a pandemic killing people in thousands? Trump will use all this chaos to win the elections and take power. He only wants to win and he has no regard for people’s lives. Leftist democrats like the Squad are his biggest allies who made him so powerful by their extreme liberal policies.
We are living in a time when the Public trust in our government is at historic lows in its low 20s. The vast majority of American People believe that our law enforcement, Justice, and judicial systems all are getting politically biased or influenced by political populism and rhetoric, right and left. Even our supreme court decisions show some political bias with its Trumpian majority. Our highest democratic institutions are under attack and protected behind armed fencing. We are seeing an increased number of protests, riots, clashes, violence, and looting across our cities. Our schools are turning into high-security facilities because of the frequent threats against them. The 10% of the population owns 70% of the nation’s wealth and the bottom 50%’s wealth shrunk to 2%. Even the public assistance policies which are meant to help the poor are benefitting the Wealthy to get richer with the influence of lobbyists over lawmakers.
In my opinion, the following would be what the American people expect in their leader
A leader who can unite this country, who is willing to listen to both sides of the political spectrum and bring back the peoples trust in government
A leader who can ban or control the Vicious social media companies in this country that are making billions by spreading hate, dividing communities, and destroying democracies here in the US and around the world.
A leader whose Domestic and foreign policy will be in line with what’s good of the hard-working people here in the US and around the world instead of what fits best for some bad corporations
A leader who can invest heavily in, fast and clean energy-based high-speed Rail system across this country to help underprivileged people to commute or relocate for better job prospects instead of getting stuck in overcrowded cities.
A leader who can understand the importance of automation in manufacturing and agriculture and train our people to adapt to the new job needs.
A leader who can rewrite the tax code in this country so that ultra-wealthy will pay their fair share
A leader who can end the segregation in the American public school system and make the college admissions process affordable for kids and end the unfair admission practices in colleges including the Ivy leagues
A leader who can stand up against the Arms companies in this country that make lethal weapons and sell them around the world causing the lives of innocent people.
A leader who the whole world can rely on when it comes to ending the pandemic and addressing global warming.
A leader who can stop supplying arms to the countries which oppress their people and help the countries which are in dire need of food and shelter like Ethiopia.
It’s time, the democrats should ignore Trumpism and Focus on what they can do to make the lives of the American people better and try to win the mid-term elections. We are not expecting this Administration to tackle and fix all the issues at once, but at least a few small steps towards addressing any of the below areas will be widely popular among people. Unfortunately, we are not seeing that and things are getting much worse instead. So I have put together all my Thoughts in the areas which most Americans might be most concerned about in the Next elections to come. Including them as Links to those articles.