Am researching poverty & hunger in the US after Bill Clinton’s 1996 destruction of the welfare system–a destruction endorsed & shilled by Hillary Clinton. That so-called reform massively increased starvation in the US among children, women, disabled, elderly, & weighs heaviest on Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, & undocumented immigrants because racism is built into the reformed system.
That post is forthcoming & isn’t just a condemnation of the Clinton candidacy but of the whole damn system where official, & certainly conservative, estimates of chronic hunger in the US are 16% of the population–about 50 million people.
In the process of researching, I learned incidentally about the origins of the electoral college which we now see is an oligarchic contraption to control elections. But originally the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention devised the thing to give slaveholders greater weight in national politics. It was to protect slavery.
In a direct election system, northern states would have outnumbered the South where slaves could not vote. The electoral college prototype let each southern state count its slaves (with a two-fifths discount) in computing its share of the overall electoral college.
Legal historians have pointed out that for 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a slaveholding Virginian was elected president–including slaveholder Thomas Jefferson who won the 1800 election against northerner John Adams “in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory.” Observers at the time said ‘Jefferson rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.’
The more you know about US history, the more you realize we didn’t get to where we are by accident. The more you know, the more you understand the two parties are central to the problem & no part of the solution.