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For The People Act

By William F. Klessens - Salem | Apr 24, 2021

Public citizen is the Washington D.C., watchdog group that keeps an eye on corporate political donations and where they’re earmarked. The organization gives us a good look at how companies’ dollar contributions to national-and-state level causes matches their rhetoric about those politicians and causes.

And pertaining to the new restrictive Republican-fueled Georgia voting laws that are clearly intended to make it difficult-to-impossible for minority voters to exercise their rights, the recent wordage from some of that state’s and our nation’s largest employers is worlds away from how their money has been spent.

Over the past six years an amazing number of America’s most well-known corporate giants have contributed millions of dollars total directly to the right-wing politicians who espouse that racist legislation, including the ones who just rewrote Georgia’s election rules. These national/international companies include AT&T, Comcast, VERIZON, Walmart, GM, Philip Morris and United Health.

Despite all the pro-democracy quotes over the past two weeks from Coca Cola and Delta Airlines, the only real dent in Georgia’s new GOP electoral protection-armor was the resounding blow Major League Baseball effected last week by moving the July 13 All Star Game from Atlanta to Denver, a tremendously-admirable move that has angered many of the white demographic that makes up much of baseball’s fan base (as well as players). Commissioner Rob Manfred showed great guts in striking this blow against Georgia’s post-Donald Trump salvo against the election fairness that America is supposed to stand for, as well as summarily obliterating Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Voting Rights Act in that state.

Lowlights of the new Georgian laws include reducing the number of available drop boxes for ballots (Atlanta’s number being dropped from 94 in 2020 to 23), cutting down the request time for an absentee ballot to 11 days before an election, and making it illegal for anyone to provide water and/or snacks to anyone waiting in line to vote. There are other new restrictions as well, but only in a nation now full of people who have lost whatever American-ness they may have formerly had somewhere along the line could get behind that last one.

This would be an economically-efficacious time for our nation’s civic-minded shoppers and patrons to boycott all companies on the Public Citizen record of new restrictive voting laws (an easily-GOOGLE-able list that includes the above-mentioned corporations, along with many others). The economy is coming back, hiring has increased exponentially, and our unemployment numbers despite last month’s surprising spike have decreased as well.

The boycott should continue until these mega-businesses and corporations begin achieving real change in Georgia. They should keep forcibly speaking out against this right-wing nationwide drive that will disenfranchise many of their own customers, giving these companies an actual vested interest in forcing a curtailment of Georgia’s and other GOP-led states’ bigoted laws. Corporations at this level have real clout and possess both financial and media-use power to put tremendous pressure on the Georgian legislature, a legislature that threatens to run roughshod over the rights of millions of their own citizens. Other Republican-run states like Texas, Arizona and Florida are also busily proposing and changing voting laws to make it nearly impossible for a Democrat to win an election in the November 2022 midterms. And beyond.

Real Americans are all hoping for the passage of President Joe Biden’s For The People Act that will hopefully cut off all the ugly Jim Crow fair election scuttling that is going on right before our very eyes in the year 2021. If the GOP has their way, we’ll all be back in the “To Kill A Mockingbird” stage of race relations in the United States. And hopefully everyone knows exactly what THAT would mean.