May MO2 News 4-Change
Dear Friends,
As an organization whose brand has been focused on events to build community and energy for political change, we at MO 2nd District for Change have found the necessary ‘stay at home’ orders to be quite a challenge. Along with individual challenges of sourcing food, working and schooling from home, we are looking for ways to serve the community while keeping everyone safe.
We’d like to hear from you. We’re planning a giant ZOOM meeting on June 1st at 7pm. We’ll be sending out more information soon on how to connect. In the meantime, save the date and be thinking of 1 or 2 ideas of how we can move forward without moving closer.
We hope you’ll find the following articles and news items informative and look forward to seeing you (virtually) soon.
Best,
Wendy Hollis Nishi, President
Action Item #1: Protect Our Vote
ON THE NATIONAL LEVEL: On April 7th, voters in Wisconsin were forced to choose between protecting their health and participating in our Democracy. This cannot happen again.
Call Missouri Senators Blunt and Hawley at 1–888–415–4527 to ask them to include $4 billion in funding to secure our elections in the next stimulus package.
ON THE STATE LEVEL: Voters should not have to choose between their health and their vote!
Gov. Parson and SOS Ashcroft Refuse to Expand Absentee Voting. Call Governor Parsons (573) 751–3222 and Secretary of State Ashcroft (573) 751–4936 and tell them we need no-excuse absentee voting!
Both have gone out of their way to make the simple question of safe voting complicated. Calling it on different occasions, ‘political, partisan, or a Democrat-Republican issue,’ they are ignoring the will of 67% of all Americans who want mail-in voting for the November election, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Even our conservative neighbors such as the Commonwealth of Kentucky have announced it will allow all registered voters to cast an absentee ballot this year. If Kentucky can do it, so can the Show-Me State.
The ACLU is currently suing for the right to have no-excuse absentee voting for our upcoming elections under the reasonable belief that a global pandemic should allow Missourians to vote by mail with as few obstacles as possible.
Action Item #2: Protect “Clean Missouri”
Nonpartisan Redistricting Experts and Citizen Reformers Denounce SJR38 Gerrymandering Plan
JEFFERSON CITY — National anti-gerrymandering experts joined Missouri reformers in denouncing the Missouri State Senate’s final passage of SJR38, a proposal that seeks to roll back redistricting reforms passed overwhelmingly by Missouri voters in 2018 — and put new language into the state constitution allowing lobbyists and political appointees to gerrymander maps in 2021.
SJR38 passed the State Senate tonight, despite bipartisan opposition from voters — and bipartisan opposition in the Senate chamber.
It is scheduled for the third reading on the House floor on May 4.
The proposed constitutional amendment would:
- Overturn the will of 1.4 million Missourians who supported the Clean Missouri Amendment
- Allow lobbyists and partisan political appointees to rig maps for their own interests in secretive backrooms.
- Allow communities to be split up by political appointees
- Remove the nonpartisan independence added to the state’s map-drawing process.
- Dramatically weaken race equity standards.
“We can’t let a handful of politicians and lobbyists overturn the will of the people. Republicans, Democrats, and Independents came together in 2018 and voted for the nonpartisan redistricting reforms in Amendment 1 by an almost 2-to-1 margin,” said Rod Chapel, President of the NAACP Missouri State Conference. “SJR38 would not just reverse the reforms 62 percent of voters supported, they would drag Missouri even further back with new tricks to make redistricting more partisan, more secretive, and more unfair than ever before, resulting in some of the worst gerrymandering in the nation.”
Some legislative leaders are eager to finish action on their top priorities, including SJR 38 (Hegeman), a joint resolution that seeks to undermine the ethics and redistricting reforms of CLEAN Missouri. SJR 38 has already been approved by the Senate and would only require House approval in the remaining weeks, assuming the House makes no changes to the language.
Now is a good time to contact your state representative and tell them to vote NO on SJR38!
MO2 News 4-Change
May 2020
(Note: the headline is the link to the full article)
Take Action with Jill Schupp for Congress
Schupp for Congress is offering virtual volunteering from home opportunities over the coming weeks, including text and phone banking. They ask that volunteers attend a training first to learn the technology, practice the scripts, and meet other volunteers. Phone bank training sign ups can be found here and text bank trainings can be found here. Additionally, check our their online volunteering platform as they add additional opportunities here.
MO House Speaker backs clerks’ plan to make elections safer amid pandemic
Above: Missouri House Speaker Elijah Haahr speaks at a press conference at Jordan Valley Community Health Center on Friday, March 6, 2020 about the coronavirus response efforts. (Photo: Nathan Papes/Springfield News-Leader)
From Springfield News-Leader: County election officials in Missouri who have pitched a plan to keep voters safe amid the coronavirus outbreak appeared to pick up a key ally this week.
In a call with the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce Friday morning, House Speaker Elijah Haahr, R-Springfield, said he agreed with their idea of letting voters cite the pandemic as a reason to vote absentee.
“I think everybody can say, ‘Yes, if you’re in a state of emergency, especially during a pandemic that manifests itself and spreads from person to person, we do not want you coming to the polls,’” Haahr said. “That is a very appropriate excuse for absentee voting.”
Currently, only people who have one of six specific excuses, like illness or travel away from home on election day, can mail in or drop off a ballot early.
But leading county clerks, including Greene County’s Shane Schoeller, have said that’s not enough right now given concerns about the virus spreading in crowded areas.
That idea got a different reaction from Gov. Mike Parson, a fellow Republican, earlier in April.
From Gates-Notes (the Blog of Bill Gates): The coronavirus pandemic pits all of humanity against the virus. The damage to health, wealth, and well-being has already been enormous. This is like a world war, except in this case, we’re all on the same side. Everyone can work together to learn about the disease and develop tools to fight it. I see global innovation as the key to limiting the damage. This includes innovations in testing, treatments, vaccines, and policies to limit the spread while minimizing the damage to economies and well-being.
This memo shares my view of the situation and how we can accelerate these innovations. (Because this post is long, it is also available as a PDF.) The situation changes every day, there is a lot of information available — much of it contradictory — and it can be hard to make sense of all the proposals and ideas you may hear about. It can also sound like we have all the scientific advances needed to re-open the economy, but in fact we do not. Although some of this article gets fairly technical, I hope it helps people make sense of what is happening, understand the innovations we still need, and make informed decisions about dealing with the pandemic.
We Are Living in a Failed State
The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.
From The Atlantic: When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills — a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public — had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity — to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and — every day of his presidency — political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.
Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.
The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.
Putin’s Long War Against American Science
A decade of health disinformation promoted by President Vladimir Putin of Russia has sown wide confusion, hurt major institutions and encouraged the spread of deadly illnesses
From The New York Times: On Feb. 3, soon after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus to be a global health emergency, an obscure Twitter account in Moscow began retweeting an American blog. It said the pathogen was a germ weapon designed to incapacitate and kill. The headline called the evidence “irrefutable” even though top scientists had already debunked that claim and declared the novel virus to be natural.
As the pandemic has swept the globe, it has been accompanied by a dangerous surge of false information — an “infodemic,” according to the World Health Organization. Analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has played a principal role in the spread of false information as part of his wider effort to discredit the West and destroy his enemies from within.
The House, the Senate and the nation’s intelligence agencies have typically focused on election meddling in their examinations of Mr. Putin’s long campaign. But the repercussions are wider. An investigation by The New York Times — involving scores of interviews as well as a review of scholarly papers, news reports, and Russian documents, tweets and TV shows — found that Mr. Putin has spread misinformation on issues of personal health for more than a decade.
His agents have repeatedly planted and spread the idea that viral epidemics — including flu outbreaks, Ebola and now the coronavirus — were sown by American scientists. The disinformers have also sought to undermine faith in the safety of vaccines, a triumph of public health that Mr. Putin himself promotes at home.
His agents have repeatedly planted and spread the idea that viral epidemics — including flu outbreaks, Ebola and now the coronavirus — were sown by American scientists. The disinformers have also sought to undermine faith in the safety of vaccines, a triumph of public health that Mr. Putin himself promotes at home.
