;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px”> Four states sent rival slates of electors to Congress in the 1876 presidential race between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. When a special tribunal blessed the electors for Hayes, Democrats began parliamentary maneuvers to obstruct the electoral count in Congress. Their plan was to run out the clock all the way to Inauguration Day, when the Republican incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, would have to step down.
Not until two days before Grant’s term expired did Tilden give in. His concession was based on a repugnant deal for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, where they were protecting the rights of emancipated Black people. But that was not Tilden’s only inducement.
The threat of military force was in the air. Grant let it be known that he was prepared to declare martial law in New York, where rumor had it that Tilden planned to be sworn in, and to back the inauguration of Hayes with uniformed troops.
That is an unsettling precedent for 2021. If our political institutions fail to produce a legitimate president, and if Trump maintains the stalemate into the new year, the chaos candidate and the commander in chief will be one and the same.
https://www.echochamber2016.us/the-atlantic-the-election-that-could-break-america-2/
Our economic system based on capitalism has created great prosperity and relieved much human suffering. It is a system that allows people with capital to exploit those without capital and public recourses like the environment. This exploitation based economic system received a large
boost in 1619 when the first slaves arrived in Virginia from Africa.
Today, we are witnessing and living through the calumnious convergence of two ruinous centuries old trends – runaway monopolistic capitalism and a nearly out of control racially motivated police state and political system the capitalists require to control the increasing exploited classes of blacks and other marginalize groups.
We live in a world in which even the oppressed for the most part are better off over time while falling ever further behind the capitalists.