Category Archives: Politics

Benghazi Witch Hunters – GET A LIFE!

After all the red, lame stream media press on Benghazi, millions of tax payers dollars spent on Republican witch hunts to find any sort of evidence to burn Hillary at the stake there is no indictable evidence or even evidence of Hillary covering up her own “incompetence”. We have nothing but hysterical screams of folks that could care less about real facts. If there was culpability it was in a premature release of unverified information but that only equates to intention to cover up in the minds of ‘made for profit’ paranoids not in real fact as ironically proven by Republican driven crazies in Congress. G.W. Bush crashed the economy and started two major wars but you would think by the decibel level Benghazi made, these Republican catastrophes were minor skirmishes. If the Democrats did something wrong it was not putting billions of dollars into neo-con witch hunts against Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld but then Democrats are more concerned about fixing problems than creating them.

Cost

$+23 Million: Minimum total cost to the taxpayers of congressional investigations into Benghazi.

Congressional Members Having Been Using Personal Email Addresses For Years

Have you ever sent an email to a U.S. Representative or Senator that was not a .gov address? Almost every member of congress has a gmail, yahoo, etc. email address. Folks a server is a server whether it is in your basement or in a private corporation. Even more so, servers talk to other servers. The internet is a long convoluted chain of servers. The name public or private does not concern an actual server in the least. c They are simply servers. Corporations which own or lease servers are just as likely to get hacked as individuals that have servers, probably more so. We regularly hear about servers being hacked. When they are hacked there are “fingerprints” which IT experts can use to verify a server was hacked and track the culprits. The FBI has the world’s best hack trackers. They found no evidence of Hillary’s home server being hacked. Essentially, Hillary did nothing different than any other Congressperson and yet given the red, lame stream media you would think she made Snowden look like faithful steward of our secrets. By the way, did you see that “C” all by itself above. OMG, you just read classified information. My wife and I have had both secret and top secret clearances and I can tell you without a proper header and footer, Director Comey agrees with me, it is not a classified document. Only the Trump Kool-Aid drinkers believer the FBI is corrupt and kept Hillary out of jail which they hope to remedy when Trump is president. If you cannot believe the FBI and want to throw people in jail for political reasons you have much more in common with Putin’s Russia than the democratic United States of America. Maybe you should move there and give it a try to see how it works for you?

A Vote for Trump is a Vote for Human Extinction

This is not a post I feel comfortable about writing. I prefer facts to emotions in these matters. I am not opposed to emotions. I think they are great on either side of the isle. However, I sincerely believe that emptions must always give way to facts or you must implicitly or explicitly give up on logic and give yourself over to your unchecked opinions which are essentially narcissistic, short sighted and counter to everything that got us out of the caves,

However, in this case I do not have the time to write this post in a way I would prefer. My wife and I are working day and night for the Hillary campaign. We are basically running a field office for Hillary. We have donated more money to Hillary than we have ever donated to any political campaign. I need to make this fast and to the point.

Psychologically and rhetorically Trump is not different than a pre-Führer Hitler. I have never said this about anyone that did not call themselves a Nazi. I debated David Duke once in his Nazi uniform with two other Nazi dressed compatriots next to him at LSU. He was a proud Nazi and still is. I do not take these words likely. Trump is purely narcissistic. I do not need the APA’s relatively new takeover of this word over the earliest Greek thinking on narcissus to protect psychiatric jargon. Trump is solely and wholly dedicated to himself to the point of projecting all his insecurities on others. For him the other is alien, dangerous, nasty, sexual predators, leaches on society, liars, ethnic slave owners (his extremely convoluted argument about blacks voting for Democrats). He has no factual basis for anything he says. He tells us he has never lost. He went bankrupt four times and failed in two marriages. The fact is he has always been a loser. I suspect his debt is close to his assets. He lost one billion dollars in 1995 and that is probably not the only year he lost huge amounts of money. He has proved he is a terrible business man with his bankruptcies. He has called himself the “King of Debt”. He will not release his tax returns only a purely fictional and unverifiable account of his net worth. He has been fact checked on more lies than fact checkers have ever seen. They cannot keep up with his lies. He logically contradicts himself on a daily basis. He tells us he never said he was for the Iraq war and yet we have audio where he tells us exactly the opposite. I will not go on because I am too busy working for Hillary to save the world from a Hitler wannabe.

Trump has told us he loves war, he loves fighting, he does not understand why we do not use nukes and why we do not let other countries like Japan get nukes. He has no concern for NATO and thinks Russia’s Putin is quite admirable. He flies off the handle and against his own best outcome chooses battles which hurt his stated desires to be president. It takes four minutes for a president with the “football” to punch in the codes and the personnel in the silo to punch in their code to launch a nuke. There is no middle man or check and balance. In light of his history who could ever lull themselves into any sense of confidence that Trump as president would “Make America Great Again”? Trump would exterminate the world before he could be impeached for ignoring the Constitution.

Additionally, if you in any way think of yourself as a Christian and are so brainwashed that you believe Trump is not the total opposite of Jesus you are absolutely apostate. I have always been fascinated at why Hitler was catapulted to power by well-meaning Germans. We need look no further than Donald J. Trump to understand how this cataclysmic event occurred. Even more so, imagine a Hitler with nukes. He is a “nativist”. He gets his “facts” from the alt-right, Breitbart, which is nothing other than unabashed white nationalists. He hires them to run his campaign. White nationalists love Trump. Jesus would tell Trump voters to “depart from me I never knew you”. Ask yourself if you think you are Christian and vote for Trump can you really can live with yourself and never doubt your vote. If so, you are well beyond hope; you are well beyond love; you have absolutely no notion of truth and righteousness. Look at my post on this site (Anti-Abortion, Anti-Immigrants, Republicans and Jesus) about how the Old and New Testament discusses the sojourner, the immigrant and try to justify yourself in light of the many Bible verses I quote on this matter. If you vote for Trump and tell others you are a Christian, you are everything that crucifies Jesus all over again.

Hitler was motivated by psychotic xenophobia. Trump’s twist on this is that he is motivated by some distorted notion of capitalism. Trump does not give a damn about the folks that have already drank his Jim Jones cool aid. He has shown that contractual obligations to pay his employees mean nothing to him. Trump has shown that capitalism is nothing other than vulture-ism. He inherited money and is every alter ego we liberals have been perhaps overly stereotyping for decades concerning the right. Trump is the ideal of what every liberal has thought conservatism was really about under the covers. A vote for Trump is a vote to concretize the liberal’s worst fear of capitalism and contrary to the sincere and legitimate concerns of the best of Republican’s “Party of Lincoln”. If you are the Republican you want to think of yourselves as, try to think these two thoughts together – the Party of Lincoln and the Party of Trump. If you are not nauseous thinking these two thoughts together you are the reason your Party is going down the tubes.

I will have time after the election to add more statistical and factual evidence to these admittedly emotive claims but for now I am completely occupied with trying to save the world for my beloved kids.

This is why the Heritage Foundation cannot be trusted…

This is just one case and point why the Heritage Foundation is not a good source for facts, making sound arguments or for sound opinions.

On September 15, 2014 the Heritage Foundation published this post, The War on Poverty After 50 Years. In this post they have the following graph:

They make the argument that President Johnson’s war on poverty was a total failure.

Do the higher living standards of the poor mean that the War on Poverty has been successful? The answer is no, for two reasons. First, the incomes and living standards of less affluent Americans were rising rapidly well before the War on Poverty began.

The second reason was because they suggest that in spite of his stated goals he really only perpetuated government dependence and did nothing but spend money without any positive effect on poverty.

Although President Johnson intended the War on Poverty to increase Americans’ capacity for self-support, exactly the opposite has occurred. The vast expansion of the welfare state has dramatically weakened the capacity for self-sufficiency among many Americans by eroding the work ethic and undermining family structure.

They actually post the graph above twice in their article. This graph has been re-published many times on the web by right wing groups and Republicans as proof that government programs are ineffective and only exacerbate poverty¹. Let’s take a look at their caption at the bottom of the graph citing their sources which they attribute to the Census Bureau.

Sources: figures for 1947-1958: Gordon Fisher. “Estimates of the Poverty Population Under the Current Official Definition for Years Before 1959.- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, 1986 figures for 1959-2012: U.S. Census Bureau. Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplements, ‘Historical Poverty Tables—People,” Table 2, https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/hstorical/people.html (accessed September 10, 2014).

Let’s take it apart…

Sources: figures for 1947-1958: Gordon Fisher. “Estimates of the Poverty Population Under the Current Official Definition for Years Before 1959.- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation,

If you search for this work on the internet you will not find it. Why? Here is what you will find:

Here is another:

Notice the word “Mimeo” in the first reference and the phrase “Unpublished Paper” in the second reference which was conveniently left out of the Heritage citation. Mimeo means:

(unpublished paper): May refer to a paper that is not in the process of being published or that is not part of an institutional working paper series.⁴

This word in bibliographies came about from the word mimeograph. It is thought the common usage was for mimeograph copies of a professors unpublished papers. The real problem is that without an official publication the authenticity of the source cannot be verified. Anyone can make the claim without any proof whatsoever that the source is authentic.

To be fair they do state in their references at the bottom of their article that, “These estimates are not official government figures.” They also state that the authors will provide the mimeograph copy upon request of the unpublished data.

1986 figures for 1959-2012: U.S. Census Bureau. Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplements, ‘Historical Poverty Tables—People,” Table 2, https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/hstorical/people.html (accessed September 10, 2014).

Try to find this on the Census Bureau web site. You will not find it. In fact, I am not an expert but I am a long time software engineer and I do not believe a second “www” in a URL as above is not even allowable. I have never seen a URL like this.

I did do a search with information they cite and found this, “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2013”

This does not show us anything about the years 1947 to 1959 as the Heritage Foundation’s graph shows. I suppose we are to assume the spike down they show on their graph comes from the unpublished paper that they state at the bottom of the article was interpolated from the mystery document. In any case, the graph from 1959 to 2012 appears similar:

Without the 1947 to 1959 data authenticated by their source, their case based on their source is not nearly so dramatic as the post would have us believe. However, I do think that this part of the graph is feasible.

Let’s not forget that the Great Depression and World War II ran from 1929 to 1945.⁵

By the end of the 1930s, 17% of the American work force remained unemployed; 30% still lived in poverty⁶

Historians see the Great Society of LBJ as a continuation of another Democrat’s attack on poverty, FDR’s New Deal. The New Deal legislation ran from 1933 to 1938. The New Deal legislation included Social Security, massive fiscal spending on infrastructure, housing and farming legislation. Certainly, spending on the war also inserting much needed short term stimulus into the failing economy. It is debatable how much effect the non-recurring, short term stimulus spending on the war had on long term economic conditions in the U.S.. In any case, the Great Society spending of LBJ can easily be seen as an extension of the New Deal. The poverty curve started coming down with FDR and continued downward dramatically until the Reagan years. In the Heritage article there is no mention of these topics. The truncation of this curve starting in 1947 instead of 1929 conveniently ignores the most important part of why the poverty curve came about and why it was going down dramatically in 1947. Additionally, if you believe the authors, the war on poverty had a dramatic but unreported effect on the “affluence” (they resist this word at the same time implying it) of the poor.

The data for poverty during and just after the Great Depression is hard to come by since there was no standard established. However, there is some Census Bureau data on unemployment during those years. The red line on the graph below shows data points from the Census Bureau starting in 1929.⁷ The blue line shows data points given by Historical Statistics of the United States published by the Cambridge University Press.⁸ The orange line shows poverty data points already discussed given by the Census Bureau.⁹ Note 1 – This data point was from the previously mentioned link, ECONOMY IN WORLD WAR II: HOME FRONT. The chart shows data from 1929 to 2014. This chart shows the relationship of unemployment to poverty during those years. In the chart, poverty lags unemployment by 12 to 15 years after the Great Depression.¹⁰ While actual data on poverty is lacking during the early years, it is reasonable to assume that poverty at this time would follow a similar trajectory as unemployment. This gives us some insight into what poverty would have looked like through the Great Depression. It is interesting to note that the unemployment recovery started around 1933 when FDR was kicking off the New Deal. Poverty started coming down dramatically some time from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s.

The Heritage article goes on to state in their Amenities section:

Because the official Census poverty report undercounts welfare income, it fails to provide meaningful information about the actual living conditions of less affluent Americans. The government’s own data show that the actual living conditions of the more than 45 million people deemed “poor” by the Census Bureau differ greatly from popular conceptions of poverty. Consider these facts taken from various government reports:

•Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, at the beginning of the War on Poverty, only about 12 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
•Nearly three-quarters have a car or truck; 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks.[9]
•Nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite television.
•Two-thirds have at least one DVD player, and a quarter have two or more.
•Half have a personal computer; one in seven has two or more computers.
•More than half of poor families with children have a video game system such as an Xbox or PlayStation.
•Forty-three percent have Internet access.
•Forty percent have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV.
•A quarter have a digital video recorder system such as a TIVO.
•Ninety-two percent of poor households have a microwave.

On one hand they try to use Census data from 1959 referenced above to show that government spending has not reduced poverty since the 1960s but only increases government waste. Then, they go on to state that the data the authors used does not accurately reflect poverty thus weakening their argument that poverty has not gone down with additional spending. If those living below the poverty level have all these amenities it would imply that they are doing quite well so the programs combating poverty must be working too well.

The authors do go on to state:

Of course, poor Americans do not live in the lap of luxury. The poor clearly struggle to make ends meet, but they are generally struggling to pay for cable TV, air conditioning, and a car, as well as food for the table. The average poor person is far from affluent, but his lifestyle is equally far from the images of stark deprivation purveyed by advocacy groups and the mainstream media.

If the poor are struggling to pay for what middle class families are paying for this implies that the poor are really middle class or at least lower middle class. Thus, poverty has effectively been eradicated by government programs and spending on the poor. However, they think that the elimination of poverty which they imply but at the same time deny is not shown in government reporting on poverty. Could it be that if we had the ‘real’ numbers for the graph above it would not be flat from the 1960s on but would actually go down further thus continuing the earlier more dramatic trend down? No, they prefer to have their cake and eat it too.

They think the Census data under-reports the real living conditions of the poor.

The Census Bureau counts a family as “poor” if its income falls below specific thresholds, but in counting “income,” the Census omits nearly all of government means-tested spending on the poor.[4]

The note [4] states:

[4] Typically, only 3 percent of total means-tested spending is counted by the Census as “income” for purposes of deriving the official poverty measure.

There is no reference for the “3 percent” number.

Again, they go on to state:

Some authors suggest that the continuing decline in official poverty from 1965 to 1970 demonstrates the initial success of the War on Poverty, but over 90 percent of the increased spending during this period was in the form of non-cash benefits that the Census does not count for purposes of measuring poverty.[20]

Note [20] states:

[20] Data available from the authors upon request.

Try asking them for the data and see what happens.

Pew Research has an interesting article stating:

Critics note that the official poverty rate, as calculated by the Census Bureau, has fallen only modestly, from 19% in 1964 to 15% in 2012 (the most recent year available). But other analysts, citing shortcomings in the official poverty measure, focus on a supplemental measure (also produced by the Census Bureau) to argue that more progress has been made. A team of researchers from Columbia University, for example, calculated an “anchored” supplemental measure — essentially the 2012 measure carried back through time and adjusted for historical inflation — and found that it fell from about 26% in 1967 to 16% in 2012.¹¹

As it turns out food stamps and some welfare benefits are not reported to the IRS. However, since IRS data does not go outside the agency for reporting purposes the source for all these claims generally comes from the Census Bureau. The Census Bureau does get self-reporting information on government assistance. Self-reporting is also used for the authors arguments in the “Amenities”, “Poverty, Nutrition, and Hunger” and “Housing and Poverty” sections. These sections go on to tell us that in addition to amenities, the poor are doing quite well with food and nutrition and homelessness is not nearly as bad as you might think. If self-reporting is problematic for some of their premises it should be problematic for all their premises.

Furthermore, if you go to the article, “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2013”, cited above Appendix A, you will see an article titled, “How Income is Measured”. It states that Census data does reflect additional income from the government:

For each person 15 years and older in the sample, the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) asks questions on the amount of money income received in the preceding calendar year from each of the following sources:
1. Earnings
2. Unemployment compensation
3. Workers’ compensation
4. Social security
5. Supplemental security income
6. Public assistance
7. Veterans’ payments
8. Survivor benefits
9. Disability benefits
10. Pension or retirement income
11. Interest
12. Dividends
13. Rents, royalties, and estates and trusts
14. Educational assistance
15. Alimony
16. Child support
17. Financial assistance from outside of the household
18. Other income

If in fact those living below the poverty level have all those amenities, this does not change their reported income which is below the poverty level. If the assumption is that the government programs allow them to live like Kings or at least paupers in the Kings palace they must be doing so on less than Federal Poverty levels currently set at:

Family Size	Annual	Monthly	Weekly
1	$11,880	$990	$228
2	$16,020	$1,335	$308
3	$20,160	$1,680	$388
4	$24,300	$2,025	$467

The Heritage Foundation states:

For decades, the living conditions of the poor have steadily improved. Consumer items that were luxuries or significant purchases for the middle class a few decades ago have become commonplace in poor households.

They go on to state that all this affluence has resulted in the poor (who are not really poor) have nothing to do but have more babies:

Since the beginning of the War on Poverty, the absolute number of married-couple families with children in official poverty has declined, but as Chart 6 shows, the number of single-parent families in official poverty (or lacking self-sufficiency) has more than tripled, increasing from 1.6 million in 1965 to 4.8 million today. When the War on Poverty began, 36 percent of poor families with children were headed by single parents; today, the figure is 68 percent. [24]

There was the baby boom after the war in the economic recovery which affected absolute population numbers, married and unmarried births proportionally. Here is what the source they cite tells us:

Key findings
Data from the National Vital Statistics System and the National Survey of Family Growth
•Nonmarital births and birth rates have declined 7% and 14%, respectively, since peaking in the late 2000s.
•Births to unmarried women totaled 1,605,643 in 2013. About 4 in 10 U.S. births were to unmarried women in each year from 2007 through 2013.
•Nonmarital birth rates fell in all age groups under 35 since 2007; rates increased for women aged 35 and over.
•Birth rates were down more for unmarried black and Hispanic women than for unmarried non-Hispanic white women.
•Nonmarital births are increasingly likely to occur within cohabiting unions—rising from 41% of recent births in 2002 to 58% in 2006–2010.

So, unwed mothers includes those that cohabitate and are not legally married. National Health Statistics Reports tells us:¹²

This fact is conveniently left out of the discussion. Additionally, since nonmarital birth rates have declined since the late 2000s, government spending on poverty has risen dramatically due to the Great Recession starting in 2008 (with a Republican president and a majority in the U.S. Congress for six years prior) the causal link to increased government programs on poverty and unwed births appears problematic. The Heritage article was written in 2014. They should have had access to all this information but clearly omitted it. The fallacy of false cause is well known in statistics. As they say, it is a fact that people drowning is statistically correlated to eating ice cream. However, jumping to the conclusion that ice cream causes drowning ignores the fact that people eat ice cream in the summer which is when drownings most often occur.

To conclude, drawing conclusions from false and misleading sources leads to wrong opinions and therefore voters voting on false ‘facts’. When “corporations are people too” we have turned ourselves over to the universe of commercials which have a notorious history of being false and misleading. The vested interest of groups like the Heritage Foundation which have great financial resources can dish out trash like this article with the perception of reality. The marketing guys I worked with would say it like this “perception is reality”. The mainstream media which you would have to include Fox News and journalists like the ones in this article can simply invent reality with the appearance of truth and get it repeatedly copied all over the web and into the ‘common sense’ perceptions of average people who do not have the time or inclination to find out if it is so. There is a reason why we get the politicians we vote for and deserve; in engineering we simply say, Garbage In, Garbage Out.

_________________

¹US Poverty Rate – How the Great Society Programs Reversed its Decline

²This is a reference citation in another book called “Poverty in America: A Handbook”

³This is a reference citation in another book called “Changing Poverty, Changing Policies”

⁴Read more at http://www.yourdictionary.com/mimeo#0uIuWkPes886P72I.99

⁵The Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945

⁶ ECONOMY IN WORLD WAR II: HOME FRONT

⁷Census Bureau, No. 1430. Employment Status of the Civilian Population: 1929 to 1998 (page 879)

⁸Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition, ed. Susan Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael Haines, Alan Olmsted, Richard Sutch and Gavin Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), http://hsus.cambridge.org/, accessed 5 January 2009.

⁹Income and Poverty in the United States: 2013

Current Population Reports

Issued September 2014 P60-249 By Carmen DeNavas-Walt and Bernadette D. Proctor

¹⁰It is interesting to note that the poverty rate has also lagged the unemployment rate during the Great Recession.

The recession officially lasted from December 2007 through June 2009, but monthly unemployment rates remained above 9 percent for more than two years after the official start of the current economic recovery.

Poverty and the Great Recession

Sheldon Danziger, University of Michigan,

Koji Chavez, Stanford University &

Erin Cumberworth, Stanford University

¹¹January 13, 2014, Who’s poor in America? 50 years into the ‘War on Poverty,’ a data portrait, By Drew DeSilver

¹²National Health Statistics Reports

Number 64 April 4, 2013

First Premarital Cohabitation in the United States:

2006—2010 National Survey of Family Growth

Southern Poverty and Republican Economics UPDATED

UPDATE: I have updated this previous post to enhance the clarity of the graphs, make the state’s political party domination reflect the time period of the Census data (from 2014 instead of the 2016) and to correct the food stamps data error for Wyoming (I found the data point to be that of Puerto Rico). I will also make the Excel Spreadsheet available to download here. Additionally, I will do some more statistical analysis in the future on this data in order to spell out some more conclusions that I think we could draw from the data.

Just let me say that the whole point of social programs is to help people, that are able, get out of poverty not stay in it perpetually. Success or failure should be measured by non-partisan statistics. I think the Census Bureau qualifies as non-partisan. The continual insistence the Republican Party has made over decades to get rid of, or greatly reduce, social programs can be shown to result in perpetual and greater poverty in terms of human misery. To the contrary, their insistence that the free market will go further in solving these problems than government assistance has not shown up in the data. How many more decades and excuses will it take before they face facts and not unfounded aspirations? Naysaying never solves problems; it only ignores problems.

In a recent post, The End of the Republican Party, I made a comment about decades of Republican political domination in the Deep South and the high poverty rate and low standard of living. In older posts I have referenced this data but I would like to supplement this data with 2014 data from the U.S. Census Bureau¹ I also referred to an opinion post in Forbes online by Mark Hendrickson defending the Republicans shabby history of governing these states in which he largely blamed the Civil War and Democrats for these conditions.² The facts are that Republicans have dominated the Deep South for many decades and those states are the worse off for it. If decades are not enough time to justify their failed economics the question looms as to how long they need to justify their boisterous and voluminous claims. In the meantime, countless people suffer and die waiting for an economic rapture that gets further and further from reality and hard facts. Their latest non-democratic ‘brilliant’ idea about emergency management in Flint Michigan poisoned and damaged the kids they claim to be so ‘pro-life’ about for their entire life. However, that is a topic for another day.

Below are charts compiled from the Census Bureau. I can provide the Excel Spreadsheets in anyone is interested in more detailed data. The charts detail 2014 data for all the states in the U.S. on the following topics:

Percentage of families below the poverty line

Percentage of families on public assistance

Percentage of families on food stamps

Percentage of families with no health insurance

I have sorted the data by states from worst result to best results. I also obtained each states political affiliations for Governor and state legislative bodies.³ The color codes on the sides and tops of the charts indicate the following for 2016 political offices:

Red – The Governor and legislature have Republican majorities

Orange – The Governor and legislature lean Republican

Blue – The Governor and legislature lean Democratic

Dark Blue – The Governor and legislature have Democratic majorities

The chart below shows the data widely reported concerning the percentage of families living below the poverty line, concentrated largely in Southern States. I have highlighted Southern States in yellow. Mississippi heads the list with over 21% of families living below $24,300 for a family of four. Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, Arizona and Florida are all in the hardest hit states. All these states have been dominated by Republican economics for decades. It is interesting that Louisiana recently elected a Democratic Governor after two terms of Republican Bobby Jindal (not reflected in the 2014 data).

The chart below shows the percentage of families with the most to the least cash public assistance income. It is really fascinating that this chart seems to be almost inverted from the previous chart. The least public assistance to the poor and children goes again to the poorest Southern States. This probably has a lot to do with the sheer volume of people living below the poverty line in those states. It also has to do with the dollar amount the states have to contribute to administer some of these programs. Republicans are all too happy to pat themselves on the back for not giving ‘hand outs’ to the poor but the data tells us that instead of solving their poverty problems their ideology simply perpetuates the misery of their citizens. While Republicans may go to church every Sunday prideful of their staunch economic policies to help the poor, the data tells us that their effect is the opposite from the admonitions of Jesus to care about the poor.

With regard to the SNAP program for food stamps, the data show the Southern States once again come in at the highest percentages of Federal food stamps.

Once again the Southern States have the highest percentages in people without health insurance. This probably has to do with many of their refusal to participate in the Medicaid expansion brought on by their intense hatred of any Obama at the human cost of their own citizenry.

Real data shows the Republican economics has not worked in the states hardest hit by Republican ideologies.⁴ Their adamant refusal to face the hard cold facts and continue to insist that they know how to handle the economy is spite of the suffering of the poorest states they have dominated for decades highly suggests a more dubious purpose for their rhetoric: their concern has nothing to do with achieving real results for the less fortunate but has more to do with protecting a more narrow constituency than most of their base cares to believe. Their strategy is a protectionist tactic for those with vested interests in less honorable goals while their marketing propaganda is obsessed with playing on people’s reactionary emotions and rarely realized aspirations.

To conclude, let me state that the huge divide between results in Democratic and Republican states makes me re-think the 10^th Amendment’s emphasis on state’s rights. I know this is a huge emphasis for the Republican Party but maybe Democrats could benefit from more separation with the states. If the divide between Republican dominated economics and Democrat dominated economics became large enough for most people to see the practical effects of each strain of economic and political ideologies, the ability to blame the other party might be reduced enough for most folks to see the real results that fall out. The downside is that many would probably suffer before it got bad enough for a failed ideology to present itself. In engineering, we like to measure results and learn from the past. In democracy this is a harder task since most folks do not seem to care about real facts versus opinions based on rhetoric. I am not sure our nation could survive the real test that would be required for most folks to reach a sound conclusion. However, I do fancy the idea somewhat of a real sink or swim test for the states and their political choice of affiliations.

_________________

¹U.S. Census Bureau, American FactFinder

² Are the 10 Poorest U.S. States Really Republican?

³ 2014 GOVERNORS AND LEGISLATURES
See also,The 10 Poorest States in the USA are in the Deep South
And, State of the States Report 2014 Local Momentum for National Change to Cut Poverty and Inequality

⁴The Big Picture: Facts Concerning History, Politics and the Economy

Guns, Tyranny and the State of Exception

Individualism and Guns

The gun debate and recent Supreme Court decisions concerning the 2^nd Amendment has opened a gaping hole in the very fabric of democracy and the historical metaphysics of individualism.

In Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in District of Columbia vs. Heller he states:

There are many reasons why the militia was thought to be “necessary to the security of a free state.” First, of course, it is useful in repelling invasions and suppressing insurrections. Second, it renders large standing armies unnecessary—an argument that Alexander Hamilton made in favor of federal control over the militia. Third, when the able-bodied men of a nation are trained in arms and organized, they are better able to resist tyranny.¹

He further states:

Besides ignoring the historical reality that the Second Amendment was not intended to lay down a “novel principl[e]” but rather codified a right “inherited from our English ancestors,” petitioners’ interpretation does not even achieve the narrower purpose that prompted codification of the right. If, as they believe, the Second Amendment right is no more than the right to keep and use weapons as a member of an organized militia, that is, the organized militia is the sole institutional beneficiary of the Second Amendment ‘s guarantee—it does not assure the existence of a “citizens’ militia” as a safeguard against tyranny.

He appears to agree that 2^nd Amendment is more than the right to keep arms in an organized militia; it is a “safeguard against tyranny”

In 2012 a Rasmussen telephone survey found that 65% of American Adults think the purpose of the Second Amendment is to make sure that people are able to protect themselves from tyranny.²

The CEO of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, has stated to Congress, “Senator, I think without any doubt, if you look at why our Founding Fathers put it there, they had lived under the tyranny of King George and they wanted to make sure that these free people in this new country would never be subjugated again and have to live under tyranny,”³

In Ancient Greece at the time of Aristotle there was much discussion on the ‘one’ and the ‘many’. Aristotle tells us in Politics,

Again, for the exercise of any faculty or art a previous training and habituation are required; clearly therefore for the practice of virtue. And since the whole city has one end, it is manifest that education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private- not as at present, when every one looks after his own children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best; the training in things which are of common interest should be the same for all. Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.⁴

As human, our greatest liberal virtue as Aristotle calls it⁵ and evolutionary adaptation is not individualism but our ability to hunt and gather as a collectivity. There were many animals in our early history that were stronger and faster than the genus Homo. Only by banding together were we able to overcome enormous obstacles. Our language is the ultimate proof that we are not all isolated monads each with a private language. The very basis for what we call ‘reality’ is ‘thought’ and can only be ‘thought’ in terms of language.

The trend in the Austrian School of Frederick Hayek⁶ and taken up by the populist Ayn Rand has been to discount collectivism as the history of tyranny. Instead of the virtue Aristotle assigned to liberalism they have made liberalism into a vast history of collectivity which gave rise to every evil from Fascism to Communism. Their fictional account of individualism is then taken as everything collectivism was not and the greatest virtue that Aristotle missed completely.

The modern metaphysics about individualism makes the individual the sole determinate for truth, the diviner for goodness and the only antidote for liberalism. Democracy, born in the city-states of Athens⁷ and built into the U.S. Constitution from the ground up as representative democracy with checks and balances does not hold the individual as the sole determinate of freedom, it holds the union of free individuals as a higher standard than the war of all against all. Thus, the rule of law is not up to each individual capriciousness and whim but acceptance of a greater good than ‘me’. In the notion of guns as the ultimate arbiter of the good vis-à-vis the individual deterrent against tyranny the most obvious dilemma is what happens when two individuals disagree?

Individualism and the State of Exception

In a previous post I discussed Agamben⁸ and the state of exception. A state of exception is a ‘state’, a union, which can only exist when it allows itself to essentially undo itself to preserve itself. In other words, the union is determined outside itself in what it allows as exceptions to its union.

The state of exception is not a special juridical order (the law which regulates the state of war,) rather it is a suspension of the whole juridical order itself which marks it for the limits, the threshold of the juridical order. It is for that reason that in public law there is not such a thing as a theory for the ‘state of exception.’⁹

If the citizens militia and the right for individuals to keep and bear arms is an essential deterrent to tyranny then this is tantamount to saying that there is a legal and constitutional basis for the dissolution of our union, built into our union, for its own state of exception whereupon the individual, any individual, has the ‘right’ to throw out any or all of our union based on a personal decision, judgement or dictum. This exceptional state needs no basis outside of itself. It need not justify, defend or legitimize itself before a system of government. It may violently assert itself at any cost without any legal or Constitutional concerns or with its own private interpretation of the Constitution. This notion has been called terrorism in other circumstances.

Is there, built into our constitution, a legal exception for terrorism, for violent overthrow with arms for any ‘citizens militia’? Are guns the ‘state of exception’ for the U.S. Government? Wouldn’t we call every individual’s war of all against all tribalism? Why would we assume that the individuals overthrowing tyranny are not equally capable of tyranny? Is it just because they are ‘individuals’? From a purely and simply logical point of view, on what basis could the Supreme Court deny its own purpose for existence, the judicator of the Constitution, to uphold the dissolution of itself in an individual’s right for a state of exception? Is there any kind of legal basis for an individual to violently determine the correct interpretation of the U.S. Constitution? Why would we need a Supreme Court if this is to be maintained? Do we need the Supreme Court to validate the absoluteness of the individual? Do we need a tyranny to make individualism real? There is a glaring contradiction in having a ‘union’ and denying that union in favor of the individual. It is symbiotic and the reckoning of insanity as before and above all reason. Haven’t we really just pseudo-legally recognized anarchy as essence in denial of how we have survived to this point as a species? If we allow every one with an assault weapon to determine what tyranny is and isn’t we are only left with a war of all against all and face the logical and necessary consequence of our own extinction. The judgement of the people should be made with consensus, voting and law not lead accelerated at high velocities!

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¹SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, et al., PETITIONERS v.

DICK ANTHONY HELLER

² 65% See Gun Rights As Protection Against Tyranny

³ Some Gun Control Opponents Cite Fear Of Government Tyranny

⁴ Politics [8.1], By Aristotle, Written 350 B.C.E

⁵And politics appears to be of this nature; for it is this that ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state, and which each class of citizens should learn and up to what point they should learn them; and we see even the most highly esteemed of capacities to fall under this, e.g. strategy, economics, rhetoric; now, since politics uses the rest of the sciences, and since, again, it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, the end of this science must include those of the others, so that this end must be the good for man. For even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete whether to attain or to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or for city-states. These, then, are the ends at which our inquiry aims, since it is political science, in one sense of that term. Nicomachean Ethics [1.2], By Aristotle, Written 350 B.C.E

⁶Fredrick Hayek

⁷ Ancient Political Philosophy

⁸ Hegel and the State of Exception

⁹ State of Exception

Radical Christian Extremism and The Free Market

Part 1 – Amnesia and Radicalism of the Other

Can you say the words, “Radical Christian Extremism”? If not, you are either woefully ignorant of the extremists currently at work in Christianity and the Trump-led Republican Party¹ or you are already a part of this violent ideology. If you want to fight an ideology you cannot use lethal weapons to do it. You may as well try to fix your smart phone with a hammer. You fight an ideology with logic, rationality and education. An idea-ology is by definition a system of thought. If you fight ideas with guns you may as well call yourself “Big Brother”, Stalin or Hitler. They are the ones that advocate squelching ideas with death. The implicit reasoning goes something like this: if you kill everyone who believes an idea you disagree with, there will be no one left to think the thought; therefore, the idea will vanish. Aside from pure logical ignorance, history has shown us that if you throw this kind of gas on a thought based fire you will spread the ideology, both pro and con, much faster than it would have spread on its own. Hitler, Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito’s insistence on nationalism and fascist ideology has made fascism the most despicable of terms. Yet Nationalism lives on popularly in the Republican Party². George W. Bush and company made the spread of terrorist thugs and tribal warfare in foreign countries into a global recruitment tool for the Islamic Caliphate and the state enforcement of shari’a law³. In this kind of state, religious education of the Quran and Sunnah is mandatory and relentless. Similarly, the radical Christian extremists in our country would get rid of the separation of Church and State (some of them deny it ever existed in our system of government⁴). They would impose religious training that would deny evolution and climate change. They would not only ban abortions but punish those who get abortions⁵. They would put abortion health providers to death. They would have the state kill homosexuals by law⁶. Currently, they publish the names and addresses abortion health providers, murder them and murder innocent people in abortion clinics calling themselves “warriors for the babies”.

When this violent Christian extremism happens in our country we want to call the perpetrators deranged and crazy. When violent Islamic extremism happens we call it ideological. Notice the hypocritical difference: Christianity is never blamed for its extremists but Islam is blamed for its extremists. Now I know, because my wife tells me this quite often, that logical consistency is not held in high regard by most folks but isn’t there some kind of imperative built into our anatomy, essential to language, for order and consistency? Does each of us make up our own private language? Do we only imagine we can communicate? Are we really fine with having reality comprised of word salad? If words and ideas have any meaning whatsoever, isn’t meaning itself dependent on making sense? Even if we deny logic and rationality, don’t we have to do it based on logic and rationality? How would one make an argument otherwise? Sorry, but if we give up on logic, rationality and consistency and opt for pure ideological narcissism we cannot even claim to be mammalian, animal, plant or mater⁷.

We demand that Muslims publicly denounce and refuse those that call themselves followers of Muhammad and kill in his name. Trump has recently stated that Muslims are intentionally hiding extremists and that he would crack down on them. Yet, when people kill in the name of Jesus, Christianity or “the babies” we want to call them crazy and deranged. We do not allow ourselves to think the thought that Christians should just as publicly and vehemently oppose violent extremism in Christianity as much as Muslims should oppose it in Islam. Do we equally demand that an anti-abortion zealot turn in dangerous Christian extremists? Are we willing to prosecute and deport any or all of them for their silence?

If we completely expunge Christian ideology by making their extremists simply ‘crazy’ and we insist at the same time that Islam is a religion which condones violence aren’t we being just as crazy, from a rational point of view, as the terrorists? Perhaps, the vengeful and jealous God which demands eternal Hell as justice for mortal sin should be rethought from a “warrior for the babies” perspective. Is it possible for the extreme condemnation and judgement of God to be taken as a blessing by God to kill those sinners who ‘murder babies’ and deny the ‘true’ God. If you thought defending God violently would keep you from going to eternal Hell, could it be thought as perhaps the dark side of thinking 70 virgins are waiting for you in Heaven when you kill in the name of God. Have Christians really forgotten the Dark Ages, Crusades and witch burnings? If you make the claim Islam is inherently violent, how could you in the same breath and of a sound mind not make the same claim of Christianity?

Well, it is easy, you simply think that your God is the ‘true’ God and theirs is not. They worship false gods and you know the ‘true’ God. You know this because ‘the Bible tells you so” and the ‘Holy Spirit” confirms it. No shadow of doubt can enter your mind because that would be the devil and you might be seduced into eternal torment with such thinking. Every religion and secular political ideology has its de-legitimizing stepping off points for extremism. We are all responsible for recognizing and reacting to attempts to hide or justify ideological weaknesses in our own backyard first. Sure there are ‘Crazies’ but as Foucault tells us in “Madness and Civilization” there is an uncanny, symbiotic relationship between insanity and rationality. Is it essential to rationality as Foucault claims? It makes for an interesting philosophical question. In any case, the treacherous territory between nut-cases and ideological enticements demand alertness and the most sober reflection if we want to avoid the apparent blindness of one’s own insanity and responsibility for our collective mental health. It is way too easy to make the devil ‘Other’ and ourselves the ‘not-Devil’. This is what is at the basis of Trump’s xenophobia. It is the easy way out to blame the ‘other’ and at the same time justify ourselves. The only problem is this sociological behavior perpetuates and exacerbates our own extremism and will never resolve it. The adamant insistence to turn a blind eye to ourselves is the mechanism that perpetuates radical extremism no matter what side of the ideological spectrum you adhere to.

For too many decades far right Republicans and fundamentalist Christians have been sowing to the worst in human behavior: negativity, condemnation, anger, distrust, suspicion, violence and war. Now they are reaping Trump. Why did they turn a blind eye to their own tactics? Because, in the short term, it got them votes. I would also suggest that the relative increases in human comfort and health sciences, especially in the U.S., kept the old line conservatives more attuned to human tragedy and weakness. They were less able to deny their own fallibility and dependence. They realized complaining and negativity did not change anything and only perpetuated their own misery. In any case, the lack of a positive message for those outside ‘the fold’ ultimately condemned Republicans to a narrow demographic range of the population. They were never able to convince many outside Kansas that aspirations unrealized are worth having. They promised them the ‘free market’ without government interference would give them their hearts desire. When it did not, they told the disenfranchised people they did not try hard enough, it was their fault. For the last several decades, they told them the Federal Government stole their dream and robbed the market of what they could have had. The found a demon, a terrorist to account for their constituents misery. If it was not their fault it must be the Government’s fault, the terrorists fault, the abortion providers fault, the homosexuals fault, the blacks fault, the Mexicans fault, the Muslims fault, on and on. In the end, all they gave their folks were empty promises and negative reasons for their misery.

Part 2 – Amnesia and the Magical Disappearance of Power

The real reason the Republican dream turned into a nightmare was instead of assigning fault and failing on ‘free market’ promises they fundamentally depended on people’s innate tendency for passivity and fantasy to keep them in office. They became the nanny state for excuses. They promised action but delivered empty and negative rhetoric. Reflection takes work on the part of an individual. Understanding one’s complicity in ones problems is the first step to overcoming one’s problems. The next step is action. When we deny our dependence on others and essential connection to each other we deny the most useful adaptation we have as humans, our intelligence. Intelligence, as is language, is not an individual will-to-power. It is fundamentally different from narcissism and individual mastery. If we help each other we help ourselves. If all of us only help ourselves we all end up in a miry bog.

The government is not antithetical to help, it is the tool for help. As individuals it is our job to make it work for us and not against us. If it is inefficient, it is our job to make it efficient not by killing it but by electing politicians the fix problems. Killing the government will not magically solve our problems, blaming the government will not solve any problems neither will bloating it with corporate politicians. Making the government a scapegoat for our problems will not solve them. Leaving us to manage on our own is really only a way for the vultures of capitalism to pick our bones dry. When we help each other we thrive. When we tear each other down and the organizations we have historically made, to realistically address problems we cannot change as individuals, we are left to the Darwinian marketplace which tells us in advance that we are all on our own against the power grubbers of capitalism (get your degree at Trump University).

I am not suggesting capitalism is inheritably bad, only that it has no external checks and balances to prevent market monopolies and vast over-reaches by its own pools of powerful interests. It must rely solely on its own inner dynamics and self-regulation to allegedly keep the ‘haves’ in check and promote the well-being of the ‘have-nots’. Therefore, the system is completely intrinsic to itself. In contradistinction, our system of government has, if you will, ‘state-planned’ checks and balances in the form of a constitution. Intervention is planned by the foresight of the Founders by three distinct branches of government. External intervention is a necessary and essential structural element of our Constitution. While the Austrian Economists may conveniently ignore the political basis of our own state planning in the U.S. Constitution as non-relevant to their extremist critique of state-planned economies there is an apparent contradiction between our form of government and their admonitions about a ‘free market’. The Founders would not tell us that the structure of our government rests on selfishness. They had a vision they coded into law that rests on a structural fairness for all based on protected divisions of power. They assumed happiness was not left to the wind of the market and vehemently rejected European Mercantilism. To the contrary of the Austrian Economists, they did not see liberalism as the (re-written and revised) historical basis rampant in Mercantilism but as the excesses of Aristocracy and power of the few.

Capitalism as Adam Smith tells us is firmly rooted in selfishness⁸. He does not take selfishness to be negative but a positive incentive for mastery and acquisition. As a note, he did however root out making money on money (interest) as an unacceptable selfishness⁹. The Austrians put no such constraints on the market. There is a bit of a magic trick, now you see it now you don’t, in raising an artificial distinction between “state-planned” control and interests of the powerful “market-planned” economy. Selfishness, left to its own devices, unmediated by anything other than individual will has historically not resulted in a balanced and prosperous state but an autocracy, an oligarchy, a mercantilism; the haves and the have-nots as we currently say. It has never had a history of mediating itself in some sort of stable and efficient distribution of goods and services despite what the Austrian Economists¹⁰ would have us believe.

While the Austrians are quick to criticize state planning as liberalism in which they mean socialism and fascism, they are quite silent when market manipulation, collusion and ‘corporate planning’ are brought to the fore from within the market. Their main basis for dealing with this is telling us that intervention by the state causes these deformities; bubbles and bursts in the market. The trick here is to change the terms from externality, what is plainly and historically visible in the consolation of power, to an internal (shall we dare suggest Hegelian) confluence of hypotheticals. If we can adequately maintain a new and improved history of the world which does not implicate unfettered commerce and economy but always attributes the deformities of power, not to the ones that have the real power in terms of, shall we say, dollars and cents but to the ones they try to keep on their payroll, we implicate the worker bees not the queen bee. The queen disappears in the hive while all the workers are left to fight it out amongst themselves for the crumbs of the existence. This well-financed illusion creates a synthesis for market failures based on a superimposed and critically differentiated other, the government. The result is that the market, unhinged and unaltered by government intervention is whole (hole), complete unto itself. The market can now will itself as self-determined. What gets lost is even the remote possibility that distortions in the market can come about not just from the super-imposed, state-controlled hubris of the government but from any other form of market control and manipulation from within the market.

The next step as the right has continually reminded us is to make the government so small we can drown it in a bathtub. The natural consequence of this is what we would call anarchy. By the term ‘anarchy’, referring specifically to no government, can we assume that the ‘free market’ would also magically take care of or have no need for this type of human organization? Can we then dump the U.S. Constitution so apparently and vehemently revered by the right to make way for the pure internal-ism of the market? When the System is complete by virtue of its own internal dynamics why would we need a government anymore. Why couldn’t the object of such disdain, disorder, and human misery simply be done away with so the beauty of the market could finally have its day? Surely, the market would correct itself and ensure that an equal playing field would be had by all. You can now wake up on the count of three.

Part 3- The Consummation of ALL in Trump

The narcissism of Trump is a creation of this utopic myth where the lion and the lamb lay down in perfect harmony…albeit, in a members only (white, straight, Mayberry reality but forget the details). This protectionist strategy leaves out some important details about who goes in the ark before the flood but never-mind that. Trump tells us to trust him. Everything will be fine. He will make us great again. He will win. He is very intelligent. The siren song continues, pay no attention to that masked billionaire behind the curtain. He is Trump, the Great and Powerful (swish, swish, boom, boom, fart, fart). Here again we have bumped into a learned tactic from the Austrians…the sleight of hand where the rich and powerful disappear in a puff of smoke and all is well in Pleasantville. Have we all found ourselves in “The Truman Show” where the right has convinced us of the infallibility of the ‘free market’? The rich are not really rich, they do not pull any strings or exercise any power OR if they do it is only because the government is bought and paid for (by the ones the market movers created and require for their own existence in the first place). All our problems are due to the evil other, the immigrant, the homosexual, the blacks, the government, ad nausea. The market is blameless in itself. It can do no wrong. Liberalism is synonymous with totalitarianism. The market is synonymous with freedom and individualism. We have been feed a steady diet for decades of ‘focus on the watch while we pick your pocket and sell you your own watch’. In this cocoon, all aspirations will be met if you only work hard and have faith in The Donald. The word ‘slavery’ has been done away with, we now call it interest on credit…Adam Smith’s vehement exception to the virtue of selfishness. When workers are paid slave wages and credit is offered we blame the worker when the payments are not met. Surely, the market could not be guilty of usury. People like Trump are not the problem, just listen to him, he will tell you who the real problem is. Corporations are people too. They do not squeeze the blood out of people. People do not have to borrow money. Surely they can live on $7.25 an hour. If they can’t, they should get another job but don’t let the undocumented worker take their jobs at an even lower hourly rate.

How many wacky theories about the ‘free market’ will we have to endure before people finally realize that the market will run over people if it is not intelligently regulated by something other than itself? It is possible for humans to govern themselves wisely without giving free reign to survival of the fittest in market economy. Is it possible for external checks and balances to work in government? It is not all or nothing, us or them, good versus evil. The evil is in the excesses that hides between our eyes in the fanciful illusions created by an invisible hand which separate us from one another, from wisdom and intelligence, in our shared languages; desires, logic and reason. When ‘we’ becomes irrelevant and ‘me’ is all that matters these words which we commonly understand fall into an abyss, Alice in Wonderland, where up is down and down is up and sense can be held at the mercy of the highest bidder.

_________________

¹Trump Selects a White Nationalist Leader as a Delegate in California

Trump retweets another apparent white supremacist

DONALD TRUMP’S SOCIAL MEDIA TIES TO WHITE SUPREMACISTS

²An Exhausted Democracy: Donald Trump and the New American Nationalism

³The rate of terrorist attacks around the world by jihadist groups and the rate of fatalities in those attacks increased dramatically after the invasion of Iraq. Globally there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks (28.3 attacks per year before and 199.8 after) and a 237 percent rise in the average fatality rate (from 501 to 1,689 deaths per year). A large part of this rise occurred in Iraq, which accounts for fully half of the global total of jihadist terrorist attacks in the post-Iraq War period. But even excluding Iraq, the average yearly number of jihadist terrorist attacks and resulting fatalities still rose sharply around the world by 265 percent and 58 percent respectively.

The Iraq Effect: War Has Increased Terrorism Sevenfold Worldwide

Also, if you have not read or seen this website, it is certainly worth reading. It puts the cost of war and the cost of peace in economic terms and the results are quite interesting…

The Economic Cost of Violence Containment

⁴The Myth of the Separation of Church and State

⁵ Kevin Swanson Agrees With Trump: Abortion ‘Ought To Be A Criminal Action’

Donald Trump’s ‘Punishment’ Talk Exposes Abortion Foes’ True Face

US Domestic Terrorism

GROUP ATTACKING PLANNED PARENTHOOD LINKED TO EXTREMISTS

HATE IN THE MAINSTREAM

Here is a Press Release by Operation Rescue on the execution of an abortionist murderer. Troy Newman is the President of Operation Rescue. He is another “warrior for the babies”.

Operation Rescue West
California Life Coalition
Joint Press Release
For Immediate Release
September 3, 2003
Contact: Troy Newman, Director, Operation Rescue West (316) 841-1700
Cheryl Sullenger, Director, California Life Coalition (619) 277-0725
Execution of Paul Hill Nothing Less than Murder
Paul Jennings Hill is scheduled to die by lethal injection today in the state of Florida for the murder of a Pensacola abortionist and his security guard in 1994. The following is a joint statement released by Operation Rescue West and the California Life Coalition regarding today’s execution:
“Today’s scheduled execution of Paul Hill is not justice, but is another example of the judicial tyranny that is gripping our nation. A Florida judge denied Rev. Hill his right to present a defense that claimed that the killing of the abortionist was necessary to save the lives of the pre-born babies that were scheduled to be killed by abortion that day. Our system of justice is based upon ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ but in Rev. Hill’s case, there was no justice because the court prevented him from presenting the legal defense that his conduct was justifiable defensive action.
“There are many examples where taking the life in defense of innocent human beings is legally justified and permissible under the law. Paul Hill should have been given the opportunity to defend himself with the defense of his choosing in a court of law. Because he was denied this right, the full truth and motivations behind Hill’s actions were kept hidden from the jury. If Paul Hill’s life can be taken by the state without the full advantage of the protections afforded him by due process simply because of the unpopularity of his views, then we have to wonder who is next? No one is safe from being denied a defense by an out-of-control and biased judicial system. Execution under these circumstances is nothing less than murder of a political prisoner.
“We pray for Paul Hill today, for his wife and children, and for our nation that sees no value in the lives of the innocent victims of abortion that Hill endeavored to rescue, but instead protects and defends their killers. Today, it is justice that has been aborted. May God have mercy on us!”

⁶If you have not seen this clip of Rachel Maddow exposing the Republican candidate’s support of the “kill the gays” pastor, it is well worth watching

⁷Animals are consistent. They have adaptations and ritualistic behaviors that enable them to survive. They breed, give birth, and in some form or another, biologically and/or behaviorally, help their young adapt to their environment. If they do not, their species will eventually go extinct. Physics is not purely random. Electrons want to satisfy conditions set in motion by protons and neutrons. Sub-atomic particles have flavors: up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom; color, spins, quarks, quirks, massless, etc. They are not purely chaotic. There is a situational sense of them which is the ‘glue’ of existence. Yet, all of this phenomena has its mal-adaptations and randomness. To the extent that these destructive behaviors are successfully repressed is to the same extent that species and matter can exist. To the extent that they are expressed the consequence of extinction and entropy are introduced. Violence may have short term advantages in nature but it seems that nature prefers avoidance, cooperation, breeding and other more successful tools for conflict resolution.

The early Greeks thought of all this as phusis from which we get our modern word ‘physics’. The point being, rationality, logic, consistency, predictability are all essential conditions of existence. They can certainly be denied but only by affirming them. Nihilism and pure destruction is not an answer to them, only a narcissistic refusal to think or acknowledge the other. Consistency demonstrates order but is not necessarily rationality and logic. It could be argued that rationality and logic recognize order as such; that it is not merely determined by order and the corresponding behavioral response of consistency. However, the appeal to reflection does not result in some sort of freedom from order only an awareness of it. In any case, if language is the determinate factor for rationality and logic it may not be as far as we think from audible, visual and behavioral communication we see in animals and plants and the constraints and interrelations we see in matter. Since we are the only ones that can insist on an essential difference there is always the anthropomorphic exception to the argument for an essential difference in order and consistency and rationality and logic.

⁸The Free Market: Capitalism and Socialism – Part 1

The Free Market: Capitalism and Socialism – Part 2

⁹In Adam Smith’s most famous work, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” he devotes over 100 pages to banking regulations. Of those who live “by profit” he states:

His employers constitute the third order, that of those who live by profit. It is the stock that is employed for the sake of profit, which puts into motion the greater part of the useful labour of every society. The plans and projects of the employers of stock regulate and direct all the most important operations of labour, and profit is the end proposed by all those plans and projects. But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity, and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this third order, therefore, has not the same connection with the general interest of the society as that of the other two. 1.11.264

¹⁰Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School and Regulation

Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School

Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School and the Problem of Suffering

Theoria and Austrian Economics [from what I can see]

The End of the Republican Party

I have been predicting the demise of the Republican Party for a number of years now even as recently as the 2012 presidential election.¹ I have been a little premature in the pace of their predicted implosion but, for me, it has been apparent for quite a while. It is amazing to me that Republicans do not seem to have a clue about themselves. Back when Mitt lost to Obama they huddled together and came out with their reflections on what they did wrong and how to fix it. It all came down to public relations. They needed to put the right spin on things to win national elections without changing any of their basic doctrines or self-righteous instincts. They just knew that the “American People” were on their side and the Democrats were marginal with their obsession about ethnic groups, women’s issues, climate change and massive wars.

Now, we see the Republican Party coming apart at the seams, in total disarray, and they do not have a clue about why it is happening. Their answer for their dilemma has always been their nemesis; the enemy liberals and Democrats, were what mucked up the works for them. If only these Democratic idiots would get out of the way, they would show us how their ideology was the answer to all our woes. If we let the ‘free market’ go unhindered and come down hard on the world stage with military might while letting the original intent of the constitution shape social values, family and culture as what ‘we’ all really know is what God wants, would be the final solution. Even in the Deep South where Republicans have dominated for decades, they still blame the Civil War and Democrats for higher poverty, worse health care and lower educational standards of the deep red states.

Here is the real reason why their party is doomed: they cannot see how what they have done has made a Donald Trump possible. All the years they were spinning conspiracy theories on Fox News, spitting out hatred, whining about the ‘Federal Government’, inciting the right to get further and further right created a base that could only react with negativity, anger, frustration and ultimately, drama. The old right’s insistence on not making excuses, putting your nose to the grindstone and above all stop complaining and whining went out the window. The new right was given the blessing and even a new virtue for complaining, stewing in anger and frustration about their dilemma and lot in life. It was all the fault of the ‘Federal Government’, the Democrats, the godless, the communists, the terrorists, the blacks, the Hispanics, they women’s libbers, the lying climate change advocates, the activist judges, on and on… All the while they were creating a monster. Monsters do not recognize ideologies. In their pure form they simply want utter destruction.

Trump is the embodiment of the monster they have fashioned for themselves. Trump, the archetypal Republican hero of capitalism, who must be smart and above ethical reproach, incorruptible and the embodiment of the truly free god who can speak politically un-correct truths due to his massive wealth and beauty would be the savior of the down-trodden. It mattered nothing to his supporters that their woes may have been the result of capitalists like Trump and not politicians and the ‘Federal Government’. As Karl Marx observed about the heroic ideal of the capitalist long ago, wealth leveled out all differences. Those with money were very, very smart as Trump fashions himself. He must be beautiful, just look at his wife and children. He must be a military genius. He must understand how to make everyone rich like him and get rid of all the riff-raff in Washington. All the while what ran out of control under the veneer of such fantasies was the sanctification of unencumbered ego. While the base could indulge in unabashed negativity, anger, frustration and endless whining, the heroic conqueror of ‘free market’ capitalism was bestowed with all knowledge and virtue. He transcended ideology. Even the most radical right wing dogma, except perhaps pure fascism, met its irrelevance in the drama of the One beyond corruption and political correctness.

The so-called ‘establishment’ of the Republican Party has not yet understood how they created this monster that will eat their party alive. The rot in their roots was all their own doing. Their base ate way too much of the party’s own bitter concoction. They gorged themselves on raw emotion and reactionary drama at the behest of the snake charming elites of the Republican establishment. Then, the un-dead they created tore the establishment apart limb by limb. In effect, the party sanctioned the evil they claimed to disdain. They became self-indulgent narcissists with the continual goading of the establishment they now hate. Hate has no bounds. It stops at nothing. Bitterness eats the soul alive and reaps havoc on everything it touches. The old right would have nothing to do with this kind of indulgent Republicanism.

The bottom line is that the reason the Republican Party is doomed is because they cannot see their own complicity in in the success of Donald Trump. They are dumbfounded by virtue of their own adamant denial. The old right would tell them to stop the whining, take responsibility for their demise and turn it around by their bootstraps not by more creative public relations, more bitter and negative attacks but positive, can-do, problem solving, inclusive not exclusive, minding our own business not solving the world’s problems with wars, moderation and making the government better not the brunt of all complaining. Until the party acknowledges their complicity in the popularity of Trump to their base they will continue on the path to their own destruction. Blaming Trump as a fake and really a liberal is simply drinking more of their own poison. Don’t get me wrong I love the freak show and have no problem watching the new right get what’s coming to them. However, I do think there is a legitimacy in some aspects of conservativism which we are all the lesser for; in not allowing them to work for society and instead, ignorantly against our better angels.

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¹My Presidential Election Prediction

A Factual Comparison and Discussion of Hillary and Bernie

In this post I have included some important facts and some of my own opinions further down. I think it is important to draw as many opinions as possible from research and not popular hearsay. There are way too many dubious opinions parading around like facts. There is also flawed logic in many of the opinions I hear tossed about these days.

In eight years Hillary sponsored or co-sponsored 417 bills in the senate¹.

In 24 years Bernie sponsored or co-sponsored 362 bills in the House and the Senate².

With regard to leadership and ideology, here is how govtrack ranks Hillary and Bernie:

Hillary³

Clinton sponsored bills primarily in these issue areas:

Government Operations and Politics (23%) Economics and Public Finance (15%) Health (14%) Science, Technology, Communications (11%) Families (10%) Social Welfare (10%) Labor and Employment (9%) Education (8%)

Bernie⁴

Sanders sponsors bills primarily in these issue areas:

Armed Forces and National Security (27%) Health (18%) Labor and Employment (11%) Energy (10%) Education (9%) Government Operations and Politics (9%) Taxation (8%) Finance and Financial Sector (7%)

Here are a few plans for Bernie⁵ and Hillary⁶ and how they plan to pay for them.

Hillary Plan:

Boost federal investment by $275 billion over the next five years.
Create a $25 billion infrastructure bank to support critical infrastructure improvements.
Harness public and private capital to fix and build new roads and bridges, expand public transportation, give every American access to broadband internet, and more.

Hillary How to Pay:

On her site Hillary simply states she would pay with “business tax reform” and not much detail. The Atlantic states⁷ that she would probably use the tax holiday proposal which gives large corporations tax breaks to move their profits back to the U.S. to generate tax revenue, to pay for several years of the plan. According to the Atlantic,

Bernie Plan:

Rebuild America Act: Sen. Sanders has proposed a$1 trillion plan to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure
and put 13 million Americans to work.

For too many years, we have dramatically underfunded the physical infrastructure that our economy depends on. That is why I have proposed the Rebuild America Act, to invest $1 trillion over five years to modernize our infrastructure. It would be paid for by closing loopholes that allow profitable corporations to avoid paying taxes by, among other things, shifting their profits to the Cayman Islands and other offshore tax havens.⁸

Bernie How to Pay:

Paid for by making corporations pay taxes on all of the “profits” they have shifted to the Cayman Islands and other offshore tax havens, which the Congressional Research Services estimates may currently create losses that approach $100 billion annually, and other loopholes.

One thing to note with Bernie’s plan to pay if you check out the study he quotes in the “making corporations pay taxes” link is that the highest estimates for tax evasions (which are legal loopholes) of these offshore tax havens is $100 billion annually. The lowest estimate is $3 billion annually. The rest seem to come in around $60 to $80 billion annually. It is important to note that Bernie’s plan would require $200 billion annually for 5 years to reach 1 trillion dollars.

Here are some of my opinions concerning Hillary and Bernie:

I think both of them need to be much more specific about how they plan to pay for their plans. However, in light of the last eight years legislative stagnation, it is hard to see how any plan would have a chance of ever seeing the light of day. I do think any chance of success would depend not on a strategy of finger pointing and insults but working behind the scenes to get things done. I think the Democrats are quite different from Republicans in acknowledging that the “American public” is also comprised of Republicans with whom we disagree on many things but believe we can compromise to address pressing issues. The majority of the Republican candidates seem intent on denying that there are Democrats which comprise a large part of the “American public”. They talk in terms of the “American public” as if it were a homogeneous, right-wing group. If they cannot even acknowledge we exist how can any compromise ever happen. There are Republicans that are not so monolithic as Governor Kasich but you can plainly see how popular he is with his electorate.

I have heard both Republicans and Democrats talking about getting more revenue out of business. I think there are dynamics in the world economy that we need to be sensitive to. The bottom line for corporations is not patriotism, it is profit. If a corporation believes it can make a higher profit outside the country they will not hesitate to move their operations and profits wherever they can maximize their profit. When I worked as a manger and engineer in the nineties at U.S. Robotics, we moved our stable, mass marketed product manufacturing to the far east. We found that manufacturing overseas was not all it was cracked up to be. It was cheaper but the quality was harder to control and high tech modems had to work right out of the box. Our more advanced and quickly changing technology stayed in Skokie, Illinois.

As unions have started to form and cost have gone up overseas the natural cycle of cost control and profit have started to level out more and more. Eventually, when the rest of the world starts to catch up with the rampant consumptionism and worker expectations and regulations of the more industrialized countries, the mass exodus of jobs from the U.S. will wane. I do not know how long that will be but I do know that trade deals might be cannon fodder for both parties, but those deals will not expedite or delay the natural consequences of competing worldwide markets and the various cost of living inequalities in underdeveloped countries. This dynamic will not be changed by protectionism not matter what politicians tell us.

In the U.S. we need to learn to stop being so manic about acquiring more and more, latest and greatest commodities. We need to stop the debt-slavery network capitalism has made so easy for us. We will also have to have more large government programs to make up the increasing gap with necessities such as health care, poverty and educational degradation. The market will not provide these basic necessities at a lower cost as decades of believing it will, have amply demonstrated. There will always be the purist that try to make us believe that we simply do not have enough faith and too much government intervention for the ‘free market’ to do its magic. These snake oil salesmen are yet another systemic problem with capitalism where truth is all too often sacrificed for perception.

Additionally, capitalism does not lend itself to long term research and development. By systemic design and necessity it needs to realize maximum profit in the shortest time possible to survive. Capital expenditure is certainly a barrier for market entry in both time and dollars. This is why we need the government to fund science, technology and health care research. We have a proven track record when we let the government and universities take the lead in typically, immediately unprofitable research.

We also need the government to fund education in spite of what the Republicans tell us. We will have to change from a manufacturing economy to an educated and highly skilled market. We cannot compete at the level we need to and the level we have in the past with manufacturing environments where foreign workers are willing to work for pennies on the dollar to our costs. We need to maximize our strengths and minimize our weaknesses. The privatization of education, prisons and retirement and pension plans has repeatedly demonstrated their weaknesses in terms of minimizing standards⁹, maximizing inmates¹⁰ and blowing up working folk’s retirement plans¹¹.

We need to ensure that we maximize private social services as much as possible while realizing that privatization is not a panacea for all social ills. There are many things the government does that no private corporation can compete with cost wise by economies of scale and quality wise by not reducing services to the lowest possible overhead with the maximum amount of marketing hyperbole.

Corporations have to compete and survive. They will not tolerate a high amount of penalties and taxation without pulling stakes and running. We need the positive things that corporations bring us like jobs and competitive pricing without mistaking that for some universal principal that always works in every situation. In short, we need to be smart, measure progress, incorporate end of life standards and requirements for social programs and privatization attempts. We need to understand and learn from history, facts and projections so we do not perpetuate fraud, waste and abuse in public or private ventures. I think that both the government and the private market have about the same batting average in this regard. The Deep South has been dominated for decades by Republicans but they tend to be poorer with less social safety nets and lower quality standards than the rest of the country. This is contrary to the popular rhetoric about Republican economics. I find it highly disingenuous for the party that gave us the Great Recession of 2008 to blame everyone but themselves for the failure and tells us now that the Democrats have screwed everything up under President Obama. The proof is in the pudding and I think most people will make the right call on these shenanigans.

Reportedly, 30% of Bernie Sanders supporters say they would not support Hillary in the general election if she were to win the nomination. How stupid can these folks be. This is tantamount to saying that they much prefer a fascist or religious fanatic to be our next president. Hillary supporters would be more than happy to support Bernie in a general election. We realize that under absolutely no circumstances can we allow the Republicans to jeopardize our country with what even many Republicans are telling us are horrible choices and even telling us that they would vote for Hillary over Trump and Cruz. We should never let our emotions become disengaged from our brain.

As I wrote in my previous article I love Bernie and wish the country were ready for him but the simple fact is that there is no revolution and there are way too may roadblocks in Congress and the real “American public” to make Bernie anything other than a poster child for the left. Folks, the Republicans have been working on Hillary for 25 years and all they have to show are emails and Benghazi, witch hunts at the tax payers expense. They have an extremely well-oiled media machine and have only come up these unfounded allegations to make the ‘Hillary is dishonest’ pitch. Sanders supporters which echo the right wing propaganda are doing favors for fascists and bigots at the expense of their own proposed cause.

Bernie has received a hall pass so far from the right’s voracious media teeth. Ask yourself why. It is because they know the real threat is from Hillary not Bernie with regard to the presidency. I know what the polls say but polls change radically with marketing and media big dollars. The right wing media know that they would make Bernie change from a nice, honest, harmless old guy to a radical communist dictator that would secretly be working with Putin and China to overthrow the United States. They would show no mercy with their rampant and ceaseless tirade of lies and distortion. They have a track record of making it stick with many folks and I would suspect the counter revolution would bring many new voters out on election day.

This bring me to another point. Are we really willing to take the chance against the major dollars of the right and corporations that a home spun and paid for hope for a revolution could match the barrage of big dollars. Folks, we need wake up and smell the coffee. It takes big dollars to win the presidency whether we like it or not. The stakes are too high to acts as if this reality was inconsequential. All of us on the left hate Citizens United and turning the clock back of voter rights but that is a fact and denying it will only lull us into a false sense of security while the war hawk right takes our kids back to war, kill our economy AGAIN and take us back to the good old days of Jim Crow laws. It takes big dollars to win national elections these days like it or not. To think that all politicians are on the take for accepting money is a gross fallacy. Big business prefers the Republicans not only because they get more perks from them than the Democrats but also because they know that Democrats are ideologically opposed to the idea of the rich getting richer while the Republicans say the pledge of allegiance every day to big business and unrestrained capitalism. Think to yourself, who is the more logical choice for receiving favors from big dollar contributions, the Democrats or the Republicans. Any equivocation from the left comes from unenlightened passion at the expense of their own stated ideals and the country. I am not suggesting all Democrats are blameless and all Republicans are on the take. I am simply suggesting that if you want to play the odds the Democrats are your best bet with regard to campaign finance reform, voter rights and social tolerance and diversity. As Democrats, the right depends on certain amount of us in Congress and the public to sabotage our own best interests and play the fools game with them.

This is why I believe we need to play odds and strategy to get where we want to end up. What is the practical choice for moving the country to the left? Think about Hillary and Bernie’s style and ask yourself who has a better chance of getting something done. Don’t buy into the government hater dogma. It is a cop out, a whine fest and only brings you down to a negative, bombastic, hate filled shell of a human being as you age in that psychic pig slop. I believe overall our government is good and has achieved historically great advances in human dignity and providing a more fair economic playing field. We still have a long way to go but bigotry and big money will only take us backwards. The stakes have never been so great for us individually and as a nation. We will only win if we apply an equal amount of idealism, strategy and practicality to our behavior and resist the abyss of cynicism and black and white, emotional judgements¹².

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¹Hillary results from govtrack.us

417 bills matched your search for sponsor: Clinton, Hillary (Sen.) [D-NY, 2001-2009]

Referred to Committee (355 bills)

Reported by Committee (24 bills)

Passed Senate (20 bills)

Agreed To (Simple Resolution) (14 bills)

Passed House with Changes (1 bill)

Enacted — Signed by the President (3 bills)

Enacted — Including via Companion Bills (11 bills)

² Bernie results from govtrack.us

362 bills matched your search for sponsor: Sanders, Bernard “Bernie” (Sen.) [I-VT]

Referred to Committee (340 bills)

Reported by Committee (13 bills)

Passed House (1 bill)

Agreed To (Simple Resolution) (2 bills)

Enacted — Signed by the President (3 bills)

Failed Cloture (2 bills)

Failed House (1 bill)

Enacted — Including via Companion Bills (7 bills)

³ Hillary – Ideology and Leadership

⁴ Bernie – Ideology and Leadership

⁵ How Bernie pays for his proposals

⁶ Hillary – Strong infrastructure is critical to a strong economy

⁷ Hillary Clinton’s Modest Infrastructure Proposal

⁸ Bernie – Creating Jobs Rebuilding America

⁹ Public Schools in the Crosshairs: Far-Right Propaganda and the Common Core State Standards

¹⁰ The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery?

¹¹ Private pension fund levels fall behind

¹²I highly recommend you take a look at the facts and statistics on my site’s reference to this site, Government is Good. You will find many well based sources, facts and evidence for many of the things I have discussed in this post.

A Democratic Socialist Working for Hillary

Ever since I can remember I have thought of myself as left of liberal. If that puts me in the camp of “Democratic Socialist” I am happy with that label. However, labels are prone to vast over-simplifications. I think real issues are always multifaceted which require weighing pros and cons in a balanced, rational approach. There are no magic ideologies only better and worse ones weighed against benefit and downside. I have lived 59 years with an unapologetic approach to social issues and ethical responsibility. Historically, I have found myself wrong more than I have been right but shame gets you nowhere, learning gets you everywhere. The determinate factor for failure to learn and refusing to mindlessly repeat the past are facts and statistics. There are better and worse facts. Facts may as well be another word for work. Research is work. It is active and not passive. Passivity makes one into a parrot, a mimic of knowledge and wisdom. If you do not do your own research you will absorb opinions around you which can be largely manipulated by technology and unabashed and unrestrained capitalistic production machines.

Democrats lag far behind Republicans when it comes to capital investment and know-how for ideological programming. Republicans are very good at it and have major networks involved in hypnotic appeals to base emotions rooted in the amygdale¹. Don’t get me wrong, leftist make attempts but they pale with regard to the effectively of the right. For one thing, modern leftists generally want to appeal to more positive emotions and facts which, from an evolutionary perspective, do not carry the emotive intensity of fear, hatred, paranoia, etc. For the most part, we must constantly face an uphill battle to viably stake out our positions to others. I have been diligently involved in this battle all my life. Additionally, being from the Deep South, and spending all of my early years around staunch Republicans, I know well how difficult and overwhelming it can be to counter and challenge opinions based on the workings of intense capitalistic media and social productions. The only consolation one can have in the face of arrogant conservatism is facts and statistics, good research and solid sources. If one’s loyalties are based on the feeling of being right or correct, better facts will never have a chance. Better facts are NOT produced or intuited they are worked for and valued apart from whether I like them or not. Personally, I hate being the victim of manipulation and ideological cons on the right so that is why I have decided to work for Hillary and not Bernie.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Bernie and wish this country was ready for a candidate like Bernie. I have the scars to prove that our country is not ready for Democratic Socialism. We have not been around long enough to have explored the political options which bestow wisdom on a culture. We are still too green and reactionary to have lived the trade offs of anti-government extremism and treasuring hard earned communal lessons codified into laws, regulations, and social services. We are too quick to expect to “win” wars and solve international issues with simplistic aphorisms that have been passively handed to us. Bernie is right in intensely bringing out the way we have been victimized, not by an evil government, but by capitalism gone wild and on steroids. Capitalism does not just produce and distribute good and services more efficiently as the Austrian Economists advocate. It also is very effective at consolidating power. Oh sure small business is given lip service as the validation of unrestrained capitalism but historically power and capital have always congealed in symbiotic embrace. Today, at times, we ironically hear the word corporatism batted about by the right as if they just discovered the detestable alliance between big business and corporations. However, historically, we have bumped into this in many other forms most notably, our Founding Fathers.

Spend some time reading about mercantilism and why the early founders of our country like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and John Adams were motivated to leave Europe and start our democracy. They detested the hermetically sealed, historical alliance of power and wealth while 95% of individuals died early in tragic, inadequate and bare subsistence conditions. History has more than adequately demonstrated that wealth corrupts and successfully feeds on others with a blind and ravenous appetite. Unfettered capitalism produces and shelters power at the expense of production, the work and reward of individuals. Left to its own, without regulation and restraint, capitalism does not encourage individualism and merit but ultimately creates the government it needs to impermeably sustain and enrich itself. This is why the Austrian Economists are naive to the point suspicious and questionable motives. They simplistically create an artificial and absolute chasm between capitalism and government which always results in capital = good and government = bad. I have always stated that if there were no government, unabashed capital and wealth would have to create one. Folks that think we can live some sort of libertarian and anarchistic life with a government “so small we can drown it in a bathtub” are living a well produced lie and myth. The bottom line is we will have government, the only choice is do we make it work for us or delude ourselves into thinking that no government or minimal government is some sort of viable option. It is not. The vacuum created by no government or minimal government will give rise to the worst atrocities and violence of those that rise to the top of the world of Mad Max.

Our government has earned some hard achievements that favor the individual and value fairness but Bernie is totally correct that this is being threatened by power and vast infestations of capital. If we give our government to the likes of Trump and the illusion of small government we will give them everything they want to destroy what is valuable and meaningful in our country. Do anti-government haters really think that Trump and his kind are going to come down on the side of altruism, freedom and protections for the individual? Hell no! What folks are missing is the vast, reality show production of some sort of utopia where the rich and anarchy favor the working individual. This illusion has been repetitively ingrained into an assumed pseudo-reality where the lion and the lamb lay down together in chummy competition irrespective of might and hunger.

This brings me around to why I am working for Hillary. The Republican machine has put multi-millions of dollars into having us believe that Hillary is dishonest. I have even talked to stanch Democrats that have bought into this illusion. Where are the facts? After 8 Benghazi commissions and lots of viscous allegations no arrests have been, no cover up has been proved, no dereliction of duty has been established. Republican leaders have made multiple comments attesting to their woeful political motivations and the taxpayers have spent millions on their reckless political ambitions. We have heard about emails but no arrest has been made. If there were any proof of giving classified information away illegally it would have surfaced long ago. My wife and I have both had secret and top secret clearances and there is no doubt such an allegation, if true, would be a clear violation of the law and bring swift punishment on the violator. Any yet, we hear from regular folks that they think Hillary is dishonest. There is no positive proof that she is dishonest and disproving a negative, as the Republican machine knows, is an impossibility. Sorry folks, but what popular opinion is demonstrating is that Hitler was right; propaganda is the surrogate of truth in its unrequited repetition. Marketing obviously works successfully on this principal where ‘truth in advertising’ is an antiquated and irrelevant superstition of the past. Show me the proof where Hillary is dishonest. After all the money and effort to prove it – nothing. They have nothing but rhetoric to show for this fantastic production of reality. In light of this vacuum, I choose another opinion.

The Republicans are not stupid. They know Hillary is their greatest threat for not getting the presidency and not getting the Supreme Court justices they want. They have known this for years and have actively been targeting and marketing the Hillary-dishonesty-show going back to the nineties. Now it has become increasingly apparent why Hillary is such a threat to them. She obviously is not perceived by them as welcoming big business and wealth interests or they would not have created such an effective propaganda machine. They, themselves, are the proof that she threatens something they hold dear – money. Has anyone heard them say anything negative about Bernie? Very little, if any. Why? Hillary is accused of taking money from Wall Street so why would that bother Republicans. After all, they are the ones that got Citizens United² through the court. They are the ones that talk up free market capitalism. They think “corporations are people too”. They have shown that they will contribute to Democrats or Republicans to further their capital interests. So why would they be threatened by Hillary if she were what they say she is? Why do they talk so little about a “Democratic Socialist” running for president?

It is because they know that Bernie will never make it in the general election. In spite of the freak show circus act they have made with their candidates they know that even a blatant fascist would size up well with a socialist. I have lived through times even in the G.W. Bush years where socialism was synonymous with profanity. President Obama has been accused of everything from socialist to communist to Islamic terrorist. Folks, this is not just loud mouth politicians. There are many, many folks in this country that are scared to death of this radical and created fantasy about the left in our country. Many folks that never vote would probably come out of the woodwork to vote against a “Democratic Socialist” and vote for a thinly veiled fascist. The revolution Bernie talks about can equally come against him for a large segment of the American population. So far, his masses of revolutionary folks have not materialized in the Iowa and New Hampshire caucuses but we have seen a huge increase in the average number of Republican voters in these states. What makes Bernie supporters think the backlash will not be worse than the hope for a revolution? If I vote for Bernie and a Trump or a Cruz gets into office I am responsible for that strategic oversight. Either Trump or Cruz could really be the death or great demise of our country. Do I want to live with that if Bernie’s revolution does not materialize? I think it is probable it will not. The majority of the country does not have the education or background to make a Bernie work.

This brings me to another point. Even if Bernie did make it in – do you think he would be more successful than President Obama? Hell no. If you think President Obama was scapegoated by the right just wait until Bernie becomes president. Bernie will not have the super majority President Obama had and we may as well call off the government for four years to save the taxpayers some money. What would make any sane person think that Bernie would be able to do more than President Obama in our highly tilted and gerrymandered right wing politics? He would get absolutely nothing done, piss off the people that voted for him and allow the right to come back with radical right wing-nut vengeance. Bernie would be the best thing for them long term to rejuvenate their failing party. Why would anyone on the left want to help them accomplish their mission and give credence to their Fox News reality show?

Regrettably, the country is not ready for Bernie but Hillary could actually be more likely to make incremental progress than the polarization that Bernie brings with him. I do not want to go backwards to the days of G.W. Bush. I think we need to show the country that the myths the right popularizes about the left is not real. We have made real progress from the financial meltdown, deregulating banks and traders resulting in 30 to 100 trillion dollar hocus-pocus derivatives worldwide³ and two massive wars we had no business in except to kill thousands of our young men and women and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians⁴. We need to have ideals, a compass, a direction and Bernie brings that but we also need to think strategically and practically about how to extend our successes and counter the Republican propaganda machine. We should not let our personal desire override the need to bring the majority of the country along with us to make democracy and fairness work better. This is a long term fight. Let’s not sabotage the possibility of winning the war for the sake of a battle. Let’s give the Republican machine its worst fear, Hillary for President. Don’t let them dupe us into buying their mass marketed rhetoric about Hillary. She is our best chance for moving forward. The intelligent right knows it and have put a lot of effort into making us think she is not honest. Let’s be measured, strategic and incremental to show the right how not to be a nut and actually make some progress rather go backwards to the dark ages of recent years.

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¹The Conservative and Liberal Brain

² Formalism: When a Lie Becomes Truth (really)

³ Latest Observations on the Housing and Economic Crisis

⁴ The Symbiotic Play of War Hawks and Terrorism

Musings

Thoughts on Philosophy, Politics, Physics, Religion, Music and Economics

Category Archives: Politics

Benghazi Witch Hunters – GET A LIFE!

Congressional Members Having Been Using Personal Email Addresses For Years

A Vote for Trump is a Vote for Human Extinction

This is why the Heritage Foundation cannot be trusted…

Southern Poverty and Republican Economics UPDATED

Guns, Tyranny and the State of Exception

Radical Christian Extremism and The Free Market

The End of the Republican Party

A Factual Comparison and Discussion of Hillary and Bernie

A Democratic Socialist Working for Hillary