The fear of censorship is real

The internet "Wayback Machine".  It is an invaluable resource housed in a server farm in California, and is used by news outlets from both sides of the aisle to extract an objective truth of what was publicly available on the internet at any given time.  I have used it myself for more mundane issues, such as retrieving web pages for a defunct "Church of Elvis" site which has been down for about 15 years. And with the election of President to be Trump, they consider the prospect of government interference enough to announce that they will clone their entire server farm in Canada to preserve their essential data. 

I am not a fan of Trump, and I think worse things could happen than if a GOP congress were to impeach him, and let VP Pence take the reins of the executive branch of government.  But this is far from ideal.  As I write this, the Electoral College hasn't voted, and enough "faithless electors" could potentially change their allegiances to affect this election.  But I strongly doubt this will happen.  For the first time in my memory, we will see a president elected who openly claimed that the election was rigged - even after he won the election!

What does this mean to America?

Sometime in January, President Obama will hand over the reins of government to the new President Trump.  We will have a man in power who has no respect for legal precedent, no respect for the rights of citizens to protest the government, and has no respect for previously negotiated contracts.  His administration will be known for promises not kept, and conflicts of interest that will only serve to make this man and his family richer than they are now. It will also be known for the political extremists who joined his cabinet, as political payback to extremist groups who supported him during his campaign.  

Over time, I expect to see attacks on hard won labor rights and hard won civil rights.  Look at Trump's position on labor issues - he recently said that wages as a whole are too high. Yes, he has flip flopped on this issue several times in regard to the minimum wage.  But can we trust labor rights to a man who discriminates against American labor?  In addition, with a vice president who ignored the AIDS crisis and supported Gay Conversion Therapy, can we expect someone like that to protect the rights of this community?

Trump has said that he'd nominate a man like Antonin Scalia for the vacant Supreme Court seat.  And recently, he has said that he would take away American Citizenship AND put a person in jail for at least a year, if convicted of burning an American flag.  Can we say that he will respect any constitutional right when Scalia himself said that flag burning is a constitutionally protected right?

How do we deal with the potential threats of a Trump presidency?

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Luigi Zingales says that the Democratic party should work with Trump when he wants to do something that helps the party achieve some of its goals, and strongly oppose him when he goes the other way. The Democrats should resist having another Clinton dynasty come in the persona of Chelsea, but should grow new leaders from their ranks.  Opposition to Trump should be modeled on Italy's opposition to Silvio Berlusconi, as they were able to remove him from office using issues instead of personality hatred as their means of motivating the electorate.

The above only covers resistance at a macro level.  What about the little people who could get in Trump's way?  For me, I believe that if one could get a second passport, that one should do so now.  Money can slowly moved outside the country and invested elsewhere. This could be done legally, without records, if the amounts are small and the resulting foreign investments were not interest bearing. (I'll let my readers figure this out for themselves. There are legal issues involved in the movement of money across our border that I don't want to discuss here, lest I am charged with giving information on how to commit a financial crime.)  Ideally, one would have a skill that is in hot demand AND would make it possible for a quick exit to Canada. Americans with skills on this list will likely be welcomed North of our border. But what about the rest of us?  The New York Review of Books published Rules for Survival in an Autocracy. And they are:

• Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says.
• Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Consider the financial markets this week, which, having tanked overnight, rebounded following the Clinton and Obama speeches.
• Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed.
• Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised.
• Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an “amazing victory for the American worker,” Republican politicians have fallen into line. Conservative pundits who broke ranks during the campaign will return to the fold.
• Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. 

I don't know exactly what will happen over the next few years.  But I do think these will be trying times, and it will be our duty to protect America from its own delusions of greatness.


 

Ineptitude and Confusion

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, The Outliers, notes that it takes about 10,000 hours of "practice" to become expert practitioner in almost any field. For most of us, this means that once we enter the work force, it takes about 5 years to develop expertise in our craft.

Most of us talk about common sense when it comes to preventing problems. But when it came to the "O Rings" on the Challenger space shuttle, did we heed the call of the engineer who wanted to call off the launch? Or, did we heed the needs of the politicians who wanted to send the bird up on schedule? Common sense gets thrown away when large institutions get involved with doing anything, as they have too many competing interests.

Right now, we're seeing the American right wing make a lot of noise about Obama not doing what America needs. Do they expect a "Superman"? And what about the "dittoheads" who parrot what Rush Limbaugh says? Could any of them do any better? It's a miracle that Obama has not crashed and burned, given less than 2 years on the job and the fires he has had to fight.

Both political parties are responsible for the mess we're in. The oil spill has shown how corrupt the MMR department became, because the United States has had no energy policy (except to buy it from risky areas such as the Middle East) and has had no intention of pursuing one. The law in Arizona shows what the lack of a real immigration policy has done to the United States - We depend on the illegal aliens who do much of the grunt work native Americans no longer do. When was the last time we went to a diner which didn't have illegal staff where the public didn't see them? What about many of our gardening services - I'll bet that many of their workers are illegally here as well. Do we want to kick them all out and end up paying more for these services? Most people will say NO to that. So what do we do?

Let's focus on immigration first. (I've covered Resource/Energy policy in a previous posting.) The people who want us to seal the border are correct. How can we have a serious immigration policy when we can't control who is immigrating to the United States? We need realistic penalties for those employers who hire illegal help. This also means that we need an easy (100% accurate) way to validate a prospective employee's right to look for work in this country. This is likely to be a big problem, but not an unmanageable one - I don't hear of any problems with US Passports being issued to illegal aliens. A similar document could be used as proof as our right to work here, and it could have biometric validation for safety.

But what about our dependency on the illegal work force? It would be inhumane to send these people home to countries where no work is available *and* it would disrupt much of the service sector economy we depend on these days. The conservatives are right when they talk of these immigrants as having broken laws. Why should they be first on line to be legalized? Once legal, why should they be first on line to become citizens? They have shown us a great disrespect by breaking the law for the first action they do on American soil.

I propose that any program developed as part of a real immigration policy consist of the following:

1. Building an effective border "fence" to keep people from crossing our Southern border illegally.

2. Create a foolproof way to validate that a person has the right to work here, and have meaningful penalties for those employers who hire illegals without appropriate due diligence.

3. For a one year period, create a temporary amnesty, where people illegally resident in the United States could apply for residency (not leading to US Citizenship for them or their children once legal residents). This application may not be done on United States soil, but must be sent to the United States from foreign soil. (In short, the illegals must go home to apply for legalization of their status.)

4. Only legal immigrants and their offspring may gain United States citizenship. (We may need to clarify this with an amendment to the constitution.) However, illegal aliens (and their children) who filed for legal residency (according to rules of #3 above) may only become American Nationals - they may carry American passports (like residents of some Pacific islands), work in the United States, travel freely, but NOT vote or hold public office. In short, they gain permanent green cards and American passports.

Even with these changes, this is the tip of the iceberg. We need the labor, and they need the work. All I'm proposing is a humane way of breaking the political deadlock and making political reality reflect the reality we all see every day.