I don't often put a advocacy group's graphic on my page without some editing. But I was a little lazy today, and I also did not want to take anything out of context.
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The folks that organize around the phrase "Black Lives Matter" (BLM) have been getting a lot of press these days. But what are they really campaigning for (or against)? As I see it, they are trying to get society to deal with the structural racism hidden in society, rules and regulations that most white people take for granted as benign, but have become very harmful to poor blacks. And they have some good points....
One of the things we've learned from the Ferguson, MO incidents is that the municipality made a good amount of money from poor people being unable to advocate for themselves after minor contact with the law. For example, a jaywalking infraction (when was the last time anyone you know got ticketed for this in the USA?) could require a person to appear before a court. Without adequate and inexpensive mass transit (and convenient court schedules), this person might not be able to appear, causing a default judgement to be assessed against the person. This person, not being able to afford paying the assessment would have a warrant issued to bring the person into the local jail, causing this person to have a record - and not be able to get a job. The police did not reflect the makeup of the community, and were totally alienated from the people whom they were supposed to serve. Therefore, BLM has a point to make when it comes to "broken windows policing". (This was also a factor in the Baltimore riots....)
All communities should be overseeing their police forces. All too often, the law enforcers get a "hall pass" on the degree which they can stretch the law in enforcing the law. How often in the past was the Billy Club used to "Tenderize" a suspect? All too often.
In today's world, the police are still much better, but not perfect. In McAllen Texas, there was a recent incident where a police officer wrongfully slammed a 15 year old black girl to the ground - and this was the same officer who wrongfully pulled out his gun during the same incident - would he have done this to a white girl? No. This is why we need citizen oversight - to hold the police accountable to the public they serve.
I'm not sure about you, but I want to limit the police force's ability to use force. Given the above mentioned incident, it frightens me that we depend on violence to keep our citizenry in line. What is the next step? Yes, the threat (and potential use) of violence is often needed. But we tend to abuse it in this country - we forget to be civil and polite first, then things escalate out of control.
Now, I'm concerned about the militarization of the police in this country. If the police get military surplus equipment, they will want to find excuses to use it. And they do. This could help America become a police state if the wrong demagogues get elected. (Can you imagine what would happen if a bombastic real estate developer actually ran a local police force? I'd be very afraid - and we have a person like this running for POTUS!) Years ago, this country made the decision to separate military aircraft development from civilian aircraft development, as they had their own unique needs. The same now goes for the tools used to impose a nation's or community's will - a military needs to impose its rule without much regard to those in opposition, while a police force must be sensitive to the needs of the entire community.
I could write several entries on the issues raised by BLM/Campaign Zero. But instead, I figure it best that their manifesto be examined, as they make some very good points....
It's hard to believe that the New York Stock Exchange once looked like this. The stock market was less regulated then, but never a place for a timid person to risk his/her money.
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One of the things I've said for years is that I believe in open, fair, and transparent markets. In an ideal world, these markets would be self regulating. However, powerful players love to distort markets via the use of rules, and via a lack of transparency. In the case of the stock market, most disputes are settled via arbitration - which is often rigged in favor of the large firm by the nature of familiarity. Precedents from one settlement are not applicable in the next case, so the large firms have an edge which is almost impossible overcome.
However, the lack of transparency affects more markets, and has an even greater effect. For example, the current practice of "Non-Standard" sizing makes it much harder for a person to "compare apples to apples" when determining the price of goods. In the case of a carton of Orange Juice, the standard 64 oz. size was shrunk by all players to 59.5 oz. - making it much harder for people to determine what the real price was. Also, the shrunken size went less far, so the customer had to buy more containers to sate their needs for Orange Juice. Something similar happened in the size of Tuna cans - a few years ago, the standard size was 6 oz. - now it's 5 oz.! No one asked the consumer (in these terms) whether we wanted to pay the same money for smaller size packages, or more money for the same size packages. If they did, the marketplace would have chastised the sellers of these goods - something they avoided by obfuscating their price hikes with package size changes.
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Right now, people are starting to see a crisis with student loans. This is another example of marketplace interference creating disastrous effects. A little over 150 years ago, it was "easy" for a person to attend some of the nation's most prestigious universities. All they had to do was learn the "basics" - which included Latin, and other skills no longer needed in the real world - and then pay the bills for school - which weren't that expensive. However, after World War 2, the GI Bill made it easier for students to afford college - and a college education was seen as the ticket to middle class success. Years later, our nation's policies changed to provide poor people with grants to go to college, trying to create a more diverse student base in these schools. And then came the age of college loans - which I see as a total disaster. Instead of increasing the supply of college seats (which would have reduced prices and increased availability), policy simply increased demand for college seats by making student loans cheap, easy to get, and with no demand that a student comes out with a salable skill. The only effect here was to raise the price for seats in a good school.
What happened to the students? Many got saddled by debt, studying in majors that would not prepare them for jobs in the outside world. When a student owes money on a student loan, it is almost impossible for it to be discharged in bankruptcy. As a result, the interest on the debt makes the student loan virtually impossible to pay off.
But what would happen if we eliminated the Federal guarantee of payment? What if these loans could be discharged in bankruptcy? Well, many of the private lenders would cease lending money, marginal students would stop going to college, and colleges might be forced to lower their prices for study. The powers that be don't want that. The banks making a lot of these student loans would cease making loans - and making guaranteed profits.
I posed a question to a couple of people and got the same negative response - therefore I know I'm on to something.... What if (1) there were no guarantees of student loan repayment by any level of government, and (2) a student loan lender could insist that a student loan borrower major in a field likely to result in a job? Both people said that this would be wrong - the student has a right to study what he/she wants to study. But at whose expense? The student is usually way too immature to make many decisions which will impact the rest of his/her life. Part of college's function in society should be more than that of a trade school - it should teach a person how to think, and how to look at life with a long term perspective. One of these people said that if he were to take out a bank loan for a car, that the bank has no right to tell him what car to buy. Yet, one could counter - that if a car manufacturer's finance arm offers you the loan on the car, it should have the right to tie you into buying one of their cars.
In short, the lack of a efficient market (with rules for proper debt discharging) for funding higher education has caused a crisis in higher education that also affects non-students. If a former student is saddled with too much student debt, that same person may not be able to afford getting married and having children. And if this person has children, he/she may not be able to pay enough in school taxes to educate the children - a long term risk for society.
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Not all problems in society can be resolved by market forces. Other methods must be used to limit consumption of resources. Great Britain spends about 35% of what America does on health care, and has a roughly equivalent standard of national health. Canada spends about 50% of what America spends. And other developed nations are in the same league. What is different? They all recognize that health care doesn't work with a marketplace model. So, instead, they ration care in ways that Americans would consider unacceptable. Britain uses results based medicine, and when in doubt, chooses the cheapest alternative. There is a waiting line for almost everything except acute emergency care - and even then, there are rules and regulations that apply - as if one were part of a giant HMO.
I do not advocate the British or Canadian models, because they err in ways Americans would not accept. But the German and French models have a lot to offer - if only we would examine them more closely.
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Americans like the idea of free express roads that take them from town to town, and city to city. There is one big problem - the price - FREE. This has encouraged the growth of the trucking industry over that of the railroads who pay for the upkeep of their track. One might say that truckers pay gas taxes that should maintain the roads. But in many states, especially in the South, these gas taxes have not been raised in years, nor have they been indexed to inflation. As a result, we're seeing part of our transportation infrastructure neglected by lack of proper funding, and now at great risk - as many structures are at the end of their life spans.
What happens when people have to pay to use a road? People actually think - do they need to make this trip? And this is an important question, as it reflects a market helping to shape a behavior. There is a discipline that takes place in a well functioning market. The trick is to design a market well, regulate that market well (but minimally), and make sure that only the right things are governed by that market.... This, as I see it, is the big challenge of the 21st century.
I don't think that most people realized what happened when Fox limited the "adult clown debate" to the top 10 contenders for the GOP nomination. By creating two levels of debates, they marked several serious contenders for the nomination as irrelevant before the bulk of campaigning had even started. Worse yet, the GOP delegated the task of culling out weak candidates to an interested, non neutral organization whose business should be reporting the news (with appropriate spin) and not being involved in the process of making the news itself.
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Currently, the joker in the deck is Donald Trump. He has the ability to foul up the GOP's chances for victory, as he can set the tone for the party well after the campaigns would normally be tacking back to middle ground to attract the interest of independent voters. Trump's success is easy to explain - he has gathered the interest of voters who believe that the 2 mainstream political parties no longer listen to the true wishes of the people. And in many ways he is right.
The way I view Trump's election bid is simple - it started out as a great publicity gimmick to promote Trump's other ventures. One problem - he didn't expect to succeed as well as he has done so far, and he's now caught in his own trap - he must make a serious run for an office that I don't think he wants to hold. He is now caught by his own words - he has to break the logjam that the two party system has made in Washington for his reputation to be preserved. So he has to learn how to tone down the BS and Bluster, and start saying things with real meaning. This is going to be hard for the greatest snake oil salesman alive in this country today.
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If Trump ends up making a 3rd party run for the presidency, I expect that he will not get on the ballot in all 50 states. This might not be as big a problem as it sounds. As long as we use the electoral college to perform the real election of the president, it is possible for a person to win the office of POTUS with the votes from a handful of states.
This brings us to examining previous 3rd party runs for POTUS. The most recent run that had any chance of success was H. Ross Perot's run - and he failed miserably. However, is we look back to the election of 1912, all hell broke loose when Teddy Roosevelt ran against Taft and Wilson. (And there were 2 other viable candidates, one of them being the Socialist, Eugene V. Debs.) Although Taft and Roosevelt had more votes than Wilson, the disunity in the "Republican Tribe" gave the election to the Democrats. And this is what the kingmakers in the GOP fear most.
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As for me, I like what I've seen so far. Trump is exposing the hatreds at the core of the GOP base, and the elders running the party machine don't like it. Trump's candidacy is going to bring a breath of needed fresh air to the GOP - and may finally force its leaders to rectify the mistake made when it chose the "Southern Strategy" of appealing to religious fundamentalists and racists during Nixon's reign.
I hope this happens. It would be nice to see a conservative party that only focuses on economic conservatism for a change....
It's hard to believe how well Bernie Sanders is doing in recent polling. Not only is he a serious contender for the office of POTUS, but this "Democrat" (he was elected to the Senate as an Independent) has amazingly high ratings against GOP competition.
A recent article notes that Sanders is either ahead of (or virtually tied with) all the top 3 GOP candidates.
SANDERS: 48%
BUSH: 47%
SANDERS: 48%
WALKER: 42%
SANDERS: 59%
TRUMP: 38%
Too bad that the election couldn't be held today.... It'd be nice to see an independent voice cause some trouble in Washington. But people are following Trump for the same reason - they feel betrayed by Washington, and Trump has become a "rara avis" - a rich populist who speaks with the emotional style craved by many working class conservatives.
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Hillary Clinton is still the most likely Democratic candidate for POTUS, even though she has a very high dislike rating. The "powers that be" prefer HRC to Bernie Sanders (or Trump) because they represent real change. Hillary may say that she stands for progressiveness, but hardly anyone believes her. Most people (even Democrats) see her as a Machiavel - a dangerous person.
But what happens if HRC becomes the Democratic candidate? An article in the Washington Post indicates that she has a lot to worry about. Americans tend to elect presidents with whom they'd like to have a drink. (Obama in my opinion is a noted exception.) Other research has shown that Americans vote for the best looking candidate, and not the most competent candidate. This means that younger GOP candidates would have another edge over her. Sadly, even the New York Times says that HRC has a lot of problems with this presidential run - the article may be hinting that she might not be the Democrats' best candidate without openly stating this. (The Times leans left of center these days.)
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Yet, I see an interesting possibility. What if Trump is able to bully his way to the top of the GOP heap, and stay there against all the wishes of the GOP nomenklatura? And, to make this more interesting, what if Bernie is able to leapfrog Hillary to the Democrats' nomination, against the wishes of its nomenklatura? Who is most likely to win? Given that Trump is a blowhard that has no idea of how to run a country according to law, would that be enough to get disaffected Republicans to consider a Democrat? Only time will tell....
I'll bet that most police officers hope that all encounters go as smoothly as this one appears to have gone. Sadly, this is not the case - and we have had an incident in the news as of late, where one driver apparently pulled over to let a police car go by, and it turned into an escalated incident where the driver was arrested, placed in jail, and found dead in her jail cell.
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As I read about Sandra Bland's incident with the police, I was appalled that the police department didn't bother to follow proper procedures in this case. And then, seeing the video of her arrest, I was further appalled by (what appears to be) a cop who was looking for an excuse to hassle a person, simply because he had a bug up his ass.
The initial incident could have been handled with much more diplomacy, if the police officer had been properly trained in tools of easing tension and had used those tools properly. Could you imagine if someone had been with her in the car and was carrying a legal handgun, as is common in Texas? Would there have been as much a commotion about a questionable death in a jail cell had someone in the car been armed?
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To me, Sandra Bland's arrest and later death was a crime, but what really did happen? I can not trust the police - the video seems to indicate that the police officer was being overly aggressive, while Bland was simply trying to exercise her rights. Does any police authority have the automatic right to arrest someone without telling that person why he/she is being arrested? Something is very wrong here. And to make things even worse, she died in the jail - with the autopsy showing results that could have been caused by a death other than suicide.
Thanks to the internet, we are finding out about much more abuse of power by police forces over the past year or two. And this is a good thing. When the police and government have lost the trust of the average person, authoritarianism can't be far behind. Let's pray that I am wrong about this....
About a year ago, I was talking with one of my friends, and she told me of an experience her sister had with a famous TV personality. At that time, I said that I would be waiting for more evidence to come out - and it did.
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This week, if Bill Cosby's reputation isn't shot, it soon will be, given everything being published in the media. Oh, how the mighty hath fallen! When the talk about Cosby mentions him giving pills to women, and the President (in no uncertain terms) defines what rape is, I do not expect that this man will be able to rescue his reputation. But stranger things have happened before.
Years ago, 3 term Mayor Marion Barry of Washington, DC was convicted on drug charges, and after serving his time, was elected to a 4th term as mayor. It is amazing how many people with criminal records have been elected to public office - in the United States, and elsewhere. It's as if we expect our politicians to be criminals, and don't demand much more from them.
In many ways, we get what we deserve - we often vote out of tribal loyalty, and then complain when things don't change. I will never vote a straight party line ticket. But I will vote against a party line. Let's say that I am pro choice. In this case, I would not automatically rule out a GOP candidate who has shown himself to be pro-choice. And if I were pro-life, I'd consider a Democrat who is pro-life. In short, I don't let the two-party system define me, and I hope that it defines the choices of fewer people in the long run.
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Why is it that the two party has worked so well for so long, and then failed so miserably in recent times? In the past, both major parties had an equal balance between conservatives and liberals - in regard to social agenda. There was only a mild bias towards or against business in each party, and one that wouldn't stop people like Theodore Roosevelt from acting against the worst of business excesses. Today, as a result of Nixon's GOP "Southern Strategy", there are fewer social liberals in the GOP , as well as fewer social conservatives in the Democratic party. This has forced the Supreme Court to be the arbiter of major social decisions - much more so today, than in the past.
In a way, the Supreme Court's role as an arbiter is a good thing. The two political parties reflect two extremes in our society which can never be reconciled. One side believes that the social order must be maintained, no matter how unjust it is to any one individual or group. And the other side believes that the rights of the individual (when in doubt) trumps that of the larger community. This divide can be defined in other ways, such a slow/fast lever defining the rate of societal change. And it has been defined as a rural vs. urban divide. But with each of these definitions, very few things bind the two sides of society together.
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If we look at the Bush ("W") and Obama administrations, a casual observer can see the hypocrisy in both tribes. And it's hard to get anything useful done when the leadership of the country is delegitimized by calling the person a criminal (as int he case of Bush) or an illegal alien (as in the case of Obama). Both tribes are equally responsible for this problem, as they have made anyone who makes an overture to people in the opposing party into pariahs.
Yet, when we look back at Bush's presidency (I think he was a poor president), one finds someone more than willing to appease his party's base. Did he get much done? Not as much as it may seem, as we (luckily) had a Democratic congress to check and balance his political instincts. (And now, the GOP can check and balance Obama's excesses.) His legacy, as I see it, will be the unrestrained and unnuanced response to terrorism, and not bothering to finance his wars properly - as we did in all of our country's other wars. (Does anyone remember WW2 war bonds?) To me, it was the Bush administration who was responsible for the unchecked loss of domestic privacy (with unwarranted searches and seizures), the unchecked use of torture (waterboarding, etc.), and the 2008 financial system "almost" collapse. The public (and much of the GOP) is right to consider him a pariah....
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My question is: Who should be a pariah? Is it just any person who commits a heinous act for which he/she should be ostracized from polite society? Or, does tribal loyalty have a part in answering that question. I feel that Bush was a decent man who was playing in the wrong league - and allowed a lot of bad things to happen. Should he be a pariah? One thing I know, I will not be watching any reruns of Bill Cosby's shows anytime soon....
Donald Trump - a man so filled with ego, he has no doubts about himself, even when he's totally wrong about things. He's a man who knows, that if you say a lie often enough, many people will consider it to be the truth - especially when they want to hear that lie become truth.
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As I write this, American businesses are slowly disconnecting themselves from their business relationships with Trump. NBC/Universal has decided not to show the Miss Universe pageant on its networks, Macy's has decided to stop selling Trump branded goods, as well as other businesses keeping their distance from this, the loudest clown in the GOP Clown Car (The GOP's 2016 POTUS Candidates).
Sadly, he's saying what many in the GOP base really wants to hear - illegal immigrants from Mexico are taking American Jobs and are part of the criminal class. Although he walked back his words, the not so hidden meaning was - most Mexicans are criminals who need to be pushed back over the border, something which is furthest from the truth.... And this has gotten the GOP mainstream worried, as Trump recently reached #2 in the polls. The last thing the GOP wants is to lose the Latino vote for the long term - and Trump's pandering to the base is hurting long term GOP prospects with the Latino population..
Most of the GOP Clown Car is afraid to deal with racism in the party's base. Recently, they ducked the issue of whether the Rebel flag should be flown in South Carolina, claiming that is was a local issue and that the flag reflected "Southern Heritage". Yet, a majority of South Carolinians (including GOP members) supported taking down the flag. Why such a disconnect between the population of South Carolina and the people who want to be our national leaders? To make things worse, when the issue was brought up in the US Congress, regarding the flying of the Rebel flag in Federal parks, the GOP leadership tried to duck the issue - so that they wouldn't anger the racists in their base who continue to vote them into office. This is a bloody shame!
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But back to Trump....
Many Americans want a president who can run this country like a business. But if Trump were to run it, we'd have a legacy of failure. His casino ventures didn't do well, his air-shuttle flopped, his vodka is forgettable, Macy's has dropped his clothing line, NBC/Universal has terminated their relationship with his Miss Unvierse pageant, and the only thing he has going for him is the magic of his name tacked onto a real estate deal. Trump has licensed out his name on a large number of real estate deals, and to me, his quality control seems to be lacking. Can you imagine how he'd screw up this country?
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Sadly, the clown car keeps moving along, and there is not anyone who I'd really feel comfortable voting for in this race. Too bad that Kinky Friedman and Jesse Ventura aren't running - either would get my vote.....
