Executions and the Plight of Women in Saudi Arabia

Well into the 1980s, UNESCO found that fewer than half of Saudi girls between the ages of six and eleven had received any education outside the home. In 2004, Saudi law was changed to allow women to enter degree programs in law. Due to Sharia law, however, a woman's testimony in a court of law, with few exceptions, is worth half of that of a man. Several hundred women hold law degrees and sixty-seven are allowed to practice, based on justice-ministry figures released in November 2015. [1]

Besides limitations on participation in the administration of law, Saudi women are subject to other major restrictions. Marriages are usually arranged and it is very difficult for women to get divorces. In conservative circles, a man is unlikely to see the face of his brother's wife. Institutions and businesses that serve Saudi women are carefully guarded so as to prevent ikhtilat, illegal gender mixing. Restaurants that serve both genders must provide a secluded section, called the "family section." The most innocent head shot of a woman can result in the use of blackmail as a tool; also, people of opposite sexes can't spend time together without risking arrest. [2]

Saudi authorities have a fear of witchcraft, so in 2009, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice created a specially trained unit to conduct witchcraft investigations. Saudi citizens are encouraged to report suspected witches and sorcerers anomalously to a hotline.

Relatively little of Saudi law is written down; judges enjoy considerable freedom of interpretation. Justice is often situational; the law is what a person in a position of power says it is. Heresy is a capital crime in Saudi Arabia. Besides heresy being a capital crime, damaging the reputation of Saudi Arabia or its king can bring the death penalty, as will being convicted of terrorism. An unusually high number of women are put to death,because so many non-violent crimes are subject to the death penalty.

By early November 2015, Saudi Arabia had already carried out more executions -- about 150 -- than it had since 1995. In late November, two Saudi newspapers reported that there had been fifty more recent executions, all based on terrorism convictions.

ADDENDUMS:
*Gun murders in the U.S. are nearly thirty times those in Great Britain.

*An analysis of a dozen military interventions over thirty-five years, up to President Obama's widespread use of assassination by drone strike today, has led Andrew J. Bacevich to conclude that destructive myths about the efficacy of the use of U.S. military power has blinded policy-makers, generals and voters. The use of overwhelming lethal force does not immediately depose dictators, defeat terrorists, or overcome generations of deep-seated sectarian conflicts. [3]

*There is no need to build eighty additional warheads at Oak Ridge in Tennessee to maintain the existing nuclear stockpile. The National Nuclear Security Administration spent about $2 billion, most of it on design of weapons, with no accountability for the waste. A second design is illegally being kept secret.

*The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute released 2015 statistics on global military spending. Such spending reached $1,676 billion (USD), broken down into: U.S.: $596 billion; China: $215 billion; Saudi Arabia: $87.2 billion; and Russia: $66.4 billion. 2015 global military spending averages out to $4.6 billion a day. The U.S. spends 2.77 times as much as China and about nine times as much as Russia on the military.  

Footnotes
[1] Katherine Zolpf, "Sisters In Law," The New Yorker, January 11, 2016.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Andrew J. Bacevich, "A Military History," The Albuquerque Journal, July 30, 2016.

Stopping Trump

I. Stretching the Edges of the Permanent Resentment Faction
"His [Trump's] support cannot be called a movement; he merely stretches the edges of the permanent resentment faction -- mostly white, mostly male -- that has figured continuously in our political scene, in various guises, since the George Wallace campaign of 1968." "Out of 429,000 registered Republicans, in a state with 2.1 million registered voters overall, Trump won Connecticut with just 123,000 votes." Trump's knockout blow in Indiana came from just 13 percent of the eligible primary electorate." "Trump's unlikely but conceivable route to victory lies in the same low turnouts that powered his standing as the presumptive Republican nominee. Trump wins only through psychological voter suppression: a protracted campaign of such ugliness, directed at a democratic nominee already widely disliked and mistrusted, that vast numbers of voters in key states become even more alienated from politics then they are now and stay home in November." "But only Trump understood that a Republican wins in this era of painful, unprecedented economic inequality by effectively taking everything else -- abortion, gay rights, military expansion, and global free trade -- off the GOP menu." [1]

"In the face of a weary and skeptical public, it will take turnout across a potent and diverse combination of highly motivated constituencies -- and across the generational divide -- to ensure Clinton's victory."

II. Trump's God Machine
"Trump's life seemed to represent everything evangelicals and social conservatives stood against: excess, indulgence, opulence, cynicism." "Trump has long boasted of supporting access to abortion and being a playboy, using the crudest language to sexualize women." In February, a group of evangelical and social conservatives quietly formed a coalition of  'not Trump now or ever' believers and called themselves Conservatives Against Trump. [2]

Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's public policy arm, said "he wonders what happens when evangelicals who were screaming that 'character matters' throughout the 1990s...  now are willing to say character doesn't matter?" Samuel Rodriguez Jr. (National Hispanic Christian Leadership Coalition president) still hopes Trump will apologize to Latino immigrants for his "hurtful, erroneous and dangerous" comments. "Latino evangelicals are more divided than white evangelicals on Trump," he says.

Elizabeth Dias, the author of the article being referred to in II., concludes that social conservative leaders believe that Donald Trump is a better vehicle than  Hillary Clinton to advance their views.

III. Donald Trump: More Like Mussolini Than Hitler
"Trump's bombastic manner, the theatrical pauses in his delivery, his sideways poses and disapproving little pouts all owe more to Mussolini than to Hitler." Trump heads an "insurrection designed to depict the Democrats not as political adversaries, but as usurpers, criminals, and callous accomplices to the murder of innocent Americans." "But the real danger comes from the normalization of menace and ridicule as substitutes for political debate and disdain for arguments, or facts, or evidence." [3]

ADDENDUM:
*In a series running in the Washington Post in the summer of 2010, Dana Priest and a fellow reporter, named William Akin, I believe, detailed the growing spread of the U.S. intelligence empire. This empire encompassed 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on programs related to counter-terrorism, Homeland Security and intelligence-gathering in ten thousand locations. An estimated 854,000 people,  nearly 1.5 times as many as live in Washington D.C., held a top-secret security clearance and 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work had been built or were under construction.

There were 51 federal organizations and military commands in 15 U.S. cities tracking the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

Footnotes
[1] Bruce Shapiro, "How to Stop Trump," The Nation, June 6/13, 2016.

[2] Elizabeth Dias, "Trump's God Machine," Time, June 13, 2016.

[3] D.D.Gutternplan, "Un-American Activities," The Nation, August 15/22, 2016.

A Tale of Two States

I. The Divergent Paths of Wisconsin and Minnesota
Under a Republican governor in Wisconsin and a Democratic one in Minnesota, the two states have followed very divergent paths. Minnesota raised taxes on the wealthy, invested in public education, expanded health care and boosted unions, while Wisconsin did the opposite. Now Minnesota is winning the border war, with faster growth, higher wages and lower unemployment. After misleading the voters of Wisconsin by hiding the fact that he wanted to make Wisconsin a right-to-work state, through three elections -- one being a recall election -- Governor Scott Walker made Wisconsin a right-to-work state but put the blame on the GOP-dominated state legislature.

The divide between the two states illustrates  how the United States is fast becoming a two-tiered democracy, a country where it's harder to vote in Republican-controlled states and easier to vote in Democratic ones. Of the 22 states that have passed new voter restrictions, more than 80 percent were under Republican control, while the states, such as Oregon and California, that have recently passed ambitious reforms like automatic voter registration are overwhelmingly Democratic.

Wisconsin's GOP-controlled legislature cut early-voting from 30 days to 12, eliminated night and weekend voting, banned straight-ticket voting, made it more difficult both to register to vote and to cast an absentee ballot, and tightened residency requirements. Although a judge has invalidated several of the voting restrictions, it is unclear whether they will not be in effect in the November 2016 election.

As of early July, Wisconsin's Department of Motor Vehicles had rejected nearly a fifth of all applicants for a voter ID. 85 percent of those rejected were African American, Latinos or Native Americans.

It is also of note that Wisconsin is so heavily gerrymandered that even though Barack Obama carried Wisconsin by seven percentage points in the last election, Republicans carried more than half of the state Senate and state Assembly districts. Just 10 percent of legislative seats are now considered to be competitive, giving the GOP a seemingly airtight majority. [1]

II. Sports Gambling
Legal sports gambling's handle in Nevada swelled in 2015 to $4.2 billion. That number pales in comparison to the $144.8 billion the American Gaming Association estimates Americans wagered illegally on sports in the same 12-month period. Although the Federal Wire Act of 1961 bans interstate commerce in the form of bets or wagers, entity wagering's proponents point out that there is no law against sending money across state lines to invest in a business. [2]

III. U.S. Bombing Libya Again
The U.S. bombing Libya again is "yet another episode of the War on Terror Circle of Life where the US bombs a country and then funnels weapons into the region, which leads to chaos and the opportunity for terrorist organizations, which then leads [to] more US bombing."  [3] Bombing, of course, invariably causes civilian casualties.

A Reuters investigation in April found that al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula has "become stronger than at any time since it first emerged almost 20 years ago."

ADDENDUM:
*Albuquerque and Rio Rancho, New Mexico are neighboring cities, yet high school graduation rates vary greatly. For 2015, Albuquerque Public Schools had a graduation rate of 61.7%, while graduation rates in two of Rio Rancho's high schools were 82.9% in Rio Rancho High and 86.2% in Sue Cleveland High. Bernalillo County,in which Albuquerque is located, had an overall high  school graduation rate of 68.1%. [4]

Footnotes
[1] Ari Berman, "A Tale of Two Cities," The Nation, July 18/25, 2016.

[2] Albert Chen and Will Green, "Mutual Attraction," Sports Illustrated," June 27, 2016.

[3] Trevor Timm, "The US is bombing Libya again," The Guardian, August 2, 2016.

[4] "Rio Rancho graduation rate dips a bit," Rio West, April 16, 2016.

Lax Private Prison Medical Care and the Obsolete Vision of Israel

I. Private Prison's Lax Medical Care
"The Adams County Correctional Center is a 2,500-bed federal prison, but the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) doesn't run it. Adams is owned and operated by the Corrections Corporation of America ( CCA),  the country's largest private-prison company, and the BOP uses 12 private-prison facilities  almost exclusively to hold non-civilians convicted of federal crimes. A third of these prisons are run by the CCA." [1]

Doug Martz, the chief of BOP's private-prison contracting office, cites: "Inadequate medical care, low staffing levels, food service issues. When you put all these together, it becomes ignitable."

The Nation magazine has reported that 38 men died in the BOP's privately run prisons from 1998 to 2014 due to inadequate medical care. Most of these inmates died between January 2007 and July 2015.

A 131-page report commissioned by the BOP concluded that privatization had not saved substantially on costs, yet had eroded the quality of care. By FY 2015, the BOP's budget for private contractors was over $1.05 billion. The Obama administration recently announced that the U.S. government will soon divest itself of all privately run prisons.

Many federal prisons struggle to fully staff their medical departments; however, one of the privately run prisons, the Cibola County Correctional Center, was operating without a single doctor.

II. Progressive Vision of Israel Is Obsolete
Writing in a recent issue of "Foreign Affairs," Aluf Benn, editor-in-chief of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has surveyed the Israeli landscape and concludes that recent transformations are rendering "the largely secular and progressive version of Israel that once captured the world's imagination, obsolete." Haaretz sees "an increasingly beleaguered opposition that is both Jewish and democratic in a country that is now Jewish if you're an Arab and democratic if you're a Jew." [2]

Benn explains: "At Haaretz, we are trying to ring the alarm bell for freedom of speech, and we are the only ones who bother to report about the occupation. But it is fair to say that most Israeli Jews, who make up approximately 75 percent of the country's population, do not much care." Benn says that the "far-right governing coalition has stepped up settlement construction and introduced a series of laws and initiatives to undermine and discredit the country's remaining voices of dissent."

Meanwhile, on the boycott, divestment and sanctions  (BDS) front, which has long been a fierce battle among academics, the latest major development occurred on June 5, when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order requiring all state entities to boycott businesses and divert their money from institutions that participate in the boycott, divestment or sanctions actively targeting Israel, either directly or through a parent or subsidiary.

Footnotes
[1] Seth Freed Wessler, "They Knew Something Was Going On," The Nation, July 4/11, 2016.

]2] Eric Alterman, "Uncovering the New Israel," The Nation, August 1/8, 2016.

Who Contributes to Political Campaigns; Citizens United; Rape in the Congo; and Syrian Torture

I. Who Contributes to Political Campaigns
In 2012, fewer than 200 Americans -- a minuscule 0.000063 percent of the population -- contributed 80 percent of all Super PAC donations. Of the top 100 contributions in 2012, only 11 were made by women. The percentage of spending coming from groups that aren't required to disclose their donors rose from 11 percent to 47 percent between the 2006 mid-terms and the 2010 mid-terms. 72 percent of the political advertising by outside groups in 2010 came from sources that were prohibited from election spending in 2006. In 2004, 98 percent of outside groups disclosed their donors, versus 34 percent in 2010. Only 26,783 Americans donated more than $10,000 to federal campaigns in 2010, or about one in every 10,000 Americans. The average donation from the elite groups that make up the majority of Super PAC donations is $28,913 -- more than the median individual American income. (The source for the above is People for the American Way)

According to a study of 467 congressional races in 2012, the candidate with more money won the race 91 percent of the time.

II. Citizens United
The Citizens United Supreme Court decision has drawn the ire of many U.S. citizens. Over 650 cities and towns have passed resolutions on ballot initiatives calling on Congress to pass an amendment overturning Citizens United. A poll by the Associated Press and the National Constitution Center found that eight in ten Americans support limits on the amount of money given to groups that are trying to influence U.S. elections. Even the public isn't buying the "money is speech" argument, as 95 percent of respondents told Hart Research Associates in 2010 that corporations spend money on politics to buy influence. Just to note that a high percentage of Americans are worried about the effect of big-spending groups, a 2012 Brennan Center poll found that 70 percent of respondents believe that Super PAC spending will lead to corruption.

Justice John Paul Stevens said the following in his dissent to Citizens United: "Corporations have no conscience, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires..." "They [corporations] are not themselves members of 'We the People,' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."

III. Rape in the Congo
"Rape in war is as old as war itself. But the intimate nature of sexual assault means that the horrors often go undocumented, sanitized out of history books and glossed over in news accounts that focus on casualties and refugee numbers." [1]

The UN reports that 200,000 Congolese women and children have been raped during the Congo's simmering conflicts. In eastern Congo alone, as many as 50,000 children were born of rape over the past two decades. In many countries in Africa and the Middle East, they are not eligible for national IDs without a father's name on the birth certificate, which prevents them from going to school or receiving government assistance.

In 1998, rape was first prosecuted as a tool of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, for crimes committed during the country's genocidal conflict.

Syrian Torture
"The Commission for International Justice and Accountability's (CIJA) work recently culminated in a four-hundred-page legal brief that links the systematic torture and murder of tens of thousands of Syrians to a written policy approved by President Bashar al-Assad." The CIJA interviewed roughly two hundred and fifty victims across several provinces to secure 'pattern evidence' "showing that crimes had been perpetrated in a systematic manner, in accordance with evidence in the documents. In hundreds of witness interviews, the CIJA found consistent patterns in interrogation practices across all branches of the security services. Detainees were routinely kept in inhumane conditions for months or years without entering the judicial system." [2]

Footnotes
[1] Bryn Baker, "War and Rape," The Nation, April 8, 2016.

[2] Ben Taub, "The Assad Files," The New Yorker, April 8, 2016.

Youth Sex Offenders, Father Mike, and Military Spending Cuts

I. Youth Sex Offenders
A ten-year-old girl pulled down the pants of a classmate at her public elementary school. She was prosecuted for "indecency with a child" and added to the state's online offender database for the next ten years. The treatment of the young girl was not a singularly rare happening, as the Centers for Disease Control and  Prevention have found that one of every four girls and one out of every six boys have experienced some form of sexual abuse before the age of eighteen; also, in a third of such cases, the National Center on the Sexual Behavior of Youth says that the offenses were committed by other juveniles -- "Kids who sexually harm other kids seldom target strangers."

The Adam Walsh Act broadened the scope of the sexual-offender registry, mandating the full disclosure of a former offender's address, along with at least a photograph; promulgated a
form of indefinite detention, known as "civil commitment;" and, in a late addition to the legislation, required children as young as fourteen, who had committed certain sex offenses, be placed in the public registry. Researchers had already observed that most youths who are charged with a sex offense -- upward of ninety-five percent, according to Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau -- don't re-offend sexually.

In her travels around the country, reporter Sarah Stillman found a cottage industry of court-authorized but poorly regulated therapy providers subjecting kids and teens to widely debunked interventions or controversial technologies. In a study of more than a thousand male juveniles with sex crime convictions, Dr. Letourneau and colleagues found that public registration did not reduce repeat-offense rates. [1]

Nearly every other nation in the world does not have a public sex-offender registry. We need to learn from other countries that placing a long-term, or even a lifetime literal mark of Cain on young people, whose offense may be as inconsequential as pulling down the pants of someone, is very harmful public policy.


II. Father Mike in Chicago
In his St. Sabina church base of operations, Father Mike Plager has outlasted three cardinals and five mayors. During his long tenure at St.Sabina, Father Mike has witnessed and tried to ameliorate Chicago innovations that Ta-Nehisi Coates has described as "segregationist social engineering:" the erection of isolated, homogeneous public housing; the racial panic fanned by real-estate agents who flipped houses for a profit; the covenants that barred white homeowners from selling to blacks; and the practice of  "redlining" by means of which banks refused home loans to blacks.

Father Mike has embraced the black-liberation theology developed by James K. Cane after the 1967 riots in Newark and Detroit. Cane was seeking to reconcile the black nationalism of Malcolm X with the Christian civil disobedience of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and he emphasized the obligation of the Church to relieve the oppression of African Americans, especially through political action.

One of the most notable campaigns of Father Mike was to try to reduce the number of alcohol and tobacco advertisements in black neighborhoods. He acted after a study found that Chicago's minority communities contained five times the number of  alcohol ads and three times the number of tobacco ads.

Fifty years after King's visit to Marquette Park, Chicago remains one of the country's most racially segregated large cities. Homicides in Chicago's black neighborhoods are thirteen times higher, on average, than in better-off white areas. Nearly forty-seven percent of all black men in Chicago between the ages of twenty and twenty-four are neither in school nor working -- the highest percentage of any big city. (Nationwide, the figure is thirty-two percent). [2]

The furor over the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald,  a young black male shot after actually moving away from the shooting officer, exposed deep problems in the Chicago Police Department's responses to citizen complaints; its rare punishment of problematic officers; and city hall's tacit cooperation. Since 2004, Chicago's city government has quietly approved more than $500 million in settlements for police misconduct. [3]

III. Some Proposed Military Spending Cuts
Peace Action, the nation's largest grassroots peace and justice organization, has proposed some military spending cuts to puncture a bloated Pentagon:

1.) Significantly reduce the approximately 1,000 military bases around the world and the roughly 5,000 bases in the U.S.

2.) Flush the slush fund, known as the Overseas Contingency Operations fund (OCO),  designed to fund current wars and occupations, but there is no requirement for the Pentagon to report on how they spent it.

3.) Reduce the number of F-35s, distinguished by the  nearly seventy percent in cost overruns since 2001 and numerous technical glitches.

4.) Reduce nuclear weapons and delivery systems - Senator Markey's SANE Act would reduce nuclear stockpiles and cut spending for the nuclear modernization program.

5.) Press President Obama on his promise for a world free of nuclear weapons.

6.) Use diplomacy, not war, by ending the forward positioning of troops and weapons to Russia's borders and launching a military buildup in the Pacific to "contain China." Instead, the U.S. should pursue diplomatic efforts that forward U.S. interests without igniting an arms race or military conflict.

7.) Stop selling death, as reflected in the U.S. being the number one in weapons sales, going back to the Cold War years. Also, controls need to be strengthened over the export of weapons to war zones and human rights abusers.

8.) Support the Syrian peace process, as there is no substitute for it. The humanitarian crisis must also be addressed.

9.) Oppose permanent military bases in Afghanistan and oppose plans for expanding the U.S.-led war on the so-called Islamic State into Libya and other countries.

ADDENDUM:
*Decline in Journalists - In 2007, there were 55,000 full-time journalists at nearly 1,400 daily newspapers; there are now 32,000, according to a census by the American Society of News Editors and the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Florida International University. "[The] tale of today's discarded journalists is, at its core, a parable of the way our economy, our whole American way of being, sucks people dry and throws them away as their cultural and economic currency wanes." "We have a lot of anecdotal information that indicates newspaper newsrooms have reverted back to older, whiter, and male-dominated [workplaces]," said Melissa Nelson, director of collective bargaining for the Newspaper Guild. [4]

Footnotes
[1] Sarah Stillman, "The List," The New Yorker, March 14, 2016.

[2] Evan Osnos, "Father Mike," The New Yorker, February 29, 2016.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Dale Maharidge, "Written Off," The Nation, March 21, 2016.

Economic Populism, Secular Stagnation, Fossil Fuels and Emergency Managers

I. Economic Populism
"Trump and Sanders are popular not just because they're expressing people's anger," [or] "because they offer timely critiques of American capitalism." Although they both "downplay the enormous economic benefits of globalization for American consumers,"  [their] "words resonate with many voters, because they articulate an important truth: free trade has created major winners and losers in the U.S. economy, and the losers -- mostly blue-collar workers -- have received little or no help."

"Trade isn't the only reason that blue-collar workers' standard of living has declined; automation and weaker unions have also played a part. By focusing on trade, though, both candidates [-- Sanders a former one --] are acknowledging something important: what has happened to U.S. labor was not a natural disaster but, in part, the product of government policies designed to accelerate globalization and expose American workers to foreign competition." [1]

II. Era of Secular Stagnation
""Though persistent inflation is an accepted fact of life today, in the middle of the 20th century it was still a novel phenomenon to Americans." "Under [Paul] Volcker in the 1980s, interest rates soared while inflation tumbled and unemployment spiked above 10 percent." Hamstrung by deficits that exploded under Ronald Reagan, Congress and the White House focused on stemming the tide of red ink, responsibility for governing the economy's fluctuations was, in effect, handed down to central bankers." "Between 1950 and 2007, the ratio of household debt to income rose more than 400 percent in the United States, with total debt doubling between 2000 and 2007 alone. Much of it was used to buy homes, the biggest investment most Americans make."

"Looking beyond the fluctuations of the business cycle, a growing number of economists are concluding that we have entered an era of secular stagnation defined by low interest rates and the persistent threat of deflation." [2]

III. Leaving Fossil Fuels in the Ground
"The idea of calling a halt to fossil fuel extraction received scientific backup from a 2015 study in the journal Nature, which found that in order to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, 80 percent of the planet's coal reserves, half of its natural gas reserves, and one-third of its oil reserves must remain unexploited."

"The vast majority of federally leased coal comes from the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana. [The Basin] is the nation's single largest source of carbon pollution and the seventh largest on the planet." "Looking for oil and natural gas on federal lands and waterways continues unabated; 34 million acres of public lands are already leased for those purposes." [3]

"The federal government's health standard for ground-level ozone is 70 parts per billion. The American Lung Association recommends an even stricter limit, 60 to 65 parts per billion, to protect both adults and children." [4]

IV. Corporate Privatization Through Emergency Managers
"The EM (Emergency Manager) law soon came to be seen as a vehicle for corporate privatization, with a 2011 New York Times investigation revealing that EM training sessions were 'run primarily by representatives from companies who stand to benefit financially." "The Michigan Department of Treasury's own internal analysis highlighted the law's overreach, concluding: 'This bill allows emergency managers too much power and control over local units of government. Emergency managers can't be rusted to act in the interests of the local units and will use the enhanced powers granted under this bill for their own gain.' "

"Benton Harbor, which has been operating under an EM since 2010, saw its voter-participation rate decline by more than half. " [5]

The state of Michigan has become the experimental laboratory for the use of emergency managers. It was an emergency manager who switched Flint's water supply to the Flint River, thereby creating a serious lead problem.

Footnotes
[1] James Surwiecki, "Economic Populism at the Primaries," The New Yorker, February 22, 2016.

[2] Timothy Shenk, "The Only Game in Town?" The Nation, March 7, 2016.

[3] Dashka Slater, "Keep It in the Ground," Sierra, March/April 2016.

[4] Judith Lewis Merrit, Redrock Deadlock," Sierra, March/April 2016.

[5] Congressman John Conyers Jr., "The Long, Dangerous History of Emergency Management," The Nation, March 7, 2016.

The Birds and Bees of Finance and Economic Life

1.) Executive Pay - Many corporate CEOs now earn more than 300 times the pay of average workers, up from 30 times a generation ago. As economist Lawrence Misshel has noted, executive pay accounts for roughly 40 percent of the income growth enjoyed by America's top 1 and 0.1 percent from 1977 to 2005. Executive pay over $1 million doesn't constitute a "legitimate business expense" -- meaning that corporations can't deduct any pay over $1 million from their income. But corporations can deduct any pay that represents a  reward for "performance." (Source: "Outrageous Fortunes," The Nation, March 7, 2016).

One way to downsize CEO pay overall,would be to deny corporations with egregiously overpaid CEOs easy access to lucrative procurement contracts.

2.) Capital Gains Tax Break - "Wealthy Americans pay just $23.80 in federal income tax on every $100 of their 'capital gains' income. Ordinary income, by contrast, faces a federal tax rate that can go as high as 39.6 percent. In other words, for every $1 million of wheeling-and-dealing income that billionaires claim, the capital-gains tax preference shears about $160,0000 off their tax bill." (Source: "Tax for Tots," The Nation, March 7, 2016).

3.) The Debt Sentence - "Student debt now tops $1.3 trillion, and the burden weighs heaviest on black and Latino students. Young, low-income African-American families are twice as likely to have student debt as their white counterparts." (Source: "End the debt sentence," The Nation, March 7, 2016).

4.) Tax Havens - "Since 1980, the volume of U.S. equities held by tax-haven investors has more than quadrupled. America's richest individuals now have at least $1.2 trillion stashed offshore." (Source: "Off the Grid," The Nation, March 7, 2016).

5.) Savings of Major Corporate CEOs - A recent Center for Effective Government and Institute for Policy Studies  report showed that 100 major corporate CEOs have individual savings equal to 41 percent of American families. In contrast to the very comfortable lives of these major CEOs, nearly 70 percent of Americans over age 65 will need at least three years of long-term care. Many can't afford it. (Source: "Crack a Few Nest Eggs," The Nation, March 7, 2016).

6.) Black Workers' Pay Shortfalls - "Overall, 42 percent of US workers make less than $15 per hour -- but according to the National Employment Law Project, 54 percent of African-American workers earn less than that." "Between 1983 and 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that the share of black workers represented by a union fell by 16 percent. The decline for white workers was only about half that: 8.7 percent." "Recent polling shows that about 87 percent of low-wage black workers approve of labor unions, a level of support almost 20 percent higher than among white workers." (Source: "Black Workers Matter," The Nation, March 7, 2016).

7.) Wealth Generators - "According to a recent Institute for Policy Studies report, the billionaires on the Forbes 400 list now own about as much wealth as the entire African-American population, plus more than a third of the US Latino population combined." (Source: The Wealth Generator," The Nation, March 7, 2016).

8.) Game Changers - "Our nation's 20 richest individuals -- a group small enough to fit in a single Gulfstream jet -- have more wealth than the bottom half of the entire US population." (Source: "Game Changers," The Nation, March 7, 2016).

9.) The Billionaire Loophole -  [Private-equity firms] "are not compensated for building new ventures from scratch, with the risk that entails, but for managing the investments of wealthy individuals and pension funds, and other institutional clients. Even if no profits are realized, private-equity firms get paid: under the '2 and 20' compensation structure, they receive a two-per-cent fee annually on assets under management, in addition to a twenty-per-cent cut of profits beyond a given benchmark, The I.R.S. characterizes the managers' cut of the profits as carried interest, taxing it as though it were capital gains made through the sale of a person's own investments. For most of the past fifteen years, long-term capital gains have been taxed at fifteen per cent, compared with the thirty-five per cent for ordinary income in the top bracket."

Victor Fleischer, a tax-law professor, has argued that the loophole contributes significantly to income inequality by inflating what he calls the 'alpha income' of financiers in the top one per cent of the one per cent. "The easiest way to close the loophole would be to equalize the rates on capital gains and regular income, as was done in 1986." "The tax code supports this view, making charitable giving tax-deductible. By 2013, the mount written off by all taxpayers was more that forty billion dollars annually. The wealthy benefit the most, because they are deducting income that would otherwise be taxed at the highest personal rate." (Source: Alec MacGillis, "The Billionaires' Loophole," The New Yorker, March 14, 2016).

A Critical Look at Selected Aspects of Barack Obama's Presidency

I. Stimulant Problems
Reaching back into Obama's first term, the stimulant to the economy he proposed was too small, was split among infrastructure spending, tax cuts, and aid to strapped states. It didn't do anything to dissuade firms from laying off workers.

"In ruling out a housing bailout, the [Obama] Administration left itself at the mercy of the  real estate industry." The government could have insisted on a share of the future appreciation of the property, perhaps by issuing a second mortgage paid off upon a sale. [1]

Another mistake that President Obama was that he gave up an opportunity to split up the megabanks, such as Citibank and the Bank of America.

II. War and Peace in the Middle East
Whereas Barack Obama came into office with the high hopes of ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he "has reached a kind of grudging compromise with the world. Where once he  hoped to win the war..., he has stopped troop withdrawals from both countries and empowered the thousands of troops serving there -- about 5,000 as of now -- to engage in missions against the Taliban and ISIS." [2] He is now pushing to make the U.S. into a Pacific power to thwart Chinese advances in the region.

Obama is now the longest-serving wartime President.

III. The Drone War and a Bloated Baghdad Embassy
Drone strikes, electronic surveillance, and stealth engagements by military units, such as JSOC, as well as private corporations and mercenary armies are more common as tools of U.S. foreign policy than conventional warfare or diplomacy. [3]

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that the U.S. has killed on the order of 3,000 people in 319 drone strikes, some 600 of the victims being civilian bystanders, of which 174 of the 600 have been children. 84 percent of these casualties occurred during the Obama administration's tenure.

The U.S. embassy in Baghdad houses 16,000 people, most of them being civilian contractors. Also housed in the embassy are 2,000 diplomats and several hundred intelligence operatives. In comparison, the Foreign Service has fewer than 14,000 personnel. [4]

IV. Obama's Disastrous Effect on Democrats
During the reign of President Barack Obama, the Democratic Party has gone from a Senate caucus of 60 members to 46 and from a substantial majority in the House of Representatives to a seemingly permanent minority. In the states, the Democrats have lost ten state governor's offices and 910 legislative seats. [5]

ADDENDUM:
*Every Supreme Court nominee since 1875 has received either a hearing or a vote. Most confirmations have taken place within about three months  of nomination. Six justices, including Anthony Kennedy, have been confirmed in presidential election years since 1900. [6]

Footnotes
[1] John Cassidy, "Stimulant Problems," The New Yorker, March 26, 2012.

[2] Massimo Calabresi, "Obama at war and peace in the Middle East," Time, June 6, 2016.

[3] Juan Cole, "Shadow Power, The Nation, April 4, 2012

]4] Ibid.

[5] Jeffrey Toobin, "Court Politics," The New Yorker, March 28, 2016.

[6] Ibid.

Distortions of Donald Trump's Acceptance Speech

On the Opinion page of the July 23 Albuquerque Journal, syndicated columnist Cal Thomas writes that Donald Trump's acceptance speech was too loud, and he declared that: "Modulation is the key to good public speaking." This is a welcome antidote for those who single out Hillary Clinton for shouting her speeches.

Besides agreeing with Thomas on Trump's speech being too loud and too long, I found Thomas's comments on the content of the speech to be wrong on almost every count. Thomas cites the latest Real Clear Politics data showing 69.3 percent of those polled believing that the United States is on the wrong track and adds that one has to go back to Jimmy Carter to see similar numbers. Wrong track polling has been done frequently during recent years and the results consistently show that about two-thirds of respondents say the nation is on the wrong track. One poll taken in 2015 added the question of whether more or less government is needed to get on the right track. The respondents split 50-50 on the question, meaning that the public didn't have  a clear remedy to offer.

Cal Thomas alluded to Trump promising to be a "law and order" president, with "specifics to come." Given that Donald Trump is notorious for not giving specifics for his policy proposals, it is unlikely that specifics will come. What Thomas did not say was that crime statistics, as measured by the FBI, have fallen significantly since the early 1990s and have continued to decline during President Obama's time in office. No president can end crime, or end it quickly, as Trump proposes to do.

Donald Trump's proposals to torture "beyond" waterboarding; allow soldiers to commit war crimes; and his encouragement of violence against protesters are not attributes of a "law and order"president.

Thomas claims "Poor children are trapped in failing public schools and Democrats won't let them escape." It is no deep, dark secret that Republicans have pushed school vouchers because they want to weaken teachers' unions.

When Thomas speaks of blue-collar workers who "haven't had a significant pay raise in years," he fails to mention that Trump wants to leave the minimum wage issue to the states and Trump is a strong foe of labor unions -- two avenues of increasing worker pay.

It is when Donald Trump said: "Only I can fix it." that movement conservatives should have started shaking in their boots. Trump rules out any role for Congress in fixing what he views as a nation falling apart. Republicans have been fierce in their condemnation of President Obama legislating from the White House, yet Trump's "go it alone" course will make Obama look like a "wet-behind-the-ears" amateur. A key tenet of movement conservatives is that the smaller and weaker the government is, the better, while Trump is saying that government will remedy all of America's problems by himself.

Suicide by Gun; the Most Dangerous Occupations; Gerrymandering; and "Surprise Medical Bills"

I. Suicide by Gun
"Of all the gun deaths in the United States, 60 percent are suicides." The latest government statistics reveal someone in America commits suicide every 13 minutes, more than 41,000 during 2013. "Women think about suicide more than men but men take their own lives nearly five times as often and when they do they most commonly use a firearm." [1]

For kids  aged 10 through 14, suicide is the third leading cause of death. Seventeen percent of high school students admit they seriously considered suicide in the previous 12 months. About 14 percent of them made a plan to do it and 8 percent actually attempted to kill themselves. For those aged 15 to 34, suicide is the second leading cause of death. [2]

II. The Most Dangerous Occupations
Although being a law enforcement officer is incessantly promoted by the media and is commonly accepted by the general public as the most dangerous job in the United States, the occupation doesn't make the list of the most dangerous occupations. Time magazine ranked the top five occupations as follows: 1.) Logger; 2.) Fishers and related fishing employee; 3.) Aircraft pilots and flight engineers; 4.) Roofers; and 5.) Refuse and recyclable material collectors. I've seen lists of the ten most dangerous jobs and being a law enforcement officer doesn't make those lists -- urban window washers and construction workers typically outrank police work. [3]

The average number of law enforcement officers killed annually in the line of duty is in the 50 to 60 range. Given that there are an estimated 990,000 law enforcement officers in the United States, there is a one in 16,500 chance that an officer will be killed each year. It is a tragedy when any officer is killed; however, we should not exaggerate the danger of the work.

III. Gerrymandering in Virginia
In May 2016, the U.S.Supreme Court left in place the ruling of a 3-judge panel that the Virginia GOP-led legislature was in error when it packed African American voters in the Hampton Roads 3rd congressional district, thereby making the surrounding districts safer for white GOP candidates. The Supreme Court left the lower court ruling in place on the grounds that the lawmakers who brought the suit didn't have standing. By so doing, the Supreme Court didn't take a position on the practice of gerrymandering.

IV. "Surprise Medical Bills"
An estimated one in three American adults with private health insurance falls victim every two years to what are known as "surprise medical bills," according to a 2015 survey by Consumer Reports. This can happen, for example, when a doctor with very minimal contact with a patient files a bill. [4]

Footnotes
[1] Diane Dimond, "Suicide by gun a huge U.S. problem," The Albuquerque Journal, April 23, 2016.

[2] Ibid.

[3] "Peril at work," Time, May 30, 2016.

[4] Haley Sweetland Edwards, "You only think you are covered," Time, March 14, 2016.

Paul Ryan Puts His Own Agenda Ahead of Disavowing Donald Trump's Inexcusable Behavior

House Speaker Paul Ryan described Donald Trump's Second Amendment gaffe as "a joke gone bad" and said: "I hope he clears it up very quickly." In regard to the Khans and their son being killed in Iraq: "His [the son's] sacrifice -- and that of Khizr and Ghajala -- should always be honored." And on Trump's verbal assault on Judge Gonzalo Curiel: "Claiming a person can't do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment. I think that should be absolutely disavowed. It's absolutely unacceptable. ..."

Danielle Allen, a writer for the Washington Post, takes Paul Ryan harshly to task for his refusal to completely sever his support for Trump. "Trump dwells in the realm of the suggestive to land his hits while also maintaining plausible deniability. The comment-that-can-never-really-be-cleared-up is his basic working method." "And what precisely is Ryan enabling? Not merely Trump but also a further and especially steep descent of American political culture into a nihilism corrosive enough to imperial the foundations of democracy and constitutional politics. Ryan has accepted marriage to Trump's immoral, unconstitutional commitments for the sake of the potential acquisition of power that will permit him to pursue his agenda." "If you have been given the opportunity of political leadership but undermine the foundations of democracy and constitutionalism in the process of trying to wield their powers, you will go down in history not as a statesman but as a self-serving, self-deceiving sycophant."

Paul Ryan is, of course, not the sole target of Danielle Allen's stinging indictment, as many other Republican leaders have accepted, by default or embrace of Donald Trump's many assaults on the basic foundations of our nation, as described so well by Danielle Allen; also, Donald Trump has engaged in ugly insults of those who displease or oppose him in any way. He has gone well beyond the pale in how he  has characterized his opponent, Hillary Clinton. He has said he is very close to endorsing the idea that Clinton should be in prison.

ADDENDUM:
*At a October 8, 2015 rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, Phillip G. Ruffin, the owner of the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino, announced that Trump gave $20 million to the St. Jude children's home. A spokeswoman for St. Jude, Kelly Schulz, said St. Jude had never announced a gift of this kind. A spokeswoman for Ruffin said she had seen no evidence that Trump had made such a gift.

The last recorded gift was for $50,000 in 2008. A list of charitable donations to St. Jude made over a 5-year period by a Donald Trump-owned entity added up to $92,603; however, much of that amount was in in-kind gifts, such as free golf or gift certificates.

A Big No on Abstinence Teaching; Trans Bathroom Stumbling Block; and Eyewitness Unrelibility

I. Abstinence Teaching Doesn't Work
In 2012, The Tennessee legislature passed a bill requiring everyone teaching  sex education to teach abstinence as the only legitimate option and barring any discussion that could be perceived as encouragement of "gateway sexual activity." [1]

A 2011 study by the University of Georgia researchers found that states that stressed abstinence had a roughly 25 percent higher rate of teen pregnancy than states that didn't. A University of Washington study found that teens taught comprehensive sex education were 50 percent less likely to get pregnant than teens who had abstinence-only education. A study in the journal Pediatrics, published in 2009, showed that young people who took virginity pledges -- a common practice in abstinence-only programs -- were less likely to use protection when the time came. Half of all states now embrace the abstinence approach. [2]

In 2015, Tennessee enacted a law that requires sex education teachers to "inform students... concerning the process of adoption and its benefits."

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy reported that 41 percent of 18- and 19-year olds say they know little or nothing about condoms, and 75 percent say they know little or nothing about the Pill.

II. The Unanticipated Problem of HB2
North Carolina's HB2 law requires people to use the restrooms and locker rooms of the sex shown on their birth certificates in public schools, colleges and universities, and in government buildings; also, the law bars municipalities from passing L.G.B.T.-friendly ordinances. The simple fact is that the threats to women's safety and privacy are posed by men, not trans women, "so why should trans women suffer for these men's sins?" "Ironically, the bathroom bill 'solves' an imaginary problem by creating a more realistic one, because it will force trans men to use the ladies' room!" [3]

III. Eyewitness Testimony Is Very Unreliable
In cases where an eyewitness account is the only evidence tying a person to a crime, the chance of a wrongful conviction goes up significantly. A paper published by the American Bar Association (ABA) reports that those involved in witnessing violent high-stress crimes -- especially when a weapon is used - suffer from impaired recall  because their focus is diverted to the weapon, not to the face of the person holding it.

 Aileen P. Clare, a Columbia, South Carolina attorney who has studied witness misidentifications, says: "Witnesses select the wrong suspect from a photo lineup roughly a quarter of the time." "When the suspect is left out of the lineup, witnesses select an innocent person more than a third of the time -- even when told the suspect may not appear in the lineup." Misidentification plays a role in more than 70 percent of convictions that are overturned by DNA. [4]

ADDENDUMS:
*A survey has found that 82 percent of Yemen's population between the ages of 18 and 24 consider the U.S. to be an enemy. Furthermore, regional experts contend that the coalition focus on targeting Houthi rebels has allowed affiliates of ISIS and Al Qaeda in Yemen to significantly expand their territories.

*The criminal justice reform legislation before Congress could be derailed by "mens rea," a legal phrase used to describe state of mind. Basically, the fight boils down to whether prosecutors should be forced to prove that someone intended to break the law, specifically when it comes to white-collar corporate crimes. The House Judiciary Committee has already moved a bill that says that when federal criminal law fails to provide a clear standard of interest, prosecutors would have to prove defendants "knew,"or had reason to believe the conduct was unlawful.

Although the Koch brothers have been credited with supporting criminal justice reform legislation, it may be the case that they are working behind the scenes to use "mens rea" to make it more difficult to prosecute corporate executives for wrongdoing.

Footnotes
[1] Becca Andrews, "Sex Negative," The Nation, April 4, 2016.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Katha Pollitt, "Discomfort Stations," The Nation, May 9/16, 2016.

[4] Diane Dimond, "Eyewitness accounts not as accurate as you think," The Albuquerque Journal, February 13, 2016.

Climate Change: Exxon's Denial; Newborn Footprint; and Hopeful News

I. Exxon's Denial of Climate Change
In 2015, a pair of researchers independently uncovered proof that as early as 1977, Exxon executives knew that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels were contributing to global climate change. "In a 1982 memo that circulated among company executives, Exxon's environmental affairs manager reported that addressing the greenhouse effect 'would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion' and that without the reductions, 'there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered.' " [1]

Greenhouse gases are increasing due to "the burning of fossil fuels," an ice researcher with Exxon's Canadian division told a group of engineers at a 1991 conference. The researcher noted that "Nobody disputes this fact."

Peter Leherer, with Earthjustice, says that "Exxon's private acceptance of climate science elevates its pattern of public climate denial from a case of negligence to one of intentionally."

By the mid-1980s, Exxon scientists had repeatedly informed company managers that burning oil, gas and coal would raise global temperatures, bringing changes to food and water supplies and other essentials of civilization. [2]

II. Newborn Carbon Footprint
In a 2009 report, statisticians at Oregon State determined that giving birth to one more American adds about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female. "Factoring in grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it multiplies her lifetime emissions by a factor of six." "40 percent of Americans fear that climate change will harm their family members, and a majority under the age of 40 believe it will affect them over the course of their lives." [3]

III. Hopeful Developments on Coal Mine Closures and California Renewables
On January 15, 2016, U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announced a 3-year moratorium on new coal-mine leases on publicly owned land, as well as a comprehensive review of the "environmental and public health impacts" of coal mining. This is big news, because publicly owned coal in Wyoming's Powder River Basin alone, accounts for ten percent of the country's annual greenhouse-gas emissions. [4]

China will halt coal mine approvals for three years and close roughly 1,000 existing mines, the head of the National Energy Administration , Neu Beleri, announced on December 29, 2015. Together, China and the U.S. account for about 60 percent of global coal consumption. [5]

California is in first place in just about every renewable energy category: largest wind farm and largest solar thermal plant. In June 2016, Solar Star began sending 579 megawatts of electricity -- making it the most powerful solar farm in the world -- across Southern California, the equivalent of a quarter of a million homes. SB 350, the Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act, says that by 2030, California must get half of its electricity from renewables and double the energy efficiency of its emissions by 5.5 percent, while increasing its GDP by 17 percent -- under the nation's most stringent energy regulations. By 2025, 16 percent of all new vehicles sold in the state would have to be zero-emissions. In 15 years, Mary Nichols, California's energy czar, wants new car buyers to only be able to shop for zero-emission vehicles. [6]

The transportation sector accounts for 37 percent of California's greenhouse-gas emissions. Remarkably, California is the 8th-largest economy in the world but accounts for about one percent of global emissions.

ADDENDUMS:
*"So-called light pollution has gotten so bad that by one estimate, 8 of 10 children born today, will never encounter a sky dark enough for them to see the Milky Way." [7]

Footnotes
[1] Jason Mark, "Bit Oil in the Hot Seat," Sierra, May/June 2016.

[2] Mark Hertgaard, "Exxon and the Climate Fight After Paris," The Nation, February 22, 2016.

[3] Madeline Ostrander, "Child of Hope and Disaster," The New Yorker, April 4, 2016.

[4] Hertsgaard.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Sarah Begley, "Night of a Thousand Stars," Time, May 30, 2016.

Donald Trump on the Second Amendment: A Joke or a Call to Vote

Donald Trump's remarks this week on the Second Amendment in a rally in North Carolina have stirred up a new furor only a day after Trump had presented portions of his economic plan for the nation. After Trump had said that if Hillary Clinton was elected president, she would get rid of the Second Amendment through the appointment of Supreme Court justices. Trump then said that "we can't do anything about it" but maybe the Second Amendment people could.

After Trump's remarks were telecast to the nation, a number of opinion makers read them as a thinly-veiled attempt to prompt someone to take out Clinton with a firearm. Trump surrogates immediately responded by  blaming the reaction on a misreading by a biased media; however, after what Trump said was broadcast a great number of times and the words remained the same, that effort was essentially abandoned. The new response was that Donald Trump was just telling a joke. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), for instance, called it "a joke gone bad" and he hoped that Trump would "clear" it up very shortly. Sen. Susan Collins also called it a joke but acknowledged that Trump's lack of discipline in what he says does lead to multiple interpretations.

One of those who now doesn't contend that what he said was intended as a joke is Donald Trump himself. His current argument is that the defense of the Second Amendment is so important that he was just telling his supporters to use their political clout by coming out to vote and denying Hillary Clinton the presidency. There is no way to turn, twist or spin Trump's words to match his declared intent.  We know from the fatal shootings of abortion providers and the use of explosives to blow up abortion clinics, that there are enough people with unstable minds that any utterance that seems to encourage the use of violence may be acted on.

ADDENDUMS:
Yesterday, Donald Trump invoked former New York City mayor Rudy Guliani as a particularly reliable witness to what he said in the North Carolina rally because "he was there."

Yesterday, Trump identified George Washington as the founder of our nation; President Obama as the founder of ISIS; and  Hillary Clinton as the co-founder of ISIS. So what is it? Are Obama and Clinton co-founders, or is Obama the sole founder?

The Uneasy Relationship Between Donald Trump and Mike Pence

After the 2012 presidential election, Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, conducted what came to be called an autopsy. The objective of the autopsy was to try to discover how the Republican party could do a better job of reaching out to African Americans, Hispanics and women. Then along came Donald Trump and the outreach effort was effectively destroyed. Not only has Donald Trump vowed to deport the estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., but he has depicted as criminals those Mexicans wanting to come to the United States. He is a harsh critic of Black Lives Matter and his unconditional support of law enforcement officers drives away the many African Americans who have received discriminatory treatment at the hands of law enforcement officers. Moreover, Trump has not proposed programs that might make the lives of minorities better. Trump's many derogatory comments about women; claims that he has engaged in sexual harassment of women; and his conversion to an anti-choice position on abortion have all contributed to the latest polling that Hillary Clinton has a 23 percentage lead on him for the upcoming general election.

When Donald Trump picked Indiana Governor Mike Pence to be his running mate, the general media reaction was that Pence would help him with conservative voters and ease concerns about Trump among what has come to be called the Republican Establishment. Perhaps Pence has helped Trump in the ways described above; however, has he helped in the outreach effort? If we assume that Republican women are much more anti-choice than Democratic women and those women who style themselves Independents are also more pro-choice, than perhaps Pence has hurt, rather than helped the Trump/Pence ticket.

The most recent polls I have seen show that Trump is receiving a  decidedly lower percentage of support from Republican women than either John McCain or Mitt Romney. Pence's record in Congress and in the governor's chair in  Indiana will hardly endear the Republican ticket to pro-choice women. While in the U.S.House of Representatives,  Mike Pence voted to give personhood rights to embryos and cut off funding for Planned Parenthood. He famously or infamously said that mothers with outside jobs will lead to "stunted emotional growth" for their children. For those women who want equal treatment for women in military service, Mike Pence doesn't want a combat role for women.

Another turn-off for Democratic women, in particular, might be that while in Congress, Pence threatened to block Katrina funding unless it was offset by cuts to Medicare, the National School Lunch Program and PBS.

Turning now to the matter of how compatible are Trump and Pence on issues, there were and still are wide differences between the two:
*Pence was a critic of Trump's anti-Muslim ban but has changed his position to align with Trump.
*Pence was never a proponent of torture but now will go beyond waterboarding.
*Pence voted for all, or almost all, free trade treaties that came up for  a vote in Congress.
*Pence voted for the AUMF in 2003 but Trump has given him a pass on it.
*Pence initially signed a bill to allow services to be withheld from L.G.B.T. people based on a moral or religious belief but resubmitted the matter to the state legislature after a firestorm of criticism broke out. Trump was once okay with allowing trans persons to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender choice but now wants to leave the matter up to the states.
*Trump once didn't consider John McCain to be a war hero; however in a clumsy back-and-forth exchange in the  60 Minutes interview, he gave Pence permission to say he respects McCain.

There have been instances during the campaign when Pence has tried to soften or reword something Trump has said, but they have tried to avoid direct contradictions of one another.





  

Some Financial Facts Concerning Startups, Income Equality, Immigration Wage Effect, and a Declining Banking Sector

I. Startups, Income Equality, Union Membership, and Raising Kids
About a quarter of American startups are not founded on brilliant new ideas, but on the desperation of men or women who can't get a decent job. The majority of all American enterprises are solo ventures, having zero payrolls, employing no one but the entrepreneurs, and often wasting away. [1]

Norway ranks with Sweden, Denmark and Finland as among the most income-equal countries in the world. Only 11% of U.S. workers belongs to a union, compared to Norway's 52%, Denmark's 67% and Sweden's 70%. [2]

In Norway, both mother and father in turn take paid parental leave during the child's first year or longer. The international organization, Save the Children, puts Norway as the best country in which to raise children; the United States is ranked in 33rd place.

II. Women Earn Less at Every Age Range
According to an analysis by Time magazine, women earn less than men at every age range: 15% less at ages 22 to 25, and a staggering 38% less at ages 51 to 64. [3]

Before retiring, a woman typically loses $435,049 over the course of a career, because of the current wage gap, according to a 2015 analysis from the National Woman's Law Center, a Washington D.C. advocacy group. Most startling: there was not a single occupation in which women ages 30 and older took home significantly higher average salaries than their male colleagues, even if they started out earning more.

III. Immigration's Effect on Wages
Immigration raises wages overall 0.35% and boosts growth, even though it may cut wages 2.2% for those without a high school diploma. A 20% increase in the minimum wage would benefit other wages too. [4]

Since the Great Recession, working-class wages are down 8%. If they had kept their share, they'd be 27% more in wages today. The drop in the share of national income for the bottom 60%: 28% in 1979; and 22% in 2007. [5]

IV. Banking's New Normal
"Returns on equity have fallen. Bonuses and salaries have been slashed; in the first quarter, Goldman Sachs cut the amount it set aside for compensation by forty per cent. Payroll is down too: banks have eliminated tens of thousands of jobs in the past couple of years and are now embarking on a new round of severe job cuts." [6]

James Surwiecki, who writes a financial column for The New Yorker magazine, points out that before the financial crisis, "financial companies (not including the Federal Reserve banks) accounted for nearly thirty per cent of the U.S. corporate profits. By 2015, the number had fallen to just seventeen per cent." Although Surwiecki paints a picture of a declining banking sector, the really big banks seem to be doing so well that Bernie Sanders made the breaking up of them a cornerstone of his campaign for the presidency.

ADDENDUMS:
*Senator Tom Cotton (R-ARK) has slammed efforts to reduce mandatory minimum sentences, saying the U.S. is actually suffering from an "under-incarceration problem."

*A 106-page grand jury report finds that Oklahoma's lethal injection process has been saddled with "inexcusable failure"and it cites a "litany of failure and avoidable errors committed by state employees."

Footnotes
1. Ann Jones, "America Felt Backward," The Nation, February 15, 2016.

2. Ibid.

3. Amelia Showalter and Chris Wilson, "How the pay gap hurts women's financial security," Time, March 14, 2016.

4. Bryce Covert and Mike Konczal, "Trump vs. Immigrants," The Nation, April 11/18, 2016.

5.) Ibid.

6. James Surwiecki, "Banking's New Normal," The New Yorker, May 16, 2016.

Donald Trump and His "Ghost" Video --- also, Trump's Curious Endorsements

I. The "Top Secret" Ransom Payment
On August 3rd, Donald Trump told rally attendees in Daytona Beach, Florida a story of getting up in the morning, reading a  newspaper and then turning on the television. He saw a "top secret" video of Iranian officials unloading $400 million from an unmarked plane. The following day, he told the same story in a campaign stop in Portland, Maine. Trump further said that Iran provided all of the footage.

Trump described the video as being very clear and taken at a good angle to reveal what was taking place. Subsequently, media outlets scrambled to find the video that Trump had seen and came up empty. The New York Daily News reported that Trump was either leaking classified information -- Trump had described what he saw as a "top secret" government video -- while his campaign and security officials were trying to cover it up; or he was confusing cable news footage for top secret security footage; or he was just spouting outright lies.

The day after the Portland stop, Donald Trump tweeted: "The plane I saw on television was the hostage plane in Geneva, Switzerland, not the plane carrying $400 million in cash going to Iran."

The story that Trump told had the ring of a fairy tale from the beginning, as why would a television station be running a film of an event that happened in January 2016 on a recent day when  he turned on his set? It is most likely that the Trump campaign staff came upon a story that seemed to be a ransom being paid for the release of hostages held by Iran, and Trump made up a story of having stumbled on a video of the transaction. It would be interesting to learn the general reaction of rally attendees to the news that they had been hoodwinked by a falsified story.

II. A Most Curious Set of Endorsements
It was only a few days ago that Donald Trump made big news when he announced that he was not endorsing House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senator John McCain and Senator Kelly Ayotte. He played on Ryan's earlier statement that he was "no quite there yet" in regard to endorsing Ryan by using the same language. He cited McCain's bad treatment of veterans as the reason for not endorsing McCain.

Instead of speaking off the cuff as he usually does at rallies, Trump read from a paper that he was holding to the left of the lectern. My take on this was that Trump had been advised to read from a script, because of a fear that left to his own devices, he would ad lib something that would destroy the impact of his endorsements.

The curiousness of the endorsements is not only due to Trump reading from a script, but more significantly, nothing had happened during the few days between not endorsing and endorsing to change Trump's position. There had been no meeting between Ryan and Trump, nor any exchange of conciliatory statements between the two. McCain had not indicated any change in his position on veterans -- McCain, as I understand it, didn't like the idea that veterans could use private doctors for their care -- creating the potential that veterans might feel that they had been thrown under the bus by Trump for not getting any concession from McCain for the endorsement. As for Kelly Ayotte, she immediately released a statement that she had no plans for joint appearances with Donald Trump.

I question if the endorsements will have much impact, because the hopeful words of working together were at such odds with what Trump had said only a few days before. It is also the case that any indication of working with the Republican establishment is not the message that Trump's most devoted followers want to hear.

ADDENDUM:
When Donald Trump said in his acceptance speech that: "Only I can fix it.", I wrote in my writer's notebook that this was a huge mistake on his part. It left Congress out in the cold; it eviscerated the GOP assault on Obama for legislating through executive orders; and it utterly destroyed a key tenet of movement conservatives that government should be as small and weak as can be. Trump was proposing a government that would be a leviathan.

I felt vindicated in my judgment when I read a poll taken of movement conservatives after the Republican convention. Only 64 percent of respondents said they would vote for Trump, versus about twenty points higher for other Republican presidential candidates over the last three or four decades. Most surprisingly, 21 percent replied that they would vote for Hillary Clinton.

Sexual Assault in the Military; Tampon Applicators and Taxes; and L.G.B.T. Issues

I. Sexual Assault in the Military
Thousands of sexual abuse victims have been pushed out of the service with less-than-honorable discharges, which can leave them with no or reduced benefits, poor job prospects and a lifetime of stigma. "Reversing the rulings is difficult because the Pentagon's process for reversing discharges is stacked against the soldier or sailor." "About 125,000 veterans who served in Afghanistan and  Iraq have such 'bad papers,' which denies them VA benefits." [1]

In a new study, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW) concludes that one in ten veterans petitioning the boards after incidents of sexual abuse result in upgraded discharges.

There were more than 20,000 cases of sexual assault, rape and unwanted sexual contact in the military in 2015. Of the 2015 incidents, around 6,000  were reported and 543 proceeded to trial. According to the Pentagon, somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of those who report being sexually assaulted experience retaliation. (Statistics cited are from DoD sources).

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand's Military Justice Improvement Act (MJIA) would remove sexual assault cases from the military chain of command, freeing victims to speak out without fear of retribution or punishment, and putting trained and unbiased military prosecutors in charge of deciding which sexual assault crimes to try.

II. Pollution and Taxation Problems of Tampon Applicators
According to Susan Shaw, the founder and executive director of the Marine and Environmental Research Institute, and a leading expert on the plastics in the oceans, says that sea animals often mistake application-sized pieces (plastic tampons) for food. A research team found an average of 177 pieces of micro-plastics in each system they tested. [2]

Kate Commor, a spokesperson for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is not aware of scientific evidence suggesting that plastic applicators are better for women's bodies than cardboard applicators or applicator-free tampons.

Of course, plastic applicators shouldn't end up in the ocean in the first place, since they are not supposed to be flushed. But lots of them do and they also gum up  treatment facilities.

"More than 88 percent of the estimated $1.1 billion worth of tampons sold in 2015 had plastic applicators." [3]

On May 25, 2016, New York State citizens voted to eliminate a "luxury" tax on menstrual products, to which the goods had been subject to as "non-necessities..." According to Jennifer Weiss-Wolf of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, who has been at the forefront of the push to eliminate the tax on tampons, fourteen states and three major cities have introduced legislation, amendments or budget lines this year to nix the tampon tax. In July 2015, Canada ended its sales tax on these items. [4]

III. Good and Bad News on L.G.B.T. Rights
As of late April this year, legislation in at least 25 states have proposed more than a hundred bills limiting L.G.B.T. rights, often under the guise of protecting religious freedom. Although there is no federal law protecting L.G.B.T. people from discrimination, three-quarters of Fortune 500 firms have policies forbidding such discrimination. "To many business leaders, today's social-conservative agenda looks anachronistic and is harmful to the bottom line; it makes it hard to hire and keep talented employees who won't tolerate discrimination." [5]

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) appeared in a PSA for SAVE, a south Florida gay rights organization, saying: "Every transgender person is part of someone's family and should be treated with compassion and protected from discrimination." Ileana and her husband, Dexter Lehtinen, have a son, Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, who is transgender. Ileana supports President Obama's directive to schools to let students use he school facilities that match the sex they identify with.

A CNN/ORC national poll found 38 percent approving and 59 percent opposing "bathroom bills" that require transgender people to use bathrooms that correspond with their birth gender. 39 percent were strongly opposed and 25 percent strongly approved. Three-fourths favored laws that guarantee equal protection for transgender individuals.

Footnotes
[1] Mark Thompson, "In the military, victims of sexual abuse sometimes suffer twice," Time, May 30, 2016.

[2] Kiera Butler, "Killer App," Mother Jones, March/April 2016.

[3] Ibid. [4] Ibid.

[5] Maya Rhodan, "States and the tampon tax, after the 'Year of the Period,' Time, June 13, 2016.

Gender-Based Violence; Budding Despots; Parental Leave; Post Office Banking; and Farm Antibiotics

I. Gender-Based Violence
Republican legislators are not known for their enlightened approach to gender-based violence, witnessed by the fact that 160 GOP lawmakers voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act in 2013. And now, many GOP lawmakers are claiming that sexual assaults would increase if trans people were allowed to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity.

9 - The number of states that have active bills to ban trans folks from using public bathrooms that fit with their gender identity.

3 - The number of Republican officials who have been arrested for bathroom harassment in recent years.

0 -  The number of trans people who have been arrested.

224 - The number of cities and counties that have prohibited discrimination based on gender identity. (Source: Natalie Pattillo, "Behind Closed Doors," The Nation, May 9/16, 2016).

II. Despotism's Budding Prospects
1. Donald Trump
The Republican presidential candidate, who has endorsed killing the families of suspected terrorists and condoned physical violence against protesters at his rallies, has only recently fallen behind Hillary Clinton in national polling.

2. Jair Bolsonaro
"An army paratrooper in the days of Brazil's military dictatorship, the Social Christian Party congressman celebrates torture while denouncing immigrants ('the scum of the world') and gays. He will likely run for president in 2018 with the backing of the Brazilian elite."

3. Marine Le Pen
"After scrubbing her National Front Party clean of Anti-Semitism, if not of Islamophobia, Le Pen will run for president next year on a platform calling for an end to the 'Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism' whose 'first victims are white male heterosexuals.' "

4. Recep Tayyip Erdogan
"Erdogan has persecuted journalists and critics, launched a renewed war against the Kurds, and ignored unfavorable election results." Having survived an attempted coup, he is now putting in jeopardy the civil liberties of many thousands of Turkish citizens. (Source: "Despotism's Budding Prospects," The Nation, June 6/13, 2016).

III. Paid Family Leave
"The United States lags behind the rest of the world in providing paid family leave in a study of  185 countries, only two besides the United States failed to ensure that new mothers get paid time off from work; the United States was also one of very few countries that doesn't extend paid leave to fathers."

"Still, even in California, women are twice as likely to  take leave as men. After all, Californians who take time off don't receive full pay. The typical benefit is 55 percent of their usual weekly salary, capped at about $1,000 a week."

The Family and Medical Leave Act allows 12 weeks without pay. Some states give partial pay; therefore, the lowest-paid spouse takes the leave -- usually mom.

In Sweden. parental leave offers 480 days off with 390 at 80% salary. At first, men didn't take it. Now they do -- or lose benefits.

Swedish mothers' incomes have been found to rise 7 percent for every month of leave their husbands take. (Source: Bryce Covert and Mike Konczal, "Equality Is in the Details," The Nation, May 9/16, 2016).

IV. Turning Post Offices Into Banks
Payday lenders cost $2,400 in fees and interest each year  for an average family. If the United States Postal Service were to offer debit cards, savings accounts, and small-dollar loans, it could save the average underbanked family more than $2,000 a year.

Nearly one in three households needs access to traditional banking. 35 million households are unbanked or underbanked. 12 million households use payday loans.

About 40% of post offices are in "banking deserts."

If postal banking were instituted, "the flow of money out of millions of Americans' pockets and into predatory lenders' coffers may someday be stanched." (Source: Bryce Covert and Mike Konczal, "A Friendlier Lender," The Nation. July 4/11, 2016).

V. Farm Antibiotic Use
Measured from a base point of 2009, U.S. meat production has remained relatively constant, yet antibiotic use in animals had increased by about 23% in 2014.

Measured from a global perspective, and comparing farm antibiotic use in thousands of tons from 2010 to projected use in 2030, China leads the world in both 2010 use and projected 2030 use. China used about 15 thousand tons of farm antibiotics in 2010 and is projected to use about 32 tons in 2030. The United States used about 8 thousand tons in 2010 and is projected to use about 12 thousand tons in 2030. Germany will use about the same tonnage in 2030 as it did in 2010. (Source: USDA, FDA, National Academy of Sciences).