Cage-Free Hens and North Carolina's Ballot Box, and Gender Discrimination

1.) Cage-Free Hens
In the U.S. market, Steve Easterbrook launched McDonald's successful All Day Breakfast, removed high fructose corn syrup from the company's buns, ended the use of antibiotics in the company's chickens and embarked on a 10-year plan to liberate the birds from the cages in which they long have been confined. Chickens and eggs account for 50 percent of the items on the menu. "The terms that are important now are 'antibiotic and hormone-free,' 'natural and organic.' " "Right now only 13 million of the company's 2 billion U.S. eggs are cage-free." [1]

"Cage-free birds suffered twice the fatality rate of caged and enriched birds, according to [a] study." "Free birds also required more feed." "The egg-per-uncaged-hen average lagged because of the elevated mortality and the birds' tendency to lay eggs on the floor. Hens from enriched cages provided the most [eggs]."

"The transition to fully cage-free production will be lengthy. Henhouses have an average life span of 30 years." Constructing a cage-free henhouse tends to be three times as much as a caged version, according to estimates by United Egg Producers.

2.) Ballot Box and Bathroom Discrimination
The GOP majority in the North Carolina legislature commissioned a study into African American voting patterns and then crafted House Bill 589, which dramatically cut back ballot access in North Carolina, reducing the number of early voting days, requiring photo ID, and eliminating same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting (aimed at college students), and a preregistration program for 16-and 17- year-olds. "Black voters are three times more likely to have transportation issues than whites. They make up a disproportionate share of those lacking ID, and many of them vote on early-voting Sundays. [2]

Art Pope, the GOP's chief fundraiser, did indeed, REDMAP the state, redistricting legislative and congressional districts. Despite the GOP's lock on the Statehouse, North Carolina is still more Democratic than Republican.

Two days after the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down -- by a 3-0 vote -- HB 589, the same court would rule that 28 of the North Carolina's 170 state legislative districts were unconstitutional "racial gerrymanders." "Race was the predominant factor motivating the drawing of all challenged districts," the court found, creating "one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history."

Although Republicans like to claim that they believe that the government closest to the people governs best, they often do not honor that claimed belief. The HB2 legislation mandating bathroom use based on the gender on the birth certificate, was in response to an anti-discrimination statute that Charlotte had passed protecting trans peoples' right to use the bathroom of their choice. Critics of the General Assembly say over-and-over that hard-won victories at the local level are squashed at the state level.

ADDENDUMS:
*On November 10, 1898, a coup d' etat took place on United States soil. It was perpetrated by a gang of white-supremacist Democrats in Wilmington, North Carolina." "By the end of the day, they had killed somewhere between fourteen and sixty black men and banished twenty more, meanwhile forcing the mayor, the police chief, and the members of the board of aldermen to resign." [3]

*"Most porn is viewed on easily accessible 'tube sites,' such as YouPorn, Red Tube, X Videos, and Pornhub." "According to a recent CNBC report, seventy per cent of  American online-porn access occurs during the nine-to five workday." In 2014, Pornhub alone had seventy-eight billion page views and X Videos is the fifty-sixth most popular Web site in the world." [4]

"Most performers are independent contractors who get paid per sex act." "The average career is between four and six months."

*"Since 1989, eyewitness misidentification has contributed to a  seventy-one per cent rate of wrongful convictions, proved by DNA testing." The British unit (London Met's police unit of "super-recognizers") uses its record of guilty pleas as evidence of the efficacy of super-recognizers, but guilty pleas are highly unreliable indicators of actual guilt, as innocent people often plead guilty, particularly when facing charges of low-level crimes." [5]

Footnotes
[1] Beth Kowitt, "Free Bird," Fortune, September 1, 2016.

[2] Mac McClelland, "The Bathroom and the Ballot Box," Mother Jones, November/December 2016.

[3] Lauren Collins, "American Coup," The New Yorker, September 19, 2016.

[4] Katrina Forrester, "Lights. Camera. Action." The New Yorker, September 26, 2016.

[5] Letter to the editor by Karen Newirth, The New Yorker, September 26, 2016.

Upholding the Iran Nuclear Treaty; Illegal Trump Foundation Spending; and a Syrian Civil War Position

1) Upholding the Iran Nuclear Treaty
Twelve peace and justice organizations have joined in a letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Minority Leader Harry Reid, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, with copies sent to all members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

The letter surges the 114th Congress to continue to maintain the United States' commitment to upholding the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which has succeeded in blocking Iran's potential pathways to a nuclear weapon while averting a  disastrous war.

"Second, it is important to note that the administration will retain full authority to snap back sanctions in order to respond to a potential Iranian breach of the accord with or without the extension of ISA under the authorities established by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)." ISA is the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996.

"Third, if ISA is extended beyond the date of the JCPOA's 'Transition Day,' Congress should reaffirm that the U.S. is fully committed to upholding its commitments to terminate nuclear-related sanctions on that date so long as Iran upholds its own obligations. The latest potential date for 'Termination Day' under the JCPOA is October 18, 2023." "An act of Congress will therefore be necessary to terminate nuclear-related sanctions, including ISA sanctions, and Congress should make clear that this remains its intent."

"There have been numerous efforts to undermine confidence in the JCPOA, both from Congressional opponents of the JCPOA and hardliners in Iran. Any consideration of an ISA extension must not become an opportunity for opponents of the JCPOA on either side to re-litigate or renege on the accord."

2) Trump Foundation Money Used for Political Purposes
Donald Trump appeared to use his foundation to launch his presidential campaign ambitions, according to filings analyzed by RealClearPolitics.

"From 2011 to 2014, Trump sent at least $286,000 to conservative or policy groups. The contributions corresponded to speaking engagements and endorsements as Trump cast himself as a potential presidential candidate, according to the analysis. If the contributions were solely to benefit Trump, they could be in violation of IRS laws that prohibit private foundations from self-dealing."

"Improper reporting is still a violation of tax law," charity law specialist Rosemary Fei told RealClearPolitics.

"The report pointed to other examples that appear to show Trump using his foundation to curry favor, such as Trump's foundation donating $100,000 to the Citizens United Foundation ahead of a 'cattle call' of possible Republican presidential candidates sponsored by the group, which Trump attended."

3) The U.S. True Role in Syria
Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, who has many titles but whose base is at Columbia University, has presented his position on what the U.S. role in Syria should be. He calls Syria's civil war the "most dangerous and destructive crisis on the planet." He says that President Barack Obama has "greatly compounded the dangers by hiding the US role in Syria from the American people and from world opinion. An end to the Syrian war requires an honest accounting by the US of its ongoing, often secretive role in the Syrian conflict since 2011, including who is funding, arming, training, and abetting the various sides. Such exposure would help bring to an end many countries' reckless actions."

"Through occasional leaks, investigative reports, statements by other governments, and rare statements by US officials, we know that America is engaged in an active, ongoing, CIA-coordinated war both to overthrow Assad and to fight ISIS. America's allies in the anti-Assad effort include Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qater, and other countries in the region. The US has spent billions of dollars on arms, training,special operations forces, air strikes, and logistical support for the rebel forces, including international mercenaries. American allies have spent billions of dollars more. The precise sums are not reported."

Professor Sachs presents the opposing position, which is that secrecy is as it should be. "Their position is that a vote by Congress 15 years ago authorizing the use of armed force against those culpable for the 9/11 attack gives the president and military carte blanche to fight secret wars in the Middle East and Africa. Why should the US explain publicly what it is doing? That would only jeopardize the operations and strengthen the enemy. The public does not need to know."

"I subscribe to a different view: wars should be a last resort and should be constrained by democratic scrutiny. This view holds that America's secret war in Syria is illegal both under the US Constitution (which gives Congress the sole power to declare war) and under the United Nations Charter, and that America's two-sided war in Syria is a cynical and reckless gamble. The US-led efforts to topple Assad are not aimed at protecting the Syrian people, as Obama and Clinton have suggested from time to time, but are a US proxy war against Iran and Russia, in which Syria happens to be the battleground."

"The American people want security -- including the defeat of ISIS -- but they also recognize the long and disastrous history of US-led regime-change efforts, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia."

Corporate Tax Rates; ATF; For-Profit Schools; N. Korea's Nuke Testing; and Latinos Driving Growth

1) Overseas Tax Concessions
"Tax arrangements offered Apple in 1991 and 2007 were illegal, allowing the Cupertino, California firm to pay annual tax rates of 0.005% to 1% on its European profits from 2003 to 2014." Those rates are much lower than Ireland's standard corporation tax rate -- already the second lowest in the European Union at 12.5%. [1]

"American companies have an estimated $2.4 trillion stashed overseas -- in principle, American and European regulators agree on the need to squash country-specific tax loopholes and provide multinationals clearer rules." "Even as big firms have stowed cash abroad, many have borrowed money in the U.S. debt markets at low interest rates. Unfortunately most use that debt to fund share buybacks that enrich mainly the wealthiest Americans, rather than invest in job- and growth-creating research and development." [2]

2) Corporate Profits and Taxes
Since 1952, corporate profits as a share of the economy have risen from 5.5% to 8.5%, while corporate tax revenues have dropped from 5.9% to 1.9%. Deferral of taxes paid on profits earned abroad will cost the U.S. Treasury $1.3 trillion over 10 years, according to the Americans for Tax Fairness and the EPI Chartbook.

Priority should be given to closing the gaping deferral loophole.

3) ATF at Distinct Disadvantage
"More than 10 million guns are made in the United States every year, and another 5 million are imported. That's on top of the estimated 350 million already in  Americans' hands."  "About 370,000 times a year, law enforcement agencies ask the ATF to help them track down the origins of a gun that's been trafficked or used in a crime." Furthermore, the ATF estimates that about 50,000 firearms are illegally smuggled across state lines ever line. Then consider that there are only 2,600 ATF [Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] special agents. [3]

Currently, the ATF is only allowed to provide specific trace information when a local law enforcement agency asks for it, and only for that particular jurisdiction. The majority of weapons used in crimes comes from a tiny percentage of the nation's gun dealers. [4]

4) For-Profits Educational Crash
In August 2016, citing failure of financial responsibility and federal fraud charges, the Department of Education tightened its oversight of ITT by requiring the school to boost its cash reserves. That ultimately led to its shuttering.

For-profit schools are facing a reckoning after years of meteoric growth. In 2009, for example, for-profit schools spent 17% of their budgets on instruction and 42% on marketing or investor payouts. Although for-profit schools are still a small part of the overall educational sector, from 2010 to 2012 they took more than a quarter of federal aid subsidies and represented nearly half of all defaults. [5]

5) North Korea's Testing and Hacking
In 2016 alone, North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests and 20 missile tests, and analysts believe the nation has the ability and atomic material to test another nuke at any moment.

Yu Dong-Yeol,the director of the Korea Institute of Liberal Democracy in Seoul, told a defense security conference on July 7 that Pyongyang runs 6,800 professional hackers, engaged in fraud and blackmail; also, an online gambling ring generates annual revenue of $860 million. [6]

6) Latinos Drive U.S. Economic Growth
Although it seems hard to believe, the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative says that Latinos have launched  small businesses at a pace more than 60 times that of their non-Latino counterparts. Also, according to the Stanford study, Latino-owned businesses employed 2.5 million workers,  a number that has likely grown since the study. [7]

According to a 2016 Pew Research poll, 59% of Americans say immigrants strengthen the country, while 33% say immigrants are a burden. These findings diverge along partisan lines, with 78% of Democrats saying they strengthen the nation and just 35% of Republicans agreeing.

ADDENDUMS:
*In a letter to the September 5, 2016 The New Yorker, Sidney Brown and Vincent Iacojins say they were participants in the documentation of cases at Guantanamo and they can confirm that the psychological effects of indefinite detention are harmful and lasting.

*President Obama has now put more acreage under protection than any other president, though the bulk of it is underwater. "In the face of climate change and sea-level rise, even creatures living in the planet's newest, largest aqueous preserve may not be preserved; as conditions shift, they may be forced to swim and slither beyond the borders." [8]

*"Clinton's flaws aren't just smaller than Trump's, they are not on the same scale. It's as if the American Presidency might suffer the same fate as the NASA orbiter that was lost because someone mixed up metric and non-metric measurements." Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy found that last year Hillary Clinton received a far higher proportion of negative coverage than any other candidate. [9]

Footnotes
[1] Rana Feroghar, "Apple's $14.5 billion tax spot ..." Time, September 12-19, 2016.

[2]Ibid.

[3] Bryan Schatz, "Outgunned and Outmanned," Mother Jones, September/October 2016.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Rana Feroghar, "What comers after for-profit colleges ..." Time, September 26, 2016.

[6] Charlie Campbell, "Kim's Last Laugh," Time, September 26, 2016.

[7] Tessa Berenson, "How Latinos Drive America's Economic Growth," Time, September 26, 2016.

[8] Elizabeth Kolbert, "Into the Wild," The New Yorker, September 12, 2016.

[9] Amy Davidson, "Upholding Standards," The New Yorker, September 19, 2016.

1) Louisiana: The Third Poorest State
"Louisiana is the country's third-poorest state; 1 in 5 residents live in poverty. It ranks third in the proportion of residents who go hungry each year, and dead last in overall health." Louisiana leads the nation in its proportion of 'disconnected youth' -- 20 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds in 2015 were neither in school nor at work." (Nationally, the figure is 14 percent.) [1]

According to the American Cancer Society, Louisiana had the nation's second-highest incidence of cancer for men and the fifth-highest rate of male deaths from cancer.

2) Assessing the Underground Railroad
"For one thing, far from being centrally organized, the Underground Railroad was what we might today call an emergent system, it arose through the largely unrelated actions of individuals and small groups, many of them were oblivious of one another's existence." "Yet mainstream attention goes to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was established in 1816, in direct response to American racism and the institution of slavery, and played at least as crucial a role in raising money, aiding fugitives, and helping former slaves who had found their way to freedom make a new life." [2]

"Most whites faced only fines and the opprobrium of some in their community, while those who lived in anti-slavery strongholds, as many did, went about their business with near-impunity."

The Underground Railroad didn't operate below the Mason-Dixon Line at all. Aside from a few outposts in border states, the Railroad was a Northern institution. As a result, for the roughly sixty percent of America's slaves who lived in the Deep South in 1860, it was largely unknown and entirely useless. "Instead, while slavery itself was against the law in the North, upholding the institution of slavery was the law." "Outside of scattered pockets in upstate New York, Massachusetts, and the Midwest, moral opposition to slavery was not the norm above the Mason-Dixon Line."  [3]

The Underground Railroad was perhaps the least popular way for slaves to seek their freedom. The historian, Eric Foner, estimates that, between 1830 and 1860, some thirty thousand fugitives passed through its network to freedom. In 1860, the number of people in bondage in the United States was nearly four million. Foner, making the best of difficult data, suggests that across the country and throughout the duration of slavery, the number of white Americans who regularly aided fugitives was in the hundreds. "In the entire history of slavery, the Underground Railroad offers one of the few narratives in which white Americans can plausibly appear as heroes." [4]

3) Affordable Care Act Problems
Aetna's decision to leave Obamacare "reflects an awkward reality: the jury-rigged, potentially compromised nature of Obamacare has made the program unstable, and unable to live up to its lofty promises." "Some thirty million Americans remain uninsured. participants in the A.C.A. marketplaces are less numerous, and sicker, than anticipated: 8.3 million fewer people enrolled through the exchanges this year than the Congressional Budget Office had projected. As a result, insurers in much of the country are fleeing the marketplaces. [5]

The Kaiser health organization estimates that between twenty and twenty-five percent of U.S. counties may have only one insurer offering coverage in 2017. "The U.S. could well end up with a two-tier insurance market in which people lucky enough to get insurance through their employers will get much better coverage and wider options than those on the individual market, even when both groups are paying the same amount in premiums." [6]

In the final analysis, if we want to make universal health insurance a reality, the government needs to do more, not less.

4) Child Soldiers
"The phrase 'child soldier' tends to conjure images of places like Sierra Leone, where minors were used extensively, and in other African conflicts during the nineteen-nineties. But boys and girls under the age of eighteen have been deployed in battles throughout the world." "A recent report by the Quilliam Foundation describes Islamic State propaganda videos that feature children committing murder and suggests that the group is broadcasting its willingness to flaunt international norms in a deliberate effort to seize the psychological upper hand. This is a standard feature of any curriculum in homicide: progressive exposure to violence." [7]

Child soldiers often rely on drugs to inure themselves to horror. Committing murder may mean upward mobility.

Footnotes
[1] Arlie Russell Hochschild, "No Country for White Men," Mother Jones, September/October 2016.

[2] Kathryn Schulz, "Derailed," The New Yorker, August 22, 2016.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] James Surwiecki, "Sick Business," The New Yorker, September 5, 2016.

[6]Ibid.

[7] Patrick Radden Keefe, "Young Guns," The New Yorker, September 12, 2016.

Topics Covering Workplace Sexism, Automation, Genocide and Fashion

1) Workplace Sexism
"One plaintiff described an environment run like a 'sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult' under former Fox chairman Roger Ailes, who resigned in July amid accusations of sexual harassment and suggestions that he fostered an atmosphere where women were judged by looks and pliability and men weren't judged at all." "Women reported being groped and propositioned by male National Park Service employees on trips into the parks, and if they rejected the advances, they were subject to verbal abuse and other kinds of bullying." "This summer, a number of fire departments are coping with allegations that the few women in their ranks are routinely bullied and harassed." Other female firefighters across the country have reported that they've had their shampoo bottles filled with urine, semen put on their bunks and holes cut in their clothing." [1]

2) Automation Bomb
"The deeper problem facing America is how to provide meaningful work and good wages for the tens of millions of truck drivers, accountants, factory workers and office clerks whose jobs will disappear in coming years because of robots, driverless vehicles and 'machine learning' systems." "Currently, only 5 percent of occupations can be entirely automated, but 60 percent of occupations could soon see machines doing 30 percent or more of the work." "The 'automation bomb' could destroy 45 percent of the work activities currently performed in the United States." The White House Council of Economic Advisers says that the density of robots per 10,000 workers is actually higher in Japan and Germany than in the United States. [2]

David Ignatius warns that politicians "need to begin thinking boldly, now, about a world where driverless vehicles replace most truck drivers' jobs, and where factories are populated by robots, not human beings.

3) American Genocide
"In the words of the United Nations Genocide convention, acts quality as genocide if they are 'committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group.' It is intent, not motive, that matters in establishing the fact of genocide.' "

Benjamin Madley, the author of An American Genocide,  describes the massacre of California Indians as a 'killing machine' composed of U.S.soldiers, California militia and volunteers, slavers and mercenaries (so-called 'Indian hunters') in it for the money. The killings of Indians in California were sometimes a few at a time, sometimes massacres of 100 or more, continued year after year for roughly a quarter of a century. "For every American who died, 100 Indians perished." "Americans held Indians collectively responsible for any injury suffered by whites. And they were relentless." [3]

"Fighting Indians became a source of profit; men enlisted for the pay, and the government provided it." "Madley estimates that between 1846 and 1873, the number of California Indians -- already halved during the Spanish and Mexican periods --plunged by another 80 percent, reaching a nadir of about 30,000 people."

4) Dress Code
The Orthodox Jewish dress code conveys a notion of female-only 'modesty,' which, in turn,  brings about the acceptance of the female body as the site of sexuality. Therefore, the female body must be concealed as a danger and provocation to men. "We could learn something from France about our own First Amendment, which seems to be morphing from the separation of church and state into the  [making] of all sorts of religious bigotry and backwardness." "Even if you think Islamic garb -- or Orthodox wigs or fundamentalist-Mormon prairie dresses -- is a fashion prison, it doesn't follow that banning it is the path to liberation." "Why not trust Muslim women to figure all this out for themselves over time, as other immigrants from patriarchal cultures have done?" [4]

Footnotes
[1] Susanna Schrobsdorff, "A distressing summer of workplace sexism ...," Time, September 5, 2016.

[2] David Ignatius, "Superpower battlefield in new era,"  Albuquerque Journal, August 20, 2016.

[3] Richard White, "Rather a Hell Than a Home," The New Yorker, August 22, 2016.

[4] Katha Pollitt, "France's Cultural Panic," The New Yorker, August 22, 2016.

Tidbits From My Writer's Notebook But Giving Donald Trump a Holiday

1) Graduation Rates - "With just 2 million residents spread across [New Mexico], the fifth-largest state in the nation, a $589 million budget shortfall, declining oil and gas revenues that are the core source of state education funding, and six-year graduation rates in the low double digits, does it make any fiscal sense to fund 32 public colleges and universities?" "A 2015 national report found that the state's college graduation rate was just 40 percent, with only Alaska (26 percent), Idaho (39 percent) and Nevada (29 percent) handing out fewer degrees per enrolled student.Six-year graduation rates range from a dismal 18 percent at New Mexico Highlands University to 49 percent at the University of New Mexico." (Source: "New Mexico can't afford so many colleges graduating so few," [editorial] Albuquerque Journal, October 1, 2016.)

2) Game Officials Shortage - "The New Mexico Activities Association is having a hard time scaring up enough officials this season to cover football, soccer and volleyball. Maybe that's because the referees, who make a pittance for working the events, don't think putting up with the abuse expressed by many fans is worth it." "Over the past seven years, the number of statewide officials who call football high school games has dropped by about 20 percent, from 423 to 340 currently." (Source: "R-E-S-P-E-C-T  the referees," Albuquerque Journal, October 1, 2016.)

3) Obesity Costs - "A 2012 study in the Journal of Health Economics estimated the medical-costs of obesity in the U.S. in 2005 to have been as high as a hundred and ninety billion dollars, a figure that is steadily increasing." "Today, obesity is second only to tobacco as a killer in this country. "A study that followed up on fourteen contestants from Second 8 of "The Biggest Loser" found that all but one of the finalists had regained much or most of their original weight, and that these contestants' metabolic rates had slowed dramatically, making maintaining a healthy weight even more difficult." (Source: Rivka Galchen, "Keeping It Off," The New Yorker, September 26, 2016.)

4) Gender Identity - "Just twenty states have laws explicitly protecting people from employment and housing discrimination based on gender identity. Transphobic hate crimes tripled in the United States from 2014 to 2015, and nineteen trans Americans have been murdered this year, almost all of them African-Americans. Forty-one per cent of transgender Americans have attempted suicide, compared with five per cent of the general population." (Source: Michael Schulman, "Model Citizen," The New Yorker, September 26, 2016.)

5) Building Waste in Landfills - "The U.K. Green Building Council estimates that 15% of materials delivered to construction sites end up in landfills, the result of mismanaged scheduling and purchasing. The American Institute of Architects believes building-related waste makes up anywhere from 25% to 40% of America's solid-waste stream." (Source: Clay Dillow, "A Drone for Every Job Site," Fortune, September 15, 2016.)

6) Texas's Maternal Mortality - Texas now has the highest  rate of maternal mortality in the developed world. According to a just-released report from the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, maternal mortality doubled in the state from 2011 to 2014. One cause is the opioid epidemic. Black women are 11.4 percent of all pregnant women in the state but 29 percent of those who die.

Texas is one of nineteen states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. (Source: Katha Pollitt, "Fatal Births," The Nation, September 26/October 3, 2016.)

7) Sustainable Development Goals - Based on measures of dozens of factors, including diseases, suicide rates, road injuries, smoking, water quality, and war, the U.S. ranks 28th. More than 1,870 researchers in 124 countries complied data on 33 different indicators of progress toward the UN goals related to health. The UN has 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

The Nation Magazine's Take on Domestic Policy Choices and Comments on the War on Drugs

I. Policy Choices Between Clinton and Trump
Minimum Wage
Hillary Clinton supports raising the federal minimum wage to $12, and she has also supported the Fight for $15 in individual cities and states.

Donald Trump's stance has been called "indecipherable," but campaign officials say he supports a $10 federal minimum wage, as well as the right of states to set their own minimums.

Immigration
Hillary Clinton says she'll introduce comprehensive immigration reform with a path to full citizenship in her first 100 days in office, and she has also pledged to end private detention centers.

Donald Trump says he'll build a wall along the US-Mexican border, deport undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes with zero tolerance, and triple the number of deportation officers.

Health Care
Hillary Clinton supports expanding the Affordable Care Act and incentivizing states to expand Medicaid.

Donald Trump has vowed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act and plans to encourage states to design their own Medicaid programs.

Reproductive Rights
Hillary Clinton stands with  Planned Parenthood and defends access to affordable, safe, and legal abortions.

Donald Trump says he's opposed to abortion except in a few cases; he supports defunding Planned Parenthood and turning the Hyde Amendment --which severely restricts Medicaid's coverage of abortion services - into permanent law. (Source: Samantha Schuyler, "Easy Choices," The Nation, October 24, 2016.)

II. By the Numbers
12 - Weeks of paid leave an employee will receive to care for a new child or a sick family member under Hillary Clinton's plan.

35M - Number of Americans who would be lifted out of poverty by Hillary's proposed minimum-wage increase to $12 an hour.

$275B - Funds that would be invested in comprehensive infrastructure rebuilding under Clinton's plan.

$0 - Tuition that students from families making up to $125,000 a year will pay at in-state four-year public colleges and universities by 2021 under Clinton's plan. (Source: Molly Stier, "DC By the Numbers," The Nation, October 24, 2016.)

III. Exporting Jobs
5M - US manufacturing jobs lost between 2000 and 2014, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

3.6M - Manufacturing job loss from 2000 to 2007 attributable to trade deficits, according to the EPI.

2.3M - Manufacturing jobs lost during the Great Recession.

900K - Manufacturing jobs that have been recovered as of 2015.

82% - Americans who believe that factory workers should have the right to unionize, according to a recent Pew poll.

11.1% - American workers who belonged to a union at the end of 2014. (Source: "Exporting Jobs," The Nation, October 24, 2016.)

IV. Law Fools
1886 - In its class listings, Yale University notes that the law courses as open only to men. While several women practiced law at the time, elite schools were still hostile to enrolling women.

1939 - The dean of Columbia Law reports an urgent need for a new women's bathroom, as the only one available is in the cellar.

1968 - A group of Harvard Law women protest an institution common at elite schools, called "Ladies Day," in which professors single out women to answer embarrassing or provocative questions ranging from dower to what degree of penile penetration constitutes rape. A 1969 graduate said it was "entertainment, a show put on at our expense." The Harvard women ended the practice by dressing in black and, when prompted to finish a lewd joke about women's underwear, produced from their briefcases lacy lingerie, which they tossed at their male classmates and mortified professor.

1994 - A study published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review reports significantly lower rates of class participation among women, who describe a classroom dynamic in which they felt their voices were "stolen." One women recounted being called a "man-hating lesbian" due to her frequent participation, which she said nearly made her drop out. (Source: Samantha Schuyler, "Law Fools," The Nation, October 24, 2016.)

V. Comments on the War on Drugs
"Penalties for the possession of  a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself." Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States.

"[It's] about creating fairness and consistency in our laws since there is a blatant inconsistency in the way we deal with small amounts of marijuana possession ... together we are making New York fairer and safer, and ensuring that every New Yorker has access to [a] justice system that doesn't discriminate based on age or color." Andrew M. Cuomo, Democratic Governor of New York.

"Obviously if the expected result was that we would eliminate serious drug use in America and eliminate the narco-trafficking networks, it (the war on drugs) hasn't worked." Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States.

"Can any policy however high-minded, be moral if it leads to widespread corruption, imprisons so many, has so racist an effect, destroys our inner cities, wreaks havoc on misguided, and vulnerable individuals and brings death and destruction to foreign countries?"  Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize Winner, Economics.

"We've got to take a look at what we're considering crimes. I'm not exactly for the use of drugs, don't get me wrong. But I just think criminalizing marijuana... criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot ... is costing us a fortune and ruining young people who go into prison as youths and come out hardened criminals." Pat Robertson, Founder, Christian Broadcasting Network.

"After 40 years of the war on drugs, I can't change what happened in the past. What I can do as the governor of the second largest state in the nation is to implement policies that start us toward a decriminalization and keeps people from going to prison and destroying their lives." Rick Perry, Republican Governor of Texas.

ADDENDUMS:
*The Arrest Related Death Act requires the Department of Justice to require police officers to collect data on any and all deaths of people while in custody. This data would go to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Police say that this is another burden placed on them.

*By a 2 to 1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's structure is unconstitutional but allowed it to continue to operate. It is headed by a single director and not a required multiple-member board.

*Six nations -- Austria, Brazil, Ireland, Mexico, Nigeria and South Africa -- introduced a resolution to the UN General Assembly urging the commencement of negotiations in 2017 for a treaty banning nuclear weapons.

*Sen. Ed Markey (D-MASS) and Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) have introduced bills to eliminate the ability of the President to conduct a nuclear first strike without an explicit declaration of war from Congress.

*Military convoys that transport British nuclear weapons through UK cities and towns have been involved in 180 mishaps in 16 years.

*58% of South Koreans support the idea of their country developing nuclear weapons. 39% of those in their 20s support the idea and 3/4s of those 60 and older support the idea.

*The use of 1% of the world's nukes could put two billion people at risk of starvation. 127 nations have said their security is directly threatened by the worlds's nukes.

Troublesome and Stressful Sides of Law Enforcement Life

1) The Tamir Rice Settlement
Tamir Rice was the 12-year-old boy playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland, Ohio park, who was fatally shot about two seconds after a police officer exited his vehicle. Commenting on the $6 million settlement with the Rice family, the Cleveland police union said: "We only hope the Rice family and their attorneys will use a portion of this settlement to help educate the youth of Cleveland in the dangers associated with the mishandling of both real and facsimile firearms." A Twitter post interpreted the statement as: "I hope you use the settlement from us shooting your son dead to teach kids how not to get shot dead."

Stephen S. Loomis, the president of the police union, threatened to tell his officers not to work security at Cleveland Browns' games unless running back, Isaiah Crowell,  takes down his social media post depicting the death of a police officer. Crowell had already apologized to Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams by phone. He had also posted a written apology on Instagram and quickly deleted it.

Loomis had blasted a group of community leaders' plans to bypass prosecutors and seek changes in how to respond to the shooting death. The clueless union chief said: "It is very sad how miserable the lives of these self-appointed activists, civil rights leaders, and clergy must be." "I can't imagine being so very consumed with anger and hatred."

2) Police Sex Scandal
This past month, seven former and current Bay Area (San Francisco) law enforcement officers were charged with criminal behavior in connection with allegations that the officers had sex with a teenager. The 19-year-old has said she had sex with more than a dozen Oakland police officers and a total of about 30 instances of sexual activity with other police agency officers. Some of these acts occurred when she was still underage. Oakland's mayor said four officers would be fired and seven suspended without pay.

3) The "Thick Blue Line" Resists Reform
Despite outcries and urgent calls for reform of police use of excessive force against minorities, police unions have resisted attempts to change the status quo, attacking their critics as enablers of crime. A study of collective bargaining by big-city police unions, published this past summer by the reform group, Campaign Zero, found that agreements routinely guarantee that officers aren't interrogated immediately after use-of-force incidents and often insure that disciplinary records are purged after three to five years. Samuel Walker, an emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, has found "a culture of impunity." "For the past fifty years, police unions have done their best to block policing reforms of all kinds." "And though conservatives regularly castigate public-service unions as parasites, they typically exempt the police." [1]

4) Police Fabricating Charges
Michael Picard was videotaping the police when one trooper illegally seized his phone.  A Connecticut trooper, not knowing the phone was still recording, begin shouting: "Let's give him something!" Another trooper suggested: "We can hit him with creating a public disturbance." "Gotta cover our ass,"said a third.

5) Police Suicides
The National Police Suicide Foundation puts police officer suicides in the 400-a-year range, which would mean a rate of 53 suicides per 100,000 officers. Another advocacy group, the Badge of Life organization, puts the rate at 14 to 17 suicides per 100,000. The rate among the general population is 11 per 100,000, according to the  Badge of Life. The 141 suicides verified for 2008 by the Badge of Life, were almost three times the number of officers killed by felons. [2]

According to Robert Douglas, executive director of the National Police Suicide Foundation, "The number one reason why officers commit suicide is a breakdown of the family unit, and part of that is the extramarital affair." Douglas added that the police training academies do not teach communication skills in relation to families. The suicide numbers might be higher, because there are no uniform reporting standards and police departments often try to hide or cover up officer suicides; furthermore, of the 18,000 police agencies in the United States, less than three percent of those agencies have police suicide awareness programs.

ADDENDUMS:
*North Carolina's House Bill 972 restricts the disclosure of police dash/body camera video and audio to the public (including the families of those affected) without a court order.

* In the fatal choking case of Eric Garner in New York City, the only one charged with a crime was the videographer.

*Duke Energy maintains that the ash produced in its manufacturing process is no more toxic than rocks and dirt, which also contain heavy metals. North Carolina's environmentalists disagree: "The metals have been concentrated in the ash and can pose serious health problems when they contaminate drinking water sources." Sam Perkins, Catawba Riverkeeper, says that contaminated groundwater has been found at each of 33 sites. [3]

*"During the Civil War, more than a quarter of a million Southern men died, creating the phenomenon of a vast number of female-headed households throughout the region. Mass incarceration during the War on Drugs has produced a similar phenomenon among African-American households." [4]

Footnotes
[1] James Surwiecki, "The Thick Blue Line," The New Yorker, September 19, 2016.

[2] Dennis Domrzaliki, "APD's Sexcapades Taking Their Toll," ABQ Free Press, September 7-20, 2016.

[3] Tristram Korten, "State of Denial," Sierra, September/October 2016.

[4] Jelani Cobb, "The Home Front," The New Yorker, August 29, 2016.

Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and the Law of Torment

Selections from: Jill Lepore, "The Dark Ages," The New Yorker, March 18, 2013.

"No member of the [military] commission need be a lawyer. The ordinary rules of military law would not apply. Nor would the laws of war. Nor, in any conventional sense, would the laws of he United States. In the language of the order, 'It is not practicable to apply in military commissions under this order the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts.' "

In the final draft of the military order concerning the "Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism," signed by President George W. Bush on November 13, 2001, suspected "terrorists could be imprisoned without charge, denied knowledge of the evidence against them, and, if tried, sentenced by courts following no previously established rules."

"Beginning in the fall of 2001, hundreds of men were taken into custody and interrogated, all around the world, but especially in Afghanistan, where the U.S. military dropped flyers offering, in exchange for information about men with ties to  Al Qaeda and the Taliban, bounties of millions of dollars. 'This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life,' one flyer read. Detainees later said they were sold for between five thousand and twenty-five thousand dollars."

More camps were built at Guantanamo Bay to house more prisoners, "eventually seven hundred and seventy-nine, from forty-eight countries."

"Methods described in the torture memos include stripping, exposure to extremes of temperature and light, false threats to family members, and the use of dogs." "In the memos, these techniques have names like 'Fear Up Harsh' and 'We Know All,' and are daubed with the greasy paint of the bureaucrat. 'Sleep Adjustment' is adjusting the sleeping times of the detainee (e.g., reversing sleep cycles from night to day.). This technique is NOT sleep deprivation." "Water boarding: 'the individual is bound securely to an inclined bench, which is approximately four feet by seven feet. The individual's feet are gently elevated. A cloth is placed over the forehead and eyes. Water is then applied to the cloth in a controlled manner. As this is done, the cloth is lowered until it covers the nose and mouth.' In this fashion, 'water is continuously applied from a height of twelve to twenty-four inches,' so that the individual experiences the sensation of drowning. After a break of three or four breaths, 'the procedure may then be repeated.' "

"Many of these forms of torment, including subjecting prisoners to stress positions, sleep disruption, semi-starvation, and extreme cold, came from a 1957 study, conducted by the Air Force, called 'Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War.' "

"An ancient form of adjudication known as trial by ordeal became commonplace after 500 A.D.; its heyday lasted from 800 to 1200 A.D.. In trial by ordeal, a defendant submits to a grueling physical test, the outcome of which is taken as a sign from God, an indication of guilt or innocence. In the end, man is judged by God alone. Trial by ordeal was practiced throughout Latin Christendom."

"The Church's sanction for trial by ordeal was withdrawn in 1215, by order of the Fourth Lateran Council."

"In England, trial by ordeal was replaced not by judicial torture but by trial by jury." "In 1215, the year the Church effectively abolished trial by ordeal, King John signed the Magna Carta, pledging certain liberties to the people..."

"The  sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed a revolution in punishment: blood sanctions (maiming and execution) began to be replaced by forms of bondage (galley slavery and indentured servitude) and of confinement (short- and long-term imprisonment)."

"In time, the rule of law, revulsion at torture, the abolition of blood sanctions, and the law of evidence became the means by which the nations of he West came to distinguish themselves from the rest of the world (including, not least, non-states like the Taliban insurgency and terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda). Nobody, not even a king, could imprison someone without cause."

"The laws of war can be debased and made, even, into weapons of war. The rule of law can be made a travesty. Still, sometimes laws are all that stand in the way of imprisonment, torture, trials, and executions conducted at the king's pleasure."

It was the Bush II administration that envisioned for the first time "a permanent legal structure under the president's sole command."

In 2006, a team from Seton Hall School of Law released a study of the five hundred and seventeen prisoners then remaining a Guantanamo; according to Department of defense data, only five per cent of these men had been captured by U.S. troops; at least forty-seven per cent had been arrested by Pakistani or Northern Alliance forces during the months when the U.S. government was offering bounties."

"In February [2013], NBC News released a confidential, undated Justice Department memo, titled 'Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa'ida or an Associated Force.' It explains in sixteen pages, how it is that the president of the United States has the power to order not imprisonment without charge but the killing of men without anyone bringing evidence before any judicial body, not even an unconstitutional military commission."

"The past is often figured as dark, a prison, a tomb; the future, bright, blue sky, a spaceship. This is an inheritance of the Enlightenment, with its faith in progress and reason and law. Part of the terror of September 11th was the gleaming skyscraper become a  tomb, the seeming backward march of time, the horror of the unreasonable. What, then, of the assassin become an unmanned flying machine?"

Defrauding Polish Undocumented Workers and Other Trump Subject Matter

1.) Underpaying Polish Workers
Fro 36 years, Donald Trump has denied knowingly using undocumented workers to demolish the building that would be replaced with Trump Tower. Trump had sought out the undocumented Polish workers when he saw them on another job; instigated the creation of the company that paid them and negotiated the hours they would work. The men were put on 12-hour shifts with inadequate safety equipment at subpar wages that their contractor paid sporadically, if at all. [1]

By early June 1980, the Polish workers' unpaid wages totaled over $100,000. A lawsuit was filed  by the workers' lawyer, John Szabo, and at the end of the trial, Szabo and the U.S. Labor Department own a judgment of $254,523 against William Kaszycki, the workers' boss and Trump's middleman. 'Trump never had to pay the  Poles another cent." [2]

2.) Trump and School Choice
Donald Trump has promised $20 billion in federal grants for poor children to attend a school of their family's choice: magnet school, charter school, public or private school. The grant would come from existing federal spending.

Trump made the announcement at a charter school that has received failing grades from the Ohio Department of Education for its students' performance and progress on state math and reading tests.

Congress rejected a Trump-like plan in its last major overhaul of the nation's chief education law last year. Proposals such as Trump's bleed dollars from traditional public schools.

3.) A Busted Democracy (One Commentator's Opinion)
"Donald Trump's presidential campaign has been like an oil train derailment in slow motion -- the spectacle is awful to witness, impossible to turn away from, and mesmerizing in its sheer horror." "Trump enjoys being a bully. His bigotry and his bile are nauseating: the calculated cruelty, the willful ignorance, the lack of empathy and grace." "Our democracy is, in a word, busted." [3]

4.) Following Charity Rules
"Full Measure" host Sharyl Attkisson asked Donald Trump if the Trump Foundation has followed all charitable rules and laws. Trump answered: "Well, I hope so, I mean, my lawyers do it. We give away money; I don't make anything."

Under the laws in New York, any charity that solicits more than $25,000 per year from the public must obtain a special kind of registration beforehand. Charities as large as Trump's must also submit to a rigorous annual audit that asks -- among other things -- whether the charity spent any money for the  personal benefit of its officers. Washington Post reporter, David Farenthold, learned that the Trump Foundation doesn't have the required certification.

The attorney general of New York has suspended the Trump Foundation because it doesn't have the needed certification.

5.) Doing Business With Cuba
Late last month, Newsweek magazine broke a story that Donald Trump did business with Cuba. A company controlled by Trump secretly conducted business in Cuba, which is illegal under trade laws. The money was run through the consulting firm Seven Arrows Investment and Development Corporation. Seven Arrows instructed senior officers in Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts on how to make the venture legal by linking it, after the fact, to a charitable effort. A total of $68,000 was spent in 1998 and linked to a Catholic charity.

6.) A Sampling of Trump Sayings and Reversals
*At the GOP "Your Money, Your Vote" CNBC 1st tier debate on October 28, 2015, Trump said: "We'll take some Syrian refugees on humanitarian grounds." He later reversed himself when he saw that so many of the refugees were men -- but about half are children.

*On September 16, 2015, Trump said that the 14th Amendment should go through the Supreme Court -- it was created by the Supreme Court. Trump also said: "A lot of really bad dudes in this country [came] from outside." "This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish."

*In 2011, Trump said he did a great service in forcing Obama to produce a long-form birth certificate.

*At the Iowa Freedom Summit, Donald Trump said that half the undocumented residents are criminals.

*In his book, Time to Get Tough, p. 145, Trump said that foreign students coming to this country should be allowed to stay. Also, in the same book, Trump recommended hiring 25,000 border patrol agents. Now he wants 5,000.

*On "Meet the press," November 8, 2015, Trump ruled out tariffs to pay for the border wall. He said they will pay "one way or the other."In the October 28, 2015 GOP debate, Trump said; "A politician cannot get them to pay, I can." "I would do something very severe unless they contributed or gave us the money to build the wall."

*The Wall Street Journal on Trump Tax Cuts: "His deficit-financed tax cut would drive up interest rates, sucking in foreign capital and driving the dollar higher. The result would be higher imports, weaker exports and more foreign debt than otherwise."

Footnotes
[1] Massimo Calabresi, "Trump's Tall Tales," Time, September 5, 2016.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Jason Mark, "The Worst Environment Money Can Buy," Sierra, September/October 2016.

A Miscellany of Short Subjects That Have Captured My Interest

*The Violence Against Women Act criminalized cyberstalking back in 2006, but federal prosecutors pursued about ten out of an estimated 3.5 million instances of cyberstalking between 2010 and 2013. (Source: Hannah Levintova, "Targeting the Trolls," Mother Jones, September/October 2016.)

*An effort led by Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has documented more that 4,000 lynchings of African-Americans across twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950. (Source: Maura Ewing, "Putting Lynching on the Map," Mother Jones, September/October 2016.)

*Favorable ratings of major politicians before first presidential debate, based on aggregate polling: Hillary Clinton - 42%; Donald Trump - 34%; Paul Ryan - 33%; Nancy Pelosi - 24%; Harry Reid - 22%; and Mitch McConnell - 16%.

*David Clarke, sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, is no great friend of Black Lives Matter (BLM). He has said that BLM pours out violence and hate-filled messages. He calls the members "subhuman creeps," "garbage," and "black slime." Clarke has infamously said that there is no police brutality in the United States.

*One 2012 Pentagon estimate found that enforcing a no-fly zone in Syria would involve at least 70,000 service personnel; another Pentagon estimate was that such an effort would involve hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines and other enablers. (Source: Adam H. Johnson, "Anguish Over Aleppo," The New Yorker, August 22, 2016.)

Pence's "Forgiveness"; Trump Not Successful Businessman; Tax Manipulation; and GOP Voting Restrictions

1,) Mike Pence's Grace and Forgiveness
Republican candidate for vice-president Mike Pence has fallen back on his Christian religion to try to justify how he can continue to remain as the running mate for Donald Trump. In theology, a "day of grace" is a time of probation when sinners may obtain forgiveness. In Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary there are sixteen definitions of "grace"when used as a noun and four definitions when it is used as a verb. It is unclear what definition Pence is using when he uses the word "grace" but the word "forgiveness" has a less complicated meaning. Given the frequency with which Donald Trump lies and insults others, forgiveness is wasted on him, because he will have offended again before the word "forgiveness" flowing from Pence's mouth has reached the ears of his listeners.

Mike Pence would be more fully exercising his Christian religion if he focused his attention on getting his running mate to stop using almost every derogatory word in the lexicon to describe Hillary Clinton. Trump's latest two totally unsubstantiated slams on Clinton are that she was on drugs during the last debate between the two and that the Clinton campaign is responsible for the firebombing of a Trump campaign headquarters in North Carolina.

2.) Trump Not a Polished Politician
During the vice presidential debate, Mike Pence ventured to try to defend Trump's way of speaking by saying he is not a "polished politician." The word "polished" can be interpreted to mean that Trump hasn't learned to lie as a polished politician does, thereby playing on the disgust and even contempt the U.S. public has long displayed toward  politicians. Once Donald Trump became a candidate for president, he became a politician, by definition. Learning how to conduct himself and use words in a way that would help him win the presidency should have been the guideposts for Trump to use to be a successful politician.

3.) Businessmen Make Good Politicians
One qualification that many Trump supporters cite for their support of him is that he is a businessman who will make the national government run more efficiently. The great flaw in the belief that businessmen or women will improve the operations of government by running it like a business is that business operates through the profit motive. Many government operations cannot be operated on the profit motive. Running a city bus line on the basis that passenger fares must yield a profit would mean setting the fares so high that most people now using the buses could not afford to ride them. The military, which consumes a giant share of national government revenue, cannot be run to make a profit. Our many and far flung intelligence services cannot be run on the basis of making a profit. This list of government operations that cannot be run on a profit basis could be greatly expanded, but the bottom line here is that government must perform many services that cannot be run on the basis of making a profit.

Donald Trump is hardly the epitome of a successful businessman, given his several bankruptcies -- in which investors in his bankrupted companies were the biggest losers -- his stiffing of contractors by not paying them agreed-upon compensation; and his use of meagerly paid overseas workers to make clothing and other products of his.

4.) Donald Trump and Income Taxes
Donald Trump and his surrogates have defended his use of a $915 million real estate loss to possibly not pay any federal income tax for as many of 18 years, by simply saying that he used the lawful provisions of the tax code. In the vice presidential debate, Mike Pence even tried to get Tim Kaine to admit that he used all of the tax breaks found in the tax code; however, Donald Trump is not simon pure in this matter, as in regard to the 47 percent of tax filers that the IRS said didn't pay any federal income tax, Trump said that they should have made a contribution. There has been at least one other time that Trump said the same thing.

It is one thing when Donald Trump uses all of the tax breaks available to him and yet another when he uses breaks for which he does not qualify. In filing his 2015 property tax, Trump used a school tax credit available only to New Yorkers with taxable incomes of $500,000 or less. A Trump spokesperson said it was an error made by the city and the city had corrected it; however, the NYC Division of Finance has stated as recently as June 2016 that it is investigating media reports of Trump using the school credit and it has not taken any corrective action. This is not a one-time thing, as Trump has used the same credit for at least three years.

Donald Trump paid no federal income tax in 1984, even though he claimed over $2 million in capital gains income and said his main occupation was "consulting." Yet he claimed no income from consulting, nor was there any documentation provided, nor receipts. It was in this same year that a photocopy of Trump's tax return was discovered with the signature of his accountant on it, yet the accountant testified in court that he did not sign the tax return, nor did anyone else in his firm.

5.) A "Rigged" Election
Donald Trump is now deeply focused on a claim that the upcoming election will be "rigged." There is real fear that aging voting machines and new electronic ones that can be hacked may give unreliable results; however, there is no credible evidence that the elections will be rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton.

The rigging that has taken place has been perpetrated almost entirely by Republicans, who have enacted legislation to make it more difficult to vote for those people who are most likely to vote for Democrats. The judiciary has been striking back by invalidating some provisions of voter restrictive legislation in at least Wisconsin, North Carolina and Texas.

Short Subjects From My Writer's Notebook

*Police union contracts and police bill of rights laws include officers reviewing evidence before they are interrogated, limits on how long they can be interrogated, and even erasing misconduct from their records.

*Milwaukee County (WI) Sheriff David Clarke has said Black Lives Matter (BLM) pours out violence and hate-filled messages. He has called BLM membes "subhuman creeps," "garbage," and""black slime." Clarke has also infamously said there is no police brutality in the U.S.

*The Equal Justice Initiative, headed by noted civil- and human-rights lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, has documented more than 4,000 lynchings of African-Americans across twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950. Where the lynchings mostly occurred mirrors where most of the legal executions now occur.

*According to reports, Britain saw a 57 percent rise in reported hate crimes in the week following the Brexit vote; it seemed that a section of society felt free to express racist views. (Source: Aminnatta Forna, 'The Future of Citizenship," The New Yorker, August 22, 2016.)

*"One 2012 Pentagon estimate found that enforcing a no-fly zone would involve at least '70,000 American servicemen;' another estimate insisted such an effort would involve 'hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines and other enablers.' " "Yet, no one calling for a ramped-up war in Syria has offered a clear indication of what it would entail." (Source: Adam H. Johnson, "Anguish Over Aleppo," The New Yorker, August 22, 2016.)

*North Carolina's House Bill 972 restricts the disclosure of police dash/body camera video and audio to the public, (including families of those affected) without a court order.

*The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported 4,446 inmate deaths in state prisons and local jails in 2013, an increase of 131 over the prior year. Suicides constituted 34 percent of the deaths. The number of decedents ages 55 or older has increased by an average of five percent annually since 2001. Nearly a quarter of the deaths occurred in California and Texas.

*"The average American child spends four to seven minutes a day playing outdoors and up to seven hours a day staring at a screen. Diabetes, attention deficit disorder, heart disease, depression, myopia, allergies, and asthma have all skyrocketed." (Source: Wendy Becktold, "Rewilding the Kids," Sierra, September/October 2016.)

*Scientists believe Earth has now crossed the threshold to a 400 ppm future.

*A recent study by the cybersecurity company, Norton, found that 76 percent of the women under 30 surveyed had experienced abuse or harassment online.

*"In a recent National Review piece, J.D. Vance, author of 'Hillbilly Elegy,' cites research that shows 'the average white person now feels that anti-white bias is a bigger problem than other forms of racial discrimination.' " (Source: Joe Klein, "Don't believe the new myths...," Time, September 12-19, 2016.)

*Nearly half a million households in the U.S. lack the basic dignity of hot and cold running water, a bathtub or shower, or a working flush toilet, according to  the Census Bureau. In one Alabama county, 35 percent of homes had failing septic systems, with raw sewage on the ground. Another 15 percent had nothing.

*Forty-two states have voting machines in circulation that are more than a decade old and run on software no more sophisticated than that of an "old, stripped-down PC," says Lawrence Norden, an election expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.

How Much Military Is Enough?

In the January 28, 2013 The New Yorker, Jill Lepore asks the question: "How Much Military Is Enough?" Lepore presents some signposts along the way to illustrate how the role of the military has grown like Topsy.

Beginning in 1822, congressional oversight was handled by two standing committees: one for the Army, and the other for the Navy. A committee on the militia, established in 1815, was abolished in 1911 -- the militia itself having been essentially abandoned. It was in 1934 that Congress passed the National Firearms Act, which, among other things, strictly regulated the private ownership of machine guns. (Keeping military weapons out of the hands of civilians seemed to the Supreme Court, when it upheld the Firearms Act, in 1939, entirely consistent with the Second Amendment, which provides for the arming of militias.) The Supreme Court, in effect, was warning about the militarism of civilian life, a trend that has accelerated in recent times.

It was not until the Second World War that the United States established what would become a standing Army. A seminal event occurred in 1947, when Lockheed Martin's chief executive told a Senate committee that the nation needed funding for military production that was "adequate, continuous, and permanent."

We are now slightly over seven decades past V-J Day and we have nearly 300,000 U.S. troops stationed overseas, including 55,000 in Germany, 35,000 in Japan and 10,000 in Italy. Much of the money hat the federal government spends on "defense" involves neither securing the nation's borders nor protecting its citizens. Instead, the U.S. military enforces U.S. foreign policy.

Andrew J. Bacevich, a career Army officer and now a professor of history, has captured the extent to which the U.S. public has "fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have come to define the nation's strength and well-being in terms of  military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals." Bacevich refers to the irony of a nation founded on opposition to a standing Army,  now being a nation engaged in a standing war.

Bacevich refers to the "mystical war on terrorism" and finds its counterpart in the "mystical war on Communism." Mystification, he has said, leads to exaggerated threats and ignores costs. "It prevents us from seeing things as they are."

When General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee on October 13, 2011, he made it clear that we should not expect to see any change in the preeminent role of the military in American life: "I didn't become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to  oversee the decline of the Armed Forces of he United States, and an end state that would have this nation and its military not be a global power. That is not who we are as a nation."

Jill Lepore has a much more hopeful vision of a nation not consumed with the use of force as the be-all and end-all of its role as a global power. Lepore says: "The decision at hand concerns limits, not some kind of national, existential apocalypse. Force requires bounds. Between militarism and pacifism lie diplomacy, accountability, and restraint. Dempsey's won't be the last word."

Auditing the Pentagon: Mission Nearly Impossible

Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) is a legislator who has been intent on grappling with the thankless task of trying to audit the Pentagon. She introduced the Audit the Pentagon Act of 2012 and then introduced an updated version of that bill in January 2013. She included a press release from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), which had the following language: "As the only federal agency not subject to an audit, the Pentagon has lost tens of billions of dollars to waste, fraud and abuse. It is past time to check the wasteful practices with little oversight that weakens our financial outlook and ultimately our national security."

"The Pentagon is the only agency that cannot be audited or predict realistically when it will do so. The Pentagon admits the problem and agrees it has a duty to pass an audit. The Pentagon's Office of the Comptroller wrote in 2008, 'Our financial problems are pervasive and well documented.' "

William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project of the Center for International Policy, has stated that "the Defense Department doesn't know how much equipment it has purchased, how much it has been overcharged, or how many contractors it employs."  The Project on Government Oversight maintains that the Pentagon has spent about $6 billion thus far on "fixing" its audit problem. But it has done so, Hartung notes, "with no solution in sight."

The story of the F-35 jet fighter helps explain how not having a functional auditing system causes U.S. military spending to get out of hand. The initial estimate of the building program for the F-35 was $233 billion. Today, the price tag has more than quadrupled, with estimates ranging from $1.1 trillion to $1.4 trillion, making it the most expensive weapons system in human history. The pilots' helmets alone run to $400,000 a piece.

The F-35 is, of course, only one part of a spending and auditing problem that will only grow in the future. Lawrence S. Wittner, a professor at Albany (NY) University and a fellow board member of Peace Action, estimates that Donald Trump's plan for military spending will add about $90 billion to the annual Pentagon budget. Wittner, who writes extensively on military spending issues, calculates that the share of discretionary spending will increase from 54% in FY 2015 -- the National Priorities Project uses 55% for FY 2015 -- to 63%  if military spending was increased to $690 billion in the next FY budget and other areas were cut to fund this increase.

Just to keep things in perspective, China's current military spending is about a third of what the U.S. spends and Russia spends about a ninth.

ADDENDUMS:
*The Death in Custody Reporting Act (DICRA) requires all law-enforcement agencies and medical examiners to fill out an 18-question report for any person who dies, no matter the cause, while interacting with the criminal justice system. The Department of Justice can withhold 10% of federal grant funds for any agency that does not comply.

*The Open Ended Working Group (OEWG) adopted a report recommending negotiations to start in 2017 on a legally-binding instrument to ban nuclear weapons. All African, Latin-American, Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Pacific states, along with some European countries, united behind the proposal. All nine nuclear-armed nations boycotted the OEWG.

*The nuclear waste accident at New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) contaminated 35% of the underground site. The cleanup could cost $2 billion, making it one of the most expensive nuclear accidents in history.

*A lawsuit filed in the Washington D.C. District Court by Grant Smith, director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, contends that U.S. aid to Israel is illegal under U.S. law, which prohibits aid to nuclear-armed nations that have not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty -- Israel is one of four countries that have not signed it. Israel has had nuclear weapons for decades. The lawsuit also contends that the aid violates two amendments to the 1961 Foreign Aid Act, known as the Symington and Glenn amendments, which ban aid to clandestine nuclear powers.

Since Congress passed the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act in 1975, the U.S. has given Israel about $234 billion in aid.