Distrust of Government – Page 14

September 21, 2016

On-the-ground insight from the Chelsea area of Manhattan on Sunday: Long-time reader David P. gives us some, from the day after the bombing:

I just finished reading your Wrongologist entry for today.

OTOH, I find some evidence that fear is not (universally?) out of control. We drove into NYC yesterday [Sunday] after seeing TV accounts of the bombing in Manhattan at 23rd St, near 5th Ave. In a 10-block stroll through the West Village and Chelsea, I noted no businesses, of the sort normally open on Sundays that were shuttered. We had brunch at a restaurant on the corner of 20th St and 7th Ave., in the open air. The sidewalks were bustling and the street traffic seemed to be at the expected level for a Sunday. I exchanged a few social niceties and joking exchanges with waiters and other strangers; none seemed fixated on what had and was transpiring a few blocks away…

On the TV, both on Sunday and thus far on Monday (4 PM), local politicians and police administrators have given calm, factual, professional updates, with the politicians adding that the terrorist enterprise could only prevail if we were to give way to fear and allow our lives to be disrupted any more than necessary…

The ONLY sour note that I heard in the 40 hours since the first explosion was Mr. Trump’s irresponsibly premature pronouncement on a still-emerging event, coupled with his opportunistic attempt to blame it on President Obama and Hillary Clinton. Otherwise, from my perspective and at least in my corner of the universe, people seem to be vigilant without being terrorized.

I hope that the media will show the rest of the country that, here near the center of the terrorism bulls-eye, most of us are not succumbing to fear. I also hope that the rest of the country will notice that we are not voting for someone who, faced with those who would do us harm, responds with bluster and bullshit, rather than with quiet determination and deference to professionals who know what they are doing.

David

Some media, and of course the Pant Load, are trying to fan the fear. Some are saying “New York Attacked!” They want Americans to be more afraid for their safety than for the likelihood of losing more of our American values. Interestingly, the states that have seen terror attacks, NY, CA, MA, PA and VA are solidly in Hillary’s camp, while Florida is too close to call.

Perhaps when you actually have to face your fear, you think differently.

On a separate issue: There is a growing ACLU and Amnesty-led campaign to secure a pardon for Edward Snowden, timed to the release of the Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden”. There have editorials and op-eds, pro and con appearing all over the country in recent days. Few attempt to lay out the facts. In fact, the Washington Post editorial board is against his pardon. That is the height of hypocrisy, since the WaPo won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting based on the very information that Snowden took from the US government!

Glenn Greenwald, who helped Snowden get his information to the media said:

Three of the four media outlets that received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden — The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Intercept –– have called for the US government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the US with no charges.

The exception is the WaPo.

Back to the pardon, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) has recommended against a Snowden pardon. Marcy Wheeler tears their report apart, stating that in a two-year investigation, HPSCI failed to interview any of the direct witnesses, repeated known untruths about Snowden, and used the wrong methodology to conduct the damage assessment caused by the document releases. From Marcy:

One thing is certain: the public is owed an explanation for how HPSCI came to report knowably false information.

Snowden is a saint compared to the Congress jerks who signed off on this recommendation.

It is one thing to believe Snowden’s breach of a duty of confidentiality to the US government is not offset by the good that public knowledge of the NSA’s clandestine spying programs provided.

It is another to create a false report about the individual and the damage done.

There are probably a few dozen or so Dennis Hastert’s in Congress that are more than interested in suppressing any whistle blower’s information. Who knows, it could end a career.

Congress seems to have sworn an oath to complicity, not an oath to uphold the Constitution.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 18, 2016

Luckily, it only comes up every four years:

cow-cialis-election

Colin Powell’s emails were hacked, and America loved it:

cow-colin-powell

OTOH, Powell lied at the UN about WMDs. That helped start an unnecessary war in which many died. People have short memories. His standing should not be revived by a few blunt emails.

Hillary is back on the road. Is it too little vision, too late?

cow-fainting-spell

Dems should be ashamed, ashamed that their candidate runs so poorly with the young. That she is an ineffective campaigner. This is reminiscent of the summer of 1988, when Dukakis spent a week in August in Nantucket thinking he was ahead in the polls (Clinton spent two weeks in the Hamptons). She and her team are badly misdiagnosing what drives voters. Every response seems weak and ineffective.

Wells Fargo caught in phony account scheme:

cow-wells-fargo

Wells fired 5300 “low level” employees, roughly 1% of the workforce, for signing up customers for checking accounts and credit cards without their knowledge. About 2 million sham accounts were opened, complete with forged signatures, phony email addresses, and fake PIN numbers, created by employees who were hounded by supervisors to meet daily account quotas. But the executive at the top of this hot steaming pile, Carrie Tolstedt, left in July with a $125 million retirement package.

Trump retracts his birther scam with an untrue swipe at Hillary Clinton:

cow-trump-admits

From Mark Shields on the NewsHour about Trump’s birther nonsense:

He wasn’t only the loudest and the highest-profile and the most persistent and the most well-publicized birther, he, Donald Trump…lied. He lied consistently and persistently.

And, today, without explanation or excuse, he just changed his position and tried to absolutely falsely shift the blame onto Hillary Clinton…he debased democracy. He debased the national debate. He appealed to that which is most ignoble or least noble in all of us.

From David Brooks on the NewsHour:

Usually, there’s some tangential relationship to the truth…But now we’re in a reverse, Orwellian inversion of the truth with this. And so we have a team of staffers and then the candidate himself who have taken the normal spin and smashed all the rules. And so we are really in Orwell land. We are in “1984.” And it’s interesting that an authoritarian personality type comes in at the same time with a complete disrespect for even tangential relationship to the truth that words are unmoored…And so what’s white is black, and what is up is down, what is down is up. And that really is something new in politics.

Who Moved My Cheese?

Some may remember the book by this name by Spencer Johnson, published in 1998. The underlying message of the book is “Don’t waste time fighting against change: accept that bad stuff will happen to you for no good reason and just keep moving”.

This outdated and simplistic message remains the message of the Democratic Party to the White Working Class (WWC). Donald Trump’s message is different. He offers them nothing but a dream, to limit immigrants working in the US and to cut off the US market from China. And since the WWC knows that more of the same isn’t going to work, they’re voting for Trump.

It is useful to remember that since our “Most Favored Nation” trade deal with China in 1979, we have lost 35% of all manufacturing jobs in this country.

The WWC thinks that the Democrats have not been able to do anything to help them keep their jobs. The reasons for failure can be at least equally shared by the Parties, but since Dems have said for years that they are the party of the working class, they are getting the greater share of the blame for 35 years of no results.

There are two issues that dominate the discussion: Illegal immigration and transition assistance when jobs are lost. Regarding Immigration:

The WWC knows that Dems need the political support of the Hispanic community, and that requires Dems to show sympathy with illegal immigration.
The WWC believes that illegal immigration has put downward pressure on job opportunities and wages in the trades, in restaurant and hotel work, and in service sectors where immigrants may be overly represented.
That’s why Trump’s stance on immigration is so popular with the WWC. They probably know in their hearts that kicking all the Mexican workers out, or building a wall is ridiculous. But the Democrat’s position on immigration is diffuse, and is viewed as “soft” on illegals by the WWC.

Despite anything the Dems say about retraining or “transition assistance”, the WWC knows that someone on job transition assistance can’t earn enough to support a family. Other problems:

Identifying the fields/industries that workers can train in that will produce stable, living wage employment is an inexact science. So, demand for retrained workers is often less than the supply for any given job type.
Businesses have been very successful at shifting the burden (and cost) of training displaced workers from themselves to society. This is helped along by a corporate critique that public and not-for-profit private schools are failing to maintain standards, and they can’t churn out sufficient grads with qualifications that meet the corporations’ highly specific requirements.
Hence the continuing financial opportunities for for-profit technical schools and for-profit universities, (can you say Trump University?)

And Ford Motor Co. just gave Trump a big wet kiss:

Ford Motor Co. says it’s moving all of its US small car production to Mexico…The company is building a new $1.6 billion assembly plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. It will make small cars there starting in 2018.

What can the Pant Suit say about this that would go beyond what the Pant Load will certainly say? And if she did, would WWC people believe her?

On the macro level, our current capitalism has turned to technology to produce much of what is needed with far less human labor input than ever before. That leaves job growth (and job opportunity) in only the low-skilled, low-paid “service” jobs; or in highly advanced, specialized jobs requiring very advanced training/skills/talent.

This means that the dogma of Endless Economic Growth, which we have accepted since the Industrial Revolution, is dead. Along with killing that, we need to kill off the current organizing principle of our economic system, where humans exist solely to fulfill the needs of businesses.

Work helps us find our place in society. It is something that we see as having an inherent value, something that fills a basic human need, similar to food and shelter. But our current economic system no longer recognizes that, and our economy provides little opportunity for fulfilling that basic need for a large portion of American citizens, including many in the WWC.

The idea of government deploying under-utilized labor to build and repair our infrastructure, or to re-tool our country to reduce carbon emissions would be a step that might return the WWC to jobs and a place in society. It would cost a ton.

But the idea that the government would create demand is too socialist for most politicians to accept, despite the fact that the rest of the tools just haven’t worked in 35+ years.

Tell me again why Bernie Sanders was a terrible choice.

Is Ignorance Bliss?

If so, we all must be blissed out. Yesterday, we talked about how the media love to air candidates’ ’’dirty laundry”, rather than concentrate on examining their policies. Today, we ask the question, “Where and how do people get their news?”

The current US population is around 320 million. Of that number, there are 219 million people eligible to vote, of which 145.3 million (66%) are registered to vote in the US. So, how many people are watching the news on ABC, CBS or NBC? In August 2016, the number was 22.5 million. That’s down from 48 million in 1985, and from 24.5 million in 2013.

And how many watch the cable giants Fox News, MSNBC and CNN? Overall, Fox News averaged 2 million total viewers while MSNBC averaged 1.13 million, and CNN trailed with 844,000. That’s four million viewers total, folks.

Taken together, major network and cable TV account for 26.5 million viewers, or 18.2% of registered voters. And we have no data on the overlap between viewers and voters.

How else do the campaigns reach voters? Social media. From the Wall Street Journal:

Of the two candidates, Mr. Trump has the largest following on social media — with 10.3 million Twitter followers and 9.9 million Facebook likes, compared to Mrs. Clinton’s 7.78 million followers and 4.8 likes.

This means that the two campaigns have more direct reach than any individual TV or cable outlet. Clinton has nearly as many Twitter followers as CBS has viewers, while Trump has even more, and also has FIVE times as many Twitter followers as his friends at Fox have viewers. And we can assume that all of those followers are likely voters, not passive viewers.

The campaigns use different strategies. A new Pew study of the campaign websites of Clinton and Trump found that Clinton’s website focused on original news content, while Trump mostly re-posted stories from outside news media. Clinton’s campaign has almost entirely bypassed the news media; instead, they post news stories produced in-house. Trump’s site offers mostly content from articles produced by outside sources like Fox News or CNN.

Pew also surveyed where people get their news:

where-to-get-news-png

As of early 2016, just 20% of US adults get their news from print newspapers. This has fallen from 27% in 2013.
This decrease occurred across all age groups, though the age differences are stark: Only 5% of 18- to 29-year-olds often get news from a print newspaper, whereas about half (48%) of those 65 and older do.
Compared with print, nearly twice as many adults (38%) often get news online, either from news websites/apps (28%), on social media (18%), or both.
TV continues to be the most widely used news platform; 57% of U.S. adults often get TV-based news, either from local TV (46%), cable (31%), network (30%) or some combination of the three.

If you are watching a traditional TV newscast, you are a dinosaur: Fully 70% of those ages 18-29 either prefer, or only use mobile for getting their digital news, compared with 53% of those 30-49, 29% of those 50-64 and just 16% of those 65+.

According to Pew, radio is a more frequently used news source than newspapers. In fact, 13.25 million people listen to Rush Limbaugh, while 12.6 million listen to NPR’s Morning Edition, making both more followed than any of Fox, MSNBC, CNN, CBS, NBC, or ABC.

While there has been an explosion on the digital front, readership (viewership?) is now totally fragmented. This fragmentation is a key to understanding today’s political landscape. Twenty-five years ago, we had a core of news outlets that helped the political parties build a public consensus. That’s no longer the case. Traditional media are at best, just one stream in a whole chaotic flow. Picking and choosing whom to follow (and trust) in this river of chaos isn’t easy. The fundamental questions are:

Does watching a specific news feed inform you, leave you asking questions, or create confusion?
Does the power of images displayed on an individual news feed interfere with understanding the context of a complex situation?
Are news outlets providing users with both education about events, AND a sense of civic responsibility?
How do you know you can “trust” a given news feed?

With so many options for learning about our world and government policy, we could either be on the cusp of a reboot of the Age of Enlightenment, or, the news feed chaos could help bring on another Dark Ages.

Choose wisely.

Where Republicans Are Coming From – Monday Wake Up Edition

(There will be limited blogging until 8/25, as Wrongo and Ms. Right visit Glacier National Park. Keep your tray tables in the upright and locked position while we are away.)

One of Wrongo’s earliest memories, a fragment, was riding in the car with my parents. When I asked where we were going, my mother said: “To elect Mr. Dewey president.” That was 1948. And here is a graphic example of what civic-minded Republicans were doing in Pittsburgh in 1949:

Vote Republican

The photo was taken by Charles “Teenie” Harris, and is in the archives of the Carnegie Museum of Art. It is part of a show of his work that opened on Aug. 13. Pittsburgh was Harris’s home town.

Note the predator’s clutching fingers. Note the long nails that Americans imagined that their Japanese enemies had in WWII. Note the blackface doll carried by the little white girl. While many Blacks in the north still voted for the Party of Lincoln in 1949, this billboard was in many ways a “dog whistle” for the white community of Pittsburgh.

The billboard was part of the Republican Party’s “informed debate” in Pittsburgh’s mayoral election in 1949. Their message was that the streets were not safe for women and children. This, at a moment in American history when we were not suffering lots of crime. In fact, there was a drop in homicides in the immediate post-war period.

There was pushback against the billboard, even among Republicans, in fact, the Pittsburgh Outdoor Advertising Co. refused to honor their contract to put up 100 copies of the image once they saw it. They had to be forced to do so by a local judge, who called the picture “a shocking example of bad taste.” Within a week of the billboard’s appearance, however, the Republicans themselves decided to replace it with a less offensive image. From Blake Gopnick at Artnet:

Back then, at least, a Republican candidate could realize he’d crossed a line and decide to step back from it.

That’s much too much to ask in 2016. Of course today, the Republicans would say the way to make that child safe would be to give her a gun and tell her to lock and load.

So another Monday morning wake-up for the GOP. To help them join the rest of us in the real world, here are Belle and Sebastian with “Olympic Village, 6am”. As we start the second week of the Olympics, the focus shifts to track and field, and so does this video:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

(H/T: LGM)

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 14, 2016

Apparently, President Obama makes a playlist every year for his summer fun time on Martha’s Vineyard. Playlists by politicians are common, and usually are big nothingburgers. Obama has a “Day” playlist and a “Night” list. This year, The Atlantic approves of Mr. Obama’s night playlist, and thinks the day list is a snooze. Guess critics gotta criticize.

Make up your own mind: here is the Obama “Night” playlist.

It was a big week in manufactured news. Trump dominates, but Politico speaks about the Trump campaign thusly: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

What’s bothering people on the [Trump] campaign is that they feel like they’re doing all the right things, but they’re losing every news cycle to Hillary and there’s nothing they can do about it.

It’s doubtful that Clinton has won a news cycle since the convention, but what the Trump campaign is trying to say is that Clinton doesn’t need to win a news cycle as long as Trump “misspeaks” every day. From Karoli Kuns at C&L: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

I think that’s precious, don’t you? Considering that Trump dominates the news for every cycle with his intentional demonization of President Barack Obama and [his] opponent, Hillary Clinton, it’s hard to imagine Republicans wringing their tiny little hands over losing news cycles to her.

Ok, the GOP should keep explaining Trump’s gaffes until America is tired of all the winning.

On to cartoons. Simone Biles gave us a feel-good moment:

COW Americas Great Again

This is the one Burka that Trump likes:

COW Tax Returns

With all of the “resets” and “mansplaining”, the GOP could lose its balance:

COW Balance Beam

This is as understandable as any other explanation by Monsieur big mouth:

COW Trump Backs Up

Trump’s new tax policy is same old, same old. It’s a reconstitution of the standard Republican trickle-down economics that benefits big corporations and a wealthy few:

COW Trump Tax Plan

Pentagon Can’t Account for $6.5 Trillion

Let’s take another break from the cacophony of the presidential campaign to provide some insight into a Pentagon report that the mainstream media barely covered.

The Inspector General (IG) of the US Department of Defense (DoD) issued an audit report on July 26, stating that the DoD cannot account for $6.5 trillion in total funds, of which, $2.8 trillion is “missing” from the last fiscal quarter. According to the IG’s report: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

Army and Defense Finance and Accounting Service [DFAS] Indianapolis personnel did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in third quarter adjustments and $6.5 trillion in year-end adjustments made to Army General Fund [AGF] data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation…We conducted this audit in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards.

The IG also said that the DoD agrees they received these funds, agrees the funds are gone, and claims not to have records of where the money went. This doesn’t mean that the money (or equipment and supplies) was embezzled, but without accounting records, the Pentagon just doesn’t know what happened to it.

This isn’t a new problem. On September 10, 2001, then Sec Def Donald Rumsfeld reported that the DoD could not find $2.3 trillion of our tax dollars. After the next day’s al Qaeda attack, the Pentagon and the Congress lost focus on this problem. From the Fiscal Times:

Starting in 1996, federal agencies were mandated by law to conduct regular financial audits. However, the Pentagon has NEVER complied with that federal law. In 20 years, it has never been able to account for the trillions of dollars in taxpayer funds it has spent. An increasingly impatient Congress has demanded that the Army achieve “audit readiness” for the first time by Sept. 30, 2017, so that lawmakers can get a better handle on military spending.

But the IG report says (pg. 21), that they are not likely to comply:

Until the Army and DFAS Indianapolis correct these control deficiencies, there is considerable risk that the AGF financial statements will be materially misstated and the Army will not achieve audit readiness by the congressionally mandated September 30, 2017, deadline.

If this was your bank, and they agreed that they had received a large deposit from you, agreed that they had no idea where it was, and had no plans to refund it, you would sue and move to another bank.

Since this is the Pentagon, you can’t do either. Congress has been allowing the Pentagon to get away with this travesty for decades. Heads should roll at the Pentagon, but where is the Congressional oversight?

Sorry, this is gross negligence, and it isn’t excused because it is done by our “warrior” class who are only trying to keep us safe.

Think about it, $6.5 trillion lost is the equivalent of embezzling $1 billion a day for 18 years. Another way to look at the issue, is that the Pentagon can’t account for around $86 million in our tax dollars per hour. That means the Pentagon misplaces enough of your tax dollars every day to deliver every American free health care.

Now, they almost certainly didn’t lose or steal that much, but they shouldn’t have so much dough to play with until they learn how to account for what they get.

The people deserve whatever regime they endure.

This should be unendurable.

Why is AARP Funding ALEC?

Yes, you heard that correctly, AARP, the insurance company that styles itself as a champion for senior citizens has become a corporate sponsor of ALEC.

Let’s remember what ALEC is: The name stands for the American Legislative Exchange Council. It operates by offering model legislation to its members, who typically are big corporations and conservative Republican state legislators. It was initially funded by the Koch Brothers.

Its legislative ideas cover practically every area of state government, from education and health to energy, environment and tax policy. State legislators introduce the ALEC-drafted bills in their home states, allowing ALEC’s legislative concepts to metastasize in almost identical laws in statehouses across the country.

ALEC has pushed for:

The repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which has saved Medicare enrollees millions of dollars by closing the Medicare drug benefit “doughnut hole.”
It opposed Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.
It has targeted public pensions, pushing to cap benefits and shift workers toward defined contribution plans, which shifts market risk onto the shoulders of individual workers.
It advocates for privatizing at least a portion of your Social Security taxes.

Governing, a publication for state and local policymakers, says that roughly 1,000 bills based on ALEC language are introduced in an average year, with about 20% getting enacted.

Since 2011, ALEC suffered a backlash, as a number of its corporate sponsors, (more than 100 corporations), pulled their support including Ford, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, among many others. Eric Schmidt of Google told NPR after deciding to leave ALEC:

I think the consensus within the company was that that was some sort of mistake and so we’re trying to not do that in the future.

So why would AARP sign on as a corporate sponsor of ALEC? From the LA Times: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Among the policies that have been promoted by ALEC are several that arguably undermine the interests of seniors and retirees, AARP’s core constituency.

Despite that, the Center for Media and Democracy has learned that AARP joined ALEC, and that it is a named sponsor of the ALEC annual meeting that took place in Indianapolis, Indiana from July 27-29, 2016.

AARP didn’t hide its new financial relationship with ALEC, at least to ALEC legislators. The AARP logo appears in the conference brochure and attendees at the conference were each provided with an AARP branded portable USB power pack as they registered for the event.

Here is AARP’s corporate response when challenged about their new ALEC relationship: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

In 2016, AARP paid a fee to ALEC, which gave us an opportunity to engage with state legislators and advance our members’ priorities from a position of strength at ALEC’s annual meeting.

AARP’s engagement with ALEC is NOT an endorsement of the organization’s policies either past or present. As is the case with other groups AARP engages with, there are many issues and areas where we strongly disagree with ALEC’s position or approach.

So, who in AARP’s marketing department convinced the top brass that they need to “pay” to meet with state legislators? And wouldn’t AARP members be very interested in what AARP’s management asked of state legislators?

From the LA Times:

Yet in arguing that a relationship with ALEC is necessary to “engage” with the legislators affiliated with the group, AARP is taking a different approach from the dozens of corporations that have abandoned ALEC.

Election Myths and Realities – Pant Load Edition

Ian Welsh lays out a probable narrative that the Pant Load will use if he loses:

Republican leaders and billionaires turned on him when he could have won, flocking to Clinton, and there was voter fraud.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Distrust of Government