Free and fair elections

The last time my friend and debate partner and I talked (or maybe emailed) about the upcoming midterm elections I expressed doubts about about their security and accuracy and he didn’t seem all that concerned. If I have that wrong I’m sure he’ll tell me.

Here are a few articles that might change his mind.

All of the posts I’m linking to are by Melissa McEwan of Shakesville. She is being very clear about our need to talk about this, even if at times it feels like we can’t do anything about it.

McEwan and Sarah Kendzior traded tweets discussing a tweeted accusation from the nasty guy who said the Russians didn’t help him – they helped Democrats. The two ladies note that Russia has no reason to help the Dems (who know how to oppose Putin) and every reason to help the GOP and the nasty guy – their desires coincide.

McEwan references a couple articles by Michael Harriot at the Root. In the first he talks about the aggressive efforts to purge blacks from voter rolls. McEwan adds that voter suppression is one reason why the election won’t be fair, even if the Russians behave themselves.

In the second Harriot says there is evidence that Russian hackers did more than try to influence voters in 2016, they likely changed votes. And nobody is talking about it. Sources say that Russian agents could have. But are we to believe these operatives broke into voting systems and merely looked around?

Those bits of news prompted McEwan and a guy who uses the handle BrianWS, who used to be a guest blogger on Shakesville, to ponder a possible scary scenario. Putin’s agents allow Dems to get close to taking the House and carefully plant “evidence” that a Russian agent hacked in favor of a Dem (only need one). All hacking in favor of the GOP is, of course, carefully destroyed.

This planted evidence is pulled out at a strategic time to “prove” that the election results are illegitimate. Future elections are delayed or canceled until we find out how that traitorous Dem who colluded with a foreign power pulled it off.

McEwan says we need to be prepared. But why prepare for something we can’t prevent? McEwan answers that question in a comment to the post. Prepare psychologically. Prepare for a future with reduced rights. Women might tie their tubes to avoid unwanted children they won’t be able to abort. Consider how to live if Russia meddles with infrastructure (lots of news lately about them penetrating power companies). Consider being a safe house for targeted people – would you be able to hide increased purchasing? Overall, consider how your life might change if democracy fails.

The nasty guy issued another tweet saying there is no collusion except by “Crooked Hillary and the Democrats!” He is cranking up a strategy he used in 2016 – floating the idea that the election is rigged. He can pull out that idea if things don’t go his way. As before the claim doesn’t need to be accurate. He only needs to provide a talking point for his base and complicit media.

First step in resistance work: show up

I’m now home again. Over the last several days I was in the St. Louis area. My cousin and I did a couple days of genealogy research (I’ll tell family members more about it when I have time to go over my notes – which may be after my next trip). Then I attended the For Everyone Born Convocation put on by the Reconciling Ministries Network and the Love Your Neighbor Coalition. These groups advocate for full inclusion of LGBT people within the United Methodist Church. You can read my report of Convo on my brother blog here.

He has what he wanted

The nasty guy said he had “solved” the nuclear issue with North Korea. Which makes Hunter of Daily Kos* ask if things are going so well why are North Korean diplomats blowing off meetings with their American counterparts? That diplomatic snubbing seems to be happening along with new efforts in the NK nuclear program.

Why? Because Kim Jung Un already has what he wanted – to stand on a stage with a major power and be treated as an equal.

Since nuclear weapons brought him that honor he has no reason to give them up.

Which is why smarter presidents stage that photo-op after the deal has been signed.



I remember the news a few years ago when someone announced that they had designed a gun that could be made with a 3D printer. This allows anyone to create an untraceable gun. Those are used only for nefarious purposes. At the time the State Department banned the distribution of the blueprint. And the company with the blueprint sued.

The nasty guy’s State Department has settled the case, allowing those plans to be distributed. Melissa McEwan of Shakesville responds:

There is no barrier to owning an untraceable 3D-printed gun — not even cost, as the price of 3D printers continues to drop and many are now cheaper than the price of many guns.

No licensing requirements; no background checks. No problem if you're a convicted domestic abuser. All you need is access to a 3D printer "and enough ABS plastic resin" to create one.

Shiver.

I was one who posted a reply to McEwan’s post:

Part of Hitler's rise to power was the terror inflicted by the brownshirts. If I heard I don't remember if the brownshirts were directed from above or took matters into their own hands. As DT has taken the same trajectory I've wondered who will be his enforcers. I also wonder if these enforcers will be directed from the top or will take matters into their own hands. It probably doesn't matter to DT.

Even if DT doesn't direct these modern American enforcers (beyond Twitter innuendo) he and his minions (and the entire GOP) are making sure these enforcers are well armed.

My second summer trip begins tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be attending a conference where the big topic is whether the United Methodist Church can avoid a schism over how to treat LGBT people and whether we can influence the decision towards being more inclusive. With that as a topic I may manage to do some blogging.

The bells were ringing

I’m home for a few days. My trip across the state to Grand Rapids was a good one.

My performance group gave the opening concert of the national handbell seminar. It went very well and was praised by those attending. It was also the first event of the seminar, so I could enjoy the rest of it. The remainder of the four-day event was taken up by classes and other Midwest handbell groups, all very well done. A nationally known handbell clinician tried his hand at standup comedy – and did a good job. He had all us handbell people laughing. I don’t think I can share much because most of it was handbell in-jokes.

I stayed with my niece, who lives only a couple miles from downtown. She and her partner joined me for supper a couple times. I saw her each morning when I got up as she dashed out the door to her job.

I didn’t post because I mostly ignored the news. I didn’t even check email until Friday evening.

In and out

My travel season is about to start.

I leave in the morning to drive across the state to indulge in my musical passion by attending the National Handbell Seminar. My performing group will be featured Wednesday just after lunch. Classes in all kinds of handbell related stuff and concerts by the finest Midwest ensembles will continue morning through evening until Saturday afternoon.

Then I’m home for a couple days before heading to St. Louis and the Reconciling Ministries Convocation. That will last until Sunday noon. Before it starts I’ll have a couple days with my cousin.

Again I’ll be home for only three days before my third trip, the big vacation.

I probably won’t blog at all during the handbell seminar. I may blog during the reconciling convocation (it’s about acceptance of gay people in the church) or write up a summary when I get home.

Watching commercials

I watch the Oscars and the Tonys because I watch movies and plays. But I don’t watch TV or listen to popular music so the Emmys and Grammys are of no interest to me. The Emmy nominations were announced last week and I ignored it all.

But Bill in Portland, Maine and his Cheers and Jeers column on Daily Kos says there are a few Emmy nominations worth noticing in the category of best commercial. Commercials! That’s one reason why I don’t watch TV! But Bill says three nominations are worth our attention. To make it easy he included them in today’s post. The three are:

Earth, Shot on an iPhone has beautiful scenery and the voice of Carl Sagan, so we know it is important.

The Talk in which black parents prepare their children for the abuse they’ll get in white culture.

In Real Life, which is about bullying.

Used to be

I had to look this one up. An administrative law judge (ALJ) presides over disputes of administrative law – the laws that govern how the various agencies within the government work. Got a dispute with the rules of the Social Security Administration? An ALJ will hear the case. They are members of the executive branch and many are assigned to particular agencies. To be appointed they have to go through a rigorous testing process. According to Wikipedia, “Federal ALJs are the only merit-based judicial corps in the United States.”

Alas, we must change the “are” to “used to be.” The nasty guy issued an executive order that eliminates the testing process. Which means the appointment of an ALJ is now as partisan as the rest of the nasty guy’s administration, ready to defend his bigotry.

Tyranny of the minority

In March of last year I wrote a post that discussed the problems with the Electoral College and how the rural states had more influence on the outcome than highly urban states. Wyoming gets three Electoral College votes and California gets 55. But that gives a Wyoming voter more influence over the outcome than a California voter.

Along with that post I linked to a map (with explanation) created by Neil Freeman at Mental Floss. This map redrew state boundaries so that each state has 6.1 million voters rather than the current state boundaries where Wyoming has a half-million and California has 40 million.

My friend and debate partner responded to that earlier post quite simply: “Gerrymandered!”

After doing presentations on gerrymandering I disagree with my friend. Even highly gerrymandered states follow the national law about districts having equal population.

Ian Millhiser of Think Progress says the same imbalance that affects the Electoral College also affects the Senate. And this imbalance is likely to create a legitimacy crisis for our upper chamber. Millhiser pulls out some statistics to make his point.

Because two-thirds of Latinos live in the five largest states, one white voter is equal to 1.7 Latinos. David Birdsell of Baruch College says by 2040 “About 70% of American are expected to live in 15 states.” Flip it around and 30% of the population lives in 35 states or, as Millhiser puts it, “That means that 30 percent of the population will elect 70 percent of the senators.” But we don’t have to wait until 2040 for the problem to appear.

The Senate imbalance will affect the approval of Brett Kavanaugh, the next Supreme Court nominee.

Currently, Republicans hold 51 votes in the Senate, while the Democratic caucus is only 49 senators. Yet the Democratic “minority” represents nearly 40 million more people than the Republican “majority.”

Indeed, this Republican advantage may already be a permanent feature of the Senate. In 2016, when Senate Republicans blocked Chief Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the 46 Senate Democrats represented 20 million more people than the 54 Republicans. In 2017, when Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to occupy the same Supreme Court seat, the 45 senators who opposed Gorsuch represented more than 25 million more people than the senators who supported him.
...
A president who [didn't get a majority of votes] is poised to fill a second seat on the Supreme Court, despite the fact that his party represents only a minority of the country in the Senate. One of those seats, moreover, was only available for him to fill because the party that represents only a minority of the nation stole it from a president who was elected twice.

And if Kavanaugh gets to the Supreme Court, he is likely to put an even bigger thumb on America’s electoral scales, making it even harder for a majority of voters to remove the GOP from power.

Clothes make the character

I visited the Detroit Institute of Arts today for their special exhibit Star Wars, the Power of Costume. The exhibit shows many costumes from the George Lucas private collection (or maybe a Lucas museum somewhere). It also includes concept art, so we sometimes see the evolution of a costume. The audio guide also offered explanations. Overall, an enjoyable show, especially for someone who has enjoyed (most of) the movies.

The commentary talked about the job of a costume – help explain or identify character traits in three seconds. To do that the costume draws on cultural signals – Darth Vader dresses in black because he is evil. Princess Leia dresses in white because she is a good person. But one must be careful. For example, the people who reside in the desert must wear clothes that are appropriate for the desert – but how much is the costume to evoke Arab dress and is the cultural baggage appropriate for the character?

There were many costumes of ambassadors, court officials, and royalty. How to make a royal person look royal? Using a European style crown isn’t going to work. So the costume team looked at the dress of dignitaries from around the world. That headdress is Mongolian, this detail is Japanese, that dress is modeled on Queen Elizabeth I, etc. We get the sense of royalty even if we can’t place what detail came from which culture. That cultural mishmash wasn’t confined to the royals – Vader’s helmet has Samurai influences (sheesh, the thirteen steps to get Vader into his costume had to be written out).

We see Chewie’s costume and told about the 15 pounds of yak hair that went into it. After the first three movies a cooling system was added. In the display Han is standing beside him. Harrison Ford looked at what he was to wear in the first movie and demanded the costume department remove the Peter Pan collar (I had to look it up) and use something simpler. Lucas did not comment. The costume for C-3PO is also there. He was modeled on the malevolent female robot from the silent era movie Metropolis. The actor inside didn’t care much for the costume but loved the caracter.

One display shows characters about to leap into a light saber battle. The commentary talked about how the costumes needed to be constructed so the actor could move uninhibited. The fighting costume for Darth Maul was designed so when he spun about the tunic would flare into a circle. The Jedi costume was to evoke their simple lifestyle such as that of a Buddhist, though it took cues from the Japanese kimono. And Yoda’s costume is a miniature of what the humans wore.

Another display was of the military costumes. The uniforms of the Empire military intentionally mimicked Nazi uniforms (only 32 years before the first movie). The orange of the Tie Fighters were modeled on the orange jumpsuits early astronauts wore. As for the Storm Troopers, their armor looked plastic (because it was), which implied they were all identical, they didn’t think for themselves, and an endless supply could be easily manufactured.

A display towards the end of the tour was many of the outfits Padme Amidala wore in the prequel trilogy. She had the largest number of different costumes and the most sumptuous, suitable for royalty in a wide variety of situations, including a picnic and wedding. Some were amazingly elaborate requiring hours of handwork.

The exhibit will be at the DIA until the end of September.

Let them enforce it

A couple storys about the judicial branch of our government in the nasty guy era.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville has been doing a daily list of what the nasty guy and his minions have been doing to undermine democracy. The list is always long. She has now started a daily list of what the nasty guy and his minions are doing in their war against immigrants. This second list is more than half the length of the first.

In yesterday’s list of actions against immigrants she linked to two articles about the court that ruled that children under 5 who were taken from their parents need to be reunited by today. There are reports of 100 such children. One of these articles say that Secretary Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services assured us the goal of reuniting all these little kids would be met – only to immediately backtrack. He did so because someone in the gov’t (maybe not Azar) said they’ve lost track of 20% of the parents.

In the second article the ACLU says less than half of these children will be reunited by today. There has also been talk of the gov’t people whining about how hard the task is and that they need extra time.

McEwan’s commenters add to the story:

donnakh reminds us this family separation process is intended as punishment. “There was not any way to keep track of the families in place because they never wanted to.”

Zardeenah says the key phrase might be “now let them enforce it.” I’ll expand on that. The NPR program Radiolab did a series More Perfect about the Supreme Court. One struggle early in our nation’s history is what happens when the Supremes hand down a ruling. The courts don’t have any police force of their own, so can’t go after anyone who disregards what they say. The Supremes have power because the other two branches of government say they have power. The President and Congress have consistently done what the Supremes required.

That power was made clear in the modern era when in 2000 the Supremes ruled for G. W. Bush to take the presidency. Al Gore’s concession speech was described as the best of his candidacy. He said he disagreed with the Supremes, but respected and understood the value of the court in a democracy. He would not continue to battle their decision.

So now we have a federal court that has issued a demand to the nasty guy, a demand he has no intention to fulfill and has made sure it is very difficult to fulfill. This leaves two paths, neither is good.

The first path, of which we’ve already seen evidence, is for the gov’t officials to whine about how hard it is to comply and the court extending the deadline. More whining could extend it some more. This could go on indefinitely. The result is a court order that is not followed.

The second path is the court holds firm and starts saying the slow response is contempt of court. The reply from the nasty guy and his minions is essentially, yes, you get it – we have contempt for the court. Want us to return those kids? How are you going to enforce it? Congress certainly won’t.

Either path is a big step in rendering the courts meaningless.

On to the other big story about courts in the nasty guy era.

The news, of course, has lots of stories about Brett Kavanaugh being nominated for the Supreme Court. All the progressive news sites will tell you how horrible he will be to progressive ideas and causes.

McEwan discusses another aspect to this appointment, of which I’ve heard rumors. Reportedly the nasty guy convinced Justice Anthony Kennedy to retire by assuring Kennedy his legacy would be protected. This campaign reportedly began last November when Kavanaugh and four others (used as cover) were added to the list of potential nominees. Yeah, that means the nasty guy made his choice last November and the rest was just show. It also means the nasty guy actively influenced the court.

Though Kennedy has sided with progressives in key issues over the years, most important to us being the ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, he was not a progressive nor even a centrist. He was just the most moderate of the conservatives. I think it was Nina Totenburg of NPR who noted that in the 2017-2018 court season there were no 5-4 votes in favor of progressives with Kennedy as that swing voter.

Each of the nine justices has a few clerks who work for them for a year or two. It gives law school graduates a shiny star to put on their resumes. Of course, justices choose clerks who match their own progressive/conservative leanings. One of Kennedy’s former clerks is – Brett Kavanaugh. Reportedly Kavanaugh made such a personal impression on Kennedy that the mention of the former clerk as a replacement convinced the justice to retire.

I’ve also heard that all four of the finalists served as clerks for Kennedy.

So we look for one more thing that set Kavanaugh apart: Kavanaugh has written that the president should not be the subject of a criminal investigation while in office. Think the president did something criminal? Impeach him. But otherwise don’t investigate him.

Though it is obvious, I’ll spell it out anyway. While he is in office this president is being investigated for criminal offenses associated with his collusion with Russia. Of course, he would be delighted with a justice who believes it is wrong to investigate the president.

But that opinion is in conflict with what Kavanaugh thought twenty years ago. Then he was a part of Ken Starr’s special investigation into President Bill Clinton.

In one story the judiciary is made irrelevant. In the other the judiciary becomes an enabler of a despot. And democracy gets whacked upside the head.

Acceptance, kindness, respect, and love

This afternoon I went to see the movie Won’t You Be My Neighbor? With a title like that it can only be a documentary of Fred Rogers, of the famous Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. And indeed it is.

We see how Rogers gets into television before going off to seminary, then getting back into TV to start his show. We meet the puppets, Daniel (sometimes Rogers’ alter-ego, able to say things the adult can’t), King Friday, and the rest. And we see how Rogers interacts with kids.

After Robert Kennedy’s assassination Daniel asks what that word means. When the space shuttle blows up with a teacher on board Rogers takes up the issue. When Superman becomes popular and kids are hurt playing with Superman capes he tackles the difference between real and make-believe. Public Television barely gets started when a senator wants to defund it and Rogers’ testimony convinces him otherwise. He helped kids cope and made sure he could continue to do that.

One of the recurring characters of the TV series was Officer Clemmons, a black police officer. At a time when black children were being chased out of public swimming pools Rogers invited Officer Clemmons to share his wading pool (only big enough for their feet) and share a towel when they were done. In this movie we learn another aspect of Officer Clemmons – Francois Clemmons, who played the officer, is gay. And in the early 1970s that could not be mentioned on air. Clemmons married, which was a disaster. A while later (perhaps a few years later) Rogers sang a song while Clemmons was there, the song was about I love you as you are. Clemmons realized a man is telling me he loves me, which his father and step father never did, and he loves me knowing I’m gay and he’s okay with that, he loves the gay part too.

Back to the way he treated kids. He respected them. He cared about them. He focused on the child in front of him. And he listened to what the child had to say.

I didn’t watch the show growing up, partly because by the time it would have been available where I lived I would have been in high school or college. I did see an occasional episode over the years, such as when he visited a musician in the neighborhood. Even so, I heard of his reputation – which was considerable.

Fred Rogers and his display of acceptance and kindness is something sorely needed at a time when the leader of the country practices cruelty and his party and voters approve. This was mentioned briefly – what would Rogers say and do about today? I’ll paraphrase a line near the end (only because I can’t remember the original wording) – Don’t ask what Mister Rogers would do. Ask what you will do.

Hillary’s emails were covered for 600 days, and …

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville has a post about the nasty guy’s continued war on immigrants. This post describes five aspects of that war.

* The Citizenship and Immigration Services is up and running to identify naturalized citizens suspected of fraudulently applying for citizenship with the intention of revoking that citizenship.

* The Army is discharging immigrants who signed up both because they love America and because the Army was offering a path to citizenship.

* The nasty guy’s administration is in a “chaotic scramble” to reunite immigrant children who had been taken from their parents in an attempt to comply with a court order. McEwan adds:

It's a pretty pointed commentary on the fact that the Trump Regime never, ever, had any intention of reuniting families. And, to be frank, probably still doesn't. I highly doubt they are "scrambling." More like biding their time, waiting for some other atrocity to divert attention away from this one.

* The nasty guy will likely again lower the limit of the number of refugees allowed in the country next year. It will likely be less than a quarter than what it was in Obama’s last year.

* Yeah, some children have been reunited with their parents – in detention centers. Where conditions are awful. McEwan added a comment to this aspect, though I think her words apply to the whole post:

Again, this deserves sustained media attention, all day every day. I recall the political press covering Hillary Clinton's fucking email virtually every single day for 600 consecutive days, and I wonder where is that dedicated, tenacious energy when it comes to the horrors being perpetrated at the southern border.

Yes, there were lots of protests held last Saturday about the treatment of immigrants. Here are some pictures.



A phrase about civility has been circulating. I saw it on a post about how the nasty guy insulted Rep. Maxine Waters and Sen. Elizabeth Warren with some quite derogatory language. The phrase:

Trump supporters are afraid they will treated the way they treat minorities.

And so they demand civility from us.



The Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan report that agreed with the intelligence community that (as Caroline O. summarizes and McEwan explains)…

“1) Russia interfered; 2) Putin approved it; & 3) The goal was to sow chaos & help Trump's election chances." Because if the Republicans are the Senate Intelligence Committee are finally ready to concede what we all knew a year and a half ago, that means they no longer fear any consequences for their party or their president.

And for something fun. Dublin Bus arranged to have some dads pick up their LGBTQ children and take them to the Dublin Pride festivities. The youth didn’t know Dad was coming – or what he would be wearing. This is so wonderful for many of us who discovered coming out meant rejection.

The safest country in the world

The intrepid teens, survivors of a mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, have released the schedule of their July tour through Texas to Nevada and nearby states. Along the way they will register voters and urge them to vote. They also have a website with their ten legislative demands.

1. Fund gun violence research. A couple decades ago Congress banned the CDC from doing such research. Restart it.

2. Eliminate absurd restrictions on the ATF, including allowing them to digitize records.

3. Universal background checks.

4. High-capacity magazine ban.

5. Limit high-powered weapons.

6. Fund intervention programs, those that have evidence-based violence reduction strategies.

7. Extreme risk protection orders. Remove guns from a person in crisis.

8. Disarm all domestic abusers.

9. Gun trafficking. There are no federal laws to prevent criminal networks from flooding a community with guns.

10. Safe storage and mandatory theft reporting. An estimated 4.6 million children live in homes with unsecured guns.

David Hogg, one of those Parkland teens, wrote an editorial for Rolling Stone. Here’s a bit of it. The nasty guy said at this years NRA convention that the Second Amendment is under siege. Hogg replies:

By this line of reasoning, the only way to keep your family safe is to turn your house into an armory. The sad part is, that messaging works: Stockpiling has increased by about one hundred million guns in the past decade. If more guns made us safer, the United States, with over 340 million guns – more than the total population of the U.S. – would be the safest country in the world. But the President has it all mixed up; the Second Amendment has us under siege.
…
We are nothing but school kids pitted against the most powerful lobby in the country. The NRA and politicians that are funded by them are being exposed; the young people can see through the lies that we’ve been force-fed for years.

Safety of the Canadian Wall

There’s a Twitter thread with the tag #SecondCivilWarLetters. They are as if the writer is taking a brief moment out from war to write to family back home. The general tone matches a t-shirt I saw recently, “The Sarcasm is Strong in This One.” A few of my favorites:

Dearest,
I write to you from the safety of the Canadian Wall. It’s not nearly as fortified as I had imagined. It stands 3 feet high and is comprised mostly of science-based learning and kindness. They expect it to hold for years against the red hats.

The gay cake cannon has the red hats retreating in fear but food coloring at desperate levels. Send glitter.

Dearest wife,
Quick thinking saved my platoon today from the Red Hats as we erected a barrier out of Hillary’s e-mails, since they still can’t seem to get over them. War is Hell.

I have disguised myself as white privilege, and the Red Hats cannot bring themselves to acknowledge my existence.

Our foe confounds us. Though they claim to love both the Constitution and the Bible, they seem to have not read either. And don’t get me started on how they treat people actually named Jesus.

Personal assets help one get ahead

I’m still reading magazines I kept while cleaning out Dad’s house. Every so often one has something worth sharing. The one I just finished is Washington Monthly for July/Aug 2012, just before Obama was re-elected. This edition featured a series of articles on the financial health of middle class America. This came out only four years after the Great Recession, which had a huge impact on the middle class, though not the only impact. I’ll describe some of the articles briefly.

Since about 1980 the middle class has been squeezed by two things. First was wages barely keeping up with inflation. But the middle class wanted to maintain their middle class living, so financed it with debt. Which leads to the second thing, predatory debt practices. The most common of these, though far from the only one, was high interest rates on credit cards.

The next article was about the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with the hope that Congress would let it live long enough to be effective. Since this article was written in 2012 the CFPB has done marvelous work – which is why the nasty guy is doing all he can to make it ineffective.

Stakeholder accounts are the idea that everyone at birth gets a savings account with money put in it by the government. The account owner can withdraw at 18 for college or training expenses or perhaps at 22 to start a business.

There has been a sharp drop in entrepreneurship, of people starting their own businesses. We’ve heard the GOP talk of these small businesses creating most of the jobs in the economy. But small businesses face two big problems. First, the consolidation of banks, making less money available to start a small business. Second, since 1980 there has been little enforcement of anti-monopoly laws. Most areas where a person might start a business, from farming to hardware stores, a behemoth already sits in the way.

Studies have shown when a young person has some sort of personal assets (such as a bank account) that person is more likely to attend college. There are suggestions for ways to make that happen.

With college so expensive there is a growing trend to give college credit for things a person already knows. This is no longer about diploma mills.

A person with a solar panel on his house has a way of generating money. Corporate energy companies are trying to prevent that.

And six years later these problems still exist and the ideas have not been implemented.

I understand the reason for that. Because of ranking, the GOP and its backers want us to be poor and do not want us to have a way to better ourselves. I thought of that while reading each articles in the series.

Hire right thinking employees

Reporter Jim DeBrosse has a new book out, See No Evil, The JFK Assassination and the U.S. Media. Short summary of JFK’s death: DeBrosse doesn’t believe the Warren Commission Report. It is the second part of the title that interests me, especially since I’ve discussed how bad the media’s coverage of the nasty guy has been.

David Akadjian of Daily Kos talked to DeBrosse. This is a bit of what they discussed. Akadjian first:

One of the things I find most interesting about your book is that there are some great critiques of corporate media and how it protects the status quo. How does establishment media work, and what’s an example from JFK’s assassination?

Debrosse responds:

I borrowed my critique mostly from the seminal book *Manufacturing Consent* by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. The authors point out that the owners of corporate media don’t have to intervene directly in the stories that their reporters and editors produce. Instead, the owners hire “right thinking” employees who mostly share their views and then apply the more subtle workplace pressures that can lead to promotion or demotion within the company. On top of that, the authors point out, elite journalists often travel in the same social circles and share the same interests as those in power.

Reporters who wanted to pursue the truth in the JFK case often had to leave their mainstream newspapers and magazines and work for themselves.

My explanation (derived from years of writing this blog) of how that applies to modern media:

The modern GOP is heavily financed by corporate leaders who have an attitude of however I want to make my money is my business and nobody should be able to stop me (and right now only the federal government and its regulations is the only force strong enough to stop them).

Media has many of this type of corporate leader.

The nasty guy won on a bigoted platform, drawing the bigoted voters. Those bigots include racists and misogynists. That pool of voters includes many corporate leaders in media. They like all the bigoted things the nasty guy says, they want all the bigoted policies he implements. That includes whoever owns the New York Times and Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post.

These media leaders then hire reporters who are biased as they are or apply workplace pressures to uphold their biases.

An example is NPR. I get most of my mainstream news through them. But I’m also frequently annoyed with them trying to balance viewpoints. Even when they are critical of conservatives they rarely go into how destructive those conservative views are to democracy. And then last October, Michael Oreskes, head of news at NPR, resigned because of complaints of sexual harassment. A misogynist at the head of news definitely influenced how NPR covered the first female candidate for president. And others like him influence how the nasty guy is portrayed to the public. They want what he is selling. Who needs democracy?