Who Are We Fighting For?

The method of promoting propaganda and its purpose

On this Independence Day, We the People continue to live under the spell of the oligarchs. They set the agenda--an agenda that keeps all of the wealth and power in the hands of the ruling class--and we fight battles against our fellow Americans to benefit a preferred political party.

In our revolt against England, we fought against oligarchs to create a nation that would respect and uphold the rights of the individual, the citizen. Now we are fighting for the oligarchy to make sure that our fellow Americans do not have too much freedom or too much power.

If you are concerned about gun violence and mass shootings, left wing politicians will tell you that we need to ban certain kinds of guns, even though millions of your fellow Americans are intelligent and responsible enough to own these firearms safely. Taking a position on this issue will affect the balance of political power between politicians who support more gun regulations and those who oppose it but it does little to actually improve public safety. Expanding background checks and requiring gun safety training for gun owners would do much more and would not deprive your fellow Americans of owning firearms they enjoy owning and shooting.

If you are concerned about election integrity, right wing politicians will tell you that we need to require photo IDs, closing polling places, reduce voting hours and other measures that limit eligible voters' access to the polls. But your fellow Americans are not committing voter fraud in numbers large enough to be a concern. Eliminating electronic voting machines, outlawing gerrymandering and expanding access to the polls would make elections much more accurate and will allow your fellow Americans to hold their politicians accountable for crimes, corruption and bad policies instead of allowing them to get away with actions that are destructive to our society.

We should put our efforts toward strengthening ethics rules rules for politicians so they can't get away with conflicts of interest and corruption. We should fight to get money out of politics so that the wealthy will not be able to buy our politicians to serve the narrow interests of the few. These things would limit the power and influence of politicians and the ruling class, therefore you will never be advised to focus on them by any politician or establishment media news host. You would also get agreement on how to address these problems from the vast majority of your fellow Americans. The last thing that politicians and the ruling class want is a united electorate that is working together to strengthen our democracy, which would shift the balance of power from the greedy oligarchs who are driving our country into the ground, to the citizens, who would prefer a more just society and system of government.

We live in a society where the loudest, most extreme and, frankly, stupidest people and opinions get amplified and promoted. It is good for ratings, clicks and increased viewership/listenership but it creates a false image of what our country is like and what the citizens want. If you get your information from media sources that have advertisers, you can be certain that ratings and advertising dollars drive the content of their "news" more than factuality or the relevance of the information do.

Your fellow Americans are not trying to destroy our country or dramatically alter your way of life. They are not trying to change our system of government to communism. This is hyperbolic nonsense being promoted by the ruling class to keep the country divided. While some people are doing outrageous things or promoting dangerous ideas, the vast majority of Americans reject these things. We do not want to live in a country with discrimination or a country that is unjust. But our devotion to political parties and ideologies will ensure that we remain in such a country.

~R. Charan Pagan
information systems technologist, musician, writer, filmmaker
Los Angeles, CA 90017
http://www.reclaimingourbirthright.blogspot.com/

Blagojevich is Trump's Middle Finger

Trump's salute to the American people

Trump in many ways had the potential to be the best president in modern times. He had no allegiances with the Democratic or Republican Parties and no duty to serve them or their corporate masters. Trump could have pursued an agenda that served the interests of the American people and, having done so, he would have been a beloved president. But Trump has no vision and therefore could only continue on the path of grift and corruption that he had been following his entire adult life.

During the campaign, Trump promised to further an agenda that would serve the American people: to
'drain the swamp', to institute term limits for US Congress (within the first 100 days), to alter the 14th Amendment, to repeal the carried interest tax loophole, to end our foreign wars, to rebuild the country's crumbling infrastructure and to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with a better and more affordable health care system. All of these issues were forgotten or made worse--along with many others--once Trump became president and he instead became a tool of the Republican Party. Like Ronald McDonald selling crappy burgers for the McDonald's corporation, Trump is the clown who is shamelessly selling the crappiest Republican policies to the electorate. And those policies are more unhealthy for the American people than Mickey-D's burgers.


Trump's only real "accomplishment" so far has been appointing judges determined to be unqualified  by the American Bar Association to the federal bench. When a powerful corporation destroys your life or kills members of your family and you find that you are powerless to hold them accountable, you will understand the dangerousness of these extreme right-wing judges having control over our lives. You can research the infamous "frozen trucker" case in which the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch argued that a company was justified in firing a truck driver because he did not stay with his broken-down rig, even though it was understood that the driver could have frozen to death had he done so.

By far, the worst of Trump's betrayals was his hollow promise to fix our broken election system. In his defense, he reversed his position on that campaign promise after he won the Republican primary and before the general election had taken place. People voted for him anyway. (I believe that Trump's reversal was a signal to the Republican Party and to all of the establishment politicians in Washington, DC that he would not upset the rigged system that they have created for themselves.) But who could consider themselves to be a patriot, knowing that our election system is broken and having the power to fix it when they simply choose not to? What's worse is that Trump and the Republican and Democratic Parties are actively working to undermine our democracy. Perhaps we should just kiss our democracy goodbye? Unless citizens find the courage and intelligence to protect our democracy from the assaults of politicians, it will not remain intact. Then we will never be able to get horrible politicians out of office.

Throughout the country, politicians are implementing new voting systems that are inadequate, faulty, hackable, subject to manipulation and  that lack transparency. (This is not at Donald Trump's direction, it is a manifestation of the rot in government that has been going on for decades, if not since the founding of the country.) Billions of tax dollars are being spent to introduce new voting machines that will never be able to verify a single voter's intent. Our election results will have to be taken completely on faith as there will be no way to determine if they are accurate or not.

Since our 2020 election is likely to occur while we are still fighting a pandemic, using the touchscreen voting devices that are being purchased will be extremely risky and could spread the disease. There will be a lot of people demanding vote-by-mail options. Do you know that when you mail in your ballot, the poll worker who receives it may be able to see your votes and they can determine that the signature on your ballot is fraudulent? Your vote can be thrown in the trash by a poll worker who is not an expert in handwriting and may have a bias regarding the outcome of the election. In most cases, when a person has their vote nullified, they will never even know that their vote was not counted.

There are a lot of things that need to be fixed with our election systems and processes but very few politicians are concerned with fixing the problems. It is up to citizens to rescue our democracy but we seem to be content with watching it erode away. Perhaps if Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity told their audiences that they should be concerned for our democracy, they would be. But the corporate media is not concerned about our democracy either. The most we get from them is reporting on election systems after they have failed and it is too late to do anything about it. If only we could find someone in a $3,000 suit with a television studio and a $300 haircut to deliver the message that our democracy is important, people might listen.

For all of Trump's talk about voter fraud, he himself committed voter fraud by registering and voting in the state of Florida, where he does not have a legal residence.

And while many politicians are actively working to undermine our democracy, that just isn't enough for Trump. He wants to relish in his broken promise to fix our elections by rubbing his lies in our faces.

Click the image for a more complete list

Rod Blagojevich was the Democratic governor of Illinois in 2008. He was caught trying to personally benefit from Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat after Obama won the presidency. It was a sick display of corruption for personal benefit and an assault on our democracy. Trump, being a bird of that feather naturally commuted Blagojevich sentence and he was released from prison six years early. Dinesh D'souza is another disgusting, corrupt political creature. D'souza, a right-wing political pundit and provocateur, manipulated campaign contributions--using strawman donors--in an attempt to evade campaign finance laws and donate more than the allowable limits to candidates; breaking the law to buy politicians and weaponize them against the interests of We the People. Trump pardoned D'souza. Both acts were a huge middle finger to US citizens, just like refusing to release his tax returns and refusing to divest from his company were. What other message could be intended???

Trump's middle finger was a clear signal to many people after he passed his tax overhaul scam as well. It was sold to the American people as a tax cut for the middle class that would not benefit the wealthy. In reality, those making more than $2 million per year stand to receive 83% of the tax benefits with only 47% of middle class workers seeing a decrease in their taxes. Following how the tax scam was negotiated was even more telling than seeing the results of it. It was decided in the beginning that the wealth limits for the inheritance tax would be doubled and  the tax subsidies for private jet owners would remain in place. The carried interest tax loophole that Trump promised to eliminate during the campaign also remained in the tax code, benefiting ultra-wealthy private equity executives.

After protecting all of the tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and eliminating some of their tax obligations, then the administration looked at how middle class Americans would be affected. The effect of the tax law could not impact revenues by more than $150 billion per year or it could not be passed under reconciliation, which requires just 50 votes, rather than 60 in the Senate. So the deductions that police officers, teachers and other workers could use were capped to prevent too much tax money being returned to working people.

The standard deduction amount was increased which eliminated the need for many people to itemize their deductions. That simplified tax filing for many people and may have won them over, even if they didn't save any money on their taxes or even if they had to pay a bit more.

The tax benefits for the middle class are also temporary. They will expire after eight years. The tax benefits for the ultra-wealthy and corporations are there forever.

The best way to sum up Trump's betrayal of the working class in our country is with the phrase "promises plus". Trump coined this phrase to publicly celebrate with his ruling class cronies the campaign promises that were implied during the campaign but that Trump could never have spoken out loud because it would have cost him votes and he would never have been elected. The preservation of the carried interest tax loophole and private jet tax deductions are "promises plus". Doubling the threshold on the inheritance tax is "promises plus". "Promises plus" is allowing corporations to dump more toxic chemicals in waterways so they will make more profits, even if it makes the people in the community sick. It's dropping more bombs and killing more innocent people so that the Department of Defense checks (our tax dollars) keep rolling in. It's locking up anyone law enforcement agencies can get their hands on so that the private prison facilities keep making billions in profit (our tax dollars). Attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement law and kicking 37 million people off their health care plans was an attempt at "promises plus" that luckily failed. Trump also failed to pass his initial budget that included deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare, something he promised not to do during the campaign.

Trump has abandoned any pretense of furthering an agenda to benefit the American people. Will the American people ever demand that politicians work toward an agenda that serves our interests? Continuing to fight for the agendas that serve the ruling class isn't going to get us anywhere. But, I guess with the snide nicknames, ripped-up speeches and insults being hurled about, Washington, DC produces television as compelling as the sleaziest soap opera. What could better placate a society raised on reality TV?

AFTERWARD

If you do not know what an overvote is, or what an undervote is, or a spoiled ballot or if you don't know what caging lists or purge lists are, then it is imperative that you learn these terms and make sure they are not tactics being used to rig elections in your state. If you know that some of our electronic voting machines are made by white collar criminals and foreigners, that some still run on Windows 95 or that they are manufactured in countries who do not care about US elections, or worse, would enjoy tampering with our elections, I would hope that you find these issues to be of upmost priority to address. And the vast majority of your fellow citizens will agree with you on what measures should be taken. This is the reason why the ruling class never tells us to worry about our elections. They do not want the American people standing together to fix the real problems facing our country.

If you want to know about how politicians are stealing our democracy, read any of Greg Palast's books, especially "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" (or watch the documentary with the same title), listen to the Bradcast and read the Bradblog and follow attorney and citizen activist Jennifer Cohen on Twitter (@jennycohn1).

We should all be demanding hand-marked paper ballots that are hand-counted in a process that can be overseen by the public. Anything less is an erosion of our democracy. Why should we stand for it? Write to your secretary of state, governor and state legislators to demand the gold standard of voting systems: paper.

We should also be demanding the right to cast multiple votes. People should be allowed to vote for any candidate that is acceptable to them. The two-party system resists this because it would prevent them from holding citizens over a barrel and forcing them to vote for a lesser-of-two-evils candidate, who will continue to serve the oligarchy at the expense of the American people.

If We the People focus on an agenda that serves our interests, we could reclaim our birthright: a country of our own. And we would finally have independence and autonomy.

Happy Fourth of July!

Breaking Down Obamacare, Or: Everything You Wanted to Know About the ACA but the Inept News Media was too Incompetent to Tell You

As per usual, partisan differences leave citizens caught in the middle.

Last week, the House passed a bill to repeal Obamacare. The Congressional Budget Office was unable to evaluate the bill so it is unclear how many people will be negatively impacted if the bill in its current form passes the Senate and is signed into law.

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act#

While Obamacare has problems. repealing it, absent any comparable replacement, would be a disaster. This is because Obamacare remedies some major flaws in the health care system. And although our health care crisis did not cause the economic collapse of 2008, it has been a major factor in recovering from what was the deepest recession since the Great Depression. Continue reading for the full breakdown...

I. Funding

Tax Increase On the Wealthy

In my opinion, the biggest flaw of Obamacare is that the subsidies that allow poor and middle class Americans to afford health insurance is partly funded by taxes paid by wealthy people (through taxes on Cadillac health care plans, which is currently delayed, and other taxes as well as cost savings). This means that the law will always be a target for repeal because wealthy people, like the rest of us, generally want their taxes to be as low as possible. [A brief history: the wealthy people of today succeeded in part due to the opportunities afforded our generations by the generations of wealthy
people before us. We all for the most part succeeded because of their generosity, vision and patriotism. We were able to build a country that had the best school system in the world. We had the best infrastructure in the world. Healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture; we were Number One at just about everything. But the wealthy people of today don't want to pay the kinds of taxes that can sustain what we once had and what we once were. Their taxes have been radically reduced over the past few decades, leaving the middle class with the burden of making up the gap while losing services due to lack of funding.]

The political influence of today's wealthy people in our politics is so substantial that Republican politicians have spent over $50 million of our tax dollars holding votes on bills to repeal the ACA. The repeal bills never had any hope of being signed into law, so you and I and everyone we know paid $50 million for Republican politicians to declare to their wealthy campaign donors that they were strongly against Obamacare. It was simply a way of ensuring that they would be showered with campaign cash in upcoming elections. When it comes to health care, Republicans have refused to lead, follow or even get out of the way.

II. Performance

State-by-State Variances
Obamacare's performance differed widely by state. States like Kentucky and California that embraced the law, expanded Medicare and set up state-wide insurance exchanges saw a large decrease in the rates of uninsured citizens and a reduction in the rate of rise of insurance premiums. Other states have experienced less success. Nationwide, Obamacare helped to slow the rate of increase to insurance premiums. People who got their health insurance from their employers, rather than through Obamacare, seemed to enjoy a slight reduction in actual health care costs.

Source: http://www.consumerreports.org/personal-bankruptcy/
how-the-aca-drove-down-personal-bankruptcy/

Personal Bankruptcies
One of Obamacare's largest positive impacts was effectuating an astonishing 50 percent decrease in personal bankruptcies. While Obamacare is not likely to be the only reason for the reduction in bankruptcies, experts believe that it is likely to have been the largest driver of that trend. When people got access to affordable health care, they were able to get needed medical treatment and pay their other essential bills. Unfortunately, I don't know how to evaluate the broader economic impact of preventing nearly 800,000 bankruptcies in the country but it would almost certainly mean a reduction in dependency on government services like food stamps and welfare. It would also mean avoiding a negative impact on productivity and our GDP. It certainly seems like fewer bankruptcies would mean a stronger economy overall.

III. Republican Attacks

Repeal Votes
While Republicans have attempted to say that Obamacare is collapsing under its own weight, the truth is that they have made every imaginable attempt to undermine the law. Had Republicans not wasted $50 million voting on bills that aimed to repeal it, that money could have been used to help solve deficiencies with the law or to fund more subsidies for those who cannot afford their insurance premiums.

Advising to Pay Penalties
When the law first passed, Republican politicians and pundits recommended that their constituents and followers pay the fine and get nothing rather than buy insurance through the ACA and actually have health insurance. This was not because they thought it would be the better choice for the individual. It instead was another tactic to undermine the law. They knew that the more people that signed up, the more likely it would succeed. There is something very disgusting about wealthy people who have great health care trying to achieve their political ends by telling people to forego health care coverage.

De-funded Risk Corridors

The fatal blow to Obamacare may have been delivered by Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), when he snuck an amendment into an unrelated bill that de-funded the risk corridors. There is some debate about this issue so I will break it down as I understand it: the risk corridors were set up to make sure that insurance companies didn't lose money by offering coverage to poor and sick people. In the past, those people simply would not be able to secure insurance coverage for themselves so the risk corridors were a way of bringing insurance companies into the program and to allow the poorest and sickest among us to finally get health care.

Democrats said that the risk corridors were going to be self-funded. Meaning that if Highmark made $5 million of net profit in the exchange selling policies to people in California and Humana lost $1 million selling policies to people in New Jersey, Highmark would share some of their profits with Humana so that Humana would not lose money by participating in the exchange. The amendment required that the risk corridors be self-funded, as the Democrats said they would be. This means that the government could not step in with money from other programs to pay the insurance companies if there was not enough money in the risk corridors to compensate all of the losses. In the first few years of the law's existence, it is extremely difficult for insurance companies to know how much to charge customers for premiums because there was no way of knowing how many sick people and how many healthier people would be signing up. Requiring that the risk corridors be self-funded meant that if the insurance companies were incorrect about their cost estimates, they would lose money in the exchange and they may not get compensated. [FYI: all of these insurance companies are incredibly profitable overall, but the challenge of figuring out how to make a profit by offering insurance to poor people is obviously difficult.]

Ramming it Down
Republicans said that Democrats had rammed the ACA down American's throats. This was a way of reinforcing a negative opinion of the law with citizens but it was never really true. Democrats held over 30 bipartisan hearings and allowed dozens of amendments to the law, in a process that took fourteen months. In the end, it passed with no Republican votes but the Republicans' fingerprints were all over it. Democrats started with the compromise position of using two conservative principles as the foundation of the law: the individual mandate and the private insurance exchange. Republicans railed against the individual mandate, even though it was their own invention. [Once, while reading Vultures Picnic by Greg Palast, I encountered a passage that said that the Koch brothers came up with cap-and-trade as a way of using free market constructs to get corporations to pay for the environmental damage that their businesses cause. I had to set the book down to contemplate why the Kochs would propose this solution, then fight it so vociferously years later. It suddenly occurred to me that it was a stall tactic. A successful one. Democrats worked to figure out ways to implement this system and how to make it work and when they are finally ready to pass legislation, the conservatives reverse their position, proclaiming that such a law would be un-American and would destroy the economy. Republicans have successfully stalled any further regulation of pollution for more than fifteen years. The same stall tactic seems to have been used to oppose the ACA.]

IV. Democratic Failures and Incompetence

Bad Optics

Who was health care reform intended to help?

Many of Obamacare's problems are undoubtedly the result of corruption and incompetence of Democrats and of Obama. The health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and hospital associations were invited to have input on the drafting of the bill which smacked of corruption and therefore tainted people's opinion of the law.

Poor Messaging
Democrats did a poor job of selling Obamacare to the nation. They allowed Republicans to get out in front of them and brand the legislation and set the framing for it. Republicans called it a government takeover of health care which isn't really true. They system never departed from the concept of citizens paying private insurance companies to manage health care provided by private health care providers. Government involvement only comes into play when a person cannot afford to pay their private health insurance premiums. The government gives subsidies in such cases. While some people embraced Obamacare, many opposed it, either because they didn't want government involvement in health care or because they felt that the law should have done more to provide health care to people and to cover more people.

The Invisible Three-Pronged Approach

In the book Confidence Men, Ron Suskind wrote that Obamacare was a way of tackling three major problems with a single action. We would put some of the eight million people that had lost their jobs in the economic collapse back to work in the health care delivery industry and create new demand therein by providing access to health care for many of the 50 million people who were without it. At the same time we could reform the health care system so that it was more efficient, more accountable to patients and would not leave people without access to needed services. It was a way of killing three birds with a single stone but Democrats are too incompetent to convey that message. Instead, they were always on the defense as they tried to shoot down ludicrous notions such as the law having "death panels". The soundness of the three-pronged strategy may have been convincing for many voters but they were unlikely to know anything about it if they didn't read Suskind's book. In the hundreds of articles about Obamacare that I've read over the years and in the many interviews with politicians I've seen, only in Confidence Men did I learn anything about this three-pronged approach.

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act#

Job Creation
So how well did the job creation aspect of Obamacare work? In an analysis, it was determined that more than one million of the new jobs created after passing of the law were in the health care industry. And Obamacare created compliance and advisory jobs in other industries as well. It would have been very difficult to reduce the unemployment rate by 5.6 points without some very large initiative such as health care reform. I certainly never heard any other plan from a politician that could have come close to being the jobs engine that Obamacare became. (The one other plan was Obama's Green Energy initiative but that was stalled in Congress. Trump's infrastructure plan may also result in a substantial employment increase but there has been little action on it and few details about the plan.)

Disastrous Rollout
The rollout of Obamacare was a disaster due to the web site for patients to sign up constantly crashing and being unable to handle the traffic. Many people tried for hours and could not complete their registrations. This was an unexpected and embarrassing failure because Obama got elected in large part to his campaign's embrace of technology and use of social media. Technology was skillfully wielded to get an advantage during the campaign but when it came to actually doing the people's business, the administration seemed incompetent.

Keeping Your Doctor and Insurance Plan

As we watched the debate over health care unfold, Obama did something unexpected and befuddling. With constituents across the country angry over the health care bill and misinformed by Republican lies about death panels and that undocumented residents would be able to access benefits from the program, Obama emerged to reassure everyone that if they liked their health care plan, they could keep it. And if they liked their doctor, they could keep their doctor. The statement was a bit like promising someone that you will never die. A grandfather clause in the law stipulates that people can keep their health care plan if they want to (even if it doesn't comply with the basic requirements of coverage in Obamacare). But there is nothing in the law that requires an insurance company to continue to offer a plan that a customer wants to keep. Nor is there anything in the law that prevents doctors from leaving an insurance network, retiring or dying.

My guess is that Obama wanted to convey the true fact that there is nothing in Obamacare that takes away anybody's insurance plan or prevents them from seeing the doctor they like. I also believe that Obama was intentionally misleading with his statements and that he understood that people would believe that they could not lose their doctor or insurance plan under any circumstances. I think that Obama sunk to this low and ill-advised position because he was exasperated by all of the lies that were being told by Republican politicians and conservative pundits about the law.

Obamacare gave small business employers the ability to get out of the practice of providing health care for their employees. Many small businesses relieved themselves of the burden but the change up in payers meant that many of these people would lose the coverage they had and would be forced into another plan. Their preferred doctor may not be in the network of the new insurance company so many lost access to their preferred doctor as well.

The Individual Mandate
The individual mandate is undoubtedly the most despised part of the Affordable Care Act. It requires that all citizens have health care coverage or pay a penalty. The penalties started at just $90 but increased over time. It is a slap in the face to every person who cannot afford health care coverage. Thousands of people ended up having to pay fines of a few hundred dollars simply because there were no affordable health care insurance options available for them. Especially in states where the Affordable Care Act was not supported by politicians, few insurance providers bought in to the program and therefore there were few options and little competition for health care plans.

V. My Personal Experiences

Doctors and Insurance Companies Denying Coverage
I supported Obamacare because when I was 22 years old, I was denied an MRI exam by my HMO doctors because they knew that they could get bonuses and other financial incentives to deny me care and save the insurance company money. This is an absurd situation that no American should be subjected to but there were millions of us that were. Many of them died from their inability to get the health care benefits covered by the insurance plans that they paid for.

If Republicans had come up with legislation that prevented this from happening to more people, I would have supported that legislation. But Republicans did not care about the millions of patients harmed by the practice. Insurance companies are the constituents of the Republican Party and they weren't complaining about the situation so Republicans had no interest in addressing the problem.

When Republicans had the opportunity to "repeal and replace" Obamacare--as they campaigned on doing in the 2016 election--they had nothing with which to replace Obamacare. After seven years of attacking and trying to destroy the law, they had not taken a single step to draft legislation to address any of the serious health care failures that Obamacare corrects.

~R. Charan Pagan
information systems technologist, musician, writer, filmmaker
Los Angeles, CA 90017
http://www.reclaimingourbirthright.blogspot.com/

The Danger of Drumpf

On Monday, December 19, the Electoral College will convene to vote for our next president. Although it would be a dramatic, unprecedented and frightening action, I support the Electoral College selecting someone other than Trump as president.

I believe that the United States is strong enough to survive a Trump presidency. I also do not have fears that the US will turn into Nazi Germany under a Trump administration. But there are several rational reasons why Trump will likely cause severe damage to the US and to the world:

1. The Iran Nuclear Deal. Trump has stated that he would tear up the Iran deal if elected president. Without the deal, there is nothing to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, short of the US attacking them militarily. Trump said that he would re-impose sanctions on Iran but sanctions did not prevent Iran from moving their nuclear program forward in the past. Iran was simply willing to give up the program in order to end the sanctions. Sanctions, like war, would mostly affect the citizens of Iran--many of whom are kind, peace-loving people who have no ill will toward the United States. Many Iranians know more about our country and our politics than our own citizens do. Those people will suffer most under sanctions or in war with the leadership of the Iranian government hardly be affected. I think that it would be naive to think that there are not people in our government that want to go to war with Iran. It would mean billions more for war profiteers.
2. The environment. Trump has expressed support for the Keystone XL pipeline and he is
   personally invested in the project, as well as the Dakota Access Pipeline. Both of these

   

   Oil Pipeline Spill in the Town of Mayflower, AR

   pipelines threaten the drinking water for millions of people, at a time when there are already millions of people who do not have access to clean drinking water. There is lead contamination in the water in Flint, MI; coal ash contaminates the drinking water for residents in states surrounding the Appalachian Mountains; coal cleaning chemicals have contaminated drinking water in South Carolina and Kentucky; and other oil pipelines have contaminated drinking water all over the country where, "since 1986 pipeline accidents have killed more than 500 people, injured over 4,000 and cost nearly seven billion dollars in property damages." Does Trump not understand that such catastrophes really hit working people hard when they have to buy bottled water for all of their needs? Perhaps he simply does not care.
3. Homeland Security. For all of Trump's tough talk about defeating ISIS and Islamic extremism around the world, he has not been attending daily briefings by intelligence advisers. Trump famously said that he knew more about ISIS than the generals. He may actually believe that and many of his supporters may also believe it. I am skeptical. With Trump having no diplomatic experience and no foreign policy experience, there has probably never been a president-elect that needs daily intelligence briefings more.
4. The Vultures. Paul "the Vulture" Singer made his first killing when he bought Owens-Corning.

   

   Asbestosis, anyone?
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestosis

   The company was going down due to lawsuits filed against it from hundreds of thousands of people whom it had made sick with asbestosis. Singer was able to buy the company cheap. Then he slowed down the legal cases so that the victims would accept a paltry settlement or die with no compensation at all. Paul Singer made millions off the deaths of those people, then turned his sights to foreign countries. He began buying up the debt of impoverished countries. Tens of billions of dollars of debt had been forgiven to allow the countries to provide drinking water and medicine to their citizens. But now Singer is demanding full payment. Paul Singer's greed for billions is going to kill millions of people all over the world. President Obama and the US State Department had blocked Singer's actions with a court injunction. It is unlikely that Trump would try to block Singer or any of the other vultures from feeding off the corpses of poor countries. After all, Trump made his first killing by hiring illegal Polish construction workers to demolish his building, before building Trump Tower. The workers were not given safety equipment and likely also died of asbestosis.

I could go on and on about Trump but I think those few bullet points are quite enough to consider an Electoral College intervention as a possible remedy. I would love to have a wild, non-politician, unorthodox president to blow the whole political system up. I would just want that person to be rational, intelligent and competent with a good sense of fairness. I don't see any of that in Trump.

If you agree, contact the electors before December 19th and let them know your thoughts.

~R. Charan Pagan
information systems technologist, musician, writer, filmmaker
Los Angeles, CA 90017
http://www.reclaimingourbirthright.blogspot.com/

A Possible Triple Trexit

Surprisingly, the press has not called the efforts to unseat Trump a possible "Triple Trexit"

The Takeaway

I'm going to start with the takeaway before I get into the weeds with all this recount and Electoral College business: my guess is that if Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump told people to get mad about our broken election system and to demand that politicians address the problems with it, millions of people would go out and protest for the cause. If Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow said that people should protest and demand an election system that is fair, accurate and transparent, millions of their sycophant viewers would comply. But politicians and pundits do not want a fair, accurate and transparent election system. It seems that we are stuck with a broken election system and a political system that cannot serve the citizens of the country because we haven't learned that the issues that politicians try to avoid are the very issues that would make dramatic improvements to the strength of our democracy and our country. Instead, we are told to protest about the Affordable Care Act or gun control issues. People comply while our election system is incapable of producing candidates that are worth voting for. If we had candidates worth voting for, they wouldn't be passing laws that need to be defended. They would be passing laws and instituting policies on which nearly everyone would agree. If politicians passed a law to end the practice of gerrymandering, do you know a single person that would protest such a change? It is past time that we stop taking our direction from politicians and political pundits and instead identify an agenda that serves citizens and democracy, rather than politicians and political parties.

What happened to the Founders' vision of the country?

The Recount/Audit

There are two last ditch efforts underway to prevent Trump from taking office. The first is a recount effort, initiated by Green Party presidential candidate, Jill Stein, in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Jill Stein is leading this effort because 1) in order for someone to start a recount, they need to have "legal standing"--meaning that only someone who has suffered a tort due to the election process (one of the candidates) can demand a recount. And, 2) Hillary Clinton will not ask for a recount because the people who own her (Wall Street banks and CEOs of large corporations) do not care who the president is. Their interests will be served whether Trump is in the White House or Hillary is. Hillary is not going to rock the boat on behalf of her voters when her masters just want a peaceful transfer of power and limited disruption to business operations.

The states selected for recount were selected because the election results differed from the polls before the election and the exit polls. The votes in these states were never counted but were simply tabulated by optical ballot readers that are capable of error and can be programmed to deliver a specific result. It would be stupid to accept the election results when every metric available suggest that they may be in error and when the ballots were never actually counted by anybody.

The recount is not expected to change the results of the election for a number of reasons. In Wisconsin, a hand recount was requested but denied by the courts. So, the same ballots will be run through the same ballot scanners and if there is no significant variation in the vote totals, the results will likely be accepted as correct, even though the ballots have never been counted. There is no way of knowing--other than counting the ballots by hand--if the ballot scanners correctly tabulated the votes in the first place or in the "recount". In Pennsylvania, most of the precincts use electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper record at all. There will not really be any kind of a recount there because there is nothing to count. Basically, they'll ask the machine if it was correct on Election Day, press some buttons and the machine will likely spit out the same answer. There may be an audit of these voting machines as part of the recount effort and that could reveal malfunction or malfeasance.

The recount could change the election results under the following circumstances:

1. If an audit of the ballot scanners and/or voting machines is performed and it is revealed that tampering or hacking had taken place.
2. As I understand it, the ES&S M100 ballot scanners are in use in the states that are going to be recounted. When tested, these machines would give varying results when the same ballots were run through them. For this reason and others, the M100 was not certified to be used in the State of California (thank god). It is possible that the "recount" results could change due to machine error. Were that to occur, we would hopefully get a hand recount so that we would better know who the winner actually was.
3. If spoiled (rejected) ballots are reviewed and assigned to a candidate (when appropriate) it could overturn the Trump victory. This election, 3 million votes were rejected. Ballots can be rejected for legitimate reasons, such as if the voter had marked more than one choice for president, for instance. The machines can also be programmed to reject specific ballots with the intent to sway the election. Then there are semi-legitimate reasons for spoiled ballots. If there are stray marks on a ballot, it can be rejected but the same optical readers are sometimes used in other districts and configured to alert the voter when their ballot has been rejected. This allows the voter to cast a new ballot. In states that have Democratic Secretaries of State, the latter type of machine may be deployed in Republican districts while the former type is used in Democratic districts. In states with Republican Secretaries of State, the opposite is likely to be true. It's one of the ways that the political parties game the system and if some of these rejected ballots are valid and they are reviewed, the election results could change.
4. Provisional ballots are not always counted. The "recount" could include a review of hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots cast by legitimate voters who were removed from the voter rolls and/or hundreds of thousands more provisional ballots cast by people who did not have the ID required by new election laws in specific states, like Wisconsin. The spoiled and provisional ballots far outnumber the margin of Trump's victory in these states.

Electoral College Correction

The other effort underway to prevent Trump from occupying the White House is a campaign for the Electoral College to select another candidate. This is also not likely to occur but it is certainly a possibility and it could shake out two ways. The Electoral College is supposed to be a safety switch to prevent an unqualified and unfit person from becoming president. Donald Trump can easily be argued to be unfit and unqualified. In polls before the election, 62 percent of Americans responded that Trump was unfit to be president. And it would not require 270 electors to vote against Trump to select another president. If a handful electors decide to vote against him, or decide to award their state's electoral votes proportionally (rather than winner-take-all), then it could result in neither Trump nor Clinton having enough Electoral College votes to win the White House. In this instance, the House of Representatives would select the person to be the next president. John Kasich has been rumored to be the most likely compromise candidate.

The multitude of conflict of interest scandals and breaches of protocol by Trump in the past couple of weeks will make an Electoral College vote against him more probable. The questions raised by our dysfunctional election system and the restrictive voting rights laws could also be factors.

Of the possible outcomes (a recount giving Hillary Clinton victory, John Kasich being selected to be president by the Electoral College/House of Representatives or Trump remaining the president-elect), I would prefer to have Kasich as the next president. But that would set a new, scary and perhaps dangerous precedent: the Electoral College overturning the choice of the people. I believe that Trump is inexperienced and dangerous enough to take this dramatic action, but is he really? Is he dangerous enough to risk turning to the Electoral College to select a president for the country or turn the decision over to the House of Representatives, invalidating the election results? There is no way of knowing, other than letting Trump take the oath of office and seeing how things go--at which point it could be too late to ever rectify the situation. I'm not sure what the outcome will be but luckily, as an American, I am used to having no good options.


If you support the campaign for the Electoral College to overturn Trump's victory, or if you oppose that action, you can send a message to the electors to let them know how you feel. If you support the recount effort to determine who actually won in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, go to Jill2016.com. We have until December 19th, when electors vote, to get this right.

Afterward

If you want to know all there is to know about elections in the United States, you need to follow two people: Greg Palast and Brad Friedman. The pair of journalists are the foremost experts in the country when it comes to voting laws and politicians' schemes to violate them. If you are listening to anyone else speak about election issues, then you are likely getting utter nonsense or, at best, you are getting unsubstantiated speculation for which there is little or no evidence. If you don't know what a caging list is, or a purge list, or what an overvote is, or what an undervote is, or if you don't know what Interstate Crosscheck is, or if you don't know what "fraction magic" is, then you are not aware of the multitude of ways that politicians try to steal elections and undermine YOUR vote. Both parties commit any election fixing they can get away with. Don't hold your breath waiting for a someone among them to encourage you to get involved with cleaning up our elections.

~R. Charan Pagan
information systems technologist, musician, writer, filmmaker
Los Angeles, CA 90017
http://www.reclaimingourbirthright.blogspot.com/

My Pussy or My Democracy

Trump, the Republicans' Trojan Horse

I don't have a pussy but, if I did have one, I think I would prefer someone grabbing it without my permission than to have someone actively working to undermine our democracy. I think that is a big part of what we saw with the Trump victory this week, when white women and even some minorities voted for Donald Trump in surprisingly large numbers. I cannot vote for someone that is actively working to undermine democracy. That was the main reason that I could not vote for Hillary Clinton.

As Americans, we hold democracy sacred. And while it is always tampered with and manipulated in every election, I believe that the revelations of the Clinton campaign's meddling in the elections and conspiring with the news media to elevate Trump and other "extremists" during the Republican Party primaries cemented the public's view of Hillary as being untrustworthy. But not just untrustworthy. She was caught attempting to undermine democracy with this and numerous other tactics. To every American, that should be sacrilege.

The media was largely asleep on the job when it came to the Trump campaign conspiring with the FBI to harm Clinton's campaign. But Trump being an "outsider" to politics would likely have gotten a pass on that, even if it were widely reported. There is something especially distasteful about a politician being placed in a position of power and then violating that sacred trust.

So we slayed the three-headed dragon that is neo-Liberalism, media collusion with political operatives and the Clinton cabal. And in doing so, we've unleashed a six-headed dragon upon the world. With no record of accomplishment or any indication of competence, Trump is a Trojan horse for the Republican Party. Trump's platform and plan for his first 100 days includes items that the Republicans have been trying to get passed for decades but have been unsuccessful. Most notably are proposals to build the Keystone XL pipeline, to further cut taxes on the wealthy and to repeal Obamacare.

Republican presidential candidates have not been able to win the popular vote since the 1980s. Let that sink in for a moment. At least two of the Republicans' three 'wins' since the '80s were the result of election tampering. A strategy for wealthy donors to superfund Republican candidates for state legislatures after the 2010 census resulted in more Republicans getting elected and therefore charged with re-drawing Congressional district maps. The maps were heavily gerrymandered to benefit Republicans in future Congressional House elections. In the past few elections, Republicans have won more seats in the House although the Democrats won more votes.

Constantly rebuked at the polls, the Republican Party scored big by having Trump run in their party and to win the nomination. Now, the Trump supporters that trust everything he says--even though he's been proven to be a compulsive liar--are eager to support the policies that they rejected repeatedly when proposed by Republican "insiders".

There are a some very good parts of Trump's platform too. Unfortunately, they would require Trump to convince members of Congress to slit their own throats, such as the plans to impose term limits on members of Congress, to close the revolving door between Congress and lobbying firms and to strengthen ethics rules for the legislature. Some of these things could get done through state conventions but I do not credit Trump with the intelligence to know that. Even if he figures it out, I don't see him spending the political capital on these efforts. If I am wrong and Trump actually accomplishes these things, it could potentially make his presidency a net positive change for the country, no matter how badly he may screw up everything else. I say this because, to my knowledge, these issues have never been part of a major party 's platform.

There are many reasons that I'm so skeptical of Trump's sincerity on these issues. They would be major benefits to the American people yet Trump has hardly spoken about them in any of the debates or on the campaign trail. That is strange for a candidate that considers himself a populist. You may also recall that Trump complained many times that the Republican primary was rigged against him when the Republican establishment tried every parliamentary tactic imaginable to bump Trump from the lead and knock him out of contention for the nomination. Trump had a legitimate complaint but, once he won the nomination, he declared that he no longer cared that the primary system is rigged. For those perceptive enough to hear that dog whistle, it was a clear statement to reassure the Republican and Democratic establishment that if he became president, he would not try to fix the election system that benefits the Republican/Democratic duopoly and steals democratic power from citizens. This does not sit well with me since I do still care about our elections not being fair, accurate and transparent. Trump knowing how undemocratic our election system is and not caring enough to try to fix it is a good clue as to where his loyalties actually lie.

So where are we headed in the next four years? It's really anybody's guess. Trump's positions turn 180 degrees at any moment so he may do the opposite of what he campaigned on. I think the most likely outcome is that the Republican Party wish list will get passed immediately and the policies that are actually populist will languish and be forgotten about. In a few years, Trump will give his last State of the Union Address and list his accomplishments as president: Tax cuts for the rich! Pipelines to benefit the rich! Deregulation to benefit Wall Street and polluters! Hopefully, fixing the VA will make that list but I'm not going to hold my breath on that.

~R. Charan Pagan
information systems technologist, musician, writer, filmmaker
Los Angeles, CA 90017
http://www.reclaimingourbirthright.blogspot.com/

Examining Donald Trump's Harebrained Schemes

Donald J. Trump (our next president?)

Donald Trump became the Republican nominee at their convention in Cleveland, OH this week. The convention had its controversies, scandals and surprises.

Unsurprisingly, Trump again proposed to build a wall on the border of Mexico and to deport all of the country's undocumented workers. And he again pledged to be tough on terrorism. These are two of Trump's most notable positions and two that can use very close examination...

I. BORDER WALL AND IMMIGRATION POLICY

Trump's idea to build a wall on the border of Mexico is a position tailor made for the ignorant. Although we do need to be able to control our border and know who is entering our country, there are many reasons why blaming illegal immigrants for our country's problems and proposing to build a wall and deport them is insane.

I'll list some of those reasons in a moment but the most bewildering aspect of proposing to build a giant wall on the border of Mexico is that it is an attempt to use a Stone Age solution to solve a modern problem. I'm surprised that nobody in the media has picked up on this. To me, it is akin to John F. Kennedy declaring that "we are going to the moon... by constructing a giant ladder!"

Trump may not know it but we are living in the Digital Age. A network of sensors, satellites and aerial drones would be far more effective at preventing unauthorized entry into our country than a wall. Such a  system could be implemented in much less time than it would take to build a wall. But Donald Trump lacks the vision to imagine things beyond the comprehension of a Neanderthal.

So why is Trump's policy on illegal immigration ignorant and ill-advised?

1.   Many illegal immigrants came to the United States because they were recruited by US companies, looking to hire cheap laborers. Cracking down on these companies would be the way to end the problem of Mexican workers crossing the border.

2.   Illegal border crossings is currently at net zero.

3.   NAFTA is partly responsible for the economic conditions in Mexico that have driven workers to the US. Our corrupt leaders colluded with the corrupt leaders of Mexico and the workers in both countries got the shaft. It does not make sense to blame the victims on the opposite side of the border instead of the politicians that passed the trade deal.

4.   Undocumented immigrants commit less crime than native born citizens. Even the oft vilified shooting of a woman in San Francisco by an illegal immigrant was most likely the result of an accidental firearm discharge and ricochet, for which Francisco Lopez Sanchez may not have even been responsible.

5.   Undocumented immigrants are likely to have a net positive effect on our economy.

6.   Without cheap immigrant labor picking fruits and vegetables and processing meat, many Americans would not be able to afford groceries. A nation-wide food shortage may also result, as when individual states have attempted to crack down on undocumented workers, millions of dollars of crops rotted in the fields with no-one to pick them.

7.   Only about half of illegal immigrants are Mexicans. Most of our country's illegal aliens did not sneak across our borders. They arrived by plane with a work, student or tourist visa. Then they over-stay their visas.

8.   A wall on the border of Mexico is highly unfeasible. The 1,200 mile border has about 500 miles of terrain so rugged that it would be inaccessible to work crews and equipment. Trump would be long out of office before construction of the wall could ever be completed.

9.   In an experiment, the previously-proposed border wall could be climbed over in less than 12 minutes. It took less than half that time to cut though it. And the wall could be tunneled under in about three minutes.

10. Undocumented workers do the worst jobs in the country for peanuts. Most US citizens would not do the jobs that immigrants do or they would demand much more money, which would make the products un-affordable for most people.

II. TORTURE

Trump criticizes George W. Bush for going into Iraq (although he didn't voice his objections until we were already there for a year). Trump has also stated that he would bring back waterboarding and other methods of torture. Personally, I would want a leader that is intelligent enough to connect the dots between the ill-advised invasion of Iraq and the torture that produced some of the flawed intelligence that got us into that war.

Trump's support for torture is another appeal to the ignorant because there is no evidence that torture produces useful information that cannot be obtained without it. Most experts proclaim that torture does not produce useful intelligence but other methods of extracting information do. CIA Director John Brennan admitted that torture tactics did not lead to the killing of Osama bin laden. The Useful information that was gathered leading to the killing of bin Laden was obtained before Hassan Ghul was waterboarded.

Trump is apparently willing to trade our security and our reputation for the self-aggrandizing purpose of appearing to be a "tough" leader. Why so many people are not as concerned about their leader being effective is anybody's guess.

In World War II, Nazis were proactive about finding methods of torturing and killing people that wouldn't emotionally scar their soldiers and operatives. What does it say about the United States that so many of our citizens and politicians clamor for more torture when it has been proven ineffective and it harms the people who torture others?

Here are a few questions that I feel any person should get a reasonable answer to before they consider voting for Donald Trump:

1.   What happens to radical Islamic recruitment after Trump tortures Muslims and murders the families of terrorists?

2.   What happens to journalism, whistleblowing and oversight of government after Trump puts Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning in front of a firing squad and makes the media subservient to politicians?

3.   What happens to the millions of refugees from Alaska, Bangladesh and elsewhere who need to flee their homelands due to rising sea levels? Where are those people going to go and, can we deny them asylum in the United States considering that we are responsible for much of the environmental damage that is causing sea levels to rise? Trump has declared that he thinks climate change is a hoax, yet he wants to build a wall to protect one of his golf resorts from rising sea levels.

Donald Trump may be entertaining to watch and listen to at times but many of his ideas are poorly conceived and dangerous. Not to mention unconstitutional, offensive and ignorant.

Next week the Democrats are expected to nominate Hillary Clinton as their presidential candidate, arguably a worse choice to have in the White House. The 2016 general election is going to be strange, ugly and will likely culminate with the election of one of the worst presidents in modern times.

Perhaps it will result in the beneficial consequence of citizens closely examining our political system and electoral process that allowed two of the worst and least-liked contenders to vie for the highest office in the land. Perhaps one consequence of electing a President Clinton or Trump will be that people will become motivated to change our political process to prevent such catastrophes in the future. One can hope.

~R. Charan Pagan
information systems technologist, musician, writer, filmmaker
Los Angeles, CA 90017
http://www.reclaimingourbirthright.blogspot.com/