Honor Revolutionaries Without Slaves

Seven of the original writers and signers of the Declaration of Independence were not slave owners.  Let's honor them.  John Adams, Samuel Adams, Oliver Ellsworth, Alexander Hamilton, Robert Treat Paine, Thomas Paine and Roger Sherman.  They hailed from Massachusetts, Connecticut,  New York, and Pennsylvania.

Others of these patriots later engaged with anti-slavery societies, including Ben Franklin and John Jay.

Of note, our First President, George Washington, freed his slaves as an act of conscience.

I have for most of my life, applied the 80/20 % rule to my analysis of things.  Here again, about 20% of the creators of our country did the right thing about the issue of slavery in their lives.  Same was true of the supporters of the Revolution.....supported by about 20% of the Colony's populace.

The other 80% pursued their own self-interest agendas while the 20% did the hard work of creating the great American Experiment, risking alienation and rejection by the majority.

Maybe the current Revolution in the streets to do the right thing vis a vis racism and the need for systemic change and reform is inspired by our tradition of Revolution and attempts to perfect this Union that started in 1776.  The current polling in support of the change being advocated in the streets seems to suggest my 80/20% rule of thumb might well be grossly understated and wrong.  Let us hope so for the sake of the continuation of our Experiment toward a real democracy.

Rethinking Policing

Finally, Black Lives Matter and millions of allies have taken to our streets in mostly peaceful protests against policing abuses against our  fellow citizens who are black and brown .  But, in addition, and it is an important addition, Americans are now having a national discussion about our policing practices overall.  In particular, the massive resources of our tax dollars to municipal, county, state and federal budgets to our criminal justice system overall that in the main, miss serving our society.

Law and Order has been the battle cry of both conservatives and liberals concerned about public safety and our overall protection against abuse by others.  But in the course of our evolution from frontier justice to what many believe is a police state in America, we have now begun to understand that policing and the criminal justice system itself often heaps abuse on us. The data clearly says the abuse is disproportionately experienced by persons of color.  So lets talk about policing, and specifically where the criminal justice system starts......with arrests.

The FBI maintains national databases on arrest statistics from all policing agencies and provides a report annually.  The most recent such report tells us that while arrests are declining slightly overall, arrests of all kinds totaled 10,310,960 in 2018.  One strange aberration of their reports is that of those ten million arrests, 3.2 million, 30 %, were for unexplained "all other offenses of the 28 categories of arrests they report.  Not a clue as to what those arrests can be as their 27 other categories cover a broad range of violence, property and drug/alcohol and other anti-social  related categories. 

The really big 3 categories comprise 99% of arrests: 29% related to property, 20% related to violence including DUI which I consider a threat of violence and 20% related to drugs and alcohol.  So, presumptively 99% of policing and support staff time is dedicated to these three categories.

So, if we peeled off drugs and alcohol from their workload by decriminalizing or legalizing drugs and ending the War on Drugs, (mainly a war on minority citizens) we might reduce their workload and maybe staffing and funding by some comparable percentage....20%, and redirect solutions and public protection to other more qualified specialists such as health and counseling experts.

"Other offense"  arrests, cumulatively account for the largest arrest number, again 30%.  If these are such esoteric infractions and disruption to the public order as to not be counted as activities of either violence or property misappropriation, might at least a major part of them be handled by professions more properly trained to discipline or rehabilitate this mysterious category of offender?

We now have addressed potentially half of the time and resource allocation to policing and redirected that work to other professions.   Roundly, this is potentially a huge burden lifted from policing so as to reallocate their attention to work they might be better prepared and trained to address, violent crime which poses the greatest existential threat to us citizens.

Now as to violent crime, we know that some significant cause of violence is attributed to mental and emotional health problems. A significant number of persons suffering these kinds of issues are children; some of these vulnerable people can be identified early in life through both the medical and educational arenas, with solutions provided to many through vastly better funded and trained professionals in both fields. Yes, it is likely some perpetrators of violence, both children and adults would need to be at least temporarily removed from society for therapy, treatment and rehabilitation. In fact, the data says 50% of arrests involve young people.  Yes, most certainly we citizens will need protection from some perpetrators of any age as they threaten violent acts or are in the process of committing them.  But, certainly, some of those persons threatening violence can be better handled by persons expert in psychology and deescalation.

Thus, some percentage of policing time and resources can be redirected to those experts..Yes, policing will be required for some who are judged not restrained by non-policing professionals and certainly we will need policing protection from those in the process of committing violent acts.  And some, the sociopaths, might be beyond treatment and rehabilitation and will require incarceration to protect the rest of us.  But the recruiting and training of the remaining duties of policing, the prevention, intervention or cessation of violent acts by citizens  will require a complete rethinking of what kind of personalities are best suited for these tasks.  The evidence is clear that currently persons with authoritative personality traits are attracted to police work as now defined.  This has caused much of our heartbreak as a people in dealing with policing.  And, we have not yet seemed to be effective in screening out persons with overt racist views.  Likewise, there is evidence that programs to reduce implicit racism in us have not been effective.  Racism and authoritarian mitigation have to be our highest priority in revamping recruiting and training  police officers for the future of the reduced role of this service.

There are suggestions that police applicants have at least a college degree in criminal justice and certification and renewal, continuing education requirements similar to nurses.  Seems quite reasonable. In addition, there may be evidence that the stress of policing work might cause some PTSD.  All should be tested for this and other psychological issues with regularity.

So, now were are left with property related crime arrests, 29%.  We know that some, in fact many are related to drug addicted persons needing funds to satisfy their drug habits.  Couldn't we make a huge dent in property crimes by addressing vastly expanded drug treatment or legal provision of needed narcotics?  And another major dent in property crime committed to persons desperate for basic life supporting goods due to poverty, underpayment and joblessness.  Yes, some likely are social miscreants who have no respect for the rights of others to own possessions.  We need protection from those via arrest by trained police and more than likely some will require confinement if they are not treatable or cannot be rehabilitated. Likely, this will be a minority percentage of those arrested.

Traffic control work by fully trained police officers seems an under use of their significant training having little or nothing to do with policing driving violations.  Very likely, specially trained traffic/safe driving specialists could more appropriately provide safety for citizens in that arena, joined by EMS and police in situations of  road clearing, injury or acts of violence on the roadways of our country. 

Surveillance technology on cars and roadways can be cautiously explored in application to unsafe/illegal driving as possible replacement of invasive human intervention, though civil liberty implications must be carefully assessed.

There seems little doubt that over time, likely decades of revamping the  policing and criminal justice system, we can dramatically reduce the footprint  and task list of policing in America and yet provide safety, security and peace of mind for our our citizenry.  Thank you Black Lives Matter for charting a course for a much better America.

Covid Shows Flaws In Our Trade Policy

The advent of the horrific Covid nightmare clearly illustrates major flaws in our dependence on foreign nations for critical needs in our society that relate to our health and very person survival.  There are clearly innumerable products that need to be available and made domestically to assure immediate supply in order to both save and preserve life.  Certainly these include products used in healthcare such as  life saving equipment, medications and tools/materials used by hospitals and medical care givers, likewise, products and foods vital to maintaining health and life.  This list likely includes all kinds of products used in industrial accidents and natural disaster that cannot wait for overseas production or shipment. 

I'm not nearly smart or informed enough to provide a comprehensive list of these; such a list needs to be created by a national commission staffed with people from numerous professional fields and disciplines.  I do not need to recount the life saving items in short supply at the advent and still today through the course of this awful pandemic. They are obvious.

We do have by law certain items maintained in strategic national reserves such as petroleum related products, certain critical metal products such as uranium, food products such as wheat, rice and corn, weapons and armaments related to national defense as well as medical supplies and pharmaceutical products.

But our stockpile list needs to be modified to include maintaining ongoing domestic production of items absolutely necessary to address events such as national disasters and pandemics to assure rapid availability of production to address needs during crises and replenishment of a revamped list of stockpile inventories.

We might even take a page out of the Russian book and seriously look at their policies of stockpiling vital food items in the event of famine crises we might never anticipate. 

This would mean modifying our trade policies requiring companies undertaking offshore production of goods vital to preservation of life in the USA to simultaneously produce a given portion of those foods in domestic location as a condition of their license to operate in the USA. 

Clearly we do not need to face dependence on vital life preserving products from nations either unable to supply those goods or hostile to our need for them in a crisis environment.

Let's make rethinking both our trade and stockpile a top priority for the next Administration.  And let us build in safeguards on maintaining well thought out stockpile minimums to avoid the whims of partisan

budget hawks as we experienced with Tea Party Republicans during President Obama's administration which is now causing massive loss of life and jeopardized health with their failure to heed stockpile replenishment requests from the Obama administration and incompetence from the current catastrophe called the Trump administration.

Trumpites Studied: Aggressive Authoritarians

A recently republished study on the characteristics of Trump supporters/voters by K. Norman Smith and Eric Hanley of Kansas University provided a very clear understanding of the type of persons finding Donald Trump's leadership appealing.  They and other sociologists identify these people as Aggressive Authoritarians.  Their study contrasts them from other more benign authoritarian personalities classified by psychologists.

Below is an Abstract of their study.

Abstract

Recently released data from the 2016 American National Election Study allow us to offer a multifaceted profile of white voters who voted for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election. We find that Trump’s supporters voted for him mainly because they share his prejudices, not because they’re financially stressed. It’s true, as exit polls showed, that voters without four-year college degrees were likelier than average to support Trump. But millions of these voters—who are often stereotyped as “the white working class”—opposed Trump because they oppose his prejudices. These prejudices, meanwhile, have a definite structure, which we argue should be called authoritarian: negatively, they target minorities and women; and positively, they favor domineering and intolerant leaders who are uninhibited about their biases. Multivariate logistic regression shows that, once we take these biases into account, demographic factors (age, education, etc.) lose their explanatory power. The electorate, in short, is deeply divided. Nearly 75% of Trump supporters count themselves among his enthusiastic supporters, and even “mild” Trump voters are much closer in their attitudes to Trump’s enthusiasts than they are to non-Trump voters. Polarization is profound, and may be growing.

Smith's and Hanley's work is supported by numerous other studies on this very topic from around academia across the globe.  This includes studies from U.of Manitoba, U. of Aukland, U. of Southern Denmark, U. of Akron, Harvard, Cambridge, U. of Chicago, Stanford, Princeton and Oxford.  It is also supported by studies published by Gallup and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 

Think about this in your own experience among your Trump supporting family and friends.  Seems to speak truth to me.  Those same characteristics  are exhibited by  those I know and now do my best to avoid.  Why do I shun them?  Because their views are toxic to me and the values I try to espouse.  Life is difficult enough without  this poison.  These people are antithetical to everything I think our very flawed society and democracy is attempting to advance for humanity.  The European academics who have studied these types of people initiated their work to try to understand how much of Europe embraced fascism.  Their work is an attempt to avoid repeating these same mistakes. 

Authoritarian figures are not foreign to American society as seen in our history.  These are not your bread a butter kinds of conservatives we liberals once were able to make common cause with to solve societal problems.  They are brutal, cruel and unforgiving of opposition.  We are seeing it now in their refusal to follow difficult but reasonable social norms to spare others of Covid 19 infection and possible death.  They advocate the value of the economy over human life.  Economies can be restored.  Life cannot.

So, I choose to both resist the policies now being advanced by both D.J. Trump and the Republican Party. He has shaped it into a White Nationalist party. I'll remove these people from my life, wary of the harm they wish to visit on my society, country and me. 

Wishing A Field Of Bluebonnets For All Of You

Each year of all my years in Texas when the Bluebonnets bloomed in the spring, I had the urge to go and lay down in that field, feel their beauty and gaze in to the blue sky overhead.  A couple of times, riding my bike in the country, I did exactly that.  The feeling then and the memory now is exhilarating. That is how I feel too about all the people over my 83 years who have touched my very good and happy life. 

So far, in the Corona crisis we are all experiencing, I am well.  In fact, with a new workout regime, feeling better than I've felt in years.  But, with the uncertainty of this, maybe the most difficult time each of us have ever faced, I wanted to share my appreciation of each and every one of you .

Facebook and personal friends alike, many being in both categories, I want to thank you for being in my life.  And I wish for each of you a future healthy life.

Whether you have been among those who shared with me a close personal friendship, shared with me my journey through school, college and the military, or in friendship through my 46 years of my first love. I'm grateful for you.

If we labored together through a journey through and out of the Catholic church, thank you for being there for me.  If we parented together in our early years of marriage, I so appreciate you.   If our relationship was around social activism and political reform, being in the trenches with you was so gratifying, through success and failure.  We dealt together with uncertainty then as we do now and reinforced one another.

If our relationship was around career and professional and business pursuits, you provided such amazing inspiration to me.  If we engaged together in our neighborhood and community, thank you for being there for me.

Should we have connected a result of my new life with the second great love of my life in the past 13 years of personal and geographic adventure, you'll never know how much support and enrichment I've gained from our being together.

Each of you have provided me love, affection, respect, sometimes harsh truth and the certainty that I have not been alone in this journey.  I hope I have been able to give back to you in the same way you were so generous in your support for me.

Wishing each and all of you a fruitful and satisfying journey. 

Repubicans Have Abandoned Democracy Part V

The earliest expression of the concept of the free press conveyed  in pre-America were the pamphleteers, so well represented by Thomas Paine.  The concept was codified in the Constitution as a key component of a functioning democracy.

Our free press, with all its flaws, misuses, and inaccuracies has saved our democracy over the generations on countless occasions. Truth and facts are durable and  more often than not survive numerous attempts at subverting them in our history.

The current era of Trump lies, distortions and suppression of truth and facts in favor of his fiction is, in my view, the most threatening assault on our free press.  Sadly, early coverage of his fascist rallies in the name of opaque journalism laid the groundwork for his abuse of a free press.  Remember those scenes at his rallies where he ridiculed the press present to cover his events, causing his audiences to erupt in mindless jeering and threatening behaviors toward those journalists?  Remember his calling their work "fake news?"

This was only the beginning of his assault on free speech.   As his campaign ensued he banned some journalists and outlets from his campaign coverage because they had the temerity to be critical of him, or worse, report the truth of what he and his admirers were saying or doing.  The latter press work became the object of his wrath as soon as he was elected.

His spin-meisters populating his press staff immediately began promulgating outright untruths on such matters as the size of his inauguration crowds.  Photographic evidence of their small size were rejected at fake news.  Press spokespersons began a turnover in personnel unprecedented in Presidential history because of their being called out by our free press as liars and fabricators.

Little opinion media is needed in the Trump era as all the media has to report is Trump's own words, more often than not expressed in over 15,000 statements in a little over three years fact checked as outright untruths.  He is largely doing the media's work for them as a result of his compulsive need for public attention.  Tragically, his untruths as related to the current pandemic crisis is creating more than distrust and consternation; it is resulting in putting people in danger of losing their lives.  His lies are documented as having caused at least one death due to improper use of a medication recklessly  mischaracterized by Trump in a public statement.  Countless Lupus patients have been denied this life saving mediction as a result of shortages of this same medicine caused by his statement.

The suppression of factual and truthful reporting soon resulted in the abandonment of White House press briefings as a routine.  This too is unprecedented.

His early pronouncements about creating a "state media," a technique used for generations by dictators and authoritarian rulers around the globe are truly bone chilling. Trump is also on record threatening licenses of broadcast outlets airing statements critical of him.   This is a complete outrage.

The fact is that our free press has provided invaluable insight into his criminal background, abuse of power and use of government action to enrich his family. It is the only source of factual information on what he is doing to our democracy.  This has been an unequaled period of frank disclosure about public crimes committed by Trump and his allies dedicated to dismantling both our government and our democracy to enrich the already rich.

Up to this very moment, Trump has turned press briefings of the Corona Virus pandemic into campaign events led by Trump expounding on untruths regarding the extent of the crisis and infection rates,  untruths about testing regimes, untruths about vaccine initiatives and untruths about the incompetent Federal response to getting this pandemic under control.

So, thank you New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, McClatchy News Services, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and NBC as well as, yes, some in the news division of Fox News for shining your light on the most anti-democracy President in our history.  Thank you, the investigative reporters at work out there risking your careers in bringing the truth to an often ungrateful America.  Some of you too have given your lives in delivering the truth and we as a nation owe you our support and to the degree possible, protection.

Republicans Have Abandoned Democracy Part IV

One of the hallmarks of Republicanism in the modern era is their persistent and pervasive effort to suppress the voting rights of minorities, soon to be a majority of citizens.  This endeavor is sometimes bluntly concealed in an insistence that it really just to suppress the "Democrat" vote, thinking this somehow absolves them of the crime of voter interference of persons of color, though blatantly admitting to the suppression part.  They also masquerade these practices as measures to protect voting rights.  Their history is clear in opposing legislation to assure voting rights and undermining its implementation.

This takes the form of passing legislation requiring a voter ID, with the rationale of protecting against a nearly non-existent problem of imposters trying to vote in someone else's name.  The result is denying very poor, or mobility challenged or remotely rural voters from both access to these ID's and their right to vote.  This initiative started about 20 years ago at the state level and is rampant in denying millions their voting rights.

Another technique is to purge voter rolls, as if they want to clear the voter rolls of ineligible voters who have long since moved out of the jurisdiction or passed on.  It is true, many voters fail to inform their voting departments of a move or family death.  But there is ample evidence that such database updating seems to be focused on minority neighborhoods or persons with Hispanic names.  The net result is voters showing up to vote to find their names removed from the rolls and their vote denied, excepting perhaps a provisional ballot only counted in a very close election.

Other measures to suppress votes is to move or remove polling sites in heavily populated minority neighborhoods.  This has been observed in 2018 and 2019 elections.  This is routinely practiced in Republican dominated voting jurisdictions.  A further iteration of this is to limit the number of voting booths/machines at these same minority polling places, causing long waits for people often with hourly wage employment and very limited time to depart work to cast a vote.

These same voters are often denied extended voting time frames such as so called early voting available in more voter encouraging jurisdictions.  And restricted absentee voting rules and regulations designed to limit rather than encourage voting by elderly and disabled voters.

Likewise, vote discouraging Republicans practice limiting voter registration opportunities to more affluent neighborhoods and vigorously oppose legislation to simplify registration with such opportunities as same day registration and automatic voter registration when the qualifying age is reached.  Similarly, even motor voter registration created under a Democratic President is deliberately sabotaged with complex bureaucracy and deliberately inconveniencing license appliers with long lines or onerous documentation requirements as well as conveniently losing or failing to process applications is commonly practiced.

Further, there is ample evidence of non-government interference with minority voting.  I have seen with my own eyes vote suppression flyer sheets circulated in minority neighborhoods giving the wrong dates for election day.  Harassment of voters waiting in line.  Intimidation of voters at polling sites.  These techniques are particularly rampant in areas of strong Tea Party organization.  Yes, the Tea Party is an adjunct to the Republican party and strongly encouraged.

These common practices of  voter suppression are systematic with both Republican voting policy makers, Republican election officials and those leading their local party organizations.  It is decidedly un-American and even worse, undemocratic.  Republicans, you own this behavior.

This is systematic and deliberate undermining the rights of others also entitled to the privilege you asshole Republicans think you and you alone are granted by your brilliance and success.  I reject you who call yourselves Republicans.