I did not know until I read this post by “writeforthemasses” from June 28, which linked to this video of a speech by FDR in 1944, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had plans for after victory in the Second World War, plans which were dropped when he died of a cerebrovascular hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. The direction of US policy and the federal government were, of necessity, left to Harry Truman, who was a newcomer to Roosevelt’s administration, having been vice president for only three months.
Roosevelt is considered by most historians to be one of the three greatest US presidents, after Washington and Lincoln; he helped to rescue the US from the Great Depression and directed the war effort to victory in WW II. He believed that the common man needed protection and assistance, and he is known for saying this:
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
Roosevelt proposed a “Second Bill of Rights” in in this speech, to complement the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. This is an “economic” bill of rights. It is justified by the Preamble to the Constitution, which confers upon the federal government the following purposes:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Specifically, the Constitution is intended to produce a government which “promote[s] the general welfare.” The “welfare” rights of the people are broadly construed to include those things which provide for the people’s well-being: a job at a rate of pay which will allow adequate food, clothing, and recreation; housing, education, and medical care, and protection in one’s old age. As shown below, Roosevelt’s idea of people’s rights include the rights of farmers, businessmen, and employed workers to “useful and remunerative” jobs, and freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies.
The Second Bill of Rights, from the speech referenced above:
- The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
- The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
- The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
- The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
- The right of every family to a decent home;
- The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
- The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
- The right to a good education.
Our federal government could use a refresher course in applying this “Second Bill of Rights”, for which we have only a partial showing in our current system. Specifically, we have been providing more abundance to those who already have too much, and stinting on providing enough for those who have too little.
Income inequality and wealth inequality have been increasing for thirty or forty years, since the benighted presidency of Ronald Reagan. President Reagan began showing signs of mental decline early in his first term (after he was shot and nearly killed), and it appears that he left many policy decisions to his vice president, George H. W. Bush. The first President Bush was an intelligent and capable man, but he was a conservative who paid only lip service to the notion that the federal government should provide for those with too little.
To contrast our current situation with the dark vision provided by the Donald in his nomination acceptance speech the other day, we have had a significantly improved crime rate in this country over the last twenty years. There has been a small increase in some cities in the last year or two, but overall, crime, and especially violent crime, has been much reduced over the long term. There has been a significant recovery from the very serious recession of 2008, and the yearly deficit has gone down steadily since that turbulent time. The overall debt has dramatically increased because of the massive deficit that began in the Bush years and peaked with the recession; however, our capacity to pay off that debt has also dramatically improved. Employment has improved significantly and steadily over the last eight years, although many US workers have abandoned their efforts to find work and have only recently been re-integrated into the economy.
In summary, the condition of the US economy has steadily improved over the last eight years. What has not resolved is the plight of many middle-aged, steadily employed people who have been permanently thrown out of work by de-industrialization of the economy. Manufacturing facilities have been moved overseas, to places where wages are lower and the condition of workers is much more marginal than here. What has happened here is a deterioration to the state of things overseas. We are beginning to feel the insecurity that people in developing countries have felt for many years.
The really serious development recently has been the rise of Islamic State terrorism; there have been repeated terror attacks all over the world, especially in Iraq, Turkey, and Western Europe. The US military has responded to this development with aerial attacks against the base of the Islamic State, which have killed many leaders and degraded the oil refinement capabilities of the Islamists, but not reduced their capacity and motivation to strike within the unprotected civilian areas of the rest of the world.
Another serious recent development has been the exposure of police treatment of people of color by cell phone videos. The number of shootings of black civilians has been relatively steady; what has changed has been the video documentation of the circumstances of these shootings. As a result of these videos, people have become very concerned about the way they are treated by the police. At the same time, the police have reacted as if they are under attack. Who is actually under attack is a matter of perception.
The bottom line is that things are not nearly as dark as Donald has painted them. He wants us to feel fundamentally insecure so that he can set himself up as our savior. Donald gives us no specific plans for our rescue, but he assures us that he alone can perform the salvation. How absurd, to think that Donald can rescue us from our existential plight any more than any other leader or government can. Many people, though, will swallow Donald’s lies hook, line, and sinker; if he is elected, they are bound to be deeply disappointed. What a great excuse to abrogate our civil liberties and force us to accept the destruction of the lives of the “other”– immigrants, Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, Arab-Americans, and whomever Donald wishes to designate as the perpetrators of white America’s humiliation. Doesn’t this sound similar to Hitler’s approach? Only in Hitler’s time, it was the Jews who were the objects of destruction; this time, Sheldon Adelson will make sure that the Jews are spared and the Arabs (and many others) are given the shaft.
Sculptures in a Garden
Paul Krugman has a new column in the NYT called “Trump, the Siberian candidate” (a play on “The Manchurian Candidate”, a movie describing a fictional Chinese plot to assassinate a presidential candidate) that states a shocking, scary possibility: the Donald is a puppet of Vladimir. This is based on a Slate story from yesterday that explicitly calls Donald the puppet of Vladimir, and has some very specific reasons for saying so. For example, Donald’s campaign manager Paul Manafort was on the payroll of Victor Yanukovitch, who was the Ukraine’s leader and an ally of Vladimir’s before he was overthrown just a few years ago. The Atlantic also has a story from yesterday that describes Hillary as running directly against Vladimir because Donald is Vladimir’s handmaiden.
Donald gave the secret away when he said that if he was president, he would hesitate to come to the aid of NATO countries under attack from Russia “unless they met their obligations to us” (meaning unless they paid through the nose for the privilege.) Donald ignores our treaty obligations to NATO countries, which closely resemble the obligations Western countries undertook to Poland before WW II– and which led to Great Britain declaring war on Germany and Russia when they overran Poland in September 1939.
The Atlantic says that Russia has been supporting “right-wing populists” in Europe; for example, they lent money to Marine Le Pen in France. Silvio Berlusconi of Italy has received personal gifts from Vladimir and has profited from energy deals with Russia. Russia even propagandized in favor of Britain’s exit from the European Union.
Donald has been unstinting in his praise of Vladimir, and called his piece slamming American exceptionalism “a masterpiece.” For almost a decade, Donald has made fawning statements lauding Vladimir’s abilities and his drive to control all of Russia. He even denied that Vladimir has had overly-critical Russian journalists assassinated, a conclusion which seems obvious to most observers. Donald has praised Vladimir’s leadership, famously grading him as “an A.”
In turn, Vladimir’s propaganda apparatus has pushed Donald’s candidacy and thrashed Hillary. Russian hackers broke into the Democratic National Committee’s servers, taking opposition research on Donald and whatever else was laying around. The research on Donald is critical to Donald’s campaign because he needs to know what dirt Hillary has that she is planning to expose during the next few months, in order to counter it– as if they could find effective defenses to the facts about Donald’s shady business life and four bankruptcies from which he has skimmed millions of dollars.
Last month, Bloomberg news reported that suspected Russian government intelligence hackers had broken into the servers of the Clinton Foundation. Bloomberg stated, “Trump said the hack was a political ploy concocted by the Democrats.” The Russian hackers apparently have broken into the computers of over 4,000 individuals associated with all sides in the US campaign for president, according to government investigators who have been monitoring their activities. A Clinton spokesman was quoted as saying, “What appears evident is that the Russian groups responsible for the DNC hack are intent on attempting to influence the outcome of this election.”
The hackers have apparently threatened to release the contents of thousands of internal memos from the computers of Democratic campaign officials. In addition, confidential files from the Clinton Foundation could be the subject of attacks by Donald’s campaign, which has threatened to make the activities of the Foundation a campaign issue. Donald has claimed that the Clintons have enriched themselves by donations to the Foundation and their internal documents could prove to be a rich source of negative propaganda. Donald’s campaign work could be made much easier by access to these secret materials, which the Russian government has spent considerable time and money to obtain.
The bottom line: Donald is a potential right-wing fascist dictator who would, even without changing the US government’s nominal organization, turn the US into an inward-looking, xenophobic country that would fail to counter Russia’s expansionist policies. We would abandon NATO and fail to protect Western Europe from Russia’s incursions, while allowing Syria’s al-Assad to continue his murderous campaign of civil war. Donald’s foreign policy would suit Vladimir and so he gladly helps Donald’s campaign for the Presidency.
As patriotic Americans and in support of democracies that protect human rights and the rights of the individual all over the world, we must prevent Donald from achieving his aim of taking over our government. The Republicans, who claimed to be internationalists in support of democracy under George W. Bush (and went overboard with waterboarding, torture, and “rendition”), have taken control of the Congress and nearly taken over the Supreme Court (in spite of the timely death of Antonin Scalia.) They will happily become isolationists in order to win the Presidency, and they will readily accept Vladimir Putin’s support to do so.
Despite American blunders in stepping on nascent freedom movements all over the world over the last hundred and fifty years, we still have the largest and most effective military in the world. We must use our power to support freedom and human rights, not just to stop the Islamic State, but to counter Russia’s right-wing fascists under Vladimir Putin. Please vote against Donald in November; if you must hold your nose to vote for Hillary, do so, and if you think it’s the lesser of two evils, then vote anyway.
Here are some (most?) of the things that Republicans claim that Hillary Clinton has been guilty of, according to Chris Christie (based on a NYT account of his speech at the Republican Convention):
- Libya: supposedly Hillary is responsible for the collapse of governance in Libya because she advocated the NATO bombing of Moammar Gaddhafi’s troops when they threatened to overwhelm Libyan rebels in Benghazi in 2011. In fact, Christie called Hillary the “chief engineer of the disastrous overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya.” To blame Hillary as the “chief engineer” for the troubles of Libya seems overblown, to say the least. She certainly counselled support for the Libyan rebels, but she wasn’t chiefly responsible for the bombing campaign; that was a decision made by President Obama and the heads of the NATO countries. To blame anyone other than Gaddhafi for the situation in Libya is to be ignorant of history. Gaddhafi was the dictator who ruled Libya with an iron hand for many years, and who made a deal with President Bush to slide out from under responsibility for terrorism and the Lockerbie bombing by paying reparations and turning over one of the suspects in the bombing to Scotland for prosecution (in addition to cooperating with “rendition” of terror suspects and secret torture). If anyone, Bush was responsible for allowing Gaddhafi to remain in power after that pivot. Gaddhafi was clever, and he saw the handwriting on the wall after the attacks of 9/11/2001; he decided to curry favor with Bush by making it appear that he was cooperating in the “war on terror.”
- Terrorism in Nigeria and Boko Haram: Christie blamed Hillary for keeping Boko Haram off the State Department list of terrorist groups for two years. He called it “amazing.” In fact, she was advised to leave the organization off the list by “Islamic scholars and regional experts [who] had urged it to try other means of confronting the group’s tactics.” Christie claimed that Hillary’s “actions had led directly” to Boko Haram’s kidnappings of over two hundred teenaged girls. To blame Hillary Clinton for the actions of a terrorist group in Africa is disingenuous, to say the least. Boko Haram’s behavior would not have been inhibited by the State Department’s putting them on a terrorist list, nor anything else the State Department could reasonably have done short of assassinating their entire leadership.
- Trade with China: Christie claimed that Hillary was “desperate for Chinese cash” and that she pushed Obama to oppose the “Buy American” provision of his economic stimulus legislation in turn for a promise to China. He claimed that she supported “big-government spending financed by the Chinese” in opposing the “Buy American” provision. This provision was “protectionist” and could have provoked a trade war with the Chinese, not to mention the fact that it would have had little effect on our balance of trade with China. To call the stimulus package “big government spending” is just name-calling. There was no “promise to China” in any case; she opposed the protection provision for practical reasons.
- Syria: Christie claimed that Hillary had defended Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and called him “a reformer.” He then laid partial responsibility for the 400,000 deaths in the Syrian civil war so far at her feet. In fact, what she really said (in 2011, at the beginning of the protests against Assad) was “some members of Congress in both parties ‘believe he’s a reformer.’ ” She never defended Assad, nor said anything remotely positive about him after 2011. To blame her for anything Assad has done is simply false.
- Iran: Christie blames Hillary for the Iran nuclear treaty and claims that it is indefensible, allowing Iran to continue its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. This is false, and a complete mischaracterization of the treaty. It is true that Hillary had a hand in the treaty but not that it is a bad treaty. Iran made significant concessions in the treaty and, as the NYT says, has disposed of 98 percent of its nuclear materials and dismantled most of its centrifuges. There is no evidence that the treaty makes us “less safe”; in fact, there is more safety with the treaty than without it. Iran gave up most of its nuclear ambitions in order to end a crippling economic blockade; if the blockade had continued, it is likely that Iran would have become more radical than before.
- Russia: Christie blames Hillary for “that stupid reset button.” This is disingenuous when Donald has made admiring statements about Putin. It merely plays to the crowd’s (warranted) suspicion of Russia.
- As the NYT states,
Finally, Mr. Christie accused Mrs. Clinton of choosing to set up a private email server in her home in order to protect her personal secrets. “Let’s face the facts: Hillary Clinton cared more about protecting her own secrets than she cared about protecting America’s secrets,” he said.
It is unclear what “secrets” Mr. Christie thinks Hillary is protecting, but it is unlikely that she would be able to keep any of her secrets from the prying eyes of the Republican attack apparatus. Armed with subpoenas and lawsuits, as well as House Committee hearings, there is little that would escape the scrutiny of the right-wing investigators. It is also unclear how government servers could have protected American secrets any better than Hillary’s private servers; there is no magic about government computer equipment that makes it immune from Chinese military hackers. Fortunately, there are no allegations that any of our government’s secrets have been disclosed due to insecure emails sent or received by Hillary.
The bottom line is that Christie, and the Republican attack apparatus in general, is (successfully) trying to smear Hillary with every perceived foreign policy failure of the United States in her lifetime. The result is that the general public has unfairly come to view Hillary as untrustworthy and untruthful. The “untruthful” attitude is particularly ironic when we compare Donald’s acknowledged tendency to gross exaggeration and documented history of downright falsehoods, which he refuses to correct when confronted with the truth.
Sculpture of a Child in a Garden
More comments today on the New York Times online, to a piece by David Brooks about Donald’s Republican convention:
Mark Young
San Francisco, CA
Folks, this is becoming a little too scary for any sane person’s comfort.
People need to remember that the US possesses thousands of nuclear weapons ready to be launched on the authority of one person—the President. Trump could invoke this authority on the smallest of errors or pretense. He has said as much. He would show any nation the consequences of questioning the US’s or his authority.
There is no one to question, debate or check this authority held by the President. Once an order to launch is given, the military will follow orders without question.
The smallest of weapons in the US arsenal will vaporize everything within 2.5 miles. Millions would die. If the exchange is big enough, the survival of everyone on the planet would be in question.
Do we really want to grant that authority to a man who’s ego is this fragile and who describes outright lies as creative hyperbole?
There is no place on this planet that you could move to to escape the risk of a Trump presidency.
David Blum
Daejon, Korea
It’s one thing to have a twitter feed and go off on that.
It’s another thing to have the nuclear codes.
I could understand his nutty tweets if he drank, but he supposedly doesn’t.
This man is unstable.
DH
Miami-Dade County
Trump hasn’t slipped off the rails, Mr. Brook, he has been on no rails all campaign. Mexican Rapists. Build a wall that blocks Mexico from the US. The Mexicans will pay for it all. Woman are dropping on their knees. The Central Park rapists are still guilty. One could go on all day with Trump quotes that show he has no sense of reality.
What has slipped off the rails is the US Press Corp that has allowed this Nabob of Narcissism to get this far as to claim the Republican Nomination for the Presidency. And don’t be coy Mr. Brooks; after all, at least George Will had the decency to give up his Republican Party voting preference. When will you?
All the candidates for president, on both sides, complain that their news coverage has been unfairly negative. You don’t hear this much from Clinton, but you do hear it a lot from Sanders, and particularly from Donald– he has banned some news outlets from his press conferences.
A study by Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy says that Clinton has, by far, been treated most negatively in news coverage, especially in the year preceding the beginning of the primaries. Donald was treated positively, even before he began his rise to the top of the primaries. The data collected by this study is detailed in a report from the Center that makes for good reading and goes into great detail. The Center also studied news reporting of the primary season from January to June of this year and found the same problems: Clinton has received substantially more negative coverage than Sanders, and Sanders was relatively ignored early in the primary season. Donald was treated positively in the news before he won the primaries, but then the reporting switched to highly negative after he had cinched the nomination.
The impressions that we have been getting about the news coverage of presidential candidates have been confirmed by these in-depth studies. Clinton has been treated in a very negative fashion by the news. Some would argue that’s because she’s got a lot of negative aspects– but how do we know? We only know what we are told by the news media.
Vox posted a report about the Shorenstein Center’s studies, and they mention another study by a different group, Crimson Hexagon, a “social media analytics firm in Boston” that they reported on back in April. The Hexagon studied reporting from a different angle but got similar results: Clinton was treated more negatively than any other candidate, and received fewer positive stories as well. Sanders was relatively ignored early on in the race, but then got more positive reports than Clinton– belying the complaints of Sanders supporters that they were being treated unfairly.
The Hexagon’s methodology was quite different, and involved an analysis of retweets and mentions on Twitter that indicated the most discussed media outlets. These outlets, whose names turn out to be the publishers of the most popular news stories, generated some 170,000 stories in the first four months of 2015. These outlets included some of the biggest names: the Washington Post, Politico, Fox News, the Huffington Post, and CNN.
The stories produced were analyzed by computer for their positive, neutral, or negative content– and most turned out to be negative, for all the candidates. However, the number of positive stories was least for Clinton and the most for John Kasich (who also had the fewest negative stories.) Kasich turned out to be an also-ran, but then so did Sanders, who was treated in an average way. Aside from the positive or negative slant of stories, there is also the way the candidates are treated as “most likely to win” or “not a winning candidate.” This treatment, the Hexagon asserts, has the most effect on voter’s perception of the candidates as winners or losers. Thus, the media’s initial treatment of Sanders had an inhibiting effect on his chances and made voters look upon him as a loser, at least according to the Hexagon.
The most important point to be gathered from these analyses is that Clinton has been treated most negatively by the press, and this has had an effect on the way she is perceived: as untrustworthy or dishonest. The perception of Clinton as dishonest compared to Donald is risible, considering the practiced way in which Donald lies his way through every speech. Donald even brags about his lies in the books he has written, and everyone who has been involved with him in a business deal has a story to tell about the lies he has inflicted upon them in an effort to look more successful than he really is.
The bottom line is that Donald is unlike almost every other candidate for President who has ever ran. He is the most dishonest, the most narcissistic, the most manipulative, and he has proposed the most disruptive policies of any candidate. He makes an appeal to the racist, xenophobic, and misogynist sentiments that lurk in the hearts of the under-educated, middle-aged, white males who lurk in the most economically depressed areas of this country. He brings out the hatred and distrust that have been generated by the systematic deprivation of jobs and livelihoods of the white underclass by corporations that have sent all the manufacturing capacity of this country overseas.
The people who support him had jobs and lives that were removed from them by these corporations, and they have no prospects to get new jobs that would support them in the way to which they had become accustomed. Unlike the black underclass, who have never had good prospects and suffer from despair and learned helplessness, these people have only recently been put down and still have plenty of rage to express. At the same time, the minorities (mostly black but also Latino) who have been oppressed for many years are beginning to express themselves in opposition to the police state that has had its foot on their necks. The black people who feel oppressed are sympathetic to Clinton– who has been rational and reasonable, unlike Donald, who has been irrational and unreasonable.
Who would you support– a narcissistic demagogue who is supported by a relatively privileged white underclass, or a rational leader who has the support of the truly oppressed? It is no wonder that people don’t believe the news media when they treat this extremely polarized election as a horse race.
Here is a long article about how big egos can perpetuate stupid mistakes in social science: it seems that a graduate student noticed mistakes in a paper by an established professor. He asked to see the scientist’s data, nicely, and got nowhere. So eventually he published a paper detailing the mistakes the professor made, and the professor got all bent out of shape about it. This is worth reading for those who are interested in why science, especially social science, is so full of mistakes that take decades to correct.
The basic problem was that a social scientist had misread his data in a fairly obvious way: his conclusion was that conservative people tend to be more likely to be individualistic and less likely to “fall into line.” This is the opposite of what you would think if you were just guessing, and the opposite of what most of the research literature had shown up to that point. The student, on reading this paper, thought that the scientist must have miscoded his data. He had his advisor send an email to the scientist asking for his raw data, so he could evaluate for himself if this was the case. He never got the data despite repeated requests.
A couple of years later, the student had graduated, and with his new job as a professor, was able to muster the resources to re-examine the data on his own. He did the evaluation and wrote a paper, which he submitted to a journal. But the journal sent the paper for review to the original scientist who had made the mistake. This scientist suddenly turned around and wrote another paper correcting his own errors. At the same time, he developed a false narrative that the student was out to get him. Fortunately, the student wasn’t made to suffer for the scientist’s ego and back-tracking. It’s a long story, and well worth reading, in New York magazine.
Horse of a retouched Color
Using Photoshop, I drastically darkened a distracting light area to the left of the horse’s head, which simplified an otherwise somewhat complex image.
Water Faucet in Rest Area
Conrad Theodore Seitz 