Day 6 of the New Order - What to believe?

News of the Day:

Obama has a press conference panned by the right where he said he considered Trump a pragmatist that would not willy-nilly dismantle programs and treaties that his administration championed.   Trump on the other hand just appointed Steve Bannon the White House Chief of Staff, a move that is nowhere near pragmatic but completely on the other extreme bring alt-Right ideology front and center into the Executive Branch.  This does not bode well.  This is not a position that has Senate approval so he is clearly in and we cannot stop him from influencing what appears to be an easily influenced President.  Obama clearly missed that memo or was ignoring it trying to put his best face on things.

Facebook is a mess of vindictive name calling which suits the Trump style nicely.  Both sides cannot believe the other side is behaving the way it is.  Many Trump supporters are saying they aren't racists, homophobes, anti-Muslim, etc but those Trump haters then call them out for voting for someone who espouses those views so openly.  Meanwhile the Trump supporters call the other side cry babies for protesting and the Trump camp says they are being organized by bad people intent on just creating chaos.  All this is ominous as I mentioned before that Obama will put up with the protests but once the new regime is in place the tolerance levels will go down and it will get very ugly and scary.  We must never stray from civil disobedience into civil unrest or we risk becoming a police state very quickly.

The Electoral College is under siege as well it probably should be.  Since writing my piece on it I found an excellent article on how the College was actually tied to the 3/5ths rule and helped the Southerners retain control of the government but having more electoral votes even as the North got more populous.  The Electoral College probably should have been disbanded during Reconstruction but as it was not some states now hold the key to the Presidency because they do not keep to one side of the aisle in every contest.  It is in the states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Arizona that these contests are decided.  New Hampshire had quite a bit of activity being the most conservative state in New England but nobody really visits the rest as they will vote Democratic.  It is hard to say if it is warping the Republic by giving too much power to people in certain states over everyone else but it certainly appears to be.

I do believe the appointment of Bannon is a blow to any hope that Trump is a person that maybe will act pragmatically and keep the rights of all Americans in mind despite how moderate he seemed to be on 60 Minutes last night.  He is easily led and I see Bannon as the Cheney of the White House, always having the President's ear and often leading him in the wrong direction.  Even if Trump himself is not an overt racist there is no doubt Bannon is.  The excuse that he just owns the company but does not write the stuff does not fly.  Who sets the tone for a business.  I know when I had one it was my goals that we pursued not the staff's.  I hired staff that believed in my goals and I am sure that is true of Bannon and true of Trump.  Saying Trump is not a racist but he just allows them to have a large say in his administration is in the same mode.  The boss sets the tone with their hires and this tone is sickening.

I don't know what to do now.  We need someone to lead the charge.  Where is Jon Stewart when we need him,  Where is Bernie?  Where is some new person to take the reins and ride into the fray so that we are coordinated and effective in opposition to the new status quo..

Day 5 of the New Order - Protests galore and is Trump backpedalling?

I feel like I am right on the cusp of getting thinks right and then find someone has a better idea than I have.  Yesterday I suggested we take care of our citizens who follow Islam and once having finished found the safety pin idea.  I am glad some people are more creative than I am.  Where your safety pins proudly my friends.

I also feel that my choice of a title for this blog was a little over the top.  I was stealing a title from a Steve Earle song mostly to demonstrate that we must begin to work towards steering the revolution that has occurred with the election of Trump in the right direction.  We must direct the revolution as it is occurring.  Revolutions are tricky endeavors.  Few in history have resulted in long term stable governments just as few Civil Wars have.  We do not want a violent revolution but we need one to keep the world intact as a Trump Presidency if he commits to all he wants to will be a revolution not the evolution that our form of government lends itself to.  Sometimes that evolution is too slow and there are explosions.  I would argue that the Civil War was caused in large part because we did not change quickly enough.  Trump's election is partly an indication that the last 6 years of governmental gridlock did not allow the government to address the issues that were brewing.   The problem with that is while Obama has high approval ratings and Congress low ones the backlash went in favor of the party that controlled Congress.  Go figure.  I am sure this will contribute to gridlock in the future as the parties continually compete for control by blocking the others programs and never finding the middle ground where most of the population is actually most comfortable.   Shades of Gray may have sold well to the public but it is lost in our political system.

Onto to the recent news,  People have turned out in large numbers in some cities to protest the election of Donald Trump.  Soon they may be joined by Trump supporters who realize they have been had.  Already he is waffling on Obamacare although his response on 60 Minutes shows he has not a clue how government works as he said he would repeal and replace it at the same time.  Even with Congress on his side which they may not be given his desire to preserve parts of the plan it will take months of wrangling to get such a bill passed.  So will he repeal it the first day in office by executive order and is that even allowed?  What will his supporters say when he doesn't do that or arrest Hillary.  Most of my Facebook friends pro-Trump posts have to do with those two topics even more than the wall or the threat of a Muslim takeover.  I guess we will see who is in the streets in the future but it looks like we are going to have to get used to it.  Right now the Trump camp is calling them crybabies but had he lost with all of his rigged election talk I am sure we would have seen similar anger but as most of his supporters are scattered in more rural areas it may not have resulted in the same kind of protests.

The protests themselves are generally peaceful but some have degenerated into violence including a city that I really loved on our cross country trip, Portland.  This is unfortunate as it gives the incoming group a good excuse to crack down on all dissent, the first step to the dismantling of the American republic.  This is how Hitler took power in Germany.  We need to follow the wise strategy of Martin Luther King.  The peaceful protests he led were often met with force which only further reinforced his idea that the blacks were in the right.  Having lived through those times the violent protests against the Vietnam war and Malcolm X's call to arms seemed to harden the opposition.  King adopting Gandhi's successful strategy was much more effective in producing change.  The current problem is a legacy from the Occupy Movement where the protest are purely democratic to the point of being a whole group of individual actions rather than a coordinated one.  The movement needs a leader who will control the excesses and make sure the movement has clear goals and moves in a direction that will achieve those goals.  I think that Senator Sanders would be ideal to be such a leader.  Elizabeth Warren while she shares his views is now too closely tied to Hillary.  Had she come out early for the candidate that she most agreed with rather than sitting on the fence I would trust her more but Bernie has been consistent.  Even his support for Hillary was couched in terms of being anti-Trump rather than pro-Clinton.  He can lead it for a while and as there gets to be a cadre of leadership types that rise to the top like the NAACP had he can turn it over to others.  But we need someone and we need them soon to both keep the protests civil and give President Trump a point person to negotiate with.  As an aside I hate saying President Trump.  If I wake up in the middle of the night and remember he is President I cannot get back to sleep.

Until the movement gets coordinate please protest peacefully, wear your safety pins and fight the big corporations as much as you can.  Until tomorrow peace be with you.

Day 4 of the New Order: Nativism redefined

There is no good news on the screens these days.
There are two sources of violence currently in the country.  The protest from the left have been extensive and need to be non-violent to actually work. Peaceful demonstrations in liberal cities are important to show the President-elect that his campaign tactics have sown some significant hatred that he will have to defuse in some way.  He has put himself into a difficult position and unlike when he did this in business he will not be able to turn to bankruptcy court to get some relief.   The moral bankruptcy he showed during the campaign will come back to haunt him but violent protests will come back to haunt his opponents as there will not be any quarter given by Trump and civil unrest is a leader's excuse for the imposition of strong armed tactics against the opposition.  Protest now but protest peacefully.  The lunatics are in charge of the asylum, don't set them off.

But what I would like to talk about today is the new Nativism that Trump has tapped into.  Although the United States has as a founding principle the words at the base of the Statue of Liberty the citizens in residence have not always been so kind to those huddled masses.  The "No Irish need apply" signs that you can buy on eBay today (http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/131804759911?lpid=82&chn=ps&ul_noapp=true) was a common sight in the past.  The Italians and Hispanics faced the same hurdles and in many areas of the country the Hispanics are still not completely assimilated.  Blacks have been around longer than either of those groups but given that for most of that time they were slaves they have had different hurdles to gain acceptance.

Why does a country that professes one thing act in a different fashion.  Some of it is probably based on our biology.  Our brains look for patterns as a way to simply our decision making and one thing humans brains are good at is recognition of similarities.  By identify similarities we can apply learning we have acquired in situations that were not identical but close enough to make a sound decision based on what happened in the previous instance.  We do the same with people judging them as like us or not like us.  We do that in various categories: gender, age, race, the way they speak, the way they dress, etc. and use these to quickly assess another person.  Stephen Colbert professes to not see a person's color but that is an ingenious way to get us to understand that we all do.  The difference between being a racist or sexist is how we react to noticing these attributes.  A racist immediately thinks trouble when they see a black person or if black a white person.  Yes blacks can be racist too.  If your reaction to finding your new boss is a women boss is immediately that she will be incompetent, bossy,.and moody you are being sexist.  It is not always that simple.  Sometimes you will find that although you would not have sought out a black friend your new black next door neighbor who you cringed to see move in turned out to be a good person who you enjoy or that women boss is really good at her job and easy to work for.  Unfortunately learning research shows that the concept map of our brains that deals with these patterned responses is not  easily persuaded to give up those patterns of thought.  Saying you have a black friend does not make you not racist if your reaction to the next black person you meet moving into the neighborhood again makes you cringe.  It will take a number of positive encounters in a row to change that and one or two negative ones will set back the clock.  I was hoping a smart, classy black President would help all Americans to the realization that people are in fact people and have the same desires, hopes and dreams.  But the opposite seems to have occurred as anytime he did something that confirmed that black people wanted handouts (Obamacare) or were lawless hooligans the President would protect (police shooting responses from Ferguson on) their black people are bad counters seemed to reset.

So how have we made as much recent progress in acceptance of other nationalities, races, sexual orientation and religion as we have over the years?  We are at the core also social animals and most of us are also wired to promote societal goals also.  As we have more contact with people of different backgrounds and ideas that are part of our societal framework we will learn to accept them and then codify into law that acceptance.  However I did take a long (12,800 mile) road trip through the country this summer and the mixing of these different people is not occurring outside the cities and the coasts and even there neighborhoods are rarely heterogeneous so the preconceptions of ethnicity in particular rarely get challenged enough to move everyone in the same direction as the legislative action is pushing them.

Onto the scene bursts Trump spouting that illegal immigrants are taking your jobs and Muslims are all out to kill you.  That falls right in line with what the non-urban Americans see on the news nightly especially if they watch Fox News.  Those in urban areas are surrounded by Muslims who are not trying to kill them and do not accept that because it does not fit their reality.  The fact is that we have been at war with parts of the Muslim world since Israel was founded in the late 1940's.  At first it was just arming the Israelis but under Bush I turned into fighting with the US Army and under Bush II having a protracted war in two countries.  We are now involved in three countries although not with the troop strengths we had and mostly in support.  It is a complex situation with religious overtones, both Christian versus Muslim and Sunni versus Shiite  with the added nation versus nation and Kurds versus everyone.  On top of this Christianity has always been an apocalyptic religion and has a number of sects that rejoice to see the End Times near.  Coupled with the Muslim radicals hope for a final battle to destroy Christianity this is a recipe for world wide destruction and calamity.  The Presidency is not an easy thing and there is little room for error and certainly not rash decisions.

As we are at war with Muslims even as we have Muslim allies it is convenient and common historically to paint those people we are fighting as less than human.  I have in my 78 record collection a disc titled "Don't be a sap, kill a Jap"  from World War II.  We just paid reparations to the Japanese for their internment during that war.  The people running the wars know this.  The Christmas soccer game between the Germans and British in WWI drove the generals crazy mostly because it humanized the enemy.  John McCutcheon does a nice job of capturing this in his song "Christmas in the Trenches".  So Trump has fanned the flames that already existed and the problems have already started as Muslim women who wear headscarves are readily identifiable they will probably bear the brunt of the violence.  I will deal with the illegal immigrant nativism issue tomorrow but for today I think our action has to be not only to go out of our way to be welcoming to any Muslims we meet but be prepared to protect them from violence.  They are justifiably scared that with the election of a man who has nothing good to say about them they will be open and relatively unprotected from attack.  We have to be willing as Americans to stop people acting outside of the ideals of our country even if it means bodily injury to ourselves.  We must be brave for them as they are being brave to stay here given the current situation.  The best way to radicalize an American Muslim is to antagonize them and make them feel they are apart from our society. The best way to stay safe is to make sure they feel safe.  Back them into a corner and they will try to fight their way out.

Here is one women's suggestion as to how to deal with Islamophobic attacks.  https://sojo.net/articles/what-do-if-you-see-islamophobic-harrassment.  Of course all situations are different but here approach is non-confrontational and as we know escalating conflicts are more likely if a confrontation occurs.

Day 3 of the New Order:The Electoral College

With the petition currently circulating and already having over 1 million signatures I think we need to have a short civics lesson as it appears from Facebook that many people do not quite understand how all this works.

Nuts and Bolts

When we are voting we are not actually directly voting for a candidate but rather for an elector that presumably will vote for that candidate.  Each state gets as many electors as they have Congressional delegates.  This favors small states as the House representation is based on population every state has two senators.  Thus if a larger state is 10 times the size of a smaller one it will get 12 votes but the smaller one gets 3 so the larger state only gets 4 times as many votes as the smaller one with 10 times the number of people.  You can see this clearly in the current election.  Clinton took the popular vote but lost the electoral college by taking the larger population states and not taking the more numerous smaller ones.  This is also what happened to Gore.  This is one reason the Electoral College exists but there is another one.

When the US Constitution was written only males who owned property had the right to vote.  Even with that elite group being the only voters the framers did not completely trust the electorate and wanted a safeguard in case of complete idiocy on their part.  Thus they incorporated this extra step in the election process to ensure that large mistakes would not be made because the electors are not actually bound to vote anything but their conscience.  The electors themselves are generally party regulars who are expected to vote the party line but there have been exceptions in the past none of which changed the expected outcome.  If the College ties the vote goes to the House to elect the President and the Senate to elect the Vice-President.  

Another thing to note is that when this system was originally designed there were no political parties and the Vice President was for the first three elections the person who garnered the second most votes in the Electoral College.   With the election of 1800 there were in fact newly formed parties involved and each put up a candidate for President and Vice President.  This lead to a mess when the two members of the same party got the same number of votes in the electoral college and the whole thing was thrown into the House of Representatives who had no idea what to do this situation being without precedent.  You can read elsewhere about all the machinations that resulted in Jefferson becoming President.  It did result in a rift between Jefferson and Burr with Jefferson, a master of character assassination, managed to make Burr a pariah to this day.  I don't have the money to see Hamilton the play but it might be covered in part there as it did exacerbate the enmity between Burr and Hamilton that resulted in the sitting VP shooting a past cabinet official dead.  In any case this lead to a hasty amendment to the Constitution redefining how the College works to this day.  

Hope?

Can this be used to derail Trump on his way to the White House.  While it is highly unlikely that it can work it is the best way within the country's laws to accomplish the goal of having him never sworn in.  However it does carry with it the threat of violence in the streets as it will prove to all the rapid Trump supporters that in the end the election was rigged.  You can't blame them for thinking that.  

How do you convince both the Trump supporters and the Electoral College that he is dangerous and must be stopped?  My feeling is that if all the hate talk, incomplete sentences, wishful thinking, outright lies and his narcissism did not accomplish that pointing in that direction is useless.  I think that the Russian connection is the most obvious place to start.  I don't think many Americans are ready to embrace Russia, many still distrust them from the cold war era, others are immigrants from areas that are affected by Russian or past Soviet deprivations and still others see Putin as a thus and a threat to world peace.  The fact that the Trump camp talked to them, that Trump encouraged them to release emails that they had, and that he is such an admirer of Putin and wants to get rid of NATO is flirting with or maybe even over the line of treason.  I think that is the line the press needs to take to help the process.  The press helped us into this mess maybe they can help us out.  I call on the New York Times and Washington Post to do some good investigative reporting on this matter and hope they turn up a smoking gun.

An aside

Did anyone else see the dynamic at the press conference yesterday.  First I feel bad for Trump in a way because like myself his mouth falls into a frown at rest and makes us look grumpy.  He looked like a frog sitting on a lily pad for the whole thing until Obama finally made him laugh at the end.  Ah but I digress.  The dynamic I saw was that Obama was in charge and treated Trump like a schoolkid.  The contrast in demeanor was startling.  It almost looked like he had spent the whole meeting prior to that teaching and occasionally scolding him as Trump sat slouched and frowning while Obama talked smoothly to the press glancing over occasionally to make sure Trump stayed in line and kept quiet.  Trump as per usual said little that was coherent but waved his hands a bit and used plenty of superlatives.  He was showered so many of those on Obama and his accomplishments I was transported back to Star Wars IV when Obi Wan convinces the guard to let them pass and explains to Luke that "The force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded."  Obama clearly has a lot more of the force than his successor-elect does.

Action

Sign the petition to the electoral college with the link from yesterday and get your friends to do the same.  Talk up the Russian connection and lets hope there is something behind it that we find out by December 18th.  If you are religious pray and if not hope.

Day 2 of the New Order:A Discussion 

OK so Trump was elected as our new leader.  I, and a lot of other Americans could never imagine this day would come.  His rise was improbable having started with an announcement that he was running that he paid people off the street to attend.  By the end of the campaign thousands waited in long lines to see him.  His speeches consist mostly of superlatives and little substance but somehow he won.  I want to examine that now not to find blame although in discussing it I am sure to sound like I am laying blame but I think if we are to ever move forward we have to see the past and what I am seeing is some reflections from Germany in the 1930's which disturb me.  I think we need to be mindful of those reflections and make sure that we organize to redirect any moves in that direction.  These are my opinions and analysis.  I know there are many more things I did not think of and plenty of you my disagree with what I might say.  Please respond.  I am writing this as therapy for me but also as a call to arms and I want to hear other opinions that help define and understand what is going on.  I am currently a college professor and a good discussion is what we live for.  Please be polite and as I teach science I would like any comments to stick to facts over conjecture or rumor.  We have MSNBC and Fox for that stuff.

So how did we get here:
There are many factors and here is the list of items I can come up with at the moment.  I am not going to talk about Trump much because he is a result more than a cause of our problems.  I am also going to just take one item a day as I have only so much time to spend doing this and you the reader so much time to read it.  I will pose a problem each day and discuss actions individuals can take and things we need to work towards in changing society.

The economy- Globalization

The economy is not in shambles but there are two things that are deep rooted and grew insidiously over the past 30 years or so that make it seem so to the working people of the country.  Helping them to that decision is Fox New telling them that the recovery is not strong enough.  They are globalization and the concurrent change of the US economy away from manufacturing and into a service economy.  Due to the high wages unions gained for their workers which did not matter due to productivity gains in the 50's and 60's coupled with the cost of meeting tightened pollution and safety standards manufacturing concerns closed plants in the States and took them overseas.  This has in fact resulted in a cleaner environment and less dangerous working conditions in America with a resultant shift in our employment to service jobs.  The boom in college education after World War II certainly was part of this trend also as the coal minors sent their kids off to college so they would no have to work in the mines.  These people then filled the management jobs in the shifting economy.

However the problem with this shift is that now we purchase many things abroad and just sell them here.  Consumption is high and price competition is great between the outlets that sell whether they be the now dying big box stores, the almost already dead local stores or the currently thriving web based ones.   The workers in these places are not generally protected by unions and as such receive as low a wage as the company can get away with paying.  Health insurance is not generally paid either but health insurance is a whole topic unto itself so we will leave that for another time.  Suffice it to say that given the high unemployment rate after the Bush trickle-down years that wage could be quite low.  It is only now after that rate has been whittled down to a manageable level that wages are rising but they will never be equal to what some of those great manufacturing jobs paid.

There are so many possible solutions to this and admittedly Trump has a couple that do make some sense. I will take them first.
1.  Import duties - I would charge them based more on a Jimmy Carter type model where environmental and working conditions in the country of origin count more than were the company once manufactured the materials which I is how I interpret Trump's plan
2.  Lean on China to fix currency issues.  Somehow we have to make china understand that the world market needs to control their currency.  As a leading trade partner we should be able to have some influence even though they hold a lot of our debt paper which is their trump (sorry) card.  Their economy currently is overheated and any slowing of their growth rate would be disastrous for them so we hold some cards too.  We just have to be willing to play them.
Here are some of mine for legislative action:
1.  Charge back companies for food stamp and health insurance paid by the US Government on behalf of their employees.  If they aren't paying enough to keep people of medicaid and food stamps their profits should not be at the expense of the taxpayers
2.  Set the minimum wage higher -  This is substituting government intervention for unionization but is probably easier to accomplish as any union organizer will tell you.
And here is an individual or group goal.
1. Boycott Walmart - OK a personal bias here.  This chain is an egregious example of taking advantage of employees to enrich the corporation.  They also squeeze suppliers unmercifully.  Years ago they boasted everything in the store was made in the US but in the end when their sharp practices brought their US suppliers into near or actual bankruptcy they took everything overseas anyway.   I would love to see organized protests outside every Walmart.  This worked great for the Market Basket employees.  It was a great protest that took some guts on the employees part but was well received by the public who virtually shut down the operation until the management changed.  Walmart is a different, much large animal but I believe the tactics would work if done properly and nationally.  They but must be done outside the company as the employees will lose their livelihood as poor as it is if seen protesting.  

And there is this long shot https://www.change.org/p/electoral-college-electors-electoral-college-make-hillary-clinton-president-on-december-19

Now add yours and any suggestions for how to organize to carry out any of these.