Analysis and Information on psychological, social, economic, and political states of affairs
A video interview with Jill Stein conducted by Abby Martin.
Published and posted in Media Roots by Abby Martin.
This video builds the best case I have seen for environmental and health care reforms and policies.
Dr. Stein understands what is going on and has practical doable ideas for producing significant lasting change now.
View it in total by clicking here http://mediaroots.org/dr-jill-stein-abby-martin-symptoms-of-a-sick-society/.
Your life might depend on it.
Posted on October 29, 2016 by Stacy Herbert – 116 Comments ↓
We discuss ‘encountering Eric Holder,’ the former US Attorney General, at the Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington DC where they confronted him on the #PodestaEmails, Citigroup, HSBC and more. In the second half, Max interviews Francine McKenna, transparency reporter at Marketwatch.com about how history will look at Eric Holder and his decisions on Too Big To Fail banks. They also discuss Donald Trump’s taxes and Deutsche Bank’s problems.
Here is a mind-blowing interview and video showing another intelligent woman running for US president in 2016, Gloria De Riva.
Being a dyed-in-the-wool case method teacher and learner, I do not fully accept any sort of ism, capitalism, Buddhism, socialism or otherwise; but I think you should give this video a look and listen. It espouses a plausible point of view, as plausible as yours and mine. Here is another woman you can vote for for US president, other than Hillary Clinton November 8.
Friday, 28 October 2016 00:00 By Abby Martin, teleSUR | Video Interview. Posted in Truth-Out.
To watch and listen, click here, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38170-the-empire-files-meet-the-socialist-woman-running-for-president.
From a passage I wrote on page 645 of my book, BUSINESS VOYAGES: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, a business bible, written in 2004, first published in 2008 by our publishing company, Effective Learning Publications:
“I am not a Democrat, or a Liberal, and for sure I am not a Republican, or a Conservative. I am a member of the FFPP, my own creation, the Freedom, Fairness, and Progress Party. If you would like to join this party, send no money, but act in such a way as to encourage all people to act in truly free, fair, and progressive ways. Most Democratic congress people seem about as devoid of workable solutions for real problems in today’s world as Reagan and Bush II, although I will say I think Democratic politicians in Washington in general have been more Christian-like than Republican politicians in Washington since 1980. At least they did not take from the poor and give to the rich. Most Republican and Democratic politicians have done little in the last 25 years but slavishly vote for their party line, as they were told by their party bosses, to conserve their chances of getting help from their party bosses in their next election.”
Vote the rascals out ASAP and replace them with free, fair, responsible, progressive members of the FFPP, who want to do the right thing for all people.
Vote in Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, as President of the United States in November 2016!
And all other progressive independents you can find.
Unfortunately, as of this writing, October 22, 2016, it appears most demos and repubs that voted in the primaries do not have good political judgment, not having the sense to vote in their own interests, since most voted for Hillary, the establishment candidate, and Trump, which will result in another federal administration not doing anything for ordinary citizens.
The Senate and House are still controlled by establishment politicians.
The last thing we need now are more party-line pandering career politicians out to feather their own nests and the nests of their sugar daddies ensconced in their corporate headquarters atop skyscrapers and their favored elite rich few by slavishly voting for bills, acts, laws and rules in their favor, at the expense of we the people on the street, in the on-going US class war, exponentially increasing the incomes and wealth of the elite rich from year to year, creating ever-widening inequality, inexorably destroying our society from the inside, as climate change destroys it from the outside.
Most local politicians are ethical conscientious citizens doing their best to serve their fellow citizens, but the farther from home the government is located the more likely politicians are to be corrupted and bought off by large corporations and the elite rich, causing them to vote in their interests, rather than in the interests of their fellow citizens.
Get rid of federal flat taxes. Large corporations and the elite rich now pay about the same after loophole effective tax rate as the middle class. Reset the top ALETR to above 70 percent where our wisest ancestors set it before 1980, who knew you have to have progressive income tax rates to prevent inequality from destroying society. Use the new tax revenue and borrowed and printed money to directly fund infrastructure jobs in green energy, transportation, education and the like to help the unemployed and underemployed and small businesses on main streets, to create a multiplier effect that will create even more jobs as people spend the money the new jobs provide, restoring a semblance of fairness in our society.
The problem now with our stagnant economy is that digital stimulus money created by the Federal Reserve System did no good as far as job creation is concerned; it wound up in the hands of large corporations that used it to buy back their own stock to enrich their executives with stock options, inflating stock markets, making it seem the economy had recovered, which it did for the elite rich owning stock. But both stock markets and bond markets are now in bubbles that could burst at any time, causing the rich to give back about fifty percent of their gains.
Real savers and conservative investors thanks to the low interest rate policies of the Fed cannot now make sensible investments for retirement, and the pension plans and investments of current retirees are being deprived of interest income needed to survive.
Bring back the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which was gotten rid of in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, signed by Hillary’s husband when he was president, possibly the most unethical and harmful piece of US legislative action of the 20th Century, almost criminal, which gave banksters in too big to fail Wall Street banks permission to gamble with bank money backed by depositors and citizens using derivatives of all sorts, financial weapons of mass destruction, turning the money and banking system into a giant gambling casino, putting the deposits and pension money of all citizens at risk to this very day.
I used a spinning arrow over 30 years in all my university case method business courses at Georgia Southern University to point out and randomly select the discussion leader of the day, thereby insuring every student in the class had an equal opportunity to be the class leader of the day, thereby teaching democratic leadership behaviors. I am now convinced you could randomly select intelligent knowledgeable citizens off the streets of the US and send them to Washington replacing all sitting politicians and the US government would improve overnight, since these citizens could use their common sense to vote for things benefiting we the people, having not been paid with corporate and elite rich money to fight on the side of large corporations and the elite rich in the US class war.
The US federal government would improve almost overnight if you sent Jill Stein to Washington as president, a highly intelligent, conscientious, ethical woman, an MD with a degree from Harvard medical school, with years of political experience leading the Green Party, which is now on the ballot in all but six states, with write-in capabilities in three of those six states, including Georgia. Why? Because, if for no other reason, Jill Stein is not bought and paid for by large corporations and the elite rich.
I thought Bernie Sanders should have fought it out with the Democratic National Committee and Hillary to the bitter end by accepting Jill Stein’s offer to hand him the nomination for president of the Green Party; but, alas, he turned it down. There are rumors he was threatened by the DNC and this caused him to throw in the towel and support Hillary.
Hillary and Trump were selected by about seventeen percent of possible voters each in the primaries. About sixty-five percent of possible voters either voted for Bernie Sanders or did not vote at all in the primaries. If all of them voted for Stein on November 8 she could win, a long shot, but a possibility nevertheless. Vote for Jill Stein and let the chips fall where they may. As evil as things are now voting for the lesser evil is clearly Jill Stein, who has a much higher probability of bringing about structural improvements in the economy, and not creating another disaster, such as starting a war like the Iraq War, than Hillary or Trump.
Randomly selecting leaders is not a novel idea. The ancient Greeks had the idea and used it as early as the 6th Century bce. The process is called sortition.
Random selection of political leaders would be far better than the election systems we now use–for the simple reason randomly selected leaders would not be beholden to vested interests, or corrupted by the money current politicians have to raise from rich patrons to purchase TV and mainstream media print advertising to get elected to federal offices, money that has to be paid back once they get in office, insuring the government is run primarily to benefit large corporations and the elite rich, not we the people.
Trump came across better in the second presidential debate (Sunday, October 9, 2016), Hillary not as well, in my judgment.
Hillary admitted she made a mistake with her email server and 33,000 emails, and Trump clobbered her for having bad judgment, something most people probably suspected.
Hillary clearly came out on top in the third debate.
What is judgment?
According to Google on the Internet, judgment is “the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions,” “an error of judgment.”
| synonyms: | discernment, acumen, shrewdness, astuteness, sense, common sense, perception, perspicacity, percipience, acuity, discrimination, reckoning, wisdom, wit, judiciousness, prudence, canniness, sharpness, sharp-wittedness, powers of reasoning, reason, logic; More
savvy, horse sense, street smarts, gumption “his temper could affect his judgment” |
One can build the case any woman who would marry an out-of-control sexual person like Bill Clinton and stay married to him decades has bad judgment.
But maybe Hillary’s marital decision reflected good judgment, given her goals and ambitions. It seems to me her being married to Bill Clinton enabled her to achieve her personal political ambitions, regardless of what he did sexually with other women, or how many times he embarrassed her, assuming his escapades and scandals did embarrass her. She may have found them entertaining.
Not many women have goals and objectives like Hillary’s, including seriously becoming the first woman president of the US.
Hillary has also been accused of being an out-of-control sexual person, as shown by a post on Facebook at http://www.wnd.com/2015/10/webb-hubbell-no-comment-on-fathering-chelsea-clinton/ asserting with compelling evidence her daughter’s biological father is not Bill Clinton but one of her law partners from her days with a law firm in Arkansas. Tit-for-tat a Facebook post at http://www.infowars.com/banished-the-untold-story-of-danney-williams-search-for-his-father/ asserts with compelling evidence Bill Clinton has a son he fathered with an African American sex worker from his days as governor of Arkansas.
Apparently it’s not embarrassing to millions of voters to think we US citizens shall once again have this Clinton couple in the White House, with Hillary overseeing and theoretically managing millions of employees in the US federal bureaucracy as chief executive, directing the activities of millions of employees in the US military as commander in chief, and supposedly psychologically leading all of us–morally, ethically, economically, and politically . . . to god knows where.
Bill Clinton’s bizarre sexual behavior and subsequent scandals enabled Hillary to automatically get millions of dollars worth of free political advertising in mainstream media, enabling her to develop her political brand, while acting in the leading lady role in one of the most successful real life soap operas of all time, The Clintons, watched by billions of people around Earth over twenty-five years–an experience that may enable her to take control of the White House Oval Office, and the White House bedrooms, come February of next year.
Trump said Hillary never gives up pursuing her goals and dreams, which he saw as a good thing about her. She has perseverance, for sure.
And no doubt about it, Hillary Clinton is an abnormally clever, attractive, and sophisticated person, with a good education, Yale and all that, as is her charming husband Bill, also a Yale law school graduate. Starting from scratch, they are now wealthy, having made their money after Bill left the US presidency on January 20, 2000, primarily by selling books and giving speeches to large corporations and the elite rich.
Regardless of Hillary’s abilities and proclivities, bad judgment, assuming she indeed has bad judgment, is not a good thing to have when a president sleeps with a red telephone by her bed in the White House giving her the power to destroy the world with a nuclear bomb, or start WWIII, with one telephone call in the middle of the night. Nor is bad judgment a good thing to have dealing with greedy aggressive bought and paid for US senators and representatives, banksters, and various types of oligarchs gradually but inexorably undermining the functioning of the US government from the inside seeking and gaining tax concessions and other favors.
Trump may have better judgment for foreign policy issues than Hillary, and for dealing with banksters and fellow oligarchs, however flawed his judgment is. Trump said he thought Antonin Scalia was a great Supreme Court judge, showing the kind of Supreme Court judges he would appoint, showing what poor judgment Trump has regarding the judgment of Antonin Scalia, especially Scalia’s judgment in the Citizens United case of 2010, an oxymoronic insulting name for the case, a case that dis-united citizens, a case that turned corporations into first class citizens with super power to influence elections in their favor, a case that turned people into second class citizens with diminished power. Scalia was one of the worst Supreme Court judges in US history, in my judgment.
Trump and his cronies and minions in the Oval Office, if Trump gets elected, could appoint a thousand or more judges, cabinet members, ambassadors, bureaucrats, etc., giving Trump power to do untold evil–exercising his flawed judgment.
Trump’s family life is about as strange as Hillary’s, hopefully also not a new normal for the US. Hopefully it’s nothing more than a bizarre dysfunctional rich family copying a TV reality show or soap opera, just for the fun of it, having nothing better to do to stave off boredom.
Both Trump and Hillary are potentially very evil presidents.
Woe be unto the land one of them shall probably wind up president of the US, thanks hugely to the mostly intellectually-challenged voters who selected Trump and Hillary in the primaries, and the corrupt rigging of the US primary system, designed to implement the will of the deep state, not the will of we the people.
Polls and posts still show Bernie Sanders could win in a landslide if he were on the ballot in November, as shown on my Facebook page, indicating a large majority of US possible voters are moderate sensible people, however apathetic many of them were in the primaries, if they could have voted and did not. Many registered Independents who supported Bernie could not vote for him, thanks to the nefarious rigging of the Democratic NationalCommittee.
We ought to do in the US what they do in Australia: Require all possible voters to vote, and fine them if they don’t.
Hillary and Trump were selected in the primaries by about thirty-five percent of possible US presidential voters, about seventeen percent of possible voters each, who were mostly credulous poorly-informed ideological extremists on the left and right, who could care less about the facts of foreign and domestic policy issues. They are mostly people who don’t want to be confused by facts, who believe memorizing a few simple dogmas, doctrines, or beliefs one time is all you need to live a successful and proper life.
We are being ruled by a tyranny of the minority.
Hopefully the collective judgment of US voters once all the November votes are tallied, announced, and accepted will be good enough to enable us in the US and all people around Earth to continue muddling through somehow, for a long time, regardless of who “wins” the election. It’s amazing to me we have done as well as we have collectively given the political incompetence and malfeasance we have seen in the US and worldwide in the last fifty-six years. The environment up to now has been very forgiving. How much longer it can tolerate human folly remains to be seen.
It’s grandiose for anyone to think that her or his personal vote in the November election will make one whit’s worth of difference in the overall outcome for the US and the world following the election. One vote in a secret ballot presidential vote is like a limb falling from a tree in a forest with no human around to see or hear it. Forget about making America great again with your vote, magically, as Trump mouths to the masses, or keeping America great, as it is, as Hillary mouths to the masses.
On the other hand, if you could somehow magically convince a majority of sensible moderate possible presidential voters to vote on Tuesday, November 8 that might make a difference. This is just as true for this presidential election as it has been for those of the past. Nothing will change if moderate sensible voters keep voting for the lesser evil selected by the evil Democratic and Republican Parties, in my judgment.
Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, is the best choice on the November presidential ballot. Vote for her, shake the dust off your feet as you walk away from the voting booth, don’t look back lest you get turned into a pillar of salt, pray for the best, and let the chips fall where they may.
As that great American stripper Mae West said, in her judgment, “Confronted with choosing the lesser of evils, always choose the evil you’ve never tried.”
One can build the case that no feeling, thought, decision, action, article, book, constitution, person, family, group, organization, religion, or nation is all good or all evil, and never has been.
One can build the case that all humans since time immemorial have done what they were caused to do in dog-eat-dog competitions in their environments in which there are always winners and losers, that all humans are inevitable evolutionary accidents, that free will does not exist, that all effects, including feelings, thoughts, and decisions are caused, and all causes and effects are linked in cause-effect chains in infinite regressions; and therefore no human is to be blamed or praised.
I have covered the issue of free will and determinism in some detail in my books. If you ask Google–Does free will exist?–you will find 10,400,000 results. Some of the posts say free will exists, and others say it does not. Most likely there is no proof either way. It’s possible I guess one of the 10,400,000 results might prove it one way or the other, but I have no illusions about reading all of them to find out.
If you click on my Business Voyages Archives option on our Effective Learning Company website at www.effectivelearning.net, and peruse some of my posts in the last ten years you will see I have a decent track record making political calls, for a Monday morning quarterback, and if you click on my Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397 you will see I have assembled here lately some posts from my Facebook Home selections that support the recommendation made in this essay factually and statistically, assuming you can believe the posts.
There is a lot at stake in this election, and I am aware that two of the wisest and most successful essayists of our generation, Noam Chomsky and Henry Giroux, have publicly stated voting for Hillary, as evil as she is, is the ethical choice under the circumstances, given the horrendous evilness of Trump.
But, having almost never done anything just because a wise person told me to, having always been somewhat of a devil’s advocate, it seems to me there is some chance, however low its probability, that if enough wiser folks advocate Jill Stein between now and November 8 she might get elected; and in my judgment, the probability of Jill Stein leading the US to an improvement, and not leading the US to a disaster, is much higher than for Trump or Hillary.
Yes, it’s a long shot, but why not take it, given the evilness of the overall situation we are in? What do you have to lose?
Here’s an article by Jim Hightower, one of the US’s foremost populist writers, published in AlterNet, well worth a read.
By Jim Hightower / AlterNet
September 30, 2016
In a 1932 dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted that the benefit of America’s federal structure is that “a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”
During my two terms as Texas Agriculture Commissioner, I was lucky enough to get the chance to put the Brandeis proposition into practice. There, we succeeded in establishing a broad network of farmers markets, providing state certification and labeling for organic products, promulgating comprehensive pesticide protections, creating food marketing co-ops, encouraging farmers to grow high-value nonconventional crops (from apples to wine grapes), financing and developing locally-owned ag processing facilities, opening the doors of corporate-controlled commerce so small farmers and food artisans could sell their products in supermarkets and even in international markets, and promoting both water conservation and the use of renewable energy sources, Brandeis’ “laboratory” realized!
But–oops–meet unintended consequences of Brandeisian theory: The gaggle of small-minded, far-right extremists who’ve grabbed the levers of gubernatorial power and established notoriously regressive regimes in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Kansas, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Arizona, Oklahoma, Indiana, and Texas. These governors share an uncanny uniformity in the policies (written by the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC) they push and the political language they use–as if operating from a common plan, advancing the same duo of governmental goals:
To increase the power and profits of the corporate interests that put up the campaign cash that keep the governors in office by delivering subsidies, no-bid contracts, special tax breaks, regulatory benefits, etc.
To knock down working-class and poor people by such despotic actions as suppressing voter turnout, destroying unions, bashing immigrants, militarizing police forces, slashing education budgets, corporatizing government programs, cutting human services for the needy, holding down wages, using theocratic piety to invade women’s bodies and rights, and autocratically pre-empting the democratic authority of activist citizens and local governments.
So while state (and local) offices offer myriad opportunities to create progressive democratic change, those laboratories of democracy are equally available to Dr. Frankenstein right-wingers (funded by the Koch Brothers and their cartel) who seek to engineer regressive plutocratic changes. And in recent years the forces of corporate rule have been building a national political structure that–brick by brick–locks in plutocratic power. Key to this scheme is systemically investing in the takeover of such state posts as governorships, legislatures, judges, redistricting boards, and regulatory agencies. Meanwhile, liberal strategists, funders and political operatives have largely avoided the gritty work of building democratic power through state campaigns. Instead, they have focused almost exclusively on the more glamorous, high-dollar races for President and Congress.
The right wing has recognized that while the media and both major parties are riveted on this year’s macabre (thanks to The Donald) contest for the White House, that’s hardly the only race that matters–and at least one progressive leader agrees: “Trump and Hillary are taking up all the oxygen,” says Nick Rathod, head of State Innovation Exchange, a policy consortium. “But, really, he explains, “where policy making is getting done is the states.” Having lost 913 state legislative seats since 2010, Democrats should be crying Mayday, for Republicans now control 68 of America’s 99 state legislative chambers–more than any time in our history. This includes 23 “trifecta” states where the GOP controls the governor’s office and both legislative chambers. In case the Democratic Party needs a Civics 101 refresher course, these state chambers will be redrawing–ie, gerrymandering–congressional districts following the 2020 census.
So, perhaps it’s time for the Democrats’ strategic geniuses and the rest of us to pay a bit more attention to state rep/senate races.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker and author of the book Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow (Wiley, March 2008). He publishes the monthly Hightower Lowdown, co-edited by Phillip Frazer.
By John Chuckman
Posted on September 30, 2016
Published by the Intrepid Report
Read in full at
the Intrepid Report by clicking here.
John Chuckman is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. He has many interests and is a lifelong student of history. He writes with a passionate desire for honesty, the rule of reason, and concern for human decency. John regards it as a badge of honor to have left the United States as a poor young man from the South Side of Chicago when the country embarked on the pointless murder of something like 3 million Vietnamese in their own land because they happened to embrace the wrong economic loyalties. He lives in Canada, which he is fond of calling “the peaceable kingdom.” John’s columns appear regularly on Intrepid Report, CounterPunch, Media Monitors, Politics Canada, Baltimore Chronicle, Intrepid Report, Scoop (New Zealand), Asian Tribune, Aljazeerah.info, Smirking Chimp, Dissident Voice, and many other Internet sites. He has been translated into at least ten languages and is regularly translated into Italian and Spanish. Several of his essays have been published in book collections, including two college texts. His first book has just been published, “The Decline of the American Empire and the Rise of China as a Global Power,” published by Constable and Robinson, London. Contact him at [email protected].
September 30, 2016
by Henry Giroux
Published in CounterPunch
Check it out at
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/30/thinking-dangerously-in-the-age-of-normalized-ignorance/.