By Richard John Stapleton

Trump had the better bullshit given the intelligence of US voters and the US electoral college.

And now we have no choice but to suck it up and get on with it.

Let us pray now that they are in power that Trump and his fundamentalist cronies might accidentally do more good than harm for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth.

Which is what we would have had to pray had Hillary won, or had Bennie Sanders won, or had Jill Stein won.

ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is probably the most unfair, pernicious, and egregious right-wing organization in the US, presumably only concerned about the US of America—not Canada, Central America, and South America—set against true democracy for we the people of all countries.

It’s funded by the Koch Brothers, Exxon, and Big Pharma.

They provide state legislators in the US free meals, drinks, lodging, and entertainment at luxury resorts for conferences at which ALEC experts give them legislation they have drafted for the so-called legislators to enact in their state legislatures.

This is probably the most effective top-down fascist organization run by the rich in the world, a descendant of the John Birch Society in the US.

If it gets what it wants, listed in the article below by Simon Davis-Cohen, like all fundamentalists, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, and ISIS, they will set the US back economically, culturally, and democratically two hundred years,  and they will probably usher in another Great Depression, a depression greater in terms of human suffering than the depression of the 1930’s.

They are hell bent for leather on achieving their goals, having been at it since the 1950s.

We the people of Spaceship Earth can only pray that saner and wiser spirits in the US and worldwide can somehow muster enough countervailing power to thwart them.

Unfortunately, corporate and elite rich money talks much louder than words from the mouths of ordinary human beings.

Read all about it at

The Right Wing:  Corporate America Is Inching Even Closer to a Constitutional Convention

In statehouses across the country, ALEC-backed legislators are pushing for a balanced-budget amendment, a repeal of the federal income tax and more.

By Simon Davis-Cohen / In These Times

January 26, 2017

 By clicking here:

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/corporate-america-inching-even-closer-constitutional-convention.

by Richard John Stapleton

I think our local newspaper the Statesboro Herald put together a great video report last week covering the Martin Luther King parade, the Scottish Heritage Society Robert Burns Supper, Georgia Southern basketball, and last year’s business leader of the year selected by the Rotary Club.

I carried the haggis in for the opening ceremonies of the Robert Burns Supper.  As clerk of the Scottish Heritage Society of Southeast Georgia, I was sitting with my wife Debbye at the end of the head table.

Joe McGlamery, president of the Bulloch County Historical Society, and president of the Statesboro Herald, was our speaker for the evening.  He said he remembered giving a similar address to our society in 2004.  His knowledge of Robert Burns and Scotland of his time in the 18th century is laudable and was well received.

Good cheer was had by all.

Watch and listen to the excellent Statesboro Herald video report by clicking here.

http://www.statesboroherald.com/multimedia/8022/.

US class, economic, political, religious, ideological, and military wars internally and externally have been quieter in recent years under a charming, deceptive, ineffective President Obama and a sullen, anti-social, do-nothing Repub Congress. Now that Trump is about to take over, things are heating up.

The US is like a recently quieter volcano that is once again emitting larger plumes of smoke and ash at its summit. All hell could break loose.

The Repubs are already on the move trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, in short order, and there’s rumors they are about to attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in a serious way. The Demos are attacking Trump in more vicious ways. Trump is fighting back with his Tweets.

As John Chuckman cogently points out in his article below, “Of Wizards and Washington and the Dreary, Unrelenting Reality of American Politics,” Trump has been hardened and toughened in a long career of wheeling, dealing, and intrigue, which might be a good thing when he gets into the heat of battle in Washington. How much heat he can take and how much backbone and conscience he has for doing the right thing and not doing the wrong thing remains to be seen.

Read an excerpt from Chuckman’s article below and click on the full article in the Intrepid Report for an erudite comprehensive overview of what is going on and what might happen.

Of wizards and Washington and the dreary, unrelenting reality of American politics

A raw and sometimes darkly comic survey of America’s treacherous political terrain

By John Chuckman
Posted on January 13, 2017 by John Chuckman in the Intrepid Report.

The books about The Wizard of Oz were written as satire on American politics, but Hollywood, in its inimitable way, turned them into a song-and-dance picture for children. Still, one scene in the film has a sense of the author’s intent. That scene is when Dorothy, in Emerald City, approaches a closet-like structure, which, as it happens, is the Wizard’s control booth for sounds and smoke and lights, his special effects for intimidating visitors and impressing them with non-existent power.

The entrance curtain happens to be open, so Dorothy sees a modest man busily pulling levers and pushing buttons and speaking into a microphone which alters his voice into a great booming one, echoing like a great organ in a cathedral. When the man realizes that he is being watched, he makes a last effort and booms out words along the lines of “Pay no attention to the man in the booth.” Of course, the jig is up, and we all understand there is no wizard.

What better allegory for events in Washington today could there be? We have booming noises and smoke and glaring lights, and it all comes from a rather sad little—little in the sense of failed—man with about two weeks left to sit at his big desk and pretend that he is a great and powerful wizard. Except, when you are president, as this man is, you can never be observed in your control booth and you have your stunts and booming claims seconded by a chorus of flacks, hangers-on, and political appointees, presumably lending a semblance of authenticity and substance.

What the controversy engendered by “the Russians did it” has achieved is almost the opposite of what was intended. Dubious claims and pretend evidence have caused lights to shine brightly over what is a blanketing fabric of dishonesty in America’s establishment. The fabric covers everything from foreign affairs and the military to the details of domestic affairs. It is an immense, complex, and carefully constructed covering, and those who created it have very little tolerance for any of it being scrutinized under spotlights. Achieving this scrutiny may be regarded as Obama’s final act of failure.

Whether it is “the Russians hacked the DNC” or “America has been bombing ISIS in Syria” or “the Russians threaten Eastern Europe” or “the Russians committed atrocities in Aleppo” or “Russia shot down Flight MH-17,” the same tiresome actors making the same unsupported claims have for eight years expected that just their inflated job titles should intimidate us into believing them. Proof? Who needs that? Would I lie to you about such matters? Once you start something foolish as Obama has done, and it is widely understood as being foolish, you only weaken your authority over all the other less-obviously dubious claims you have been making. The fabric of lies becomes weakened, and that is one of Obama’s small, but unintended, achievements now.

Read the article in full in the Intrepid Report by clicking here,

http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/20062 .

By Richard John Stapleton

Several times in recent weeks I have been lured into clicking on Internet posts purporting to show the IQ’s of US presidents, including the president-elect now waiting to take over.

You will find over 700,000 results if you ask Google, “What is Donald Trump’s IQ?”

I have scanned several of them but I have yet to find a definitive IQ for any president. Based on one study using biometric data, John Quincy Adams had the highest IQ of all US presidents, 168.  Donald Trump was not included in this study. These IQs are estimates based on biographical data and other historical evidence.

One Internet post asserted Donald Trump had an IQ of 156, which was shown by Snopes, a fact-checking website on the Internet, to be bogus. Most of the posts I read indicate all US presidents have been more intelligent than the average US college graduate.

I have seen Trump in a video extolling his high “aptitude”, which he said he inherited from his parents. He also said in a video he was proud of his German “blood”.

Having little concern about the meaning of words or context, he did not say what he thought his aptitude was for in his video.  One can have a high aptitude for screwing up.  I suppose he was saying he had high aptitude for making money in business and that aptitude would make money for everyone in the US when he took over as president.

I have also read on the Internet Trump only has about a 200-word vocabulary. It’s probably larger than that, but based on hearing him talk many times it seems to me he has the smallest vocabulary of any president I have heard talk, including Bush II.  In general people with high IQs do not have small vocabularies.

Regardless, Trump has told us over and over again in various ways he is very smart because he has made so much money. No one can use the aphorism “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” against him. At the outset of his presidential campaign he let his Repub competitors for president know he had more money than all of them put together, implying that made him smarter than they were, maybe smarter than all of them were put together.

In the process of running for president Trump talked about the Wharton graduate school of finance as though he went there.  Wharton is a respectable graduate business school, at the University of Pennsylvania, not too many rungs down the business school prestige ladder from Harvard Business School, where Bush II got a master’s degree.  I assumed Trump had an MBA from Wharton.

It turns out Trump does not have a master’s degree from Wharton. He took some finance courses at the University of Pennsylvania, where Wharton is the graduate business school, while earning a bachelor’s degree. It’s unclear whether his SAT, GRE, GMAT or other aptitude test scores were high enough to get accepted into the Wharton graduate school of business, or whether he wanted to get a graduate degree.

We have also been told over and over that Trump is a “billionaire” with no definition of the term and little context. In general a billionaire is a person who has a net worth of one billion dollars or more. Net worth is total assets owned minus total debts owed. There is no way to prove whether Trump is a billionaire because we have no idea what his total assets are worth and what his total debts are. Since most of his assets are land and buildings he can say they are worth whatever he says they are worth, enough to produce a net worth of ten billion dollars, which he has done.

In reality his land and buildings are worth what they can be sold for in today’s market. One analyst said Trump has about two hundred million dollars in cash and liquid assets, not shabby for sure, but that sounds far less “bigly” than billions.

Apparently his parents gave him one or two million dollars or so to play with as a young man after college, telling him he was a king and such, and he lost some of it in failed deals and schemes; but it seems he learned on the job how to function playing a real estate mogul and oligarch role in life, as no doubt his father and mother wished; and eventually apparently some of his deals and schemes paid off, after he smartly learned to always hire the “best” people to make decisions for The Trump Organization.

Trump worked for his mother in her business called Elizabeth Trump & Son, which no doubt included assets inherited from her husband when he died, when the Donald attended the University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate. He changed the name of Elizabeth Trump & Son to The Trump Organization after he inherited it in 1971.

One article on the Internet posted a few years ago said in the process of borrowing money from a bank Trump was forced to disclose enough verifiable asset and debt data that the bank was able to determine that his net worth was about $700 million, a lot of money, but not enough to be a billionaire, based on a good definition of the term. On the other hand, based on market values for his land and buildings he may be a billionaire now, assuming his holdings could be sold for the asking price.

As anyone who has studied or done accounting knows, it’s not easy to prove what facts are in large businesses, even if the large business hires certified public accountants to audit their business, and even if the audited financial statements are made public. Almost nobody has seen any audited financial statements for Trump’s mainly rentier businesses since they are not publicly traded. Rentier businesses do not produce products; they mainly collect rents.

The fictive business called Enron, in Houston, Texas, named and spelled to sound like Exxon, back in the Bush II days, was run by what business pundits called the smartest guys in the room, until it imploded, wiping out the jobs and retirement savings of hundreds of employees and stockholders; and two of those smartest guys in the room, who had MBAs from Harvard Business School, were sent to prison for faking facts and cooking the books, books audited and certified by Arthur Andersen & Company, one of the five largest certified public accounting firms in the world, that also did management consulting for Enron, which was a conflict of interest. The smart guys running Enron not only ran Enron into bankruptcy, they caused Arthur Andersen to be broken up.

A relevant question is how much net worth did the Donald inherit from his parents after they died. According to Fortune and Forbes magazines Trump’s net worth in today’s dollars is somewhere around three billion dollars. It’s possible he inherited that much wealth from his parents after you compound what he inherited up to the present using historical inflation rates. If so he has not “made” any money on his own.

Nor is it easy to prove what “smart” is, or what an IQ is. My mother told me once, in our lumber yard and hardware store at Wolfforth, Texas in the 1950s, “You don’t have to tell people how smart you are. If you are they will just know it.”

After proving he was smart enough to get elected, it remains to be seen how smart the Donald will be as president of the United States.  Buying his election only cost him about forty-five million dollars of his own money; how much this deal will pay off for him also remains to be seen.

Richard John Stapleton is an emeritus professor of business policy, ethics, and entrepreneurship at Georgia Southern University who writes on business and politics at www.effectivelearning.net. He is the author of Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds.

By Richard John Stapleton

It was Bill Clinton’s fate to sign some deleterious laws for we the people of the US when he was in office as president of the United States. The video linked below explains one of the most egregious laws.  Another law was the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 that did away with the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that gave large too-big-to-fail banks permission to gamble with depositor, stockholder, and taxpayer money in global stock and derivative markets, causing the money and banking meltdown of 2008 and the deplorable monetary and economic situation we find ourselves in today.

Clinton did not originate these bad ideas, but he lacked the moral courage to veto them, and thus he is largely responsible for the consequences, having been unable to resist the inexorable forces of greed propelling corporate capitalism toward a one world government run by one corporation powerful and successful enough to consolidate all the others, which might not be a bad thing, given where we are today, assuming that corporation were run by we the people of Spaceship Earth for we the people.

Take a look at this video to see how the consolidation of the media industry has constricted the freedom and consciousness of US citizens. Well worth a look and listen.

Such “consolidating” by large corporations in the US and elsewhere might finally put an electronic noose around all their necks, finally liberating we the people.

To see and hear it all click here at Bill Clinton Paved The Way For Today’s Dumbed-Down Media.

The Ring of Fire

By Richard John Stapleton  

I argued in my article “Moving Farther West to Escape Problems at Home is No Longer an Option,” published August 29, 2013 in the Intrepid Report, that capitalism and most religions are now almost obsolete; and, given the advent of modern computers, computer programmers, computer software and the Internet, it is now technologically feasible to construct a new economic system vastly more efficient, effective and fair than what now exists on Earth.

Reading Buckminster Fuller’s great little book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) back in the 1970s stimulated some of these ideas. He was the first person I read to suggest computers are the best hope for human survival on Earth, that humans should never do work that machines can do better, and that unemployment can be eliminated overnight by governments issuing mind grants to all citizens, paying them to think.

Progressives now argue something must be done about poorly regulated quasi-obsolete economic systems, religious systems, legal systems, and production and distribution systems that have resulted in the richest 20 percent of Earthians consuming about 76 percent of all goods and services produced every year on Earth, with the bottom 20 percent consuming about 1.5 percent of all goods and services, while a small free Earthian elite, about 26 million humans own and control about 40 percent of Earth’s wealth, living in luxury with almost unlimited options for travel and entertainment, living cheek by jowl among billions of humans mired in poverty, owning almost nothing, doing almost the equivalent of slave labor day in and day out all their lives, yet living in constant fear of being fired from their jobs for disloyalty or slackness, who are condemned to poverty by their wages, in most cases within miles of where they were accidentally born, where they grew up with little or no opportunity to learn relevant knowledge about how the world works, in many cases not even having an opportunity to learn how to read.

I am not advocating capitalism, communism, socialism, atheism, or any religious ism, or abolishing capitalism; but I think certain aspects of capitalism are humane and beneficial, such as the decentralization of production at the entrepreneurial and small business level and rewarding people for creating new ideas, products and services. On the other hand, I think the inevitable centralizing of wealth and power in large corporations and in the hands of the elite rich caused by capitalism is an incredible abomination causing many of Earth’s most threatening problems, including global warming. But I do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

This article was first published in MWC News (Media with Conscience), on September 9, 2013. Read the article in full at

http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/31023-spaceship-earth-incorporated.html.

By Richard John Stapleton

Recommendations For Waking Up From The American Nightmare is my ebook showing how to attack the root causes of economic troubles in the US using a dialectical democratic case method discussion process I used 35 years as a business professor.

Take a look at the book by clicking here:

https://www.amazon.com/Recommendations-American-Nightmare-Business-Voyages-ebook/dp/B009TOJVPI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1481483884&sr=8-1&keywords=recommendations+for+waking+up+from+the+american+nightmare+++++stapleton.

Better yet buy it and read it.  It only costs two dollars and ninety-nine cents, less than a six pack of beer.

I am convinced the root cause of American economic troubles is political, economic, religious and social polarization among US voters who since 1980 have voted into office polarized politicians out to feather their own nests and promote idiosyncratic economic interests, beliefs, values, dogmas, doctrines and ideologies.  These politicians have been bought and paid for by the elite rich and large corporations who funded their political campaigns who require lower taxes and other favors in return, regardless of what is best for voters not having the sense to vote in their own interests.

Polarized politicians since 1980 voted for or against legislation based on their predetermined economic interests, ideologies, dogmas and doctrines, not the facts of cases, resulting in the deadlocked dysfunctional government we have today.

Recommendations For Waking Up From the American Nightmare advocates more dialectical democratic case method discussions among people from all walks of life in more and more Town Hall Meetings to foster more discussion of facts of cases and their logical solutions, resulting in more voters concerned about the facts of cases and inducing logical conclusions, resulting in the election of rational politicians voting to do the right thing for we the people based on the facts of cases, not predetermined idiosyncratic ideologies, economic interests, beliefs, values, dogmas, doctrines, etc.

In order for this to happen some process must be devised to bring polarized US citizens together to discuss face-to-face in a serious civil manner relevant political, economic, and environmental problems.

The book describes and explains a recommended dialectical democratic case method process and offers policies I have recommended in published writings for managing the US economy in the short and long run, based on the facts of the case since 1980.  These policies are offered as a basis for discussion, not as absolute truth, to foster the creation of better policies acceptable to a majority of US citizens.

I am convinced Republican neoconservative and Democratic neoliberal ideologies inflicted on the US economy since 1980 are major causes of the economic problems we have today; and, while I am not overly impressed with the Obama administration since 2009 I think this administration has been less harmful than Reagan and Bush II.

I recommended reelecting the neoliberal Obama administration in 2012, being convinced they charted and piloted better policies and courses than those applied and recommended by Republican neoconservatives, such as Reagan, Bush II, Romney and Ryan.

I thought electing Romney-Ryan would be disastrous, leading to a federal debt explosion within three years similar to the debt explosion the US experienced when Ronald Regan started his “voodoo”, deficits-do-not-matter economics, in 1980, and Bush II invaded Iraq in 2003, a debt explosion possibly causing this time federal debt defaults and/or repudiations within ten years, creating chaos and abject depression, possibly culminating over time in a civil war between the US upper class and what used to be the US middle class, in a war reminiscent of the French Revolution of 1789 and the Spanish Civil War of 1936.

Recommendations for Waking Up From the American Nightmare was published on October 19, 2012.

I recommended amending the US Constitution as soon as possible to eradicate Citizens United of 2010, the absurd and abominable 5-4 Supreme Court case in which five predetermined Republican judges ruled corporations are people with free speech, entitled to spend as much money as they wish buying propaganda in mainstream media to influence federal elections in their favor, at the expense of we the people.

I recommend the proposed United States Voters’ Rights Amendment (USVRA) at http://usvra.us, asking readers to sign up as a supporter to get in the habit of doing democratic things to help foster an American awakening.

The Obama administration has been a disappointment, having done little to correct the basic financial and fiscal problems of the US, reduce the global military activities of the military-industrial complex, and create good jobs for the middle and lower classes.

I was a strong advocate of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries until he dropped out, at which time I switched to Jill Stein of the Green Party.  Stein’s platform agrees with my Recommendations more than any politician I have found.

Assuming Trump gets inaugurated as president after winning the 2016 election thanks to the obsolete Electoral College, all bets are off for the future.

Interestingly, Trump has recommended one of my major recommendations in my Recommendations ebook: creating infrastructure jobs to create livable jobs for the lower and middle classes.  Good luck on getting this implemented.  Obama also recommended this, but he did not strike while the iron was hot soon after he got in office when Democrats had a majority in both houses of Congress.  After nihilist Repubs got control of the House and Senate they sabotaged any hope for real improvement in the economy.  Whether they will go along with Trump on infrastructure jobs now remains to be seen.

The problem is Trump advocates significantly cutting taxes again for the rich, just like Reagan and Bush II did, while borrowing and creating more digital money to finance the increased spending for infrastructure jobs, making another futile attempt at “trickle-down” economics.  I advocated significantly raising the after loophole tax rate of the elite rich, the upper one percent, back to where our wisest ancestors set it before 1980, to seventy percent or so, and using the proceeds for funding infrastructure projects.   Our wisest ancestors knew we have to have progressive income tax rates to prevent income inequality from destroying the economy.

Most likely Trump will increase military spending while I recommended seriously cutting military expenses.

While the Obama administration increased the federal debt about nine trillion dollars over eight years (which is a lot of so-called money, if you stop to think about it), they reduced the yearly deficit by about fifty percent, a bad enough record, but a vast improvement from Bush II.

Trump’s recommendations, assuming he does what he said he wanted to do, will significantly increase the yearly budget deficit and significantly increase the rate of increase of the total debt, causing the deficit and debt to explode astronomically, most likely enough to seriously jeopardize the fiscal viability of the government, probably causing the rate of increase in the US federal debt to accelerate as much as Reagan and Bush II did.

Obama significantly lowered the rate of deficit and debt increase, as bad as his overall record was dealing with the money and banking system and the fiscal affairs of the US government, leaving the US in what appears to be decent financial and economic shape in 2016 after eight years, when it reality in many ways it is in worse shape now than when he took over.  The US economy is now built on and fueled by debt, not real economic growth in terms of real production, and it could fall off an economic cliff at any time.  More and more US citizens have fallen prey to parasitical money and banking policies and practices.

Thanks to Trump’s “victory” the US now faces more threats than ever.

Take a look at Recommendations for Waking Up From the American Nightmare by clicking here:

https://www.amazon.com/Recommendations-American-Nightmare-Business-Voyages-ebook/dp/B009TOJVPI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1481483884&sr=8-1&keywords=recommendations+for+waking+up+from+the+american+nightmare+++++stapleton.  

by Richard John Stapleton

This past summer my son Jonathan and his wife Renee made a swing trough Statesboro and stayed a few days for the first time in a year or so.  My wife Debbye and I and took them out to eat several times while they were here, along with their three children, Walker, Emmy, and Orion.

Friends of ours who saw them in restaurants with us were impressed with them, especially the grandchildren.  One lady told me as I was walking back to our table after going to the restroom, “You marked every one of them,” which was a high compliment.

A few weeks ago Debbye and I were having dinner at the Forrest Heights Country Club here in Statesboro with our friends Beth Hardy and Lon Carnes.  A lady whom I have known for a long time from our days at Georgia Southern University, Mouse, stopped by our table to chat with Beth.  She told Beth, a former mathematics professor at Georgia Southern, that she took a math course from her forty or so years ago, and she made a “B”, the only grade she made that was not an “A” at Georgia Southern.

Beth did not remember her in the course but as they were exchanging pleasantries Mouse noticed me sitting across the table, and as she was leaving she came around and told me, “I want you to know you have three great grandchildren.”

I told her I knew that but I appreciated her saying that.  Mouse and her husband live near my former wife Ginny, the grandchildren’s birth grandmother, and her husband Bob.  Mouse had seen and talked with the grandchildren during the summer when they stayed overnight with Ginny and Bob.

Jonathan graduated from Statesboro High School in 1990, the Star Student of our congressional district in Georgia that year, and went on to Rice University in Houston, Texas where he met his wife Renee, from Montana.  Jonathan maxed the math part of the SAT and the GRE exams.  They then went to Seattle, Washington where Renee got her MD and PhD degrees from the University of Washington.  Jonathan taught school and invented things, such as his Reptangles toy, now marketed nationally and internationally by the Fat Brain Toy Company, an educational toy that can be assembled into geometric shapes.

Jonathan and Renee went on to Burlington, Vermont where Renee now researches, teaches, and practices pulmonary medicine at the University of Vermont.  Jonathan teaches senior physics and earth sciences at Essex Junction High School, and invents things.

Their children have done well in school.  Walker is now in the seventh grade, Emmy is in the fifth grade, and Orion is in kindergarten.  Walker’s cross country team has won every track race they have raced in, including the state championship; Emmy is supposedly reading at an eighteen-year-old level; and Orion has already been identified as gifted in mathematics.  Walker plays the piano, Emmy plays the violin, and Orion plays the violin.

I know it’s narcissistic but I could not resist posting this post.

by Richard John Stapleton

Editor’s note:  It’s possible the Trump economic plan will add vitality to the US economy in the short run, adding real jobs through massive spending on infrastructure and through tax cuts for large corporations; increasing interest rates for savers, retirement plans, and banks; increasing sales and profits in heavy industry and transportation; maybe bringing back some US jobs from overseas, and preventing some from being sent overseas; maybe even boosting sales and profits in the small business sector.