I have taken some time to let the shock of a Trump win settle to make sure what I am going to say is not emotion but what I honestly think is fact. As far as I can see we are faced with three scenarios which I will discuss in more detail below:

1. Utter destruction of the earth and humanity
   
2. Worldwide depression which will make the Great Depression which effected the entire world look like a time of affluence.
   
3. The collapse of the United States economy and the rise of rabid fascism across the planet
   

All three of these scenarios are dismal. We are looking at a future where rationality and facts mean nothing. Trump and his Cabinet Goons are so fact challenged, as was the case with his campaign and Hitler propaganda, that contradictions, lies and deceit are strategic:

“The function of propaganda is to attract supporters, the function of organization to win members… Propaganda works on the general public from the standpoint of an idea and makes them ripe for the victory of this idea….” – Adolf Hitler, 1924

Trump makes no pretense to consistency, the hobgoblin of small minds. He is the prototypical ‘Prince’ of Machiavelli:

Trump loves war as he himself stated. The Prince in Machiavelli wants to ‘perfect’ war.

A Prince should have the appearance of being merciful, faithful, humane, frank, and religious, but the most important quality is only to seem to have these qualities. The Prince must play on the aspirational qualities of his subjects. Facts are a hindrance for the Prince.

Generosity is to be avoided for a Prince. Its sets up a presentence which can only result in disappointment and hatred on the part of the subjects. A Prince should have the appearance of a miser so as appear to be efficient and concerned about the taxes of his subjects. However, if the Prince can spend others money without the appearance of generosity he is wise.

Is it better to be loved or hated? Machiavelli states, “The answer is that one would like to be both the one and the other; but because it is difficult to combine them, it is far safer to be feared than loved if you cannot be both.”

Should Trump keep his word? Machiavelli states, “He should appear to be compassionate, faithful to his word, guileless, and devout. And indeed he should be so. But his disposition should be such that, if he needs to be the opposite, he knows how.” The appearance of being truthful is the opiate that his subjects need not the reality.

Lastly, the Prince should not have the appearance of depriving their subjects of property or women. If they want to “grab a woman by the pussy” it is only a little locker room talk, right?¹

The ‘war of all against all’ originally from Locke but taken up in the Prince of Machiavelli is the ideal embodiment of Mr. DJ Trump.

I have previously predicted the end of the Republican Party.² I think that Trump is the fulfillment of this prediction. I have written about this in more detail but the end of the Old Right was with Barry Goldwater.³ The New Right lasted until Trump. Now we have the New Reich. To use astronomical terms, I was wrong about the New Right ending in a Red Giant. Instead, it went Super Nova. The unthinkable downside of a Super Nova is the destruction of everything in its wake. This is what we are faced with now. The real problem is that we have 63 million voters of the 129 million votes cast that are intent on turning the evolutionary clock back. They are reacting from pure anger, bitterness, resentment and entitlement. They were pumped up with Machiavellian aspirations which never materialized except in the credit bubble which ended in the Great Recession. They could no longer afford the life style to which they were artificially accustomed to. When people believe they are in pain they react selfishly and irrationally.

Here is the final vote count for the popular vote according to Business Insider:

Trump     62.97 million votes

Clinton     65.84 million votes⁴

Hillary won by almost 3 million votes but Trump is President due to the Electoral College. I will not get into the pros and cons of the Electoral College in this post. My point is not so much that she won by almost 3 million but that he took almost 49% of the 128.81 million voters that voted in a country of over 350 million people with 218,959,000 eligible voters.⁵ 55% of eligible voters actually voted.

 So, I ask myself if 55% of eligible voters voted and 45% did not why should I care? Additionally, if 49% of the folks that voted want Trump, we as a country are not ready for facts and science. Global warming is a liberal lie right? Evolution is a lie of liberal academics, creationism is God’s truth right? Abortion is filicide, the mass murder of children, right? The ‘free market’ is always more efficient than government, right? Our national intelligence is wrong. Perhaps we should save the tax payers some money and contract out our intelligence to the KGB, right? Why do we have nukes if we do not use them, right? The rate of increase of health care cost would be much less without ObamaCare, right? TrumpCare must be better, right? Health Savings Accounts will benefit the “50 percent of people that do not pay taxes” according to Romney, right? So going back to emergency room care will reduce the rate of increase of all our health care premiums, right?

Honestly, if that many folks think all this is feasible I am not going to fight it. We have much to learn to survive as a country and a world. The stakes are very high now with a narcissistic maniac as President and the Goon Squad of radical neo-cons aching for war. I have much intrepidation about our future as a country and a world. I am sorry for the 51% of folks that voted for Hillary and will be hurt by a Trump presidency. We cannot fight the 49% that will be hurt by the very guy they voted for. Realistically, we are not ready for something better we are, as a country ready, for something far worse. We need to learn. Democracy was made for enlightenment voters, educated and aware of real facts. The realm of propaganda and illusion still mesmerizes far too many of us to effect real change for the better. We still prefer phantasma to our own security. We will suffer greatly and as far as I can remember we have a higher chance of human extinction than we have ever faced. These are facts that I cannot change.

Did I mention that before the Great Recession of the last Republican President and Congress was the previous Republican President and Congress that preceded the Great Depression…now we have nukes in the hand of an imbecile and his Cabinet of Cronies. The last Republican majority we had in the Congress and the Presidency started two mass wars which killed 190,000 people, 70% civilians, 4,488 US military killed, 3,400 US contractors killed, cost 6 trillion dollars.⁶ Financial deregulation went Super Nova in the Bush years costing 30 trillion dollars worldwide due to faulty and deceptive financial derivatives. It is insane to suggest that the US Housing Bubble could cause that level of financial catastrophe.⁷ The result of the Bush years was the Great Recession and mass wars which needlessly exploded the Middle East, created ISIS and recruited massive numbers of terrorists (see references in my History post). A great proverb tells us, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. We the American People have become the ‘me’ in this proverb.

Under President Obama we had the longest running private sector job recovery in history and the fastest job growth pace since Clinton⁸, the fastest economic recovery in history ⁹

Since President Barack Obama first took office:

The U.S. trade deficit has shrunk by 24 percent; exports have grown faster than imports.
The number of immigrants in the U.S. illegally has gone down — by 3.4 percent according to one independent estimate and by 9 percent according to another.
The economy has added 9.7 million jobs.
The unemployment rate has dropped below the historical norm.
The buying power of the average worker’s weekly paycheck is up 4.2 percent.
Corporate profits are running 144 percent higher and stock prices have soared.
Federal debt has more than doubled, and annual deficits, after shrinking, are again on the rise.
The number of people lacking health insurance has gone down by nearly 15 million.¹⁰

We can kiss that all goodbye now thanks to millions of our own citizens. 64 million of our own voters, mainly rural voters, just voted against their own best interest.¹¹ I blamed the Bush voters for mass killings of our own and others and economic disaster. The New Reich has a noteworthy chance of destroying the planet with a psychologically ill President. We can certainly count on economic disaster under Trump. If our citizens think they have rights protected by the Constitution, you can forget that. Women’s rights, civil rights, religious freedom, ethnic protections, health care, consumer protections are all a thing of the past thanks to 64 million voters. However, always remember they are us. We are all in this together. We failed as a country to move towards a better future. As much of the world is gathering dark storm clouds of nativism, xenophobia, protectionism, tribalism and fascism reminiscent of the rise of the Third Reich we have yet again forgotten history and the blame is on us all. We are in for long years of wars, millennials – you will discover the draft many of us already knew, massive debt that will make our current debt look like pocket change. All of our self-righteous ideals about democracy will simply fly out the window into the hypocritical whimpering of Nietzsche’s Last Man. All of us will have to own this one way or the other. We all failed.¹²

As far as my wife and I and my kids, in the short term, the irrational exuberance of the ‘Trump’ rally has been good to us although the Obama rally after the last Republican majority was by far better. I know that what I have described is dismal and goes against all of our grain but as a philosopher I find a great deal of resemblance of our dark future to death. We all face the reality of death every day and yet we live as if that day will never come. The same mechanism releases me from living my life in a pit of despair. Life is about quality not quantity. My family is doing very well and we will fare better than most until the day of Mad Max arrives. After that means nothing to me in the present. Others will suffer much more than my family both the 63 million that voted for Trump, 66 million for Clinton, the rest of the 350 million that did not vote and the rest of the world that could not vote. Optimism in the face of death is a great gift of evolution. If Nietzsche is right we will all be here again for another time around…forever. It is not about the absolute judgements and determinations of history, Spirit, Idea (of Hegel). It is about the small place of a human life endowed with optimism, forgetfulness and the will for drama (not the will for power). This is where value, happiness, love, desire and meaning happen in the face to face encounter of a small community and the day to day trivia of an infinitesimally small wisp of an instant we call existence. Be happy, what is our choice?

 

_________________

¹ See Niccolò Machiavelli
² The End of the Republican Party
³ Conservatism and Liberalism: A Historical Perspective
⁴ The results are now final: Clinton wins popular vote by nearly 3 million, Business Insider
⁵ Voting Turnout Statistics
⁶ History
⁷ Latest Observations on the Housing and Economic Crisis, The Housing Crisis – Research Revisted, The Facts: Deregulation=Republicans=Economic Crisis
⁸ Obama Blows Republicans Out Of The Water With Fastest Job Growth Pace Since Clinton
⁹ Federal Deficit and Debt – President Obama vs President Bush, Unemployment Statistics – President Obama vs President Bush, The Big Picture: Facts Concerning History, Politics and the Economy
¹⁰ Obama’s Numbers April 2016 Update
¹¹ After a Hard Day’s Night…
¹² A Vote for Trump is a Vote for Human Extinction, Trump’s Red Lame Stream Media – Nightmares Work

Here is a new scratch song in memory of an amazing man with an amazing life – Victor.

Distant Interlude

Integrity is hard work. It does not come naturally or easily. Personally, I have endured some hard blows and scars which will endure in me to my last breath in the struggle to be honest. Integrity is built on personal honesty. There are times in life when a lie holds the illusion of a quick an easy way out of an ethical dilemma. However, unless you have no conscience, you find that every lie you tell leaves a bitter pill in your soul that will continually come back to haunt you in the most innocuous and inopportune moments. Every lie builds a hardness around you that entombs the pure and innocent child, full of life and beauty and hope and wonder, in a living stagnation, a resignation and despair which constitute a living death. It bogs the soul down in resentment, negativity, fear, anxiety and anger. Only a sociopath can tell lies without any toll to be paid, at least consciously. I believe Donald Trump is such a person. He is now the President of the free world.

Trump has been caught in lie after lie. Contradiction seems to be no problem for him. He has told many lies to win this election. Those folks that elected him thinking he will increase their personal incomes and make them prosperous are the ones that ultimately will face a harsh punishment from Trump lies. Trump cannot bring jobs back to this country. He has a factual history of taking jobs out of this country. Trade agreements will not hinder or facilitate the creation and restoration of jobs in this country. The bottom line is that when impoverished countries have people that will work for pennies on the dollar to what our citizens can work for to have any sort of a livable wage we will never be able to compete in purely capitalistic, dollars and cents, terms. No political lie or promise will change the economic worldwide shift brought about by technology and global capitalism.

If fact, trying to manipulate trade deals and treaties to “bring jobs back to the US” will only raise prices for the basic necessities of life. The increased cost of groceries, fuel, building materials for shelter, textiles and all the luxuries we have come to enjoy will first and foremost hit the most unfortunate among us. Those folks in rural regions of the country who were hit hard by the credit bubble burst brought on by a rabid financial deregulation pushed those who were living above their means back into the stark reality of vulture capitalism. This ugly bird has devoured the carcasses of many historic societies.

Mercantilism which drove our Founding Fathers into a new world and was most prominent in Thomas Jefferson’s reaction to the consolation of power, resulted in the typical and tragic repeated story of slavery and aristocracy. Left to its own devices pure, Austrian, capitalism has repeatedly shown us that unrestricted wealth is unrestricted power. It has always resulted in one percent basking in the purgatives of the master and ninety-nine percent living in the tragic impoverishment of enslavement to the harsh and dyer realities of suffering, torment and early death. That story will never change left to its own devices.

Adam Smith’s selfishness which gave way to competition and thereby more efficient cost of services and increased value to consumers is now working on a global scale. Very few politicians, especially Republicans can openly state the true case for global competition. As Americans we are on the losing end of the competition wars when it comes to labor and cost of goods produced except in certain very narrow markets where automation can be achieved. Even then, the capital costs are prohibitive to newcomers to free market competition. In effect, the natural barrier to competition in production in the US market is enormous up front capital investment. The double punch of much lower labor costs in foreign markets than we can possibly achieve here and the huge capital outlay for domestic production lines will ensure that the US will likely never see the affluence that the industrial revolution once afforded us.

The dark side of selfishness is the intoxication of power. The human ego attains the illusion of godhood when infused with the aspiration of absolute power. In effect, power and consolidation result in market manipulation of cost and create barriers to the kind of competition Adam Smith envisioned. Monopolies are thereby the antithesis to more efficient and reduced cost of goods and services. If this could be thought in the far right’s anti-government terms it would be called ‘tyranny’. The Machiavellian struggle of monopolies and globalism can only be interrupted with government intervention not with xenophobia.

The ‘government’, our government, is not a harsh vulture capitalist monster which picks the bones of its victims. It is an instrument of the people which takes money from the private sector and redistributes it to the masses. It is an economic device which when working as our Founding Fathers intended resists the tendency for power to simply be reduced to the survival of the fittest. It holds the promise of a Titan strong enough to fight the historic monster of aristocracy, dictators and tyrants. Our government was never meant to be a tyrant. Only when the people are active in making the government work for the people and not getting elected simply to “drown the baby in the bathwater” or “starve the beast” can we hope to form a more perfect union. When regulation works for the people it comes from the demand of the people not the corporatism of the wealthy. Starving the beast will only give the corporate beast free reign to protect its own interests, regulate competition out of existence and allow the vulture of capitalism to eternally eat the liver of Prometheus only to have it devoured again when it grows back.

The only hope for common folks is to have a champion which can match up to the Titans of capitalism and industry. If we make the government small we are also giving free reign to the economic ‘redistribution’ of capital into receptive bastions of power fueled by greed and selfishness. These bastions hold no allegiance to the people only to themselves at the eternal cost of the people (otherwise known as slavery). They do not rest when they deliver essential goods and services for human survival. They must create artificial needs and illusory aspirations which work more like the curse of Sisyphus. The only true allegiance to the people is in the government by and for the people. If we buy the lie that unhindered capitalism will result in affluence for all we have ignored history and accepted our slavery as illusive, aspirational freedom. Trump did not get rich by being an humanitarian. He got rich by coming from wealth and stepping over anyone that got in his way and not paying anyone he owed when he felt financially threatened. He could care less about the average country bumpkin who is counting on him to ease his lot in life. He can never, due to global economic realities and his own illusions of grandeur, do what he promised.

Sure he can spend lots of money on infrastructure which has some economic benefit and ineffective ‘great walls of China’ which will only increase the deficit. He can reduce taxes for corporations and the wealthy which will also increase the deficit with the lack of revenue inflow. He will change the deficit reduction we had in the Obama years after the Great, GW Bush Recession. He will bring us back to the deficit increase under GW Bush reversing the surplus we had in the Clinton years. These are economic facts which cannot be ‘spun’ away by creative marketing on the right.

Trump has brought our country back to ‘nativism’ and isolationism along with rising xenophobia and fascism in Europe, the middle east and Asia. These same historic conditions set the stage for Nazi Germany, Italian and Japanese fascists. When Hitler came to power the first thing he did was consolidate power to himself. The American People have handed Trump the Congress and the Supreme Court. This is the first step towards a Führer. We can only hope that our Constitution will hold and he will fail.

Trump and Putin believe that low and medium yield nukes will give us regional victories without escalating into a major nuclear apocalypse. Trump tells us “we have nukes why don’t we use them”? Can we stop Trump before he is impeached for interning and deporting millions of immigrants? Maybe. Can we stop him from religious and ethnic suppression and ‘cleansing’ with impeachment based on Constitutional grounds? Possibly. However, we have significantly weakened our chance by giving him a running start with the Congress and the Supreme Court. It would be a denial of reality to think these possibilities are lessened considering his remarks and the white nationalist company he likes to keep.

I do not want to be alarmist as that is equally irrational but certain dark forces have been set in motion which history has repeatedly shown us can gain a momentum which culminate in epic human tragedy. With the advent of nuclear weapons we may not have the ability to crawl out of our human weaknesses, fallibilities, insecurities, greediness and fears to find another day. The stakes are high and half of our population has played a bluff in a very dangerous game. Anger does not solve problems. It only creates more problems. We will not find a solution in the dictates of sociologic anger. Storm clouds are gathering over the world which have lead us to the brink before. This time we may be able to come back.

Nevertheless, sinking into dark and foreboding thoughts has never solved a problem. Many of us in Boulder County worked our tails off to stop this national tragedy. We are proud and we think we were the primary reason we were able to keep Colorado blue. We canvassed and phone banked the county and surrounding counties so they could not cease hearing their phone ring and their doors knocked until they voted. We can sleep at night knowing we did not violate our conscience. When problems loom large on the macroscopic scale the only relief can be found in the microscopic scale. Our Constitution is based and founded on this. If we lose our democracy and our liberal ideal of fair marketplace and a hand up not a handout we will have lost any claim to historic uniqueness and exceptionalism. The US will be a fatal failure of history and the crushing ambitions of the few will squash any such fragile notion as ‘we the people’.

Our response to Trump and the future gravity of fascism can only take place in each one of us, in our resolve to keep working with eyes on the prize. We cannot let the dazzling brilliance of frenzied, right-wing lame stream media marketing fear, anxiety, dread and paranoia to lull us into passiveness. The transcendent step into externality and away from moaning, groaning, complaining and self-pity is not ‘out there’ somewhere. It is in simply putting one leg in front of the other to make our democracy live up to its promise. If we try to put more into existence than we took out of it we will free the pure and innocent child, full of life and beauty and hope and wonder. To stand full and free of a haunting conscience is the struggle of adulthood which takes place in locomotion, steps from dawn to dusk, each day. Passivity denies promise. My friends in this dark place we find ourselves in, failure is behind us promise is ahead of us and all we have to do is walk towards the light.

 

Fox News, Breitbart and all the other lying right wing sources are reporting that anonymous sources are telling them that indictments are coming in the FBI investigation to Hillary Clinton. However, Trump is telling everyone that since the system is rigged the indictments may get buried by the Justice Department. Funny how the red lame stream media has conveniently discovered these anonymous sources days before the election. Actually, only s**t for brains would take these jokers seriously. As any fascist cult leader would do, Hitler was the best, they simultaneously make preposterous claims, discredit any other contradictory source and give themselves a way out, the ‘rigged system’, when their lies inevitably show themselves to be pure propaganda.

Here are some quotes from a Spiegel Online article in 2008 and some of my comments in brackets:

How Hitler Won Over the German People

[Trump will “drain the swamp”]

“Today Hitler Is All of Germany.” The newspaper headline on Aug. 4, 1934 reflected the vital shift in power that had just taken place. Two days earlier, on the death of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler had lost no time in abolishing the Reich Presidency and having the army swear a personal oath of unconditional obedience to him as “the Führer of the German Reich and People.” He was now head of state and supreme commander of the armed forces, as well as head of government and of the monopoly party, the NSDAP. Hitler had total power in Germany, unrestricted by any constitutional constraints. The headline implied even more, however, than the major change in the constellation of power. It suggested an identity of Hitler and the country he ruled, signifying a complete bond between the German people and Hitler.

[The vote is “rigged”. Check out current stories on the right wing “Voter Integrity Project” and right wing vote rigging. Also, the Trump campaign’s voter suppression tactics.]

The referendum that followed on 19 August 1934, to legitimize the power-political change that had occurred, aimed at demonstrating this identity. “Hitler for Germany — all of Germany of Hitler” ran the slogan. As the result showed, however, reality lagged behind propaganda. According to the official figures, over a sixth of voters defied the intense pressure to conform and did not vote “yes.” In some big working-class areas of Germany, up to a third had not given Hitler their vote. Even so, there were one or two tantalizing hints that Hitler’s personal appeal outstripped that of the Nazi regime itself, and even more so of the Party [Is Trump outstripping the Republican Party?]. “For Adolf Hitler yes, but a thousand times no to the brown big-wigs” [the ‘establishment’] was scribbled on one ballot-paper in Potsdam. The same sentiment could be heard elsewhere.

[The ‘great’ business achievements of Trump as opposed to the great bankruptcies of Trump.]

The personalized focus of the regime’s “successes” reflected the ceaseless efforts of propaganda, which had been consciously directed to creating and building up the “heroic” image of Hitler as a towering genius, to the extent that Joseph Goebbels could in 1941 with some justification claim the creation of the Führer Myth to have been his greatest propaganda achievement.

The propaganda image was never better summarized than by Hitler himself in his Reichstag speech of 28 April 1939 (which Haffner also cited):

‘By My Own Efforts’

“I overcame chaos in Germany, restored order, enormously raised production in all fields of our national economy…I succeeded in completely resettling in useful production those 7 million unemployed who so touched our hearts…I have not only politically united the German nation but also rearmed it militarily, and I have further tried to liquidate that Treaty sheet by sheet whose 448 Articles contain the vilest rape that nations and human beings have ever been expected to submit to. I have restored to the Reich the provinces grabbed from us in 1919; I have led millions of deeply unhappy Germans, who have been snatched away from us, back into the Fatherland; I have restored the thousand-year-old historical unity of German living space; and I have attempted to accomplish all that without shedding blood and without inflicting the sufferings of war on my people or any other. I have accomplished all this, as one who 21 years ago was still an unknown worker and soldier of my people, by my own efforts…”

The claim that the change in Germany’s fortunes had been achieved single-handedly was, of course, absurd. Fascinating, nevertheless, in this litany of what most ordinary Germans at the time could only have seen as astonishing personal successes of the Führer, is that they represented national “attainments” rather than reflecting central tenets of Hitler’s own Weltanschauung. There was not a word in this passage of the pathological obsession with “removing” the Jews [Trump’s plan for ‘illegal immigrants’], or of the need for war to acquire living space. Restoration of order, rebuilding the economy, removal of the scourge of unemployment, demolition of the restrictions of the hated Versailles Treaty [Trump’s rhetoric on current treaties], and the establishment of national unity all had wide popular resonance, ranging far beyond die-hard Nazis, appealing in fact in different ways to practically every sector of society. Opinion surveys long after the end of the Second World War show that many people, even then, continued to associate these “achievements” positively with Hitler.

The parallels with Trump and Hitler are clear and foreboding. If we have not learned from History, History will repeat itself and we will have no one else to blame but ourselves. Please, save the world, get out and do whatever it takes to vote for Hillary!

After all the red, lame stream media press on Benghazi, millions of tax payers dollars spent on Republican witch hunts to find any sort of evidence to burn Hillary at the stake there is no indictable evidence or even evidence of Hillary covering up her own “incompetence”. We have nothing but hysterical screams of folks that could care less about real facts. If there was culpability it was in a premature release of unverified information but that only equates to intention to cover up in the minds of ‘made for profit’ paranoids not in real fact as ironically proven by Republican driven crazies in Congress. G.W. Bush crashed the economy and started two major wars but you would think by the decibel level Benghazi made, these Republican catastrophes were minor skirmishes. If the Democrats did something wrong it was not putting billions of dollars into neo-con witch hunts against Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld but then Democrats are more concerned about fixing problems than creating them.

Cost

$+23 Million: Minimum total cost to the taxpayers of congressional investigations into Benghazi.

• $14 Million: The State Department has spent more than $14 million responding to congressional investigations into Benghazi.“During yesterday’s meeting, the State Department reported that it has now spent more than $14 million responding to the eight congressional investigations of the Benghazi attacks, turning over tens of thousands of pages of documents, and making dozens of witnesses available for scores of hearings, interviews, and briefings.” [Benghazi Committee Democrats press release, 10/10/15]
  
• $7.1 Million: The Benghazi Committee’s investigation has cost more than $7.1 million. [Benghazi Investigation: The Cost to Taxpayers, accessed 6/27/16]
  
• +$2 Million: The Pentagon said multiple investigations into Benghazi had cost the Department of Defense “millions of dollars.” “The Pentagon said Tuesday that its work to comply with the six congressional investigations into the September 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, has cost the military millions of dollars and thousands of man hours. The Pentagon said in a letter to Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.), the top Democrat on the House Armed services Committee, that Defense Department officials have participated in 50 congressional hearings, briefings and interviews about the attack.” [The Hill, 3/22/14]
  

   

  Hearings

  33: Number of congressional hearings, public or private, held on the Benghazi tragedy according to publicly available hearing transcripts, congressional reports, and committee websites and fact sheets.
  

• Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs hearing, Homeland Threats and Agency Responses held 9/19/12. [Homeland Threats and Agency Responses, 9/19/12]
  
• House Committee on Armed Services hearing, Full Committee Hearing on the Attack in Benghazi held 9/19/12. [Fact Sheet: HASC Oversight Activities on Libya, armedservices.house.gov, accessed 4/13/15]
  
• House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing, The Security Failures of Benghazi held 10/10/12. [The Security Failures of Benghazi, 10/10/12]
  
• House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing, Benghazi and Beyond: What Went Wrong on September 11, 2012 and How to Prevent it from Happening at other Frontline Posts, Part I held 11/15/12. [Benghazi and Beyond: What Went Wrong on September 11, 2012 and How to Prevent it from Happening at other Frontline Posts, Part I, 11/15/12]
  
• House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Full Committee Hearing with DNI Clapper, ADCIA Morell, D/NCTC Olsen, and Under Secretary Kennedy held 11/15/12. [Investigative Report on the Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Facilities in Benghazi, Libya, September 11-12, 2012, pg. 7, footnote 11, 11/21/14]
  
• Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Hearing on the Attacks in Benghazi held 11/15/12. [Senate Intelligence Committee press release, 10/25/12, SSCI Review of the Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Facilities in Benghazi, Libya, September 11-12, 2012, pg. 3, footnote 4, 1/15/14]
  
• House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Full Committee Hearing on Benghazi held 11/16/12. [Investigative Report on the Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Facilities in Benghazi, Libya, September 11-12, 2012, pg. 25, footnote 131, 11/21/14]
  
• Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Hearing With General David Petraeus Re: His Knowledge of the Attacks on U.S. Facilities in Benghazi, Libya held 11/16/12. [SSCI Review of the Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Facilities in Benghazi, Libya, September 11-12, 2012, Additional Majority Views, pg. 3, footnote 143, 1/15/14]
  
• Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Hearing on Security Issues at Benghazi and Threats to U.S. Intelligence and Diplomatic Personnel and Facilities Worldwide Since the Attack held 12/4/12. [SSCI Review of the Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Facilities in Benghazi, Libya, September 11-12, 2012, pg. 6, footnote 18, 1/15/14]
  
• House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Full Committee classified hearing on efforts to find the Benghazi attackers held 12/13/12. [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) Investigation into the Benghazi Terrorist Attacks Timeline of Investigation to date, no. 34, 12/04/14]
  
• House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing, Benghazi Attack, Part II: The Report of the Accountability Review Board held 12/20/12. [Benghazi Attack, Part II: The Report of the Accountability Review Board, 12/20/12]
  
• Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing, Benghazi: The Attack and the Lessons Learned held 12/20/12. [Benghazi: The Attack and the Lessons Learned, 12/20/12]
  
• House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing, Terrorist Attack in Benghazi: The Secretary of State’s View held 1/23/13. [Terrorist Attack in Benghazi: The Secretary of State’s View, 1/23/13]
  
• Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing with Secretary Clinton, Benghazi: The Attacks and the Lessons Learned held 1/23/13. [Benghazi: The Attacks and the Lessons Learned, 1/23/13]
  
• Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing, Department Of Defense’s Response To The Attack On U.S. Facilities In Benghazi, Libya, And The Findings Of Its Internal Review Following The Attack held 2/7/13. [Department Of Defense’s Response To The Attack On U.S. Facilities In Benghazi, Libya, And The Findings Of Its Internal Review Following The Attack, 2/7/13]
  
• House Committee on Armed Services hearing, The Posture of the U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command held 3/15/13. [“HASC Committee Oversight of Benghazi Attack,” HASC website, accessed 4/21/15]
  
• House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing, Securing U.S. Interests Abroad: The FY 2014 Foreign Affairs Budget held 4/17/13. [“Investigation of Benghazi,” gop.gov, accessed 4/13/15]
  
• House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing, Benghazi: Exposing Failure and Recognizing Courage held 5/8/13. [Benghazi: Exposing Failure and Recognizing Courage, 5/8/13]
  
• House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Full Committee Hearing with CIA’s former Chief of Benghazi Base held 5/22/13. [Investigative Report on the Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Facilities in Benghazi, Libya, September 11-12, 2012, pg. 14, footnote 70, 11/21/14]
  
• House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Full Committee Hearing with Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell held 5/22/13. [Investigative Report on the Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Facilities in Benghazi, Libya, September 11-12, 2012, pg. 16, footnote 83, 11/21/14]
  
• House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Full Committee Hearing on Benghazi Investigation held 6/14/13. [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) Investigation into the Benghazi Terrorist Attacks Timeline of Investigation to date, no. 63, 12/04/14]
  
• House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, and Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa joint hearing, The Terrorist Threat in North Africa: Before and After Benghazi held 7/10/13. [The Terrorist Threat in North Africa: Before and After Benghazi, 7/10/13]
  
• House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Full Committee Hearing with DCIA Brennan held 7/25/13. [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) Investigation into the Benghazi Terrorist Attacks Timeline of Investigation to date, no. 70, 12/04/14]
  
• House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Full Committee Hearing on Benghazi Investigation held 9/12/13. [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) Investigation into the Benghazi Terrorist Attacks Timeline of Investigation to date, no. 74, 12/04/14]
  
• House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing, Benghazi: Where is the State Department Accountability?       held 9/18/13. [Benghazi: Where is the State Department Accountability?, 9/18/13]
  
• House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversights and Investigations hearing, Defense Department’s Posture for September 11, 2013: What are the Lessons of Benghazi? held 9/19/13. [Defense Department’s Posture for September 11, 2013: What are the Lessons of Benghazi?, 9/19/13]
  
• House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing, Reviews of the Benghazi Attack and Unanswered Questions held 9/19/13. [Reviews of the Benghazi Attack and Unanswered Questions, 9/19/13]
  
• House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, The Benghazi Talking Points and Michael J. Morell’s Role in Shaping the Administration’s Narrative held 4/2/14. [The Benghazi Talking Points and Michael J. Morell’s Role in Shaping the Administration’s Narrative, 4/2/14]
  
• House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing, Benghazi, Instability, and a New Government: Successes and Failures of U.S. Intervention in Libya held 5/1/14. [Benghazi, Instability, and a New Government: Successes and Failures of U.S. Intervention in Libya, 5/1/14]
  
• House Select Committee on Benghazi hearing, Implementation of the Accountability Review Board Recommendations held 9/17/14. [Implementation of the Accountability Review Board Recommendations, 9/17/14]
  
• House Select Committee on Benghazi hearing, Reviewing Efforts to Secure U.S. Diplomatic Facilities and Personnel held 12/10/14. [Reviewing Efforts to Secure U.S. Diplomatic Facilities and Personnel, 12/10/14]
  
• House Select Committee on Benghazi hearing, Status Review of Outstanding Requests held 1/27/15. [Status Review of Outstanding Requests, 1/27/15]
  
• House Select Committee on Benghazi hearing, Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held 10/22/15. [Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, 10/22/15]
  

   

  

  Benghazi By The Numbers

   

Have you ever sent an email to a U.S. Representative or Senator that was not a .gov address? Almost every member of congress has a gmail, yahoo, etc. email address. Folks a server is a server whether it is in your basement or in a private corporation. Even more so, servers talk to other servers. The internet is a long convoluted chain of servers. The name public or private does not concern an actual server in the least. c They are simply servers. Corporations which own or lease servers are just as likely to get hacked as individuals that have servers, probably more so. We regularly hear about servers being hacked. When they are hacked there are “fingerprints” which IT experts can use to verify a server was hacked and track the culprits. The FBI has the world’s best hack trackers. They found no evidence of Hillary’s home server being hacked. Essentially, Hillary did nothing different than any other Congressperson and yet given the red, lame stream media you would think she made Snowden look like faithful steward of our secrets. By the way, did you see that “C” all by itself above. OMG, you just read classified information. My wife and I have had both secret and top secret clearances and I can tell you without a proper header and footer, Director Comey agrees with me, it is not a classified document. Only the Trump Kool-Aid drinkers believer the FBI is corrupt and kept Hillary out of jail which they hope to remedy when Trump is president. If you cannot believe the FBI and want to throw people in jail for political reasons you have much more in common with Putin’s Russia than the democratic United States of America. Maybe you should move there and give it a try to see how it works for you?

This is not a post I feel comfortable about writing. I prefer facts to emotions in these matters. I am not opposed to emotions. I think they are great on either side of the isle. However, I sincerely believe that emptions must always give way to facts or you must implicitly or explicitly give up on logic and give yourself over to your unchecked opinions which are essentially narcissistic, short sighted and counter to everything that got us out of the caves,

However, in this case I do not have the time to write this post in a way I would prefer. My wife and I are working day and night for the Hillary campaign. We are basically running a field office for Hillary. We have donated more money to Hillary than we have ever donated to any political campaign. I need to make this fast and to the point.

Psychologically and rhetorically Trump is not different than a pre-Führer Hitler. I have never said this about anyone that did not call themselves a Nazi. I debated David Duke once in his Nazi uniform with two other Nazi dressed compatriots next to him at LSU. He was a proud Nazi and still is. I do not take these words likely. Trump is purely narcissistic. I do not need the APA’s relatively new takeover of this word over the earliest Greek thinking on narcissus to protect psychiatric jargon. Trump is solely and wholly dedicated to himself to the point of projecting all his insecurities on others. For him the other is alien, dangerous, nasty, sexual predators, leaches on society, liars, ethnic slave owners (his extremely convoluted argument about blacks voting for Democrats). He has no factual basis for anything he says. He tells us he has never lost. He went bankrupt four times and failed in two marriages. The fact is he has always been a loser. I suspect his debt is close to his assets. He lost one billion dollars in 1995 and that is probably not the only year he lost huge amounts of money. He has proved he is a terrible business man with his bankruptcies. He has called himself the “King of Debt”. He will not release his tax returns only a purely fictional and unverifiable account of his net worth. He has been fact checked on more lies than fact checkers have ever seen. They cannot keep up with his lies. He logically contradicts himself on a daily basis. He tells us he never said he was for the Iraq war and yet we have audio where he tells us exactly the opposite. I will not go on because I am too busy working for Hillary to save the world from a Hitler wannabe.

Trump has told us he loves war, he loves fighting, he does not understand why we do not use nukes and why we do not let other countries like Japan get nukes. He has no concern for NATO and thinks Russia’s Putin is quite admirable. He flies off the handle and against his own best outcome chooses battles which hurt his stated desires to be president. It takes four minutes for a president with the “football” to punch in the codes and the personnel in the silo to punch in their code to launch a nuke. There is no middle man or check and balance. In light of his history who could ever lull themselves into any sense of confidence that Trump as president would “Make America Great Again”? Trump would exterminate the world before he could be impeached for ignoring the Constitution.

Additionally, if you in any way think of yourself as a Christian and are so brainwashed that you believe Trump is not the total opposite of Jesus you are absolutely apostate. I have always been fascinated at why Hitler was catapulted to power by well-meaning Germans. We need look no further than Donald J. Trump to understand how this cataclysmic event occurred. Even more so, imagine a Hitler with nukes. He is a “nativist”. He gets his “facts” from the alt-right, Breitbart, which is nothing other than unabashed white nationalists. He hires them to run his campaign. White nationalists love Trump. Jesus would tell Trump voters to “depart from me I never knew you”. Ask yourself if you think you are Christian and vote for Trump can you really can live with yourself and never doubt your vote. If so, you are well beyond hope; you are well beyond love; you have absolutely no notion of truth and righteousness. Look at my post on this site (Anti-Abortion, Anti-Immigrants, Republicans and Jesus) about how the Old and New Testament discusses the sojourner, the immigrant and try to justify yourself in light of the many Bible verses I quote on this matter. If you vote for Trump and tell others you are a Christian, you are everything that crucifies Jesus all over again.

Hitler was motivated by psychotic xenophobia. Trump’s twist on this is that he is motivated by some distorted notion of capitalism. Trump does not give a damn about the folks that have already drank his Jim Jones cool aid. He has shown that contractual obligations to pay his employees mean nothing to him. Trump has shown that capitalism is nothing other than vulture-ism. He inherited money and is every alter ego we liberals have been perhaps overly stereotyping for decades concerning the right. Trump is the ideal of what every liberal has thought conservatism was really about under the covers. A vote for Trump is a vote to concretize the liberal’s worst fear of capitalism and contrary to the sincere and legitimate concerns of the best of Republican’s “Party of Lincoln”. If you are the Republican you want to think of yourselves as, try to think these two thoughts together – the Party of Lincoln and the Party of Trump. If you are not nauseous thinking these two thoughts together you are the reason your Party is going down the tubes.

I will have time after the election to add more statistical and factual evidence to these admittedly emotive claims but for now I am completely occupied with trying to save the world for my beloved kids.

This is just one case and point why the Heritage Foundation is not a good source for facts, making sound arguments or for sound opinions.

On September 15, 2014 the Heritage Foundation published this post, The War on Poverty After 50 Years. In this post they have the following graph:

They make the argument that President Johnson’s war on poverty was a total failure.

Do the higher living standards of the poor mean that the War on Poverty has been successful? The answer is no, for two reasons. First, the incomes and living standards of less affluent Americans were rising rapidly well before the War on Poverty began.

The second reason was because they suggest that in spite of his stated goals he really only perpetuated government dependence and did nothing but spend money without any positive effect on poverty.

Although President Johnson intended the War on Poverty to increase Americans’ capacity for self-support, exactly the opposite has occurred. The vast expansion of the welfare state has dramatically weakened the capacity for self-sufficiency among many Americans by eroding the work ethic and undermining family structure.

They actually post the graph above twice in their article. This graph has been re-published many times on the web by right wing groups and Republicans as proof that government programs are ineffective and only exacerbate poverty¹. Let’s take a look at their caption at the bottom of the graph citing their sources which they attribute to the Census Bureau.

Sources: figures for 1947-1958: Gordon Fisher. “Estimates of the Poverty Population Under the Current Official Definition for Years Before 1959.- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, 1986 figures for 1959-2012: U.S. Census Bureau. Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplements, ‘Historical Poverty Tables—People,” Table 2, https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/hstorical/people.html (accessed September 10, 2014).

Let’s take it apart…

Sources: figures for 1947-1958: Gordon Fisher. “Estimates of the Poverty Population Under the Current Official Definition for Years Before 1959.- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation,

If you search for this work on the internet you will not find it. Why? Here is what you will find:

²

Here is another:

³

Notice the word “Mimeo” in the first reference and the phrase “Unpublished Paper” in the second reference which was conveniently left out of the Heritage citation. Mimeo means:

(unpublished paper): May refer to a paper that is not in the process of being published or that is not part of an institutional working paper series.⁴

This word in bibliographies came about from the word mimeograph. It is thought the common usage was for mimeograph copies of a professors unpublished papers. The real problem is that without an official publication the authenticity of the source cannot be verified. Anyone can make the claim without any proof whatsoever that the source is authentic.

To be fair they do state in their references at the bottom of their article that, “These estimates are not official government figures.” They also state that the authors will provide the mimeograph copy upon request of the unpublished data.

1986 figures for 1959-2012: U.S. Census Bureau. Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplements, ‘Historical Poverty Tables—People,” Table 2, https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/hstorical/people.html (accessed September 10, 2014).

Try to find this on the Census Bureau web site. You will not find it. In fact, I am not an expert but I am a long time software engineer and I do not believe a second “www” in a URL as above is not even allowable. I have never seen a URL like this.

I did do a search with information they cite and found this, “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2013”

This does not show us anything about the years 1947 to 1959 as the Heritage Foundation’s graph shows. I suppose we are to assume the spike down they show on their graph comes from the unpublished paper that they state at the bottom of the article was interpolated from the mystery document. In any case, the graph from 1959 to 2012 appears similar:

Without the 1947 to 1959 data authenticated by their source, their case based on their source is not nearly so dramatic as the post would have us believe. However, I do think that this part of the graph is feasible.

Let’s not forget that the Great Depression and World War II ran from 1929 to 1945.⁵

By the end of the 1930s, 17% of the American work force remained unemployed; 30% still lived in poverty⁶

Historians see the Great Society of LBJ as a continuation of another Democrat’s attack on poverty, FDR’s New Deal. The New Deal legislation ran from 1933 to 1938. The New Deal legislation included Social Security, massive fiscal spending on infrastructure, housing and farming legislation. Certainly, spending on the war also inserting much needed short term stimulus into the failing economy. It is debatable how much effect the non-recurring, short term stimulus spending on the war had on long term economic conditions in the U.S.. In any case, the Great Society spending of LBJ can easily be seen as an extension of the New Deal. The poverty curve started coming down with FDR and continued downward dramatically until the Reagan years. In the Heritage article there is no mention of these topics. The truncation of this curve starting in 1947 instead of 1929 conveniently ignores the most important part of why the poverty curve came about and why it was going down dramatically in 1947. Additionally, if you believe the authors, the war on poverty had a dramatic but unreported effect on the “affluence” (they resist this word at the same time implying it) of the poor.

The data for poverty during and just after the Great Depression is hard to come by since there was no standard established. However, there is some Census Bureau data on unemployment during those years. The red line on the graph below shows data points from the Census Bureau starting in 1929.⁷ The blue line shows data points given by Historical Statistics of the United States published by the Cambridge University Press.⁸ The orange line shows poverty data points already discussed given by the Census Bureau.⁹ Note 1 – This data point was from the previously mentioned link, ECONOMY IN WORLD WAR II: HOME FRONT. The chart shows data from 1929 to 2014. This chart shows the relationship of unemployment to poverty during those years. In the chart, poverty lags unemployment by 12 to 15 years after the Great Depression.¹⁰ While actual data on poverty is lacking during the early years, it is reasonable to assume that poverty at this time would follow a similar trajectory as unemployment. This gives us some insight into what poverty would have looked like through the Great Depression. It is interesting to note that the unemployment recovery started around 1933 when FDR was kicking off the New Deal. Poverty started coming down dramatically some time from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s.

 

    
The Heritage article goes on to state in their Amenities section:

Because the official Census poverty report undercounts welfare income, it fails to provide meaningful information about the actual living conditions of less affluent Americans. The government’s own data show that the actual living conditions of the more than 45 million people deemed “poor” by the Census Bureau differ greatly from popular conceptions of poverty. Consider these facts taken from various government reports:

•Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, at the beginning of the War on Poverty, only about 12 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
•Nearly three-quarters have a car or truck; 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks.[9]
•Nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite television.
•Two-thirds have at least one DVD player, and a quarter have two or more.
•Half have a personal computer; one in seven has two or more computers.
•More than half of poor families with children have a video game system such as an Xbox or PlayStation.
•Forty-three percent have Internet access.
•Forty percent have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV.
•A quarter have a digital video recorder system such as a TIVO.
•Ninety-two percent of poor households have a microwave.

On one hand they try to use Census data from 1959 referenced above to show that government spending has not reduced poverty since the 1960s but only increases government waste. Then, they go on to state that the data the authors used does not accurately reflect poverty thus weakening their argument that poverty has not gone down with additional spending. If those living below the poverty level have all these amenities it would imply that they are doing quite well so the programs combating poverty must be working too well.

The authors do go on to state:

Of course, poor Americans do not live in the lap of luxury. The poor clearly struggle to make ends meet, but they are generally struggling to pay for cable TV, air conditioning, and a car, as well as food for the table. The average poor person is far from affluent, but his lifestyle is equally far from the images of stark deprivation purveyed by advocacy groups and the mainstream media.

If the poor are struggling to pay for what middle class families are paying for this implies that the poor are really middle class or at least lower middle class. Thus, poverty has effectively been eradicated by government programs and spending on the poor. However, they think that the elimination of poverty which they imply but at the same time deny is not shown in government reporting on poverty. Could it be that if we had the ‘real’ numbers for the graph above it would not be flat from the 1960s on but would actually go down further thus continuing the earlier more dramatic trend down? No, they prefer to have their cake and eat it too.

They think the Census data under-reports the real living conditions of the poor.

The Census Bureau counts a family as “poor” if its income falls below specific thresholds, but in counting “income,” the Census omits nearly all of government means-tested spending on the poor.[4]

The note [4] states:

[4] Typically, only 3 percent of total means-tested spending is counted by the Census as “income” for purposes of deriving the official poverty measure.

There is no reference for the “3 percent” number.

Again, they go on to state:

Some authors suggest that the continuing decline in official poverty from 1965 to 1970 demonstrates the initial success of the War on Poverty, but over 90 percent of the increased spending during this period was in the form of non-cash benefits that the Census does not count for purposes of measuring poverty.[20]

Note [20] states:

[20] Data available from the authors upon request.

Try asking them for the data and see what happens.

Pew Research has an interesting article stating:

Critics note that the official poverty rate, as calculated by the Census Bureau, has fallen only modestly, from 19% in 1964 to 15% in 2012 (the most recent year available). But other analysts, citing shortcomings in the official poverty measure, focus on a supplemental measure (also produced by the Census Bureau) to argue that more progress has been made. A team of researchers from Columbia University, for example, calculated an “anchored” supplemental measure — essentially the 2012 measure carried back through time and adjusted for historical inflation — and found that it fell from about 26% in 1967 to 16% in 2012.¹¹

As it turns out food stamps and some welfare benefits are not reported to the IRS. However, since IRS data does not go outside the agency for reporting purposes the source for all these claims generally comes from the Census Bureau. The Census Bureau does get self-reporting information on government assistance. Self-reporting is also used for the authors arguments in the “Amenities”, “Poverty, Nutrition, and Hunger” and “Housing and Poverty” sections. These sections go on to tell us that in addition to amenities, the poor are doing quite well with food and nutrition and homelessness is not nearly as bad as you might think. If self-reporting is problematic for some of their premises it should be problematic for all their premises.

Furthermore, if you go to the article, “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2013”, cited above Appendix A, you will see an article titled, “How Income is Measured”. It states that Census data does reflect additional income from the government:

For each person 15 years and older in the sample, the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) asks questions on the amount of money income received in the preceding calendar year from each of the following sources:
1. Earnings
2. Unemployment compensation
3. Workers’ compensation
4. Social security
5. Supplemental security income
6. Public assistance
7. Veterans’ payments
8. Survivor benefits
9. Disability benefits
10. Pension or retirement income
11. Interest
12. Dividends
13. Rents, royalties, and estates and trusts
14. Educational assistance
15. Alimony
16. Child support
17. Financial assistance from outside of the household
18. Other income

If in fact those living below the poverty level have all those amenities, this does not change their reported income which is below the poverty level. If the assumption is that the government programs allow them to live like Kings or at least paupers in the Kings palace they must be doing so on less than Federal Poverty levels currently set at:

The Heritage Foundation states:

For decades, the living conditions of the poor have steadily improved. Consumer items that were luxuries or significant purchases for the middle class a few decades ago have become commonplace in poor households.

They go on to state that all this affluence has resulted in the poor (who are not really poor) have nothing to do but have more babies:

Since the beginning of the War on Poverty, the absolute number of married-couple families with children in official poverty has declined, but as Chart 6 shows, the number of single-parent families in official poverty (or lacking self-sufficiency) has more than tripled, increasing from 1.6 million in 1965 to 4.8 million today. When the War on Poverty began, 36 percent of poor families with children were headed by single parents; today, the figure is 68 percent. [24]

There was the baby boom after the war in the economic recovery which affected absolute population numbers, married and unmarried births proportionally. Here is what the source they cite tells us:

Key findings
Data from the National Vital Statistics System and the National Survey of Family Growth
•Nonmarital births and birth rates have declined 7% and 14%, respectively, since peaking in the late 2000s.
•Births to unmarried women totaled 1,605,643 in 2013. About 4 in 10 U.S. births were to unmarried women in each year from 2007 through 2013.
•Nonmarital birth rates fell in all age groups under 35 since 2007; rates increased for women aged 35 and over.
•Birth rates were down more for unmarried black and Hispanic women than for unmarried non-Hispanic white women.
•Nonmarital births are increasingly likely to occur within cohabiting unions—rising from 41% of recent births in 2002 to 58% in 2006–2010.
 

So, unwed mothers includes those that cohabitate and are not legally married. National Health Statistics Reports tells us:¹²

This fact is conveniently left out of the discussion. Additionally, since nonmarital birth rates have declined since the late 2000s, government spending on poverty has risen dramatically due to the Great Recession starting in 2008 (with a Republican president and a majority in the U.S. Congress for six years prior) the causal link to increased government programs on poverty and unwed births appears problematic. The Heritage article was written in 2014. They should have had access to all this information but clearly omitted it. The fallacy of false cause is well known in statistics. As they say, it is a fact that people drowning is statistically correlated to eating ice cream. However, jumping to the conclusion that ice cream causes drowning ignores the fact that people eat ice cream in the summer which is when drownings most often occur.

To conclude, drawing conclusions from false and misleading sources leads to wrong opinions and therefore voters voting on false ‘facts’. When “corporations are people too” we have turned ourselves over to the universe of commercials which have a notorious history of being false and misleading. The vested interest of groups like the Heritage Foundation which have great financial resources can dish out trash like this article with the perception of reality. The marketing guys I worked with would say it like this “perception is reality”. The mainstream media which you would have to include Fox News and journalists like the ones in this article can simply invent reality with the appearance of truth and get it repeatedly copied all over the web and into the ‘common sense’ perceptions of average people who do not have the time or inclination to find out if it is so. There is a reason why we get the politicians we vote for and deserve; in engineering we simply say, Garbage In, Garbage Out.

_________________

¹ US Poverty Rate – How the Great Society Programs Reversed its Decline

² This is a reference citation in another book called “Poverty in America: A Handbook”

³ This is a reference citation in another book called “Changing Poverty, Changing Policies”

⁴ Read more at http://www.yourdictionary.com/mimeo#0uIuWkPes886P72I.99

⁵ The Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945

⁶ ECONOMY IN WORLD WAR II: HOME FRONT

⁷ Census Bureau, No. 1430. Employment Status of the Civilian Population: 1929 to 1998 (page 879)

⁸ Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition, ed. Susan Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael Haines, Alan Olmsted, Richard Sutch and Gavin Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), http://hsus.cambridge.org/, accessed 5 January 2009.

⁹ Income and Poverty in the United States: 2013

Current Population Reports

Issued September 2014 P60-249 By Carmen DeNavas-Walt and Bernadette D. Proctor

¹⁰ It is interesting to note that the poverty rate has also lagged the unemployment rate during the Great Recession.

The recession officially lasted from December 2007 through June 2009, but monthly unemployment rates remained above 9 percent for more than two years after the official start of the current economic recovery.

Poverty and the Great Recession

Sheldon Danziger, University of Michigan,

Koji Chavez, Stanford University &

Erin Cumberworth, Stanford University

¹¹ January 13, 2014, Who’s poor in America? 50 years into the ‘War on Poverty,’ a data portrait, By Drew DeSilver

¹² National Health Statistics Reports

Number 64 April 4, 2013

First Premarital Cohabitation in the United States:

2006—2010 National Survey of Family Growth

 

UPDATE: I have updated this previous post to enhance the clarity of the graphs, make the state’s political party domination reflect the time period of the Census data (from 2014 instead of the 2016) and to correct the food stamps data error for Wyoming (I found the data point to be that of Puerto Rico). I will also make the Excel Spreadsheet available to download here. Additionally, I will do some more statistical analysis in the future on this data in order to spell out some more conclusions that I think we could draw from the data.

Just let me say that the whole point of social programs is to help people, that are able, get out of poverty not stay in it perpetually. Success or failure should be measured by non-partisan statistics. I think the Census Bureau qualifies as non-partisan. The continual insistence the Republican Party has made over decades to get rid of, or greatly reduce, social programs can be shown to result in perpetual and greater poverty in terms of human misery. To the contrary, their insistence that the free market will go further in solving these problems than government assistance has not shown up in the data. How many more decades and excuses will it take before they face facts and not unfounded aspirations? Naysaying never solves problems; it only ignores problems.

 

In a recent post, The End of the Republican Party, I made a comment about decades of Republican political domination in the Deep South and the high poverty rate and low standard of living. In older posts I have referenced this data but I would like to supplement this data with 2014 data from the U.S. Census Bureau¹ I also referred to an opinion post in Forbes online by Mark Hendrickson defending the Republicans shabby history of governing these states in which he largely blamed the Civil War and Democrats for these conditions.² The facts are that Republicans have dominated the Deep South for many decades and those states are the worse off for it. If decades are not enough time to justify their failed economics the question looms as to how long they need to justify their boisterous and voluminous claims. In the meantime, countless people suffer and die waiting for an economic rapture that gets further and further from reality and hard facts. Their latest non-democratic ‘brilliant’ idea about emergency management in Flint Michigan poisoned and damaged the kids they claim to be so ‘pro-life’ about for their entire life. However, that is a topic for another day.

Below are charts compiled from the Census Bureau. I can provide the Excel Spreadsheets in anyone is interested in more detailed data. The charts detail 2014 data for all the states in the U.S. on the following topics:

Percentage of families below the poverty line

Percentage of families on public assistance

Percentage of families on food stamps

Percentage of families with no health insurance

I have sorted the data by states from worst result to best results. I also obtained each states political affiliations for Governor and state legislative bodies.³ The color codes on the sides and tops of the charts indicate the following for 2016 political offices:

Red – The Governor and legislature have Republican majorities

Orange – The Governor and legislature lean Republican

Blue – The Governor and legislature lean Democratic

Dark Blue – The Governor and legislature have Democratic majorities

The chart below shows the data widely reported concerning the percentage of families living below the poverty line, concentrated largely in Southern States. I have highlighted Southern States in yellow. Mississippi heads the list with over 21% of families living below $24,300 for a family of four. Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, Arizona and Florida are all in the hardest hit states. All these states have been dominated by Republican economics for decades. It is interesting that Louisiana recently elected a Democratic Governor after two terms of Republican Bobby Jindal (not reflected in the 2014 data).

 

 

The chart below shows the percentage of families with the most to the least cash public assistance income. It is really fascinating that this chart seems to be almost inverted from the previous chart. The least public assistance to the poor and children goes again to the poorest Southern States. This probably has a lot to do with the sheer volume of people living below the poverty line in those states. It also has to do with the dollar amount the states have to contribute to administer some of these programs. Republicans are all too happy to pat themselves on the back for not giving ‘hand outs’ to the poor but the data tells us that instead of solving their poverty problems their ideology simply perpetuates the misery of their citizens. While Republicans may go to church every Sunday prideful of their staunch economic policies to help the poor, the data tells us that their effect is the opposite from the admonitions of Jesus to care about the poor.

With regard to the SNAP program for food stamps, the data show the Southern States once again come in at the highest percentages of Federal food stamps.

Once again the Southern States have the highest percentages in people without health insurance. This probably has to do with many of their refusal to participate in the Medicaid expansion brought on by their intense hatred of any Obama at the human cost of their own citizenry.

Real data shows the Republican economics has not worked in the states hardest hit by Republican ideologies.⁴ Their adamant refusal to face the hard cold facts and continue to insist that they know how to handle the economy is spite of the suffering of the poorest states they have dominated for decades highly suggests a more dubious purpose for their rhetoric: their concern has nothing to do with achieving real results for the less fortunate but has more to do with protecting a more narrow constituency than most of their base cares to believe. Their strategy is a protectionist tactic for those with vested interests in less honorable goals while their marketing propaganda is obsessed with playing on people’s reactionary emotions and rarely realized aspirations.

To conclude, let me state that the huge divide between results in Democratic and Republican states makes me re-think the 10^th Amendment’s emphasis on state’s rights. I know this is a huge emphasis for the Republican Party but maybe Democrats could benefit from more separation with the states. If the divide between Republican dominated economics and Democrat dominated economics became large enough for most people to see the practical effects of each strain of economic and political ideologies, the ability to blame the other party might be reduced enough for most folks to see the real results that fall out. The downside is that many would probably suffer before it got bad enough for a failed ideology to present itself. In engineering, we like to measure results and learn from the past. In democracy this is a harder task since most folks do not seem to care about real facts versus opinions based on rhetoric. I am not sure our nation could survive the real test that would be required for most folks to reach a sound conclusion. However, I do fancy the idea somewhat of a real sink or swim test for the states and their political choice of affiliations.

 

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¹ U.S. Census Bureau, American FactFinder

² Are the 10 Poorest U.S. States Really Republican?

³ 2014 GOVERNORS AND LEGISLATURES
See also,The 10 Poorest States in the USA are in the Deep South
And, State of the States Report 2014 Local Momentum for National Change to Cut Poverty and Inequality

⁴ The Big Picture: Facts Concerning History, Politics and the Economy

See also, The Great Lie: The Great Depression and Recessions of the United States

 

Individualism and Guns

 

The gun debate and recent Supreme Court decisions concerning the 2^nd Amendment has opened a gaping hole in the very fabric of democracy and the historical metaphysics of individualism.

In Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in District of Columbia vs. Heller he states:

There are many reasons why the militia was thought to be “necessary to the security of a free state.” First, of course, it is useful in repelling invasions and suppressing insurrections. Second, it renders large standing armies unnecessary—an argument that Alexander Hamilton made in favor of federal control over the militia. Third, when the able-bodied men of a nation are trained in arms and organized, they are better able to resist tyranny.¹

He further states:

Besides ignoring the historical reality that the Second Amendment was not intended to lay down a “novel principl[e]” but rather codified a right “inherited from our English ancestors,” petitioners’ interpretation does not even achieve the narrower purpose that prompted codification of the right. If, as they believe, the Second Amendment right is no more than the right to keep and use weapons as a member of an organized militia, that is, the organized militia is the sole institutional beneficiary of the Second Amendment ‘s guarantee—it does not assure the existence of a “citizens’ militia” as a safeguard against tyranny.

He appears to agree that 2^nd Amendment is more than the right to keep arms in an organized militia; it is a “safeguard against tyranny”

In 2012 a Rasmussen telephone survey found that 65% of American Adults think the purpose of the Second Amendment is to make sure that people are able to protect themselves from tyranny.²

The CEO of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, has stated to Congress, “Senator, I think without any doubt, if you look at why our Founding Fathers put it there, they had lived under the tyranny of King George and they wanted to make sure that these free people in this new country would never be subjugated again and have to live under tyranny,”³

In Ancient Greece at the time of Aristotle there was much discussion on the ‘one’ and the ‘many’. Aristotle tells us in Politics,

Again, for the exercise of any faculty or art a previous training and habituation are required; clearly therefore for the practice of virtue. And since the whole city has one end, it is manifest that education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private- not as at present, when every one looks after his own children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best; the training in things which are of common interest should be the same for all. Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.⁴

As human, our greatest liberal virtue as Aristotle calls it⁵ and evolutionary adaptation is not individualism but our ability to hunt and gather as a collectivity. There were many animals in our early history that were stronger and faster than the genus Homo. Only by banding together were we able to overcome enormous obstacles. Our language is the ultimate proof that we are not all isolated monads each with a private language. The very basis for what we call ‘reality’ is ‘thought’ and can only be ‘thought’ in terms of language.

The trend in the Austrian School of Frederick Hayek⁶ and taken up by the populist Ayn Rand has been to discount collectivism as the history of tyranny. Instead of the virtue Aristotle assigned to liberalism they have made liberalism into a vast history of collectivity which gave rise to every evil from Fascism to Communism. Their fictional account of individualism is then taken as everything collectivism was not and the greatest virtue that Aristotle missed completely.

The modern metaphysics about individualism makes the individual the sole determinate for truth, the diviner for goodness and the only antidote for liberalism. Democracy, born in the city-states of Athens⁷ and built into the U.S. Constitution from the ground up as representative democracy with checks and balances does not hold the individual as the sole determinate of freedom, it holds the union of free individuals as a higher standard than the war of all against all. Thus, the rule of law is not up to each individual capriciousness and whim but acceptance of a greater good than ‘me’. In the notion of guns as the ultimate arbiter of the good vis-à-vis the individual deterrent against tyranny the most obvious dilemma is what happens when two individuals disagree?

 

Individualism and the State of Exception

 

In a previous post I discussed Agamben⁸ and the state of exception. A state of exception is a ‘state’, a union, which can only exist when it allows itself to essentially undo itself to preserve itself. In other words, the union is determined outside itself in what it allows as exceptions to its union.

The state of exception is not a special juridical order (the law which regulates the state of war,) rather it is a suspension of the whole juridical order itself which marks it for the limits, the threshold of the juridical order. It is for that reason that in public law there is not such a thing as a theory for the ‘state of exception.’⁹

If the citizens militia and the right for individuals to keep and bear arms is an essential deterrent to tyranny then this is tantamount to saying that there is a legal and constitutional basis for the dissolution of our union, built into our union, for its own state of exception whereupon the individual, any individual, has the ‘right’ to throw out any or all of our union based on a personal decision, judgement or dictum. This exceptional state needs no basis outside of itself. It need not justify, defend or legitimize itself before a system of government. It may violently assert itself at any cost without any legal or Constitutional concerns or with its own private interpretation of the Constitution. This notion has been called terrorism in other circumstances.

Is there, built into our constitution, a legal exception for terrorism, for violent overthrow with arms for any ‘citizens militia’? Are guns the ‘state of exception’ for the U.S. Government? Wouldn’t we call every individual’s war of all against all tribalism? Why would we assume that the individuals overthrowing tyranny are not equally capable of tyranny? Is it just because they are ‘individuals’? From a purely and simply logical point of view, on what basis could the Supreme Court deny its own purpose for existence, the judicator of the Constitution, to uphold the dissolution of itself in an individual’s right for a state of exception? Is there any kind of legal basis for an individual to violently determine the correct interpretation of the U.S. Constitution? Why would we need a Supreme Court if this is to be maintained? Do we need the Supreme Court to validate the absoluteness of the individual? Do we need a tyranny to make individualism real? There is a glaring contradiction in having a ‘union’ and denying that union in favor of the individual. It is symbiotic and the reckoning of insanity as before and above all reason. Haven’t we really just pseudo-legally recognized anarchy as essence in denial of how we have survived to this point as a species? If we allow every one with an assault weapon to determine what tyranny is and isn’t we are only left with a war of all against all and face the logical and necessary consequence of our own extinction. The judgement of the people should be made with consensus, voting and law not lead accelerated at high velocities!

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¹ SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, et al., PETITIONERS v.

DICK ANTHONY HELLER

² 65% See Gun Rights As Protection Against Tyranny

³ Some Gun Control Opponents Cite Fear Of Government Tyranny

⁴ Politics [8.1], By Aristotle, Written 350 B.C.E

⁵ And politics appears to be of this nature; for it is this that ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state, and which each class of citizens should learn and up to what point they should learn them; and we see even the most highly esteemed of capacities to fall under this, e.g. strategy, economics, rhetoric; now, since politics uses the rest of the sciences, and since, again, it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, the end of this science must include those of the others, so that this end must be the good for man. For even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete whether to attain or to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or for city-states. These, then, are the ends at which our inquiry aims, since it is political science, in one sense of that term. Nicomachean Ethics [1.2], By Aristotle, Written 350 B.C.E

⁶ Fredrick Hayek

⁷ Ancient Political Philosophy

⁸ Hegel and the State of Exception

⁹ State of Exception