1) That  Russia did indeed break into RNC and DNC networks, meaning they never were safe. That means other foreign powers could too (if Russia, then why not Nigerian or Iran hackers). But Russia did not manage to tilt the election. Or –

2) That Russia hacked, and tilted the election suggesting  that in general, national elections can be controlled from afar. Or –

3) that Russia controlled our voting technology from afar. Next possibility-

3) That there was something toxic contained in the hacked information that was bad enough to prevent Hillary winning. Of course we would want to discover what that part was. Or-

4) We discover that there was control from afar, but it was from Wikileaks, so please stop shouting at Russia.

OR

5) We discover that Russia didn’t do it. This possibility is equally explosive because of the magnitude and width of the media noise on Hillary’s side. This possibility would suggest Hillary’s people en masse are deluded.  Hillary and any sympathetic Congress members would get buried in international scorn, cementing Trump’s win.

BUT-

Another possibility is that the investigation itself is a temporary political strategy involving the CIA. We’re talking national cybersecurity, but would we be doing such an investigation if Hillary won? The Democrats are looking for electoral college defectors. This might sway enough electors. But the involvement of the CIA puts that agency at odds with Trump, if he starts presiding, and that would be another problem for national security.

The Russian interference investigation must proceed rapidly, dispassionately and completely, and in no way partially, because that would give Trump ammunition for noisy charges of Hillary’s crookedness.

The risks of this investigation to Hillary are also large.

Trump is a businessman, corporations are the stars in his sky.  He will steer the good ship America that way. Perhaps less President than CEO of America.

But – all the generals.  Army officers do not work in democratic settings. The military is a command hierarchy. And all of those appointees have extreme personalities.  Stocking the top with men who are trained to expect automatic obedience is putting sharks in the carp pond.

Will they soften? Well, a dog that bites is a dog that bites.

Thing is, the world’s dictatorships often have this particular partnership of the military and plutocratic businessmen. The overall aim is efficiency. Yes, Trump may have risen to power as a populist emancipator, promising to eliminate civilian corruption. But in the name of getting this country back in the right direction, he is going to employ people who like war.

Securing the borders, a strong military defense, the promotion of science and technology – expect all of that. Many of history’s biggest and ruthless dictatorships are based on a cult of personality, and Trump has cultivated that first.

His TIME picture as Person-of-the-Year shows him sitting in a big armchair which faces the other way, he stretching around backward to see us – a picture filled with subtext. That is the way rich pricks notice average people.

Never take your eyes off the 1%.

She’s alienated Trump’s people. She’s alienated  Bernie Sanders’ people. She’s alienated lots of people who don’t have her her upper class values. So if she wins, she will be leading millions upon millions of people who she’s alienated, and that’s going to be a rough ride.

Every week, Wikileaks shows how saturated in dirty tricks her campaign has been.  If she gets elected, that information doesn’t go away. 

And it’s never been clear why Hillary wants to be President. It’s not the golf games. It maybe a sense of entitlement – it’s her turn. But she doesn’t talk much about leading, or showing the world how to do it right. Also, who in the outer world would listen if they know that a majority of her own citizens don’t agree with her?

Those people voting for Hillary only to stop Trump had better not get complacent as Trump’s polls fall. Hillary’s victory depends on that group.  

The debate was uncorked insolence. It was more like a Jerry Springer show than an official event.

And we, the public, are being played by the press. All the top news outlets are giving us interpretations that are more like propaganda than news, which is fearful in itself, as the public’s trust in the media, a component of democracy, evaporates. 

The debate was a punch fest. Social media has mothers who are afraid to let their children watch the debate because these next presidents are acting in ways parents prohibit around the house.

Shows like this have huge audiences because they are both magnetic and repellent. A lot of disinterested people finally take interest in the candidates.

These debates will change the trajectory of national politics.

 His organization is dedicated to lifting secrecy from government and individual operations releases classified material when it sees wrongdoing. Wikileaks is where whistle blowers go public. He is a power broker in this presidential election.

A lot of people and some governments wish Assange would use the exit door from the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he lives. He inhabits a small space where he is protected. He knows too much.

From his hideaway Assange has been timing his information releases over the course of this presidential campaign – the timing brings an almost theatrical element – but what isn’t theatrical about this campaign?

He is rumored to be physically ill and in chronic pain. But if he leaves the embassy to go to a London hospital, he’ll be arrested.

We’ve been hearing promises about an October Surprise, a release that could break Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for president. But his releases haven’t broken anyone yet.

If she looks like exceptional wealth, if she talks like exceptional wealth, there’s something five coats of paint will never cover: she’s exceptionally wealthy. She’s part of the nation’s oligarchy of elite rulers, and she has nothing in common with the poor and immigrant  minorities whose vote she’s trying to get.

In America the rich get richer and the poor get poorer – it’s called wealth inequality – and she’s part of that.

 She makes $200,000 for a speech. She has nothing in common with factory or street. She has nothing in common with the 1 American in 6 who faces hunger. 

After Bernie Sanders departed the race, Hillary has a wide stage to strut. But her lefty lines are never inspiring. Because she’s not inspiring. She’s fake.  

The two prime values of democracy are freedom and equality. Those are the legs on which it walks. But with this degree of inequality, the second one is broken. More…

How would you rate the job they’re doing? 

Money stress has far reaching consequences. The  APA report says about 1 in 5 people say that they have either avoided going to the doctor or have not gone because of money worries. Money also affects  relationships: 31 percentof Americans report that money is a major source of conflict.

Conclusion? Money is wreaking grievous damage across America. When the average person spends hours a day worrying about money, (3.3 hours a day according to a USA Today report), that is time taken out of  the nation’s good functioning. It’s a drag on productivity.

Second this report is official because it’s the APA, the voice of psychology in America. It cements the connection between money problems and health as a political problem because it involves another institution. Institutions – from banks to hospitals to the APA to marriage itself – institutions are are power concentrations. Balances of power are what politics is all about.

Enough stress will break a person’s spirit, of course, whether the stress be huge sudden, or milder but unending. So more depression, and more anesthetics like alcohol and drugs, and more addiction. Doesn’t sound like the stress is making us stronger, does it? A take-away is that money is breaking the American spirit.

This report is not a quirky finding. It’s not something you read and get a little angry on the inside. It’s that the whole system that allows this public damage is decayed. 

Differences between how rich and the poor are suffering is always a big political problem.

If the collective damage – to health and wellbeing – visited on this counry by financial stress was something caused by a foreign country, it would be an act of war. That’s a political thing too. Does the direction the damage is coming from – outside or inside – make the damage less? No.

It’s our system. Our ideology. We’re looking at an inside job.

Big angry on the inside. Why doesn’t the American Psychological Association bite the bullet and write in its book of psychological symptoms (DSM5) about mental health and greed?

The APA report is here .

Sen. Elizabeth Warren calls for new judges to replace the present ones who have grown up slanted towards money interests and who are accustomed to business being their business, here.  Big businesses always trying to influence courts, she says. So do we have any courts that are fair?

Gotta love this senator.  She’s the only one with the strength to do what Obama should be doing.

Consumer buying is a huge part of the economy. These consumers have nothing but plastic cards to shield them against a seige of wrathful debt collectors, landlords and banks. They snap their wallets shut when the red line hovers, and that explains why the nation’s big malls are failing – too few customers – here.

We’ve heard about this, of course. You can read about this until your teeth fall out. But will anything change?

Banks, of course, are doing well.

Known for her persistent attacks on the rich, and her barefoot run-ins with banks and corporate titans, Elizabeth Warren is known for providing some much needed honesty and strength of character in Congress.  She’s willing to fling paint at those moneyed inhabitants of Congress who are deaf to the social issue of inequality. She’s been warned to tone down – but she toned it up. A grenade thrower against the moneyed establishment.

Race is a factor too. Though all races have much less since 2007, white family wealth on average is now x13 black family wealth.

See the graphs in this report.

Why did the Occupy movement disappear so quickly?  It didn’t lose steam. It didn’t get lost. And it didn’t dissolve for lack of leadership. It got squashed.  In a New York Review article 2012, Michael Greenberg documents some of the squashing.

The Occupy movement got a lot of attention and had a lot of public sympathy. Its disappearance leaves a political vacuum.

Get that?

According to Rand you can’t be both a follower of her capitalistic ideology and a Methodist, Catholic, New Age spiritual believer, 12-Stepper, Evangelical, Southern Baptist, Mormon, Unitarian, Presbyterian or Orthodox Jew, unless you can walk on both sides of a fence.

Which poses a problem for millions of Rand-adoring capitalists because most of them believe in God.

She refuses that.

At another point in her letters she says she sometimes called herself an atheist as a kind of shorthand:

” I do not call myself an ‘Atheist’ as an identification of my metaphysical position…But I do use the term ‘Atheist’ in the appropriate context such as, for instance, in answer to the queries of religionists or of those who spread verbal confusion by claiming that ‘a belief in natural law is a belief in God’, etc.” (2)

If you’re a believer and you claim to be on Ayn Rand’s side,  you should first know that capitalism and Christianity are opposed. Rand’s Capitalism is selfish. On the other hand Christianity is prosocial and altruistic.

Jesus acted like an anti-capitalist, kicking money changers out of the temple. His freely distributing fishes and loaves among a horde was an act of socialism.

Any Rand went on to develop a sociopathic politics, here.

(1) Letters of Ayn Rand, M.S. Berliner (Ed). New York: Plume Books. 1995. p. 621

(2) Letters of Ayn Rand, M.S. Berliner (Ed). New York: Plume Books. 1995. p. 577

After all we’re going through. After the reports, the statistics, the debates. Next time you hear somebody talk that ‘rising tide lifts all boats,’  just do a U-turn. Flip the channel.  

It’s a wrenchingly insulting metaphor from a group of nasty people.

After the catastrophic events of the past years, they continue to natter the little sayism.  ‘A rising tide lifts all boats.’

But this image never fits what you see, looking out the window, as you drive through the city.

It is a competitive society. They are proud of that. Now, the outcome of any competition is inevitably a winner and a loser. That’s an inequality. Obviously both people are not lifted; only the winner’s boat.

So they musts concede that in a competition (between people or between groups) one side increases, the other side decreases. The sum of the two is zero. That’s why it’s called a “zero-sum”.

So the truth we need to be telling each other is another picture. Scrap the boats. The accurate picture is:  The higher the tree, the deeper the roots.

The economy is an organic whole. The top and bottom parts are not disconnected from each other. Not detached like boats, and that aspect is obvious. Everything is connected in society.  The tree’s branches reach high into the glittering sun because the roots reach low into the clotted dark.

So in the business world. Stratospheric bonuses for CEOs are possible because the wages of the workers have not increased from mud-low.

So why do they keep drawing for us this picture ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ on us?

Because generations of greed are so rationalized.

But why do they say so, when it is clear it is not so? Over and over, like preachers who shout from the pulpit for two thousand years that the rapture is coming, and for two thousand years the congregation then turns out of the church door in rapture. But on the way home, the congregation doesn’t see any rapture. Just the city. On the way home, they notice that every year, the limousines get longer and every year there are more homeless people.

We think: it can’t be. Some people are raised, yes.  But not the poor. Not all are raised.

Educators: this is a teachable moment. That boats metaphor is insulting because it’s not rational. In any competition (on which business is based) one party wins because the other party loses. It is not possible that both the winner and the loser of a competition win.

The depth of this is that, after this is explained, that they will use their sayism again. But repetition is not the same as truth.

If we try to explain to them about the tree roots, they start to object, not on the basis of evidence, but with scorn that we do not understand.

That scorn is no substitute for reality. It is the way they nail their points. And it does not make the boats image true.  

Politicians know the effectiveness  of images and metaphor to convey complex processes because it’s hard to disprove an image. And in our culture of sound bytes, the shorter the communication, the better — few people stop to ingest an economic treatises. But a competing image, catching the imagination, has the power to move, because it combines concept and feeling. It has a sticking quality. Communicated, it has the power to upset a whole paradigm.

Less boat. More tree.

Simple idea. Social justice.

Here’s information: The Robin Hood Tax.

That’s odd. Aren’t the stock market and Wall St itself bastions of Republicanism?

Fox News reports the same finding here. Generally, corporate profits are better under Democratic administrations. Here.

Not so odd. Republican presidents don’t steer too well, prefering no regulations and we remember the cascading damage left after Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Bush.

Republican leadership lets America down. More reason for lefties to feel a little angry on the inside.

How common is wage theft?

Wikipedia   “A 2008 study based on surveys of over 4,000 workers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City found: Wage theft from low wage workers in large cites in the United States is severe and widespread. Incidence varies with the type of job and employee; however, any worker may be impacted.^{[4]   “}

 LA Times  article survey how much low-wage workers suffer, shows average lose 12.5%  of their pay, here

“The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), an independent agency created by Congress to monitor U.S. spending in Afghanistan, has detailed the money wasted in the Afghan supply process in a series of audits focused on procurement of fuel and vehicle parts for Afghan security forces.

As of March 2013, the U.S. has spent (PDF) about $54 billion funding security forces in Afghanistan and $92 billion on reconstruction, agriculture, and other development projects, according to a SIGAR report.”

America is the biggest exporter of food.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture reveals that at home, 4% of American households are going hungry for lack of money (that’s 4.4 million households), and another 12% are food-insecure: they eat if they don’t pay rent or other bills.

American poverty is a multifaceted disaster. Why do we export liberty and abundance to other lands when America is not taking care of its own?

We have had a conservative leadership. Many conservatives simply don’t want to take care of our poor. More welfare, according to Social Darwinists, just encourages the poor and then they won’t work. These conservatives are proud of their ruthlessness.

Those conservatives who do believe in helping also believe that the only help should be in the form of charity.

Many conservatives believe that charity is the answer to poverty.

(This is obviously wrong, because if charity really worked, there would be no more homeless and hungry.)

What’s the catch?

The catch is the conservative mindset that charity should only be given to people who are ‘deserving.’ (And conservatives insist on making that judgment themselves.)

So we have 18% of American children living in poverty, and their numbers are growing. We’d rather give charity to foreigners. Conservatives are giving charity selectively because of their prejudice against the poor. — These kids’ parents are welfare cases, so are not ‘deserving.’

But a nation with many hungry millions cannot be a strong nation. A hungry person is not a free person (originally Adlai Stevenson’s dictum) because hunger is coercive. A well-fed person can explore his options, read, and act as an informed member of a democracy. But a hungry person is a problem: he’s distracted, fearful, resentful, and he must look for food.

Unequally distributed hunger creates a division in a society.

Next: in a dangerous dog-eat-dog world, which conservatives insist, there’s Darwinian competition between nations. Conservatives keep saying: to survive, we have to be top dog. But how can we be top dog, with these internal divisions? Outsiders, looking at us, certainly see us weakened by them.

I’m not saying conservatives are rational.

Taking care of our own would heal us, naturally. But fathoms deep in the conservative mind is some dark, lurching logic that weakens us. Something even stronger than the fear of outside threats prevents them helping their fellow Americans.

An absurd calculus. It means that while America is the biggest exporter of food, we have hunger. We have poverty and blight. From the outside it cannot look like America is the land of the free.

Related article here.

Banking is a predatory industry.

Congress says it can’t find the money to provide healthcare for ordinary Americans, who are the public. Investment banks at this writing are furiously lobbying Congress and writing new legislation to push back regulations. And they know they will win. Those coiffed gentlemen want to play the very gambles that helped drop us all in the banking crisis of 2008. And they will do it again. Banks act like they own Congress. And thus you are entitled to feel violated.  Read more here

Essay: THE WAR on INTELLECTUALISM

Answer:  USA. It ranks 33  (out of 110 countries); England ranks lower at 37; Canada ranks 40.  People are killing themselves more in America, which also has the dubious distinction of more military suicides than lives lost to enemy combat.

Source here

Democracy stands on two main values: Freedom and equality.  But conservatives think equality would take away incentive in their lives, here.

    Nearly 2/3 of voters think the stock market is rigged against them, here.

The heart of conservative economics is the idea that rich people’s wealth eventually benefits everybody. Rich people begin businesses, hire the poor, and pay them. Rich people spend money on goods the poorer people manufacture. So the wealth at the top “trickles down.”

We’re supposed to see a diagram here of the shape of society as roughly like a diamond, viewed from the side, with most people in the middle class. And as the rich get richer, the top of the diagram moves up, pulling lower ranks up.

But actually the bottom of society is not moving up. So as the top goes up, society just gets longer and more unequal. That’s what’s happening.

Trickle down theory is fairy dust. (But it drives a lot of government policy.) To a large extent, very wealthy people invest in things that bring no benefit for the working poor: paintings, jewelry, real estate.

What’s the alternative? Well there’s a new idea called the Winner Take All theory which says in this competitive society people have an intense drive to win. And the prize for rising to the top is that you grab it all – or a huge percentage – then the losers divide up what’s left.

A winner-take-all society has a different shape. A tall pyramid.

That shape is more accurate, because currently the top 1% of our population actually owns 40% of the wealth. This means a sharp inequality.

So are the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor?

The Left is naturally opposed to laissez faire (free market) economics because it produces big wealth only for some people. What it always produces is inequality. The Left doesn’t like hierarchy (inequality) anyway, and the inequality creates great pain for the people who are left behind. The Right actually encourages social inequality. Some of them say it makes the economy run better.

There’s a statistic which population experts now use called the Gini Index. It shows how unequal a society is. It runs on a scale from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality) and in the U.S. it has been increasing steadily, and it stood at 0.47 in 2011. If the Gini Index gets high, it predicts social unrest.

And there’s some new scientific research comparing nations. It shows that the more social inequality in a country, the shorter the life expectancies. For everybody. Naturally, the Right is vigorously ignoring that research. But it’s your health. That research is the single biggest threat to free market economics. More here.

The study says just 15% of all this wasted food would be enough to feed more than 25 million Americans every year.

Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years for leaking this miiitary video of an American attack helicopter killing civilians in Iraq.  The video comes from inside the cockpit of an Apache helicopter. It records the voices of the crew as they find some Iraqis walking on the street, then decide they are carrying weapons, then shoot them all to death.  Turns out they were not weapons the civilians were carrying but cameras.  Two of them were local reporters. Turns out one was not killed, he crawled away wounded and when a local van stopped to rescue him, the Americans turned the helicopter back and shot up the van too. Two school children were inside the  van. They were badly wounded.  Altogether maybe 12 civilians were killed. This is a wrenching video, the more so because the American crew were recorded adding comments like “nice” to their carnage.

Because Pvt. Manning turned the video over to WikiLeaks, he was court martialed and will now spend most of his life in prison.

The video Collateral Damage is also on WikiLeaks here 

BRASS AND IRON is set in 1898 Chicago, with the birth of unions and the story runs with labor protests,  work mutinies against exploiters , and it features a red hot, class-conflict romance. Available hereor click on the image.

Story: A sweeping romance set against the labor riots of Chicago in the 1890s. The young Wyand returns from war to Chicago. He is broken with war nightmares. 1898 finds big cities in America the same: the ultra-rich live next to the desperate poor, extravagance flaunted in the face of the overcrowded hungry. Wyand finds no work except in one of the hellish southside factories. The poor neighborhoods are awash in brutal labor riots. Wyand stumbles into a labor mutiny where he saves the life of a beautiful worker, Kate, about to be killed by hired goons. She promptly rejects him as an educated boy, not her working class. He is smitten by her spirit and her beauty, and he pursues. She extracts a price for her affections: Wyand has to help her organize another mutiny against the stranglehold of their exploiters. She leads him into the labor turmoil across gang-infested streets. Strikes were illegal and brutally crushed, and twice their organizing is broken, and suffering and hunger fill the streets. But Wyand is hypnotized by Kate’s spirit. Jailed for striking, he returns to the cause and wins the respect of the workers. Seizing the moment after a bloody street battle, he picks up as a street orator and once again rallies the crowd of desperate and broken. Kate is finally impressed. Together the two work tirelessly to get a foothold in the struggle for justice. They plan a third big uprising against deadly obstacles. They once again confront the widespread fear, the factory owners, the law.

When will voters get popular representation?

Despite Obama’s declarations he want to repair the gap, things are not getting better in US, they’re getting worse. The rich get richer and the poor are fighting for breath.

Is anyone interested in reducing social inequality with its proven toxic effects (see post below)? Is anyone interested in closing the gap?

Not the top 1%. 

Marketwatch quotes under-oath statements from bank employees who said they had to to lie to customers so the bank could foreclose on their properties.

Marketwatch’s  Al Lewis: …”The accusations are so outrageous, it’s best to read them in the former employee’s own words — which they have submitted under penalty of perjury.”  Here.

Quotes from Bank of America employees:

• “Although I was called a “Home Retention Specialist,” my job was to collect as much money as possible from homeowners,” said Recorda Simon, who worked at Bank of America’s call center in Fort Worth, Texas, from August 2010 to January 2011.

• “We were told to lie to customers and claim that Bank of America had not received documents it had requested, and that it had not received trial payments” when in fact it had, said Simone Gordon, who worked at Bank of America from July 2007 to February 2012. “A collector who placed 10 or more accounts into foreclosure in a given month received a $500 bonus. Bank of America also gave employees gift cards to retail stores as rewards for placing accounts into foreclosure.”

• “I saw records regarding hundreds of homeowners that Bank of America treated dishonestly,” said Erika Brown, who worked at Bank of America from June 2009 through June 2010. “The homeowners were eligible for loan modifications under HAMP, sent back all the required documents, and made all their required payments. Bank of America nevertheless damaged their credit ratings by reporting them delinquent, tacked on additional charges to their loans, increased the amounts it considered as being owed and often referred these homeowners to foreclosure.”

• “I told my supervisors these practices were ridiculous and immoral,” said William E. Wilson Jr., a team manager for Bank of America from June 2010 through August 2012, in Charlotte, N.C. “We were instructed to delay and then push homeowners to accept an internal refinance so that Bank of America would profit. Once an applicant was finally rejected after a long delay, the bank would offer them an in-house alternative. Bank of America would charge a higher interest rate, ranging up to 5%, as compared to 2% if the loan had been modified under HAMP.”

• “The numbers Bank of America were reporting to the government and to the public were simply not true,” said Steven Cupples, an underwriter who worked at Bank of America until 2012. “Employees who challenged … the ethics of Bank of America’s practice for any reason were fired.”

• “Bank of America was trying to prevent as many homeowners as possible from obtaining permanent HAMP loan modifications, while leading the public and the government to believe that it was making efforts to comply with HAMP,” said Theresa Terralonge, who worked for Bank of America from June 2009 to June 2010.

As well as TSA getting data from Facebook, Google and other sources, here and here

White House says it’s OK, here.