Parallel to unfairness of open primaries

I have long thought it was unfair for the general public to select a political party's candidates, people who have never given time nor a dime to that party.  Neither Sanders nor Trump are party members, but they both presumed a right to run in party primaries.

Arthur C. Brooks gave a great parallel in his conversation with Gail Collins.  See http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/opinion/the-democrats-nailed-it-does-it-matter.html.

"It amazes me how we have come to see democracy in all matters, public and private, as our natural right. Can you imagine if The New York Times had a policy of letting the readers unilaterally decide who writes for the Op-Ed page? It would make the paper into an ideological fever swamp."

Shouting is not free speech

It seems more and more demonstrators for whatever cause claim they are exercising their free speech rights.  Are they exercising free speech or freedom to disrupt?

Is it “free speech” to shout down a speaker?  By doing so, isn’t a shouter impinging on the speakers right of free speech?  Is it free speech to demonstrate outside a building in such large numbers that others can’t exercise their freedom to come and go as they please.

Some supporters of Bernie Sanders threaten to disrupt the Democratic National Convention.  As far as I know, Sanders has not yet disavowed these supporters.

Similarly, Trump supporters have disrupted other meetings.  Or anti-Trump supporters have tried to disrupt his meetings.

Consider that vocal opposition can arouse to unknown actions those you oppose.

Here is a better protest.  Silence.  Get a seat or a place to stand at a meeting of a politician you disagree with.  Then do nothing.  Don’t applaud.  Don’t boo.  Don’t cheer.  However, do stand for the singing of the Star-Spangled Banner or the Pledge of Allegiance.  You don’t want to be called unpatriotic.  You don’t have to sing or recite.  Lots of supporters do likewise.

You may be alone, but you are not yourself supporting or disrupting the speaker.  If you can get a couple dozen friends to join you, you have multiplied the silence.  If your action catches on, it could happen that a politician encounters a very quiet audience.  Nothing can be more disconcerting to a politician than silence.

See also "Free opinion vs. free speech",
http://magree.blogspot.com/2016/04/free-opinion-vs-free-speech.html

Quote of the Day: On Violence

"...but violence only strengthens your enemies and weakens your cause."

- Charles M, Blow, "Violence Is Never the Answer", NYT 2016-05-26, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/opinion/violence-is-never-the-answer.html.

Bernie Sanders, second choice after none of the above

I really am not happy with our choice of Presidential candidates this year, but from all that I can read Bernie Sanders is far above being more interested in the people than the special interests.  It really is time we bring government back to "We the People" rather than "We the Corporations" or "We the special interests".

If you are for Bernie Sanders, before sure to vote even if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee.  If you stay away because your first choice didn't get the nomination, consider that if you stay away that is one more vote for the party of the plutocrats.

That said, here is one of Bernie Sanders latest pronouncements about bringing government back to "We the People".

In the United States today, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, 47 million Americans are living in poverty.

Almost 22 percent of American children are poor and we have the highest child poverty rate of almost any major country on earth.

Let’s be clear. Living in poverty doesn’t just mean you don’t have enough money to buy a big screen TV, a fancy laptop, or the latest iPhone. It goes much deeper than that.

Living in poverty means you are less likely to have a good grocery store in your community selling healthy food. Far too often it means you don’t know where your next meal is going to come from. Living in poverty means you are less likely to have access to a doctor, dentist or mental health care provider. It means you have less access to public transportation, which makes it harder to find a job. It means you are less likely to have access to child care.

In the United States of America, poverty is often a death sentence.

Yesterday, I spoke about poverty in McDowell County, West Virginia — one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest states in America. In 2014, over 35 percent of the residents in McDowell lived in poverty, including nearly half of the children. The roads are crumbling and only 6 percent of adults have a college education. Less than two-thirds have graduated high school. It has the lowest life expectancy for men in the entire nation. I hope you’ll watch part of my speech on poverty and share it with friends and family on social media.

\Bernie Sanders Speaks on Poverty in McDowell County, WV [See Video]
https://go.berniesanders.com/page/share/poverty-is-a-death-sentence


Poverty is an issue we must address. In 2011, the American Journal of Public Health found that 130,000 people died in just one year alone as a result of poverty.

This is not an issue we can just sweep under the rug and hope it will go away. Because it won’t.

And when I talk about it being too late for establishment politics and economics, this is what I mean. When I talk about thinking big and outside the box, about rejecting incremental change, I am talking about the millions of Americans who live in poverty who have been tossed out, left behind, and abandoned by the rich and powerful. We need to create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.

Here’s what we need to do:

Rebuild our country’s crumbling infrastructure. A $1 trillion investment in our infrastructure will create at least 13 million jobs all over America - jobs that cannot be outsourced.

We must rewrite our disastrous trade policies that enable corporate America to shut down plans in places like West Virginia and move them to Mexico, China, and other low-wage countries.

We can create 1 million jobs for disadvantaged youths through legislation I introduced with Rep. John Conyers of Michigan.

We need to increase the wages of at least 53 million American workers by raising the minimum wage from a starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour.

At a time when women workers earn 79 cents for every dollar a man earns, we need to sign the Paycheck Fairness Act into law. Equal pay for equal work.

We need to make health care a right for every man, woman, and child through a Medicare for All single-payer system.

We need to treat drug addiction like a mental health issue, not a criminal issue.

We need to ensure every worker in this country has at least 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, two weeks of paid vacation, and one week of paid sick days.

We need to impose a tax on Wall Street to make public colleges and universities tuition free while substantially reducing student debt.

At a time when half of older workers have no retirement savings, we’re not going to cut Social Security, we’re going to expand it so people can retire with dignity and respect.

No president can do all of these things alone. We need millions of Americans to begin to stand up and fight back and demand a government that represents all of us. That is the political revolution.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

Paid for by Bernie 2016
(not the billionaires)
PO Box 905 - Burlington VT 05402 United States - (855) 4-BERNIE

Stand against the powerful special interests who are systematically buying our Congress and have their sights set on the presidency.

Advice to Bernie Sanders

I sent $25 to the Bernie Sanders campaign a few weeks ago, and now I am bombarded with requests for money and volunteer calling.  I decided that the campaign could use my "advice" more.  So, I sent the following to info@BernieSanders.com in response to the message: "I will be with Bernie as long as he is willing to fight".  I wonder if any of it will percolate up to the great man.

Bernie has a whole arsenal to use: the actual contents of documents that the billionaires and their lackeys misrepresent.

Adam Smith only used "free market" once, and that was the wool merchants kept the price of wool down by legislative means.

Adam Smith said that "This order of men is not to be trusted..."  These were those who lived by profit.

Adam Smith's invisible hand really is a variation of the law of unintended consequences. He did not state that either man succeeded, only that the outcomes did not necessarily match their intentions.

The billionaires ignore much of the constitution.  What part of Congress having the power to "regulate commerce" among the states don't they understand?  Isn't sending pollution to another state commerce among the states?

What part of "no religious test" don't they understand?

In his "Farewell Address" George Washington warned about foreign entanglements and admonished his reader to pay their taxes.

If you can find an expert on the Federalist Papers, he or she can give you lots of ideas to counter the selfish who have no sense of community.

I can't find my reference, but a true free market is

Many buyers and sellers,
Both buyers and sellers are free to enter and leave the market,
Both buyers and sellers have all the information they need to make a decision,
There are no externalities.

Finally, avoid any questioning of the personal integrity.  Providing honest definitions of their pronouncements should do quite well for "hoisting them on their own petards."

For other ideas, see mdmagree.blogspot.com.

I didn’t mention that he should also remind the Republicans of the warning given by the last great Republican President: Dwight David Eisenhower; the military-industrial complex.  Now Ike’s party as been taken over by the military-industrial complex.

Iconoclastic ideas (or mysteries)

 “I would love to talk to people, and say ‘Why do you need so much money?’ And why do people say it’s so admirable? I think the world has gone quite mad.” - John Cleese as reported by Lee Schafer, Star Tribune, 2016-02-17.

I haven’t yet gone back to “Dark Money”, the book I mentioned last week, but I keep wondering why so many exorbitantly rich have so much money to slosh around that they spend exorbitant sums to ensure that they get even more.  When one has hundreds of billions of dollars, what’s a hundred billion or two less?

What is galling is that many claim they earned it, every penny.  But how many people worked for a pittance or even a decent salary to create and implement the ideas to earn this money?  Often several thousand people showed up every day to bring in that money while the billionaire was jetting here and there on vacation or attending a conference to rail against taxes and government, the same taxes and the same government that subsidizes many of their enterprises.  For example, I’ve seen estimates that every Walmart store costs government entities one million dollars a year.

Many who want strict adherence to the Constitution seem to forget "Regulate commerce among states" and "establish a post office”.

The Republicans and their giant-corp backers are doing their best to nullify the EPA rule about emissions.  Are these polluters keeping their emissions in the state where they are produced?  If any of these emissions go to another state, then the President is right to regulate this commerce in emissions.

The Republicans seem to be bending over backwards to dis-establish the Post Office.  The latest gimmick was to impose far greater requirements on pension funding than many corporations get by with.  The last I looked my Unisys pension was funded at 77 percent.  I exaggerate, but it seems like the Republicans want the Postal Service to be fully-funded on pensions for employees who have not even been hired yet.

I really don’t know what a “fair share” of taxes is, but it is a mystery how many people want perfect infra-structure, immediate arrest of all criminals, and bombing of countries far, far away but do not want to pay any taxes for any of these.  Is there a correlation between complaints about government and complaints about burdensome taxes?

A good case in point is the following headline: “Wisconsin crackdown on repeat drunken drivers will cost taxpayers”, Mark Sommerhauser, Wisconsin State Journal, published in the Duluth News Tribune, 2016-02-19.  Duh!?  What is the cost to taxpayers of the death and destruction caused by drunken drivers?  I submit that it is quite a bit higher than the cost of the crackdown.  In other words, spend what seems too much to prevent something that costs even more.  Even that crackdown on fourth offenders may be too soft. Sweden had or maybe still has tough drunk driving laws: first offense was two years in jail, even for members of Parliament.

Why does Clinton have to be president so we finally have a woman president?  Amy Klobuchar or Elizabeth Warren are much better choices, but neither seems to be interested.

Why do we have reach out across (fill-in the blank) lines?  Can’t we just be nice to everybody.  I hold doors for others, they hold doors for me.  Rodney King said, “Can’t we all just get along.”

We do have to reform or at least neutralize people who judge people by factors which have nothing to do with a given situation.

Right now many established and respected media are giving misleading information.  Clinton “won” in Nevada and Trump “won” in South Carolina.  I posted a comment on a New York Times article; the article made no reference to the actual delegates gained. Sorry, I didn’t note the article.  Interestingly, my comment was not posted for all to see.  At least, as I write this hours later, I have not been emailed that my comment was posted.

Well, Trump did win in South Carolina because the South Carolina Republican primary is winner take-all.  He “won” with less than a third of the vote.  However, in Nevada, Clinton received 22 delegates and Sanders received 16 delegates.  Oops, another source gives 19-15, and yet another shows a spread of about 600 votes.  Sorry, I’m visiting so many sites to get to the truth that I have forgotten where I found which figures.  Clinton does have an advantage because of super-delegates, elected and party officials who are automatically delegates to the convention.  The super-delegates are overwhelmingly pro-Clinton.

One of these sources was “How many delegates do Trump, Clinton need to win? What's the delegate count for each candidate?” by Jonathan D. Salant at http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/02/how_many_delegates_do_hillary_clinton_and_donald_t.html.

Let's skip caucuses and primaries and even do away with political parties.  Even though the writers of the Constitution warned about factions, they soon split into them.  The most famous being the long feud between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

Let’s start at the local level.  Let each registered voter send in a nomination for each position by email or mail.  Rank the nominations by number of votes; those who are in the top half of the list go on to the next ballot.  Repeat as necessary until one is chosen. Named candidates can drop out at any time.

Some may say that this is too expensive and subject to fraud.  Isn’t the low turnout expensive to our society?  Supposedly we already have too much fraud if you believe those who demand onerous restrictions on voting.

The only vote that doesn’t count is the vote not cast.

Also in the Reader Weekly of Duluth on 2015-02-25 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2016/02/25/6797_iconoclastic_ideas_or_mysteries.