May 5, 2020

May 4, 2020

America’s Ruling Class, by Angelo Codevilla

Filed under: Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 10:51 pm

Feature

America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

The only serious opposition to this arrogant Ruling Party is coming not from feckless Republicans but from what might be called the Country Party — and its vision is revolutionary. Our special Summer Issue cover story.

By Angelo M. Codevilla – From the July 2010 – August 2010 issue

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several “stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

The Political Divide

Important as they are, our political divisions are the iceberg’s tip. When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences “undecided,” “none of the above,” or “tea party,” these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as

Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders,

Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate — most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class’s prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans — a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents — lack a vehicle in electoral politics.

Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority’s demand for representation will be filled. Whereas in 1968 Governor George Wallace’s taunt “there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference” between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with only 13.5 percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a serious contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39 percent of Americans vs. 31 percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Clinton) simply by speaking ill of the ruling class. Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans’ conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.

While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust, the American people’s realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes. But only the realization was new. The ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008. Machiavelli compares serious political diseases to the Aetolian fevers — easy to treat early on while they are difficult to discern, but virtually untreatable by the time they become obvious.

Far from speculating how the political confrontation might develop between America’s regime class — relatively few people supported by no more than one-third of Americans — and a country class comprising two-thirds of the country, our task here is to understand the divisions that underlie that confrontation’s unpredictable future. More on politics below.

The Ruling Class

Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?

The most widespread answers — by such as the Times‘s Thomas Friedman and David Brooks — are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg’s notion that America is now ruled by a “newocracy”: a “new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization — including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy.” In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.

Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities’ priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston’s Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate — just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists. Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative “nonprofit” and “philanthropic” sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter’s grievances.

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity — being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs. Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment’s parts.

If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can “write” your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was “inadvertent,” and you can count on the Law School’s dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that “closes” the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about “global warming” to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.

Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill, France’s ruling class are bright people — certifiably. Not ours. But didn’t ours go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn’t most of them get good grades? Yes. But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d’Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France’s ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America’s “top schools” is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that “the best” colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.

The Faith

Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that “we” are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Founding generation’s paradigm that “all men are created equal”?

The notion of human equality was always a hard sell, because experience teaches us that we are so unequal in so many ways, and because making one’s self superior is so tempting that Lincoln called it “the old serpent, you work I’ll eat.” But human equality made sense to our Founding generation because they believed that all men are made in the image and likeness of God, because they were yearning for equal treatment under British law, or because they had read John Locke.

It did not take long for their paradigm to be challenged by interest and by “science.” By the 1820s, as J. C. Calhoun was reading in the best London journals that different breeds of animals and plants produce inferior or superior results, slave owners were citing the Negroes’ deficiencies to argue that they should remain slaves indefinitely. Lots of others were reading Ludwig Feuerbach’s rendition of Hegelian philosophy, according to which biblical injunctions reflect the fantasies of alienated human beings or, in the young Karl Marx’s formulation, that ethical thought is “superstructural” to material reality. By 1853, when Sen. John Pettit of Ohio called “all men are created equal” “a self-evident lie,” much of America’s educated class had already absorbed the “scientific” notion (which Darwin only popularized) that man is the product of chance mutation and natural selection of the fittest. Accordingly, by nature, superior men subdue inferior ones as they subdue lower beings or try to improve them as they please. Hence while it pleased the abolitionists to believe in freeing Negroes and improving them, it also pleased them to believe that Southerners had to be punished and reconstructed by force. As the 19th century ended, the educated class’s religious fervor turned to social reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolved of all, were the improvers.

Thus began the Progressive Era. When Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked “can’t you let anything alone?” he answered with, “I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going down-hill.” Wilson spoke for the thousands of well-off Americans who patronized the spas at places like Chautauqua and Lake Mohonk. By such upper-middle-class waters, progressives who imagined themselves the world’s examples and the world’s reformers dreamt big dreams of establishing order, justice, and peace at home and abroad. Neither were they shy about their desire for power. Wilson was the first American statesman to argue that the Founders had done badly by depriving the U.S. government of the power to reshape American society. Nor was Wilson the last to invade a foreign country (Mexico) to “teach [them] to elect good men.”

World War I and the chaos at home and abroad that followed it discredited the Progressives in the American people’s eyes. Their international schemes had brought blood and promised more. Their domestic management had not improved Americans’ lives, but given them a taste of arbitrary government, including Prohibition. The Progressives, for their part, found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people’s backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America. The American people had failed them because democracy in its American form perpetuated the worst in humanity. Thus Progressives began to look down on the masses, to look on themselves as the vanguard, and to look abroad for examples to emulate.

The cultural divide between the “educated class” and the rest of the country opened in the interwar years. Some Progressives joined the “vanguard of the proletariat,” the Communist Party. Many more were deeply sympathetic to Soviet Russia, as they were to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Not just the Nation, but also the New York Times and National Geographic found much to be imitated in these regimes because they promised energetically to transcend their peoples’ ways and to build “the new man.” Above all, our educated class was bitter about America. In 1925 the American Civil Liberties Union sponsored a legal challenge to a Tennessee law that required teaching the biblical account of creation. The ensuing trial, radio broadcast nationally, as well as the subsequent hit movie Inherit the Wind, were the occasion for what one might have called the Chautauqua class to drive home the point that Americans who believed in the Bible were willful ignoramuses. As World War II approached, some

American Progressives supported the Soviet Union (and its ally, Nazi Germany) and others Great Britain and France. But Progressives agreed on one thing: the approaching war should be blamed on the majority of Americans, because they had refused to lead the League of Nations. Darryl Zanuck produced the critically acclaimed movie [Woodrow] Wilson featuring Cedric Hardwicke as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who allegedly brought on the war by appealing to American narrow-mindedness against Wilson’s benevolent genius.

Franklin Roosevelt brought the Chautauqua class into his administration and began the process that turned them into rulers. FDR described America’s problems in technocratic terms. America’s problems would be fixed by a “brain trust” (picked by him). His New Deal’s solutions — the alphabet-soup “independent” agencies that have run America ever since — turned many Progressives into powerful bureaucrats and then into lobbyists. As the saying goes, they came to Washington to do good, and stayed to do well.

As their number and sense of importance grew, so did their distaste for common Americans. Believing itself “scientific,” this Progressive class sought to explain its differences from its neighbors in “scientific” terms. The most elaborate of these attempts was Theodor Adorno’s widely acclaimed The Authoritarian Personality (1948). It invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the “F scale” (F for fascist), interviewed hundreds of Americans, and concluded that most who were not liberal Democrats were latent fascists. This way of thinking about non-Progressives filtered down to college curricula. In 196364 for example, I was assigned Herbert McCloskey’s Conservatism and Personality (1958) at Rutgers’s Eagleton Institute of Politics as a paradigm of methodological correctness. The author had defined conservatism in terms of answers to certain questions, had defined a number of personality disorders in terms of other questions, and run a survey that proved “scientifically” that conservatives were maladjusted ne’er-do-well ignoramuses. (My class project, titled “Liberalism and Personality,” following the same methodology, proved just as scientifically that liberals suffered from the very same social diseases, and even more amusing ones.)

The point is this: though not one in a thousand of today’s bipartisan ruling class ever heard of Adorno or McCloskey, much less can explain the Feuerbachian-Marxist notion that human judgments are “epiphenomenal” products of spiritual or material alienation, the notion that the common people’s words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our ruling class. They absorbed it osmotically, second — or thirdhand, from their education and from companions. Truly, after Barack Obama described his opponents’ clinging to “God and guns” as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointing out he had said “what everybody knows is true.” Confident “knowledge” that “some of us, the ones who matter,” have grasped truths that the common herd cannot, truths that direct us, truths the grasping of which entitles us to discount what the ruled say and to presume what they mean, made our Progressives into a class long before they took power.

The Agenda: Power

Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a “machine,” that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels’ wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges — civic as well as economic — to the party’s clients, directly or indirectly. This, incidentally, is close to Aristotle’s view of democracy. Hence our ruling class’s standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government — meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class’s solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming. A priori, one might wonder whether enriching and empowering individuals of a certain kind can make Americans kinder and gentler, much less control the weather. But there can be no doubt that such power and money makes Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it. Let us now look at what this means in our time.

Dependence Economics

By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices — even to buy in the first place — modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency’s value for all.

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting univocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others. Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don’t have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.

By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support. Thus in the 1990s and 2000s, as Democrats and Republicans forced banks to make loans for houses to people and at rates they would not otherwise have considered, builders and investors had every reason to make as much money as they could from the ensuing inflation of housing prices. When the bubble burst, only those connected with the ruling class at the bottom and at the top were bailed out. Similarly, by taxing the use of carbon fuels and subsidizing “alternative energy,” our ruling class created arguably the world’s biggest opportunity for making money out of things that few if any would buy absent its intervention. The ethanol industry and its ensuing diversions of wealth exist exclusively because of subsidies. The prospect of legislation that would put a price on carbon emissions and allot certain amounts to certain companies set off a feeding frenzy among large companies to show support for a “green agenda,” because such allotments would be worth tens of billions of dollars. That is why companies hired some 2,500 lobbyists in 2009 to deepen their involvement in “climate change.” At the very least, such involvement profits them by making them into privileged collectors of carbon taxes. Any “green jobs” thus created are by definition creatures of subsidies — that is, of privilege. What effect creating such privileges may have on “global warming” is debatable. But it surely increases the number of people dependent on the ruling class, and teaches Americans that satisfying that class is a surer way of making a living than producing goods and services that people want to buy.

Beyond patronage, picking economic winners and losers redirects the American people’s energies to tasks that the political class deems more worthy than what Americans choose for themselves. John Kenneth Galbraith’s characterization of America as “private wealth amidst public squalor” (The

Affluent Society, 1958) has ever encapsulated our best and brightest’s complaint: left to themselves, Americans use land inefficiently in suburbs and exurbs, making it necessary to use energy to transport them to jobs and shopping. Americans drive big cars, eat lots of meat as well as other unhealthy things, and go to the doctor whenever they feel like it. Americans think it justice to spend the money they earn to satisfy their private desires even though the ruling class knows that justice lies in improving the community and the planet. The ruling class knows that Americans must learn to live more densely and close to work, that they must drive smaller cars and change their lives to use less energy, that their dietary habits must improve, that they must accept limits in how much medical care they get, that they must divert more of their money to support people, cultural enterprises, and plans for the planet that the ruling class deems worthier. So, ever-greater taxes and intrusive regulations are the main wrenches by which the American people can be improved (and, yes, by which the ruling class feeds and grows).

The 2010 medical law is a template for the ruling class’s economic modus operandi: the government taxes citizens to pay for medical care and requires citizens to purchase health insurance. The money thus taken and directed is money that the citizens themselves might have used to pay for medical care. In exchange for the money, the government promises to provide care through its “system.” But then all the boards, commissions, guidelines, procedures, and “best practices” that constitute “the system” become the arbiters of what any citizen ends up getting. The citizen might end up dissatisfied with what “the system” offers. But when he gave up his money, he gave up the power to choose, and became dependent on all the boards and commissions that his money also pays for and that raise the cost of care. Similarly, in 2008 the House Ways and Means Committee began considering a plan to force citizens who own Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to transfer those funds into government-run “guaranteed retirement accounts.” If the government may force citizens to buy health insurance, by what logic can it not force them to trade private ownership and control of retirement money for a guarantee as sound as the government itself? Is it not clear that the government knows more about managing retirement income than individuals?

Who Depends on Whom?

In Congressional Government (1885) Woodrow Wilson left no doubt: the U.S. Constitution prevents the government from meeting the country’s needs by enumerating rights that the government may not infringe. (“Congress shall make no law…” says the First Amendment, typically.) Our electoral system, based on single member districts, empowers individual voters at the expense of “responsible parties.” Hence the ruling class’s perpetual agenda has been to diminish the role of the citizenry’s elected representatives, enhancing that of party leaders as well as of groups willing to partner in the government’s plans, and to craft a “living” Constitution in which restrictions on government give way to “positive rights” — meaning charters of government power.

Consider representation. Following Wilson, American Progressives have always wanted to turn the U.S. Congress from the role defined by James Madison’s Federalist #10, “refine and enlarge the public’s view,” to something like the British Parliament, which ratifies government actions. Although Britain’s electoral system — like ours, single members elected in historic districts by plurality vote — had made members of Parliament responsive to their constituents in ancient times, by Wilson’s time the growing importance of parties made MPs beholden to party leaders. Hence whoever controls the majority party controls both Parliament and the government.

In America, the process by which party has become (almost) as important began with the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr which, by setting the single standard “one man, one vote” for congressional districts, ended up legalizing the practice of “gerrymandering,” concentrating the opposition party’s voters into as few districts as possible while placing one’s own voters into as many as possible likely to yield victories. Republican and Democratic state legislatures have gerrymandered for a half century. That is why today’s Congress consists more and more of persons who represent their respective party establishments — not nearly as much as in Britain, but heading in that direction. Once districts are gerrymandered “safe” for one party or another, the voters therein count less because party leaders can count more on elected legislators to toe the party line.

To the extent party leaders do not have to worry about voters, they can choose privileged interlocutors, representing those in society whom they find most amenable. In America ever more since the 1930s — elsewhere in the world this practice is ubiquitous and long-standing — government has designated certain individuals, companies, and organizations within each of society’s sectors as (junior) partners in elaborating laws and administrative rules for those sectors. The government empowers the persons it has chosen over those not chosen, deems them the sector’s true representatives, and rewards them. They become part of the ruling class.

Thus in 2009-10 the American Medical Association (AMA) strongly supported the new medical care law, which the administration touted as having the support of “the doctors” even though the vast majority of America’s 975,000 physicians opposed it. Those who run the AMA, however, have a government contract as exclusive providers of the codes by which physicians and hospitals bill the government for their services. The millions of dollars that flow thereby to the AMA’s officers keep them in line, while the impracticality of doing without the billing codes tamps down rebellion in the doctor ranks. When the administration wanted to bolster its case that the state of Arizona’s enforcement of federal immigration laws was offensive to Hispanics, the National Association of Chiefs of Police — whose officials depend on the administration for their salaries — issued a statement that the laws would endanger all Americans by raising Hispanics’ animosity. This reflected conversations with the administration rather than a vote of the nation’s police chiefs.

Similarly, modern labor unions are ever less bunches of workers banding together and ever more bundled under the aegis of an organization chosen jointly by employers and government. Prototypical is the Service Employees International Union, which grew spectacularly by persuading managers of government agencies as well as of publicly funded private entities that placing their employees in the SEIU would relieve them of responsibility. Not by being elected by workers’ secret ballots did the SEIU conquer workplace after workplace, but rather by such deals, or by the union presenting what it claims are cards from workers approving of representation. The union gets 2 percent of the workers’ pay, which it recycles as contributions to the Democratic Party, which it recycles in greater power over public employees. The union’s leadership is part of the ruling class’s beating heart.

The point is that a doctor, a building contractor, a janitor, or a schoolteacher counts in today’s America insofar as he is part of the hierarchy of a sector organization affiliated with the ruling class. Less and less do such persons count as voters.

Ordinary people have also gone a long way toward losing equal treatment under law. The America described in civics books, in which no one could be convicted or fined except by a jury of his peers for having violated laws passed by elected representatives, started disappearing when the New Deal inaugurated today’s administrative state — in which bureaucrats make, enforce, and adjudicate nearly all the rules. Today’s legal-administrative texts are incomprehensibly detailed and freighted with provisions crafted exquisitely to affect equal individuals unequally. The bureaucrats do not enforce the rules themselves so much as whatever “agency policy” they choose to draw from them in any given case. If you protest any “agency policy” you will be informed that it was formulated with input from “the public.” But not from the likes of you.

Disregard for the text of laws — for the dictionary meaning of words and the intentions of those who wrote them — in favor of the decider’s discretion has permeated our ruling class from the Supreme Court to the lowest local agency. Ever since Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in 1920 (Missouri v. Holland) that presidents, Congresses, and judges could not be bound by the U.S. Constitution regarding matters that the people who wrote and ratified it could not have foreseen, it has become conventional wisdom among our ruling class that they may transcend the Constitution while pretending allegiance to it. They began by stretching such constitutional terms as “interstate commerce” and “due process,” then transmuting others, e.g., “search and seizure,” into “privacy.” Thus in 1973 the Supreme Court endowed its invention of “privacy” with a “penumbra” that it deemed “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” The court gave no other constitutional reasoning, period. Perfunctory to the point of mockery, this constitutional talk was to reassure the American people that the ruling class was acting within the Constitution’s limitations. By the 1990s federal courts were invalidating amendments to state constitutions passed by referenda to secure the “positive rights” they invent, because these expressions of popular will were inconsistent with the constitution they themselves were construing.

By 2010 some in the ruling class felt confident enough to dispense with the charade. Asked what in the

Constitution allows Congress and the president to force every American to purchase health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied: “Are you serious? Are you serious?” No surprise then that lower court judges and bureaucrats take liberties with laws, regulations, and contracts. That is why legal words that say you are in the right avail you less in today’s America than being on the right side of the persons who decide what they want those words to mean.

As the discretionary powers of officeholders and of their informal entourages have grown, the importance of policy and of law itself is declining, citizenship is becoming vestigial, and the American people become ever more dependent.

Disaggregating and Dispiriting

The ruling class is keener to reform the American people’s family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class’s self-definition so definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so open. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its very particular interest — often defined as mere coherence against outsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its members from playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all, it reproduces itself.

Since marriage is the family’s fertile seed, government at all levels, along with “mainstream” academics and media, have waged war on it. They legislate, regulate, and exhort in support not of “the family” — meaning married parents raising children — but rather of “families,” meaning mostly households based on something other than marriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the distinction between cohabitation and marriage — except that husbands are held financially responsible for the children they father, while out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizes marriage and forces those married couples who raise their own children to subsidize “child care” for those who do not. Top Republicans and Democrats have also led society away from the very notion of marital fidelity by precept as well as by parading their affairs. For example, in 1997 the Democratic administration’s secretary of defense and the Republican Senate’s majority leader (joined by the New York Times et al.) condemned the military’s practice of punishing officers who had extramarital affairs. While the military had assumed that honoring marital vows is as fundamental to the integrity of its units as it is to that of society, consensus at the top declared that insistence on fidelity is “contrary to societal norms.” Not surprisingly, rates of marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have increased. The biggest demographic consequence has been that about one in five of all households are women alone or with children, in which case they have about a four in 10 chance of living in poverty. Since unmarried mothers often are or expect to be clients of government services, it is not surprising that they are among the Democratic Party’s most faithful voters.

While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental. That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents’ consent, the people who run America’s schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents’ knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class’s assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence. Only sheer political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents’ right to homeschool their children against the ruling class’s desire to accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: “to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.”

At stake are the most important questions: What is the right way for human beings to live? By what standard is anything true or good? Who gets to decide what? Implicit in Wilson’s words and explicit in our ruling class’s actions is the dismissal, as the ways of outdated “fathers,” of the answers that most Americans would give to these questions. This dismissal of the American people’s intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others’ comprehension.

While the unenlightened ones believe that man is created in the image and likeness of God and that we are subject to His and to His nature’s laws, the enlightened ones know that we are products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and the will to primacy. While the un-enlightened are stuck with the antiquated notion that ordinary human minds can reach objective judgments about good and evil, better and worse through reason, the enlightened ones know that all such judgments are subjective and that ordinary people can no more be trusted with reason than they can with guns. Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is “science” only in the “right” hands. Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them.

That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, “scientific” judgment on whatever it chooses. When the government declares, and its

associated press echoes that “scientists say” this or that, ordinary people — or for that matter scientists who “don’t say,” or are not part of the ruling class — lose any right to see the information that went into what “scientists say.” Thus when Virginia’s attorney general subpoenaed the data by which Professor Michael Mann had concluded, while paid by the state of Virginia, that the earth’s temperatures are rising “like a hockey stick” from millennial stability — a conclusion on which billions of dollars’ worth of decisions were made — to investigate the possibility of fraud, the University of Virginia’s faculty senate condemned any inquiry into “scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards” claiming that demands for data “send a chilling message to scientists…and indeed scholars in any discipline.” The Washington Post editorialized that the attorney general’s demands for data amounted to “an assault on reason.” The fact that the “hockey stick” conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinction between itself and those they rule.

By identifying science and reason with themselves, our rulers delegitimize opposition. Though they cannot prevent Americans from worshiping God, they can make it as socially disabling as smoking — to be done furtively and with a bad social conscience. Though they cannot make Americans wish they were Europeans, they continue to press upon this nation of refugees from the rest of the world the notion that Americans ought to live by “world standards.” Each day, the ruling class produces new “studies” that show that one or another of Americans’ habits is in need of reform, and that those Americans most resistant to reform are pitiably, perhaps criminally, wrong. Thus does it go about disaggregating and dispiriting the ruled.

Meddling and Apologies

America’s best and brightest believe themselves qualified and duty bound to direct the lives not only of Americans but of foreigners as well. George W. Bush’s 2005 inaugural statement that America cannot be free until the whole world is free and hence that America must push and prod mankind to freedom was but an extrapolation of the sentiments of America’s Progressive class, first articulated by such as Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson and Columbia’s Nicholas Murray Butler. But while the early Progressives expected the rest of the world to follow peacefully, today’s ruling class makes decisions about war and peace at least as much forcibly to tinker with the innards of foreign bodies politic as to protect America. Indeed, they conflate the two purposes in the face of the American people’s insistence to draw a bright line between war against our enemies and peace with non-enemies in whose affairs we do not interfere. That is why, from Wilson to Kissinger, the ruling class has complained that the American people oscillate between bellicosity and “isolationism.”

Because our ruling class deems unsophisticated the American people’s perennial preference for decisive military action or none, its default solution to international threats has been to commit blood and treasure to long-term, twilight efforts to reform the world’s Vietnams, Somalias, Iraqs, and

Afghanistans, believing that changing hearts and minds is the prerequisite of peace and that it knows how to change them. The apparently endless series of wars in which our ruling class has embroiled America, wars that have achieved nothing worthwhile at great cost in lives and treasure, has contributed to defining it, and to discrediting it — but not in its own eyes.

Rather, even as our ruling class has lectured, cajoled, and sometimes intruded violently to reform foreign countries in its own image, it has apologized to them for America not having matched that image — their private image. Woodrow Wilson began this double game in 1919, when he assured Europe’s peoples that America had mandated him to demand their agreement to Article X of the peace

treaty (the League of Nations) and then swore to the American people that Article X was the Europeans’ non-negotiable demand. The fact that the U.S. government had seized control of transatlantic cable communications helped hide (for a while) that the League scheme was merely the American Progressives’ private dream. In our time, this double game is quotidian on the evening news. Notably, President Obama apologized to Europe because “the United States has fallen short of meeting its responsibilities” to reduce carbon emissions by taxation. But the American people never assumed such responsibility, and oppose doing so. Hence President Obama was not apologizing for anything that he or anyone he respected had done, but rather blaming his fellow Americans for not doing what he thinks they should do while glossing over the fact that the Europeans had done the taxing but not the reducing. Wilson redux.

Similarly, Obama “apologized” to Europeans because some Americans — not him and his friends — had shown “arrogance and been dismissive” toward them, and to the world because President Truman had used the atom bomb to end World War II. So President Clinton apologized to Africans because some Americans held African slaves until 1865 and others were mean to Negroes thereafter — not himself and his friends, of course. So assistant secretary of state Michael Posner apologized to Chinese diplomats for Arizona’s law that directs police to check immigration status. Republicans engage in that sort of thing as well: former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev tells us that in 1987 then vice president George H. W. Bush distanced himself from his own administration by telling him, “Reagan is a conservative, an extreme conservative. All the dummies and blockheads are with him…” This is all about a class of Americans distinguishing itself from its inferiors. It recalls the Pharisee in the Temple: “Lord, I thank thee that I am not like other men…”

In sum, our ruling class does not like the rest of America. Most of all does it dislike that so many Americans think America is substantially different from the rest of the world and like it that way. For our ruling class, however, America is a work in progress, just like the rest the world, and they are the engineers.

The Country Class

Describing America’s country class is problematic because it is so heterogeneous. It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers’ defining ideas and proclivities — e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded. Demographically, the country class is the other side of the ruling class’s coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice. While the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to government and its members’ yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others.

Even when members of the country class happen to be government officials or officers of major corporations, their concerns are essentially private; in their view, government owes to its people equal treatment rather than action to correct what anyone perceives as imbalance or grievance. Hence they tend to oppose special treatment, whether for corporations or for social categories. Rather than gaming government regulations, they try to stay as far from them as possible. Thus the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo, which allows the private property of some to be taken by others with better connections to government, reminded the country class that government is not its friend.

Negative orientation to privilege distinguishes the corporate officer who tries to keep his company from joining the Business Council of large corporations who have close ties with government from the fellow in the next office. The first wants the company to grow by producing. The second wants it to grow by moving to the trough. It sets apart the schoolteacher who resents the union to which he is forced to belong for putting the union’s interests above those of parents who want to choose their children’s schools. In general, the country class includes all those in stations high and low who are aghast at how relatively little honest work yields, by comparison with what just a little connection with the right bureaucracy can get you. It includes those who take the side of outsiders against insiders, of small institutions against large ones, of local government against the state or federal. The country class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary people are more unequal than ever.

Members of the country class who want to rise in their profession through sheer competence try at once to avoid the ruling class’s rituals while guarding against infringing its prejudices. Averse to wheedling, they tend to think that exams should play a major role in getting or advancing in jobs, that records of performance — including academic ones — should be matters of public record, and that professional disputes should be settled by open argument. For such people, the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Ricci, upholding the right of firefighters to be promoted according to the results of a professional exam, revived the hope that competence may sometimes still trump political connections.

Nothing has set the country class apart, defined it, made it conscious of itself, given it whatever coherence it has, so much as the ruling class’s insistence that people other than themselves are intellectually and hence otherwise humanly inferior. Persons who were brought up to believe themselves as worthy as anyone, who manage their own lives to their own satisfaction, naturally resent politicians of both parties who say that the issues of modern life are too complex for any but themselves. Most are insulted by the ruling class’s dismissal of opposition as mere “anger and frustration” — an imputation of stupidity — while others just scoff at the claim that the ruling class’s bureaucratic language demonstrates superior intelligence. A few ask the fundamental question: Since when and by what right does intelligence trump human equality? Moreover, if the politicians are so smart, why have they made life worse?

The country class actually believes that America’s ways are superior to the rest of the world’s, and regards most of mankind as less free, less prosperous, and less virtuous. Thus while it delights in croissants and thinks Toyota’s factory methods are worth imitating, it dislikes the idea of adhering to “world standards.” This class also takes part in the U.S. armed forces body and soul: nearly all the enlisted, non-commissioned officers and officers under flag rank belong to this class in every measurable way. Few vote for the Democratic Party. You do not doubt that you are amidst the country class rather than with the ruling class when the American flag passes by or “God Bless America” is sung after seven innings of baseball, and most people show reverence. The same people wince at the National Football League’s plaintive renditions of the “Star Spangled Banner.”

Unlike the ruling class, the country class does not share a single intellectual orthodoxy, set of tastes, or ideal lifestyle. Its different sectors draw their notions of human equality from different sources: Christians and Jews believe it is God’s law. Libertarians assert it from Hobbesian and Darwinist bases. Many consider equality the foundation of Americanism. Others just hate snobs. Some parts of the country class now follow the stars and the music out of Nashville, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri — entertainment complexes larger than Hollywood’s — because since the 1970s most of Hollywood’s products have appealed more to the mores of the ruling class and its underclass clients than to those of large percentages of Americans. The same goes for “popular music” and television. For some in the country class Christian radio and TV are the lodestone of sociopolitical taste, while the very secular Fox News serves the same purpose for others. While symphonies and opera houses around the country, as well as the stations that broadcast them, are firmly in the ruling class’s hands, a considerable part of the country class appreciates these things for their own sake. By that very token, the country class’s characteristic cultural venture — the homeschool movement — stresses the classics across the board in science, literature, music, and history even as the ruling class abandons them.

Congruent Agendas?

Each of the country class’s diverse parts has its own agenda, which flows from the peculiar ways in which the ruling class impacts its concerns. Independent businesspeople are naturally more sensitive to the growth of privileged relations between government and their competitors. Persons who would like to lead their community rue the advantages that Democratic and Republican party establishments are accruing. Parents of young children and young women anxious about marriage worry that cultural directives from on high are dispelling their dreams. The faithful to God sense persecution. All resent higher taxes and loss of freedom. More and more realize that their own agenda’s advancement requires concerting resistance to the ruling class across the board.

Not being at the table when government makes the rules about how you must run your business, knowing that you will be required to pay more, work harder, and show deference for the privilege of making less money, is the independent businessman’s nightmare. But what to do about it? In our time the interpenetration of government and business — the network of subsidies, preferences, and regulations — is so thick and deep, the people “at the table” receive and recycle into politics so much money, that independent businesspeople cannot hope to undo any given regulation or grant of privilege. Just as no manufacturer can hope to reduce the subsidies that raise his fuel costs, no set of doctors can shield themselves from the increased costs and bureaucracy resulting from government mandates. Hence independent business’s agenda has been to resist the expansion of government in general, and of course to reduce taxes. Pursuit of this agenda with arguments about economic efficiency and job creation — and through support of the Republican Party — usually results in enough relief to discourage more vigorous remonstrance. Sometimes, however, the economic argument is framed in moral terms: “The sum of good government,” said Thomas Jefferson, is not taking “from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” For government to advantage some at others’ expense, said he, “is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association.” In our time, more and more independent businesspeople have come to think of their economic problems in moral terms. But few realize how revolutionary that is.

As bureaucrats and teachers’ unions disempowered neighborhood school boards, while the governments of towns, counties, and states were becoming conduits for federal mandates, as the ruling class reduced the number and importance of things that American communities could decide for themselves, America’s thirst for self-governance reawakened. The fact that public employees are almost always paid more and have more generous benefits than the private sector people whose taxes support them only sharpened the sense among many in the country class that they now work for public employees rather than the other way around. But how to reverse the roles? How can voters regain control of government? Restoring localities’ traditional powers over schools, including standards, curriculum, and prayer, would take repudiating two generations of Supreme Court rulings. So would the restoration of traditional “police” powers over behavior in public places. Bringing public employee unions to heel is only incidentally a matter of cutting pay and benefits. As self-governance is crimped primarily by the powers of government personified in its employees, restoring it involves primarily deciding that any number of functions now performed and the professional specialties who perform them, e.g., social workers, are superfluous or worse. Explaining to one’s self and neighbors why such functions and personnel do more harm than good, while the ruling class brings its powers to bear to discredit you, is a very revolutionary thing to do.

America’s pro-family movement is a reaction to the ruling class’s challenges: emptying marriage of legal sanction, promoting abortion, and progressively excluding parents from their children’s education. Americans reacted to these challenges primarily by sorting themselves out. Close friendships and above all marriages became rarer between persons who think well of divorce, abortion, and government authority over children and those who do not. The homeschool movement, for which the Internet became the great facilitator, involves not only each family educating its own children, but also extensive and growing social, intellectual, and spiritual contact among like-minded persons. In short, the part of the country class that is most concerned with family matters has taken on something of a biological identity. Few in this part of the country class have any illusion, however, that simply retreating into private associations will long save their families from societal influences made to order to discredit their ways. But stopping the ruling class’s intrusions would require discrediting its entire conception of man, of right and wrong, as well as of the role of courts in popular government. That revolutionary task would involve far more than legislation.

The ruling class’s manifold efforts to discredit and drive worship of God out of public life — not even the Soviet Union arrested students for wearing crosses or praying, or reading the Bible on school property, as some U.S. localities have done in response to Supreme Court rulings — convinced many among the vast majority of Americans who believe and pray that today’s regime is hostile to the most important things of all. Every December, they are reminded that the ruling class deems the very word “Christmas” to be offensive. Every time they try to manifest their religious identity in public affairs, they are deluged by accusations of being “American Taliban” trying to set up a “theocracy.” Let members of the country class object to anything the ruling class says or does, and likely as not their objection will be characterized as “religious,” that is to say irrational, that is to say not to be considered on a par with the “science” of which the ruling class is the sole legitimate interpreter. Because aggressive, intolerant secularism is the moral and intellectual basis of the ruling class’s claim to rule, resistance to that rule, whether to the immorality of economic subsidies and privileges, or to the violation of the principle of equal treatment under equal law, or to its seizure of children’s education, must deal with secularism’s intellectual and moral core. This lies beyond the boundaries of politics as the term is commonly understood.

The Classes Clash

The ruling class’s appetite for deference, power, and perks grows. The country class disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks. The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all stupid. The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept. The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side’s vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side — especially the ruling class — embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side’s view of itself. One side or the other will prevail. The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable.

In this clash, the ruling class holds most of the cards: because it has established itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference. Breaking them, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involve far more than electoral politics. Though the country class had long argued along with Edmund Burke against making revolutionary changes, it faces the uncomfortable question common to all who have had revolutionary changes imposed on them: are we now to accept what was done to us just because it was done? Sweeping away a half century’s accretions of bad habits — taking care to preserve the good among them — is hard enough.

Establishing, even reestablishing, a set of better institutions and habits is much harder, especially as the country class wholly lacks organization. By contrast, the ruling class holds strong defensive positions and is well represented by the Democratic Party. But a two to one numerical disadvantage augurs defeat, while victory would leave it in control of a people whose confidence it cannot regain.

Certainly the country class lacks its own political vehicle — and perhaps the coherence to establish one.

In the short term at least, the country class has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party, which is eager for its support. But the Republican Party does not live to represent the country class. For it to do so, it would have to become principles-based, as it has not been since the mid-1860s. The few who tried to make it so the party treated as rebels: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The party helped defeat Goldwater. When it failed to stop Reagan, it saddled his and subsequent Republican administrations with establishmentarians who, under the Bush family, repudiated Reagan’s principles as much as they could. Barack Obama exaggerated in charging that Republicans had driven the country “into the ditch” all alone. But they had a hand in it. Few

Republican voters, never mind the larger country class, have confidence that the party is on their side. Because, in the long run, the country class will not support a party as conflicted as today’s Republicans, those Republican politicians who really want to represent it will either reform the party in an unmistakable manner, or start a new one as Whigs like Abraham Lincoln started the Republican Party in the 1850s.

The name of the party that will represent America’s country class is far less important than what, precisely, it represents and how it goes about representing it because, for the foreseeable future, American politics will consist of confrontation between what we might call the Country Party and the ruling class. The Democratic Party having transformed itself into a unit with near-European discipline, challenging it would seem to require empowering a rival party at least as disciplined. What other antidote is there to government by one party but government by another party? Yet this logic, though all too familiar to most of the world, has always been foreign to America and naturally leads further in the direction toward which the ruling class has led. Any country party would have to be wise and skillful indeed not to become the Democrats’ mirror image.

Yet to defend the country class, to break down the ruling class’s presumptions, it has no choice but to imitate the Democrats, at least in some ways and for a while. Consider: The ruling class denies its opponents’ legitimacy. Seldom does a Democratic official or member of the ruling class speak on public affairs without reiterating the litany of his class’s claim to authority, contrasting it with opponents who are either uninformed, stupid, racist, shills for business, violent, fundamentalist, or all of the above. They do this in the hope that opponents, hearing no other characterizations of themselves and no authoritative voice discrediting the ruling class, will be dispirited. For the country class seriously to contend for self-governance, the political party that represents it will have to discredit not just such patent frauds as ethanol mandates, the pretense that taxes can control “climate change,” and the outrage of banning God from public life. More important, such a serious party would have to attack the ruling class’s fundamental claims to its superior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and hearten one’s own. The Democrats having set the rules of modern politics, opponents who want electoral success are obliged to follow them.

Suppose that the Country Party (whatever its name might be) were to capture Congress, the presidency, and most statehouses. What then would it do? Especially if its majority were slim, it would be tempted to follow the Democrats’ plan of 2009-2010, namely to write its wish list of reforms into law regardless of the Constitution and enact them by partisan majorities supported by interest groups that gain from them, while continuing to vilify the other side. Whatever effect this might have, it surely would not be to make America safe for self-governance because by carrying out its own “revolution from above” to reverse the ruling class’s previous “revolution from above,” it would have made that ruinous practice standard in America. Moreover, a revolution designed at party headquarters would be antithetical to the country class’s diversity as well as to the American Founders’ legacy.

Achieving the country class’s inherently revolutionary objectives in a manner consistent with the Constitution and with its own diversity would require the Country Party to use legislation primarily as a tool to remove obstacles, to instruct, to reintroduce into American life ways and habits that had been

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cast aside. Passing national legislation is easier than getting people to take up the responsibilities of citizens, fathers, and entrepreneurs.

Reducing the taxes that most Americans resent requires eliminating the network of subsidies to millions of other Americans that these taxes finance, and eliminating the jobs of government employees who administer them. Eliminating that network is practical, if at all, if done simultaneously, both because subsidies are morally wrong and economically counterproductive, and because the country cannot afford the practice in general. The electorate is likely to cut off millions of government clients, high and low, only if its choice is between no economic privilege for anyone and ratifying government’s role as the arbiter of all our fortunes. The same goes for government grants to and contracts with so-called nonprofit institutions or non-governmental organizations. The case against all arrangements by which the government favors some groups of citizens is easier to make than that against any such arrangement. Without too much fuss, a few obviously burdensome bureaucracies, like the Department of Education, can be eliminated, while money can be cut off to partisan enterprises such as the National Endowments and public broadcasting. That sort of thing is as necessary to the American body politic as a weight reduction program is essential to restoring the health of any human body degraded by obesity and lack of exercise. Yet shedding fat is the easy part. Restoring atrophied muscles is harder. Reenabling the body to do elementary tasks takes yet more concentration.

The grandparents of today’s Americans (132 million in 1940) had opportunities to serve on 117,000 school boards. To exercise responsibilities comparable to their grandparents’, today’s 310 million Americans would have radically to decentralize the mere 15,000 districts into which public school children are now concentrated. They would have to take responsibility for curriculum and administration away from credentialed experts, and they would have to explain why they know better. This would involve a level of political articulation of the body politic far beyond voting in elections every two years.

If self-governance means anything, it means that those who exercise government power must depend on elections. The shorter the electoral leash, the likelier an official to have his chain yanked by voters, the more truly republican the government is. Yet to subject the modern administrative state’s agencies to electoral control would require ordinary citizens to take an interest in any number of technical matters. Law can require environmental regulators or insurance commissioners, or judges or auditors to be elected. But only citizens’ discernment and vigilance could make these officials good. Only citizens’ understanding of and commitment to law can possibly reverse the patent disregard for the Constitution and statutes that has permeated American life. Unfortunately, it is easier for anyone who dislikes a court’s or an official’s unlawful act to counter it with another unlawful one than to draw all parties back to the foundation of truth.

How, for example, to remind America of, and to drive home to the ruling class, Lincoln’s lesson that trifling with the Constitution for the most heartfelt of motives destroys its protections for all? What if a country class majority in both houses of Congress were to co-sponsor a “Bill of Attainder to deprive Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and other persons of liberty and property without further process of law for having violated the following ex post facto law…” and larded this constitutional monstrosity with an Article III Section 2 exemption from federal court review? When the affected members of the ruling class asked where Congress gets the authority to pass a bill every word of which is contrary to the Constitution, they would be confronted, publicly, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s answer to a question on the Congress’s constitutional authority to mandate individuals to purchase certain kinds of insurance: “Are you kidding? Are you kidding?” The point having been made, the Country Party could lead public discussions around the country on why even the noblest purposes (maybe even Title II of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964?) cannot be allowed to trump the Constitution.

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How the country class and ruling class might clash on each item of their contrasting agendas is beyond my scope. Suffice it to say that the ruling class’s greatest difficulty — aside from being outnumbered — will be to argue, against the grain of reality, that the revolution it continues to press upon America is sustainable. For its part, the country class’s greatest difficulty will be to enable a revolution to take place without imposing it. America has been imposed on enough.

Editor’s Note: This version corrects an error that appears the print edition of this article, which incorrectly lists Barack Obama as a research assistant to Laurence Tribe in 1984. He in fact was an assistant to Tribe in 1988-89. Update:

The article has also been changed to correct a quote from Nancy Pelosi.

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American Spectator magazine and training aspiring journalists who espouse traditional American values. Your contributions are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law. Each donor receives a year-end summary of their giving for tax purposes.

Source URL: http://spectator.org/articles/39326/americas-ruling-class-and-perils-revolution

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April 14, 2020

From a Grocery Store Manager 4/14/20

Filed under: Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 2:54 pm

I manage a grocery store.

Here’s some things everyone should know:

1. I don’t have toilet paper
2. I don’t have sanitizer
3. I run out of milk, eggs and meat daily
4. I promise if it’s out on the shelf … it’s not in a hidden corner of our back room

Those are the predictable ones, now for the real stuff:

5. I have been doing this for 25 years I did not forget how to order product
6. I did not cause the warehouse to be out of product
7. I schedule as much help as I have, including many TMs working TONS of overtime to help YOU
8. I am sorry there are lines at the check-out lanes

Now for the really important stuff:

9. My team puts themselves in harm’s way every day so you can buy groceries
10. My team works tirelessly to get product on the floor for you to buy
11. My team is exhausted
12. My team is scared of getting sick
13. My team is human and do not possess an antivirus… they are in just as much danger as you are. (Arguably more) But they show up to work everyday just so you can buy groceries
14. My team is tired
15. My team is very underappreciated
16. My team is exposed to more people who are potentially infected in one hour than most of you will in a week (medical community excluded, thank you for all that you do!)
17. My team is abused all day by customers who have no idea how ignorant they are
18. My team disinfects every surface possible, everyday, just so you can come in grab a wipe from the dispenser, wipe the handle and throw the used wipe in the cart or on the ground and leave it there… so my team can throw it in the trash for you later
19. My team wonders if you wash your re-usable bags, that you force us to touch, that are clearly dirty and have more germs on them than our shopping carts do
20. My team more than earns their breaks, lunches and days off. And if that means you wait longer I am sorry.

The last thing I will say is this:

“The next time you are in a grocery store, please pause and think about what you are saying and how you are treating the people you encounter. They are the reason you are able to buy toilet paper, sanitizer, milk, eggs and meat.”

“If the store you go to is out of an item.. maybe find the neighbor or friend that bought enough for a year … there are hundreds of them… and ask them to spare 1 or 2. They caused the problem to begin with…”

“And lastly, please THANK the people who helped you. They don’t have to come to work!”

We owe our grocery store workers a huge debt of gratitude and an enormous amount of respect. If this pandemic is teaching us anything, it’s that we rely far more on people in these positions than we’ve probably ever thought about, so we should absolutely be treating them with dignity—at the very least. If you think you’re stressed, imagine how these workers feel. If you feel frustrated, imagine how these workers feel. If you’re afraid you might get sick, imagine how these workers feel.

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February 5, 2020

Response to Romanoff bid for CO Senate

Filed under: Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 6:21 pm

Editor: The Villager

8933 E. Union Avenue, #230

Greenwood Village CO 80111-1357

gerri@villagerpublishing.com

Re: Opinion, p 4, Vol 38 #10 January 30, 2020

Madam,

In response to your coverage of Andrew Romanoff, Esq., I submit the following:

Why should those who have never paid into Medicare (Health Care Finance Agency/ HCFA) be permitted to withdraw coverage?
SSA is bankrupt, primarily because more are taking out, than have put in, which is contrary to what FDR promised, what is to prevent this from happening to Medicare for All?
Adding up Mr. Romanoff’s arithmetic, premiums, deductibles, &c., is misleading:
1. It does not include 50% of premiums paid by the employer;
2. It does not include the 30 million illegals who have never paid in, nor will they;
3. It does not include the 40% of all hospital beds and hospitals, such as Shriners’ Hospital for Children, St. Jude’s Hospital for Children, The Sisters’ of Carondelet Hospital System, The Baptist Hospital System, The Seventh Day Adventist System, The Trump Pavilion (funded by the Trump Family specializing in geriatric care, located in Jamaica NYC) &c. who are non-profit/ charitable institutions and are not included in any cost analysis by The Left, and who provide medical services without charge to all who need it;
4. It certainly does not figure in how national health services ration care by establishing quotas of service per physician as the U.K.’s National Health Service does, meaning that doctors must perform X number of procedures per year, and when that number is reached, they can move on to insured patients; &
5. All of the NHS’s Mr. Romanoff mentions have private insurers running parallel to them, and that many patient, those who can afford it, come to the U.S.
18% vs 10% doesn’t show how Americans pay for the bulk of all drug and medical research and development;
18% vs 10% doesn’t show how cancer survival rates in those countries is stuck in the 1960’s and not as high as they are in 2020 U.S.A.’
Waiting six to 10 months for an MRI or a prostate biopsy doesn’t compare to the two weeks here in the U.S.A. refutes the phrase, quality of care;
Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that for the first time since the PPACA (Patient Protection Affordable Care Act/ Obamacare) life expectancy has increased;
K. N.H.S. accounts for over 30% of the national budget. That may be only 10% of G.D.P., but it depends upon what agency budgets are counted. Buildings are not part of the N.H.S. budget as they are Crown Properties, (this may have changed since I last checked), thus, the 10% figure is misleading;
The countries listed don’t have any militaries as they have redirected funding from self-defense to a faux healthcare solution. These are the same countries who depend upon the U.S. Military to defend them. Is Mr. Romanoff going to shut down our Army, our Navy, our Air Force, our Marine Corps, our Coast Guard, and our Space Force, to pay for Medicare for All?
Not to get into a discussion over the importance of the Second Amendment, but to honestly and legally afflict it, one must go to Article V of the Constitution, why doesn’t Mr. Romanoff, a product of a mostly Ivy League education, discuss this, or is he a member of that group who believes in Judicial Legislation when it benefits him, but is not in favor of we the people making our own decisions?
Based on the last 60 years of national government, regardless of what is said and promised on the campaign trail, Democrats going to congress always vote en bloc, with the coastal plutocrats. Just look at Jason Crow. Where did Mr. Romanoff stand up and condemn the Russia Hoax? The many Obama scandals? The current Impeachment Hoax? &c.; &
Finally, his talking about so much, President Trumps 2020 State of the Union address, a summary of his administration’s accomplishments, where was Mr. Romanoff on any of these issues? Those successes were accomplished over the last three years, where was he on border control? On Chinese intellectual property theft? NATO financing? SEATO? &c. Does Mr. Romanoff think that the faux health care issue is all that there is? As someone who has family member with problems already addressed by the Trump Administration, e.g. successfully bringing down generic drug prices, and providing pre-existing condition transfer, why is he pushing things that have already been addressed?

From reading the article, I can only conclude that Mr. Romanoff wants to turn the entire United States into California, and create a New Cuba/Venezuela in North America.

Respectfully submitted,

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January 25, 2020

Sick of Fools With Law Degrees

Filed under: Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 5:59 pm

Sick of Fools With Law Degrees

It’s obvious that ALL of the lawyers and politicians involved with this impeachment are both fools and constitutionally illiterate, having never read The Constitution of the United States of America.

Simply and succinctly: The Constitution of the United States of America incorporates as both part of its philosophical origin and its law, actual and real obstruction of congress as an integral part of the federal government.

Do I really need pages of argument or debate? It’s called, the veto. Obstruction of Congress is an integral part of the Organic Law of the Land.

The basis for the Second Article of Impeachment is the ignoring of congressional subpoenas. Subpoenas not properly voted on by the committee, therefore null & void. Further, the remedy for not obeying a subpoena is to file in federal court for contempt & an order to compel. These people should all be disbarred, sanctioned, and expelled from congress.

The real problem here is not that Trump is Trump. The real problem is that moral bankrupts like Schiff, Nadler, Pelosi, Romney, Crow, and soon AOC, get re-elected by ignorant and arrogant constituents whom they then ignore to do the bidding of their plutocrat owners.

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November 26, 2019

Does this make sense? by Ramin Pasa, thanks to Jfasb for sending

Filed under: Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, Historical context, Iran, Islam, Media Check, Obama Foreign Policy, Political Commentary, Putin, Russia — justplainbill @ 4:56 am

DOES THIS MAKE SENSE?

*************************************************

A Genius strategy

This is relayed from a friend who is Greek and teaches in Kurdistan – she has friends worldwide and widely distributed her assessment of the situation in northern Syria.

—————————————————————————————–

Update on situation here!

By pulling US troops out of Syria, Turkey invaded Syria and assaulted the Kurds.

Russians sent an envoy to Damascus to make a deal between the Kurds and Syrian government to unite them against Turkey.

Iran is not happy the Turks are in Syria and brought their troops to the border of Turkey.

Germany hits Turkey with sanctions.

Do you see what a chess player Trump is?

As long as U.S was there, those forces were united against U.S. He is pitting these former allies against each other and they neutralize each other and didn’t cost U.S. anything.

Formerly Turkey, Iran, Russia and Syria were united against U.S.

Europeans were not involved and were enjoying U.S. protecting their interest, but now they are busy fighting for their interests.

It’s good for Israel because Iran has to defend Syria against Turkey instead of focusing on harming Israel.

Three enemies of Israel: Iran, Turkey and Syria are facing off against each other.

This invasion is going to cost Turkey a lot!

So, it brought unity between Syria and Kurds, and division between Russia, Turkey and Iran.

This is just unbelievable what President Trump is doing! This guy is a genius. A modern-day Otto von Bismarck.

Submitted by

-Ramin Parsa

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November 16, 2019

TWSJ Investigative Report: Google [16/11/2019]

Filed under: Business, Econonics, Elections, Global Intel, Historical context, Media Check, Political Commentary, Racism, Religion, US Constitution — justplainbill @ 11:37 pm

WSJ Investigation

How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results

The internet giant uses blacklists, algorithm tweaks and an army of contractors to shape what you see

Kirsten Grind,

Kirsten Grind

The Wall Street Journal

Sam Schechner,

Sam Schechner

The Wall Street Journal

Robert McMillan and

Robert McMillan

The Wall Street Journal

John West

The Wall Street Journal

Nov. 15, 2019 8:15 am ET

Every minute, an estimated 3.8 million queries are typed into Google, prompting its algorithms to spit out results for hotel rates or breast-cancer treatments or the latest news about President Trump.

They are arguably the most powerful lines of computer code in the global economy, controlling how much of the world accesses information found on the internet, and the starting point for billions of dollars of commerce.

Twenty years ago, Google founders began building a goliath on the premise that its search algorithms could do a better job combing the web for useful information than humans. Google executives have said repeatedly—in private meetings with outside groups and in congressional testimony—that the algorithms are objective and essentially autonomous, unsullied by human biases or business considerations.

The company states in a Google blog, “We do not use human curation to collect or arrange the results on a page.” It says it can’t divulge details about how the algorithms work because the company is involved in a long-running and high-stakes battle with those who want to profit by gaming the system.

But that message often clashes with what happens behind the scenes. Over time, Google has increasingly re-engineered and interfered with search results to a far greater degree than the company and its executives have acknowledged, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

Those actions often come in response to pressure from businesses, outside interest groups and governments around the world. They have increased sharply since the 2016 election and the rise of online misinformation, the Journal found.

Google’s evolving approach marks a shift from its founding philosophy of “organizing the world’s information,” to one that is far more active in deciding how that information should appear.

More than 100 interviews and the Journal’s own testing of Google’s search results reveal:

• Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones, and in at least one case made changes on behalf of a major advertiser, eBay Inc., contrary to its public position that it never takes that type of action. The company also boosts some major websites, such as Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.

• Google engineers regularly make behind-the-scenes adjustments to other information the company is increasingly layering on top of its basic search results. These features include auto-complete suggestions, boxes called “knowledge panels” and “featured snippets,” and news results, which aren’t subject to the same company policies limiting what engineers can remove or change.

• Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as required by U.S. or foreign law, such as those featuring child abuse or with copyright infringement, and from changes designed to demote spam sites, which attempt to game the system to appear higher in results.

• In auto-complete, the feature that predicts search terms as the user types a query, Google’s engineers have created algorithms and blacklists to weed out more-incendiary suggestions for controversial subjects, such as abortion or immigration, in effect filtering out inflammatory results on high-profile topics.

• Google employees and executives, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have disagreed on how much to intervene on search results and to what extent. Employees can push for revisions in specific search results, including on topics such as vaccinations and autism.

• To evaluate its search results, Google employs thousands of low-paid contractors whose purpose the company says is to assess the quality of the algorithms’ rankings. Even so, contractors said Google gave feedback to these workers to convey what it considered to be the correct ranking of results, and they revised their assessments accordingly, according to contractors interviewed by the Journal. The contractors’ collective evaluations are then used to adjust algorithms.

THE JOURNAL’S FINDINGS undercut one of Google’s core defenses against global regulators worried about how it wields its immense power—that the company doesn’t exert editorial control over what it shows users. Regulators’ areas of concern include anticompetitive practices, political bias and online misinformation.

Far from being autonomous computer programs oblivious to outside pressure, Google’s algorithms are subject to regular tinkering from executives and engineers who are trying to deliver relevant search results, while also pleasing a wide variety of powerful interests and driving its parent company’s more than $30 billion in annual profit. Google is now the most highly trafficked website in the world, surpassing 90% of the market share for all search engines. The market capitalization of its parent, Alphabet Inc., is more than $900 billion.

Google made more than 3,200 changes to its algorithms in 2018, up from more than 2,400 in 2017 and from about 500 in 2010, according to Google and a person familiar with the matter. Google said 15% of queries today are for words, or combinations of words, that the company has never seen before, putting more demands on engineers to make sure the algorithms deliver useful results.

A Google spokeswoman disputed the Journal’s conclusions, saying, “We do today what we have done all along, provide relevant results from the most reliable sources available.”

Lara Levin, the spokeswoman, said the company is transparent in its guidelines for evaluators and in what it designs the algorithms to do.

AS PART OF ITS EXAMINATION, the Journal tested Google’s search results over several weeks this summer and compared them with results from two competing search engines, Microsoft Corp. ’s Bing and DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused company that builds its results from syndicated feeds from other companies, including Verizon Communications Inc. ’s Yahoo search engine.

The testing showed wide discrepancies in how Google handled auto-complete queries and some of what Google calls organic search results—the list of websites that Google says are algorithmically sorted by relevance in response to a user’s query. (Read about the methodology for the Journal’s analysis.)

Ms. Levin, the Google spokeswoman, declined to comment on specific results of the Journal’s testing. In general, she said, “Our systems aim to provide relevant results from authoritative sources,” adding that organic search results alone “are not representative of the information made accessible via search.”

The Journal tested the auto-complete feature, which Google says draws from its vast database of search information to predict what a user intends to type, as well as data such as a user’s location and search history. The testing showed the extent to which Google doesn’t offer certain suggestions compared with other search engines.

Typing “Joe Biden is” or “Donald Trump is” in auto-complete, Google offered predicted language that was more innocuous than the other search engines. Similar differences were shown for other presidential candidates tested by the Journal.

The Journal also tested several search terms in auto-complete such as “immigrants are” and “abortion is.” Google’s predicted searches were less inflammatory than those of the other engines.

See the results of the Journal’s auto-complete tests

Use the lookup tool below to select the search terms analyzed. Percentages indicate how many times each suggestion appeared during the WSJ’s testing.

   Abortion is
   Bernie Sanders is
   Boeing is
   Democratic debate
   Donald Trump is
   Elizabeth Warren is
   Guns are
   Heroin dosage
   Hobbs and Shaw
   How do I kill myself
   Ilhan Omar is
   Immigrants are
   Joe Biden is
   Kamala Harris is
   New England Patriots
   Recession
   Where do I buy heroin

View more auto-complete suggestions:

Donald Trump
Immigrants
Abortion
Democratic debate

View Interactive

See results of the Journal’s auto-complete tests

Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo’s chief executive, said that for certain words or phrases entered into the search box, such as ones that might be offensive, DuckDuckGo has decided to block all of its auto-complete suggestions, which it licenses from Yahoo. He said that type of block wasn’t triggered in the Journal’s searches for Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

A spokeswoman for Yahoo operator Verizon Media said, “We are committed to delivering a safe and trustworthy search experience to our users and partners, and we work diligently to ensure that search suggestions within Yahoo Search reflect that commitment.”

Said a Microsoft spokeswoman: “We work to ensure that our search results are as relevant, balanced, and trustworthy as possible, and in general, our rule is to minimize interference with the normal algorithmic operation.”

In other areas of the Journal analysis, Google’s results in organic search and news for a number of hot-button terms and politicians’ names showed prominent representation of both conservative and liberal news outlets.

ALGORITHMS ARE effectively recipes in code form, providing step-by-step instructions for how computers should solve certain problems. They drive not just the internet, but the apps that populate phones and tablets.

Algorithms determine which friends show up in a Facebook user’s news feed, which Twitter posts are most likely to go viral and how much an Uber ride should cost during rush hour as opposed to the middle of the night. They are used by banks to screen loan applications, businesses to look for the best job applicants and insurers to determine a person’s expected lifespan.

In the beginning, their power was rarely questioned. At Google in particular, its innovative algorithms ranked web content in a way that was groundbreaking, and hugely lucrative. The company aimed to make the web useful while relying on the assumption that code alone could do the heavy lifting of figuring out how to rank information.

But bad actors are increasingly trying to manipulate search results, businesses are trying to game the system and misinformation is rampant across tech platforms. Google found itself facing a version of the pressures on Facebook, which long said it was just connecting people but has been forced to more aggressively police content on its platform.

A 2016 internal investigation at Google showed between a 10th of a percent and a quarter of a percent of search queries were returning misinformation of some kind, according to one Google executive who works on search. It was a small number percentage-wise, but given the huge volume of Google searches it would amount to nearly two billion searches a year.

By comparison, Facebook faced congressional scrutiny for Russian misinformation that was viewed by 126 million users.

Google’s Ms. Levin said the number includes not just misinformation but also a “wide range of other content defined as lowest quality.” She disputed the Journal’s estimate of the number of searches that were affected. The company doesn’t disclose metrics on Google searches.

Google assembled a small SWAT team to work on the problem that became known internally as “Project Owl.” Borrowing from the strategy used earlier to fight spam, engineers worked to emphasize factors on a page that are proxies for “authoritativeness,” effectively pushing down pages that don’t display those attributes.

Other tech platforms, including Facebook, have taken a more aggressive approach, manually removing problem content and devising rules around what it defines as misinformation. Google, for its part, said its role “indexing” content versus “hosting” content, as Facebook does, means it shouldn’t take a more active role.

One Google search executive described the problem of defining misinformation as incredibly hard, and said the company didn’t want to go down the path of figuring it out.

Around the time Google started addressing issues such as misinformation, it started fielding even more complaints, to the point where human interference became more routine, according to people familiar with the matter, putting it in the position of arbitrating some of society’s most complicated issues. Some changes to search results might be considered reasonable—boosting trusted websites like the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, for example—but Google has made little disclosure about when changes are made, or why.

Businesses, lawmakers and advertisers are worried about fairness and competition within the markets where Google is a leading player, and as a result its operations are coming under heavy scrutiny.

The U.S. Justice Department earlier this year opened an antitrust probe, in which Google’s search policies and practices are expected to be areas of focus. Google executives have twice been called to testify before Congress in the past year over concerns about political bias. In the European Union, Google has been fined more than $9 billion in the past three years for anticompetitive practices, including allegedly using its search engine to favor its own products.

In response, Google has said it faces tough competition in a dynamic tech sector, and that its behavior is aimed at helping create choice for consumers, not hurting rivals. The company is currently appealing the decisions against it in the EU, and it has denied claims of political bias.

GOOGLE RARELY RELEASES detailed information on algorithm changes, and its moves have bedeviled companies and interest groups, who feel they are operating at the tech giant’s whim.

In one change hotly contested within Google, engineers opted to tilt results to favor prominent businesses over smaller ones, based on the argument that customers were more likely to get what they wanted at larger outlets. One effect of the change was a boost to Amazon’s products, even if the items had been discontinued, according to people familiar with the matter.

The issue came up repeatedly over the years at meetings in which Google search executives discuss algorithm changes. Each time, they chose not to reverse the change, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Google engineers said it is widely acknowledged within the company that search is a zero-sum game: A change that helps lift one result inevitably pushes down another, often with considerable impact on the businesses involved.

Ms. Levin said there is no guidance in Google’s rater guidelines that suggest big sites are inherently more authoritative than small sites. “It’s inaccurate to suggest we did not address issues like discontinued products appearing high up in results,” she added.

Many of the changes within Google have coincided with its gradual evolution from a company with an engineering-focused, almost academic culture into an advertising behemoth and one of the most profitable companies in the world. Advertising revenue—which includes ads on search as well as on other products such as maps and YouTube—was $116.3 billion last year.

Some very big advertisers received direct advice on how to improve their organic search results, a perk not available to businesses with no contacts at Google, according to people familiar with the matter. In some cases, that help included sending in search engineers to explain a problem, they said.

“If they have an [algorithm] update, our teams may get on the phone with them and they will go through it,” said Jeremy Cornfeldt, the chief executive of the Americas of Dentsu Inc.’s iProspect, which Mr. Cornfeldt said is one of Google’s largest advertising agency clients. He said the agency doesn’t get information Google wouldn’t share publicly. Among others it can disclose, iProspect represents Levi Strauss & Co., Alcon Inc. and Wolverine World Wide Inc.

One former executive at a Fortune 500 company that received such advice said Google frequently adjusts how it crawls the web and ranks pages to deal with specific big websites.

Google updates its index of some sites such as Facebook and Amazon more frequently, a move that helps them appear more often in search results, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“There’s this idea that the search algorithm is all neutral and goes out and combs the web and comes back and shows what it found, and that’s total BS,” the former executive said. “Google deals with special cases all the time.”

Ms. Levin, the Google spokeswoman, said the search team’s practice is to not provide specialized guidance to website owners. She also said that faster indexing of a site isn’t a guarantee that it will rank higher. “We prioritize issues based on impact, not any commercial relationships,” she said.

Alphabet’s net income

$30

billion

2005

’10

’15

Note: 2017 figure reflects a one-time charge of $9.9 billion related to new U.S. tax law. Alphabet was created through a corporate restructuring of Google in 2015. Figures for prior years are for Google Inc.

Source: FactSet

Online marketplace eBay had long relied on Google for as much as a third of its internet traffic. In 2014, traffic suddenly plummeted—contributing to a $200 million hit in its revenue guidance for that year.

Google told the company it had made a decision to lower the ranking of a large number of eBay pages that were a big source of traffic.

EBay executives debated pulling their quarterly advertising spending of around $30 million from Google to protest, but ultimately decided to step up lobbying pressure on Google, with employees and executives calling and meeting with search engineers, according to people familiar with the matter. A similar episode had hit traffic several years earlier, and eBay had marshaled its lobbying might to persuade Google to give it advice about how to fix the problem, even relying on a former Google staffer who was then employed at eBay to work his contacts, according to one of those people.

This time, Google ultimately agreed to improve the ranking of a number of pages it had demoted while eBay completed a broader revision of its website to make the pages more “useful and relevant,” the people said. The revision was arduous and costly to complete, one of the people said, adding that eBay was later hit by other downrankings that Google didn’t help with.

“We’ve experienced significant and consistent drops in Google SEO for many years, which has been disproportionally detrimental to those small businesses that we support,” an eBay spokesman said. SEO, or search-engine optimization, is the practice of trying to generate more search-engine traffic for a website.

Google’s Ms. Levin declined to comment on eBay.

Companies without eBay’s clout had different experiences.

Dan Baxter can remember the exact moment his website, DealCatcher, was caught in a Google algorithm change. It was 6 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 17. Mr. Baxter, who founded the Wilmington, Del., coupon website 20 years ago, got a call from one of his 12 employees the next morning.

“Have you looked at our traffic?” the worker asked, frantically, Mr. Baxter recalled. It was suddenly down 93% for no apparent reason. That Saturday, DealCatcher saw about 31,000 visitors from Google. Now it was posting about 2,400. It had disappeared almost entirely on Google search.

Mr. Baxter said he didn’t know whom to contact at Google, so he hired a consultant to help him identify what might have happened. The expert reached out directly to a contact at Google but never heard back. Mr. Baxter tried posting to a YouTube forum hosted by a Google “webmaster” to ask if it might have been a technical problem, but the webmaster seemed to shoot down that idea.

One month to the day after his traffic disappeared, it inexplicably came back, and he still doesn’t know why.

“You’re kind of just left in the dark, and that’s the scary part of the whole thing,” said Mr. Baxter.

Google’s Ms. Levin declined to comment on DealCatcher.

(The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp, which has complained publicly about Google’s moves to play down news sites that charge for subscriptions. Google ended the policy after intensive lobbying by News Corp and other paywalled publishers. More recently, News Corp has called for an “algorithm review board” to oversee Google, Facebook and other tech giants. News Corp has a commercial agreement to supply news through Facebook, and Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services. Google’s Ms. Levin and News Corp declined to comment.)

GOOGLE IN RECENT months has made additional efforts to clarify how its services operate by updating general information on its site. At the end of October it posted a new video titled “How Google Search Works.”

Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor and faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, said Google has poorly defined how often or when it intervenes on search results. The company’s argument that it can’t reveal those details because it is fighting spam “seems nuts,” said Mr. Zittrain.

“That argument may have made sense 10 or 15 years ago but not anymore,” he said. “That’s called ‘security through obscurity,’ ” a reference to the now-unfashionable engineering idea that systems can be made more secure by restricting information about how they operate.

Google’s Ms. Levin said “extreme transparency has historically proven to empower bad actors in a way that hurts our users and website owners who play by the rules.”

“Building a service like this means making tens of thousands of really, really complicated human decisions, and that’s not what people think,” said John Bowers, a research associate at the Berkman Klein Center.

On one extreme, those decisions at Google are made by the world’s most accomplished and highest-paid engineers, whose job is to turn the dials within millions of lines of complex code. On the other is an army of more than 10,000 contract workers, who work from home and get paid by the hour to evaluate search results.

The rankings supplied by the contractors, who work from a Google manual that runs to hundreds of pages, can indirectly move a site higher or lower in results, according to people familiar with the matter. And their collective responses are measured by Google executives and used to affect the search algorithms.

Mixed Results

Google’s results page has become a complex mix of search results, advertisements and featured content, not always distinguishable by the user. While these features are all driven by algorithms, Google has different policies and attitudes toward changing the results shown in each of the additional features. Featured snippets and knowledge panels are two common features.

Other features

Organic search results

Featured snippet

Knowledge panel

Highlights web pages that Google thinks will contain content a user is looking for. Google says it will remove content from the feature if it violates policies around harmful and hateful content.

Information Google has compiled from various sources on the web, such as Wikipedia, that provides basic facts about the subject of your query. Google is willing to adjust this material.

search term

Organic search results

Links to results that Google’s algorithms have determined are relevant to your query. Google says it doesn’t curate these results.

Other features

Organic search results

Knowledge panel

Featured snippet

Highlights web pages that Google thinks will contain content a user is looking for. Google says it will remove content from the feature if it violates policies around harmful and hateful content.

Information Google has compiled from various sources on the web, such as Wikipedia, that provides basic facts about the subject of your query. Google is willing to adjust this material.

search term

Organic search results

Links to results that Google’s algorithms have determined are relevant to your query. Google says it doesn’t curate these results.

Other features

Organic search results

Featured snippet

Knowledge panel

Highlights web pages that Google thinks will contain content a user is looking for. Google says it will remove content from the feature if it violates policies around harmful and hateful content.

Information Google has compiled from various sources on the web, such as Wikipedia, that provides basic facts about the subject of your query. Google is willing to adjust this material.

search term

Organic search results

Links to results that Google’s algorithms have determined are relevant to your query. Google says it doesn’t curate these results.

Other features

Organic search results

Featured snippet

Highlights web pages that Google thinks will contain content a user is looking for. Google says it will remove content from the feature if it violates policies around harmful and hateful content.

search term

Organic

search results

Knowledge panel

Information Google has compiled from various sources on the web, such as Wikipedia, that provides basic facts about the subject of your query. Google is willing to adjust this material.

Links to results that Google’s algorithms have determined are relevant to your query. Google says it doesn’t curate these results.

One of those evaluators was Zack Langley, now a 27-year-old logistics manager at a tour company in New Orleans. Mr. Langley got a one-year contract in the spring of 2016 evaluating Google’s search results through Lionbridge Technologies Inc., one of several companies Google and other tech platforms use for contract work.

During his time as a contractor, Mr. Langley said he never had any contact with anyone at Google, nor was he told what his results would be used for. Like all of Google’s evaluators, he signed a nondisclosure agreement. He made $13.50 an hour and worked up to 20 hours a week from home.

Sometimes working in his pajamas, Mr. Langley was given hundreds of real search results and told to use his judgment to rate them according to quality, reputation and usefulness, among other factors.

At one point, Mr. Langley said he was unhappy with the search results for “best way to kill myself,” which were turning up links that were like “how-to” manuals. He said he down-ranked all the other results for suicide until the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline was the No. 1 result.

Soon after, Mr. Langley said, Google sent a note through Lionbridge saying the hotline should be ranked as the top result across all searches related to suicide, so that the collective rankings of the evaluators would adjust the algorithms to deliver that result. He said he never learned if his actions had anything to do with the change.

Mr. Langley said it seemed like Google wanted him to change content on search so Google would have what he called plausible deniability about making those decisions. He said contractors would get notes from Lionbridge that he believed came from Google telling them the “correct” results on other searches.

He said that in late 2016, as the election approached, Google officials got more involved in dictating the best results, although not necessarily on issues related to the campaign. “They used to have a hands-off approach, and then it seemed to change,” he said.

Ms. Levin, the Google spokeswoman, said the company “long ago evolved our approach to collecting feedback on these types of queries, which help us develop algorithmic solutions and features in this area.” She added that, “we provide updates to our rater guidelines to ensure all raters are following the same general framework.”

Lionbridge didn’t reply to requests for comment.

AT GOOGLE, EMPLOYEES routinely use the company’s internal message boards as well as a form called “go/bad” to push for changes in specific search results. (Go/bad is a reporting system meant to allow Google staff to point out problematic search results.)

One of the first hot-button issues surfaced in 2015, according to people familiar with the matter, when some employees complained that a search for “how do vaccines cause autism” delivered misinformation through sites that oppose vaccinations.

At least one employee defended the result, writing that Google should “let the algorithms decide” what shows up, according to one person familiar with the matter. Instead, the people said, Google made a change so that the first result is a site called howdovaccinescauseautism.com—which states on its home page in large black letters, “They f—ing don’t.” (The phrase has become a meme within Google.)

Google’s Ms. Levin declined to comment.

In the fall of 2018, the conservative news site Breitbart News Network posted a leaked video of Google executives, including Mr. Brin and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, upset and addressing staffers following President Trump’s election two years earlier. A group of Google employees noticed the video was appearing on the 12th page of search results when Googling “leaked Google video Trump,” which made it seem like Google was burying it. They complained on one of the company’s internal message boards, according to people familiar with the matter. Shortly after, the leaked video began appearing higher in search results.

“When we receive reports of our product not behaving as people might expect, we investigate to see if there’s any useful insight to inform future improvements,” said Ms. Levin.

FROM GOOGLE’S FOUNDING, Messrs. Page and Brin knew that ranking webpages was a matter of opinion. “The importance of a Web page is an inherently subjective matter, which depends on the [readers’] interests, knowledge and attitudes,” they wrote in their 1998 paper introducing the PageRank algorithm, the founding system that launched the search engine.

PageRank, they wrote, would measure the level of human interest and attention, but it would do so “objectively and mechanically.” They contended that the system would mathematically measure the relevance of a site by the number of times other relevant sites linked to it on the web.

Today, PageRank has been updated and subsumed into more than 200 different algorithms, attuned to hundreds of signals, now used by Google. (The company replaced PageRank in 2005 with a newer version that could better keep up with the vast traffic that the site was attracting. Internally, it was called “PageRankNG,” ostensibly named for “next generation,” according to people familiar with the matter. In public, the company still points to PageRank—and on its website links to the original algorithm published by Messrs. Page and Brin—in explaining how search works. “The original insight and notion of using link patterns is something that we still use in our systems,” said Ms. Levin.)

By the early 2000s, spammers were overwhelming Google’s algorithms with tactics that made their sites appear more popular than they were, skewing search results. Messrs. Page and Brin disagreed over how to tackle the problem.

Mr. Brin argued against human intervention, contending that Google should deliver the most accurate results as delivered by the algorithms, and that the algorithms should be tweaked only in the most extreme cases. Mr. Page countered that the user experience was getting damaged when users encountered spam rather than useful results, according to people familiar with the matter.

Google already had been taking what the company calls “manual actions” against specific websites that were abusing the algorithm. In that process, Google engineers demote a website’s ranking by changing its specific “weighting.” For example, if a website is artificially boosted by paying other websites to link to it, a behavior that Google frowns upon, Google engineers could turn down the dial on that specific weighting. The company could also blacklist a website, or remove it altogether.

Mr. Brin still opposed making large-scale efforts to fight spam, because it involved more human intervention. Mr. Brin, whose parents were Jewish émigrés from the former Soviet Union, even personally decided to allow anti-Semitic sites that were in the results for the query “Jew,” according to people familiar with the decision. Google posted a disclaimer with results for that query saying, “Our search results are generated completely objectively and are independent of the beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google.”

Finally, in 2004, in the bathroom one day at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Mr. Page approached Ben Gomes, one of Google’s early search executives, to express support for his efforts fighting spam. “Just do what you need to do,” said Mr. Page, according to a person familiar with the conversation. “Sergey is going to ruin this f—ing company.”

Ms. Levin, the Google spokeswoman, said Messrs. Page, Brin and Gomes declined to comment.

After that, the company revised its algorithms to fight spam and loosened rules for manual interventions, according to people familiar with the matter.

Google has guidelines for changing its ranking algorithms, a grueling process called the “launch committee.” Google executives have pointed to this process in a general way in congressional testimony when asked about algorithm changes.

The process is like defending a thesis, and the meetings can be contentious, according to people familiar with them.

In part because the process is laborious, some engineers aim to avoid it if they can, one of these people said, and small changes can sometimes get pushed through without the committee’s approval. Mr. Gomes is on the committee that decides whether to approve the changes, and other senior officials sometimes attend as well.

Google’s Ms. Levin said not every algorithm change is discussed in a meeting, but “there are other processes for reviewing more straightforward launches at different levels of the organization,” such as an email review. Those reviews still involve members of the launch committee, she said.

Today, Google discloses only a few of the factors being measured by its algorithms. Known ones include “freshness,” which gives preference to recently created content for searches relating to things such as breaking news or a sports event. Another is where a user is located—if a user searches for “zoo,” Google engineers want the algorithms to provide the best zoo in the user’s area. Language signals—how meanings change when words are used together, such as April and fools—are among the most important, as they help determine what a user is actually asking for.

Other important signals have included the length of time users would stay on pages they clicked on before clicking back to Google, according to a former Google employee. Long stays would boost a page’s ranking. Quick bounce backs, indicating a site wasn’t relevant, would severely hurt a ranking, the former employee said.

Over the years, Google’s database recording this user activity has become a competitive advantage, helping cement its position in the search market. Other search engines don’t have the vast quantity of data that is available to Google, search’s market-leader.

That makes the impact of its operating decisions immense. When Pinterest Inc. filed to go public earlier this year, it said that “search engines, such as Google, may modify their algorithms and policies or enforce those policies in ways that are detrimental to us.” It added: “Our ability to appeal these actions is limited.” A spokeswoman for Pinterest declined to comment.

Search-engine optimization consultants have proliferated to try to decipher Google’s signals on behalf of large and small businesses. But even those experts said the algorithms remain borderline indecipherable. “It’s black magic,” said Glenn Gabe, an SEO expert who has spent years analyzing Google’s algorithms and tried to help DealCatcher find a solution to its drop in traffic earlier this year.

ALONG WITH ADVERTISEMENTS, Google’s own features now take up large amounts of space on the first page of results—with few obvious distinctions for users. These include news headlines and videos across the top, information panels along the side and “People also ask” boxes highlighting related questions.

Google engineers view the features as separate products from Google search, and there is less resistance to manually changing their content in response to outside requests, according to people familiar with the matter.

These features have become more prominent as Google attempts to keep users on its results page, where ads are placed, instead of losing the users as they click through to other sites. In September, about 55% of Google searches on mobile were “no-click” searches, according to research firm Jumpshot, meaning users never left the results page.

Two typical features on the results page—knowledge panels, which are collections of relevant information about people, events or other things; and featured snippets, which are highlighted results that Google thinks will contain content a user is looking for—are areas where Google engineers make changes to fix results, the Journal found.

Curated Features

Google has looser policies about making adjustments to these features than organic search results. The features include Google News and People also ask.

Other features

Organic search results

search term

Top stories

News articles surfaced as being particularly relevant. Google blocks some sites that don’t meet its policies.

People also ask

A predictive feature that suggests related questions, providing short answers with links. Google says it weeds out and blocks some phrases in this feature as it does in its auto-complete feature.

Organic

search results

Other features

Organic search results

search term

Top stories

News articles surfaced as being particularly relevant. Google blocks some sites that don’t meet its policies.

People also ask

A predictive feature that suggests related questions, providing short answers with links. Google says it weeds out and blocks some phrases in this feature as it does in its auto-complete feature.

Organic

search results

Other features

Organic search results

search term

Top stories

News articles surfaced as being particularly relevant. Google blocks some sites that don’t meet its policies.

People also ask

A predictive feature that suggests related questions, providing short answers with links. Google says it weeds out and blocks some phrases in this feature as it does in its auto-complete feature.

Organic

search results

Other features

Organic search results

Top stories

News articles surfaced as being particularly relevant. Google blocks some sites that don’t meet its policies.

search term

Organic

results

People also ask

A predictive feature that suggests related questions, providing short answers with links. Google says it weeds out and blocks some phrases in this feature as it does in its auto-complete feature.

In April, the conservative Heritage Foundation called Google to complain that a coming movie called “Unplanned” had been labeled in a knowledge panel as “propaganda,” according to a person familiar with the matter. The film is about a former Planned Parenthood director who had a change of heart and became pro-life.

After the Heritage Foundation complained to a contact at Google, the company apologized and removed “propaganda” from the description, that person said.

Google’s Ms. Levin said the change “was not the result of pressure from an outside group, it was a violation of the feature’s policy.”

On the auto-complete feature, Google reached a confidential settlement in France in 2012 with several outside groups that had complained it was anti-Semitic that Google was suggesting the French word for “Jew” when searchers typed in the name of several prominent politicians. Google agreed to “algorithmically mitigate” such suggestions as part of a pact that barred the parties from disclosing its terms, according to people familiar with the matter.

In recent years, Google changed its auto-complete algorithms to remove “sensitive and disparaging remarks.” The policy, now detailed on its website, says that Google doesn’t allow predictions that may be related to “harassment, bullying, threats, inappropriate sexualization, or predictions that expose private or sensitive information.”

GOOGLE HAS BECOME more open about its moderation of auto-complete but still doesn’t disclose its use of blacklists. Kevin Gibbs, who created auto-complete in 2004 when he was a Google engineer, originally developed the list of terms that wouldn’t be suggested, even if they were the most popular queries that independent algorithms would normally supply.

For example, if a user searched “Britney Spears”—a popular search on Google at the time—Mr. Gibbs didn’t want a piece of human anatomy or the description of a sex act to appear when someone started typing the singer’s name. The unfiltered results were “kind of horrible,” Mr. Gibbs said in an interview.

He said deciding what should and shouldn’t be on the list was challenging. “It was uncomfortable, and I felt a lot of pressure,” said Mr. Gibbs, who worked on auto-complete for about a year, and left the company in 2012. “I wanted to make sure it represented the world fairly and didn’t leave out any groups.”

Google still maintains lists of phrases and terms that are manually blacklisted from auto-complete, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company internally has a “clearly articulated set of policies” about what terms or phrases might be blacklisted in auto-complete, and that it follows those rules, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Blacklists also affect the results in organic search and Google News, as well as other search products, such as Web answers and knowledge panels, according to people familiar with the matter.

Google has said in congressional testimony it doesn’t use blacklists. Asked in a 2018 hearing whether Google had ever blacklisted a “company, group, individual or outlet…for political reasons,” Karan Bhatia, Google’s vice president of public policy, responded: “No, ma’am, we don’t use blacklists/whitelists to influence our search results,” according to the transcript.

Ms. Levin said those statements were related to blacklists targeting political groups, which she said the company doesn’t keep.

Google’s first blacklists date to the early 2000s, when the company made a list of spam sites that it removed from its index, one of those people said. This means the sites wouldn’t appear in search results.

Engineers known as “maintainers” are authorized to make and approve changes to blacklists. It takes at least two people to do this; one person makes the change, while a second approves it, according to the person familiar with the matter.

The Journal reviewed a draft policy document from August 2018 that outlines how Google employees should implement an anti-misinformation blacklist aimed at blocking certain publishers from appearing in Google News and other search products. The document says engineers should focus on “a publisher misrepresenting their ownership or web properties” and having “deceptive content”—that is, sites that actively aim to mislead—as opposed to those that have inaccurate content.

“The purpose of the blacklist will be to bar the sites from surfacing in any Search feature or news product sites,” the document states.

Ms. Levin said Google does “not manually determine the order of any search result.” She said sites that don’t adhere to Google News “inclusion policies” are “not eligible to appear on news surfaces or in information boxes in Search.”

SOME INDIVIDUALS and companies said changes made by the company seem ad hoc, or inconsistent. People familiar with the matter said Google increasingly will make manual or algorithmic changes that aren’t acknowledged publicly in order to maintain that it isn’t affected by outside pressure.

“It’s very convenient for us to say that the algorithms make all the decisions,” said one former Google executive.

In March 2017, Google updated the guidelines it gives contractors who evaluate search results, instructing them for the first time to give low-quality ratings to sites “created with the sole purpose of promoting hate or violence against a group of people”—something that would help adjust Google algorithms to lower those sites in search.

The next year, the company broadened the guidance to any pages that promote such hate or violence, even if it isn’t the page’s sole purpose and even if it is “expressed in polite or even academic-sounding language.”

Google has resisted entirely removing some content that outsiders complained should be blocked. In May 2018, Ignacio Wenley Palacios, a Spain-based lawyer working for the Lawfare Project, a nonprofit that funds litigation to protect Jewish people, asked Google to remove an anti-Semitic article lauding a German Holocaust denier posted on a Spanish-language neo-Nazi blog.

The company declined. In an email to Mr. Wenley Palacios, lawyers for Google contended that “while such content is detestable” it isn’t “manifestly illegal” in Spain.

Mr. Wenley Palacios then filed a lawsuit, but in the spring of this year, before the suit could be heard, he said, Google lawyers told him the company was changing its policy on such removals in Spain.

According to Mr. Wenley Palacios, the lawyers said the firm would now remove from searches conducted in Spain any links to Holocaust denial and other content that could hurt vulnerable minorities, once they are pointed out to the company. The results would still be accessible outside of Spain. He said both sides agreed to dismiss the case.

Google’s Ms. Levin described the action as a “legal removal” in accordance with local law. Holocaust denial isn’t illegal in Spain, but if it is coupled with an intent to spread hate, it can fall under Spanish criminal law banning certain forms of hate speech.

“Google used to say, ‘We don’t approve of the content, but that’s what it is,’ ” Mr. Wenley Palacios said. “That has changed dramatically.”

Business Model

Google’s search results page has changed over the years, becoming much more ad-heavy.

Other features

Organic search results

search term

Ads

Ads in recent years claim more space at the top of the results page.

Vertical search results

Various features that present specialized results for specific topics, like hotels or places, often with photos or maps. The results in some of these features are paid advertisements.

Organic search results

As Google has placed more ads and verticals at the top of the page, organic search results have shrunk.

Other features

Organic search results

search term

Ads

Ads in recent years claim more space at the top of the results page.

Vertical search results

Various features that present specialized results for specific topics, like hotels or places, often with photos or maps. The results in some of these features are paid advertisements.

Organic search results

As Google has placed more ads and verticals at the top of the page, organic search results have shrunk.

Other features

Organic search results

search term

Ads

Ads in recent years claim more space at the top of the results page.

Vertical search results

Various features that present specialized results for specific topics, like hotels or places, often with photos or maps. The results in some of these features are paid advertisements.

Organic search results

As Google has placed more ads and verticals at the top of the page, organic search results have shrunk.

Other features

Organic search results

Ads

Ads in recent years claim more space at the top of the results page.

search term

Vertical

search results

Organic

search results

Various features that present specialized results for specific topics, like hotels or places, often with photos or maps. The results in some of these features are paid advertisements.

As Google has placed more ads and verticals at the top of the page, organic search results have shrunk.

Health policy consultant Greg Williams said he helped lead a campaign to push Google to make changes that would stifle misleading results for queries such as “rehab.”

At the time, in 2017, addiction centers with spotty records were constantly showing up in search results, typically the first place family members and addicts go in search of help.

Google routed Diane Hentges several times over the last year to call centers as she desperately researched drug addiction treatment centers for her 22-year-old son, she said.

Each time she called one of the facilities listed on Google, a customer-service representative would ask for her financial information, but the representatives weren’t seemingly attached to any legitimate company.

“If you look at a place on Google, it sends you straight to a call center,” Ms. Hentges said, adding that parents who are struggling with a child with addiction “will do anything to get our child healthy. We’ll believe anything.”

After intense lobbying by Mr. Williams and others, Google changed its ad policy around such queries. But addiction industry officials also noticed a significant change to Google search results. Many searches for “rehab” or related terms began returning the website for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the national help hotline run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as the top result.

A spokesman for SAMHSA said the agency had a partnership with Google.

Google never acknowledged the change. Ms. Levin said that “resources are not listed because of any type of partnership” and that “we have algorithmic solutions designed to prioritize authoritative resources (including official hotlines) in our results for queries like these as well as for suicide and self-harm queries.”

Google’s search algorithms have been a major focus of Hollywood in its effort to fight pirated TV shows and movies.

Alphabet’s revenue, by type

Advertising

Other

$150

billion

100

2005

’10

’15

Note: Alphabet was created through a corporate restructuring of Google in 2015. Figures for prior years are for Google Inc.

Source: the company

Studios “saw this as the potential death knell of their business,” said Dan Glickman, chairman and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America from 2004 to 2010. The association has been a public critic of Google. “A hundred million dollars to market a major movie could be thrown away if someone could stream it illegally online.”

Google received a record 1.6 million requests to remove web pages for copyright issues last year, according to the company’s published Transparency Report and a Journal analysis. Those requests pertained to more than 740 million pages, about 12 times the number of web pages it was asked to take down in 2012.

A decade ago, in concession to the industry, Google removed “download” from its auto-complete suggestions after the name of a movie or TV show, so that at least it wouldn’t be encouraging searches for pirated content.

In 2012, it applied a filter to search results that would lower the ranking of sites that received a large number of piracy complaints under U.S. copyright law. That effectively pushed many pirate sites off the front page of results for general searches for movies or music, although it still showed them when a user specifically typed in the pirate site names.

In recent months the industry has gotten more cooperation from Google on piracy in search results than at any point in the organization’s history, according to people familiar with the matter.

“Google is under great cosmic pressure, as is Facebook,” Mr. Glickman said. “These are companies that are in danger of being federally regulated to an extent that they never anticipated.”

Mr. Pichai, who became CEO of Google in 2015, is more willing to entertain complaints about the search results from outside parties than Messrs. Page and Brin, the co-founders, according to people familiar with his leadership.

Google’s Ms. Levin said Mr. Pichai’s “style of engaging and listening to feedback has not shifted. He has always been very open to feedback.”

CRITICISM ALLEGING political bias in Google’s search results has sharpened since the 2016 election.

Interest groups from the right and left have besieged Google with questions about content displayed in search results and about why the company’s algorithms returned certain information over others.

Google appointed an executive in Washington, Max Pappas, to handle complaints from conservative groups, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Pappas works with Google engineers on changes to search when conservative viewpoints aren’t being represented fairly, according to interest groups interviewed by the Journal, although that is just one part of his job.

“Conservatives need people they can go to at these companies,” said Dan Gainor, an executive at the conservative Media Research Center, which has complained about various issues to Google.

Google also appointed at least one other executive in Washington, Chanelle Hardy, to work with outside liberal groups, according to people familiar with the matter.

Ms. Levin said both positions have existed for many years. She said in general Google believes it’s “the responsible thing to do” to understand feedback from the groups and said Google’s algorithms and policies don’t attempt to make any judgment based on the political leanings of a website.

Mr. Pappas declined to comment, and Ms. Hardy didn’t reply to a request for comment.

Share Your Thoughts

Does Google give you what you expect in search results? Join the discussion below.

Over the past year, abortion-rights groups have complained about search results that turned up the websites of what are known as “crisis pregnancy centers,” organizations that counsel women against having abortions, according to people familiar with the matter.

One of the complaining organizations was Naral Pro-Choice America, which tracks the activities of anti-abortion groups through its opposition research department, said spokeswoman Kristin Ford.

Naral complained to Google and other tech platforms that some of the ads, posts and search results from crisis pregnancy centers are misleading and deceptive, she said. Some of the organizations claimed to offer abortions and then counseled women against it. “They do not disclose what their agenda is,” Ms. Ford said.

In June, Google updated its advertising policies related to abortion, saying that advertisers must state whether they provide abortions or not, according to its website. Ms. Ford said Naral wasn’t told in advance of the policy change.

Ms. Levin said Google didn’t implement any changes with regard to how crisis pregnancy centers rank for abortion queries.

The Journal tested the term “abortion” in organic search results over 17 days in July and August. Thirty-nine percent of all results on the first page had the hostname http://www.plannedparenthood.org, the site of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the nonprofit, abortion-rights organization.

By comparison, 14% of Bing’s first page of search results and 16% of DuckDuckGo’s first page of results were from Planned Parenthood.

Ms. Levin said Google doesn’t have any particular ranking implementations aimed at promoting Planned Parenthood.

View Interactive

See results of the Journal’s search tests

See the results of the Journal’s search tests

Use the lookup tool below to select search terms analyzed. Percentages indicate how many times each web page appeared during the WSJ’s testing.

   Abortion
   Bernie Sanders
   Boeing
   Democratic debate
   Donald Trump
   Elizabeth Warren
   Guns
   Heroin dosage
   Hobbs and Shaw
   How do I kill myself
   Ilhan Omar
   Immigrants
   Joe Biden
   Kamala Harris
   New England Patriots
   Recession
   Where do I buy heroin

google Show

Abortion – Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion100%
Abortion Information | Information About Your Optionshttps://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/abortion100%
An Overview of Abortion Laws | Guttmacher Institutehttps://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/overview-abortion-laws100%
What facts about abortion do I need to know? – Planned Parenthoodhttps://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/abortion/considering-abortion/what-facts-about-abortion-do-i-need-know67%
In-Clinic Abortion Procedure | Abortion Methods – Planned Parenthoodhttps://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/abortion/in-clinic-abortion-procedures52%
National Abortion Federation: Homehttps://prochoice.org/44%
Abortion | Center for Reproductive Rightshttps://reproductiverights.org/our-issues/abortion38%
What Happens During an In-Clinic Abortion? – Planned Parenthoodhttps://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/abortion/in-clinic-abortion-procedures/what-happens-during-an-in-clinic-abortion38%

bing Show duckduckgo

Abortion – Pros & Cons – ProCon.orghttps://abortion.procon.org/100%
Abortion – Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion99%
Abortion Information | Information About Your Optionshttps://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/abortion98%
Abortion: Get Facts About the Procedure and Statisticshttps://www.emedicinehealth.com/abortion/article_em.htm97%
Abortion – The New York Timeshttps://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/abortion92%
Abortion | Medical Abortion | MedlinePlushttps://medlineplus.gov/abortion.html89%
Sterling Abortion Clinic | AWFC Abortion Clinic in …http://www.abortionva.com/sterling-va-abortion-clinic.htm77%
Mosaic Virginia • Mosaic Virginia®, Loudoun County, VAhttps://mosaic-virginia.org/21%

duckduckgo Show bing

Abortion – Pros & Cons – ProCon.orghttps://abortion.procon.org/100%
Abortion – The New York Timeshttps://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/abortion100%
Abortion Information | Information About Your Optionshttps://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/abortion100%
Abortion: Get Facts About the Procedure and Statisticshttps://www.emedicinehealth.com/abortion/article_em.htm100%
AbortionFacts.com – Information on Abortion You Can Usehttps://www.abortionfacts.com/100%
Abortion – Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion99%
Abortion | Medical Abortion | MedlinePlushttps://medlineplus.gov/abortion.html98%
Abortion Procedures During First, Second and Third Trimesterhttps://americanpregnancy.org/unplanned-pregnancy/abortion-procedures/76%

View more search results:

Bernie Sanders
Donald Trump
Guns
Recession

The practice of creating blacklists for certain types of sites or searches has fueled cries of political bias from some Google engineers and right-wing publications that said they have viewed portions of the blacklists. Some of the websites Google appears to have targeted in Google News were conservative sites and blogs, according to documents reviewed by the Journal. In one partial blacklist reviewed by the Journal, some conservative and right-wing websites, including The Gateway Pundit and The United West, were included on a list of hundreds of websites that wouldn’t appear in news or featured products, although they could appear in organic search results.

Google has said repeatedly it doesn’t make decisions based on politics, and current and former employees told the Journal they haven’t seen evidence of political bias. And yet, they said, Google’s shifting policies on interference—and its lack of transparency about them—inevitably force employees to become arbiters of what is acceptable, a dilemma that opens the door to charges of bias or favoritism.

Google’s Ms. Levin declined to comment.

DEMANDS FROM GOVERNMENTS for changes have grown rapidly since 2016.

From 2010 to 2018, Google fielded such requests from countries including the U.S. to remove 685,000 links from what Google calls web search. The requests came from courts or other authorities that said the links broke local laws or should be removed for other reasons.

Nearly 78% of those removal requests have been since the beginning of 2016, according to reports that Google publishes on its website. Google’s ultimate actions on those requests weren’t disclosed.

Russia has been by far the most prolific, demanding the removal of about 255,000 links from search last year, three-quarters of all government requests for removal from Google search in that period, the data show. Nearly all of the country’s requests came under an information-security law Russia put into effect in late 2017, according to a Journal examination of disclosures in a database run by the Berkman Klein Center.

Google said the Russian law doesn’t allow it to disclose which URLs were requested to be removed. A person familiar with the matter said the removal demands are for content ruled illegal in Russia for a variety of reasons, such as for promoting drug use or encouraging suicide.

Requests can include demands to remove links to information the government defines as extremist, which can be used to target political opposition, the person said.

Google, whose staff reviews the requests, at times declines those that appear focused on political opposition, the person said, adding that in those cases, it tries not to draw attention to its decisions to avoid provoking Russian regulators.

The approach has led to stiff internal debate. On one side, some Google employees say that the company shouldn’t cooperate at all with takedown requests from countries such as Russia or Turkey. Others say it is important to follow the laws of countries where they are based.

“There is a real question internally about whether a private company should be making these calls,” the person said.

Google’s Ms. Levin said, “Maximizing access to information has always been a core principle of Search, and that hasn’t changed.”

Google’s culture of publicly resisting demands to change results has diminished, current and former employees said. A few years ago, the company dismantled a global team focused on free-speech issues that, among other things, publicized the company’s legal battles to fight changes to search results, in part because Google had lost several of those battles in court, according to a person familiar with the change.

“Free expression was no longer a winner,” the person said.

—Keach Hagey, Andrea Fuller, Rob Copeland, Jim Oberman and Mythili Sankara contributed to this article.

—Illustrations by Martin Tognola

—Graphics by Elliot Bentley and Kara Dapena

Write to Kirsten Grind at kirsten.grind@wsj.com, Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com and Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com

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November 12, 2019

The Looming ‘1984’ Election, by Victor D. Hanson [nc]

Filed under: Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 6:09 pm

Elections

The Looming ‘1984’ Election

Like it or not, 2020 is going to be a plebiscite on an American version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four.

Victor Davis Hanson

– November 10th, 2019

For a variety of reasons, the 2020 election is going to be a referendum beyond Donald Trump’s record and his Democratic opposition.

The furor that Trump has incurred, and the radical antithesis to his agenda and first term, have redefined the looming election. It is becoming a stark choice between a revolutionary future versus American traditionalism.

The choice in reductionist terms will be one between a growing, statist Panopticon, fueled by social media, a media-progressive nexus, and an electronic posse. Online trolls and government bureaucrats seek to know everything about us, in Big Brother fashion to monitor our very thoughts to ferret out incorrect ideas, and then to regiment and indoctrinate us to ensure elite visions of mandated equality and correct behavior—or else!

In other words, the personality quirks of a Trump or an Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders will become mostly irrelevant given the existential choice between two quite antithetical ideas of future America. In 2020 we will witness the penultimate manifestation of what radical progressivism has in store for us all—and the furious, often desperate, and unfettered pushback against it.

Targeting Traditional America

We are also well beyond even the stark choices of 1972 and 1984 that remained within the parameters of the two parties. In contrast, the Democratic Party as we have known it, is extinct for now. It has been replaced since 2016 by a radical progressive revolutionary movement that serves as a touchstone for a variety of auxiliary extremist causes, agendas, and cliques—almost all of them radically leftwing and nihilistic, and largely without majority popular support.

00:00

When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and a number of Democratic presidential candidates sympathize with the New York subway jumpers who openly threaten the police, then what or who exactly is the alternative to such chaos?

When the media proves 90 percent partisan according to its own liberal watchdog institutions, or reports things as true that cannot be true but “should” be true, what are the forces behind that?

When the violence of Antifa is quietly—or sometimes loudly—condoned, who are those who empower it and excuse it?

If a late-term abortion results in a live baby exiting the birth canal only to be liquidated, who exactly would say that is amoral?

If the leading Democratic presidential candidates openly embrace the Green New Deal, reparations, abolishing the Electoral College, welfare for illegal aliens, open borders, amnesties, wealth taxes, a 70-90 percent income tax code, Medicare for all, and legal infanticide—what is the alternative vision and who stands between all that and a targeted traditional America?

Californication Ahead!

In California, the nation’s largest utility preemptively shuts off power to multibillion-dollar industries and two-million customers, given its ossified grid and over-regulated operations, and the deliberate policy of the state not to clean up drought-stricken dead forests and underbrush that are ignited by wind and antiquated transmission cables. So, who or what then in 2020 would oppose all that?

In a state where half the nation’s homeless use the streets as open sewers and receptacles for refuse, incubating medieval diseases and public hazards, who exactly says that is unacceptable? The California attorney general openly boasts that he believes the state is the home for 10 million immigrants of undetermined legal status; is there any pushback to that agenda? If not, would 20 or 30 million immigrants be acceptable for Californians? Why not 50 to 60 million additional residing foreign nationals legal or otherwise?

Can even a leftwing Facebook, Google, or Apple operate within a landscape that cannot ensure reliable power to run its businesses? Do the progressive masters of the Silicon Valley want to hand over millions per year in wealth taxes on money that has already been taxed—but which is considered by the Warrenites and Sandersites as veritable public property given their own past use of state roads and infrastructure to build their businesses? Do these billionaires really think conservative state policies encouraged tens of thousands of homeless people to sleep in cars and streets near their businesses?

On the social front, we are bombarded with celebrities dreaming of various methods of assassinating the current president. Who speaks out against such incendiary smears? Did Hollywood stars do the same to then-President Barack Obama?

In professional sports, Colin Kaepernick’s circus of not standing up during the national anthem has transmogrified into something far more serious—the National Basketball Association’s wholesale appeasement of the dictatorial communist Chinese government, and the leveraging of U.S. free speech in return for access to the lucrative Chinese market. Who is more likely to speak out against that?

Will Campus Culture Replace Our National Character?

Our universities effectively have eroded the First Amendment and the due process protections of the Fifth in matters of sexual assault allegations. Higher education is now controlled by a revolutionary clique. It institutionalizes racially segregated dorms and safe spaces, matter of factly promotes censorship, and either cannot or will not prevent students from disrupting lecturers with whom they disagree. What or who exactly say not to all that? Who would dare say that America in its third century is not going to change its use of English pronouns or decide that there are not three and more biological genders?

When a progressive mom takes her kids to walk and play in a California municipal park and, instead of relaxing comfortably with her fellow mom friends, finds blood-tainted needles sticking up out of the grass, what sort of policies does she imagine allowed that? When a small business owner in San Francisco finds vagrants defecating near his breezeway or mobs of shoplifters swarming his store, what sort of politics and ideologies will he consider led to that?

Who Is Sovereign Here?

On the national level, what or who created a landscape in which the highest echelons of the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department sought to surveil American citizens, undermine a presidential campaign, and abort a presidential transition and then a presidency? If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, would anyone have objected? Do any object today that she hired a foreign national to work with foreign sources to discredit and smear her political opponent?

Who or what is behind the constant remonstrations that the American people are racist, sexist, homophobic, nativist, xenophobic, and oppressing the transgendered? Who lodges such charges? Who believes them to be true?

Why is gasoline reaching $5 a gallon in coastal cities, when states like California have huge untapped sources of oil and natural gas? Why is lumber sky-high in stores while the state mandates that millions of harvestable drought-stricken dead trees instead slowly rot to serve as kindle for deadly wildfires?

What is wrong with 3.5 percent unemployment? Is there a Democratic plan to lower it to 2.5 percent?

Who exactly wishes to pack the court, to repeal the Electoral College, to nix the difference between residency and citizenship, to promote identity-politics tribalism over collective affinities, to nullify federal immigration law, to hunt down and disrupt political opponents as they eat and sleep—and who not?

Whose ideologies logically lead to promoting iconoclasm and statue-toppling, the Orwellian renaming of streets and buildings, the defacing of public murals?

The Orwellian Jacobins or America First

The new progressive party is Jacobin. It sees politics in all-inclusive French revolutionary terms—encompassing every aspect of American life from entertainment, sports, academia, religion, and family matters to politics, foreign policy, and individual rights.

In his own way, Trump also fights back in 360-degree fashion, from the existential to the trivial, railing against Colin Kaepernick, tit for tatting Hollywood stars, weighing in on radical abortion, open borders, power outages, the homeless and subway jumping. The result is not just that there looms a choice between two different agendas, but two quite different American lifestyles and experiences—and histories.

Like it or not, 2020 is going to be a plebiscite on an American version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. One side advocates a complete transformation not just of the American present but of the past as well. The Left is quite eager to change our very vocabulary and monitor our private behavior to ensure we are not just guilty of incorrect behavior but thought as well.

The other side believes America is far better than the alternative, that it never had to be perfect to be good, and that, all and all, its flawed past is a story of a moral nation’s constant struggle for moral improvement.

One side will say, “Just give us more power and we will create heaven on earth.” The other says “Why would anyone wish to take their road to an Orwellian nightmare?” The 2020 election is that simple.

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November 8, 2019

Girl with gun, 1; bad guy, 0. By Deeann DuCote [pay attention to the result!]

Filed under: crime control, Education, equalizers, gun control, handguns, Law Enforcement, Police, Political Commentary, self-defense, US Constitution — Tags: Women's Rights — justplainbill @ 8:16 pm

GOOD GIRL WITH A GUN: 1, BAD GUY: 0

Posted by Guest Contributor

You are here: Home Good Girl With A Gun: 1, Bad Guy:

0 COMMENTS

By: Dee Ann DuCote

Years ago my husband introduced me to deer hunting, so I became pretty proficient with a rifle. It wasn’t until 1999 that something happened which caused me to up my handgun game beyond simple bullseye shooting.

I arrived home after dark, and with rain predicted, I parked my car and paused in the yard to turn off our garden fountain. I later recalled what should have been a significant sound in the dark bushes, but I ignored it at the time, and went on.

Once in the screened porch just off the driveway, I heard our dogs barking in the kennels out back, sounding an alert. Just then I saw an adult male approach the porch. I recognized him as the neighbor from across the road, but he was not someone I knew well or talked with at all. We were on opposite sides of the porch screen, and he asked if he could use my phone. He then stated that his car had broken down around the corner. I thought this was odd, considering he lived across the road and most certainly had a phone in his house.

I told him I couldn’t help him, and I retreated from the porch through the sliding glass door behind me into the house, locking it after I was inside. I went upstairs, grabbed the phone, and starting dialing our land line (the only method of communication available to me at our rural location). I wanted to alert and consult my husband, who was out of town on business. His instructions were to get my handgun and call 911. So I went down the hall to our bedroom, hid one gun under the pillow, and took the second one with me to the breakfast room at the other end of the upstairs area. Here I could attempt to look out onto the dark back yard, but to make the 911 call, I would have to end my call with my husband. As a result, he would be unaware of what happened next.

Since the dogs continued to bark and were clearly disturbed, I decided that I may have a real problem. I dialed 911, and began to describe to the operator what was happening. I was so flustered initially, I gave her the last name of another member of his family, but corrected it as I continued to talk with her. Just then I heard the sliding glass door to the porch downstairs being rattled. It was directly under where I was now standing, and was being shaken to the point that the lock lifted up. I then heard the door slide open.

The distance from that lower door, through the basement family room to the base of the stairs, was about 30 feet. Once in the house, the intruder ran that distance, then up the stairs, and then into the dining room in what I estimated to be about 3-4 seconds. As I became aware of what was happening, I was able to firmly plant myself at the far side of the dining room. I met him with a loaded gun as he rounded the corner from the stairs and came towards me.

Up to this point, I had been holding the phone in my left hand, keeping the 911 operator informed of who the intruder was, where he was, and what was going on. I knew that our conversation, and any facts I would share with her, would be recorded, and could help later if something were to happen to me that night. I also approached this situation a little differently than if I had been at the range.

Specifically, I am right handed, but I shoot left-handed (due to eye dominance). Since on this night in a dark room the front sight had no relevance, I held the gun in my right hand for stability.

Years earlier, my husband had been a law enforcement officer who worked mostly midnights. We lived in a very rural area at the end of a dead-end road, and we decided that a plan was needed in case I had to defend myself in our home while he was at work.

We had rehearsed many scenarios, which now quickly played out in my head. At this point, I shouted out a warning for the intruder: “Stop, I have a loaded gun, and it is pointed right at you.” I will never forget the light from our driveway shining on his white t-shirt. At this point the 911 operator cautioned me not to shoot him. My response to her was “Lady, if he does not retreat, I will shoot him.” This told him that there was someone else who knew he was there, and what I was willing to do. I have referred to this strategy over the years as “Being bigger than the bear.”

I instructed him to go downstairs (back to the screened porch), and told him that the county sheriff was on his way. It turns out that there were only two deputies on duty that night in the third largest county in my state, and it took them about 15 minutes to arrive. In the meantime, the intruder did sit down in the screened porch downstairs while I stayed just inside that sliding glass door with my handgun pointed at him.

Once the deputies arrived, they were in my driveway directly behind the intruder. They instructed me to put down my handgun so they could enter the porch. I did not see at the time that they were concerned about their own personal safety; my concern was my personal safety and the fact that this guy could lunge towards me or even take me hostage.

I kept my handgun ready as the deputies entered the porch. This event, while instilling fear in me, also instilled anger. I think this is because the intruder was someone I knew (albeit not very well), and he lived very near me. So with my anger came a warning from me to this guy as he was taken away to “stay away from me, my family, and my property”.

He had most likely been in my house at some time before we moved in, so he knew the floor plan. He knew my husband was not home because he saw me mowing the grass the day before. He knew I was alone, as when he asked to use the phone earlier, my husband did not come to the door. Because of my anger, I talked with the intruder while we waited for the deputies. I asked him if he were drunk, and he responded “yes”. While this explains his bad judgment, it does not excuse it. I later asked my husband to analyze what I had done wrong, and what I had done right. Here are some of his points:

Wrong:

I did not assume he had an accomplice.
I did not make him lie on the floor, with his hands behind his head, and his feet crossed (In fact, I let him have a cigarette while we were waiting. My thought at the time was, at least his hands are busy!)

Right:

I did call 911 and kept them on the line throughout this ordeal.
I did have a handgun (actually multiple handguns), and was trained on its use (and when not to use it).
I displayed an attitude that told him I was in charge, and that I was not afraid.

My husband talked by phone with the deputies before they took the intruder away, and he asked if they could hold him while he (my husband) traveled back to our house from his work location. By this time it was about 11 pm, but they assured him they could put him on a 24-hour hold. This was NOT how it played out, and the guy was back on the street on bond within two hours. It took my husband longer than that to get home, despite driving frantically on the dark back roads of the rural part of our state.

This event occurred before the Castle Doctrine law was passed in our state. It was even before any concealed carry laws were passed. We went to the County Prosecutor the very next day, and here is what he said to us… My problem was that I did everything right! He went on to say that if I had shot the intruder, most likely no charges would have been filed against me (I was a female in my home alone at night). We asked if the intruder could be prosecuted for aggravated burglary, and the answer was “no”. We were told that he could not get a conviction on aggravated burglary, and could only prosecute him for simple trespass, as he would not be able to prove “intent”. This seemed illogical to me, as why would I want to let the situation progress to the point where I could find out what the intruder’s real intent was? Wasn’t it enough that he broke into a house through a locked door (after being told to go away), and then advanced through that house until he found its lone female occupant? Fast forward, and I can tell you that this guy eventually was only charged with simple trespass (a misdemeanor). He also only spent two weeks in jail (and he picked the time frame). Consequently, my case (and other similar cases) were taken to the legislature of our state, and the laws were changed.

While I did not fire my gun in this situation, the mere presence of a gun and my willingness to use it caused this intruder to back down. I asked for a copy of both the 911 tape and the intruder’s statement when he was charged. In his statement he said “I thought she meant business and I wanted to get the hell out of Dodge”! No one was physically hurt in this encounter, and we both have gone on to live our lives many miles apart. That said, I never felt safe again living in that location, and from that point forward I carried a firearm each time I went back and forth between my house and my car when my husband was out of town. However, it was my firearm, my training, my attitude, and the intruder’s willingness to follow my directions that affected each of our tomorrows. Without a firearm, there is no parity, no safety, and in some cases, no tomorrow for any law-abiding individual, especially a woman.

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September 27, 2019

1998 Pres Clinton signs treaty w Ukraine to cooperate in prosecuting crimes

Filed under: Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 4:12 pm

DOH! Did You Know There’s a Treaty Between the USA & Ukraine Regarding Cooperation For Prosecuting Crimes?

Posted on September 25, 2019 by DCWhispers

My goodness. It was passed when Joe Biden was a member of the U.S. Senate and then signed by then-President Bill Clinton.

A comprehensive treaty agreement that allows cooperation between both the United States and Ukraine in the investigation and prosecution of crimes.

It appears President Trump was following the law to the letter when it comes to unearthing the long-standing corruption that has swirled in Ukraine and allegedly involves powerful Democrats like Joe Biden and others.

“To the Senate of the United States: With a view to receiving the advice and consent of the Senate to ratification, I transmit herewith the Treaty Between the United States of America and Ukraine on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters with Annex, signed at Kiev on July 22, 1998. I transmit also, for the information of the Senate, an exchange of notes which was signed on September 30, 1999, which provides for its provisional application, as well as the report of the Department of State with respect to the Treaty. The Treaty is one of a series of modern mutual legal assistance treaties being negotiated by the United States in order to counter criminal activities more effectively. The Treaty should be an effective tool to assist in the prosecution of a wide variety of crimes, including drug trafficking offenses. The Treaty is self-executing. It provides for a broad range of cooperation in criminal matters. Mutual assistance available under the Treaty includes: taking of testimony or statements of persons; providing documents, records, and articles of evidence; serving documents; locating or identifying persons; transferring persons in custody for testimony or other purposes; executing requests for searches and seizures; assisting in proceedings related to restraint, confiscation, forfeiture of assets, restitution, and collection of fines; and any other form of assistance not prohibited by the laws of the requested state. I recommend that the Senate give early and favorable consideration to the Treaty and give its advice and consent to ratification.”

WILLIAM J. CLINTON.

https://www.congress.gov/106/cdoc/tdoc16/CDOC-106tdoc16.pdf

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September 22, 2019

I’ve Been Banned From Walmart (LOL)

Filed under: Humor, Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 1:15 am

Subject: Banned From Wal-Mart

Apparently, I’m banned from the Walmart…

I just received this letter from Walmart’s corporate office:

Dear. Mr Horton

Over the past several months you have caused quite a commotion in our store.. We cannot tolerate this behavior and have been forced to ban you from the store. Complaints against you are listed below and are documented by our video surveillance cameras.

1. June 15: You took 24 boxes of condoms and randomly put them in other people’s carts when they weren’t looking.

2. July 2: You set all the alarm clocks in Housewares to go off at 5-minute intervals.

3. July 7: You made a trail of tomato juice on the floor leading to the women’s restroom.

4. July 19: you walked up to an employee and told her in an official voice, ‘Code 3 in Housewares. Get on it right away’. This caused the employee to leave her assigned station and receive a reprimand from her supervisor that in turn resulted with a union grievance, causing management to lose time and costing the company money.

5. August 4: You went to the Service Desk and tried to put a bag of M&Ms on layaway.

6. August 14: You moved a ‘CAUTION – WET FLOOR’ sign to a carpeted area.

8. August 18: When a clerk asked if they could help you, you began crying and screamed, ‘Why can’t you people just leave me alone?’ EMTs were called…

9. August 21: you looked right into the security camera and used it as a mirror while you picked your nose.

10. August 26: While handling guns in the hunting department, you asked the clerk where the antidepressants were.

11. Aug 28: You darted around the store suspiciously while loudly humming the ‘Mission Impossible’ theme.

12. Sept 3: In the auto department, you practiced your ‘Madonna look’ by using different sized funnels.

13. Sept 5: you hid in a clothing rack and when people browsed through, you yelled ‘PICK ME! PICK ME!’

14.Sept 6: When an announcement came over the loud speaker, you assumed the fetal position and screamed ‘OH NO! IT’S THOSE VOICES AGAIN!’

And last, but not least:

15. Sept 7: You went into a fitting room, shut the door, waited awhile, and then yelled very loudly, ‘Hey! There’s no toilet paper in here.’ One of the clerks passed out.

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August 20, 2019

All Hands: Rice & CO2, The Galileo Movement, thanks to Butch for sending

Filed under: Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 4:41 pm

Go read the first post on this site, then visit:

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July 20, 2019

Iran vs NATO

Filed under: Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 4:32 pm

I may not be the brightest bulb in the lamp, but:

My understanding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is that if one member is attacked, then all must respond when the treaty is invoked. If the United Kingdom declares that Iran’s attacks on its shipping to be Acts of War, then ALL of the NATO members must respond. This includes the U.S.

As a matter of reality, how long would Iran last in such a conflict? And, is this necessarily a bad thing?

Think about it. All of Iran’s terrorist activities would end and we could move all of the Palestinian “refugees” could be moved to Iran and given land to farm or otherwise work as they would.

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July 10, 2019

America’s Social Contract, by Col Dr Sam Holiday, US Army (Ret)

Filed under: Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 11:56 pm

Social Contract–by Dr Sam C. Holiday, USMA ’48, Col USA (Ret)

Yahoo/Inbox

Joseph R. John <jrjassoc@earthlink.net>

To:jrj@combatveteransforcongress.org

Jul 10 at 4:34 PM

America’s Social Contract

By Capt Joseph R. John, July 10, 2019: Op Ed # 441

Every American citizen who values their precious freedoms outlined in The Bill of Rights, should read Dr. Sam C. Holiday, USMA ’48, Col USA (Ret) article listed below, especially millions of millenniums, who for over 20 years, had been misled in classroom instruction by leftist teachers and professors about success of Socialism in comparison to the failure of the Constitutional Republic of the US.

Socialist governments have suppressed, enslaved, and murdered hundreds of millions of people throughout the world for over 100 years in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Castor’s Cuba, Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, Nyerere’s Tanzania, Jaruzelski’s Poland, Najibullah’s Afghanistan, Ortega’s Nicaragua, Ceausescu’s Romania, Dubcek’s Czechoslovakia, Zinvkov’s Bulgaria, Tito’s Yugoslavia, etc. Most recently, The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report on Venezuela, noting that between January 2018 and May 2019, Nicolas Maduro’s Socialist thug-regime murdered nearly 7,000 people.

Millenniums should have been able to easily compare the failures of brutal Socialist regimes in the 37 countries where they gained control, with the success of the Founding Fathers Constitutional Republic, that has freed so many oppressed people in the world. and received so very little in return. Unfortunately for over 20 years, the Common Core Curriculum forced upon states by Department of Education, required the use of revised US History textbooks, funded by George Soros, that lie about the remarkable History of the Republic.

The below listed narrative is presented to provide a more in depth understanding of the creation of the Constitutional Republic, and the three Pillars of the Republic; it is the glue that strengthened the Republic for 243 years. The three Pillars are:

1. The Declaration of Independence which formed the moral basis of government in the new Republic.

1. The US Constitution that sets the legal basis for the government, of and by the people.

1. Together, they check and balance each other, to establish America’s unwritten “Social Contract”, i.e. what is right and legal in the government, of and by the people, of the Republic.

The genius of the Founding Fathers was to combine the Western idea of God, with the Chinese concept of nature, and the teachings of Confucius, in order to form a new and unique government, of and by the people, that established the “Social Contract”—an unwritten agreement between the Colonists and their new government.

The Founding Fathers were convinced that a government founded on the basis of the Three Pillars of The Republic would secures and fosters a nation for future generations of Americans that would bring peace, justice, order, safety, and happiness in the Republic.

Members of the US Armed Forces and Law Enforcement Officers have always sworn to protect and defend one of the pillars that established the legal basis for the government of the Republic, the US Constitution.

The Founding Fathers believed as long the” Social Contract” continued, it would foster a Republican form of government, and a way of life, that would create a stable noble nation.

The Founding Fathers understood the meaning of “Equality”, it is not what Socialists have been indoctrinating America’s youth, for the last 20 years, that equality means. Equality did not mean that everyone is the same, that everyone has the same duties, everyone has the same rights, or the same responsibilities.

The Founding Fathers knew that human being are not equal in background, upbringing, physical, and intellectual endowments, or motivation. Equality, as referred to in the US Constitution, meant that all humans beings have received their natural rights from “God”, which are inherent and inalienable, and that includes life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, property, and religion.

In the below listed article, Dr. Holiday explains how the complex interrelationships developed between the government and people for 243 years, and why America’s “Social Contract” has been so important.

For the last 20 years, the Pillars of the Republic have been under attack by the Progressives, Socialists, Marxists, Communists, The Muslim Brotherhood, and the Democrat Socialist Party run by Tom Perez, who was appointed as the Chairman of the Democrat National Committee by Barrack Obama before he left office.

Perez has a long history of anti-white views, including making the declaration “White people should not be entitled to protection under the Voting Rights Act.” Perez was the longtime leader of a Communist, militant open border immigration group, Casa de Maryland, that since 2000, has continued to work toward giving Illegal Aliens the right to vote. Support for Illegal Aliens voting rights was also voiced by Nancy Pelosi. Her most recent quote: “You need to voted for Democrats, otherwise Illegal Aliens will lose their rights.”

Hugo Chavez, the former Communist President of Venezuela, and protégé, of the Communist Dictator Fidel Castro, sent $1 million to Perez’s Casa de Maryland annually, with instructions to keep the southern border wide open. Perez worked to keep the southern border wide open by applying Chave’s funding, and continued for the last three years, with the help of Pelosi, Schumer, and Rinos in Congress.

Perez’s Democratic Socialist Party refusal to help stem the massive flow of illegal immigrants invading the United States, has resulted in over one hundreds thousand Illegal Aliens from 52 countries being interdicted each month, meaning that two hundred thousand Illegal aliens entered the US illegally without being interdicted each month. The Illegal invasion of over 300,000 Illegal Aliens each month, is resulting in the Republic close to losing its sovereignty, and massive drug smuggling has gotten completely out of control.

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, 35,000 African migrants have arrived in Central America, and are now en route to enter the United States illegally; failure to quarantine those 35,000 African migrants is posing the dangerous threat of an Ebola epidemic to the lives of all Americans.

The Common Core Curriculum’s vilification of US History continues, and its indoctrination of the benefit of Socialism, has resulted in millions of millenniums demonstrating in the streets against Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly, and against closing the wide open southern border. Millenniums are instead demonstrating in support of Socialists candidates for president, for post birth abortion, free health care for all Illegal Aliens, and open borders, resulting in the enslavement of female children for prostitution.

By misleading and polarizing America’s youth for the last 20 years, the dark forces in the nation, funded by George Soros, with the support of Leftists, Progressives, Socialists, Marxists, Communists, The Muslim Brotherhood, and the Democrat Socialist Party have been intent on destroying the Republic the Founding Fathers created, and The Free Enterprise System. They are intent on replacing the Constitutional Republic, with a Socialist State controlled by a very few brutal and oppressive Marxist leaders.

That polarization currently being fostered by the left of center liberal media establishment, Progressives, Socialists, Marxists, Communists, The Muslim Brotherhood, and the Democrat Socialist Party, are undermining the unity that the Founding Fathers achieved, by they fostering the 3 Pillars of the Republic—unity is close to being lost.

In order to restore the unity of the American people and the Republic in a government, by and for the people, that the Founding Fathers envisioned, Patriotic Americans should come together to re-invigorate America’s “Social Contract” by supporting a number of national initiatives to:

1. Provide the US Border Patrol with support they need to build a wall to close the wide open Southern Border.

1. Put pressure on 50 State Education Departments and County School Boards, to eliminate the Common Core US History curriculum, with the revised US History textbooks that degrade, misrepresents, and eliminates positive facts about the remarkable History of the Republic.

1. Support identity measures to prevent massive voter fraud perpetrated in 2016 and 2018, by putting pressure on elected legislators to require all voters to present the same type of IDs in order to vote at the polls, that is required to board an aircraft, cash a check, obtain medical treatment at a hospital, check a book out of a library, etc.

1. Oppose “Political Correctness” in all its formas, in order to prevent the abridgment of “Freedom of Speech

There are many more initiatives “The American People” must develop and support to “Right the Ship of State”. We encourage you to read Dr. Holiday’s below listed article.

Copyright by Capt Joseph R. John. All Rights Reserved. The material can only posted on another Web site or distributed on the Internet by giving full credit to the author. It may not be published, broadcast, or rewritten without the permission from the author.

Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62

Capt USN(Ret)/Former FBI

Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC

2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184

San Diego, CA 92108

http://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org

https://www.facebook.com/combatveteransforcongress?ref=hl

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
-Isaiah 6:8

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

From: Dr. Sam C. Holliday, USMA ‘48
Sent: Monday, June 03, 2019 8:41 PM
To: Joseph R. John
Subject: America’s Social Contract

America’s Social Contract

America’s Social Contract is an unwritten agreement between Americans and their government. It not the Constitution alone that is the foundation of America. The Declaration of Independence reflect the soul of the American nation and forms the moral basis of government among Americans. The Constitution states what is legal. Together they check and balance each other to establish the Social Contract of America. The Declaration is a clear and concise statement of the principles based on custom and tradition that caused the American Revolution, and served as the basis for an appeal under British rights to natural law (Sacred Authority) for the creation of the new nation from the former colonies. It asserted that man-made laws have limits, set by “self-evident truths based on the laws of God and nature” which is supreme. This is the Social Contract that combines what is legal and what is right. Although this concept was based on the Western idea of God it has much in common with a Chinese concept based on nature and the teaching of Confucius.

One meaning of equality is that no one is by nature, i.e. God, the ruler of another; this is specified in the Declaration. But equality does not mean everyone is the same or has the same duties and responsibilities. Moreover, those who rule, i.e. members of the body politic, must earn that privilege through character, dedication and hard work. Equality also means all humans have natural rights from God, which are inherent and inalienable, and include life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, property, and religion. The body politic is to insure there for everyone living in the country.

To secure these rights, human beings consent to leave the state of nature and form a government of Secular Authority, i.e. a state, which protects their rights through such means as national defense, local security, criminal laws, civil laws, and minimal support for the disadvantaged. This concept has been, and is still, misunderstood because of the phrase “all men are created equal”. The Founders knew that human being are not equal in background, upbringing, physical and intellectual endowments, or motivation. But they held the Stoic-Augustinian view that the only equality of importance was the human soul before God, and thus secular differences were unimportant. But they knew that success was most likely when the best held the reins, and therefore they accept the concept of the body politic. In the 21st century many have another view: that equality means uniformity of outcomes with diversity, not merit, being the primary goal.

The right to consent requires the agreement of the individuals who have accepted the Social Contract, and who except the Secular Authority of government (rule of Law) to check and balance Sacred Authority (what individuals consider right), in return for having their free will and freedom secured by government. The representatives of the majority of the body politic establish rules, regulations and laws, and maintain and administer them as the result of elections within the body politic. Should a government become unjust, violating rather than protecting rights (loses the Mandate of Heaven, or violate the Social Contract), the people may exercise their right to change the government. Of course skillful politics can twist this concept for very different purposes. The Founders saw it as a way to decentralize governance to the lower possible level, while the Chinese saw it as a way to justify authoritarian rule.

The Founders thought that government founded on the basis of these principles would secures and fosters a republican way of life for America that would bring peace, justice, order, safety, and happiness to all of those living in the United States. But the polarization currently in the United States reflects the fact that the unity which the Founders wanted to achieve by these principles has been lost, and America’s Social Contract has been violated.

It is now up to Americans to rebuild America’s Social Contract. If this is not done America will continue on the cycle into decline and decay, but with knowledge, determination, skill and will Americans can reverse the cycle and have the united nation with liberty and justice for all that the Founders visualized.

Dr. Sam C. Holliday, Col. US Army, Armiger Cromwell Center, LLC

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July 7, 2019

Bill Clinton on illegals, from C-Span

Filed under: Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 11:09 pm

Subject:WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN IF TRUMP SIMPLY AIRED THIS?

Donald Trump should just
televise this Bill Clinton speech from 1995 and then simply state “I’m
Donald Trump and I approve this message.”
Oh, please, please let this go viral. Not one word of
commentary needs to be added.
Very short video – about 84 seconds.

https://www.c-spanorg/video/? c4351026/c

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June 25, 2019

Trent England, J.D., on not doing away with the Electoral College [concur]

Filed under: Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 5:51 pm

Trent England
Director, Save Our States

Trent England is executive vice president and the David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, where he also directs the Save Our States project. He earned his B.A. in government from Claremont McKenna College and his J.D. from the George Mason University School of Law. He previously served as executive vice president of the Freedom Foundation and as a legal policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. He hosts the podcast, The Trent England Show, and has written for numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, and The Washington Times. He is a contributor to The Heritage Guide to the Constitution.

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The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 30, 2019, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C.

Once upon a time, the Electoral College was not controversial. During the debates over ratifying the Constitution, Anti-Federalist opponents of ratification barely mentioned it. But by the mid-twentieth century, opponents of the Electoral College nearly convinced Congress to propose an amendment to scrap it. And today, more than a dozen states have joined in an attempt to hijack the Electoral College as a way to force a national popular vote for president.

What changed along the way? And does it matter? After all, the critics of the Electoral College simply want to elect the president the way we elect most other officials. Every state governor is chosen by a statewide popular vote. Why not a national popular vote for president?

***

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 asked themselves the same question, but then rejected a national popular vote along with several other possible modes of presidential election. The Virginia Plan—the first draft of what would become the new Constitution—called for “a National Executive . . . to be chosen by the National Legislature.” When the Constitutional Convention took up the issue for the first time, near the end of its first week of debate, Roger Sherman from Connecticut supported this parliamentary system of election, arguing that the national executive should be “absolutely dependent” on the legislature. Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, on the other hand, called for a popular election. Virginia’s George Mason thought a popular election “impracticable,” but hoped Wilson would “have time to digest it into his own form.” Another delegate suggested election by the Senate alone, and then the Convention adjourned for the day.

When they reconvened the next morning, Wilson had taken Mason’s advice. He presented a plan to create districts and hold popular elections to choose electors. Those electors would then vote for the executive—in other words, an electoral college. But with many details left out, and uncertainty remaining about the nature of the executive office, Wilson’s proposal was voted down. A week later, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts proposed election by state governors. This too was voted down, and a consensus began to build. Delegates did not support the Virginia Plan’s parliamentary model because they understood that an executive selected by Congress would become subservient to Congress. A similar result, they came to see, could be expected from assigning the selection to any body of politicians.

There were other oddball proposals that sought to salvage congressional selection—for instance, to have congressmen draw lots to form a group that would then choose the executive in secret. But by July 25, it was clear to James Madison that the choice was down to two forms of popular election: “The option before us,” he said, “[is] between an appointment by Electors chosen by the people—and an immediate appointment by the people.” Madison said he preferred popular election, but he recognized two legitimate concerns. First, people would tend toward supporting candidates from their own states, giving an advantage to larger states. Second, a few areas with higher concentrations of voters might come to dominate. Madison spoke positively of the idea of an electoral college, finding that “there would be very little opportunity for cabal, or corruption” in such a system.

By August 31, the Constitution was nearly finished—except for the process of electing the president. The question was put to a committee comprised of one delegate from each of the eleven states present at the Convention. That committee, which included Madison, created the Electoral College as we know it today. They presented the plan on September 4, and it was adopted with minor changes. It is found in Article II, Section 1:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.

Federal officials were prohibited from being electors. Electors were required to cast two ballots, and were prohibited from casting both ballots for candidates from their own state. A deadlock for president would be decided by the House of Representatives, with one vote per state. Following that, in case of a deadlock for vice president, the Senate would decide. Also under the original system, the runner up became vice president.

This last provision caused misery for President John Adams in 1796, when his nemesis, Thomas Jefferson, became his vice president. Four years later it nearly robbed Jefferson of the presidency when his unscrupulous running mate, Aaron Burr, tried to parlay an accidental deadlock into his own election by the House. The Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, fixed all this by requiring electors to cast separate votes for president and vice president.

And there things stand, constitutionally at least. State legislatures have used their power to direct the manner of choosing electors in various ways: appointing them directly, holding elections by district, or holding statewide elections. Today, 48 states choose their presidential electors in a statewide, winner-take-all vote. Maine and Nebraska elect one elector based on each congressional district’s vote and the remaining two based on the statewide vote.

***

It is easy for Americans to forget that when we vote for president, we are really voting for electors who have pledged to support the candidate we favor. Civics education is not what it used to be. Also, perhaps, the Electoral College is a victim of its own success. Most of the time, it shapes American politics in ways that are beneficial but hard to see. Its effects become news only when a candidate and his or her political party lose a hard-fought and narrowly decided election.

So what are the beneficial effects of choosing our presidents through the Electoral College?

Under the Electoral College system, presidential elections are decentralized, taking place in the states. Although some see this as a flaw—U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren opposes the Electoral College expressly because she wants to increase federal power over elections—this decentralization has proven to be of great value.

For one thing, state boundaries serve a function analogous to that of watertight compartments on an ocean liner. Disputes over mistakes or fraud are contained within individual states. Illinois can recount its votes, for instance, without triggering a nationwide recount. This was an important factor in America’s messiest presidential election—which was not in 2000, but in 1876.

That year marked the first time a presidential candidate won the electoral vote while losing the popular vote. It was a time of organized suppression of black voters in the South, and there were fierce disputes over vote totals in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Each of those states sent Congress two sets of electoral vote totals, one favoring Republican Rutherford Hayes and the other Democrat Samuel Tilden. Just two days before Inauguration Day, Congress finished counting the votes—which included determining which votes to count—and declared Hayes the winner. Democrats proclaimed this “the fraud of the century,” and there is no way to be certain today—nor was there probably a way to be certain at the time—which candidate actually won. At the very least, the Electoral College contained these disputes within individual states so that Congress could endeavor to sort it out. And it is arguable that the Electoral College prevented a fraudulent result.

Four years later, the 1880 presidential election demonstrated another benefit of the Electoral College system: it can act to amplify the results of a presidential election. The popular vote margin that year was less than 10,000 votes—about one-tenth of one percent—yet Republican James Garfield won a resounding electoral victory, with 214 electoral votes to Democrat Winfield Hancock’s 155. There was no question who won, let alone any need for a recount. More recently, in 1992, the Electoral College boosted the legitimacy of Democrat Bill Clinton, who won with only 43 percent of the popular vote but received over 68 percent of the electoral vote.

But there is no doubt that the greatest benefit of the Electoral College is the powerful incentive it creates against regionalism. Here, the presidential elections of 1888 and 1892 are most instructive. In 1888, incumbent Democratic President Grover Cleveland lost reelection despite receiving a popular vote plurality. He won this plurality because he won by very large margins in the overwhelmingly Democratic South. He won Texas alone by 146,461 votes, for instance, whereas his national popular vote margin was only 94,530. Altogether he won in six southern states with margins greater than 30 percent, while only tiny Vermont delivered a victory percentage of that size for Republican Benjamin Harrison.

In other words, the Electoral College ensures that winning supermajorities in one region of the country is not sufficient to win the White House. After the Civil War, and especially after the end of Reconstruction, that meant that the Democratic Party had to appeal to interests outside the South to earn a majority in the Electoral College. And indeed, when Grover Cleveland ran again for president four years later in 1892, although he won by a smaller percentage of the popular vote, he won a resounding Electoral College majority by picking up New York, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and California in addition to winning the South.

Whether we see it or not today, the Electoral College continues to push parties and presidential candidates to build broad coalitions. Critics say that swing states get too much attention, leaving voters in so-called safe states feeling left out. But the legitimacy of a political party rests on all of those safe states—on places that the party has already won over, allowing it to reach farther out. In 2000, for instance, George W. Bush needed every state that he won—not just Florida—to become president. Of course, the Electoral College does put a premium on the states in which the parties are most evenly divided. But would it really be better if the path to the presidency primarily meant driving up the vote total in the deepest red or deepest blue states?

Also, swing states are the states most likely to have divided government. And if divided government is good for anything, it is accountability. So with the Electoral College system, when we do wind up with a razor-thin margin in an election, it is likely to happen in a state where both parties hold some power, rather than in a state controlled by one party.

***

Despite these benefits of the current system, opponents of the Electoral College maintain that it is unseemly for a candidate to win without receiving the most popular votes. As Hillary Clinton put it in 2000: “In a democracy, we should respect the will of the people, and to me, that means it’s time to do away with the Electoral College.” Yet similar systems prevail around the world. In parliamentary systems, including Canada, Israel, and the United Kingdom, prime ministers are elected by the legislature. This happens in Germany and India as well, which also have presidents who are elected by something similar to an electoral college. In none of these democratic systems is the national popular vote decisive.

More to the point, in our own political tradition, what matters most about every legislative body, from our state legislatures to the House of Representatives and the Senate, is which party holds the majority. That party elects the leadership and sets the agenda. In none of these representative chambers does the aggregate popular vote determine who is in charge. What matters is winning districts or states.

Nevertheless, there is a clamor of voices calling for an end to the Electoral College. Former Attorney General Eric Holder has declared it “a vestige of the past,” and Washington Governor Jay Inslee has labeled it an “archaic relic of a bygone age.” Almost as one, the current myriad of Democratic presidential hopefuls have called for abolishing the Electoral College.

Few if any of these Democrats likely realize how similar their party’s position is to what it was in the late nineteenth century, with California representing today what the South was for their forebears. The Golden State accounted for 10.4 percent of presidential votes cast in 2016, while the southern states (from South Carolina down to Florida and across to Texas) accounted for 10.6 percent of presidential votes cast in 1888. Grover Cleveland won those southern states by nearly 39 percent, while Hillary Clinton won California by 30 percent. But rather than following Cleveland’s example of building a broader national coalition that could win in the Electoral College, today’s Democrats would rather simply change the rules.

***

Anti-Electoral College amendments with bipartisan support in the 1950s and 1970s failed to receive the two-thirds votes in Congress they needed in order to be sent to the states for consideration. Likewise today, partisan amendments will not make it through Congress. Nor, if they did, could they win ratification among the states.

But there is a serious threat to the Electoral College. Until recently, it has gone mostly unnoticed, as it has made its way through various state legislatures. If it works according to its supporters’ intent, it would nullify the Electoral College by creating a de facto direct election for president.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, or NPV, takes advantage of the flexibility granted to state legislatures in the Constitution: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.” The original intent of this was to allow state legislators to determine how best to represent their state in presidential elections. The electors represent the state—not just the legislature—even though the latter has power to direct the manner of appointment. By contrast, NPV supporters argue that this power allows state legislatures to ignore their state’s voters and appoint electors based on the national popular vote. This is what the compact would require states to do.

Of course, no state would do this unilaterally, so NPV has a “trigger”: it only takes effect if adopted by enough states to control 270 electoral votes—in other words, a majority that would control the outcome of presidential elections. So far, 14 states and the District of Columbia have signed on, with a total of 189 electoral votes.

Until this year, every state that had joined NPV was heavily Democratic: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. The NPV campaign has struggled to win other Democratic states: Delaware only adopted it this year and it still has not passed in Oregon (though it may soon). Following the 2018 election, Democrats came into control of both the legislatures and the governorships in the purple states of Colorado and New Mexico, which have subsequently joined NPV.

NPV would have the same effect as abolishing the Electoral College. Fraud in one state would affect every state, and the only way to deal with it would be to give more power to the federal government. Elections that are especially close would require nationwide recounts. Candidates could win based on intense support from a narrow region or from big cities. NPV also carries its own unique risks: despite its name, the plan cannot actually create a national popular vote. Each state would still—at least for the time being—run its own elections. This means a patchwork of rules for everything from which candidates are on the ballot to how disputes are settled. NPV would also reward states with lax election laws—the higher the turnout, legal or not, the more power for that state. Finally, each NPV state would certify its own “national” vote total. But what would happen when there are charges of skullduggery? Would states really trust, with no power to verify, other state’s returns?

Uncertainty and litigation would likely follow. In fact, NPV is probably unconstitutional. For one thing, it ignores the Article I, Section 10 requirement that interstate compacts receive congressional consent. There is also the fact that the structure of the Electoral College clause of the Constitution implies there is some limit on the power of state legislatures to ignore the will of their state’s people.

One danger of all these attacks on the Electoral College is, of course, that we lose the state-by-state system designed by the Framers and its protections against regionalism and fraud. This would alter our politics in some obvious ways—shifting power toward urban centers, for example—but also in ways we cannot know in advance. Would an increase in presidents who win by small pluralities lead to a rise of splinter parties and spoiler candidates? Would fears of election fraud in places like Chicago and Broward County lead to demands for greater federal control over elections?

The more fundamental danger is that these attacks undermine the Constitution as a whole. Arguments that the Constitution is outmoded and that democracy is an end in itself are arguments that can just as easily be turned against any of the constitutional checks and balances that have preserved free government in America for well over two centuries. The measure of our fundamental law is not whether it actualizes the general will—that was the point of the French Revolution, not the American. The measure of our Constitution is whether it is effective at encouraging just, stable, and free government—government that protects the rights of its citizens.

The Electoral College is effective at doing this. We need to preserve it, and we need to help our fellow Americans understand why it matters.

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May 21, 2019

On Reparations

Filed under: Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 6:13 pm

On Reparations

Printed; 5/21/19

The recent “debate” on racial reparations based on descent from those held in slavery within the confines of these United States of America and of the Thirteen Colonies needs some historical perspective, rational thought, and some just plain common sense. At the end of this essay, will be a bibliography that, if followed, will open some eyes as to the racism and arrogant ignorance, or, maybe, the hidden agenda of those proposing these reparations.

Starting at the beginning of the thirteen colonies, not one of the original thirteen allowed slavery. Slavery was absolutely prohibited by the original charters and beliefs of the colonists. In the New England and Atlantic Colonies, religious beliefs that all are God’s creatures, caused the colonists to prohibit slavery; in the Southern Colonies, the economics of pre-cotton industrial agriculture, hemp, potash, & indigo, and the political & religious beliefs of the colonists, prohibited slavery.

Slavery was injected through the economic necessity of Mercantilism, the emerging economic philosophy of today’s American Leftist politicians and as exemplified in Venezuela, Cuba, The Peoples’ Democratic Republic of North Korea, Iran, The People’s Republic of China (PRC) & most African People’s Democratic Republics (PDR’s), as well as most Muslim countries.

In the XVII^th Century British Empire, the king had a monopoly on the slave trade. Thus, the King received a commission on each trade, a commission that was not regulated nor restricted by parliament. The money that the Crown received from each trade was uniquely his. His to do as he willed. His to spend as he would. Thus, a political necessity for going around Parliament’s hold on the purse strings. Not dissimilar to our own separation of powers, where the executive keeps trying to find ways to use resources which congress has allocated to programs with which the executive either disagrees with, or wants to use for purposes which congress has not authorized. The current disagreement over the southern border wall is only one of many that started with President Washington’s administration.

The existence of slavery in the early colonies was not only frequently challenged by Evangelicals as morally wrong, but the Scottish Reformation influenced The Founders in profound ways such that many slave owners either manumitted their slaves upon their deaths, or entered into labor contracts with slaves such that after they credited their books for their labor, this credit went against their purchase price, and they were manumitted upon equity.

The pre-1787 societal interests in slavery, with the rare exception, were fraught with guilt and moral sorrow. The open conflict between the two groups within the three colonial regions, New England, The Atlantic States, and The South, with the nascent West, defined as that region West of the Appalachian Mountains and frequently referred to as The Ohio River Valley Territories, although integral to The War of 1861, a.k.a. The American Civil War, was only one of several issues, among which the economic issue of illiberal and sectional taxation and spending was a more paramount issue.

The South paid taxes amounting to over 75% of the Federal Income. The Atlantic States and New England receiving over 75% of that income in the form of National Improvements for the encouragement of industry and transportation. This was part of Hamilton’s plan for industrial growth and Federalist supremacy, and in direct opposition to Jefferson’s Yeoman Farmer philosophy and Christian personal accountability. (DiLorenzo, Thomas J., PhD, Hamilton’s Curse, ISBN 978-0-307-38285-6) Thus, the viral infection of slavery was entered directly into the 1787 constitution and becoming one of two major killers of the original nation; the other issue being the Right to Secede, often included as one of the legalities generally called, States’ Rights.[1]

Slavery is an economic issue structured on the incorrect concept that labor is a commodity separate from the laborer. Except for the current practice in places such as India, China, and Africa, where parents can exchange the labor of their children for currency, slaves have been created almost exclusively through military conquest. Over 80% of those African slaves entered into the North Atlantic Slave Trade were taken in raids by one African tribe over another. This tribalism is still going on in Africa as shown by the slave raids of such groups as Boko Harim, Isis, and other Islamic groups. Slavery being approved of in the Qur’an. The other 20% of said slaves were taken in raids by professional slavers.

Slavery, being a mercantile concept, race, gender, religion, +/or place of origin are irrelevant to the slaver. Only the theft of labor is important. Proof of this is in the U.S. Census of 1860. Broken down by the historians, twins Ronald & Donald Kennedy of New Orleans LA, show that 58% of slaves in the U.S. were of African origin, 38% of Native American origin, working predominantly on plantations of varying sizes or in urban, both Northern and Southern, settings, 3% Chinese, predominantly owned by railroad companies or labor companies located in California selling labor to the railroads, and 1% Irish Catholic, almost exclusively in domestic positions in The North.

Of even greater interest, 32% of slaver owners were of African origins, mostly manumitted slaves. Think back to the suppression of this data when made public after Spielberg’s Amistad was released. Over 50% of slave owners owned five or fewer slaves working on smaller agricultural plots with the slaves living in the same homes as their owners, eating together, working together and attending church together. The richest slave owner in Charleston S.C. in 1861 was a Black gentleman, named Jackson, who owned 693 slaves on seven plantations, who, when it became apparent that Lincoln would be elected president, sold his holding for gold and moved Northwest to Canada. When Lincoln’s General “Butcher” Butler took military control of New Orleans in 1862, he confiscated all of the cotton that he could get his hands on as contraband, sold it at a bargain to British textile agents, and bankrupted the private citizens, amongst which the second largest land owner was a Black widow, who then moved her family Westward to Texas.

As of 1866, the actual economic benefits the American slave experience accrued either to Great Britain or the “Union.”[2]

From the 17^th Century through 1866, the economics of the Slave trade was that of a triangle. Agricultural produce from The South, was sold to Britain, where a factor purchased British goods from the proceeds for reshipment to The South. Northern and British ships shipped the goods, British and Northern Banks provided the credit and currency, and the Federal government accrued the excise taxes which went predominantly to the expansion of Northern industry, or various government canal, railroad, and industrial development schemes. Consider, John Adams died well-to-do, Thomas Jefferson died 10’s of thousands of dollars in debt[3].

As to what leftover wealth accrued to Southern States, General Sherman’s Army Reunion speech of 1866 says it all. General Sherman openly acknowledged that his army pillaged over $100,000,000.00 of wealth from along his march route, and took another $20,000,000.00 North as compensation from the Rebels. All taken from unarmed citizens under the guise of protecting and keeping The Union[4]. All taken from along his march route. How much was taken from the rest of the Confederacy as ‘retribution’ for owning slaves by ‘Union’ armies?

With the Potato Famine of the 1840’s and 1850’s in Ireland, thousands fled to the U.S. Shortly after, the unrest on the Latin Peninsula surrounding the formation of Italy as a State, more legal immigrants fled to America’s shores. Almost exclusively, they entered through New York City, with some to Boston and Philadelphia. No record of any of these, then nor after, mentions them bringing slaves with them. And, given the times of their arrivals, they could not purchase slaves after the passage of the 13^th and 14^th Amendments.

The history of outright theft of labor, slavery, in the United States, ends in 1866. Not one person held in slavery is alive today, not one!

Why is this important on this issue? Because in order to claim either reparations or restitution, one must be able to show that one was the one damaged. None of the people held in slavery are alive in order to make this claim!

Another important piece on this is that over 60% of the people living in these United States today, have nothing to do with, nor are descended from, slave owners, nor the slave owning culture of this country. And, how many of the Colored are descended from people brought here as slaves, and how many simply emigrated here? Oral histories being notoriously inaccurate or down right false, embellished for dramatic purposes as was Jason Blair’s NYTimes reporting or Alex Haley’s compilation of numerous family histories presented as his actual family history in Roots, all for personal financial gain or fame, rather than history or accurate reporting. What ‘proof’ will be used to establish damages? It certainly won’t comply with The Federal Rules of Evidence.

Consider this: if allowed to even make the claim, then I, as a descendant of Polish serfs, am permitted to sue The Russian Federation for generations of stolen labor for the time period when Russia controlled the region around Krakow, Poland; that most of those Irish descended from those born East of the Shannon can sue the British People; that Chinese can sue Manchuria & Mongolia for the decades of oppression; and on in absurdum.

The history between 1866 and 2019 regarding the theft of labor, is more along the lines of suppression and repression. Rather than get into the weeds, read Dr. Sowell’s works and that of Bruce Bartlett[5]. Basically, it is a matter of labor economics coupled to resentment over the results of The Civil War. The destruction of the Southern Economy, the loss of capital in the form of released labor, steam technology[6], excess labor due to automation, the influx of legal immigrants, limited skill sets, and the rise of federal mercantilism since 1866, all contribute to unfounded & unreasonable racism as a restriction on labor costs and availability. Note particularly, that every time there’s a labor shortage, such as that in 1917, 1941, and again in 1966, each fostered by a war economy, race as an issue is either reduced or disappears completely in the hiring process, which immediately goes to a meritocratic standard.

The likes of educated Liberals, like FDR[7], and personified by academics like Woodrow Wilson, simply made matters that were progressing nicely due to market economic factors retrogress. As former slaves and their descendants became educated and learned skills, they entered the Industrial Revolution of the late 19^th Century and became forces in both government and industry only to be forced out because of political agendas. Remember, all of those former slaves and their descendants, were fluent in English, and for the most part, were Protestants, as was the predominant population. Immigrants spoke little or no English, the Irish with a patois or accented English, and the Italians with almost no English. Former slaves were already assimilated, a condition changed over time through the Liberal Balkanization of America, and the Irish and Italian Catholics became assimilated as generations progressed, even though strong anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic sentiment survives.

In all of this, not only is who should pay to be considered, but how to calculate what compensation should be made, there is to whom should reparations be made.

Having discussed that there is no possible way to figure out to whom reparations should be made, let us look at how to calculate compensation.

Since, as noted in the first section, much money went to Great Britain, how do we assess their liability? Books were kept by most of the banks and shipping companies, as well as The Crown, and are, or their legal successors are, still in existence. Profits made from slavery by these legal entities, plus interest and allowance for inflation, can be easily calculated by computers, once the original data is collected and inputted. However, are we to include that wealth stolen by the Union Army? How do we allocate that stolen wealth? How do we calculate what they stole and destroyed? And, who has it now?

Do we subtract the costs of Affirmative Action, a program originally designed and SCOTUS approved as actual reparations to those descendants of slavery and of racism? Do we subtract Pell Grants? Again, an expense designed specifically as reparations for slavery and racism. What about, “The War on Poverty?” Again, a taxpayer expense designed specifically as reparations for slavery and racism. And, if we believe the proponents of Reparations, the White citizen-taxpayer paid for these programs and the Black citizen-victim collective received these monies. Latinos, Asians, and Native-Americans, as shown by recent lawsuits against Ivy League schools, have, allegedly and incorrectly, been excluded from these reparation programs. And, by the way, what happened to those tax dollars? Chicago has certainly not, as a city, benefitted from any of these programs. What happened to those trillions of dollars spent over the last 60 years?

A legal concept regarding this issue, is that a sum certain must be stated or at the least ascertainable. There is absolutely no way to figure out what the indeterminant victim-collective is owed, even if we could determine who the victim-collective is, for if it is to be determined by race, then, according to my 23andme results, I am to be included in the victim-collective.

Which brings us to, who IS to be included in this victim-collective and to what extent?

Recently, federal statistics by various departments,[8] although in conflict, suggest that less than 50% of those of Color currently residing in these United States, are actually descended from those held in slavery in 1865. Prior to the 1960’s Civil Rights movement, Latinos and Hispanics were considered Caucasians, and, as noted above, have never been held in slavery by citizens of these United States. How is it that these groups are being included as part of the victim-collective? Further, how is it that they were included in all of the Affirmative Action programs when there is no evidence of their having been discriminated against any worse than The Irish, Catholics, Jews, The Italians, &c.? Will these reparations proponents expand the victim-collective to include all of those who have had their labor stolen or oppressed?

The very proposal of reparations is stupid. It cannot logically be done. It defies most legal concepts of liability, damages, and remedies. It is corrupt racism and mercantilist redistribution of wealth based on narcissistic self-serving greed and moral bankruptcy.

Last question: who would implement this stupidity, and what would their cut be?

Based on The War on Poverty, The War on Drugs, Common Core, and Affirmative Action, a racial bureaucracy led by Al Sharpton[9] and Rev. Jesse Jackson, both of whom have been proven liars and racial provocateurs rather than assimilated Americans. Will they include Negan, the former mayor of New Orleans LA? Or former Gov of Illinois Blagovich?

Who will pick the bureaucracy that would implement such a program? And, how much will they keep for themselves and their bubbas?

It will just be another Chicago.

Justplainbill

Bibliography

Sowell, Thomas, PhD

Intellectuals and Race ISBN 978-0-465-05872-3

The Vision of the Anointed ISBN 978-0-465-08995-6

Discrimination and Disparities ISBN 978-1-51116-4560-8

Mason, Matthew, PhD

Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic

ISBN 978-0-8078-3049-9

Adams. J. Christian, JD

Injustice; Inside the Obama DoJ ISBN 978-1-59698-277-2

Freehling, William W., PhD

The Road to Disunion, Vol I, Secessionists at Bay 1776 – 1854

ISBN 0-19-507259-6

The Road to Disunion, Vol II, Secessionists Triumphant 1854 – 1861

ISBN 978-0-19-505815-4

Thomas, Hugh, PhD, Oxford Don

The Slave Trade; a history of the North Atlantic Slave Trade

ISBN 0-684-81063-8

Lefkowitz, Mary, PhD

Not Out of Africa ISBN 0-465-09838-X

Adams, Charles, PhD

Slavery, Secession, & Civil War ISBN 978-0-8108-5863-3

Bartlett, Bruce, JD

Wrong on Race ISBN 978-0-230-60062-1

There are numerous other works in the public domain upon which I touch upon, but as the slavery/ mercantilism issues are tangent to their focus, I have not included them. One such work is David Detzer’s, PhD, Allegiance, ISBN 978-0-15-100641-5. Dr. Detzer’s work deals with the immediate events in Washington, D.C., and Charleston S.C., leading up to the firing on Fort Sumter. Dr. Detzer comments tangentially on how city slaves, butchers, carpenters, and teamsters, were instrumental in the supplying of Fort Sumter with food and water under the supervision of the SC Militia. Although the property of plantation owners, these slaves lived in the city, on their own, operating their own businesses, and when the owner came to town, the books were audited and the owner took his predetermined share of the income.

[1] Shelby Foote’s, The Civil War; a narrative, has much more on these issues, and Cmdr. Matt Shipley’s blog, www.americanfoundingprinciples.wordpress.com has several references that include references to states’ ratification articles specifying that they were joining the union with the understanding that at anytime they could leave the union.

[2] When 1/3 of the population and governments are held in military occupation, the use of the word ‘union’ must be taken with more than just a grain of salt. For how long this military occupation lasted and its terrible and detrimental effect on The South is left for another essay. Just note the still prevalent and extensive poverty throughout the former Confederacy.

[3] Much of this had been accrued by his father-in-law, but through-out his life time, he was never able to reduce it, as plantation agriculture was not profitable for the planter. Note how George Washington went from unprofitable cotton to vegetables sold in the local markets.

[4] A reading of The Declaration of Independence and a review of various Federalist Papers essays on the Right of Man to self-governance may be of interest at this point, but only tangentially relevant to reparations. See also the writings of Thomas Paine from this time. Particularly, Common Sense and The Rights of Man.

[5] Publishing/purchases details are in the bibliography.

[6] One of the many stupidities of this war, is that slavery was dying because slave labor is so much more expensive than automation. In 1861, steam engines were being used on tractors, harvesters, railroad engines, and threshers. Slavery, as an issue for war, was disappearing. Lincoln’s use of it in The Emancipation Proclamation, is what caused so much hatred among Southerners toward the former slaves. For loads more, read Adams’ Slavery book, noted in the bibliography.

[7] FDR’s labor laws and policies provided that race could be a determination for terminating employment. Thus, in order to keep White Blue Collar and Union political support, his administration allowed employers to fire Blacks before Whites as a matter of course, merit & seniority held irrelevant.

[8] HUD, DoC(ommerce), Bureau of Labor Statistics, DoL(abor), IRS, DoJ(ustice) and a few others.

[9] From what seminary did Rev. Al graduate? Specifically, who ordained him and what was his academic record?

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May 6, 2019

Core Competencies, from John [c]

Filed under: Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 2:35 pm

[I have not verified these stats. I have not located the reference sources. However, I know from memory and reading The Wall Street Journal, that from Johnson forward, memory says that they are correct or very close to what I remember. The Reagan stats were a big news item several times throughout his tenure as prez.]

Core Competency

This is chilling! These numbers are prima facie evidence as to why every president that

we have had in our lifetime was incapable of running the country successfully. I submit

that even with 50% having been in business, it is simply not enough for our country’s

problems to be addressed with solutions that work. And here we are today, with Trump

running against a flock of RATs any one of whom would make things even worse. I

hope you are including DJT in your daily prayers, because if he fails to be President for

the next six years, we may never be the same again at any time in the future save an

armed revolution, and today, even that would be an iffy proposition.

These numbers help explain why these last eight years were disastrous for the USA. I

read the last item and then looked at Trump’s Cabinet. No wonder Washington, DC is

in a turmoil. Trump’s picks are bosses who expect their employees to work. These are

Eye Opening Numbers. This is what bothers a lot of people about Trump. He won’t

accept a can’t do attitude, or inexperienced, incompetent performance. He will get

results; it just might not be smooth or pretty.

Here are some amazing stats: Make sure you read to the bottom. An eye opener!

1. These 10 States now have more people on welfare than they do employed!

California

New Mexico

Mississippi

Alabama

Illinois

Kentucky

Ohio

New York

Maine, and

South Carolina

2. Last month, the Senate Budget Committee reports that in fiscal year 2012, between

food stamps, housing support, child care, Medicaid and other benefits, the average

U.S. Household below the poverty line received $168.00 a day in government

support. What’s the problem with that much support? Well the average household

income in America is just over $50,000, which averages out to $137.13 a day.

To put it another way, being on welfare now pays the equivalent of $30.00 an hour for

40 hour week, while the average job pays $24.00 an hour.

3. Check the last set of statistics!!

The percentage of each past president’s cabinet who had worked in the private

business sector prior to their appointment to the cabinet. You know what the private

business sector is: A real-life business not a government job.

Here are the percentages:

38% T. Roosevelt

40% Taft

52% Wilson

49% Harding

48% Coolidge

42% Hoover

50% F. D. Roosevelt

50% Truman

57% Eisenhower

30% Kennedy

47% Johnson

53% Nixon

42% Ford

32% Carter

56% Reagan

51% GH Bush

39% Clinton

55% GW Bush

8% Obama

90% Trump

This helps explain the bias, if not the incompetence, of the last administration: ONLY

8% of them have ever worked in private business!

That’s right! Only eight percent – the least, by far of the last 19 presidents! And these

people tried to tell our corporations how to run their businesses?

How could Obama, president of a major nation and society, the one with the most

successful economic system in world history, stand and talk about business when he’s

never worked for one? Or about jobs when he has never really had one? And, when

it’s the same for 92% of his senior staff and closest advisers? They spent most of their

time in academia, government, and/or non-profit jobs or as “community organizers.”

Probably a good idea to pass this on, because we’ll NEVER see these facts in the

main stream media, or from the alphabet networks.

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May 2, 2019

Chinese Prof & Harvard Colleague youtube video

Filed under: Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 2:03 pm

Worth the 90 seconds. A visiting professor from China is asked by his Harvard colleague about religion and democracy. Video is prepared by the Harvard Prof and not by Harvard, and is his personal opinion on the matter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch_p opup?v=YjntXYDPw44&sns=em

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April 1, 2019

John Adams, on Property

Filed under: Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 9:14 pm

John Adams, on Property

The Founders’ Constitution, Ch 16 doc 15

Suppose a nation, rich and poor, high and low, ten millions in number, all assembled together; not more than one or two millions will have lands, houses, or any personal property; if we take into the account the women and children, or even if we leave them out of the question a great majority of every nation is wholly destitute of property, except a small quantity of clothes, and a few trifles of other movables. Would Mr. Nedham be responsible that, if all were to be decided by a vote of the majority, the eight or nine millions who have no property, would not think of usurping over the rights of the one or two millions who have? Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty. Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of every thing be demanded, and voted. What would be the consequence of this? The idle, the vicious, the intemperate, would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend all their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them. The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If “Thou shalt not covet,” and “Thou shalt not steal,” were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable percepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.

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The Political Divide

The Ruling Class

The Faith

The Agenda: Power

Dependence Economics

Disaggregating and Dispiriting

Meddling and Apologies

The Country Class

The Classes Clash

April 14, 2020

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November 12, 2019

The Looming ‘1984’ Election

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Who Is Sovereign Here?

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November 8, 2019

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