Sunday, November 15, 2020

YOU GOT RIGHTS, FOLKS!

 Mario Savio on the operation of the machine

"Every leap of civilization was built off the back of a disposable workforce. We lost our stomach for slaves unless engineered. But I can only make so many. That barren pasture empty and salted, right here. The dead space between the stars. And this, the seat that we must change for heaven. I cannot breed them. So help me, I have tried. We need more Replicants than can ever be assembled. Millions, so we can be trillions more. We could storm Eden and retake her." 

- Niander Wallace, Blade Runner 2049


Throughout much of history, people acquired rights and responsibilities through their membership in a group – a family, indigenous nation, religion, class, community, or state. Most societies have had traditions similar to the "golden rule" of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." 


The Hindu Vedas, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, the Bible, the Quran (Koran), and the Analects of Confucius are five of the oldest written sources which address questions of people’s duties, rights, and responsibilities. In addition, the Inca and Aztec codes of conduct and justice and an Iroquois Constitution were Native American sources that existed well before the 18th century. In fact, all societies, whether in oral or written tradition, have had systems of propriety and justice as well as ways of tending to the health and welfare of their members.

Precursors of 20th Century Human Rights Documents

Documents asserting individual rights, such the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), the French Declaration on the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), and the US Constitution and Bill of Rights (1791) are the written precursors to many of today’s human rights documents. Yet many of these documents, when originally translated into policy, excluded women, people of color, and members of certain social, religious, economic, and political groups. Nevertheless, oppressed people throughout the world have drawn on the principles these documents express to support revolutions that assert the right to self-determination.

Contemporary international human rights law and the establishment of the United Nations (UN) have important historical antecedents. Efforts in the 19th century to prohibit the slave trade and to limit the horrors of war are prime examples. In 1919, countries established the International Labor Organization (ILO) to oversee treaties protecting workers with respect to their rights, including their health and safety. Concern over the protection of certain minority groups was raised by the League of Nations at the end of the First World War. However, this organization for international peace and cooperation, created by the victorious European allies, never achieved its goals. The League floundered in part because the United States refused to join.

While President Wilson didn't sign on with the League of Nations, he did sign the Federal Reserve into existence, and later lamented the creation of this debt bondage.

But do we really have rights...


Transcript

But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever,  EVER be fixed.

It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.

Because the owners, the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.

Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying,  lobbying, to get what they want.  Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: 

They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That's against their interests.

That's right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that!

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It's a big club, and you ain’t in it!  You, and I, are not in the big club.

By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you….they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you.

They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL.  And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth.

It's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.





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Or do we even need to be told that we have them? Isn't freedom a personal choice?

Plato's Allegory of the Cave


So where do these supposed rights come from? The State? The sovereignty of the Individual? Higher power?




MAJOR PHILOSOPHERS

John Locke had some interesting ideas about Natural Law...


John Locke and the romantic Jean Jacques Rousseau ideas of Individual Liberty and Natural Law seemed to  win out over the pessimism of Thomas Hobbes...

(watch video conclusion at 5:28)

And the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham who believed in the most good for the most number of people even if it competed with individual rights.

This philosophy was later adopted by corporations and morphed into something called Cost-Benefit-Analysis. This type of computing often lead to cold decisions being made for sake of what was best for the company. One example being the debacle of the Ford Pinto and rear end collisions.


Bentham's Utilitarianism has been credited with influencing Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto. 




A Republic exists to protect the Rights of a minority against the Opulence of the majority. Without these protections a democracy can quickly become a situation where two people vote for the other guy's wallet to help pay for a program he or she doesn't necessarily agree with. In his Harvard ethics classes, Sandel introduces Robert Nozick, a libertarian philosopher, who argues that individuals have the fundamental right to choose how they want to live their own lives. I own myself and thus have a right to do with myself as I please. You own yourself and have the same right. I don’t own you and you don’t own me. This gives each one of us rights not only to ourselves, but also to the fruits of our labor.


In his most famous work, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Nozick argued that income taxes are “on a par with forced labor,” because they force a “person to work n hours for another's purpose.” ... But that completely misrepresents the reality of how taxes, and especially the income tax, affect people's lives.

OTHER NOTABLE READS

Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
Philosophy of Aristotle
Liberty Defined by Ron Paul
The Republic by Plato
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Critique on Pure Reason by Emmanuel Kant
Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Since Divine Right had fallen out of favor with the people, a Democracy would have to employed, and if the Ruling Classes wanted to stay in power the minds of the masses would have to be molded.

Molded by people like Edward Bernays, the Father of Propaganda...



DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Is censorship ever justified? Can you think of some examples?
2. Are human beings born naturally good and society corrupts them or are people really only interested in survival and societal institutions correct this drive?
3. Should vaccines be mandatory? What would Jeremy Bentham have to say about it? Or John Locke?
4. What do you think about taxation? What is fair? 


I mean, do we really need governments? Max Egan makes the point that the only reason we need countries is to protect us against other countries, not their peoples, their governments.

Major Documents

Declaration of Independence

U.S. Constitution
Magna Carta
The French Declaration of the Rights of Man

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'The government breaks your legs then gives you a crutch.'  - Harry Brown

Tuesday, November 3, 2020

ELECTION 2020





CNN CITIZENSHIP QUIZ 

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/04/us/us-citizenship-quiz-trnd/index.html

Why are elections on a Tuesday?

https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2012/10/23/162484410/why-are-elections-on-tuesdays

What type of government does America have?

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/maps/forms-government-2018/#:~:text=Some%20of%20the%20different%20types,an%20oligarchy%2C%20and%20an%20autocracy.

Some Political Idioms:

https://purlandtraining.com/2018/05/23/9-essential-political-idioms-in-american-english/

What is the ELECTORAL COLLEGE?


Clause in Constitution: 

Lincoln, Adams and George W Bush: the 6 most disputed presidential elections in American history

The 2020 presidential election looks set to be one of the most contested – and divisive – in recent history. Here, historian Peter Ling looks back at other controversial elections in history, from Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860 to George W Bush’s triumph over Al Gore in 2000, and asks what we can learn…

History, Mark Twain is said to have declared, doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. The 2020 election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is shaping up to be a controversial contest, even more contentious than Trump’s 2016 Electoral College victory. What can earlier controversial elections lead us to expect this year?

1800 – Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr



The first disputed election signals the connection between controversy and partisanship. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr received the same number of Electoral College votes (73 apiece). Each state is permitted one elector for each US Senator [so always two] and one elector for each Congressman in the House [which varied according to population, giving populous states more electors]. Up until this time each elector had been allowed two votes and the vice presidency was awarded to the second-ranked candidate. The Constitution placed the decision with the House of Representatives.

It took 36 separate votes to award the presidency to Thomas Jefferson and the process deepened personal and party divisions. The ambitious Burr, who had ostensibly run for the vice-presidency, felt cheated, and blamed his loss chiefly on Alexander Hamilton (recently celebrated in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical), because Hamilton had persuaded Federalists from Maryland and Vermont to abstain, giving those states to Jefferson. Their feud culminated in a duel and Hamilton’s death in 1804.

While Jefferson used his 1801 inaugural address to call for bipartisan unity, declaring “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists”, party tensions produced both virulent press coverage and threats of secession. To reduce the likelihood of an Electoral College tie, the Twelfth Amendment was ratified in 1804 and required a separate vote for the vice-presidency. The rise of the party system and of a combined ticket of president and vice-president ultimately solved the problem.

1824 – Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams



Andrew Jackson, a war hero and a western challenger to the East Coast monopoly on presidents (all had been Virginians, apart from John Adams of Massachusetts), won both the popular vote and the most votes in the Electoral College. But the Constitution requires the president to secure an absolute majority, and in a crowded field, Jackson was opposed by John Quincy Adams (son of the second president), William H Crawford, and Henry Clay. The top three candidates faced a vote in the House, which eliminated the fourth-placed Clay, and Crawford had suffered a stroke (effectively ending his candidacy), so it was a choice of Jackson or Adams.

Given Clay’s influence as House Speaker, the result lay largely with his so-called ‘Whig’ faction, which was hostile to Jackson. When President Adams made Clay his Secretary of State, Jackson and his followers erupted with cries of a “corrupt bargain”. A favourite of Donald Trump, Jackson is seen as the first ‘populist’ presidential candidate, claiming to speak for the common man and to oppose the swamp of corruption in the nation’s capital. His defeat to Adams triggered demands for the president to be chosen by the popular vote at a time when most American states were abolishing property qualifications for voting as a relic of ‘Old World privilege’ which might corrupt the democratic Republic.

Jackson was avenged by victory over Adams in 1828 and Trump has manoeuvred to ensure that he remains on the $20 bill rather than being displaced by African-American heroine, Harriet Tubman. Ironically, Trump’s own victory in 2016 prompted calls to abolish the Electoral College.

1860 – Abraham Lincoln and John Breckinridge


Multiple candidacies and the deepening north-south divide over slavery ensured that this election was the most contentious in American history. Abraham Lincoln’s victory with just 40 per cent of the popular vote sparked the secession of first state, South Carolina, and then six further states, even before he was inaugurated. Lincoln was the standard bearer for the new Republican Party [founded in 1854] that opposed the extension of slavery into new western territories, and some southern states had responded by ensuring that he wasn’t even on the ballot; he won only northern states.

Democratic party managers chose as their nominee Stephen Douglas, who had defeated Lincoln in the 1858 Senate race in Illinois. But southern Democrats nominated Vice-President John Breckinridge to defend their interests and he, along with Senator John Bell of Tennessee, who ran for a newly formed Constitutional Union Party, siphoned off southern support. As a result, despite having the second-highest popular vote total, Douglas won just the border state of Missouri.

Believing Republican victory threatened slavery, the south was swept by secessionist fever, and the drift to war began. This remains the nightmare scenario that if sizable portions of the electorate refuse to accept the result in 2020, violence will ensue. 

1876 – Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B Hayes



In the aftermath of the Civil War, the defeated south faced a Republican-dominated federal government, which made attempts to reconstruct the southern states politically and foster northern-style economic development. By 1876, such efforts had faltered due to divisions between moderates and radicals and intense local white southern resistance. The Republican governments, at both state and national levels, had been tainted by scandals, often involving corrupt deals between politicians and businessmen, and a deep economic depression after 1873 had shaken the nation. This prompted voters in 1874 to elect a Democratic majority in the House for the first time since the war.

Samuel Tilden of New York as the Democratic nominee benefitted in 1876, comfortably winning the popular vote and leading in the Electoral College. Controversy surrounding election results in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, and over the selection of one of Oregon’s electors, denied Tilden the one vote he needed for an Electoral College victory. With the College unable to meet due to the absence of electors from four states and no resolution in sight as Congress returned in early 1877, political leaders solved this constitutional crisis by forming a bipartisan commission.

Behind the scenes, southern leaders reached a deal with supporters of the Republican candidate Rutherford B Hayes. They awarded the votes of the three contested states to Hayes, carrying him to victory, and Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops still garrisoned in former Confederate states to cow the ‘rebels’ and thereby restore southern “self-government”. This so-called ‘Compromise of 1877’ calmed fears of a second civil war, but only at the expense of allowing southern state governments to reverse the incomplete efforts to protect the rights of the formerly enslaved.

Black southerners paid a heavy price. They had been the Republican core vote in the south and in the midst of a wave of lynching, aimed at terrorising the black population, white southern elites introduced rules like literacy tests and poll tax requirements for voting that shrank the electorate in ways that excluded African-Americans. Beginning in the cities and extending from transport to the rest of public life, all-white Democratic governments passed segregation laws to protect and proclaim white supremacy.

1960 – John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon



Despite his posthumous reputation, John F Kennedy was not the clear choice of most Americans when he ran against Richard Nixon in 1960. He got 49.9 per cent of the popular vote compared to Nixon’s 49.8 per cent. Nixon carried more states, but with fewer Electoral College votes.

Crucial to Kennedy’s victory were the two states of Illinois and Texas. In Illinois, there were strong suggestions that the Chicago Democratic machine had used its proven ability to swing the state his way. The rumours were that Kennedy’s millionaire father, Joseph, had made payments to Mafia-linked bosses to guarantee the outcome. In Texas, Kennedy’s choice of its powerful senator Lyndon Johnson ensured that the vote and the count was carefully managed in Kennedy’s favour, especially in counties where Hispanic and African-American voting was encouraged or discouraged by local leaders.

Urged to contest the result, Nixon decided not to do so; ostensibly to protect the nation at a time of growing tensions with the USSR, but equally because he knew that in Illinois there had been suspect pro-Republican actions by voting officials.

Most would see Trump and JFK as a study in contrast, but both benefitted from family wealth to fund their campaigns and both adapted to changing media formats (televised debates in Kennedy’s case and ‘reality TV’ and targeted social media messaging in the case of Trump).

2000 – George W Bush and Al Gore






In 2000, with only Florida’s results pending, the Electoral College tally gave Democrat Al Gore 267 votes and Republican George W Bush 246 votes; so, whoever took Florida’s 25 votes had won. But the Florida race was extremely close and voting problems had been reported. As legal challenges and recounts continued for weeks, two technical issues gained notoriety. Some punch-card ballot machines had not produced cleanly punched cards, leaving “hanging chads” that had to be inspected to decide which candidate a voter had chosen. The process of voting correctly had also been complicated by locally designed ballots, one of which – the so-called ‘butterfly’ – had the list of potential candidates printed across two pages with the punch holes in the centre.

Headed by Bush’s brother, Jeb, Florida’s state government called the result for Bush on 26 November by a margin of just 537 votes. Unsurprisingly, legal challenges demanding a recount in selected counties continued until finally, on 12 December, the US Supreme Court in Bush Gore ruled that recounting must stop, and effectively made Bush president.

There were continuing suspicions that the result was a product of voter suppression [a term used to describe a variety of measures that make registering to vote and voting more complicated] in minority districts and partisan manipulation. For example, in Republican-controlled counties there were strong suggestions that absentee ballots that favoured Bush had been treated differently from those that favoured Gore. Despite this, Gore conceded. Arguably, the country only reunited under Bush after the 9/11 attacks.


Trump’s 2016 victory, secured by winning key Electoral College states like Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, by a barely 2 per cent margin, was partly attributed to a social media messaging campaign that galvanised his core supporters and deterred potential Clinton voters. The House Intelligence Committee has now confirmed that the Russian government systematically interfered in the election in ways that bolstered this messaging campaign as a way of inflaming pre-existing social divisions.




This recent history has set the tone for the 2020 campaign, with Trump deriding his critics as sore losers who have never accepted his victory and warning his supporters that large-scale postal voting – in response to the Coronavirus pandemic – will enable his opponent to steal the White House. In Pennsylvania, Republican election officials have declared that any ballot that is not placed in its internal envelope before being inserted in the return envelope – a so-called ‘naked ballot’ – will be discounted. We must wait and see if naked ballots are the next “hanging chad”, or whether 2020 rhymes with other past disputes; either way, it will certainly make history.

Written by Peter Ling, emeritus professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham




Possible outcomes of 2020 election

https://themadtruther.com/2020/09/18/democrats-assemble-massive-army-of-attorneys-ready-to-execute-red-mirage/

https://www.google.com/search?q=best+political+cartoons&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS808US808&oq=BEST+POLITICAL+CARTOONS&aqs=chrome.0.0i457j0l7.8737j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

ASSIGNMENT: Try your hand at POLITICAL cartooning...