 
### BOOGEYMAN  
A Great American Witch Hunt

by  
David Dennison

Smashwords Edition
Published on Smashwords by:  
David Dennison

Boogeyman  
A Great American Witch Hunt  
Copyright 2019 by David Dennison

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Smashwords Edition License Notes  
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### Other Books by this Author

The novel _On Fire_ by Thomas Anderson
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. —George Orwell

The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking. —Martin Heidegger

If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed. —Thomas Jefferson

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. —Theodore Roethke

One has a moral obligation to disobey unjust laws. An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law. —Martin Luther King

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. —MLK and Theodore Parker

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. —Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

You have to be taught to hate and fear. You have to be carefully taught. —South Pacific, Oscar Hammerstein

### To the Staff, Aramark group, and Trustees  
of the KCCC
A Note on Publication

STUCK IN AMERICA  
i.e. Always Have a Dream  
Fortune Cookie Say

This book has chased about like a bear careening madly in the woods.

It was sent to over a hundred book agents. A few sent back encouraging messages, even advice, and for those I will be forever appreciative.

The future may be about talking cars and fake hamburgers, but it will also be about globalization. A major contribution to globalization is the way that information can now flow instantly all over the planet, whether competitors like it or not, whether dictators like it or not. This is known as disintermediation. It's also known as cutting out the middle man. It has made man's ideas easily the most valuable currency on the planet. It has made man's ideas more immediate and powerful than ever in man's history. And it will inevitably and forever transform the world we are now living in.

Take travel for instance. Used to be you had to have a travel agent help you book your vacations abroad, mostly to mediate between you and the airline schedules. The schedules were complex and published separately by each airline. Hotel information was not readily available either. Typically, you had to call around or get information compiled by the hotel industry and sent only to travel agents. You needed an agent to figure your trip out. But with the internet, all that nonsense quickly became obsolete. Today everybody can easily book their own flights and hotels using a wide variety of web sites designed specifically for that purpose. Ordinary travel agents have nearly disappeared.

Retail and real estate are just two other common industries that have been similarly transformed. Instead, we have Amazon replacing most brick and mortar retail chains. In housing sales, the 6 or 7 percent fixed realtor fee is slowly disappearing as the stranglehold of the national Multiple Listing Service (the source of real estate sales information) is being eroded by other players. New and used car sales are moving away from car lots to direct online purchasing as fast as they can.

All this is because the cost of creating, holding and dispersing information to the consuming public has been reduced in virtually every industry to nearly zero by the internet. Consumers everywhere have benefited. That's globalization. It is, in short, removing the cost of information, which previously served as a kind of transactional tax or friction in the typical transaction, to almost nothing. Organizations like Amazon, which have been capable of successfully implementing this principle, are now the most important economic actors on the planet. Of course, in the case of Amazon paying no federal income tax also helped.

Book agents are no different, but the American and international publishing industry remains to this day a kind of fortress, its battlements hard to scale and storm. Today there are only five major publishers left in this highly consolidated industry, all of them located in New York City. None of them will accept unsolicited manuscripts to evaluate for publication anymore. Once upon a time they did, but eventually they simply lost the numbers battle. A typical book agent today gets as many as 10,000 unsolicited manuscripts or book proposals every single month. The publishers will only accept submissions by known book agents, leaving it up to agents to cull the herd for them. Further consolidation of the industry has taken place in the meantime, resulting in greater and greater corporate ownership and less and less interest in taking chances with unknown writers and controversial subjects. The agents have come to reflect these tastes and many would rather tell existing writers what to write than bother to seek out anything new or different from others.

In effect, the publishing industry has come to be affected, some would say infected, with a kind of tribalism, a consensus on what sells and what doesn't, a concept that book agents have neatly placed in a box tied with a very predictable looking bow. This is not their fault. The industry, like any industry, is in many ways like a living organism. It eventually tends toward entropy, loses energy and falls with rapidly increasing speed toward its demise. Take the creativity out of man's most creative enterprise, the recording of human thought, and what are you left with? A vacuum of course. Witness book sales by the big five that have trended downward in recent years. Non-fiction books suffer the most. They are now dominated by celebrity, whether of the Hollywood kind or the kind minted by making frequent appearances on network television news shows. PhD's still stand a chance, if they can dumb down their work sufficiently for public consumption. Many can't. Histories prevail.

In contrast, E-publishing, while still very much in its infancy, especially as it regards individual authors publishing their works directly online, is showing promise. The trend seems to be aided by the increasingly sophisticated world of word processing, one which automatically corrects the work of even the most spelling and grammatically challenged of authors.

Thinking never had it so good. Subjects considered controversial now stand a better chance of getting a public hearing, though it remains to be seen how controversial democracy can really get. Or how prurient some may consider the exercise of free speech and the First Amendment in the face of virtually unregulated government censorship. Or how easily we can convince ourselves that our views are right in the face of every evidence to the contrary. In the face of these existential challenges to our future, it seems like a good idea to consult the wisdom of the past, even the long ago past. The following seems to apply.

"What is good Phaedrus and what is not good, need we ask anyone to tell us these things?" —Plato, _The Phaedrus_ , 360 B.C.E.

Good advice I think, especially for a book agent.

### CONTENTS

Chapter 1: American Politics, the Short Course, aka The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

Introduction

Me Generation

The Black Box Phenomenon in Governing

Professionalism

Role of Current American Politics

1) Nationalism, Populism, and Protectionism

2) Nativism

3) Too Much Money in Politics, Citizens United

4) Extreme Gerrymandering

5) Third party political pressure groups

6) Race, Religion and Education Matter

7) Anti-Establishmentarianism or Thumb in the Eye

The Trumpocalypse of Tribalism and Authoritarianism

A State of Mind

Trumpian Tribalism

The Modern American Political Pattern Health Care as example)

Religion's High-Water Mark.

Chapter 2: What Kind of World Do You Want? Lose the Earthquakes, Keep the Faults

Chapter 3: Economics 101, or Let Them Eat Cake

Raising the US Top Marginal Tax Rate

The International Poverty Line (IPL) and the Gini Coefficient

Wealth Inequality in the World and US

Rising Costs and Debt for Housing, Education, Health Care

Free Trade, Free Willy!

Chapter 4: Top Secret: The Blind Leading the Blind

Blind Ambition

I Spy, They Give Merit Badges Don't They?

No Such Agency, the NSA

A Prelude to Orwell's 1984?

The Forever War

Chapter 5: It Happened One Night, or While I was Sleeping

Chris Hanson

Happy Town

Austin Powers

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

Onanism

The Puzzle Palace

Chapter 6: Censorship, aka Sex, Lies and Video-tapped

A State of Nature

The Fall and Shame

Literary Censorship

The Abuses of the American Plan

War Censorship, the Sedition and Espionage Acts 1917-1918

The Life and Death of Free Music—The MP3, RIAA and FBI

Censorship in the Movies—The MPAA

Modern Censorship/Regulation of Adult Materials and Uses

Internet Privacy

Ripley's Believe It or Not

Junk Science

The Breakdown, Foreign and Domestic

Sexting

The Catholic Church

Trafficking

Chapter 7: Last Call: Heaven Can Wait

The War on Normal People

The Second Progressive Era, Globalization, Gender Equality

Babies in Cages

Clean Up on Aisle 5

Take Out

Chapter 8: The List, or I Know What You Did Last Summer

Chapter 9: American Constitutional Reform: Tempus Fugit but Hopefully Not for our Democracy

Appendix: Chapter 10: A Prairie State of Mindlessness

Perfectly Dysfunctional Democracy

End Notes
Chapter 1  
AMERICAN POLITICS, THE SHORT COURSE  
aka The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

I'm old (or older), it's a Saturday evening and I'm working in my den. I have imagined this moment since I was a college kid on summer break, driving a Yahoo ride mower around my town's High School athletic fields. There was little to occupy my mind on those laid-back days. I baked in the sun and wondered about what I was going to do with my life. At the time I was waiting, like all kids do, for real life to start.

I had a sense of outrage, like everyone else at the time, over the Vietnam War and Watergate. I hoped that now, with those events in the rear-view mirror, America would soon lead the world in making social progress toward realizing true equal opportunity for all its citizens.
Introduction

We live in a time when much of life is knowable, or at least understandable. We can easily turn to whatever information sources we need make it through our days, Usually on the internet. We have even come to take this relatively new aspect of our lives for granted.

But we live sheltered lives, surrounded by the families, communities, schools and universities that dominate our early life, later by the certifications and licenses that will define our work and professional careers, later still by the complex interactions that make up daily existence between ourselves, our work groups, and the organizations that make up our society. We do all this within our narrow lanes, our chosen wheelhouses, our little areas of expertise. No one is Leonardo Da Vinci, a renaissance man and genius of his time, capable of understanding much of the known world. We can't because we have entered the age of specialization, segmentation, bifurcation, spindling and mutilating of human knowledge and experience that now goes on to an unprecedented degree in giant sophisticated, modern economic engines formed as nations, made up of hundreds of millions (if not billions) of human beings.

We live in an age where much is knowable but in which few of us seem to know very much. This is frustrating. How can we understand how great societies work and should work for the benefit of all of mankind when we can only perceive our own small part of the world with any real clarity of understanding? Is life meant to be lived looking through a straw at the world around us rather than be tossed off our feet at the avalanche of social and political concerns that come at us every day. Surely the world at large is something that we citizens should know something about if we are to be effective participants in the democratic process that is our birthright in this country.

The answer is that very few people have time to concern themselves with such grandiose and universal questions in the first place. Sure, we were all teenagers once, undergoing teenage angst. We wondered at what a crazy world this is. We wondered how on earth were we ever going to find our places in the mayhem. We can, however, all remember the excitement we felt when we started out to survey future prospects for our lives. We were all Jeff Spicolis (Sean Penn) in **Fast Times at Ridgemont High** , too sure of ourselves, young turks and smart asses that we were. We knew everything that was important to know about the world at that age. The problem was that it was nowhere near enough. The excitement lies in the certainty that, while we all wanted to succeed in spectacular fashion, we were all almost certain to fail, at least at first.

Instead, as we developed, we learned to surf life, concentrating on taking the next wave, whatever that was. We learned that we can pick and choose our waves and our way through life. We took what we needed from the great mystical ocean of life and left the rest. The rest it turns out there is, simply, no time for.

The result is that we live in a society that is defined in both political and economic terms by things like geography, ancestry, education, work, family, friends, community, schools and government. Ordinary life.

In the U.S. in particular living this way has a downside in that we tend to live in rather closed circles. First of all, in America we live in communities where we can afford to live. This limits our community circles to others that are like ourselves in terms of income and education, and dramatically reduces our exposure to those who are not like us. There are many types of communities, urban and rural, suburban and inner city, and in a lot of ways they determine how we live. Suburban areas are the most highly differentiated. There are suburbs representing virtually every income level from low to high income in most big city urban areas. The school districts of each suburb are just as diverse. They compose mini-cultural environments of their own. It is a testament to American diversity that the result of America's education system is far from boring sameness. Instead, there are amazing educational attainments being achieved at the high end balanced off by barely adequate education being provided at the low end.

Stultifying educational failure is most often reserved in the American system for inner city schools, which are well known as expensive to run and difficult to manage because of their large size and inevitable bureaucratization. The range of different languages and the existence of abject poverty that inner city schools deal with would be daunting for any educational system, but inner-city systems suffer these problems in addition because of their great size. Their size produces an inherent fiscal need for bureaucratic control. The need for control of a large organization imposes additional costs on decision making, which decision making becomes inherently limited by the need to impose fair standards applied equally across a large number of schools. It becomes too costly to manage a wide range of creative and progressive teaching methods for instance, and the result is education that is at its best bland, at its worst inadequate.

We can scale the problem up to look at all of the American economy the same way. Two-thirds of Americans work in organizations with over 100 workers, which therefore might be considered large and highly differentiated in terms of workforce. The American workforce is, in other words, complex. Urban areas provide the means for most employment to be accessible on a daily basis across the urban area, wherever the employee may choose to live. Americans are segregated therefore by where they live and where they hang their hats at night, not by where they work. Employment laws and protections have not permitted open discrimination and segregation of workplaces.

The result is that Americans sort themselves into classes by their choice of housing and the educational system (School District) that is tied to that housing. It is open segregation that the Desegregation Movement of the 1960's and 70's never adequately addressed or really ever even changed. Milwaukee, the most segregated City in the country, is, if anything, more segregated now than it was then. The Desegregation Movement only accelerated suburbanization, which resulted in the most racially segregated society on the planet. Over half of all Americans, the new post war majority, ended up voting on the racialization of American politics by using their feet to buy themselves into upscale suburban America and out of rural and inner-city poor America. Choosing your geography became the most political and tribal of American acts, and has defined the American political landscape as essentially geographic, racial and tribal ever since.

New standards of human conduct come every day to our workplaces and we learn and adjust because making a living has come to require it, which is a powerful inducement. Moreover, if as an individual we don't get the message right away, we soon do. Our work performances tend to follow us through our careers, and how we screwed up in one place is often well known in our next place of work. Catching on quickly to how all this works rapidly becomes a matter of pure career survival.

Our ability to adapt like this as a species is inherent, ingrained by sixty thousand years as members of a small group of hunter gatherers confined to the 5 land continents of an Ocean World, and the ten thousand years after that, since the Agricultural Revolution, largely spent in small communities, often on the borders of these enormous food filled seas. This has been more than long enough for these social characteristics to be hard wired into our genetic material. We have therefore developed genes that influence our behavior. Many of them continue to aide us to this day in being successful in our work and in our personal lives. Unfortunately, we still don't know enough about them yet to understand the details of how they work within specific individuals.

On a macro scale however, there is every reason to believe that genes play a huge part in how we act as political tribes, the basis for the identity politics of our time. It is the basis for how easily we close our eyes to the fate of others. And it is similarly the basis for how easily people refuse to believe what is otherwise abundantly true, only because they see it as a form of politics with which they disagree. We complain about how insular we have become, about why we live in political echo chambers of our own making, how we casually dismiss science, fact and truth. We are amazed when entire societies turn their backs on and actively persecute The Others, the chosen scapegoats of their times.

We wonder how this can happen and how it can be in a modern, educated society. What, we wonder, can create such callousness? What makes otherwise rational, otherwise good people behave irrationally? Is it because in our tribal days our very lives depended on the group, the tribe, for existence, and that we were forced to override every bit of reason to remain a member? Our survival depended on it. It became the prime directive and the first order of every day in the tribe, not just for thousands of years and hundreds of generations, but for _sixty thousand years_ _and thousands of generations_ , easily long enough for the tendency to become ingrained in the very core of human behavior. This is not the end of the story however.

You may have bought this book, or perhaps you checked it out of a library. Maybe you borrowed it from a friend. Maybe you found it as an e-book online somewhere. Perhaps you came across it as a lonely file floating lost in the vastness of the web. In any case, let's hope that you are reading it in the hope that it will soon prove to be a useful, informative read. One thing is certain. By getting this far, you have somehow managed to see your way through the noise and clatter of a modern world rife with lurid headlines, intentional falsehoods, unsupported opinions and mind-numbing ridiculousness to something like what is presumed to be a kind of reason and, therefore, hope. That is a considerable accomplishment.

While America remains a bastion of freedom and democracy to the world, we have to acknowledge that going into the future this may not always be so. In other words, it is entirely possible that our country could change and become much less free and much less democratic than it is at the present time. Indeed, there are those who argue that this is already the case. And at least in some ways, they may be right.

The author's background is in public policy, administration, finance, law, economics and urban planning. _Public policy may be defined as bringing the rigors of scientific thought to the political and social affairs of men_. The writer believes in the importance of an informed electorate for a democratic society to function and thrive, as well as the importance of community in our individual ability to lead successful and fulfilled lives. He does not think of either of these ideas as liberal or socialist or elitist, or really as political. Nor does he think of these ideas as particularly profound. In his way of thinking, these are principles that are necessary for the existence of any modern civil society.

Me Generation

Just to be upfront about it, the author may be unduly critical of the role his generation has played in making this a _Me Generation_ era. There was a time when the baby boomers were the generation of resistance to the Vietnam War and Nixon's rigid views toward crime and the youth culture that opposed him. Instead, being led by the whipped-up fears of generations of increasingly craven politicians, the boomers have engineered the greatest security state the world has ever seen. It is not a police state but it does have the largest prison system in the world, which is something one would ordinarily associate with police states. These are not accomplishment to be proud of in the author's view.

The rise of the security state will in the long term have dangerously corrosive effects on our democracy, just as it once did in Eastern Europe. It is intended to target foreign adversaries, but it targets everyone, foreign friends and domestic contacts alike. It sweeps with impunity across the spectrum of modern communications, disturbing everything in its wake. No one is really immune. As former residents of the Eastern bloc can tell you, if the government can target anyone, they can target everyone. A presumption of innocence becomes an increasingly tenuous thing in an age of total surveillance.

Since 1980 the rate of incarceration in America has shot upward in the face of a huge prison building boom. We are now the world's leading incarcerator in the world, having peaked in 2008 at 24.7% of the planet's incarcerations. With so many millions (about 70 million to be more exact) of Americans now classified as felons by the criminal justice system, one would think that to be a felon would have lost much of its stigma. It hasn't. Discrimination against felons in employment and housing is widespread, contributing greatly to a new American underclass which itself has become a significant source of fiscal drag on the U.S. economy.

Aside from shattering these world records, the Me Generation ushered in a period of unprecedented individual selfishness, accompanied by extraordinary financial and political ignorance. What in the 1960's was assumed to be a generation focused on bringing about liberal political, economic, and social change not only in this country but around the world, became instead a generation focused entirely on the introspective self, in other words: Me. It could just as well have been called the Me First Generation, a group convinced that they were entitled to live better lives than their parents. Thinking they were so entitled, partly because they were more educated then their forebears, they fought for nothing that was not in their individual best interest, and quite often not even for that.

They were identified with The Counterculture, with free love, the Great Society, voting rights, equal rights, and feminism at the time. They championed Peace and Love and Woodstock and were brought together by being fervently anti-Vietnam War. The demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of protestors in Washington D.C. and other major U.S. cities gave the cause legitimacy, reinforced by trenchant analysis of how the War had gone wrong by respected authors such as David Halberstam in his 1972 book _The Best and the Brightest_ **.** "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" became the cry of many of those demonstrating against the War.

The on-campus protests after the Cambodian incursion ratcheted up the pressure on Nixon to new heights, as did the deaths of students at Kent State University at the hands of the Ohio National Guard. Public opinion turned against the War as early as the Tet offensive, when the North Korean Army attacked the South in force, but the Nixon Administration was very slow to recognize defeat.[1] Nixon never really did, but was instead thrown out of office by Watergate. Because Watergate came right on the heels of the war, the Republican Party as a whole largely escaped major responsibility for the conduct of the war and were not turned out of office _en masse_.

But in many cases, the activists of the Vietnam War generation were a people apart, the affluent sons and daughters of the white upper middle class. They did not represent those who were being drafted in large numbers, those largely of lower income and those of color. Much like the older World War II generation, the blue-collar Vietnam War generation possessed substantial latent bigotry, nativism, xenophobia, and misogyny coming out of the period of the 1950's and 60's. This group is now the mostly older, white, rural, non-college educated lower middle class. They have come to represent a stumbling block to the progress of _the_ nation that was leading _the_ world toward liberal democracy, globalization, economic opportunity, individual equality, and income equality.

Make no mistake. America is still a great nation, with a proud history and record of achievement. But the Me Generation let us down. Bruce Cannon Gibney goes a step further in his book, _A Generation of Sociopaths, How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America_ , stating that it has been a concerted effort by the Baby Boomer generation to push off the bill for today onto the generations of tomorrow, and that the solution is to increase taxes generally across the board to address the long deferred maintenance of our economy, with special emphasis on assessing the Boomers.[2]

The U.S. has fallen far behind international norms when it comes to national infrastructure such as highways and dealing with traffic congestion. Public transportation in general has suffered, especially affecting central cities. High speed rail, airport design and efficiency, and freight rail, port and air have all suffered. All of these modes of transport also require serious consideration being given to their security, from ground installations to command and control systems. A simple trip to Asia, especially China, quickly reveals how far behind we have fallen against the international standards being adopted by our principle competitors. But this is nothing compared to how far behind world norms we have lapsed in terms of the quality of health care and education that we make available to our citizens in this country.

In addition, the baby boom generation has since Reagan brought about the most unequal distribution of wealth in this country since the Great Depression and the Gilded Age of the 1870's Robber Barons. This was a movement by tax cut and spend Republicans to bring about a massive intergenerational transfer of wealth using high Federal debt and low taxes. Government policies during this time gave rise to a bifurcated, highly fragmented, and financially opaque health care sector that doubled in cost, damaging the international competitiveness of the nation and undermining its economic growth. The nation withdrew its support of higher education and permitted college costs to rise precipitously, curtailing upward mobility and further damaging economic growth. The country expanded its military bases and operations into virtually every nation on earth and entered into ill-advised foreign wars that cost trillions, further weakening the United States. All of these policies led to the weakening of the country's middle class, faced with stagnating real incomes for over 30 years, while health care and higher education costs soared, actually diminishing real incomes for those in the middle of the income spectrum.

In his book _Against Democracy_ , Georgetown Professor Jason Brennan uses philosophy, political science and economics to call into question the effectiveness of democracy as a means of governance of a large and diverse nation. He argues that voters are largely irrational, tribalistic, and that they make political decisions based on established biases because it feels good to reinforce already held beliefs, however demonstrably wrong they may be. He goes on to state that people who spend the most time on politics are the people who spend the most time in the echo chambers of modern communications, where of course television and cable news dominate, but also increasingly in select quadrants online. Here they are comfortable receiving affirmation of their long-held beliefs, whether factually or otherwise, and their thinking is not challenged.

Neurological studies indicate that group identity can produce physical sensations of satisfaction. Seeing group members do well activates the brain's reward centers. When group members of an out group do poorly the same reward centers respond. Responses are heightened when the out group is feared or envied.[3]

In contrast to a widespread enfranchisement of such ill-informed voters, Brennan explicitly favors _epistocracy_ or rule by the knowledgeable. In his view, the only effective way to govern is to have only the educated and informed vote. In some ways this harkens back to the original Constitution of the United States, which gave the franchise only to landed males. In other words, the Framers were agreed that only property owners would be sufficiently wise and knowledgeable that they could intelligently and responsibly vote for elected officials or on important plebiscites.

Brennan describes three basic classes of voters. Hooligans are those voters who are committed to their beliefs and follow the party they identify with slavishly. Hobbits are kind of the opposite of Hooligans, they have only loose associations with the contending sides in politics and can be easily swayed this way or that depending on the occasion and their whims. Many hobbits do not vote us they do not perceive much value in doing so. Finally, there are the Vulcans, the educated class who follow politics and are genuinely knowledgeable.

In Brennan's view of the electorate, there are far fewer Vulcans in society than there are Hooligans and Hobbits. It may be useful to think of Hooligans and Hobbits as being in roughly equal number, say forty percent each, and Vulcans as perhaps twenty percent or fewer in number. In other words, the truly informed tends to make up far fewer than the majority in any society with universal suffrage, with the result that they cannot rule, however much they may deserve to. Which is why Brennan argues that only an epistocracy, rule by the knowledgeable, can overcome the numerous fatal defects of a democratic system. He documents these defects at length.[4] The author identifies as a Vulcan and presupposes that anyone enlightened enough to read his book almost certainly would have to be a Vulcan. Get out your Spock ears!

When it comes to politics, people believe whatever they want to believe. How often have you heard this? It's axiomatic. It's a free country and therefore you are entitled to believe whatever you want. Other people can say you are stupid and ignorant, foolish or naive, but you still have the right to believe what you want to believe. Just like religion, right? In other words, you have a constitutional right to be as dumb ass as you want and to hell with everybody else, as long as what you believe doesn't have the effect of harming someone else. Right? Yes, but usually we are not so extreme about it. In fact, usually we settle on a set of beliefs that have been comfortably passed down to us by our family.

Political scientists of course have come to study this phenomenon quite a bit. One of the things they have noticed is that politics becomes much easier to understand when taking into account the role that voter identity has on our election system. In the age of micro targeting, small slices of registered voters can be identified to mine specific issues. Once discovered, these groups of voters can be exploited using their commonly held beliefs. They can be swayed to affect voter behavior and the outcome of elections. As a result, formerly unified voter blocks can be cleaved by issues that are well known to be particularly divisive. This cleaving of voter blocks has permitted the identification and targeting of select groups of voters in new and sometimes surprising ways for new and sometimes surprising purposes.

This is defining voters by a group's set of political positions or beliefs, which then becomes a form of group identity. People form their individual identities while growing up in groups, absorbing the political views of those around them. They are primarily influenced by family and friends, ethnic group and religion, school and community.

In _Democracy for Realists_ authors Achen and Bartels discuss the characteristics which define most voters, such as that most voters know nothing about issues and usually vote based on the identity of whatever group they hail from. Thus, they vote primarily based on whatever they are told by the family, party, religion or ethnic group they most identify with. _Whatever they are told._ It is worthwhile noting that this is especially relevant in our age, when much of what people are told in a political campaign may in fact be highly untruthful. When passing on their political beliefs, people are rarely encumbered by concerns about bias, bigotry, racism, fairness, or truthfulness. People should be expected not to care. They will accept whatever is represented to them by the group they most identify with, without regard to fact or the possible contradictions of reality.[5]

I liken this to saying that the average voter, because he is an identity voter, couldn't find the facts or truth in a political campaign with "two hands and a flashlight"[6], which is a reference to a speech in the 1996 film _The American President_ , written by Aaron Sorkin, starring Michael Douglas. In the film Douglas, the President, argues with his top advisor, played by Michael J. Fox, about the importance of leadership. Fox argues that the voters will go anywhere they have to in order to find true leadership, even to a mirage, which, having come upon it only to discover that it is a mirage, will then, out of desperation, drink the sand. The President responds to this by saying that the voters drink the sand not because they can't find leadership, but because they don't know the difference (between true and false leadership).

In other words, voters respond to politics as they have been taught to since they were young. They favor a particular position or policy not because they know anything about it, but because they heard it from the family, friends, party, religion, or ethnic group with which they identify. They spend their political lives being comforted by the old associations they developed in their formative years. Why? Because they feel good. They are shared, reaffirmed and reinforced by all the individuals and forces which surround and nurture them. These accepted political beliefs do not form negative associations or contradictions in minds that are already made up. They do not challenge or require thought. They do not require making painful decisions or exploring complex problems. They do not generally spur one to action or threaten any other long held belief. They are unchallenged and unchallengeable in the voter's mind. To have them challenged would be to call into question the very identity of an individual, himself or herself, and that, of course, would be intolerable.

One of the ways in which this _confirmation bias, or motivated reasoning_ **,** is measured scientifically is by brain scan. Studies using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) conducted at Emory University, University of South Carolina and USC have challenged individuals on their personally held political beliefs and found that the parts of the brain that respond are not the thinking part of the cerebral cortex but rather other parts which tend to govern emotions, including those emotions which govern existential threats.[7]

In other words, we are hard wired to interpret challenges to our political beliefs as existential threats, at least to some degree. We will go to just about any length to justify our beliefs in the face of counterevidence to the contrary, but usually this takes the form of denying the legitimacy of the source of any counterevidence with which we are presented. A threat to one's beliefs is usually followed by an attack on those who threaten those beliefs, a common practice that has become all too familiar in our modern political discourse. It is also the reason that most political discussions seem to have such easily recognizable patterns, and why most people quickly grow bored with them, tuning them out.

However, when political discussions tend to reinforce already held beliefs, Viola! Nirvana is found and the political points score home with us, reinforcing our long-held beliefs and making us feel good. Internet and cable news channels thrive on such viewer identification and the insatiable demand we all have for having our egos stroked. They are also the principal propaganda agents for the respective parties they have come to represent, spreading falsehoods, distortions, and outright lies on occasion. All of this is gladly incorporated into the world views of their ratings generators, i.e. their viewers, in virtually self-perpetuating cycles of inanity.

The fact is that these networks thrive on their cozy relationships to the leaders they cover. These leaders are encouraged to keep appearing on their networks to generate further ratings and ad dollars to the networks. This further corrupts the media system, whose rights belong to the public they are intended to serve, and whose public they are intended to serve with fairness. The current corrupt system lays bare the media hypocrisy that they are in any way objective in how they cover politics. That television remains the king of communication on matters of politics and civic affairs in virtually every country in the world shows its importance and why television is always the first target for takeover by every non-democratic state. Television, with its immediacy and ubiquity, is the most important means in any modern society for controlling information provided to the public. It has also therefore become the most important means for controlling the public itself.

**Identity Politics** has become so powerful in America that it seems that even when one party takes a position, the other party automatically has to take the opposite position. This is as if the Republicans took a look at the pro-environmental policies of the Democratic Party and just woke up one day to say, "Hey, if they are for this, then we need to be against it!" In fact, if one ascribes the policies of one party with the President of the other party, you can be sure that most adherents of the one party will be opposed to them, so strong has the aversion to the President of the other party become. Policies don't matter. Who is the President of your party matters almost entirely. This is because the average voter's knowledge of policy is indifferent to non-existent in a strong state of identity politics.

In **Identity Politics** , the modern right, made up largely of evangelical white protestants, grew out of fear that pluralism (diversity, ethnic, racial, immigrant) and urbanity threatened the nation's identity.[8] Urbanity here is a distinction between the nation's larger urban areas and the country's outlying areas. In urban areas average incomes are much higher than that of average incomes in the non-urban areas of the mountain west, mid-west, and southern states, traditional Red State areas. The differing average income levels are alone enough to stratify a society, but in the United States there are important social and religious characteristics which adhere to the groups that make up this Great Divide in American politics.

The modern right is rooted in the belief that the driving forces of American history are Christianity and private enterprise, not secular reason or social engineering. Further, for the right this driving force is extended to be pro-family, by which is meant traditional paternalism. Sex is defined to be within marriage only, safely containing women's sexuality within the tradition that most preserves male dominance.[9]

Libertarianism as an opposite construct would, on the other hand, permit all kinds of personal behavior that conservatives would find "deviant, disloyal and immoral". Such a force in opposition to the religious right "would stop government from backing business, mothball the CIA, and demote the military to a homeland garrison". Libertarians would be the ultimate pluralists, while Conservatives believe in compulsory moral reform.[10] Libertarians here can be thought of as liberalism with a capital L, because today libertarianism, at least as personified in Rand Paul, is more a strain of conservatism than previously. An example of the moral reform prescribed by the conservative movement in America can be seen illustrated in the conservative movement of prohibition in the 1920's, where the result was the quadrupling of the American prison population, a definite compulsory moral reform. Conservative identity in the U.S. has always contained, along with its xenophobia, an element of martial patriotism that fit extremely well with the history of the South.

Identity politics is the non-thinking man's political system. And it's here to stay in the new _Hyper-partisan_ American political system. The Founding Fathers stressed the importance of controlling special interest politics in _The Federalist Papers_ , but they never envisioned a political system where party identification would overwhelm politics itself, where Americans of disparate geographies would belittle each other's party with references to fly-over country and bi-coastalism.

The Black Box Phenomenon in Governing

Another common problem in understanding modern political behavior is found in how people perceive government in general. Taxes go in, services and benefits roll out, is the usual interpretation. Between the two however, lies the millions of public servants in local, state, and federal governments who actually do the work of converting all those taxes into goods and services people need and use. These are widely perceived as government bureaucracies, and while they may be akin to corporate bureaucracies, they are generally thought of quite differently. This then is the field of public administration and it is very poorly understood by the public.

If a complex funding formula for a government program is only understood by a handful of state employees it may be reasonable to require that they not be allowed to travel on the same plane. In this scenario you have encountered the problem of the _Black Box_ in real life. Of course, they are not allowed on the same plane because what would happen if it crashed? There would be no one left who understood the complex funding formula and government would grind to a halt. The problem is, in a modern world state, that there a lot of black boxes.

Take for example the judicial system of the United States. It is a whole separate branch of government, one of the three main branches as defined by the U.S. Constitution. As such, there may be a judicial bureaucracy, but it is distinct from other government bureaucracies such as law enforcement in that it is not part of the Executive or Administrative Branch of local, state and federal governments. Instead, the judicial system of the third branch of government is highly dependent for its functioning on the Executive or Administrative Branch with its many multi-layered levels of governance and inter-governmental forms of cooperation. Fortunately, things have worked out over the generations. The judicial system in the U.S. has retained its essential independence in spite of the possibility of compromise by all these complex arrangements with law enforcement. It remains a black box to most Americans, however, who are forced to rely on legal representation when confronted by the complexity of the system.

It is important to keep in mind that the country's many law enforcement bureaucracies, though they may pay great deference to the Judiciary, are part of executive authorities at all levels of government. This means that they are governed by executive officials, who are elected, are part of the political system, and are subject to public oversight, just as judges usually are. Confusing huh? We generally think of law enforcement as subordinate to the Judiciary, but law enforcement doesn't take direct supervision from the Judiciary. The Judiciary doesn't control its budget, supervise its actions, or pay its employee's salaries. That is done by the Executive branch of government.

Making the legal system more accessible to the public should be an important goal of the system, but without an overarching governing authority or administrative apparatus to champion this worthwhile cause this isn't happening. What is needed is a National Judicial Commission and corresponding State Judicial Commissions to work in parallel to push an independent judiciary and greater legal transparency to strengthen our democracy and promote greater civic participation. Such Commissions can play a dominant role in selecting truly impartial judges as described in #15 of Chapter 9, **Constitutional Reform**. They can greatly reduce the influence of politics on the legal system and greatly encourage other means for dealing with violations of law than incarceration.

Bureaucracy is of course nothing more than a large, complex modern organization. Bureaucracy characterizes both private businesses, corporations and government departments. It is simply the science behind organizing and managing large human organizations.

In the Challenger disaster in the 1980's we learned how both private and government bureaucracies can both interact and, unfortunately, sometimes fail. Morton Thiokol engineers voted unanimously to tell NASA that it was too cold to launch the Challenger. NASA was under pressure because Reagan was doing the state of the union address that night and wished to refer to a successful launch in his speech. In a classic tale of how wrong things can go in a government bureaucracy, NASA over-ruled the Thiokol engineers because of Reagan's speech and the famous O-rings on the Challenger's fuel tanks thereupon failed in the too cold air. Challenger blew up in the sky over the launch site with a tragic loss of life.

Setting aside the usual confusion between the Judicial branch and law enforcement, the public often looks on government employees as the holders of comfortable sinecures. In other words, they think that having an office or position in the government comes with rather little work and a great pension. Even if the work is hard, so this reasoning goes, lots of government employees are protected by powerful unions that fight for favorable work rules and, yes, great pensions, especially the later as these are increasingly so uncommon in the private sector where everybody knows you have to work a lot harder to begin with.

The fact that while government jobs are thought of this way, government workers, whether they be in public school systems, streets and sanitation, police or fire, are thought of quite differently, as closest to the public they serve at the local level. First responders were at the center of the action on 9/11 and this burnished their image as community minded, self-sacrificing, often unsung local heroes, dedicated to their families, colleagues, and cities. That they put themselves on the line for others was widely hailed and praised at the time. Their actions went on to inspire the nation they were seen to represent.

But the work of government at higher levels is often less well known and frequently opaque to the public. How many people were aware that there are 17 different intelligence agencies reporting to the Executive Branch prior to the 2016 Election? Only afterward was it widely known that there were so many parts of the national security state, and then only because the Intel agencies had concluded that Russia had conspired to influence the US Presidential Election. Or that there are about 300,000 individuals working in these various branches of Intelligence, or that they cost reputedly $81 billion a year to fund? (Reputedly, us such budgets are not generally made public.) How many people can tell me what their own State's Department of Commerce and Community Affairs does?

This is the problem of the _Black Box_. It applies to both government agencies, which are too numerous to count, and to the vast amount of public service information that they publish. Fortunately, the Internet has made access to this information much more easily available and if the average citizen wants to know how his state DCCA (Dept. of Commerce and Community Affairs) can help him or her, it's not too hard to find out. Like taxes however, having the information and knowing what to do with it are two different things.

The reason for this is of course that the world is, like life, complicated. When it comes to taxes, you need to know what deductions and exemptions are, your various forms of income, and a whole host of other things. So it is that in government specialized knowledge is King, and all government employees represent individual repositories of this specialized knowledge, some of which they may have to acquire from general education, higher education, and government training, in order to effectively perform their jobs.

In this scenario, the Internet is just a _Black Box_. All the information you need to file your taxes is there but all the knowledge of how to do it is not. Government, and any complex human activity, is just the same. Of course, it's the job of government agencies to help people figure out how to do things with the knowledge that they possess, placing a monopoly on this specialized knowledge in the hands of the government. To all the rest of us, the Government is then just a _Black Box._ We call up a government agency, state our problem and are directed to the office that handles that problem for assistance. It's all very simple and quite nice actually. And with a little luck, we get the help we need, solve our problems, and are on our way to dinner and a movie.

The _Black Box_ phenomenon doesn't end there though. There are some things that the government designs to be well understood by the public, such as laws for instance. To be understood by everyone, laws must be simple enough to be easily communicated without special knowledge of any kind. Since every citizen is required to abide by the law, considerable effort is made by the government to make sure that laws are simplified and that everyone knows what they are. Of course, the most obvious example of this are the traffic laws. One cannot obtain a license to drive a car without demonstrating basic knowledge and understanding of the traffic laws in their state.

The important point here is that the _laws are simplified_ for this purpose. There may be many exigent factors involved in the application of traffic laws for instance. These factors enter into accident cases that are regularly contested in various state and local courts every day. No driver is expected to know the case law of traffic accidents in his state, however, in order to get a driver's license.

So it is that it is often the job of government and most government workers to have expertise on such matters within their realm of responsibility both to work effectively with their colleagues and to share with members of the public. Workers may actually participate in the development and passage of new laws, all of which of course are meant to protect the health, safety and welfare of the citizens living within their jurisdictions.

Your local City Planner knows the City Zoning Code and Map and can tell you what buildings can be built in each zone, how large, with what kinds of materials and to what building codes. If you are an exceptionally knowledgeable and experienced builder, you can probably go online and check out the local Zoning Code of the municipality you are interested in building in, and pretty much figure out what that City will allow you to build. This is because the Planner is obligated by his profession, which espouses a commitment to open government, to make sure that the Zoning Code is written in as clear and discernable language as possible to make it the most informative and useful to the public that it can be. The City Planner has made an effort to keep the Zoning Code out of the _Black Box_ and useful to the public at large. He is ethically bound as a Certified City Planner by the American Institute of Certified Planners in the United States to the process we call _Open Government._

Keep in mind that City Planner is only one of hundreds of professions, all of which require special certifications, state licenses, and professional memberships in order to practice, that make up the base of government employees in most developed countries. For them, many hold a greater fealty to the professions that they enter into than to the governments which employ them. For virtually every profession, practicing a profession includes practicing ethically, in other words doing so honestly and truthfully. As part of government service, this means telling truth to power, no matter what the potential consequences might be for one's career. It also means operating outside the _Black Box_ , or openly, not hiding behind arcane language when answering the public's questions. It means making oneself correctly understood without obfuscation or intention of evasion. _Transparent_.

For a government to operate effectively in a modern world it will have the contribution of many if not virtually all of the many new and increasingly sophisticated professions that make up society today because they all contribute to our understanding of the world and to the wide diversity of services that governments must now provide. Their individual professionalism and ethics require _Transparency_ and increasingly so do the governments that they are a part of. This has revolutionized government at all levels in the modern age and has dramatically reduced the problem of the _Black Box_ in government throughout the developed world.

Nowadays, the issue of _Transparency_ has gone far beyond just the confines of government to embrace the realms of finance and private enterprise. For international markets to work, financial information has had to be standardized by widely adopted accounting standards that apply across all countries and across every kind of business enterprise. These rules are enhanced by each country's laws and governing institutions, which also strive to put transparency at the top of their concerns. Finally, international agreements such as Bretton Woods at the end of WWII have sought to create a standardized system of international exchange and financial management based on the same principles.

It is on the basis of _Transparency_ that _Globalization_ , the worldwide economic integration that has taken place since World War II and which has accelerated since the end of the Cold War, has taken place. The advent of the Internet and its wide dispersion across the planet aided greatly in making true globalization possible. It democratized public information about company's products, services, and finances, making them easily accessible upon a moment's notice. This is not to say that the problem of the government _Black Box_ has gone away, but it has migrated to only certain aspects of modern governance, which we shall get to.

Professionalism

Each profession has what are called _Best Practices or Best Management Practices_. These are recommended ways of dealing with problems commonly or frequently encountered in pursuing that profession. In government, there are _Norms_ , which play much the same role. In writing a Zoning Code for a particular community there are usually discussions with all the _Stakeholders_ such as public officials, builders, developers, business owners, and regular citizens that attempt to arrive at a consensus view of what the town's future zoning map and regulations should be. These discussions usually start with a skeleton of an existing code or a state model code, which represents the _Norm or Normative_ code, a place to start discussions. So it is that in government there are always various norms established for every department, whether it be Finance, Community Development and Building Inspections, or Police and Fire.

The _Norms_ used in one Department in one City have often been established in most similar Departments in most other cities and towns as well. True, there are city governments that are considered within professional circles to be nonpareil, or without peer, because they are so outstanding. They exceed many norms in many areas of their public service delivery, whether it be in public safety, the quality of their downtown development, or in the amenities of their parks and public areas. They have excelled, much to their credit and to the benefit of their citizens in multiple ways.

"What do you mean, we've always done it that way?" This expression is probably the most common in government. It is said whenever anyone suggests doing something in a different, possibly better, way. By following normative practices, public employees assume that there are good reasons for the way that things are currently being done, ways that were carefully worked out and arrived at by all concerned. Public service workers are rightfully afraid of the unintended or unexamined consequences that would result from any kind of change. As individuals in their departments, they are held to performance expectations by their superiors and they do not want to be responsible for failing to meet them, however good an idea for improvement may seem to be. In all complex organizations, whether public or private, there is this built in organizational inertia and resistance to change, which tends to reinforce that organization's _Norms._

This is often associated with the idea, peculiar to government, of _Satisficing._ Because organizations by their nature have limited resources, the usual way of allocating scarce resources is to provide them to the functions of the organization in such a way that everything that needs to get done has enough resources to be done in an acceptable way. Notice that we are talking about a basic "acceptable" level of performance by all the necessary parts of the organization needed to fulfill the organization's goals. This assures an acceptable level of performance of the goals, but nothing more, satisficing the organization's goals, or providing for them in the most basic way only. To achieve excellent performance an organization is going to have to do a lot more than mere satisficing however. In the public sector, given the reliance on scarce public resources, such as fees and taxes, the establishment of which are highly subject to often contentious public participation and the vagaries of political processes, most public organizations are content if they can but satisfice. Most public services are provided at the most basic level with the understanding that the public desires only to pay what is necessary for basic services and no more.

Government _Norms_ and professional _Best Management Practices_ are very useful measures for determining if a government meets basic standards of competence, or _Satisfices,_ in carrying out its mission. This is even more true when dealing with units of government at higher levels, like state and federal governments, where government missions become much more complex and government outputs become much more difficult to quantify. The problem expands with the size and complexity of public organizations. The size of a private corporation is determined by what is profitable and what is not, but in the public sector rational actors in charge of making cost decisions are forced to rely on a measure of what the public thinks is reasonable, given the objectives that the public organization is pursuing.

Obviously, the public's view of what is reasonable is subject to change with the winds of time. Government organizations often defy this obvious fact. They are somewhat less subject to the winds of change when they gain permanent constituencies over time. When this happens, government organizations may continue to exist long after their usefulness to the public has been exhausted.

Role of Current American Politics

American politics is a lot tougher today than it was in the days after Vietnam and Watergate. Back then, there were two parties vying to govern the nation from the center, the center right in the case of the Republicans, and the center left in the case of the Democrats. Compromise and cooperation between the two parties on Congressional legislation was still possible under Reagan. Today we have a very different picture of the nation's political system. Today, we have a two-party system riven by hyper-partisanship where each party is pulled to the extreme, the Republicans to the far right and the Democrats to the far left. The pull on the right is the strongest of these forces, however. The threat of being "primaried" by candidates running on the extreme right has become a very viable force for establishing and maintaining highly orthodox conservative credentials in the Republican party. Rigid adherence to conservative principles and policies has become _de rigor_ for all Republicans at every level of government as a result.

Ross Perot's third-party Presidential candidacy in the 1990's played an important role in initiating this move to the far right, as it emphasized fiscal conservatism above all else. This focus on reducing annual budget deficits and the growing national debt was promoted with the idea that the national debt was so large as to pose an existential threat to the Republic. Because the Republic would fail to exist if overwhelmed by debt, then that debt must be dealt with before it became any larger. Bill Clinton's response was to highlight jobs and the economy in his campaign with his promise to focus on them "like a laser beam". James Carville, his campaign advisor, called the campaign strategy: "It's the economy, stupid!"

The old mantra of Republicanism had been based on the idea that if you worked hard in America you would be able to get ahead and live a good life. A good life was defined as owning a house and car, raising a family, and having a retirement that you could take before you got too old and crippled to enjoy it. This notion of the good life has come under increasing economic stress in recent decades, particularly the idea that one's kids should have a chance at a better life than that led by their parents. This idea was especially prevalent when the baby boomers went off to college after World War II, such was the sense of optimism of the time and so powerful was the U.S. economy vis-a-vis the rest of the world.

Coincident with this fundamental belief was that the good life was denied to people who did not work hard and play by the rules. People who expected something for nothing from society, the liberals and the do nothings, did not deserve the rewards of such a life in America. That there were large numbers of poor, inadequately trained and educated Americans, who suffered lives somehow lacking in the necessities to achieve a hard-working life, was unfortunate. But that was life and how the rules of life worked. To Republicans, it was never the role of government to intervene in people's lives to correct for life's inherent unfairness, because in the minds of Republicans life's unfairness could always be overcome by hard work, no matter what. It placed total reliance on the self-sufficiency required of every individual and referred to this as individual responsibility. Everyone in a Republican universe was responsible only for himself, never mind that this was essentially Darwinian.

Over time, the ability to maintain the social contract faltered. Incomes stagnated among the non-college educated as economies elsewhere in the world emerged. An anti-tax movement, the Tea Party, arose on the right in 2009, financed largely by the Koch brothers, to champion smaller government, less taxes, and a lower national debt. This was an anti-investment strategy just at a time when a new commitment to and a greater investment in America's workforce was needed following the disastrous Great Recession at the beginning of Obama's first term.

What happened to so upset the apple cart? Why now does a large part of the Republican base feel so betrayed by the promises of its party? The answer is that the benefits of the social contract they signed up for are no longer as readily available. Globalization has hollowed out the middle classes of all the major industrial nations of the world to some degree. Witness the twin rise of populism and nationalism in Britain and the United States. It is a reaction to forces of globalism that were accelerated greatly by the formation of the European Union, the dawn of the digital age, and the new emerging economies of the world that have added such vitality to the world economy. The investment in the American and European workforces that was so needed as a part of this international transformation took place only in a few countries, such as notably in Germany.

The Trumpocalypse of Tribalism and Authoritarianism

Let me be blunt. President Trump is an anti-social, psychopathically deluded narcissist. He is psychologically pretty much your average 4th grader. He even reads like one. He is Commander and Chief of the American national circus's foremost clown car. He is everyone's mad uncle elevated to the Presidency. The man has no soul and he kill's everyone else's.

A Venn diagram of the Trump party would include 80% of the Republican party, the anti-tax and anti-government tea party, anti-abortion evangelicals, anti-abortion Catholics, wealthy One Percenters and high-income individuals, older, white, males, their wives, racists, nativists, white supremacists, misogynists, xenophobes, isolationists, Anti Semites, and anti-LGBTers. Many of these groups held their noses for Trump, who often didn't respect or represent some part of their views, but these groups still have more affinity for what Trump represented than for anyone else. They are the mostly non-college half of white America. Most of Trump's white voters would never consider themselves racist. They just vote that way.

As with Reagan and the Reagan democrats, Trump pulled significantly from the Democratic base in order to win the Presidency, making the election to some degree a _Cross-cutting or Re-aligning_ election. Voters from across the Republican and Democratic spectrums were drawn to vote for Trump, as the Republican base alone would never have been enough to win him victory. Much of the reason for this re-alignment has been ascribed to the ascension of _Grievance Politics._ There are a lot of reasons though. Here are some of them.

1) _Nationalism, Populism and Protectionism._ A large swath of America has in essence turned to worn out political ideas as a result of the loss of blue-collar employment, stagnating wages due to the recession, higher health care costs, and widening income inequality. "Make America Great Again" and "America First" were the campaign's heraldic calls. Globalization and free trade, but more generally the notion that nations have banded together politically and economically to maximize the growth and efficiency of the world economy, which benefits all participants, had become a boogeyman to the working man. Political party propagandists of every political stripe and in many countries have been exploiting the fears of lower wage workers of job loss attributed to international economic globalization and free trade for years. Trump latched onto a shibboleth with a nugget of truth and exploited it to the hilt. While there have been job losses as a result of free trade, many more jobs have been created worldwide as a result.

The effect in higher wage countries has been to lower or at least hold down wages, especially since the Great Recession. Industrial nations (like Germany) have needed to provide retraining to higher wage occupations and have not always done so. Trump simply proposed to bring back jobs from yesteryear, which was nonsensical, but appealing in a nostalgic way, to many older voters. Trump knew that there were many voters who were aggrieved with job losses and lower wages. Much of this was probably a result of the Great Recession, but there was a misconception among many that globalization and free trade were the culprits. Brexit seemed to reinforce this belief among many American voters. Nationalist/populist movements proliferated in Europe and elsewhere, all influenced greatly by the long worldwide recession. This followed the same pattern as after the Great Depression, leading unfortunately to aggrieved Germans supporting the nationalist Hitler and the violence of World War II.

International trade and military agreements came more broadly to be seen as part of globalism, falling into disfavor. The military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan had become unpopular and their cost had come to be seen as an unnecessary drain on the U.S. economy. The history of American leadership in the post WWII world began to be seen as a hindrance to American economic ambition and dominance, which now seemed more threatened than ever by fast growing emerging economies in other parts of the world. The burden of maintaining a large military and numerous military commitments around the globe began to seem unfair. America was being taken advantage of by other countries in trade and military affairs was the determination of many voters.

2) _Nativism_. This boiled down to being anti-immigration, striving to keep undocumented workers from entering the country, with the rationale to protect jobs. Anti-globalist Trump was therefore the anti-immigrant. This is always a very important aspect of nationalism, which is xenophobia, the fear of _The Other_ , or the foreigner. The idea can easily be expanded to include antipathy to other cultures and multi-culturalism in particular. At its worst, this becomes outright bigotry and racism, all the way to its most extreme form, violent supremacism. Trump led with anti-Mexican statements and finished with proposals for a Muslim ban and stepped up ICE enforcement. In addition, there was resentment by white working-class voters against minorities for taking blue collar jobs just as much as if they had been immigrants.

_The Other_ is the focus of Richard Hofstadter's 1964 **The Paranoid Style of American Politics.** He noticed a pattern of extreme conspiratorial theories threatening the country. A historian, he traced the history of political fears of certain groups up and through America's recent past experiences with people and groups like McCarthy and the John Birch Society. Both feared Communism, and consistently over time added ordinary fears of immigrants, Jews and international bankers as fears of _The Other_.[11]. In recent times, these wild conspiracy theories seem to have especially occupied the far right, or alt-right, of the political spectrum, as they have come to be called.

Today we continue to find new groups to be ostracized and stigmatized due to the fears we collectively have of them. So much is this so that we have created special places of ignominy for some, employing hundreds of thousands of highly trained specialists in national intelligence and tens of billions of dollars annually in the pursuit of the ultimate _Others,_ that is, of foreign and domestic terrorists.

3) **Money.** _Citizens United_ **and Too much Money in Politics**.[12] It wasn't Murdoch, the Fox News feedback loop, and grievance politics that had given the Republicans command of the nation's political infrastructure. The Republicans had acquired the House and Senate by running against Obama and Obamacare for three Congressional cycles. They had reinforced themselves aided greatly by the Supreme Court's _Citizens United_ case, which opened further the coffers of the very rich and largest corporations to providing overwhelming political influence in the way of virtually unlimited campaign contributions. This they delivered more often by way of non-attributable, or dark, Pact money. Famously, money came by way of the individually wealth, such as the Koch Brothers or the Waltons (Walmart). The result has been _too much uncontrolled money, lobbying and influence peddling in politics at national and state levels._ Strong democracies around the world have found that they have to control access to their political systems by narrow, moneyed interests. Such interests can and often do weaken democracy.

4) _Extreme Gerrymandering_. Yes, you're right, the System is Rigged Mr. Trump, by your friends, the Republicans, but also by their adversaries, the Democrats.

The Republicans had also been aided by an invigorated ground game of gerrymandering, using the Decennial Census. Every ten years the Census re-apportionment of voting districts was used successfully by each state legislature to pack opposition voters into as few districts as possible, maximizing the returns to each state's governing party. The effect nationwide was to create Congressional voting districts that were largely incontestable and that enshrined both Republicans and Democrats in relatively safe districts. In such a district, the real threat is from a flanking movement by a candidate of one's own party in the primary for not being too far to the right or left to satisfy a party's base, rather than from a candidate from the opposite party later in the following general election. The Republicans had proven themselves more adept at this, largely because they already controlled so many more state legislatures. This _Hyper-partisanship_ led to the vanishing of the middle in American politics, and with it much of the possibility for political consensus and compromise.

The U.S. Supreme Court has been reluctant to strike down partisan gerrymandering in the past, but in _Cooper v. Harris 2017_ [13] they struck down racial gerrymandering in North Carolina based on a 1995 ruling making racial gerrymandering unconstitutional. A principal reason for the Court's reluctance has been the lack of a formula for creating districts that are compact and which do not serve to either pack districts with the opposition party or splinter voters of the opposition party into minorities of as many districts as possible. What was needed was a Constitutional formula that would automatically arrive at such a fair result. It has been proposed in a Wisconsin case that the Court has agreed to take up.

In 2015 Nicholas Stephanopoulos of the University of Chicago Law School and Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California came up with the solution.[14] They call their measure of partisan symmetry the _Efficiency Gap._ It measures the percentage of votes wasted by the parties in districting and establishes a percentage beyond which (8%) such districting becomes obviously unfair. Proposed in the Wisconsin case and now armed with such a device, the Supreme Court may be willing to at long last tackle the thorny issue of gerrymandering.

More recently, North Carolina re-struck their Congressional Districts, this time gerrymandering on a strictly partisan basis. It will be interesting if the Supreme Court strikes this down as well. Common Cause of North Carolina has weighed in on the side opposing the blatant gerrymandering power grab of the state's Republicans. It may be an effort such as this that may lead to more general reform throughout the rest of the country. In the meantime, _gerrymandering_ remains one of the central pillars of the current _hyper-partisanship_ in the United States, which is denying American voters fair and competitive representation in both State and Federal elections. Extreme _gerrymandering_ has never been a greater problem than it is today.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University looked at the effects of current **gerrymandering** on the 2018 midterm elections to see how a Democratic wave election in 2018 may be blunted by previously gerrymandered states.[15] To win a majority in the House, Democrats would have to win the national popular vote by 11%, something that hasn't been done since 1982. The tea party wave of 2010 led to extreme **gerrymandering** that has only been corrected so far in Pennsylvania. The final result of the 2018 mid terms was a large victory in the House of Representatives by the Democrats, which did require the large win in national popular vote predicted.

5) **Third party political pressure groups** in Washington DC, such as those which placed so much pressure on the Freedom Caucus during the House passage of the AHCA (Obamacare), have played a major role in demanding ideological purity from the parties they support. They have gained outsize influence over lesser media such as the internet, and can be influential in future campaigns. Most importantly, their work affects the perceptions of big donors, who have considerable power in both parties.

6) **Race, Religion and Education Matter**. All politics in America are essentially racial politics. This goes back to the beginnings of the country. The election of Obama did not usher in an era of post racial politics. America's history with race assures that it will be a central issue in American politics far into the future.

With Trumpians, or Vulgarians as they might be called, when it comes to matters of race, racial polarization has moved from the South to the white, rural parts of the West and Midwest where it has always been present as part of a more general antipathy to urbanism and diversity. Trump exploited it, mobilized it and brought it out of latency.

The branding of federal government welfare programs with racial stereotypes has long been a part of American culture. It may have started with the Great Society, but the notion of an American underclass, largely made up of minorities, has been greatly expanded over time and raised to a form of archetype. Long a view more tolerated among Republicans, Romney's comment that 47% of Americans do not pay taxes, implying that half of Americans pay for the other half in America, was such an expression of veiled racism, a dog whistle to Republicans.

These views have been furthered by Republicans' de-legitimization, even demonization, of the opposition Democrats. Attempts to legally curb Democratic voting power with voter ID laws and false claims of widespread voter fraud have been based on racial discrimination. Such efforts rely on state courts having a heavy preponderance of ideologically friendly judges. Fortunately, Federal and higher-level state courts have largely ruled against such voter suppression efforts. The Republican efforts themselves remain vigorous in a number of states.

The upcoming loss of a national majority of white voters in this country will be a major test of our democratic institutions. Trump claimed that this is the last election where Republicans will have a chance to win the White House. He was referring to the effect of changing demographics in the national electorate that will favor Democratic candidates for the Presidency in the future, a more or less acknowledged fact. By doing so, he was implying that the electorate will become too diverse for Republicans to be able to win. This was certainly an appeal to race. He eschewed Hispanic voters with his comments at the outset of the race by disparaging Mexican immigrants, this at a time when the establishment of the Republican party had acknowledged the need to broaden their base in the future if they were to have any chance of ever retaining the White House. Trump used this to create a sense of urgency, even emergency, that he be elected.

Flirting with populism, nativism (thinly disguised racism), nationalism (at times white nationalism), xenophobia, possibly fascism, and definitely misogyny (emphasis on machismo, domination, alpha male) as opposed to the liberal world order, liberal internationalism, or globalism were par for the course for Trump. Steve Bannon of Breitbart News, later the President's political muse and Senior Advisor, may have been an ethno-nationalist, but he was also the diviner of the notion that there exists a Deep State. He was intent on the Deconstruction of the Administrative State, by which he meant a burdensome, overweening and intrusive Federal bureaucracy. It was hard for him to escape his experience as a conspiracy proponent and purveyor of fake news. Cloaked in an air of the surreal, it would have been hard for him to escape unfortunate comparisons to a monkey in charge of a zoo, a nut in charge of an asylum. Had he been assigned the job of chief propagandist (for creating false and misleading "fake" news) and chief censor of the real news for the President no one would have been surprised. He would have been the perfect proponent of Rorschach test politics, where everybody sees the side they most want to see while viewing different sides of the same candidate.

Stephen Miller, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon were the architects of Trump's anti-immigrant run for the Presidency. Stephen Miller, influenced by the white nationalist fringe in college, worked for Michelle Bachman, the Tea Party fringe Republican Congressman from Minnesota. In 2013, Miller helped Sessions defeat a broad bi-partisan immigration reform bill in the House, even though it had passed the Senate. Miller and Sessions met with Bannon at his townhouse in D.C. to discuss their ideas. In January of 2015 Sessions wrote a 23-page memo predicting that the next President would win by speaking to the working class about immigrants stealing their jobs.[16] The memo came to Trump's attention and he brought Miller and Sessions into his campaign, his rallies confirming for Trump the power of this approach.

With Trump there was no there there. He did indeed become a national Rorschach test. People read into his candidacy whatever they wanted it to be. Having spoken to every side of every issue, a promise everything strategy without truth or consequences, a constant backing off of outrageous uninformed statements, and an inability to acknowledge when outright wrong, he was, essentially, a fraud. Trump was the best modern version of the professional con man personified by _Elmer Gantry_ , the crooked preacher played by Burt Lancaster in the eponymous 1960 movie, or by Robert Preston playing _The Music Man_ , who exploits a whole town in the 1962 movie of the same name. Small town America was famous for being exploited by the unscrupulous city slicker, a very common meme throughout the country's history. This time it really came to life in the form of Trump. This however, was much darker. It betokened more a national Glorious Leader intent on robbing the world's greatest democracy of its freedoms than a simple con man possessed of a mischievous glint in his eye.

Of course, these films were an acknowledgement of the passing of agricultural life and the small towns that depended on that life. Farming had fallen from some 90 percent of employment in 1790 to about 40 percent by 1900, and 1.5 percent in 2012. Agriculture as a source of indirect employment to the many small towns of America had long receded, leaving small town economies weakened and threatened. It is hardly surprising that by the 1960's films like _Gantry_ and _Music Man_ were extolling the virtues of small-town American life largely through the rear-view mirror. The 1950's had resulted in a final surge of mechanization in U.S. agriculture, bringing U.S. employment in the sector down from 10 percent to nearly the 1 percent that it is today. If American values were truly shaped by our shared agricultural and small-town pasts, the de-coupling of America from this past was sure to occasion some titanic schisms with those values.

There was no question that Trump lived on another planet. The only problem was that 40 percent of the country was living there with him. Nor did anyone seem to know which planet that was. The citizens of this country peered into the growing gloom, trying to figure out where he was coming from.

At the heart of Republican orthodoxy lies the concept of responsibility, as already mentioned, of which the poor and unfortunate are thought to have little or none. This takes on religious significance with the idea of sin. Being poor is without merit for certain, but as this philosophy goes being poor is the choice of providence, or it is the result of misfortune, or, in other words, it's just plain bad luck. Deities on high make such decisions for each of us through a form of _Predestination or Determinism_. God is omniscient, he knows exactly what is going to happen to each of us from the time of our beginning. It is all already written.

Poverty is a sin in the conservative way of thinking. It can be seen in the requirement by seven states requiring drug testing of those receiving State assistance. An examination of those programs by **Think Progress** showed that although a million dollars was being spent a year on such testing by these states, the rate of those testing positive was less than 1 percent in the case of six states, while the rate of national drug use is 9.4 percent.[17] That such programs have no efficacy is yet to be admitted. What sustains the programs is the idea, embraced by conservative voters, that the poor are wastrels. It is an idea too useful _not to be used_ by each state's leading politicians.

The idea that poverty is the result of sin is of course prominent among Christians. The **Washington Post** and **Kaiser Family Foundation** polled Americans about their attitudes on this point.[18] They found that 49% of Christians believed that poverty was the result of a lack of effort versus 29% for non-Christians. Americans who consider themselves non-religious believed that poverty was the result of circumstances rather than lack of effort by 65% to 31%. This also falls along partisan lines. Among Democrats, it fell 72% to 26% for circumstances over lack of effort. Among Republicans, it fell 63% to 32% for lack of effort over circumstances. The article suggests that this is the difference between pre-millennialism and post-millennialism views in American Christianity that diverged in the early part of the 20th century. The "Pre" views the world as already lost and so the effort needs to be made to save lost souls from damnation, whereas the "Post" views the world as needing structural reform for a more just world. These views of morality have divided Christians (and the political parties) ever since. While the view adopted by evangelical Christians is compassionate in that they wish to care for the soul to escape the end of the millennium, there being no time left to create a more just world, it often ignores the reality of the unjust world we are currently living in. The study also revealed that men were nearly twice as likely as women to say poverty was the result of a lack of effort, creating a presumption that men are twice as likely to take the Republican view as women.

Of course, what makes us poor is being born into poverty and then finding it difficult to escape once within its clutches. The difficulty of escape is evident in that so many people born into such circumstances find themselves unable to leave poverty. Those who do leave poverty are always seen as having done so by effort, often great effort, and they are hailed as heroic in their character, as persistent and hard-working, and, yes, as righteous.

On the other hand, by Providence's great hand there are those who are fortunate to have been born into circumstances without poverty but who have, in exercising their free will, made ill decisions, and have thus fallen into it. The exercise of free will is a hazard, for the proponents of this ideology of responsibility would have you believe that the righteous follower of the Deity's commands should by right avoid the pitfalls of free will by, essentially, not exercising one. Follow religious commands and edicts and no harm can come to you. By all means, do not do just as you please, for that is certain to bring the wrath of God onto you. Early religion was especially full of such prescriptions, was especially deterministic, and especially thought of the idea of free will as quaint. In ancient societies ruled by despots, in which everyone was to some degree poor, the ultimate form of economic leveling at the time, there really wasn't much free will to be found. Determinism was the philosophy _du jour_.

But we live in a modern age which has embraced the concept of free will and supposedly enshrined it in our Bill of Rights and Constitution. Still, the temptation to make reams of laws establishing the acceptable norms of society remains. In light of this, Republicans cling to the old idea that not everyone really has equal rights and that we are born inherently unequal with a government that has no responsibility to interfere in God's universal design for each of us. It is a different kind of freedom from responsibility, i.e. the freedom to ignore responsibility because everything remains in God's grace, not our own.

Some may see this as an excuse, but others may interpret it as very rational indeed. After all, no society has the means to make every citizen comfortable, so resources have to be managed, right? This will make winners and losers, an idea that Republicans seem to have embraced wholeheartedly. In this, the important thing is to be a Republican because they are the winners and have successfully re-ordered society to allocate more resources to them. When Trump emphasizes winning this is what his stalwart supporters think he means. They have long assumed that the American playing field of politics is an uneven one. They just want to be on the winning side! The Republican idea then is of a world constrained by finite resources set among unconstrained individual appetites.

The TEA Party, with their Taxed Enough Already slogan, were the perfect purveyors of this philosophy of a finite world. To them, the government, any government, were just do-gooders who couldn't realize that no amount of resources could fix the nation's, state's, or localities' problems. Their desire was the ultimate form of freedom, the freedom to be left alone to their own devices. Let the world be "every man for himself." The Tea Party proved, if nothing else, that bumper sticker superficiality has an enduring appeal in a world made complicated by the efforts of man to make it a better one.

The poor are lazy and need to get a job, the addict has a weak and flawed character, the U.S. gives too much help to people in other countries instead of focusing on its own citizens, minorities suffer from a sense of grievance and entitlement, people are sick because they didn't take adequate care of themselves and thus it's their fault. There are many of these well-known stereotypes and shibboleths and Republican doctrine does not so much explicitly affirm them as it uses them for political purposes.

Instead, substance abuse is a brain disease. 27 million Americans have substance abuse problems with prescriptions, drugs and alcohol but only 10 percent of those affected are actually getting the help that they need. Highly effective methods of treatment have been found, but a huge social stigma with mental illness and drug addiction persists in society. America is a modern industrial country and like other modern industrial countries has sufficient resources to provide adequate health care, including opioid treatment, to its citizens. It is not really a question of resources, but rather one of the politics necessary to create an adequate health care system. Free will.

Education fights the stereotypes and shibboleths and the way that we lean on pre-programmed political responses. Younger voters are more influenced by educational efforts because they are more recently educated. As voters age, however, the effect seems to reverse itself. How many of the original Baby Boomers are now rust bucket Republicans?

7) **Anti-Establishmentarianism or Thumb in the Eye**. Finally, given the straightened circumstances of America's lower classes, worsened by recession, an out of control health care sector, and a globalization that hurt America's small town and rural areas the most, there is the intangible effect of the culture of grievance promoted by **Fox News** and the far right. It focused on blaming the poor for expanding the welfare state as it was perceived and, supposedly, raising taxes on the lower and middle classes as a result. It saw the poor as using up scarce health care resources in an expanded Medicaid under which half of American babies are born while leaving many under Obamacare to pay increasingly high health care insurance premiums on their own, this last a result of the fiscal cliff created by Obama which we will address further later. There was a perception created that minorities and immigrants take jobs away from the white lower and middle classes, and that China was taking away American jobs through unfair trade agreements.

None of this was entirely true, but like any kind of propaganda, there was enough truth there to reinforce the negative stereotypes of those feeling the effects of the new economic environment for those on the ground floor in America. This was new, this sense of white entitlement for the basic American dream now slipping away, with the unexpected result of intangible resentment toward those who were not suffering in the same way. It created an alienation and antipathy toward politics and politicians and toward the so-called media elite (though certainly not with _Fox News_ , which dug itself into a perpetual negative feedback loop with its viewers). It became a "thumb in the eye" attitude toward leadership of any kind, a nihilistic desire to shake up Washington to the point of destruction, a lashing out of anger.

It was this anger that Trump so effectively tapped into and which solidified his base. It was this anger which Hillary Clinton had so under estimated. It was _Grievance Politics_.

Trump _attacked political correctness_ to show the media who's boss. Born perhaps more out of Trump's real lack of focus, knowledge or ability to study or learn, abetted by his personal psycho-pathologies and naturally incendiary bombast, and aided by his only real means of communication, Twitter, Trump became a political star. He was without a filter and utterly unable to discipline himself in any kind of politically correct way in any case.

As a result, Trump became openly vulgar and disparaging, always seeking to "Double Down" in a continuous string of insults aimed at his opponents, many of whom proved too graceful to return such vitriol in full measure. Trump used twitter as both a weapon and a way to reinforce his base. His tweets were meant to capture and manage the daily news cycle. During the campaign, the media aided and abetted Trump, always wanting him back for rating purposes and therefore never going after him the way that an independent press really ought to. As a result, Trump was able, for a time, to tame the media. When he became President, his megaphone was even bigger. At first Trump struggled with its power, saying crazy stuff about his inauguration's crowd size and about Obama spying on him, but he soon learned to modulate his Twitter feed.

Trump used counter-narrative, distraction, and mis-direction at every possible opportunity. He was greatly aided by the _Fox News Channel_ and far right media on the radio and internet, all of whom acted much more like state media, putting out the party line for each day. _Fox News_ became the President's unabashed standard bearer and co-conspirator. By all accounts, Trump consumed hours of it every day and frequently consulted directly with its on-air personalities. It became what in an autocracy would be considered a form of state television, although _Fox_ performed this function quite willingly simply for the ratings it generated, clearly without any regard for professional journalism. _Fox_ became the nation's fun house mirror, and the home for Trumpian television viewers seeking their daily reaffirmations and absolutions.

With the addition of fake news, Russian or otherwise, and the rapid escalation of the news cycle itself via Twitter and the internet, television producers were nearly overwhelmed in their ability to carry what they considered news. Finally, there was an air of unreality created as all this transpired. This was magnified by Bannon and Miller's apocalyptic utterances and speeches for Trump, almost seeming to gaslight the American public as they used their platforms to make their listeners, or victims, question their reality with an "alternate reality" of their own, one populated by an American landscape of abandoned factories, crime ridden and impoverished central cities, a dark vision of lost hope and unkept promises. In these pronouncements there was little left of America, the exceptional and indispensable nation, leader of the free world for seventy years, or of Reagan's City on a Hill, the beacon of democracy.

"I know what's best, I know better than everybody else, and this is a hoax, and this is fake news." This very Trumpian declaration became a common part of the national dialogue. It showed a distinct antipathy to science, expertise and authority in general. It is angrily defiant, ignorant, pusillanimous, and nonsensical. It embraces man in his natural Savannah-bred state, wired with evolutionary and primordial pre-human impulses. It rejects reason and embraces the fringe, the surreal, and the occult. Most importantly, it is how despotic rulers have divided and sown confusion throughout history. It is how the world turns into a vast wasteland of Orwellian doublethink.

A State of Mind

Much has been made of Trump's state of mind. Is he normal but just acts crazy (crazy like a fox) or is he abnormal (mentally ill) and really crazy? The later implies that he could be a danger to himself and others requiring the use of the _Duty to Warn_ known to the mental health profession. In answering this question, it helps to see human behavior as something that has evolved over time.[19]

Long after the progenitors of man had become bipedal, some 70,000 years ago, homo sapiens was at the dawn of the **Cognitive Revolution**. There were at most a few millions of our species populating the whole planet, most in Africa and the Middle East.

Our brains were evolving, getting larger to enable a much greater range of adaptive behaviors. Endocasts of the brain cavity in human fossils are used to measure the brain size of human fossils and also are used to determine the existence of today's brain structures in earlier brains. Although our brains were only 2 percent of body weight, they consumed 16 percent of body energy, a sacrifice in efficiency that could only be made up for by the brain's ability to make the species far more competitive in its environment. The increase in brain size permitted the formation of small tribes of mostly family members to work and live together in order to improve mutual survival. Tribal life and tribal success were aided greatly by language skills that increased with brain size. Regular use of fire for a multiplicity of purposes became common, but especially for cooking food. During this time the human digestive tract or alimentary canal evolved, shortening, thereby showing evidence of less plant and more animal food in the diet.

There were still at least two other species of man existing, Neanderthal and Denisovan. Recent evidence shows DNA of both found in small percentages of human DNA, suggesting some interbreeding occurred over history. Still, by the time of the next epoch of human history, the **Agricultural Revolution,** which started some 10,000 years ago, both other species had disappeared from the historic record. Whether they died out on their own or were eliminated by homo sapiens is not known, but by the time of the Agricultural Revolution only homo sapiens still existed. It is also quite possible, indeed likely, that there are yet other species of man yet to be discovered farther back in history.

While controversial, another important theory of recent years is that mankind experienced a near extinction event in this part of human history. This has been put forward as an explanation for the genetic bottleneck that appears to have occurred in human evolution, suggesting the entire species is descended from only 1000 to 10,000 pairs. The cause of one or more bottlenecks is speculated to have been the **Toba Super-eruption** that occurred about 75,000 years ago. Toba, one of the world's most catastrophic volcanic eruptions, occurred in Sumatra and produced up to 10 years of global winter. It could account for a dramatic drop in the population of mankind and there are indications that this happened to many other species at that same time. Because of this, man is descended from a very small gene pool with very little variation across the entire planet.

More recently, between 5000 and 7000 years ago, there occurred another major genetic bottleneck, Stanford researchers reported in **Nature** in May of 2018.[20] After 2000 years of decline there was only 1 fertile male for every 17 females left alive, men having killed each other off during the intervening period of carnage.[21] With a worldwide population of between 5 and 20 million individuals at the time, this means that as many as 9.5 million men were slaughtered in one of the greatest genocides of human history. This was the result of competition between patrilineal kin groups, otherwise known as pure tribalism. As agriculture spread and humans settled down, resources became limited, spurring competition. Finally, such competition elevated and clan wiped out clan, eliminating their Y chromosomes and sublimating their women. It would have appeared that every male member of each clan had the same father, because wiping out an entire clan of men eliminated whole lineages. Only one twentieth of the males survived, giving credence to the idea that man is indeed the most dangerous of species.

In any event, the 60,000 years between the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions was enough time for homo sapiens to evolve as a hunter and forager in small bands of humans of 100 or fewer persons. Sapiens evolved to be very broadly talented hunters and fishers who knew all about the game, fauna and terrain for hundreds of square miles around them. Today, we remain evolved to eat a wide array of things, to run and hunt and collect. We developed extensive knowledge of what we can eat and how to prepare it, and how to be curious about everything that surrounds us in order to lengthen our odds of survival.

Sapiens either lived in nuclear families or in highly communal ways. Possibly we lived by some combination thereof. Studies of modern isolated tribes show for instance that mates often carry on affairs within the tribe, which seems to suggest natural selection for desired characteristics within the tribe. The imperative that children be cared for was more a tribal than individual responsibility, being widely shared. Without a written record there is no way to know what the social mores and customs were. Burial practices show no clear evidence.[22]

These tribes were on the constant move, a necessity for finding sufficient food, requiring that each group range over hundreds of square miles of territory. The members of tribes had no more possessions than they could carry. Their evolving brains and bodies grew as they developed hunting and foraging skills necessary for survival. Humans could not survive for long without the tribe on which they were dependent. Their ability to cooperate successfully in small groups was essential for survival and they developed many social skills. In fact, much of how human beings relate to one another was developed during this time. _Humans evolved as, and remain today, socially tribal._

Along with the intelligent human behaviors that led man and his brain to physically evolve in the process of natural selection that we recognize today were behaviors that were intellectually stimulating in their own right, such as storytelling, and legend and myth making. There was probably little difference between completely made up fantasies and embellished accounts of factual events. All of these stories descended from imaginative fictionalizing and fantasizing about the world of plants and animals, sun and rain, oceans and hills, mountains, forests and grasslands surrounding them.

Eventually however such myths, having been shared and passed down from one generation to the next, became something imbued with more meaning than could be explained by a pure flight of fancy. They became **Core Myth** , often having to do with the origin of man and the world. These later evolved into a religious significance, that, when formalized, became prescriptive of human behavior, establishing tribal norms which became tribal rules which became tribal laws. Suddenly, rules such as "let the strongest men lead the group into new and potentially dangerous territory" became common. So too did comforting ideas such as that we shall rejoin our ancestors in the venerated afterlife. Man's mind expanded to comprehend the world in new ways and with sharper perception these ideas became tenants of a way of life deemed valuable enough to be passed down to one's children.

Myth was a psychological mooring in an indifferent world, such as that characterized by Thomas Hobbes in _The Leviathan_ , 1651. To him life before reason was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, filled with constant fear and violent death. Without **Core Myth** life was a bewildering unanswered question, narcissistic and nihilistic, essentially without meaning. As homo sapiens gained greater and greater brain size and survival ability, becoming increasingly social and caring for other members of the tribe, at first with only self interest in mind but later with more altruistic motivations, the development of shared myth played a role in binding the members of the tribe even closer to one another. The warm and fuzzies played a role in our species survival, just as they continue to do today. They bring us closer to one another, which is our greatest tool for individual self-defense. Our alliances with others are what makes us strong as individuals, a lesson we learned early in our species' development, and which has redounded to our credit ever since.

In the last 10,000 years homo sapiens developed an **Agriculture Revolution** , which required settling in place to grow crops. This produced much more arduous lives than previously, but as a trade-off it created a more predictable food supply. Of course, it also meant permanent settlements that grew far beyond the original size of tribes. Previously, only fishing villages could reach a few hundred persons in size. Now, even cities were possible. Man had evolved for hunting and foraging but now had to toil the fields, back breaking labor that he was not physically evolved for.

The **Agricultural Revolution** gave man the ability to form larger group associations tending crops and animals. The larger associations led to the creation of sufficient surplus to allow a few members to be supported on the basis of the efforts of all the rest. Familiar tribal patterns developed of peasants owing allegiance to overlords who could presumably muster and use martial force to enforce their taxes. This was not really a happy situation, but one which lasted until the Renaissance.

Yuval Noah Harari in his 2015 book _Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind_ suggests that these larger associations of human beings require hierarchy to organize themselves, and that hierarchy is an imagined quality. To Harari, all societies have hierarchy but different societies have different hierarchies. Indian societies organize according to caste, the Ottomans organized according to religious classes and Americans give every evidence of having adopted a hierarchy of race, a pretty negative assessment of America.[23] The forces acting on evolution since the **Agricultural Revolution** have been Economics, Politics and Religion, which he sees as three universal orders driving us to the eventual unity of all mankind. Man's history with Politics during this age has been one characterized by the rise and fall of empires, with America being only the last among many.[24] He sees the planet as uniting through economic globalism, at the heart of which is the need to balance Freedom and Equality. While great wealth can be created with great Freedom, greater equality is needed for a stable political system and that in turn requires appropriate re-distribution of wealth. Optimistically, he cites the Gilgamesh Project, the idea that scientific discovery will inevitably increase longevity in a quest for eternal life, that already the World Health Organization has found years when the average person on the planet was more likely to die of suicide than by war, terror, or violent crime.[25]

Human beings then evolved _genetically_ to be tribal. **Tribalism** is hard wired into our thinking along with more primordial instincts. It is a socially adaptive mechanism that humans are born with. Individuals in a tribe are bound to one another to protect and nurture members of the tribe. It is this inborn instinct which lies at the heart of all forms of human hierarchies. It is used by the military in forming units where individuals will fight and die for one another, just as much to create motivated sales forces and effective police and fire departments. It is often called Team Building and used to get office workers to cooperate more efficiently with each other. Though prosaic in such a sense, this does not diminish the centrality and importance of tribalism to ordinary human behavior.

Tribal beliefs can be learned behaviors that became so strong during the eons of gathering and hunting that they are practically encoded in human DNA. Fear is a natural avoidance survival reaction that many living beings have to life threatening circumstances. Man has inherent fear of large predators, violent weather, even night and darkness. And man's fears have only increased over the time of modern evolution.

Man has always lived close to starvation. When food supplies rose, population increased. When food supplies dwindled, population decreased. It became rational for man to fear other tribes moving into an area and reducing the food supply, so man feared other tribes. It was natural and favored survival to fear other tribes, and this fear of the **Other** has descended down to modern man. Later, following the rise of the age of empire after the Agricultural Revolution, man had to fear the rise of whole societies, their military excursions, conquests, and subjugations.

Tribalism also shuts humans down mentally when they are confronted with facts that do not comport with tribally acquired beliefs. This is because of hard wiring, genetically acquired thinking patterns that are now only beginning to be explored and understood by science. It is an important, even vital, aspect of politics. Individuals who can identify many aspects of tribal thinking can exploit their knowledge of this kind of built in, automatic thinking for political purposes. Human history is full of examples, many of them notorious.

Trumpian Tribalism

Modern hierarchical belief support systems in America have formed a kind of iron triangle made up of science, religion, and politics. Each has come to exist in its own world, divorced from the others. Only the world of politics is allowed to transcend, and then only to bridge the gulfs that allow the other two to co-exist in the same universe.

The authors of our form of government were only too aware of the threat of a powerful executive to a democracy, as they had seen endless wars caused by sovereign monarchs in Europe for centuries. They had seen oppressive kings and queens met out arbitrary and capricious punishments, pogroms, and vindictive mass killings throughout the interminable middle ages up to and including in their day. They saw no solution for such power except the rule of law and a system of checks and balances among branches of government. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1798, "In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from misdeed by the chains of the Constitution."

20th Century philosopher Karl Popper pointed out that liberal democracy is not about a majority being entitled to rule a minority, but rather that government power is always dangerous and has to be controlled. Democracy is not a way to sanctify majority opinion but a way to limit the damage any group can do to others via the rule of law. There are still rights for minorities and strong civil institutions to uphold those rights. "Democracy is not there to take us to heaven, but to keep us from hell."[26]

Which brings us back to Trump, America's first child President, a man who speaks with a 4th grader's vocabulary, a 4th grader's way of thinking about the world, and a 4th grader's emotional and psychological development. Clearly, he has exploited tribalistic impulses in American politics to an unprecedented degree. His gift as a politician is his ability to identify these impulses in American society combined with his boldness to act, without hesitation, to exploit them. He did so in a daring and breathtaking way that took the American political establishment by storm. What unusual kind of personality could accomplish so considerable an achievement?

In _The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,_ _27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President_ , Trump is diagnosed as having Narcissistic Personality Disorder, (NPD), according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual DSM-V, the "bible" of the American psychiatric profession. It consists of entitlement, exploitation (of others) and empathy-impairment, the 3 E's. It elevates to pathological narcissism and becomes psychopathy, a pattern of remorseless lies and manipulation, a complete absence of empathy.[27] Patients like Trump do not feel emotions the same way that non-psychopaths do. Their brains fail to light up when they confess shameful events or see others in pain or suffering. They would be much more likely to pass lie detectors because they believe what they are saying is true and feel no remorse. This becomes **Malignant Narcissism**.

Trump's thought patterns suggest an element of bi-polarization or manic depression. John Gartner PhD observes in the _The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump_ that he believes Trump exhibits Hypomania.[28] David Brooks, the columnist, observed this also in his 2016 article in the _Washington Post_ , where he commented that Donald Trump shows a manic "flight of idea", a formal thought disorder in which thoughts tumble out through a disordered chain of free associations.[29] Clearly, there are many aspects to Trump's peculiar malady, making it all the more unique in character.

Elizabeth Mika posits in _The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump_ that Trump's narcissism represents a dangerous trait that can be found in all tyrants:[30]

"Narcissistic psychopaths turned tyrants possess the right combination of manipulativeness, self-control, and intelligence to convince others to support them long enough to put their grandiose ideas to work on a large scale."[31]

Tyrants identify with other tyrants and use them for inspiration. Their supporters share narcissistic tendencies and are attracted to the tyrant's narcissism. The more grandiose the tyrant is the more his supporters identify with the tyrant's "omnipotence and glory". This heals the narcissistic wounds of the supporters but shuts down their conscience in what Mika calls "narcissistic collusion". In narcissistic collusion, the narcissistic needs of tyrant and supporters merge. A narcissist suffers from too high expectations, resentments, and a desire for revenge against both individuals and society.[32]

Michael Kimmel refers to this as "aggrieved entitlement" in _Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era_.[33] These feelings of entitlement lead the tyrant to hold his supporters in contempt, seeing them as weaker human beings. The tyrant and his supporters inevitably displace and project, scapegoating some form of Other. The Other is chosen to signify differences between the supporters and Others, which are blown up to justify contempt and aggression toward them. It helps if the selected Others are weaker and therefore easier to dehumanize, but the differences emphasized are of the narcissists' devalued parts of themselves. The purpose of the Others is to become a focal point for "a rage focused on purging, psychically and physically, all that is weak and undesirable from the narcissists' inner and external worlds".[34]

The Other is labelled an existential threat to society in order to justify a campaign of eradication. The tyrant's paranoia, grandiosity, and impulsivity grow, while his pronouncements and actions are shielded by those around him. Mika asserts that economic and social inequality give rise to the special conditions needed for tyrants. The tyrant is the vessel for the supporter's grandiose belief in themselves while the Others become the repository of their vices. In Germany's case it was the humiliation of WWI's loss that injured the narcissists and enabled their rage. In America, it's the deterioration of the middle class over recent decades. The individual narcissism that is created cuts across society at all levels, but the elites, insulated as they are, are the most blind to it (in Germany's case they thought Hitler was a clown who could not be taken seriously, in America's case it is much the same with Trump: you vote for the clown, you get the circus).

Our narcissism that we are all so blind to becomes the last taboo in a world that no longer has taboos. The tyrant may sow discord and division, pitting people against one another with an "irrepressible sadistic urge" that makes it easier to dominate and control public opinion. He seeks to change social norms, institutions and laws to reflect his pathology, to meet his needs for power and adulation. Juan Peron is noted as saying that the masses don't think, the masses feel. The narcissistic leader appeals to the emotions of the public and not to people's ability to analyze or process information.

Finally, tyrannical ideology spreads much more easily than we think because it is our narcissistic blindness that makes us think that it can't happen here. Supporters can be counted on to shut down their consciences, becoming functional psychopaths. Tyranny feeds on the irrationality of narcissistic myths and magical thinking (which are of course supported by a web of often repeated lies). A tyrant's reign collapses only after reaching great heights of violence, corruption and oppression that bring great suffering to the mass of people, who react to and finally reject it, seeking equality, justice and truth.[35]

This rejection of the tyrant can however result in a purge of the old order, with potentially devastating consequences of its own. Elizabeth Mika points out the work of Andrew M. Lobaczewski, _Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes_ , 2007 in further dissecting this kind of governance. Lobaczewski describes Pathocracies as societies run by impaired psychopaths and narcissists. They use Paralogisms as ways of distorting reality and truth, as well as Paramoralisms as ways of perverting moral values. Both of these tools are used along with propaganda strengthened by magical thinking and contempt for reason, a state of unreality well known to people raised in authoritarian regimes where up is down and white is black, where what one knows has nothing to do with the officially sanctioned version of the truth.[36]

Nor is America any less vulnerable to the siren call of one man rule, as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point out in their book _How Democracies Die_ **:**

In short, Americans have long had an authoritarian streak. It was not unusual for figures such as Coughlin, Long, McCarthy and Wallace to gain the support of a sizable minority—30 or even 40 percent—of the country. We often tell ourselves that America's national political culture in some way immunizes us from such appeals, but this requires reading history with rose-colored glasses. The real protection against would-be authoritarians has not been Americans' firm commitment to democracy but, rather, the gatekeepers—our political parties.[37]

During Reconstruction white power in the South resisted the imposition of racial equality and created authoritarian governments that stripped the vote from black people and even whites. By the mid-1930s, Mississippi had only about 6000 votes cast in midterm congressional elections out of over 2 million citizens.[38]

The Modern American Political Pattern  
Health Care as example)

In economic terms, Health Care is largely a _Price Inflexible good or service._ If a person is sick, they are likely to pay whatever is necessary to be well again, so important and vital is good health to a good life. This is what is known in Economics as a _market imperfection_. Demand and supply do not reach an equilibrium at a reasonable cost, but rather actors in the health care sector have few constraints in pricing because demand for their goods and services is so inflexible. Prices will suffer from a lack of constraint by demand. Modern economies correct for these kinds of inevitable market imperfections by establishing government regulations to prevent companies from charging exorbitant prices. This is an essential, though rarely mentioned, requirement of capitalism.

The $600 EpiPen by Mylan stands out as an example of what happens when a company gets too far over its skis on pricing. It gets very unfavorable press and a Congressional investigation. The pharma giant now faces multiple investigations, a shareholder revolt, and the prospect of an all new Board of Directors.

But this pattern of public outing and retribution in America has become the exception and not the rule. The **Health Care** sector in the U.S. now takes up one-sixth of the country's economy (18% of GDP), twice that of any other modern, developed nation on earth. This has become a matter of urgency. The nation's economic competitiveness and national security are threatened by the highly inefficient American health care sector, which places the United States economy at a significant economic disadvantage versus other countries. The high cost of health care makes our goods and services more expensive than those of other countries, as health care costs go into the cost of production of every good and service the American economy produces.

Furthermore, in recent years increases in health care costs have consistently kept American middle incomes from rising and have contributed to economic inequality generally. Inexorable and increasing cost shifting by hospitals to the rest of society has imposed major inefficiencies in the marketplace for health care, followed quickly on by sectors like medical devices and pharmaceuticals. Pricing between health insurers and health care providers has become distorted by the private employer-based health care system to such a point that there is no reasonable relationship left between the cost of health service delivery and the costs to consumers. An air of unreality in health care costing has undermined any attempts at reform. No system of marginal cost accounting could comprehend the full nature of the fraud that this has perpetrated on Americans and their economy. It was as if every player in the health care system contributed to a value added tax on health goods and services. Accounting firms, long the supposed guardians of true financial reporting, have essentially given the store away along with any credibility they might have had in dealing with the financial reporting within this industry. The financial system itself has thus become complicit in perhaps the greatest financial fraud in U.S. history.

Obamacare tried to make reforms, but ended up adding to the confusion. Instead of the 75 percent of uninsured persons needed to sign up, Obamacare only got 40 percent. Later, the Congressional Budget Office would say this was because the expected number of eligible employers did not have their employees shift to Obamacare, but rather continued to provide private health insurance to those employees.

In any case, this number was not enough to support the costs of the program and to keep insurance premiums from spiking into a death spiral. Obama could not make significant changes to the program because by that time Congress was controlled by the opposition party, which would have none of it.

The Obamacare mandate that all individuals be required to have health insurance or pay a fine was never strong enough, or sufficiently enforced by the IRS and other federal government departments that were involved. In the end, there was a lack of coordination, but also a desire not to make the program even more unpopular by strict enforcement of the mandate. In addition, the Obamacare requirement that health plans on the exchanges pay at least 80% of premiums to actual health care costs proved too burdensome to an industry used to normal expenditures of 60% on actual health care provision. That Americans were paying twice as much for their health care than anyone else because they paid for private insurance as well was becoming painfully obvious. Bernie Sanders in his 2016 campaign went back to the issue time and again, arguing for a Medicare based system that would cut out the private health insurance overhead that hung over the American economy like a sword of Damocles. To Republicans of course, this was considered "Socialized" medicine, a favorite **boogeyman, and what both Social Security and Medicare were originally called**. Sanders, unapologetic, even invited being labeled a socialist.

ACA was a baby so ugly that it would not, could not see the light of day until after passage, but it was born of widespread compromise by stakeholders in the health care industry, insurance and government. Like an animal designed by committee it was a monstrosity. It extended Medicaid and gave deep subsidies to the poor who enrolled for insurance, helping them with copays and deductibles without which the insurance would have been worthless. 75% of enrollees paid $100 or less per month on plans that typically cost $300-400 a month to the unsubsidized. They received help with their bills on top of that because the plans all turned out to be high deductible, which was never intended either. If there had been any thought that the program would have to subsidize so deeply, it would have been obvious from the beginning that the insurers were not negotiating in good faith and that only a public option would work. The insurers manipulated the government from the start.

Getting everyone into the big tent required a cut off of benefits at the $47,000 a year income level, the fiscal cliff as it became known, above which buyers of individual policies would receive no assistance managing the premiums. This would only have been okay if the individual market that was hence created had been a stable one. It was not, and the rising premiums would soon alienate middle class buyers, turning them against the program. While this was estimated to be only 10 to 15 percent of participants, it was still millions of buyers. In addition, all the plans were high deductible plans with at least $5000 deductibles, further burdening middle class buyers and turning the plans into basic catastrophic coverage only. At the same time a large proportion of the subsidized buyers were paying monthly premiums of only $75, leading to resentment from the middle-income buyers.

_Medicaid_ added to the problem. Starting in 1975 as a state matching program intended for poor children, the mentally ill and disabled, it had exploded over the decades from $17 billion to $370 billion by 2016, ($570 billion total, $200 billion from the individual states in match). It now includes low-income able-bodied adults. While the $370 billion makes up only 10 percent of the federal budget, if the state match is added, the program would be $570 billion, or about 15% of the federal budget, rivaling the annual budget of the Defense Department, which was $590 billion in 2016. The program now covers 74 million Americans, making it by far the largest government health care program in the United States. 49% of American births are now covered by the program at an average cost of $12,000 each. States have wide discretion in determining what services they cover under the program and have widely different percentage matches, the highest of which is 75 percent federal for the poorest of states.

It is notable that the top 5% of _Medicaid_ patients are using over 50% of Medicaid expenditures, but this is typical in health care systems. It differs from what one would normally suppose is the case, namely that the U.S. national average of 80% of health care expenditures would benefit 20% of the population, the 80-20 rule known in social science circles as the _Pareto Optimum_. The rule of the vital few states that as a general principle of scarcity 80% of government or public resources redound to the benefit of 20 percent of the population. Pareto was known to have observed in 1896 that 80% of the land of Italy was owned by only 20% of the population. It has also been used to state as a maxim in business that 80% of sales are made to 20% of customers.

Generally, the _Pareto Optimum_ provides a useful guide to designing public policy when thinking in terms of what a society is willing to pay to fund a socially desirable goal designed to benefit only a few directly, but which indirectly benefits the society as a whole in other ways. All society must pay taxes for schools, for instance, although only a much smaller number of members of society actually go to school and receive the benefit. Society as a whole receives the benefits, albeit indirectly, by having an educated populace capable of producing more to the economy and capable of more intelligent political participation.

A similar rule of thumb is used in describing stock ownership. It is said that in America 80% of stock ownership is held by 10% of the population, and that 40% of ownership is held by the top 1% of the population. It is also often said that half of all Americans hold some stocks, but this becomes meaningless when considering how few stocks some Americans own.

_Medicaid_ covers 60 percent of nursing home care in the United States. But this is done entirely by Managed Care Organizations contracted to Medicaid. This spending also takes up almost half of all Medicaid expenditures. Medicaid also provides about half of government expenditures on mental health care. At the beginning of the program in the 1970's Medicaid enabled the closing of custodial state mental hospitals across the nation, freeing the mentally ill from stigma and allowing them to find employment and meaningful lives. It also took the expensive burden of maintaining such facilities off state budgets.

Created in 1965, _Medicare_ is not a matching program, and is intended as an entitlement largely for those over 65 years of age. Funded by the equal payroll contributions of employees and employers, it covered 55 million Americans in 2015. It made up 18% of the federal budget at 695 billion dollars in 2016. Together, _Medicare_ and _Medicaid_ federal expenditures made up $1.066 billion in 2016, or 27% of the total federal budget in that year.

So, Medicare covers 55 million, Medicaid covers 74 million, and the VA covers about 22 million veterans and their families. The Veterans Administration is the largest health care provider in the nation, with 378,000 employees spending 273 billion dollars in 2016. This brings the total of government health care programs in the annual Federal budget in 2016 to 1.339 billion dollars, or 34 percent of the total Federal Budget of that year of 3.9 trillion dollars. All this covers a total of 151 million Americans. The cost of government provided health care in America thus makes up a significant majority of total national health care expenditures and covers about half the population.

Private health care, covering 155-170 million Americans, on the other hand, was about 1.1 trillion dollars in 2015 and also covers about half the population of the country. Total health care in the U.S. runs more than 3 trillion dollars. GDP was 18.5 trillion in 2016 and health care was 18 percent of GDP, or 3.3 trillion. These numbers do not totally add up (they are off by about 250 billion) and a part of the problem is the cost of uncompensated care. There are reliable numbers on the cost of this care by hospitals nationwide (35 billion in 2015), but the real number most likely runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars for the economy as a whole. These costs are often shifted from one part of the health care system to another and often in unpredictable ways. With American accounting firms often complicit, there is a substantial amount of fraud inherent in the American system.

Compare this to the trillion dollars or so that Defense and national security agencies take up in the United States. While the Defense Department budget may be about 600 billion, there are hundreds of billions of dollars salted away for military and national security agencies in various other department budgets, such as that found in Homeland Security, Energy, and classified intelligence budgets. This brings the total much closer to 1 trillion of the total 3.9 trillion annual federal budget in 2016, and really takes the federal national security budget from 15% to 25% of the total Federal Budget in that year.[39]

Today, the average member of the American military is better paid than their counterparts in the civilian agencies of the Federal government, with the most generous social programs and benefits. The military has become in a sense a substitute welfare state for small town America, from where most military personnel are consistently recruited. They are predominantly white, non-college educated Trump supporters.[40]

The changes wrought to the American health care system by the ACA were changes unwittingly designed to create a certain degree of class warfare. With a heavy emphasis on reducing uncompensated care, which was a hidden tax on the health care system and the economy as a whole, the ACA tried to reduce the number of uninsured as its primary goal. By doing this, cost containment might at last be addressed, essential since the trajectory of health care cost inflation was on an unsustainable path. But it did this primarily by expanding Medicaid to include able bodied adults of the lowest incomes. The creation of a health insurance marketplace by the government was really secondary, but it received by far the greatest publicity, especially when it failed on its hapless rollout in 2013.

The insurance marketplace concept was really more in line with Romney's State of Massachusetts universal coverage, which itself was derived from more orthodox conservative ideas of preserving an insurance mediated health care system. It was Independent Joe Lieberman in the Senate who was responsible for removing the public option from Obamacare late in the process of passage that really doomed the proposal. As a result, the insurance companies would be allowed to raise rates as high as they wanted knowing that the large majority of those in the marketplace were price insensitive owing to their massive subsidies. It would have been easier and not much more expensive to simply hand out free government paid for health insurance. What is amazing is how otherwise intelligent human beings could have been so easily duped by an avaricious industry intent on fleecing the American public.

The marketplace was where those with middle class incomes could go to buy insurance for individuals and their families, typically the self-employed. The plans that were available in most states at reasonable premiums were largely high deductible plans, however. This created an obvious inequity that favored the new low-income participants, a fact that was not lost on middle America and future Trump voters. This fed a sense of grievance against how Federal policy was being designed by the Federal government. It fed the fears of the white middle class that poor and minorities were being entitled over them.

For an entitlement program in the United States to benefit the poor over the middle class was inherently out of step with past policy approaches of other entitlement programs in the country. As a result, the ACA became the poster boy for the new era of _Grievance Politics_. It had its priorities wrong, failing to place the first priority on the middle class as was the case with other Federal programs over the years. _Hyper-partisanship_ in the Congress guaranteed that changes to ameliorate the ACA's policy and program deficiencies would not take place under Obama and the program continued to spin out of control.

The new American _Hyper-partisan_ political model swings majority control only briefly into the hands of each party, whereupon it is quickly lost at the next mid-term election. Because there is no need for compromise under one party control, new policy directions are established without reaching across the political aisle and spectrum to reach a verisimilitude of national consensus. Instead, the actions of the party in power are decried by the opposition and demonized as being too far to the extreme. There will be merit in this argument as no broad consensus was ever reached in devising policy. A divided government of stalemate ensues until the beginning of the next one-party control cycle.

A cyclic nature is not unusual to American politics. Democrats had only 2 men in the White House in the 72 years after the start of the Civil War. The Republicans had only one President in the 36 years after the start of the Great Depression. The current pattern of ping pong Congresses and White Houses though is an aberration.

Of 500 counties that went from Obama to Trump, 100 were the rural counties in the 3 states that swung the election in the Electoral College in 2016, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania with about 80,000 votes. It was a dramatically unexpected result. Polling had failed to pick up rural voters who declined to be interviewed as to their vote. There was a preponderance of these voters who refused within the rural areas. The interviews took 15 minutes and asked associated questions. Those willing to take the time were more likely to be the highly motivated voters on the right and left. These were _Brennan's Hooligans_ , those who felt strongly partisan, either Democrat or Republican. It was rural voters in the middle who did not feel strongly enough about the election to want to take the time to register their opinions with pollsters who ultimately decided the election. They were essentially noncommittal voters, _Brennan's Hobbits_. The voters most loosely associated with voting were the ones to make the big call.

The pollsters' failure to include these humble but aggrieved rural voters set the country up for a big surprise on Election Night of 2016. 2016 cut the country neatly in half, posing its ego against its id. On Election Night 2016 the grievances operating beneath the surface were finally encouraged to emerge.

Religion's High-Water Mark.

What has been most destructive of the conservative religious movement for some time in the U.S. has been a feeling that the religious should at least in some cases supersede the civil. This may have its moral antecedents in the religious right's position on abortion, which deems it morally repugnant, often comparing it to murder of the innocent. This view is intolerant of permitting others to make the choice as to whether they would wish to terminate a pregnancy in its early stages. To those with this view abortion within the specified limits of the law is interpreted as bringing about the death of a fetus, not just terminating a pregnancy, to which they are unalterably opposed.

In other words, for the religious right it is not sufficient that those sharing this belief should follow this belief alone, but rather that they should have the right to impose their view on others. I have never understood this part of the reasoning. Why, if this is one's view, does it therefore necessarily follow that one must make sure everyone else must follow the same view, whether they should wish to or not. Isn't it obvious to all that this an essentially moral and ethical dilemma that can only be decided in the mind of the individual and not the society at large?

It seems to me that such a view is more broadly intolerant than just the issue of abortion would imply. Why is it not sufficient to be permitted to follow one's own religious dictates without the necessity of imposing them on others?

This is an absolutist position, in a world where moral absolutes have become the distinct providence of the religious right. As such it is not strictly rational, as absolutist positions tend not to be. Other ideas of the movement have the same problem, and when translated into public policy often result in an imposition of religious belief on the norms of civic behavior. This has not stopped the right from imposing federal and state Religious Freedom Restoration Acts of dubious public policy value.

As the country was not founded on a theocracy, but rather on the idea of democracy, these ideas are at odds with much of the thinking of the founding fathers, which calls for a clear separation of church and state in the Constitution. The absolutist right further makes strict constructionist interpretations of the Constitution itself in order to limit public policy and rail constantly against Supreme Court interpretations of religious liberty that try to define the line between church and state, a line which the right appears to wish to blur at every occasion.

They do not see these activities as undermining our democracy because they believe their views are transcendent of the corporeal world and are not to be reserved to divine providence and afterlife. They mix religious belief with political belief in what can be, under some circumstances, a toxic and dangerous brew antithetical to widely accepted democratic practices. These views are strongest among the pre-millennialist evangelicals discussed earlier who believe the world must wait for redemption at its end, which is near, making the perfectibility of man an impossible task without sufficient time to reach its goals. The post-millennialists may believe that man can at least reach toward perfectibility in this life, which leaves room for democratic processes to run their course. It's easy to see, given this landscape, where the absolutists of the evangelical movement line up.

Evangelicals in general may see religion as an authority that is pre-eminent to government. The religious admonition to give Caesar what is Caesar's implies that earthly authority is to be given it's due, but Evangelicals are more likely to see earthly authority as interfering in the natural order of things and that the natural order under God is to recognize those who are God's and to favor them over the less Godly, a prescription for discrimination and inequality. Much of the 18th and 19th century European view was of course that non-Christians were heathens and therefore were necessarily lesser people.

That absolutist pre-millennialism is a danger to democracy cannot be equated to how Muslim extremism is a danger to Arab civil societies in the Middle East, however. It is not armed and violent. Well, actually many of the American pre-millennials may in fact be armed in America, but they are not violent. And this is not to say that religious extremism is not a threat to democracy in general. It is. But then this is why separation of church and state has come to be a central tenant of virtually all democracies in the modern world. The Kennedy-Nixon Presidential race highlighted the issue with Kennedy being asked if he was a Catholic who would follow religious doctrine over the Constitution or the dictates of his office as President. Kennedy successfully fought back against such claims to become the first and, to this day, only Catholic President of the United States. It is interesting that no one running for President these days is asked if their evangelical leanings will interfere with their dispassionate execution of the laws of the country, as well they probably should be.

This powerful religious force in American political life may be losing some of its strong influence however. The U.S. Census does not seek religious identification information when enumerating the American people, but reputable sources such as the Pew Research Center do perform periodic surveys on the subject. Religious diversity and pluralism have long been a central tenant of American life, with the result that it is relatively easy to identify Americans by their religious preferences.

2014 Pew Research Center Data

Religion in the United States  
according to the  
Pew Research Center (2014)[41]

The number of importance here is the 23 percent or so who are religiously non-affiliated, which is the number that is changing the fastest.

The Public Religion Research Institute's 2016 national survey shows that 35 percent of Republicans were evangelical white Protestant, a number which they found to be stable over the course of the last decade, and that 73 percent of Republicans belong to white Christian religious groups. This is clearly a defining characteristic of the GOP.[42]

According to the study, in 1976 there were 81% of Americans who considered themselves white Christian, with 55% as white and Protestant. In 2016, these numbers had dropped to 43% white Christian and 30% white Protestant. Similarly, twenty-five years ago American Catholics were 87% white, but today they are 55% white, non-Hispanic. Catholics under the age of 30 made up 52% of American Catholics in 2016. Whether Protestants or Catholics we see a strong trend away from white dominance of mainline religion in the U.S. Even white Evangelical Protestants have declined from 23 to 17 percent from 2006 to 2016.

Some of this is of course a consequence of the normal demographic changes that are taking place within the country as a whole. But it is religiously unaffiliated persons who are the fastest growing segment of the population, almost tripling from the early 90's to 24% of the population in 2016. This segment is 47% independent, 33% Democrat, and 11% Republican.

The inevitable conclusion is that the diminishing ranks of white Protestants and Evangelicals, as well as the continued growth of the religiously unaffiliated, threatens the Republican voting base in a very serious manner. Pew projects that the religiously unaffiliated will make up 38.5% of Americans by 2050.[43] This means the U.S. will catch up with other advanced countries in the percent of the religiously unaffiliated. In France it is at 44%, Germany 34%, the UK at 38%, Japan 52%, Sweden 54%, Russia 44%, and China 51%.[44]

Religious motivations are the oldest social manifestation of our genetic brain development, the need to create an afterlife construct being almost essential to a recognition of consciousness and individual awareness. Transcendence may be just an idea, but it is almost essential to being human. That man should join with the divine and supernatural in afterlife has always been at the heart of all of man's religions. When religion became more formalized, it was quickly weighted down with interpretations that reflected the historical social norms of the adherents. To the degree that these norms reflected the ignorance and fear of earlier times, religious fundamentalism and extremism could hold back social progress, as it did in the Middle Ages. It could even undermine modern societies in much the way that Islamic extremism has in the Middle East in our day.

Growing religious un-affiliation also means that, going forward, the affairs of great countries are less likely to be influenced by ignorance and fear, especially of The Other: other races, other religions, other cultures than they have been in the past, and this is because over-reliance on fundamentalist and extreme religious authority over the authority of civic institutions can be expected to diminish in time if current trends toward non-religious affiliation hold true. Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism in the United States has probably reached its zenith or High-Water Mark, and should have a gradually diminishing influence on the country's political future. With this should come more rational and inclusive public policy and somewhat less reliance on appeals to base emotion, fear and ignorance in elective politics. Northern European countries seem to be most advanced in this regard, but a lot more of their success in developing a sophisticated and equitable civic sphere can probably be attributed to having limited the amount of money at play in their electoral systems.

Evolutionary changes in the American electorate further show an older, less religious, more college educated, and less white public than in the past, and it is useful to see how these factors have affected the political landscape in general.[45]

While whites still make up 69% of the US population, the number of whites in the U.S. has declined 14% from 20 years earlier in 1997. Whites have declined in the Democratic party by even more, 16%, in that time. The College educated have increased 8% nationally but by almost twice as much in the Democratic Party, or by 15%, whereas in the Republican Party the number of college-educated has remained the same in the last 20 years.

Astonishingly, those over age 50 now make up half the U.S. demographic, up from 40% in 1997, but far more of this group is Republican than Democratic. Of course, this suggests that the Republican Party is likely to suffer from an aging demographic that it will eventually lose. While 24% of Americans have no religious preference in 2017, up a whopping 16% from 1997, most of this group appears to have aligned with the Democratic Party.

Those with postgraduate educations identify with Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 2 to 1, while Millennials show a strong preference for the Democratic Party also. All this reinforces the point that the dominance of religion in American political life appears to be waning as the population has aged, grown more educated and become more racially diverse.

By 2030 a third of Americans will have no religious preference, according to **Scientific American** , projecting forward using data from the General Social Survey conducted each year in the United States.[46] By 2020 there will be more non-affiliated than there will be Catholics and by 2035 non-affiliated will outnumber Protestants.

Whites of course will also become a minority of American citizens by 2044 and this will further reduce the white religious base of the country and the Republican Party.

Time to return to the Batcave, Robin.
Chapter 2  
WHAT KIND OF WORLD DO YOU WANT?  
Lose the Earthquakes, Keep the Faults

It is said the devil can quote scripture to his own purpose, which should give us all pause to consider how easily we let our lives become a search to justify everything we were taught at our parent's knees. We need to be Vulcan or at least put on our Vulcan ears. We need to peer beyond the barricades of the places we were born.

One doesn't come free formed into the world as a tabula rasa. The past is a slippery slope rising out of a muddy plain, treacherous in every regard. Changing perceptions of who we are defines what we are, that is: living, breathing, temporal, ephemeral beings. We are always a work in progress, never finished. Our last book never gets written. We have to take it with us when we go.

Experiences take time to understand, to integrate. We inject meaning into them. Sometimes we shouldn't.

In the cities and towns of America there is always a financial disaster waiting to happen, a backlog of developers and projects stalled in getting off the ground, a police department with disturbances on their hands, a city organization with a reputation for corruption and mis-management which it needs to overcome.

There are parts of yourself that you pack with you and parts of you that you leave behind when you travel to each new city. Like an actor you cut and paste to fit the play. Each experience is river silt meandering its way through your days, cutting an ever stranger, newer course.

Cadres of men and women who go around the country running cities and towns for the ICMA (International City Management Association) and the AICP (American Institute of Certified Planners) sometimes fancy themselves mythic gunslingers coming into town to clean things up. The ICMA's municipal managers are almost entirely male and they tend to propagate the myth more than planners do. They seek to clean up bad politics and improve the quality of life in a community. Police, for instance, always the largest municipal department, usually report to City Managers. Adopting the City Manager form of government helps make this clear in most instances. City Managers may see themselves a bit like the main character in the movie _Local Hero_ , 1983, as a man on a mission soon charmed out of it by a bunch of quirky locals.

Elected mayors and city councils are not so romantic. They fear the outsider who may prove to be nothing more than a fraud sent to fleece the Town as some kind of confidence man, ala _The Music Man_ , 1962. Or perhaps, the chosen outside professional is destined to become a cypher, whose simple statements are misinterpreted as pronouncements of profound wisdom, such as was the case with Chauncy Gardiner in 1979's _Being There_. The ideal may be Plato's philosopher king or Confucius' humanistic emperor.

I grew up in the Midwest in a 200-year-old farm town situated on the Rock Island Line. The town was founded by seven Congregational families, who moved from up-state New York to new land explored and purchased in the Northwest Territory. The year following the purchase they experienced a harrowing winter journey from New York traveling in wagons and on horseback. That first year they built their first cabin on a very flat and windy plain.

The philosophy of the settlers was puritanical. They were into self-denial and temperance. They were abolitionist and Republican.[47] The Town became a stop on the Underground Railroad and grew to a population of 5500 by 1855. It became a Town by legislative action in that year and a City by 1865. After 1855 the population levelled out and barely budged. Notably, the School District covered 260 square miles. That District now has a population of 13,000. The Library District is similar. By the 1960's many people lived in the unincorporated rural subdivisions of the Town and commuted to jobs in the nearby urban area.

In the 1960's there was a big article in the local paper about the expanding population in the rural area to the North of town. My father was particularly proud because the article pointed out that he was the new rural mail carrier for all these new, professional people. The expansion was significant to the local economy and to jobs, belying the idea that it was land rich farmers paying property taxes who were chiefly responsible for underwriting the educations of the very middle-class kids of the Town. It was an above average school system, for all that. Especially for rural Illinois.

The Town's people lived on the most level of playing fields. Everybody was poor together during the Great Depression and World War II. By the 1960's older residents complained that youth did not appreciate real privation. The young were routinely accused of living "high on the hog". It was a time of investment and innovation in the nation's agriculture. Farming thrived. So, the Town did too.

My family name had its origins in a language group known as Sorbian. It dates back to 600 AD. Keep in mind that there were few last names until 1000 years ago. First names were the only names needed in a world where individuals lived primarily in small nuclear groups of other persons every day and rarely encountered anyone from outside their group. People stayed in place their whole lives because there was little need for travel, which at most times remained both difficult and dangerous. In the Sorbian language, my patronymic is a reference to an animal native to the region, the shrew.

My patronymic stands for a place name in West Prussia. The West Prussia Gazetteer, which can be found online, shows it as a city, town, or farm. The Gazetteer further identifies the name as being found in the District (Kreise) or County of Neustadt, specifically as reported to the civil office at Schlo B Neustadt. As of 1999, after administrative reforms, this became Wejherowo County. The Gazette identifies this place as being in the Parish of Rahmel. The parishes are indicated by the Gazette to be either Protestant or Catholic and Rahmel is indicated as Protestant.

The County of Wejherowo is located 22 miles northwest of what was then called the City of Danzig, but which is now known as Gdansk. The County includes the City of Wejherowo, pop 45,000, Rumia, pop 44,000, and Reda, pop 19,000. It is known as the Kashubian Tri-City.

Gdansk was Danzig prior to the Treaty of Versailles, at which point it became known as the Free City of Gdansk. It is found in the Northernmost part of the country, situated on the Gulf of Gdansk, which is in turn part of the great and very cold Baltic Sea that borders Europe's northern regions, with its strategic shipping lanes. The parish of Rahmel lies in the easternmost part of the County of Wejherowo. This puts it right along the coast. Today, the vast majority of those in Poland with my name reside in this area, close to the Gulf of Gdansk.

According to Google Maps, 17 miles North of Gdansk in the County of Wejherowo is a village with my name. It has 124 people. Google also notes that in German the village is known also by my name. It is just a few miles West of Rumia, pop. 44,000. South of Rumia on the way to Gdansk is Gdynia, an important seaport with a population of 250,000 and Sopot, a resort city of 40,000. Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot make up the larger association known as the Gdansk Tri-Cities area.

In the late 1800's the whole northern part of what is today Poland was under the Prussian Empire and was known as West Prussia. East Prussia was essentially in what is today Russia, and West Prussia was centered around Danzig. When asked, my Great Grandfather Jacob told people that he and his family had emigrated from West Prussia, Germany, a place name that lost much of its meaning after the dissolution of the Prussian Empire post World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. At that point West Prussia became all of Western Poland and remains very Polish to this day.

My great grandfather, Jacob, and his wife, Hazel, came to the United States from this area of Poland in 1892. They had married on January 10, 1881. He was 24, she was 18. By the time they emigrated to the United States they had four children. Of the children there were three boys and one girl. The boys were Oscar, Max and William. They were to eventually have 3 more children in America, all girls. The names of all four girls were Ida, Mabel, Bertha, and Emma.

Jacob and Hazel came to America by way of ship, presumably from Danzig, landing at the Port of Baltimore on May 7, 1892. Jacob worked for the Rock Island Lines for 20 years and thereafter used his skill as a shoe cobbler, learned back in West Prussia, to go into business for himself for the next 30 years. He lived quietly, raised his family at his home on Russell Street, and died following his 60th wedding anniversary year at the age of 85.

William Senior, my grandfather, went into the trades just as my great grandfather had done. William became a carpenter, married and had two children, both boys. He lived on South Oakwood until he passed away, alone for many years after his wife Betsy had passed away. On South Oakwood he had a barn in the back yard of his house. It was probably meant originally to be a garage, but William used it as his carpenter's shop. I can remember visiting it a few times with my father. It was a disorganized place, filled with sharp carpentry tools and boards of all kinds, smelling of fresh cut lumber. A small wood stove positioned near the center of the room kept it warm in the winter. I remember how tall, rangy and agile William was. He seemed confident that he knew exactly where everything was, even though that was impossible.

William's house was a couple blocks West of our house on Spring Street. This was the 1950's of course, and he would on a nice day walk over to visit us. I can remember sitting on his steel thigh, as we were very small at the time, and gazing up to study the large mole on his cheek, which made him appear kind of Lincolnesque. The smell of cigars and pipe tobacco always accompanied him.

I don't remember him saying a lot. In fact, I can't remember anything he said. I don't think he was much of a talker, but I think he was rather more of a doer, the type who liked to get things done, the kind who relished problem solving and the satisfaction of figuring things out. He was known for his skill as a cabinet maker, and for his ability to supervise a crew in building modest depression era houses in the 1930's and 40's.

Years later I was working as a mower at the Town's only Cemetery one summer late in my college days when the Sexton (they still had one then) told me a story of the time that my grandfather had a job at the Sexton's house. The Cemetery is well known for its main hill, practically the only hill with any steepness to it in town. The Sexton's House is located at the top of it. The North side of this hill always got an annual work out as the town's sledding hill during snowy winters.

It was during the War years and my grandfather had a car with a rumble-seat. He used the rumble car that summer to roll up the South side of Cemetery Hill. In the back, in the rumble seat, were heavy piles of shingle destined for the roof of the Sexton's House. Unfortunately, it was a very bumpy ride and many of the shingles bounced out along the way. William got out of the car and looked back, only to see shingles scattered all down the hill. Apparently, the Sexton and my grandfather had a good laugh, one good enough that the Sexton was able to remember and tell me about it many years later.

My father and his brother became mail carriers. His brother delivered on foot in Town and dad delivered by car in the country. My dad started by working at the customer counter, and then entered the Army after Pearl Harbor. He served in Panama as a mail courier, driving back and forth along the Panama Canal. He was stationed at Fort Kobbe, CZ (Canal Zone), which contained Howard Field during World War II, a part of the Army Air Force. After the War dad resumed his job at the Post Office and that's when he became a rural mail carrier.

I loved going to the Post Office, which was in a cool Carnegie style building, but I rarely got the chance. Each carrier had a tall wooden desk with postal slots as high as one could reach. Into these the carriers would sort all the mail designated for their routes before bundling everything with leather straps. Dad would then load the back seat of his car with these bundles. The top bundles would be mail for the beginning of the route, the bottom bundles for the end of the route, everything carefully planned to be accessible in a sequence.

My dad and the other men who worked there clearly shared a special bond. The place felt like _It's a Wonderful Life._ I accompanied him once or twice during the Christmas season and it was fun to put the mail with all the Christmas cards and occasional gift packages into the farmer's mailboxes on my side of the car. The farmer's wives left small boxes of homemade cookies and candies at that time of year. Boxed candy ended up in my mother's big downstairs freezer for later.

United States Post Office  
******, Illinois  
September 3, 1942

To Whom It May Concern:

I am pleased to unhesitatingly recommend Mr. ***** of this City in connection with a position relating to mail service. Mr. ***** has served as a substitute carrier out of this Post Office for the past two years and my contact with him during that time has proved to me his worthiness.

He is a splendid young man, ambitious as well as industrious, strictly honest and entirely capable. He is eager to make the most of his opportunities and manifests a fine spirit of cooperation, which is indeed an attribute.

Mr. ***** comes from a good family.

I feel that he is fully competent to assume responsibility and trust that due consideration to his qualifications outlined above may be given and feel assured that he will perform his duties in such a manner as to reflect credit upon those who in any way were responsible for the position to which he is assigned.

Very Truly Yours,  
Frank M. Bradley  
Postmaster

Of course, times were tough in small town rural America in the Depression. My mother grew up in the same town with many sisters and a brother. Her father left when she was quite young. The family received assistance but everyone took up chores to earn whatever they could.

A black and white photo of the era shows my mother as a kid in a plain cotton dress looking distinctly waif like in her Mary Janes and white anklets. Her hair is chopped short with a barrette on one side. During High School, my mother worked at a local café downtown and there she met my father, back from the War.

I attended morning kindergarten in the basement of the Town's Baptist Church. I walked to kindergarten on nice days. I sucked at crayons because I was always at a loss as to what to draw. A little brown-haired girl took pity and helped me. I fell in love. But I never learned to draw and nobody cared.

I was a too enthusiastic student. Mrs. Brown indicated on my first-grade report card, "(N) Needs to improve. Desire to tell what he knows becomes too great to curb. Talks out." I improved and by second grade my teacher, Mrs. Magerkurth, says on my report card: "**** is a very dependable boy. He is very consistent in his work. **** is a very perceptive and eager student." She then goes on to criticize my cursive writing. I had to stay after class for tutoring on this. I fell in love again. But I never was good at cursive writing and nobody cared.

There were a lot of things about the town that were cool. On some Sunday mornings my father would go to the bakery early and bring us back fresh donuts and pastries. On some Sunday mornings, if I got up early, I could go with him. I loved that place, in the middle of State Street, and would go with him so we could stand in line with a group of other quite ordinary people while waiting for our turn to order. In the meantime, we could spy the different baked goods sitting in pans on shelves in the glass display cases and try to decide what we wanted. All the time you could smell the fresh bakery, an awesome smell like no other. I had no idea how European the whole thing really was until I visited Europe many times many years later.

On one of the main corners was a book store with penny candy jars lined up on top of and inside glass cases. Later the book store sold Marvel and D.C. comics, held in their own display racks, which became an obsession. We bought our school supplies there with lists from each teacher.

There was a Five and Dime store downtown. The place was like a circus in a store. There was a corner diner/store that we cut through from the parking lot behind the stores. Jocks hung out there. Not far away was a store called the Meat Locker, where farmers could have stock butchered and sold to the public. Great grandfather Jacob had a shoe shop near the railroad crossing in the early part of the century. Grandma (my mother's mother) shopped at the A&P grocery on the main corner opposite the book store. It had creaky hardwood flooring that shined brightly with heavy varnish.

We would visit Grandma Mattison most Saturday mornings and take her to the A&P, as she did not drive and had no car. She would buy us a box of animal crackers and my sister and I would take our plastic squeeze change purses to buy gum from the machine near the front door. The store had a butcher shop in the back with a real butcher using an electric power saw right in front of you. This brawny guy could vivisect anything, which made we wonder how far his grisly skills could really be employed.

I attended the South School, which was a massive old Carnegie style elementary school. The School had hardwood everywhere, on the floors, the classroom entrances, the high transoms, the huge staircases at the end of the main hallways upstairs and down. The classrooms were big and had high ceilings ringed with tall wooden windows that were hard to open. There were gigantic slate black chalk boards that went far higher than any of us could reach.

What was best about school were the Christmas programs. They consisted of little more than gathering the students in the Main Hall and Stairways to sing Christmas carols. We gathered together in the somewhat under-lit surroundings of the old building, cold and snowy and blowing outside, while we sang. I thought at the time, I will never forget this.

First and Second Grade were on the first floor, while upstairs classrooms were older grades. There were two first grades, two second grades, etc. so we would only gradually get to know everyone in our grade after a few years. On the landing of the East stairs was a big varnished, windowed cabinet that held various stuffed animals. I imagined that they had been scientifically preserved in situ, but who knows, they had been there so long. Their dark shapes stared menacingly at us grade schoolers from a time when the building had been used by more upper grades. Whatever purpose they served there seemed to have long ago been forgotten.

Everybody alive at the time remembers the day that JFK was killed. We were let go early. Our third-grade teacher told us we were being let go shortly after we returned from lunch and we sat waiting for word as to exactly when we would leave. The teacher wouldn't tell us what had happened, just something serious. Our coats were on hooks in the hardwood lined hallway leading in to the classroom. We had them on and were lined up before being let go and walking down the second-floor stairs past the stuffed animals in their cabinets. Once in the car, our mother told my sister and I what had happened. It never occurred to me that our country could be in any real danger.

The cafeteria was a separate, new building immediately adjacent to South School elementary and we had to walk over to it. It wasn't very long before I realized that I could keep my lunch money by working at the cafeteria and getting my lunch for free. I continued to work for the school cafeteria from that point on until I graduated from High School. There would always be one or two other students doing the same thing, but they came and went. I liked the fast pace of the work, the loud whir of the mechanical dishwashers and the challenge of keeping up with the cafeteria ladies cleaning plates and feeding racks of them through the machine. We had to work very fast.

The nearest point of the South School to the Cafeteria was a long tunnel that rose from the basement boiler room to the playground, at which point there were then only a few short steps outside to the back of the Cafeteria. The tunnel was a convenient way to have kids coming from the wet or snowy playground warm up as they came back into the building, shaking off the snow before going up to their classrooms. One day something happened, nobody really knew what, and the normally orderly process became jammed. Suddenly kids were crashing into each other with real force, violently, some falling, all crying out in ear splitting screams. You could feel yourself being lifted up off your feet by the crushing force of so many kids being squeezed together in the narrow space, pressed so solidly together that it was hard to breathe. In an instant it was over and we were all falling in a heap. Fortunately, no one was really hurt. Back in our classrooms we could not stop talking about it. Running down the ramp was banned after that.

My bike gave me access to the entire town. I would ride it back and forth to High School, which was across town, long after many others had bought cars. My baskets would be loaded down with books, my mind preoccupied with classes, piano/organ lessons, the school newspaper that I worked on, the stupid novel I was writing, and my grocery bagger job at the local Super Value. I loved the cold air and the slant of the morning sun as I wheeled through the back gate of the High School.

Peter, my best friend, lived at a Motel that his family managed at the South end of town. Peter's dad taught engineering at a local junior college. It was Peter's mother who really ran the motel. She had a big laundry room with professional washing and drying machines to handle all the sheets and towels from the motel rooms. And there was an intercom system that was connected to all the telephones in each room. Peter was interested in everything, especially if it had to do with nature or science, and he had all kinds of educational things in his room.

Peter's family later moved to College Avenue. It was a cool Victorian house. A la _Dawson Creek_ _'s_ , we cinematically made up the attic and a large closet with various shutters, lights and sound effects for friends to enjoy on a Halloween. Peter's family seemed interested in everything with a scientific curiosity, which I began to share.

Another good friend was Dan, who came from a large family. Their rented house was old and small and they didn't have much money, but what Dan did have was a great imagination. He loved coming up with new designs for ion propelled space ships and the like. There was really nothing he couldn't make up if he tried hard enough. He moved away before high school, but we sent long letters back and forth constantly through high school and even after we began college. At that point he was in physics and I was in biology. I came up with a design to have all these televisions with stations from around the world connected to screens and typewriters so that a person could see everything happening everywhere all at once, along with access to all the world's movies and books, in a kind of personal operations control center.

And yet another friend was a preacher's kid. I stayed over one weekend and attended their small country church with them on one strikingly beautiful Sunday morning. The preacher welcomed the church members, who responded with genuine warmth. My friend and his father were surrounded by admirers, I among them.

I wrote. We used assigned vocabulary words to make stories for school. Eventually this progressed to increasingly long and bizarre stories that were totally out of control. A bunch of us kept it going just because it was fun. I wrote a novelette and became so embarrassed by it that I put it to a merciful death in the backyard burn barrel by setting it alight. I took Dicken's book _A Christmas Carol_ and re-wrote it as a play. We were thinking of creating and learning how to use marionettes. If anyone could have designed them properly it would have been Peter. In high school I wrote a novel. Later, while in college I showed it to Ian Ballantine of Bantam Books when he visited my college's creative writing club. To his credit Ian was very nice about how bad it was, leaving me quite in awe of him.

The Junior High was the town's old High School. I loved it. Everything in the building had the feel of 19th Century pedagogy because it had been passed down from an earlier teacher's college. From the ancient gymnasium, to the old-fashioned library, to the huge study hall, to the quaint science rooms on the third floor, the place was a museum straight out of 1950's movies like _The Blackboard Jungle_

Maybe I was a bit intense, as the Junior High School counselor pointed out to me one time. I remember doing a presentation on _Future Shock_ [48] by Alvin Tofler, which described social paralysis coming from too rapid technological change and population growth. I remember asking fellow students how many would avoid having children because of imminent over-population. The answer was none.

In the summer I took an acting class at a local theater group that my mother was active with. I was reluctant, but took the class and performed as the villain in the final play. Later I was chosen to act in an adult play there. I did plays in High School and college. I even pulled curtain for a musical while in HS, managing to screw up by opening the curtain on a group of girls as they finished dressing for the opening scene.

There was the Reader's Theater production of The Murder of Lidice in High School. We stood to deliver our lines to perform this long form poem written in 1942 by Lois O. Meyer and Edna St. Vincent Millay, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, about the killing of hundreds of residents of the Town of Lidice, Czechoslovakia in 1942. The residents were killed after Himmler died of an assassination attempt by a group of partisan Jews at the height of World War II. The town was selected for punishment because it was thought to have sheltered the partisans. Code named Operation Anthropoid, it was later made a 2016 film, _Anthropoid._

I took years of lessons on piano and organ and played pipe organ for a junior choir, an Easter church service, and a couple of weddings, including my sister's. At one particularly desperate point during college I almost took a position as a regular church organist just to make money. My mother swooned.

I was given the Science Award at High School graduation and was voted Most Studious. I began writing for the school newspaper as a junior and by the end of that year was asked to co-edit it with another student who wrote sports. My erstwhile friend Peter was in charge of photography and advertising. We put the paper together in the now converted attic of his house, which was perfect because his dark room was just downstairs. In assembling the article galley proofs, pages, advertising and photographs into a coherent whole, we had a small staff assembled for all night sessions after school on Fridays once a month. The evenings were filled with pizza and soda pop.

Usually Peter would take the finished product to the local newspaper offices with the advisor the next day for actual printing, but I can't forget the night we dropped him off at his house late at night, apparently after delivering our High School paper to the local newspaper. We pulled up his steep drive to stop in front of his dreamy, graceful Victorian house. It was arctic cold on a piercingly black night, Paul Simon's Kodachrome playing loudly over the noise of the car heater, and for the first time in my life I felt pleased to belong to something. I believed that Pete led a charmed life, and I valued every minute that we shared. I was right to feel that way. He had a stroke at 34 and passed away.

I was fortunate to have a lot of cousins. One family of cousins lived on a farm not far from town. We were able to visit and stay over for short stays in the summer as children. They had an old fashioned farm house, and I loved how big it was. One of the bathrooms was under the main staircase, an afterthought from decades of dependence on outhouses. One year we visited when the temperature hit 101 degrees.

They had chickens and an incubator house where eggs were kept under warm lights until chicks were hatched. They had a chicken house where chickens nested to lay eggs, a chicken yard and sometimes a rooster. Once my mother and her sisters gathered at the farm and they killed and prepared fresh chickens. They would kill a chicken by cutting off its head with a hatchet on a block of wood, and one chicken got away and ran around without its head. We weren't supposed to see that.

When we were much younger, a cat had chosen to have kittens in the hayloft of the barn. It became an adventure to climb up to see them. I became so afraid of how high I was on the ladder that I don't remember ever seeing the kittens. One year we went to the farm for the Fourth of July and they displayed fireworks, shooting a pipe into the air with a deafening M80. We played croquet on a huge front lawn surrounded by a whitewashed wire fence. There were endless games of monopoly in the parlor, a parlor where summer moths were drawn to evening lights. I remember seeing a late summer rainbow through the room's front picture window.

Being a farm community, there were seed corn companies. There were farms that would hire high school kids to ride strange looking de-tasseling machines. The machines traveled down the rows of corn, the kids removing the tassels of pollen at the top of each corn stalk. There were boy's and girl's crews. I was fortunate to get on one summer to a Rogue crew. We walked the fields and with sharp knives on sticks cut down stalks that stood out (hence, rogue corn stalks), to root out genetic anomalies.

On warm summer nights the cousins and parents would get together at our house or at the farm and make ice cream and have watermelon. My father was a big fan of making ice cream and had been doing it since he was a kid. When he would make it for US the cream had to come fresh from a small farmer on the edge of town.

My cousin's farm was well outside of town and we visited them on Saturday nights when we were kids. We sat in the straight back seats of my father's ridiculous looking 1954 used and repainted Chevy as the farm fields flew by in the dark cool air. On the return the sky was filled with stars. Rows of fence posts popped in rapid succession one after another in the car's headlights, lulling us kids in the warm back seat to sleep. After we arrived home, while my mother got my sleeping sister, I can remember my father carrying me into the house. Back in the day, the road to my cousin's house was also well known for having a steep old hill. If my mother was driving us out to the farm during the day for some occasion, my sister and I would tease her into running the car to the top of the hill really fast so that we could feel the loss of gravity when we crested.

An older cousin and I used to play outside in the big snows that were common in those years. Later, I would confide in him a story I was writing. In this story a boy disappeared from home and dug himself an underground house. The story was all about how he did it so no one would find out and how cool the underground house was.

This older cousin would always help his Dad after services at our Methodist Church because his father was the Church janitor. My father and I would help too. My father was devoted and was the Church Treasurer for many years. Every Sunday afternoon he and my mother would count the money at home from the collection plates and deposit it at the Bank. We had to help with things like putting stamps on pledge letters. My parents were always in a hurry so they could get done. For my father, who got up at 4 am every day of the week except Sunday, this meant a Sunday afternoon nap.

There were a lot of church activities, like Sunday school, junior choir, youth fellowship meetings, accompanying on the piano, getting the attendance sheets from all the pews after each service, and helping to decorate the church for the holiday season every year. Occasionally I would be an acolyte or usher. There were numerous church dinners and once a church summer camp. My parent's involvement made all the performances for church activities inevitable over the years.

Illinois Wesleyan University and Augustana College

I interviewed pre-med university programs in the state and chose to attend Wesleyan University. During orientation I took a required math test and the advising teacher placed me in Calculus. The professor was Polish with a thick accent that defeated me completely. It was a small class of fewer than 10 students, which should have been a red flag and an indication of how unpopular the class was. I should have dropped it immediately.

While I did well at everything else my Calc grade was unimpressive and I began to reassess. The math for a long-term investment in a medical career did not look good to me. The majority of medical school students come from the top 20% of the income ladder in the U.S. and I was definitely not in that group. The pre-med students that I was attending class with came from more privileged backgrounds and it was clear that they were planning on lucrative careers. Today it costs $200,000 in debt on average for the average medical school student. I wasn't that all in.

Second term I took sociology, a couple political science courses, an intro to philosophy class, and entry level economics. They were all great. One of the poly sci courses was in Political Philosophy, about Machiavelli and Burke, Locke and Rousseau. I had prepared carefully for the final exam in this course because it counted for virtually everything and because the teacher was excellent. I was so well prepared for my final exams that I finished preparing a few days ahead of time, spending a couple days just pleasure reading. I was brushing up for my Philosophy exam in the Library when it dawned on me that I had mistaken the time. The test had already started! It was like a Freudian dream.

I ran to the classroom, shocked to see all the students hard at work and well into the exam time. The professor re-scheduled me to take the test. When I showed up, he told me that I had to devise my own test, asking questions on political philosophy as a professor would and then answering them. I got a well earned A on that test and still dream about being late to the big exam.

I transferred to Augustana College the next year. Not as costly, I liked the campus better, and it was closer to home. I lost the opportunity to take my older brother's apartment near the campus. He was just leaving it, moving on to another job, and it was perfect for me. Instead I found another apartment.

The one I chose turned out to be a little far. It was a third-floor walk-up. It had a shared bathroom and was exceedingly spare but recently redone. It was sunny. I moved in during winter when there was still plenty of snow on the streets. I remember biking one evening across the Mississippi toll bridge from Rock Island to downtown Davenport to shop for a pot and other cooking essentials. It was a very cold, wind-bitten night high on that toll bridge. The river had never seemed wider.

I soon found a closer apartment and bought a car off my dad, just in time as the old apartment was broken into. I wrote a little poetry at college and got something into the school's literary magazine. I read Joyce Maynard's book _Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties_ [49] my freshman year in college and thought it fantastic.

I was lucky to have an uncle at **International Harvester** in East Moline. He got me into the factory one summer. I became for a few months a UAW worker on the combine assembly line. Combines are very large machines used in the harvesting of field crops, mostly corn in that area. I worked a variety of positions on the assembly line my first week, some involving clambering all over the machine to construct the walls of the huge bin, or working a sub-assembly of the transmission. The transmission parts were extremely heavy but hydraulic hoists were employed to make them easier to move.

I was a skinny kid and pretty much outgunned by the amount of muscle needed for that job. It was hilarious to watch me work with guys easily weighing a hundred pounds more with arms as big as my legs, and they could not help but laugh at my puny efforts. That summer the days were blazingly hot. On the second shift that I worked the building still held the suffocating heat and humidity of the day. The cool night air greeted us as we left the building. My old Chevy had no air conditioning so I would let the wind blast through the car as I rocketed home on the empty, dark country roads.

During many college summers I worked for the School District maintenance department mowing their properties. One summer we moved all the furnishings from the South School, my old and dear elementary school, to the new pod-centered Southwest elementary school. Another summer I worked with a local contractor in insulating houses, their sides and attics, hot work, much of it on ladders. Another summer, I mowed the Oakwood cemetery, the town's cemetery.

The jobs were many. We insulated a local potter's house one day. Both the husband and wife threw pots. What an idyllic life it seemed to me to live serenely dedicated to one's art, in harmony with the world. It reminded me of what I hoped to be doing when I would someday achieve my life's dream: writing on a Saturday evening, looking from the window of a warm den toward a cold starlit night.

I spent a couple years at Seminary Hall, first in a single room, and then with friends. At the top of the campus' central hill, Seminary included a separate building for Admissions and Administration. The buildings were neo-Romanesque sandstone with ivy covered exteriors. Across the court was John Deere Planetarium. I took a film course there. It was a blast. Down the hill to the South was a women's residence where we went for meals. Augustana was a Lutheran affiliated school and required two courses in ethics and religion. Students were encouraged to be socially aware. Most of the students were affluent suburbanites from the Chicago area.

I needed a term paper for class and chose to write about a highway project being planned in Davenport, Iowa. The building of the highway would result in the loss of a number of homes in one of the City's older and more historic neighborhoods. Gathering information, I visited a community group's office to review the legal brief that fought against the highway. I then attended a public hearing on what had become a volatile local issue. I liked the public process, which appealed to my sense of fair play and government transparency. I had no idea then that public hearings would become a major part of my professional life. I walked up Seminary Hill bright with fall colors from our parking lot on the other side of 38th Street, up a steep set of winding wooden stairs to the dorm, impressed with what I had seen at the hearing.

The spring term of my junior year I accepted an internship with **Common Cause** in Washington, D.C. My assignment was to research changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a law that had been around a long time that protected public sector collective bargaining. I was thinking of a career as a union negotiator. I enjoyed spending time working at the Library of Congress and becoming familiar with everything in D.C. On Sunday afternoons I liked to hang out at Lafayette Park across from the White House. There I read Pirsig's _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_.[50] It describes what it means to pursue _virtus_ (excellence) in one's life _._ I would often jog along 16th Street, past the mysterious Victorian Russian Embassy building, and onto Pennsylvania Avenue. My parents visited and we stood at the corner of 16th and the White House, only to be suddenly pushed back by the police. A moment later a fast- moving limousine passed with the President of the United States, at least that's what the officer said.

Strangely, the lobby of the high rise building I stayed at on 14th Street was fire bombed a couple weeks after I left. The building was in an area known as the tenderloin, where even students were occasionally propositioned.

I sent a birthday card home:

Happy Birthday,

As you know, this card marks the first time (at least that I can remember) that I remembered your birthday with a card. It doesn't mean that I should have forgotten you before. What it does mean is that I made a special effort to remember this time. At least this way if you get a card from me you know it was a spontaneous act, my heart getting the better of my billfold. As a matter of fact, so generous was I that I went to a florist to buy you flowers. But I was shocked at the prices, I can tell you.

I knew you would be insulted if I spent so much money on something so frivolous, so naturally I decided a better gift would be to save you this anguish. (And spare you the need of subsidizing me at some later point.)

Needless to say, next year I will not have these convenient excuses for not buying you flowers.

To next year and all the following birthdays,  
Happy Birthday

Some part time jobs at school were really more like uncredited classes. I worked in the Art Department, cataloguing their art slides and learning art history. For a while in my junior year I patrolled the campus in the dead of winter nights to protect students out at night. I worked nightshift as an orderly for the nearby Public Hospital's Trauma Center. It was like an intro to nursing.

I majored in Public Administration and Accounting, minored in Economics, graduating cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. A large proportion of my classmates would strive to be recruited by the Accounting firm of Arthur Andersen, one of the big five accounting firms at that time. They wanted to work for Anderson in downtown Chicago from their home towns in the Chicago suburbs. To be recruited you had to be one of the best students in Accounting. All of the students chosen previously were a point of pride with the Professor in charge of the school's accounting program, who extolled them all. Little did we know at the time what would end up happening to everyone at Arthur Andersen. Those who were not good enough to be recruited by Andersen but who led careers elsewhere probably thanked their lucky stars when some years later the company blinked out of existence in one of the nation's biggest financial scandals, Enron. It was a scandal that became the harbinger of what was to come, the Great Recession, the nation's largest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Andersen was founded in 1913. It had 85,000 employees in 2002 when it was forced to surrender its licenses to practice accounting. Executives had criminal convictions for destroying documents relevant to the SEC investigation of Enron. The U.S. Supreme Court later reversed the convictions but the firm was destroyed. Enron Corporation went bankrupt in 2001, one of the largest bankruptcies in US history, losing many billions to investors and pensioners, and bringing about new legislation in Congress to prevent such financial abuses in the future. However, none of the measures taken by Congress were sufficient to forestall the inevitability of the train racing down the tracks, the U.S. mortgage crisis of 2007-08.

In the fall of 1978, I attended Southern Illinois University Law School. I was greeted with a hot dorm room lacking in air conditioning. We each had a room but the floor was shared with other law students. Again, the students were from higher income families and may have seemed a little self-centered and privileged. I would have done better not to have lived among them but rather in some off-campus apartment nearby. There wasn't much opportunity for a public career coming out of the law school at that time, and I wasn't really that interested in a private career. By Thanksgiving I began to consider other things.

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Home for Thanksgiving break, I called an old professor of mine, and told him of my interest in leaving the law and going into public administration. He was encouraging and told me of another student a year ahead of me who was doing the same thing. Little did I know at the time that I would many years later come to know and work closely with that student.

I returned home, took the GRE, was accepted at various graduate schools, and chose to take a Fellowship from what is now the **Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs** at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The Fellowship paid for my tuition and fees, and it provided a modest stipend to live on, both very much appreciated after my sojourn in law school where everything seemed expensive.

The atmosphere of the Madison campus was post 1960's. The school had been the setting of violent anti-war demonstrations. There were still student communes around, as well as some of the graffiti from that time. It was a physically beautiful city. The Wisconsin State Capital and other government buildings are located on a narrow isthmus set between two large lakes, Lake Mendota to the Northwest and Lake Menona to the Southeast. The UW campus lies along the South edge of Lake Mendota, giving the campus community access to a wide range of water-based recreation, especially sailing.

I perched in a fifth-floor high-rise apartment looking across the street at Howard Johnson's in downtown Madison. The tiny place was a stone's throw from campus and provided just enough room for a single bed, a dresser, a desk, and a student fridge. On top of the fridge was just enough room for a hot plate. To eat I used a board covered in drawer lining and sat on the bed, from where I could watch my grandma's old black and white tv set with the rabbit ears. To be dashing, I bought a second hand coat rack.

My studies consumed my time since that was all that mattered. I was content living within my means, which were trifling. We had historic snows that year, but I was on foot so it didn't really matter. The campus became a kind of winter wonderland.

During my second summer in Madison, I was fortunate to have an opportunity to serve as a paid Management Intern in Administration for the City of Madison. My work focused on preparing the 5 Year Capital Budget. I was also given the chance to visit each City Department to learn more about them. At the same time, I completed work on my thesis, which was about measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of municipal services. I had a desk in the offices of the City Administrator and worked for an Assistant City Administrator. The Mayor at the time was Paul Soglin.

Paul Soglin was a law student who became mayor in 1973 at the age of 27, having first been elected to the Common Council of the City in 1968. He had a history of being involved in the anti-war protest movement. He would go on to be elected to the Mayor's Office seven times. Underage drinking among college students as well as possession of small amounts of marijuana were generally not enforced by police under his administration.[51] Soglin played a role in the construction of the State Street Mall and later Monona Terrace, the convention center originally designed in the 1930's by Frank Lloyd Wright, located on Lake Monona next to City Hall.

The University at that time had a course in municipal engineering and, while I had no engineering background, I took it. I barely escaped with my life and a very kind C amid all the graduate engineering students. I was proud of everything that I learned in that class in the days before the computer, when it was still necessary to use math tables to complete the work. I also took municipal accounting, often called fund accounting. I fell in love with fund accounting.

I teamed up with another student for a graduate seminar project on the expansion of the Airport at Fond du Lac. An employee of the Wisconsin Department of Aviation was a great help. At one point the state aviation employee became our pilot guide and flew us in and out of Fond du Lac's airport. I learned what a white-knuckle flight really means. We bounced in the light turbulence, my stomach left behind, the deafening roar of the engine blasting in my ears. At 10,000 feet I felt we must be halfway to the moon. At another time, as part of a class on Public Sector Collective Bargaining, I attended a Milwaukee City arbitration involving the Outlaws Motorcycle Club and the City run by a really great arbitrator.

Naperville, Illinois

Finishing the requirements for the Masters in Public Policy and Administration in the summer of 1979, I was allowed to continue working for the City of Madison until October. Fortunately, I had a job interview as a Budget Analyst with the Finance Director of the City of Naperville, Illinois. The Director was a graduate of West Point who had served as Assistant Finance Director in Jacksonville, Florida before coming to Naperville. The job had a very modest salary.

The City's resources had been depleted in such a way that it was necessary to arbitrage $10 million in municipal bonds to maintain cash flow, something that would probably not be acceptable today. The former City Administrator and Finance Director had been fired and the new Finance Director had to shore up the city's finances with this debt issuance as a measure of last resort.

Police overtime was busting the budget and needed to be reined in, but the main concern was creating a viable budget and maintaining some kind of budget discipline throughout the year. The second year I tried a somewhat more innovative approach, including more background information spread throughout the budget. What is now routine on a laptop was incredibly difficult on a mini-mainframe that still required a staff of programmers to operate.

Miami

I was offered a similar position in Roanoke, Virginia but the salary was lacking. Instead I took a Budget Management position with Miami, Florida. I was hired by the Director of the Department of Budget and Management, a devoted Sikh who wore the traditional turban. The Department was very culturally diverse, including those of Cuban, African American, Jamaican, Indian, and European descent, and it was not unusual for it be referred to as the city's UN. I stayed for the interview at the Fontainebleau Hotel, where one of the hotel staff told me stories about the rich and famous people who had come through its lobby in the forties and fifties.

Miami is the only officially bilingual major City in the nation. Redevelopment was still removing the remnants of decay in the downtown area when I arrived, but there was $5 billion in proposed new real estate development in various stages of planning. The City was a crossroads between Europe and Latin America. It had a population of 350,000 but anchored a metropolitan population of several million that stretched to include Miami Beach, Coral Gables, and suburban Kendall County. The area reached Eastward to the Everglades.

Several times in its history the City had been largely destroyed by major hurricanes, the last time being in the 1930's. Modern construction and building code enforcement were therefore important to the viability of the Miami area. However, corruption had been uncovered in the City's code enforcement. The narcotics division of the Police Department had also experienced misconduct. It was the era of the cocaine cowboy and the temptation of easy money for narcotics officers was too great. Most of the division had to be replaced. The deadly riots of Liberty City and Over Town were still in the rearview mirror.

Cubans from the 1981 boatlift occupied the City's open spaces. They slept regularly with their shopping carts beneath the elevated freeway downtown where we parked on our way to our rented offices on Flagler Street. There were 140,000 Cubans sent by Castro aboard flimsy boats to United States shores, largely as retaliation for U.S. foreign policy. Many had been incarcerated in Cuba for various crimes. This posed a real danger to the City. The response was to seek an increase in the Police Department of some 150 officers. The U.S. economy was still deep in the straits of the recession of the early 1980's and City revenues were strained just to maintain current service levels. In the end it was necessary to lay off a city worker somewhere within the City workforce for nearly every position that was added in the Police Department.

I was assigned the Police and several other departments. The Police Department had received criticism for being too white and too English speaking, so efforts were being made to recruit new Spanish speaking officers as far away as Boston, the Caribbean and Latin America. The problem was that recruiting in this manner only increased the wash out rate in the police training academy, complicating matters further.

The Officers I worked with often regaled me with crime stories, as if this tactic was really necessary to gain my support for increasing their budget. They enjoyed telling me about car jackings that occurred regularly along my route back and forth to my apartment in Kendall. Young armed men would go right up to cars stopped in traffic during the rush hour, pointing their weapons and demanding that the driver get out of the car to give it up to the thief or suffer the deadly consequences. Or they would tell me about the thieves who lay in wait beneath higher end cars in the parking lot at the Dade County mall. Such a thief would wait until the driver returned to the car with their packages, at which point they would pull the feet out from under them while occupied with opening their car doors. Obviously, the thief would take everything of value from the now injured person, including of course their vehicle.

They also told me about a young woman who made a wrong turn off the highway and ended up in Over Town, only to be attacked and pulled from her vehicle. From there she was taken to a local motel and raped repeatedly for days before being let go.

I had mistakenly left the freeway in that area and remember being cat called by local residents, so perhaps I was especially vulnerable to believe such stories without actually confirming them. However, horrific stories such as this, real or urban legend, were the order of the day in South Florida. Not only was it the era of Miami Vice on television, but it was in July of 1981 that Adam Walsh was abducted from a Hollywood, Florida Sears and later found murdered and decapitated. His father, John Walsh, would go on to appear on _America's Most Wanted_ for over 20 years.

The unexpected was expected at the Miami Police Department. One day I was approached by a young Haitian couple who had been fortunate enough to make it safely to Miami's shores. They were trying to establish municipal identification through the Police Department and needed help with filling out their request form. I was surprised to be singled out by them but I had a Police ID hanging around my neck and that must have drawn their attention. I felt real shame that there was so little that I could do for them because of the language barrier. They had risked their very lives on the open ocean for the promise of a better life in this country, something we who are born here take too much for granted.

Municipal identification programs like the one in Miami can play a vital public safety role in diverse communities with new populations. The fact that Haitians were lining up to get their ID's demonstrated how useful they had become in the community, where they would not be able to get driver's licenses for some time. Weighed against this was the fact that they were providing personal information directly to the local police. It said a lot about their confidence in American authorities. Would Americans when placed in similar situations be so guileless? Perhaps, if having lost everything.

Sometimes even the most routine meetings can take an unexpected, even tragic turn, as when one of our routine budget meetings with the Police was interrupted. The leadership of the Department, the Budget Director, myself and the City Manager were meeting in the Manager's conference room one day when suddenly the police radios and the room's phones went off in unison. A patrol officer was down in a dangerous area of the City and his life had been lost. The reaction in the room was electric, personal, engraved on stricken faces. There are about a 100-150 such deaths each year in the United States. All I'm sure are met with the same reaction of instant and terrible grief.

Davenport, Iowa

My parents came to visit me in Miami during this time. They insisted that I leave. They said that they were very concerned about the safety of the City. Even though Miami was taking a drubbing nationally in terms of its image, I found it to be a very exciting City with a bright future. It was summer, when Miami is at its hottest and most humid, the time when the "snowbirds" leave the region and return to their places of origin in the north.

Even after my parents returned home, they continued to pressure me to come back to the Midwest. Miami is an expensive place to live and my wages were pretty modest at best. I ran a little short one month, the only time I've ever run into this, and my parents refused any assistance in a bid to further their ends to get me back. Fortunately, I had a good friend back home who agreed to help me out. I will always be grateful.

It was in the context of all these events that I took a job interview with the City of Davenport, Iowa for Budget Coordinator and was lucky in that I was offered the job. The cool autumn air that greeted me as I came off the plane in the Midwest was a welcome relief from the high humidity of Miami. This, combined with the challenge that the new job evidently offered, made my decision to accept an easy one.

Davenport is a City of 100,000 people on the Mississippi at the East/West bend of the river between Iowa and Illinois. Here there are actually five cities, Davenport and Bettendorf Iowa, and Rock Island, Moline and East Moline, Illinois, altogether known as the Quad Cities. It had a manufacturing economy with John Deere, International Harvester, the Rock Island Arsenal, Bandag, Alcoa and others. Davenport is the City that had so interested me when I was an undergraduate student at Augustana in Rock Island, and which had influenced me to pursue government. It is the largest of the Quad Cities.

Davenport has an unusual partisan, ward-based political system. Most cities and towns in the United States are _At Large or Non-Partisan_ , or, if partisan, have local parties that do not align with national political parties. In Davenport, the power of these local factions of Republicans and Democrats was roughly equal at that time.

American politics are largely identity politics. The average voter knows little about current political issues, whatever they may be, and finds it easier to simply adopt a set of core opinions espoused by whatever party they have identified with the most in the past. This is often determined by the family and occupational associations of the individual and is often referred to as identity politics.

When local politics in Davenport aligned with the interests of the same political parties at the State level, it gave local issues greater momentum. Given the closely distributed partisan balance of power, the Office of the Mayor of Davenport, the second largest City in the State of Iowa, was inevitably heightened in its importance to the State. Whichever party held Davenport's Mayoralty would most likely hold the balance of power on the closely divided City Council.

The majority party in the State legislature passed a bill requiring that all cities conform to the same fiscal year. There were five that did not, Davenport being by far the most significant among these. This would quite purposefully cause disarray for the current Mayor, who was not of their party, by lengthening the current fiscal year. Additional property taxes would not feasibly be available for the additional period of time, which was 3 months. This caused a large shortfall in funding. This budget gap would be very hard to resolve without substantial, and very unusual, service cuts.

By taking this approach, the majority party could force Davenport to make very unpopular reductions in services. These would damage the Democrats and their Mayor politically in the next election. In fact, the service reductions would give the Republicans a good chance to defeat the Democrats in the next election and win back the majority on the City Council.

In any case, the reform Bill passed the legislature and the Republicans won the next election for Davenport Mayor, proving the value of their strategy. The Finance Director was from the East Coast and needed a Budget Coordinator who knew something about cutting budgets, or dealing with what we called at the time Crisis Budgeting. In this regard, my experience in Miami seemed to qualify me.

Of course, this would mean I would be returning to the Quad Cities area, near my parent's home. My parents were pleased that I would leave Miami and more than willing to put me up at their home, from where I could commute back and forth to work at Davenport City Hall. I had been practicing to play for my sister's wedding on a pipe organ at a Methodist Church in the Kendall area of Southwest Miami. I was able to return home in time to play for her wedding.

The situation precipitated a budget crisis shortly after I arrived on the scene. The Republicans initiated their own Saturday Night Massacre (named after the Nixon dismissal of Special Prosecutor Cox, which forced the resignations of Attorney General Richardson and Deputy AG Ruckelshaus of the Justice Department, during the investigation of Watergate in 1973). Gathering to discuss the proposed budget on a Saturday night, the Republicans cut the budgets of the Administrator and Personnel Director to eliminate their positions, leading to the resignation of the Administrator. The budget for the first year I was there was unable to deal very effectively with the coming fiscal crisis, but it gave me the initial insight that I needed into how their budget process worked. It was the third municipal budget I had a part in preparing in that calendar year alone, having prepared budgets for Naperville, Miami, and Davenport.

I came across a professional journal article on Target Base Budgeting and how it had been successfully applied by the City of Cincinnati to its municipal budget.[52] Putting together a proposal for the Acting City Administrator, he took it to the various Council members who made up the City's Finance Committee. They were intrigued. In fact, they became interested enough in the idea that they contacted the staff in Cincinnati and, notably without taking me, flew there to learn more about it. They returned and gave the go ahead.

Target Base Budgeting is a variation of Zero-Base Budgeting, a well-known budget technique from the 1970's. In Zero Base Budgeting, all programs and expenses in a budget have to be re-justified every year or budget cycle. Budget items do not automatically carry over from year to year based on the assumption that if they were needed in the previous year then they will be needed in the next year. Aggregation of line items into actual programs gave forth to Program Budgeting, a similar technique. But in Target Base Budgeting, a greater emphasis is placed on the marginal costs and programs in an organization's budget. For example, an arbitrary standard for determining what portion of a Department's budget is to be emphasized is determined, typically 10 percent. The Department must provide detailed justification for that 10 percent of its budget. Usually it is this 10 percent, all or a portion of which is most likely to be cut during any particular budget cycle, which is eliminated from a Department's Budget following discussions with all stakeholders.

Using this approach in the following year's budget the financial crisis was successfully averted and layoffs were limited to relatively few in number. The Acting City Administrator left to work for a Chicago suburb and successfully adopted TBB there. After that, the idea spread to a nearby County government as well. Good ideas have velocities all their own.

Chicago

We entered a corner apartment on one of the higher floors of the building. There was an expansive view of downtown Chicago from a bank of windows without curtains. Glass towers reflected the glare of sunlight and cast huge shadows on the buildings. The late summer afternoon sun was beginning to set. I was looking out toward Lake Michigan and feeling a slight sense of vertigo when I looked downward. It was only a one room studio, and even at that it was going to be barely affordable on what I was going to be making. The reflections of the glass facades facing each other made the bohemian apartment an aerie suspended high above the streets.

"The bedroom is over here," my guide said, solicitously extending his arm toward what I assumed must be a kind of anteroom.

It wasn't. It was a closet with a twin mattress stretched across the floor. He gave me a sheepish side long glance.

"You probably won't spend that much time here," he said defensively. "There's just too much to do. But it's a great location! And hey, what about this view!"

Right.

I chose another apartment instead.

There are no better educations than the ones born of necessity. Learning about Chicago real estate became my education that summer. Eventually, I settled on a new high rise at Division and Wells on the Near North Side not far from Cabrini Green, one of the nation's most notorious housing projects. Cabrini was known for shootings that shut down the nearby streets from time to time. The corner grocery that I could watch from my apartment balcony high in the sky appeared to be more a hangout for the drug culture than the grocery trade. But the apartment building was a straight shot a mile North of City Hall.

The building was owned and operated by the Lutheran Church. It had a grounds guard for the surface parking lot, a doorman in the marble lobby, and a pair of glass elevators rising to the top of a 10 story, white atrium. In fact, it was called Atrium Village. Its apartments were ringed floor by floor around hallway balconies giving out onto the atrium. Residents watched from the balconies at Christmas time as Suzuki violinists performed far below on the floor of the lobby (their classes were in the building). They could frequent a small grocery on the ground floor or have their children attend one of the City's best day cares located there.

Jesse White lived there and was well known for his work with the Jesse White Tumbling Team, a group that served Chicago kids since 1959. An athlete and educator with the Chicago Public Schools, he is currently the Illinois Secretary of State and has been re-elected numerous times.

Early one beautiful morning a television reporter with a camera crew in tow showed up at the doorstep of the Davenport Community Development Department's lead staff Planner to ask the unsuspecting Planner if he lived at the residence. Turned out this was the wrong side of the Mississippi River to be living on because Davenport had an Iowa residency requirement. That requirement was going to make it necessary for me to move as well.

Not far away, the City of Chicago, famous for doing things the Chicago Way, was experiencing its own budget crisis. Jane Byrne, the City's first woman mayor, had been in office from 1979 to 1983, only to leave a veritable financial disaster in her wake. She had won the Mayor's Office after Mayor Michael Bilandic failed to respond adequately to the Chicago Blizzard of 1979, a black swan event involving two feet of snow. As Director of the Department of Consumer Affairs, she challenged Bilandic on a cab rate increase, only to be fired and later run against him for office. As Mayor, she became famous for spending three weeks with her husband in an apartment in the Cabrini Green complex, after a long series of violent crimes had occurred there. What she was trying to prove got lost in translation.

Harold Washington ran for Mayor in 1983 and defeated Byrne and Richard M. Daley, the son of Richard J. Daley, in the primary. He became the City's first black Mayor. Of the City's 50 aldermanic seats, Washington controlled those of 16 black aldermen and five whites, who were mostly reformers. On the other hand, Edward Burke, Chairman of the powerful Finance Committee, and Edward Vrdolyak, President of the City Council, controlled 29 aldermanic seats, 28 whites and one Hispanic. The two "Eddies" and their associated aldermen became an opposition group to the Mayor and to reform efforts in general.

The tactics of the Eddies and their voting block were aggressive, leading the press to label the resulting acrimony between the Mayor and Council as "Council Wars" and characterizing the City of Chicago as "Beirut by the Lake". While able to block the Mayor's initiatives, the Vrdolyak 29 votes were not enough to override the Mayor's veto, a prescription for certain conflict.

Ultimately, years later, in 2008, Ed Vrdolyak was convicted of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud. He served 10 months in Federal prison and was released in 2011. In 2016 he was again indicted, this time on federal tax evasion. He led a 20-man law firm in Chicago which included three attorney sons, to whom he steered business from his activities as an alderman.[53]

The other Eddie, Eddie Burke, aka Slick Eddie, now 75, Chairman of the City Council Finance Committee for three and a half decades, was convicted of extortion in early 2019. When I knew him, he was a dapper, whip smart, Gordon Gekko style young machine turk, hard not to like. I remember one Saturday when we played his staff in a baseball game. He has become since then a fixture of Chicago politics, a dark lord transplanted from another, more corrupt era of the City's history. His wife is currently on the Illinois Supreme Court, so his fall will inevitably have statewide consequences.

The Vrdolyak 29 were able to block many reform initiatives, (I know because I was trying to budget many of them). In the end they cooperated enough to pass the Mayor's budgets, placing the City in a much better financial position. A hiring freeze was instituted. Thousands of vacant positions were eventually cut and some layoffs occurred early in the process. The Firemen's union picketed City Hall over proposed cuts to their ranks, but most of these never actually occurred.

I had initially sent a resume to Budget Director David Schulz at the Chicago Office of Management and Budget expressing my interest in the work they were doing and wondering if they needed any help. Schulz was a man as colorful as he was physically big (over 400 pounds). With a Bachelor's Degree in Engineering from Purdue University and a Master's in Public Management from Northwestern, he had held various government positions. He had worked for the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission in 1977 and had come to Chicago to work in the Department of Transportation where he became Deputy Commissioner. After two years, his innovative leadership led to his appointment as Assistant Budget Director of the Mayor's Office of Budget and Management. In May, 1983 he became Budget Director for Harold Washington.

With a staff of about 20 we were stuck in the Mini-mainframe era of computing, which meant the principal budget analysts gave their work to a Personnel Specialist who, accounting for the vagaries of salary and benefits, provided the budget product to the Data Processing Department for calculation and printing. Yes, that's right, there were no PC's! Providing criminal checks to Police Officers on screens in their cars was considered the height of innovation at the time.

The budget process itself was both anachronistic and antediluvian at the same time. The Personnel Specialist was an old-time cigar chomping, grizzled veteran, missing only a felt fedora to complete the picture of a long-ago Chicago pol. He fit right in. Most of the analysts, all with fresh Master's degrees from places like the University of Chicago, did not.

As a Management Specialist, I was not that special, but I did have enough financial background to be given department budgets like those of Finance (200 persons), Revenue (100), Purchasing (200), Data Processing (175), Treasurer (30), Special Operations (100), and the Office of Municipal Investigations (30). Special Operations was a grant auditing function needed for managing state and federal grant funds and almost all their positions were funded by the grants themselves. OMI was the equivalent of an Office of Internal Affairs for both Police and Fire Departments. The Finance Department managed the City's health insurance. It had to police who was and who wasn't really a family member on employee's health insurance claims. It also managed a minority opportunities program (MBE) for contractors providing City services, which was capable of occasionally grabbing headlines. For obvious reasons, contracting with the City could be controversial and sole sourcing was still practiced. The City had roughly 40,000 positions at the time.

In addition, I was to make recommendations on replacing the city's accounting system, internal financial controls, contract tracking, sole source purchasing, minority business enterprise contracting, inventory and warehouse management, and indirect costing of federal and state grants. I was chiefly responsible for a Citywide Management Plan, as well as performance measurement and MBO (Management By-Objectives) development with the Deputy Chief of Staff. Washington had hired his Deputy Chief of Staff from the administration of Andrew Young, Mayor of the City of Atlanta, with whom I worked on the Management Plan. He was a hot shot and a gunslinger. He didn't last.

Dave had a personality that was, if anything, larger than his physique. He was on the phone sitting behind a large desk, his back to the corner of his corner office on the 5th Floor of Chicago City Hall, talking animatedly with a reporter about the newspaper story that his office had been bugged by the Council opposition forces. What the Two Eddies were supposedly trying to get the low down on was not exactly clear. Municipal budgets do not typically inspire acts of espionage. Dave had his office swept. Also, not exactly a common practice in City Halls.

Not to say that the Council opposition was in any way to be taken lightly. They certainly were not undermanned. In fact, the number of staff persons of the Opposition Aldermen exceeded the number of staff of the Office of Budget and Management. The Aldermen had chosen political hires who were under court devised rules (the Shakman Decree) for hiring in Chicago that required only an ability to occasionally show up for work. In addition, the Opposition staff were kitted out with the newest tools of the trade, Personal Computers, which they used to good effect.

Deliberations with Mayor Washington were often haphazard. In his defense, the Mayor had a lot on his plate. Nevertheless, it was typical for the "Budgeteers" to experience long waits outside his conference room while other things were going on during meeting times. Much later, we were ushered in for brusque foreshortened deliberations held seemingly on the fly.

In one such meeting we met the mercurial Franklin Raines. We almost gasped when he was introduced. Raines, the son of a janitor from Seattle, was a slight, balding black man from Harvard Law with a Carter White House pedigree at that time working for Lazard Freres and Co in New York City. He had written a report for the Nixon Administration in 1969 on the youth unrest that so defined the 60's. He worked for Fannie Mae, then as Clinton's Director of OMB before returning to Fannie Mae as CEO with annual compensation of $20 million a year.[54]

Frank was there as an emissary of Wall Street to bless the Mayor's efforts to reform and reorganize the City government. After taking early retirement in 2004, he would be sued in 2006 for 90 million dollars by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) in an attempt to claw back some of his income as CEO of Fannie Mae. He was accused of being instrumental in widespread accounting errors, such as those which led to shifting losses so he and others could claim higher bonuses. He has been called one of the "25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis", according to _Time Magazine_ for practices he initiated at Fannie Mae. The accounting irregularities investigated by the SEC did not follow Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), but apparently Raines, not being a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), was unaware of this. Sure.

Frank's blessings on the Mayor's endeavors may have been appreciated, but the Vrdolyak 29 were still able to stymie many of the principal reforms that the City needed. They held up approval of the Mayor's proposed Budget through Christmas and until the night of New Year's Eve, 1983 in a classic political showdown that threatened all but essential government services the next day. Last minute negotiations proceeded all evening, the Council waiting in session, while we on the Budget Staff labored intensively to publish the final document from high in the Daley Center, where the IT Department had laser printers as big as small cars.

Several of my pet reform projects were nixed about midnight, such as the new Accounting System expected to come from Arthur Andersen, warehouse management (where defalcation rates were said to be 50%, defalcation being a fancy accounting term for pilfered), and others. A shut down was averted, but neither side could declare victory. Dave gave everybody T-shirts to commemorate the occasion: "I survived the 1983 Budget!".

However, it would not be long before Dave moved on to greener pastures. In February of 1984, just as we were cleaning up the mess of the final budget changes, he received an offer from Milwaukee County Executive William O'Donnell to become Budget Director for Milwaukee County. The end of the following year Schulz was named Parks Director by O'Donnell where he used a series of stunts to promote the parks and himself until, finally, he endorsed a candidate for Mayor of Milwaukee and lost his job. He then ran against the County Executive that fired him, won 2 to 1, and served a term as the third Milwaukee County Executive. By the end of the term his flamboyance had alienated the political establishment, so he left without running again for office in 1992. After that Dave was associated with the Infrastructure Institute at Northwestern University in Evanston until his death at 58 in 2007.[55]

The next budget year we were still cutting. Typically, a government budget retrenchment cycle runs two years with about 5% reductions each year. The first 5% is like water weight, but the second 5% is bone and muscle. In that second year I wondered in one budget session in the Mayor's Office why the conversation suddenly stalled at the mention of budget cuts in the OBM, our office. What I didn't notice were the furtive glances at me, all of which must have been well hidden at the time.

The Budget staff had been easily as diverse as that which I was a part of in Miami. My experience, and the inevitable threat it posed to the Director and Assistant Director, was another thing altogether, and I was on my way out the door with two junior members of the staff. The explanation was made quite personal, a clear sign that the Director was unloading her resentments. They didn't let us know we were going until January, after the budget season wrapped, so as not to cut into their ability to get the budget done in the first place. It was a dubious strategy that alienated the entire staff, but the Director and Assistant Director were not the type for Queensberry rules.

I had questioned my involvement with Chicago from the start, as I felt the work I was being given was beneath my skills and that the whole operation needed to be turned upside down in light of the advancement of the PC. Like any large bureaucratic organization, they had sacrificed decision making to the use of outmoded means of collecting and analyzing information, operating in the past. Deficiencies obvious to me were barely visible to them. It came time to leave, even though another posting with the City became available. I did not see a career with the organization.

I retreated to my parent's home. It was a strange time to return but living on the Near North Side of Chicago was unsustainable when I couldn't foretell the future. I applied for unemployment, which the City disputed and lost, probably because I was now on the other side of the State of Illinois.

It may have been a good time for me to take a break after a very active first five years of my career. A good college friend of mine farmed nearby and I worked hay bailing with him and his Dad one gorgeous day in June, reminding myself that I was still fit, even if I was sore for 2 days afterwards. I contacted Dave in Milwaukee to no effect, which was a disappointment, and many other cities besides over the next 6 months, with increasing disappointment. I ran into the current Director at the Springfield airport but we didn't speak. I assume she was heading back to Chicago after meeting with State of Illinois officials. I was there to interview with the State of Illinois Budget Department, actually for the second time in my career. It turned out to be an unrewarded trip. Given the Age of Madigan that the State had just entered, I had no idea how fortunate a turn of events this was.

While walking one nice evening under the oaks on South State, my thoughts ran to grad school and Urban Planning. This would add a lot to my understanding of cities and government. I was soon after accepted at the University of Illinois. I pulled my things out of storage, and set off for a mobile home that I bought in a park in Champaign, Illinois.

I was fast into studies, taking tests and writing term papers (on a typewriter). Years of working long hours had prepared me. The Urban Planning program had a computer lab, which were all the rage at the time. This became the most important part of the program for me. I wrote my graduate thesis on the use of computers in Urban Planning.

My mobile home neighbor was a CPA and a law student specializing in tax law. The students were great to be around. I was learning things like urban design and real estate finance, which fascinated me. I occasionally walked the streets nearby in the evening to enjoy the more traditional neighborhoods. I saw lighted windows in homey residences, but I also saw how my interest in cities and American government was expanding.

It all came to an end after a year and a half. I had flown twice to California, as well as to places like Dayton, for city job interviews. In the meantime, I became a full-time campus temp. I temped for:

1) A PhD in Forest Management for a month by setting up a digital catalogue of his bibliography and learned a lot about what Federal and State forest management officials do.

2) A PhD in computer science, where I learned how to use the ARCNET, the forerunner to the internet, to communicate with the professor's colleagues over peer reviewed journal articles. An immigrant from Poland while still behind the Iron Curtain in 1987, he specialized in the then arcane field of Artificial Intelligence and used Alexander Haig as a professional reference. He had big Federal grants from DARPA for AI research, which kept a number of his grad students busy.

3) The Administration of the University's food service, where I worked with their IT person on database management. I don't really recall much about the work itself, but I do remember the coeds sunning themselves outside our windows at Springtime. The Food Service staff were terrific people, which didn't surprise me a bit.

Sturbridge, Southbridge and Sutton Massachusetts

Life _really_ happens on Plan B. In March I was contacted for job interviews with two towns in central Massachusetts lying along the Connecticut border who sought to hire a Shared Town Planner.

The Towns already had a Shared Town Attorney between them, which had been working out fine with both. The shared Attorney was a 20-year veteran of the Massachusetts Department of Revenue and a Councilwoman of the Boston suburban Town of Saugus.

I flew into Massachusetts the second week of April. I was surprised that there was no one to greet me at Logan in Boston. Instead, they suggested that I take a room for overnight. Not one to take advantage of the situation, I totally took advantage of the situation, and stayed at the Park Plaza Hotel, one of the best in the City.

I interviewed with Southbridge that afternoon. It started snowing. By the next morning 10 inches had fallen. I received an early knock on the door of my motel room and was greeted by Sturbridge's Director of Public Works, a generational New Englander ordered straight from central casting. He had come to pick me up in his truck to take me to City Hall, but needed to get gas. We went over to Sturbridge Plaza on I-84 and I got my first look at Sturbridge and Massachusetts, which was beautifully draped in mounds of new fallen snow glittering in the sun. A resort Town of five ponds surrounded by vintage New England homes, it was quintessentially Yankee. Covered in the wet snow of early Spring, the brick Jeffersonian style Town Hall and Commons were Rockwellian. The overcast was breaking up, the sun was brilliant, and the blue sky was emerging from behind the clouds. I had stepped into a painting of New England.

Hired by the Town Managers of each community, I was to split every week between the two towns. While Sturbridge was a small village of 8000, it contained Old Sturbridge Village, a 200-acre museum of 1830's New England. The Village had been put together from authentic New England structures found all over New England and re-assembled using original building techniques. It employed hundreds, including presenters who wore period costumes. OSV created tourism that supported many motels, shops and restaurants in the Town, about 1000 rooms. It was also commuting distance from the Boston suburbs, which had received a major boost from the computer revolution. A smaller version of Silicon Valley had developed along Route 128 circling Boston to develop mini-mainframes.

Southbridge on the other hand was an old New England factory town relying on New England's first maker of eyeglasses, American Optical, at one time the world's largest maker of eyeglasses. AO made bombsites in World War II, making its employees exempt from the draft, and some employees even worked on the Atomic bomb, which required special lensing techniques for exploding the first plutonium bomb. AO closed in the 1980's, but the Town continued to manufacture knives and wood products for RV's.

In the way of New England villages, both Towns included developed commercial and residential Centers and, as well, all the surrounding rural land up to the boundaries of the adjacent Towns. This is unlike the rest of the United States, in that incorporated city boundaries are Usually defined in American cities by the provision of water and sewer services to the physical limit of the provision of those services. Counties regulate the areas between incorporated cities, and structures in those areas depend on the use of wells and individual septic systems. As a result, New England villages include both urban and rural areas, in contrast to the rest of the country. School, library and other services are provided for all persons within their boundaries, which creates a more unified framework for the provision of local government services than is the case elsewhere.

Another distinction of the New England Town form of government is the widespread adoption of Annual Town Meetings. In a Town Meeting, all the adult citizens of the Town are invited to attend and vote on all measures. The measures can include matters as large as the annual budget and as small as the individual salaries of Town officials. It is America's longest lasting, direct form of democracy.

It was at these meetings that I learned just how both wise and foolish a thing democracy can be. On the one hand, I saw a Town Selectman demagogue an issue like a bike path to be shared by both Sturbridge and Southbridge by whipping up unjustified fears for people's safety. On the other hand, the use of the Town Meetings had the ability to unite and be a source of common pride to residents of both Towns.

A "we're all together in this" attitude seemed to prevail that provided at least some protection of minority views. Nothing worked better in this regard than a heartfelt appeal to voters based on the personal expressions of voters. This could be done so well that it swayed the entire community. Jimmy Stewart himself would have been proud. The Town Meeting form of government is America's original laboratory of democracy. It is still as effective as when it began.

My first task in Sturbridge was to shepherd the Town's Master Plan through the process of discussion and adoption with the assistance of a Master Plan consultant. Later I would prepare the Town's Open Space Plan, Site Plan Review, Subdivision control and Growth Management. I performed Citizen Surveys, traffic studies, and origin and destinations studies. During that time the Planning Board met regularly, considering a variety of hotel and conference center, retail, and mixed-use proposals. I served on the School Building Committee and the Route 131 Road Improvement Committee.

Southbridge also experienced growth. There were 20 subdivisions in various stages of approval there in 1989 including 1200 housing units. Their Planning Board approved 16 of the subdivisions and 500 apartment/condominium units.

Massachusetts was a _due process zoning law state,_ meaning that the local process of site plan approval and subdivision approval, requiring preliminary and final plan submissions, relied on faithfully fulfilling the intent of the State laws rather than a rigid _procedural_ formulation of them, as is the case in the Midwest. As a result, knowledge of common law cases in Massachusetts was necessary at times when controversy or dispute arose about the details of an approval. Having a Shared Town Attorney and Town Planner expedited this process for both Towns and brought me quickly up to speed on the relevant case law.

The S&L Crisis hit New England especially hard toward the end of my four years in Sturbridge. Suddenly, developers were filing bankruptcy all over the place and new developments started coming to a halt. I took on a third Town, Sutton, Massachusetts, with the intent of formulating a Master Plan rather than working for their Planning Board. Master Plans call for significant public involvement and I was then working three to four nights a week and most weekends to keep up.

The last year there I took on the writing of new subdivision and zoning ordinances for Southbridge while preparing an Open Space Plan for Sutton. Only Sturbridge wanted to continue after the fourth year. I drove and flew around the country once again on interviews. I took a job offer in Reading, a suburb of Boston in need of commercial re-development, while interviewing simultaneously for South Burlington, Vermont, which I really wanted because of its charm. I also interviewed for St. Joseph, Missouri for Director of Community Development.

St. Joseph had just undergone a major downsizing of its Community Development Department after a scandal involving corrupt Building Inspectors. It resulted in public perp walks and criminal prosecutions. The City had just hired a young, dynamic City Manager from an affluent suburb in Texas who in turn had hired a new progressive Police Chief from suburban Boston. Given the major turnaround of the City and its new management, I found it an interesting opportunity and accepted an offer. This required that I notify Reading and South Burlington that I was withdrawing my interest in their positions, which Reading was not too happy about.

Bernie Sanders had been Mayor of Burlington, Vermont for about 10 years at that point and had just been elected to Congress. His progressive influence reflected the politics of Vermont and the Burlington area in particular, which I would have enjoyed very much had I had an opportunity to work for South Burlington. Working directly with Community groups had become that part of the work which I enjoyed the most, but it was probably the closeness of local government to the people of New England and the trust that people there had in their government that was the most important factor.

St. Joseph, Missouri

I became Director of Planning and Community Development with the City of St. Joseph, Missouri, which had a population of 75,000 persons. The City was the start of the Oregon Trail and Pony Express, now a meatpacking town 30 miles North of Kansas City, located on the Missouri River in Northeastern Missouri. A border state in the Confederacy, the State still had Southern roots. Generally, the professional City Management community worked elsewhere than the deep South in the U.S., or, rather, if it did, usually with professionals born and raised there. Texas was the exception, with a strong City Management system and with Dallas long being recognized as one of the best managed cities in the nation.

The City was low income. The CD Department had 9 Community Development personnel funded by the Federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) and provided numerous housing assistance and related programs to low income residents. Catholic Charities played a significant role in programming. One program unique to the area and its religious background was a home for unwed mothers. It received funding through the City's budget, highly unusual.

In fact, the City had lost both jobs and population consistently as a result of losses in the meatpacking industry. Economic development would have been important in any circumstance because of the City's prevailing low wages. The City at the turn of the century been a bustling trading center to the West with a large, vibrant downtown and residential neighborhoods filled with elegant Victorians. Now, homes throughout the City were cheap. A large hospital building was abandoned and required demolition, its ownership buried in a blizzard of ownership transfers and dummy corporations. Disinvestment had taken a major toll throughout the City.

The CD Department had been twice as large, but the Building Code section had been removed and the Department downsized after the scandal involving corrupt building officials. The Department had been led temporarily by the Block Grant Manager before a new Director had been chosen. The scandal had created widespread negative perceptions of the City government. In an effort to turn things around yet another City Manager had been hired. The City had 5 City Managers under the newly adopted City Manager form of government, which had only been in place for the prior 10 years. The City Council was still coming to grips with the Strong Mayor, Weak City Manager form of government that it had adopted.

The City Council and Mayor were clubby and generally insular in their views, unable to adopt policies that would promote a vision of a forward leaning City adapting successfully to economic change. Instead of viewing its remarkably cheap cost of living as an invaluable asset and using it to entice outside investment, they instead saw it as a sign of the failed policies of the past. They preferred to think about reviving the past somehow rather than create a vision for the future. Leaders of the community simply enjoyed speaking more about how much better the City's past had been. The voters responded more to that. The City desperately needed to re-focus.

Aside from favorable economics, the Town's other great asset was its store of historic and underutilized buildings. For a town of its size it had a remarkable number of historic places: 60 National Register of Historic Places designated buildings and districts and one National Historic Landmark, Patee House Museum. In addition, it possessed one of the most significant parkway systems in the country, built in the 1920s. They had removed hundreds of homes to create an elegant 26-mile Parkway System winding through residential neighborhoods. It became a National Historic District as an urban "green belt".

The low-income status of the community helped assure a large annual CDBG budget for a City of St. Joseph's size. It also allowed the City to receive a 2 million-dollar Section 108 Federal economic development grant, which was being used at the time to incentivize the location of a South Korean paper mill recycling firm to the U.S. Meetings were ongoing but eventually collapsed. Why the City was interested in encouraging the location of an enterprise that was sure to have exaggerated environmental impacts on the residents of the area in exchange for a mere 100 permanent jobs was beyond me. There was already an ongoing controversy about the local Electric Company's coal ash impacts on a neighborhood on the South edge of town, where the existence of a cancer cluster was being very actively maintained by a group of residents.

I proceeded to re-write the Zoning and Subdivision Codes of the Municipality, which were antique and no longer served to provide meaningful direction to the City's re-development efforts. I formed a Task Force of local developers and commercial interests to address the City's Sign Laws. The Task force traveled the Highway Commercial district on the Eastern edge of the City by trolley to see the effects of the often conflicting and confusing signage of businesses competing for the public's attention and to discuss what kinds of measures might be helpful in addressing them. The highway Kudzu was a perfect example of a Signage Free Fire Zone where everyone lost: the businesses, the long-term viability of the area, and the visually assaulted citizens. Also passed was a new mobile home housing regulation, an update for a growing and increasingly sophisticated part of the local housing market, useful for a low-income community.

St. Joseph ran a small transit system and one of the planners was on my CD staff. The transit garage had fallen into dramatic disrepair, its roof a virtual sieve where umbrellas were needed inside the structure. We sought grant funding to rebuild and held the required public hearing, only to be torpedoed by the Mayor. While much of the capital and some of the operating cost of the system was supported by Federal funding, it was clear that the deplorable condition of the transit garage was no accident. The City's economy may have depended on an effective low-cost way for lower income citizens to get around, but the "biased" City government baulked at making any further commitments.

This was surprising. Transit programs are among the most popular in the United States. It was obvious that there was animus caused by the higher ridership by minority residents, or at the very least, that perception. I had also noticed what I took to be discriminatory advertising for rental housing in the City's newspapers, which would have violated federal fair housing requirements of the City's generous annual CDBG grant. The Block Grant was predicated on a clean annual audit by the Feds, and things like this could become an issue. It was interesting to see how far local prejudices could push these issues into conflict, and it was obvious that there was a prevailing attitude of resentment for the Federal government's priorities.

While there, I devised funding for and acquisition of a full Geographic Information Systems for the Department, a very necessary tool of all modern urban planning and lead the effort with the Chamber of Commerce and Federal Economic Development Administration for a new Industrial Park. We continued implementation of the City's Downtown Riverfront Plan and coordinated with downtown St. Joseph's Main Street program and the Tourism Commission. I was the lead staff with the Plan Commission, Historic District Commission, and attended City Council meetings.

Finally, I hired and guided a consultant preparing a plan for the State of Missouri to re-develop the 20 buildings making up the St. Joseph State Hospital, a turn of the century mental health hospital. The State dragged its feet on sending the funding and I became concerned about preparing to go forward without such a commitment in hand. I began to call to check on the status and always received ambiguous replies. I began to suspect that the change in political administrations anticipated at the state level might be a factor in the delay. I inquired about whether the Director of that agency was continuing and apparently my actions were misinterpreted. Pretty soon, I had a hot head State agency Director loaded for bear calling my Mayor to accuse me of meddling in Statehouse affairs.

The City Manager left me exposed in the following meeting, asking me not to attend. Without a means for defending unfair accusations, I became persona non grata. We had already had a long time Finance Director fall as a result of accusations that he had failed to resolve a long backlog of unpaid water bills, the City having lax enforcement and many residents with a habit of not paying their bills. I was next in line to leave and in the next year the excellent community policing oriented Police Chief who insisted that officers were "peace" officers and not cops left of his own accord. We were both brought in at the same time from Massachusetts. Soon the City Manager would become the Director of the Chamber of Commerce and leave City Hall as well.

The experience said a lot about the struggle that some Cities go through to modernize their local governments and their communities. It is not always a winning proposition. Struggle is at least progress. Moving forward, however haltingly, is better than standing still, whatever the cost. The fight to make our Cities and Towns better places to live and work is always worth it. I was immensely proud of what I and my staff had accomplished in those two years, some of the most productive time of my career, and I will always be grateful for the chance I had to do it.

Lake Zurich, Illinois

Within weeks I was talking to officials in the Village of Lake Zurich, Illinois about becoming their Village Planner and by September 1993 I started there, bringing me finally back to Illinois many years after leaving the City of Chicago and returning to grad school. Very differently than St. Joseph, Lake Zurich was an upper middle-class Northwest suburb of Chicago surrounded by high income suburbs. The high-income suburbs around Lake Zurich were the Barringtons and Hawthorne Woods. These surrounding communities had small residential populations on large lots served by well and septic. Only Barrington and Lake Zurich had traditional downtowns. Lake Zurich was situated around its own 200-acre Lake, a turn of the century summer resort whose population had doubled in the early 1990's. The Village had a 20 million-dollar intergovernmental agreement extending sewer and water facilities from a Lake County treatment facility. Lake Zurich and Hawthorne Woods shared the same School District.

Being upper middle class and with average incomes over $100,000, several times that of St. Joseph, the community was college educated, a sharp contrast from St. Joseph. I was to discover that this was going to make working for the Village perhaps the easiest and most enjoyable experience of my career. While the Village was still undergoing substantial political turmoil as a result of growing so fast, the staff was highly professional and capable. I worked out of the Engineering office with the Director of Engineering as immediate supervisor, but I also reported to the Village Manager and later to the Building Director. I ran a one man Planning and Development office with the assistance of a consulting landscape architect and a dedicated Village Attorney, who was part of an outside law firm. My rented condo was a few blocks away from my office. I could see the condo building from my office on the second floor of the Town Hall, and I was aware that eventually those buildings would have to be removed to make way for a State Highway Bypass of downtown Lake Zurich.

The highway bypass became one of the principle projects that I worked on during the six years that I was with Lake Zurich. Lake Zurich was located at the crossroads of two important Strategic Regional Arterials or SRAs, Routes 12 and 22 in Southern Lake County. Route 12 was a multi-county commercial corridor through the Northwest suburbs and was the focus of a substantial part of my work with the Village's Planning Commission.

As the Village Planner working with an excellent, modern Zoning Code, I supervised a very active and selective development review and approval process, carrying out all general planning and zoning functions, including downtown organization start-up and supervision of the Downtown Development Plan. This required transportation planning including a future Route 53 extension and the widening and bypassing of Route 22 through the Lake Zurich business core.

The Village received a variety of inter-governmental grants that I wrote. I carried out a Special Census with the Census Bureau. There were voluntary intergovernmental boundary agreements with all the surrounding communities and I carried out many voluntary and involuntary annexations within the limits of those agreements while in Lake Zurich. I was a member of SWALCO, the County solid waste committee, the Corridor Planning Council (for the proposed Route 53 tollway extension), the Route 12 Corridor Committee (intergovernmental), the Downtown Committee, and the Bypass Committee.

At the time there was a proposal by Taubman Group in Michigan for a large mall to be called the N. Barrington Collection Mall, one of the last big shopping malls to be planned in this part of the country, and I attended many of their meetings. They encountered widespread local resistance to the project because of its many traffic and environmental impacts. It was never approved and the era of the big shopping malls came to an end.

Lake Zurich's six years were a pleasure. The Village had an educated and well-informed citizenry, an excellent Village Manager, good Mayors, and a smart, dedicated staff. I told my successor at Lake Zurich, "Enjoy it, you will never have a better job than this."

Addison, Illinois (38,000 population)

I spent the next 11 years as Assistant Director of Community Development for Addison, Illinois, a Western suburb of Chicago. Basically, the Chicago suburbs, with over 200 concentrically sprawling suburbs, are divided into major sub-areas: Northern suburbs, Northwestern suburbs, Western and Southern. The Northern suburbs going North from the City of Chicago include Evanston, Winnetka, Highland Park, Glencoe, and Lake Forest and are by far the toniest suburbs, many with homes ranging far into the millions of dollars in value. They are the more or less glamorous suburbs where films like _Risky Business, Ferris Bueller's Day Off_ and _Home Alone_ get filmed (undoubtedly their discovery by Hollywood was helped by the fact that John Hughes lived in Lake Forest).

Addison was a near West suburb, most of its homes being of a modest ranch style built in the post-World War II era. The Mid-Century Modern revival movement, so popular in California, skipped the Chicago suburbs however, and there is little demand for restoring many of these classics. The original residents of the Village came from the City of Chicago after the War and were predominantly Italian and Catholic. They were and remain a gregarious and boisterous lot, even now, or perhaps especially now, that they have aged into their senior years. They were good at things like complaining over your head to your superiors, or in just plain complaining in general, but they did so with verve and charm.

My boss was an Irish Catholic, which relieved me of the necessity of either being Italian or Catholic in this environment. Of course, the Village had changed a lot since it was all Italian. Now about 40 percent of the community was Mexican with most of them being non-voting, non-American residents. In this they were not alone, as Addison was now home to non-American residents and naturalized immigrants from Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe, Poland in particular, and the Balkans.

This left the Italians and euro-ethnics in majority control of the Village government. Village staff residency was required only of the City Manager, perhaps the Police Chief. One of the Village government's principal characteristics was the Village's commitment to keeping wages for its professionals within the top quartile of the distribution for similar positions within the metropolitan area. This put all positions with the Village in demand. It was not unusual to have 200 people show up for testing for any open clerical position. Professional turnover was low, which gave the staff a level of experience and knowledge of the city that was invaluable and produced a quality level of public service.

In addition, the Village had an excellent Community Relations Department and was building a new City Hall, which would equip that Department with a studio and modern equipment (helped by fees derived from cable franchises operating in the Village). Run by professionals, Community Relations gave the City Manager the means to promote good contact with the public without having to get himself in the way of the message. It guaranteed a professional response in any kind of public emergency, when a City's management can be spread so thin. It also reinforces the widely accepted notion that the most effective, and powerful, means of government communication with the public is through television, which should never be underestimated.

The new Jeffersonian style Village Hall enhanced the image of professionalism of the local government. A new Library was built next door later on that was equally impressive. A major reinvestment in the Village's school buildings was underway by the School District, which also spoke well of the Village's leadership.

From the instant I started as Assistant Director, I was overwhelmed by the volume of residential property annexations coming from the unincorporated areas that fringed the Village. At the Village Manager's request, we immediately advertised "a sale" by virtue of annexation fee waivers for residential property owners.

These homes were on well and septic in the heart of a metropolitan area but officially unincorporated. By waiving the otherwise substantial annexation fees and reducing annexation costs to the minimum, the Village hoped to attract homeowners to connect to water and sewer lines that had been built over the years near their homes. After the War developers in Addison had originally extended these utilities at their own expense to serve residential areas where they proposed to construct new subdivisions. In doing so, they had built the utility lines that now passed by many unincorporated houses that were still on well and septic. Now, homeowners were being given an opportunity to take advantage of cheap annexations that forgave much of the original capital cost that had gone into the construction of those utilities. They could get their homes off aging wells and septic systems and upgrade to better municipal service delivery in general.

Dozens of property owners took advantage, and hundreds more would in the coming decade that I was there. Pockets of unincorporated homes were thus annexed one by one, voluntarily by their owners. Each annexation required following statutory proceedings for annexation as required under Illinois law. All required going to the Plan Commission for public hearings and the County Recorder's office to record land records called Plats of Annexation as well as Annexation Agreements, contracts between the property owner and the Village.

In fact, most of the Village of Addison had been developed by Annexation Agreement and the Department maintained an elaborate library of records, mirroring that at the County Recorder of Deeds, to keep track of all of them and their special provisions. Operating within this development environment was legally complex and relied on the ability to reference these long-ago agreements. The annexation program in Addison was the largest in Illinois with over 500 voluntary annexation agreements, including property of all kinds. It required extensive negotiation, tracking and coordination across the Village organization and with the County of DuPage.

The Village was very active promoting economic development. It reached an important Agreement that brought in the Pampered Chef company's 25 million-dollar headquarters to the West side of the Village in the early 2000's. The HQ was a 1 million square foot office/warehouse building. Pampered Chef Ltd. was started in 1980 by a woman in the basement of her home in the nearby suburb of River Forest as a kitchenware company using the party plan system made famous by Tupperware. The company was acquired in 2002 by Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., by Warren Buffett. At the time the project was approved for annexation by the Village of Addison it was provided state and local economic development incentives. It has a worldwide sales force of 35,000.[56]

Addison was one of the largest residential infill and industrial communities in the State, having over 800 industrial businesses with over 40,000 daily workers, the largest of which is United Parcel Service Distribution Center. An industrial park, various commercial and multi-family residential developments, Tax Increment Financing Districts, and a Town Center plan were developed and approved by the Village, to which I provided support during my time there. I obtained a federal grant for the Michael Lane Resource Center to serve a low-income area and a state grant for a new Master Plan.

The development review and approval process we created in Addison was extremely fast in that we could combine annexation, zoning, subdivision, site plan, landscaping, and architectural approvals in a single set of public hearings to come up with a municipal approval in as little as 60 days. This gave the Village great flexibility and an ability to move fast for the right development, a huge incentive to any developer. It required a talented staff and fortunately we had one.

How Grave Is It?

After having worked in Addison for a few years I began to experience digestive problems. After a year of this, anxiety also started and worsened over the next two years. Finally, my weight dropped precipitately while the anxiety peaked with a case of severe depression. Seeking treatment, I was diagnosed incorrectly by a licensed psychiatrist and her associate psychologist with mid-life ADHD. For the next ten years I was on Strattera for ADHD and omeprazole to control my digestive system.

I sought out advice from another psychiatrist and a gastroenterologist, including advice that my symptoms were not ADHD or an immune disorder. Ten years later I had another episode of sudden weight loss and this time took a blood test for thyroid. It revealed that I had hyperthyroid disease, later diagnosed as **Grave's Disease** , one of some eighty auto-immune disorders. I had my thyroid ablated and began regular thyroxine replacement, completely recovering. Auto-Immune disease and endocrinology deal with diseases of the immune system and glandular science. The effects of both can take years to figure out, time during which a lot of people are inconvenienced and have to grant some slack. My thanks go to all of them.
Chapter 3  
ECONOMICS 101  
or Let Them Eat Cake

Keeping a firewall between money and power in today's world is essential to keeping a democracy. Societies that fail to maintain adequate separation will surely lose their liberty to tyranny, especially to modern oligarchies. Rising inequality in countries around the world is leading to the creation of the rich elites that are easy to transform into oligarchies headed by ruthless strongmen.

Rising inequality is threatening governments around the world, as was made obvious in the Arab Spring of 2011 where Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria were torn apart by conflict. In all of these cases, the conflicts were based on the creation of gross income inequality, often coupled with official government oppression, of impoverished majorities of citizens. One of the reasons the Arab Spring failed was that these countries had not developed civil societies with independent power centers. The dictators that ruled had suppressed their country's independent media, courts and legislatures to the point that they were without the necessary building blocks to either build or re-build open societies. Citizens feared the chaos and turned to whatever force of strongmen they could for a way out and toward predictability. Unfortunately, in the Middle East the most available sources of power are Islamic extremism and factional tribalism.[57]

Another recent example is the rebellion in Maiden Square in the City of Kiev, Ukraine in 2013 where 50 anti-government protestors were shot dead by government troops, in what later was called the _Euromaiden_ protest. Russia had substantial control over the troops that were involved in the shooting, and soon Russia invaded Crimea and Ukraine, taking control of the Eastern half of Ukraine. The Ukrainian government had become corrupt, stealing many billions of dollars while impoverishing the country, all with the help of the Russians and Paul Manafort, a principal advisor to the Ukrainian President leading the pro-Russia government. The Russian influenced government of Ukraine was eventually overthrown. Of course, Manafort later became Trump's dubious campaign chairman in 2016, proving that anti-democratic forces do indeed take many forms.

Still, history is replete with bad leaders robbing their countries blind and installing dictatorial powers to force poverty on their peoples. This is so often the case in human history that one is left to wonder if most of the 4 million people living at any one time during the mini-ice ages of the past 70 thousand years didn't mostly live this way, oppressed with tyrannical rulers having cornered the market on force and coercion, then using their ill-gotten powers to steal from the masses in any way that they could.

In their small tribes of 100 persons or less, from the dawn of the Cognitive Age to the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution, were there millions of Type A Alpha Males asserting their dominance and ascendancy over everyone else in their tribes? Was this dominance and it's corollary, submission, pre-programmed genetically over nearly one hundred thousand years of human evolution on top of the millions of years of pre-hominid evolution? Is all this but a normal part of human behavior that contributed to evolution, necessary as it was to the survival of our species? Would mankind have failed to exist without these kinds of leader-follower behaviors? Are they so necessary that they became hard wired into our genetic circuitry, our mental bios settings?

Is being a bully toward others who are seen as smaller and weaker an inherited human trait, particularly among males of our species? Why is it so common among men that taking advantage of weaker members of a tribe is seemingly so acceptable? Why do women appear to gravitate toward men who exhibit this kind of behavior? Haven't we defined many of these behaviors to be genetic in other species? Are they especially to be attributed to mammals? Are aggressive males (or females) better protectors, leaders, providers? Is this a model of what we look for in our leaders: i.e. being or appearing to be _stronger than others in a variety of interpreted ways_?

Does this mean that there is something to being a member of the "deplorables" as Hillary Clinton put it during her 2016 election? Are these obvious personality traits that are encouraged and passed on but which have become largely meaningless in current society, mere stereotypes of earlier behaviors? Or are they something more. More basic. Are they what scientists call brain stem kind of stuff, behaviors instilled by the reptilian brain from which our brains have evolved?

And is this why, when stimulated, the human brain is capable of taking pleasure in other's pain when purposefully inflicted as part of one's role? For that matter, why is typical bullying behavior so common? The Milgram experiment of the 1970's showed how otherwise normal individuals will deliver painful shocks to others when they are told by an authority to do so, showing their obedience. Isn't this how authoritarianism is created and maintained, in a violence born of fear that escalates to implicate large numbers of people until finally it implicates the society itself.

Political philosophers characterize the primary economic differential, between rich and poor, in similar ways. Marx was fond of the term _proletariat_ to describe the working class. To him they were the implacable enemy of the capitalist class, who earned wealth simply by owning the means of production. This distinction of the wealthy class as undeserving because they do not labor in the same way that proletarians do was essential. In Marx's myth, owning the means of production didn't require much real effort compared to the protean efforts of the working class. It became ironic at the end of the Soviet Union that workers continually worked less and less as their efforts yielded fewer and fewer rewards from the State, which by then owned all the means of production. Today, Marxism is a kind of a joke, since this outcome seems ordained in even the most rudimentary of economist's thought experiments.

The term proletariat led to further disparagement of the poor in the form of the term _lumpen proletariat_ , which is meant to describe members of the proletariat as an underclass of criminals and rejects from society, the lowliest of all workers. unskilled and vagrant. In these terms they can be thought of as _The Great Unwashed_ , apparently too poor to afford a modicum of cleanliness or even personal hygiene.

More recently, the term **Blue Collar** has come to represent this class, but here in America this is most often meant to apply to both the working class and the lower middle class. Unlike Marx, today in America we don't typically think in terms of just rich and poor or just two classes of economic welfare, as he did.

In today's terms, we tend to think first of those with and without post-secondary education, as this distinction has come to represent the primary determinant of class and wealth. Those with college educations (about 30 percent of the population) tend to have higher incomes and are generally to be found in the broad middle class and the somewhat narrower upper middle class.

The poor are thought to exist at the bottom with little or no income other than what is provided to them by the state. Still, many of the poor in America today work as well, hence the term _Working Poor._

Raising the US Top Marginal Tax Rate

The upper middle class tends to be made up of those with advanced and professional college degrees such as doctors and lawyers, businessmen, and entrepreneurs who own their own businesses. Still, about half of all Americans are considered paycheck to paycheck by most modern polling. They barely make enough to meet their and their family's basic needs each week.

Then there is the upper class, those who might have reasonably been called "Richie Rich" in the 1930's but today are most often referred to as the _One Percenters._ Much of their income comes from the ownership of capital accumulated and passed down from generation to generation. If Marx were alive today, he would truly hate them, as they personify everything he reviled about capitalism. Most particularly, because they own the majority of all wealth, not just in the United States, but worldwide, in a trend that has only been increasing since his time.

However, what Marx would find truly offensive is how so much of that wealth has been secretly hidden behind off-shore accounts in an international thicket of fake incorporations, aided and abetted by powerful political interests in nearly every country in the world. This wealth has been illegally sheltered from rightful public taxation and therefore deprives countries of the resources necessary to efficiently operate their economies and provide essential public services.

We have heard other famous characterizations of the lumpen proletariat, such as that by Romney in the 2012 Presidential Election, where he implies that _The 47%_ of Americans who don't pay taxes are the U.S. economy's deadbeats who live off the taxes of the rest of us, a familiar Republican refrain (Chapter 1).

Then there is the most famous characterization of the 2016 Presidential Election by Hillary Clinton. Clinton said that half of Trump supporters are the deplorables: racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it. She went on the next day to defend her statement, taking back the word half, and saying, "It's deplorable that Trump has built his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia and given a national platform to hateful views and voices."

By doing so, she described half of the Republican Party's adherents as _Deplorables_ , something akin one supposes to skinheads and white supremacists. Or perhaps she just meant the _Deplorables_ were ignorant and fearful racists, nativists, and misogynists. Will we ever really know what she meant? Probably not.

The Federal individual income taxation should return to levels of 60-70 percent in the highest marginal tax rates in order to address growing inequality.[58] The following charts make this obvious and are often pointed out by professor Robert Reich of Berkley in his presentations on the subject.

When comparing these two charts it becomes obvious that public policy on income inequality in the United States has everything to do with the Federal individual income tax and its rates. In 1913 the tax was created to address tariff concerns and was very low but once World War I started it became a source of war financing that the nation had never known before. High marginal top tax rates quickly became effective between 70 and 80 percent. After the War the top rate slowed and then dropped precipitously to less than 30 percent before the financial markets collapsed in 1929. The top 10 percent of income earners suddenly became possessors of half the nation's income during the market run up, a situation rivaled only by today's current developments.

The big difference between then and now is that _Financialization_ occurred in the 1980's, leading to the growth in the financial sector of various means of intermediation, specialization of financial instruments, and professional speculation. Financialization has made it much easier to grow wealth in highly professional and sophisticated ways that were simply not available in the 1920's. Financialization has been spurred on by technological innovation, led by the development of the computer and internet. The Federal Government has also played an important role by making more and more sophisticated policies and rules about taxation, many intended to favor the growth of the very wealth, creating the income disparities that we now experience. State and local tax policies have endeavored to do much the same, and have been particularly regressive in their application.

David Stockman and the trickle-down theory, reinforced by Senate Republican and former football star Jack Kemp, were introduced in the 1980's during the Reagan Presidency, and had a forceful effect in reducing the top tax rate. That Stockman was purveying pure nonsense was obvious to pretty much all economists. Kemp proved to be an ignorant football player and a menace to intelligent citizens everywhere.

Among Reagan's economic advisors was Arthur Laffer, he the creator of the infamous Laffer Curve. The Curve showed how effective supply side economics, or cutting taxes, is in raising all boats in an economy. It too was panned by every decent economist. If there was ever any substance behind the "Reagan Revolution", it was this bit of silliness. Laffer took what was soon called Voodoo Economics, an outlier and essentially bogus theory from the fringe of real economic science, and made it into his mantra. This kind of pseudo-scientific approach to government and economics would soon be the biggest play in the book of Republican orthodoxy and remains so to this day. The idea is to use any goofy justification that can be come up with to be intentionally controversial and misleading, relying on the general ignorance of the audience of voters to be unable to tell the difference. Republicans have won time and again on the well tested theory that the intelligence of the average American voter can never be sufficiently underestimated. Republican policies bank on it.

If you want to espouse a politically popular idea such as that cutting taxes is painless, where the truth doesn't work make up a conspiracy theory or some other nonsense and cling to it like a life raft. This will get you through the storm of elections when all you need is votes. Later on, reality will be much harder to deal with. Reagan immediately created a major deficit problem with his tax cuts, and subsequently fostered a legacy of high U.S. debt that we continue to struggle with today. Today however, we have to add in the further tax cuts made by the Bush and Trump administrations. U.S. debt levels are now so high that it will take decades to return them to more normal, sustainable levels. The U.S. economy can be expected to underperform beneath the current weight of the national debt for a protracted period of time, well into the future.

Today, the Tea Party and Republican right, made up of white baby boomer guys (and their easily led wives who somehow think that defending their husband's financial views is important to their well-being, it isn't, wake up), were never really interested in the nation's debt, but rather only in their own taxes, and thus the great white hope of tax cuts was really their only state of nirvana. For a spoiled generation that had cornered the market on financial stupidity their entire lives this should hardly have been a major shock. They aspired to be wealthy enough to enjoy the perks of an unequal society, one that they believed they were entitled to by virtue of being white (and/or evangelical) in a world where everyone else, the discriminated against, simply don't count (for after all everyone knows that the discriminated against will receive their rewards in heaven, there not being enough time left on earth for them to be redeemed here).

It is also important to point out who pays the U.S. income tax. The PEW Research Center analysis above showed that those with income above $200,000 paid 58.8% of the Federal tax while only filing 6.8% of all taxable returns. Those below $30,000 in income filed 43.8% of returns but paid only 1.4% of the total of Federal income taxes. Of those below $30,000 in income there were 66 million filers, of whom two-thirds paid no tax at all.[59] The problem of income disparity becomes painfully obvious when seeing these kinds of numbers. In America, seemingly no one has any skin in the game, basically because they have no skin. This isn't democracy. It's indentured servitude.

Measuring International Poverty and World Income Inequality — The International Poverty Line (IPL) and the Gini Coefficient

World poverty is also increasing quickly in the modern era, but not if you look up the most commonly used measure, which is the World Bank's $1.90 per day. The World Bank started this measure some time ago at $1 per day and it stuck. Using it, and increasing it to $1.90 for today, a rosy scenario results showing all international poverty lines (IPLs) heading downward. But it is a ridiculous measure, seemingly arrived at for the very purpose of showing declining numbers of persons in poverty, when in fact the truth is very different indeed.

Jason Hickel, professor at the London School of Economics, points this out in his 2018 book **The Divide**.[60] Raising the IPL to $5 a day there would be 4.3 billion persons living in poverty (60%), 4 times what the World Bank says, and adding 1 billion since 1981. At $10 a day Hickel gets 5.1 billion, nearly 80% of the total world population, having added 2 billion since 1981. The problem is that one is looking across all the world economies at once trying to find an equivalent living standard that differs widely from one country to the next. Still, with the tremendous concentration of wealth that is occurring, it is clear that the broad cross section of people across the planet are falling behind. That there are fewer people at $1 and $2 a day may sound encouraging but only if you're cutting the difference between that and $10 a day with a microtome. The difference is so small as to be negligible in the extreme. Better measures of world poverty are clearly needed and the World Bank would probably be the first institution to say so. Analyzing the rates set by individual governments for poverty would probably be a good place to start.

Another mechanism for getting at the wide income disparities that exist today and which threaten democracy the world over is the **Gini Coefficient**. Developed in 1912, the Gini measures the dispersion of income across a frequency distribution of individual incomes. It measures from 0 to 1, with 0 being perfect distribution of income across a population, and 1 representing all the income going to just one person. The global Gini Coefficient was estimated to be between 0.61 and 0.68 in 2005 according to various sources.[61] It has been rising since 1820 when it was 0.43, meaning that global Gini or inequality has only been rising since that time and is now the worst it has ever been.

Notably, the World Bank departs from this analysis and presents its own:

 [62]

The World Bank attributes this decline in the World Gini as a result of globalization, in other words, as a result of growing incomes in developing countries like China and India, as well as better government income distribution policies such as more equal taxation and more equal distribution of public goods.

The United States is estimated to have a Gini of 0.38 after tax in 2009. A Gini below 30 is considered low and one above 50 is considered high. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Countries, representing the 35 most advanced economies of the world, of which the United States is a part, averages .31.

The Gini Coefficient then represents the good news that globalization, the result of greater free trade between the world's countries, is having a positive effect in reducing income inequality around the world. However, further analysis by economists Sudhir Anand and Paul Segal using the _absolute_ Gini index shows that the global Gini index rose from .57 in 1988 to .72 in 2005.[63]

Hickel offers a prescription to address global poverty and inequality: 1) Abolish the debt burdens of developing countries, 2) Democratize the World Bank, IMF and WTO for all countries to have a fair and equal say, abolishing the veto power of the U.S., revoking immunity from suit by loan recipients of the World Bank and IMF, 3) Provide free market access to richer countries of all WTO members in developing countries, shorten patent protections in general and especially for drugs, and reduce subsidies the richer governments give to farmers, 4) Develop a global minimum wage, and, finally: 5) Eliminate tax havens and international financial secrecy.[64]

A salient part of the post War world that America helped to create was born out of a rule-based system of international economic, political and military treaties and agreements such as the Marshall Plan, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade or GATT, NATO, and the US-Japan defense alliance. The US economy accounted for half of the world economy after WWII, but 25% at end of the cold war. Today America accounts for only 15% of World GDP.[65] American power has diminished during this time, but the liberal international order it helped to found has brought substantial stability to the world.

Wealth Inequality in the World and US

The _Credit Suisse World Wealth Report 2013_ shows how World wealth disparities are growing into an international crisis.[66] Its study determines that 1% of the World's population owns 46% of the World's wealth, and that 86% of global wealth is owned by the richest 10% of the World's population. Further, that two-thirds of the World's adults have wealth of less than $10,000, while it projects that there will be a billion millionaires and 11 trillionaires on the planet within the next two generations. It found that Global wealth had doubled since 2000 to $241 trillion in 2013, and further projects that wealth for the bottom will continue to fall. In 2014 there were 881 million people living in slums worldwide, or 1 out of every 8 people on the planet.[67]

In an Oxfam Report delivered at Davos it was reported that 1 percent of families worldwide own 46 percent of all the world's wealth, 110 trillion dollars. The top 85 people own the wealth of the bottom 3.5 billion people.[68]

Another way to look at the accumulation of worldwide wealth is to examine richest cities. In 2014 South Africa based **New World Wealth** performed a study looking at the cities with the most millionaires and multi-millionaires, the latter being defined as those having accumulated wealth exceeding $10 million.[69] London had 376,600 millionaires, the most of any city in the world, equaling 1 in every 36 persons. Geneva, Switzerland had the highest proportion however, being 1 in every 13 persons. San Francisco was fourth with 1 in every 32 persons being a millionaire. The city with the most multi-millionaires is Hong Kong, followed by New York and London. That these three cities make up the world's most important financial centers is a testament to who has benefited the most from the financialization of assets taking place in the last 30 years.

The study showed that the U.S. has the highest number of millionaires of any country, 4.1 million, and the most multi-millionaires, 183,500, seven times that of runner up China. The number of millionaires had grown by 58% in the previous ten years, and the number of multi-millionaires had grown by 71% in that same period of time. The study also figured that about 13 million of the worlds approximately 7 billion people were millionaires, just under .2% of the total.

The U.S. has 5% of the World's population and its economy makes up 15% of the World's economy. As we have just seen in examining growing income inequality in the U.S. and the World, substantial income stratification is taking place in the United States, more than that which is trending in the rest of the World and more than in most OECD nations.

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in their work, "Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data," use information reported on individual income tax returns since 1913 to capitalize various forms of capital income and then match that against the Federal Reserve's Flow of Funds to get annual estimates of income inequality.[70]

Using this novel approach, the two researchers show that wealth inequality has indeed exploded since the 1970s in a kind of return to the Roaring Twenties, where the share of wealth owned by the top 1% now rivals the One Percenters at the end of the 1920's, the "Great Gatsby" era characterized by the inherited fortunes of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age.[71] Of course, this has happened because of the dramatic erosion of the wealth of the middle class and poor in that same period of time. The average wealth of the bottom 90% was $80,000 in 2012, the same as it was in 1986, while the average wealth of the top 1% tripled. The chart shows how average wealth peaked and fell back since that time.[72]

Figure 1—Average wealth of families in the bottom 90 percent and the top 1 percent of the wealth distribution, in constant 2010 US dollars, 1946-2012.

Notes: The figure depicts the average real wealth of bottom 90 percent of families (right y-axis) and top 1 percent families (left y-axis) from 1946 to 2012. The scales differ by a factor 100 to reflect the fact that top 1 percent of families are 100 times richer than the bottom 90 percent of families. Wealth is expressed in constant 2010 US dollars, Using the GDP deflator

Source: Saez, Emmanuel and Gabriel Zucman "Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data", NBER Working Paper, October 2014, online at http://gabriel-zucman.eu/USwealth/

Saez and Zucman explain that the reason is that 90% of American families have taken on too much debt in terms of higher mortgage, consumer, and education debt. I would venture to add medical debt as well. In any case, the problem is that after Americans survived the market dips in the late 90's and early 2000's, the Great Recession had the effect of entirely collapsing their savings. Their observations are that the household wealth of the top 1% has gone from 7 percent to 22 percent of total household wealth over the past 30 years, leaving us with an income imbalance not seen since immediately before the Great Depression. Startlingly, they show that the top 160,000 families in the U.S. own as much wealth as the bottom 145 million families and that wealth is 10 times as unequal as income.[73] Further, that the bottom 90% of families own 23% of the nation's wealth, the same share as they did way back in 1940, so far has the bottom 90% fallen from their peak in 1986 at 36% of the national wealth.

A 2018 OECD paper showed that in 28 OECD countries including the United States, wealth inequality was twice that of income inequality.[74] Ten percent of households held 52% of total household wealth on average in these countries, but the situation was the worst in the United States, where the richest 10% own 79% of the total wealth. Selected results of the study:[75]

Of course, the biggest problem since then has been the complete absence of appropriate public policy to address this crisis in the United States. Public policy in the last 30 years has contributed significantly to the problem in the constant lowering of the marginal top tax rate since the 1970s, the poor regulation of the consumer debt market, and the lack of incentives to create higher household savings. Stagnant wages for blue collar occupations, caused by technological change, often mistakenly attributed to the worldwide economic progress known as globalization, has also been a constant factor, but so has the loss of private sector union representation and the elimination of private sector pension benefits. The U.S. lost 85% of its 5.6 million manufacturing jobs in the first decade of this century, but did so primarily because of the advance of technology.

There are enough contributing factors to the widespread stagnation of income to be able to describe the overall effects on the middle class as something of a perfect storm. It is a storm that could, however, have been avoided with better financial and economic public policy, as well as by much more aggressive oversight of the private sector by, primarily, the Federal Government. We will never know exactly what policies could have prevented the current situation, but the fact that the situation is ongoing, at this very moment, means that things could get much worse before they get better, in the process risking our very democracy.

Why is it that the American voter had no appreciable impact in changing the country's economic direction during this time? Insight is provided by a study by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page of **Northwestern University** in "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens".[76] They examined 1179 public policy issues between 1981 and 2002 to study who was favored in their outcomes. They concluded that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial impact on U.S. government policy and that average citizens and mass-based interest groups have relatively no impact.

Rising Costs and Debt for Housing, Education, Health Care

The largest factor outside of stagnating wages since the Great Recession for the decline of the American middle class are the rising costs of housing, health care, and education, with resulting increases in mortgage, education, health care and consumer debt, all of which have had disproportionate effects by gender and race.

First, the stagnating wages. This is so widely acknowledged a fact that it hardly seems necessary to show the chart but here it is:

Then the rising costs, starting with Health Care:

As has been pointed out, the American health care sector has grown to 18% of GDP or a sixth of the US economy, several trillion dollars a year. Of the 34 countries making up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) the United State is dead last among these advanced countries in terms of providing public universal health care coverage. Turkey and Mexico, who do not have full universal coverage yet, do better.[77] The average health care GDP cost per country in the OECD countries is 9% or half of that of the U.S., making it clear that this economic sector of the U.S. economy has become predatory, beyond out of control, a killer of the whole economy. It reduces employment because it is a major cost to employers. It chokes entrepreneurial growth because it places unusual burdens on small business. It prevents workforce development and growth as workers fail to gravitate to other employment out of fear of losing or changing their private insurance (reduced mobility and later retirement). Finally, it results in a highly fragmented system with widespread negative health outcomes that only cost the economy further.

College tuition has risen at an incredible rate in the last 45 years, far exceeding inflation. As the following chart shows, average public tuition has increased 2000%, or by 20 times what it was in the 1970's. (Take that, white Republican baby boomer senior guys who sat in college avoiding the draft during the Vietnam War: you got a nearly free ride while saving your skin, note to DJT in particular. Apparently, you didn't learn much while there either.)[78]

For example, the state school with the greatest increase in the study, the University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign, saw its in-state tuition rise more than double from $6212 to $15,020 in 2014 dollars. This puts an enormous stumbling block in front of average bright kids with no way up in society other than through education, reducing upward mobility in a country that used to prize it, and reducing economic opportunity for everyone. Again, sustaining higher and higher college costs like these will have long term effects on the competitiveness of the U.S. economy well into the future. They will compromise real economic growth.

The inevitable result of higher college costs has been dramatically growing student debt, now $1.4 trillion and counting, or an average of $32,000 per borrower.[79] The cumulative growth of such debt has exceeded 500% just since 1999.

Student loan debt in the U.S. has risen rapidly from less than 1 billion in the mid 1970's to exceed 1.4 trillion dollars today. In the 1970's you could go to college and pay for it with a part time job, government college grants were more popular than college loans, and access was practically universal. Of course, the problem with student debt is that it has a high opportunity cost for the lives of the people who are affected. Because they have to pay off debt early in their working lives, opportunities for purchasing homes and having families may well be put off to the point that they have to be foregone. This has consequences for the national economy down the road, witness the chokehold that China's one child policy will have on limiting that country's economic future.

Home mortgage debt has also risen dramatically in the U.S. since the 1980's, as can be seen in the chart from **Federal Reserve Economic Data**.[80] It dwarfs other kinds of household debt at $9 trillion. It reflects higher national costs of housing and the willingness of purchasers to acquire ever larger amounts of housing debt, especially since 2000. Since the Great Recession there has been a levelling off of this trend, although at still high levels.

Household debt in the US rose from nearly zero in the 1950's to $13.8 trillion in 2008, increased from 47% of GDP in 1980 to 94% of GDP by 2009, and jumped from 68% of disposable income to 128% of disposable income in 2007.[81] The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported in 2012 that during the five years prior to the 2007 Recession household the debt to income ratio increased in the advanced economies to 138%, up 39%, and reached 200% in Denmark, Ireland, Iceland, Norway and the Netherlands.[82] Clearly it had become a worldwide problem by the time of the Great Recession. But this only means that the debt problem was strangling middle classes in advanced countries everywhere, and not just in the United States.

However, only Americans have created a highly inequitable system of high health care debt to burden their middle class. Let's start by looking at how American medical costs have skyrocketed in recent years and the effect this is having on the typical American family of four.[83]

Clearly this is a problem. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that reliable data has been obtained about the increasing levels of household health care debt in the U.S., probably because such debt is such a recent development. Bankruptcy is another matter though, and 62% of bankruptcies reported in 2007 were caused by high medical debt, according to a **Harvard Medical School** Study conducted in 2009.[84] Three quarters of those in bankruptcy for medical debt had health insurance. In 1981, this was the case with only 8% of bankruptcies.

Future cost control will also be difficult for the health care industry as a whole, as the industry is building debt at 10 times the rate of growth of the country's GDP.[85]Defraying this tremendous increase in medical infrastructure will undoubtedly lead to some spectacular corporate failures as public options for health care grow.

Public options will be needed to bend the cost curve of health care downward to avoid crashing the entire economy. It's precipitous rise over the years has had a punishing effect on employers in terms of their costs and ability to grow and employ, but an even more devastating effect on the very ability of the middle class to survive.

Liberal government policies have underwritten health care for the vast majority of the poor so that people are not dying in the streets, but the story for the middle class has become much grimmer as employer sponsored health insurance proves to be increasingly inadequate and tens of millions cannot afford skyrocketing premiums under the ACA.

The effect on the American middle class has been further exaggerated by the paycheck to paycheck living of half of the country, resulting in a devastating lack of savings.[86] As the chart on personal savings shows, as household debt reached 130% of GDP in 2007, the nation's personal savings rate dropped to the floor, practically zero percent. Without the ability to save, America's economic system can be very predatory indeed, and has largely been shaped to be so by the lack of protections that would otherwise have been provided by appropriate public policy.

Not as famous as the Laffer Curve or the Phillips Curve, but in many ways more insidious and sinister when considering the amount of Professional Accounting dissembling and pure corruption by powerful interests it represents, is the **Health Care Curve**. Notice that this chart came from the **Congressional Budget Office** in 2011 just as the Congress was wrestling with the passage of the ACA. The best thing that can be said of it is that things are only worse now.

Finally, there is the disproportionate effect of America's unequal economy on minorities. **Economic mobility** in the U.S. is quickly being lost. Only 16% of children born into the bottom fifth (quintile) of income will rise to the top fifth of income by the time they reach 40 years of age. But only 3% of black children born into the bottom quintile will rise to the top quintile by 40.[87] Only 23% of white children will still be among the lowest quintile by 40, while 51% of black children will, which seems in line with the generally held view that half of poor black Americans will on the whole remain poor for the rest of their lives. This shows that economic trends of the last 40 years that impair mobility for whites have been virtually paralyzing for blacks, who have seen little economic improvement in their fortunes over this time.

A 2016 Report for the Economic Policy Institute examined the existence of a **Racial Wage Gap** :

"As of 2015, relative to the average hourly wages of white men with the same education, experience, metro status, and region of residence, black men make 22.0 percent less, and black women make 34.2 percent less. Black women earn 11.7 percent less than their white female counterparts. The widening gap has not affected everyone equally. Young black women (those with 0 to 10 years of experience) have been hardest hit since 2000."[88]

The Authors observe that the **Racial Wage Gap is** larger today than it was in 1979. Sociologist Douglas Massey notes the racial inequality but believes it can be addressed by greater investments in education and by eliminating racial segregation, that true enforcement of **the Fair Housing Act, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, and the Community Reinvestment Act** could effectively reduce racial segregation.[89]

That **racial segregation** is a cause of racial economic disenfranchisement and that racial segregation is pervasive and widespread in America is undeniable, but then so is racism in general in American society. The **Racial Wage Gap** is substantially smaller in public sector employment, which is consistent with the view that there are more widely observed protections against discrimination in public sector employment than there are in the private sector.

According to the **National Center for Education Statistics** , the average black student nationally went to a school that was 36% white in 1980, while in 2014-15 the average black student went to a school that was 27% white.[90] In 2014, public schools in the U.S. were 49.5% white, less than half for the first time. Two-thirds of black and Hispanic students attend schools with at least 75% minority enrollment, while only 5% of white students are enrolled in such schools.

It is easy to see how grossly unequal education can be easily provided in such an environment. The effect on the economic opportunity of the nation's minorities is serious and growing. It represents a socially reinforced form of institutionalized discrimination that can be easily ascertained when comparing inner city and suburban school systems, their various tax bases and the resulting highly differentiated spending on education. All of this is possible because of a hierarchy of housing costs that tier the quality of communities, their housing and their school systems. Where you live determines what kind of education your children get in America. High property tax states like Illinois are capable of using this mechanism, as well as restrictive zoning codes, to create the most unequal systems of education in the country. Public policy and public preferences combine in such a state to express a form of widely held antipathy to integration.

A recent study also shows that how much money you eventually make in America has a lot to do with your parents' race and whether they went to college.[91] The study and data came from the **Federal Reserve Bank** of St. Louis, which surveyed 6254 families in 2016 across the country. White kids from college educated parents could expect to make $113,628 annually in middle age, three times that of non-white kids with non-college educated parents. White kids from college educated parents could achieve on average a wealth of $374,640 by middle age, 14 times that of non-white kids of non-college educated parents. Non-college educated white kids of white college educated parents make less than half of those who graduated from college. This helps explain how the American economy can be referred to as "bifurcated" by education and race.

It's worth noting that the widening gap in economic inequality in the United States is much more pronounced than in Europe. The 2018 **World Inequality Report** shows how in 1980 both the U.S. and Europe started out with the top 1% having about the same level of national income, at about 10%.[92] But today things of have changed. Today, in America the top 1% receive about 20% of all income compared to Europe where the top 1% receive about 12% of all income. In 1980 the bottom 50% of earners received over 20% of all income in both America and Europe. Today however the American bottom 50% of earners receive only 13% of all income, whereas the bottom 50% of European earners still earn about 20% of all income. When looking at the charts you see how the American bottom 50% has declined sharply in their share of national income when compared to the European bottom 50%, whose share of national income has remained largely the same. In other words, things have gotten much worse for the bottom half of American wage earners when compared to the bottom half of European earners. And the share of national income they have lost has clearly gone to the 1%. It is Robin Hood in reverse.

The bottom 90% of Americans own 23% of the nation's individual wealth, about the same as they did in 1940.[93] As seen in the following chart, **Rise and Fall of Middle-Class Wealth** , from Saez, in 1920 it had been as low as 15%, but it had risen to 36% in the 1980's. Today, this decline in American's wealth is related to all the higher costs facing the middle class combined with the effects of the Great Recession on the decline in middle class asset values.

Free Trade, Free Willy!

Democracy suffers when American voters lack the basic knowledge necessary for the ordinary conduct of that democracy. This is particularly true when it comes to politics and economics. In politics, human beings in general have an excuse. They are born with built in biases to adopt the identity politics of the family, church, and community into which they are born.

On the other hand, Americans have at least some grasp of economics, except when economics becomes counterintuitive. Everyone intuits the idea of the hidden hand of the market place, that scarcity increases demand and price for example. Other ideas, like free trade versus mercantilism, are not so easy to grasp. They have to be taught.

Alan Blinder at Princeton refers to this as the **Free-Trade Paradox** , that two countries can both benefit from free trade even when one can produce everything more cheaply than the other, the principle in economics known as comparative advantage.[94] Instead, people like Trump use the common inference that if a country like China can produce everything more cheaply than the United States, then it is necessary to be mercantilist and assume that an unequal trade balance against the United State is equally against the national economic interest of the United States. That this is manifestly not true in reality is a subject for every professor of Economics 101 to demonstrate.

Fortunately, American policy since the Great Depression has recognized the truth and has through a series of international agreements fostered a world trading system that has promoted free trade. Fortunately, Americans generally do have an understanding of this. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of 2017 showed that 43 percent of Americans thought that free trade had helped the U.S., while only 34 percent said that it had hurt the country. On the other hand, when asked basically the same question about globalization in a CBS/New York Times poll in 2016, globalization lost 55 percent to 35 percent.[95] Words have meaning, until they don't.

Trump's style was always to throw things against the wall in front of his rabid crowds of devotees to see what would stick, and this idea that globalization was bad and that China was bad for mercantilist reasons stuck. That it conformed to his personal bias and out of date mercantilist ideas, uninformed from his years in college, should come as no surprise. The man was and is an idiot, a fact which has escaped no one.

Similarly, although free trade really has no net effect on the creation or loss of jobs in the U.S., a CBS poll in 2016 showed that 48 percent of Americans thought that it destroyed jobs while only 15 percent got it right in saying that it had little or no effect. A Bloomberg poll in 2016 asked Americans about protecting American jobs with trade restrictions and 65 percent to 22 percent approved of such restrictions.[96] Other polls have shown that Americans are overwhelmingly protectionist in general. It used to be that Democrats, Midwesterners, and farmers were the most notorious protectionists in the U.S., especially after the Great Depression. Today it is the far right and descendants of the Tea Party. Most Americans remain confused about such matters, whipsawed as they are by competing political claims of dubious value. Even most Vulcans are not solid on their feet when it comes to trade.

In free trade, both countries trading to their best comparative advantage win. However, it is true that the country that wins the least can lose some jobs in the process and the American government has long had a program to deal with that called Trade Adjustment Assistance. Sadly, it has never been popular with unions. Blinder points out that the politics of free trade make it difficult for the political process to correct the mis-impressions that counter intuitive trade creates, that the left will always think that free trade favors big business, that workers will always see free trade as exporting jobs abroad even though this is not the case, and that globalization, taken as the economic development of the rest of the world, is somehow inimical to US economic interests, that somehow economics is a zero sum game, which it most certainly is not.

Finally, technological development has much the same effect as free trade, creating temporary job losses as innovation makes work more productive for society as a whole, yet no one is suggesting that we throw all our cell phones in the trash and go back to land lines. Blinder rightly points out that we need to be comparing the effects of technological innovation to the effects of free trade, showing that both create more jobs in the end. This would at least give the maddening crowd something that they can understand.
Chapter 4  
TOP SECRET  
The Blind Leading the Blind

The U.S. national security apparatus includes about 300,000 of the country's two million or so civilian employees and 1.3 million military personnel, but also includes a large part of the additional 1 million or so Federal contract employees. The civilian agencies are estimated to cost $81 billion a year, but no exact numbers are possible in this regard because so much of the 17 agencies that make up the apparatus have **Black Budgets** , known only to members on the appropriations committees of Congress, thereby creating the biggest government black hole in the World and the World's ultimate **Black Box**. It relies on a complex system of secrecy and information classification that is widely acknowledged to be woefully inadequate. There are about 5 million persons with secrecy clearances in and out of the government. Information held secret often includes Open Source information, that which can readily be found unclassified in published documents and online, and therefore really isn't secret at all. The system for de-classifying previously classified information is preposterous. The amount of classified information that is in the system expands indefinitely, out of control.

1) Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)  
2) Department of Homeland Security (DHS)  
3) Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research  
4) Department of the Treasury, FinCEN and OFAC  
5) Department of Energy  
6) Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)  
7) Army Intelligence  
8) Navy Intelligence  
9) Marines Intelligence  
10) Air Force Intelligence  
11) Coast Guard Intelligence  
12) Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)  
13) Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)  
14) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)  
15) National Security Agency (NSA)  
16) National Geospatial Intelligence Agency  
17) National Reconnaissance Office

Here is how it breaks down.[97] The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is in charge of everything, a lead role that used to be reserved to the CIA prior to 9/11. It was after 9/11 of course when the entire system of U.S. intelligence was re-organized. This was ostensibly to deal with the fact that the various arms of the system were not communicating adequately with each other. The main finding of the 9/11 Commission was that they could have identified the 16 terrorists before they attacked the Twin Towers had they simply been sharing information. The re-organization did not follow traditional rules of public administration. It didn't try to avoid endless duplication. Instead the reorganization created an unwieldy and massive bureaucracy.

In the panic after 9/11 the Republicans who were in control of the Federal government at the time were more interested in exploiting public fears than in good public administration. They did what was easy and layered more opaque bureaucracy on top of an already impossibly byzantine one. This was after all a bureaucracy about which the public knows virtually nothing, and about which the largest swath of the American public could care less anyway. This way, Congress could act like they were doing something about terrorism while somewhat ineffectually addressing the very legitimate concerns of the 9/11 Commission.

Nobody thought that saving money in a government re-organization of the Intel Community (IC) was really the point anyway. The **New America Foundation** pointed out in 2015 that in the period from 2005 to 2015 there were 94 people killed by "Islamic" terrorists in the US.[98] Compare that to the number of Americans killed in the same period of time by gun violence: 301,797 (most of them, 64%, suicides). Domestic homeland security budgets increased by 1 trillion dollars by 2012 after 9/11. The chance of dying in a terror attack by that time was 1 in 3.5 million.[99]

To the voters back home you don't look like you're solving problems unless you're spending more money on more government to do things that are supposedly not getting done, not because of lack of government resources but because nobody in the government wants to do them in the first place. In fact, with Republicans the most popular form of government is that which is devoted to finding and killing mean old terrorists that come to the U.S. to blow us and our kids up. After 9/11 there really wasn't anything more popular with the American people than that. Getting the IC reforms passed wasn't just an easy legislative lift, it was no lift at all. The Republicans got so much political traction out of this that we could be justifiably suspicious that they had something to do with 9/11 all along.

The biggest and most spectacular creation out of this was the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In 2017 the cabinet Department had a $40 billion budget with over 240,000 employees, the 3rd largest Federal Cabinet Department after the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration. It includes the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Both are alternately famous and infamous.

DHS includes the NIMS system, the National Incident Management System. NIMS is an emergency response model that has mandated the participation of state and local emergency first responders throughout the U.S. It focuses on setting up incident command operations and maintaining effective communications with the public, while coordinating with all other agencies, presumably the most important of these being Federal. NIMS is a kind of Civil Defense model that emphasizes coordination between different levels of government, allowing Federal agencies to step in and easily take control of the local Joint Operations Command Centers that they have mandated be up and running in the case of any local emergency. It is top down full on Federalism in its most radically fitted out form. The only reason local police officials don't rebel at this intrusion on state's rights is that they get to play cowboy, lone on the range, with the expensive big toys that the Feds give them if they go along, but more about that later.

DHS has also initiated a system of "Fusion Centers" in each State, a further effort to establish top down Federal government influence on state and local governments in the area of counter terrorism. Whether this is an effort to spread the blame to states and localities in the rare homeland terrorist incident in typical fed fanny covering fashion, or something more sinister such as using the structure it provides as a means of overriding state's rights in the event of an incident, is not really known. It's not really known largely because the Fusion effort has failed to produce anything of real consequence at the state level other than more unnecessary duplication of effort by competing law enforcement agencies, along with a certain degree of natural bureaucratic confusion that the effort has bred among them. Is this really necessary? Of course not, but it allows down ballot state politicians to make statements to the effect that they are being tough on terrorism, so they support it. Anything for a vote.

The Department of State runs its own intel through its relatively small Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The Treasury Department runs a counter terrorism operation that includes the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Both FinCEN and OFAC are relatively small operations in Federal government terms, a few hundred employees at most for each of them. But their ability to monitor banking activity worldwide and to establish banking sanctions by specific approval of the President make them probably the most powerful government agencies on earth. The World's financial system has become so interdependent that in the modern day it is virtually impossible to avoid doing international business that in some way doesn't come back to and involve U.S. banking institutions in some way. As a result, these Bureaus within the Treasury have the ability, by sanctioning foreign banks, to inflict serious damage on the economy of any targeted country.

FinCEN and OFAC are aided in their mission, which is aimed primarily at money laundering, by the international transaction management system known as SWIFT, which is short for **Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication**. Created in Belgium in 1973, SWIFT is a computer system that is essential to the secure wiring of money between international banks. It's FinCEN's job to monitor SWIFT transactions and U.S. spy agencies all spy on it. Congress voted sanctions to remove some Iranian banks from access to SWIFT but they were later restored. There have been threats to cut off some Russian banks from SWIFT but that has not happened. There have been rare instances of the system being hacked, but it is widely considered very secure. It had better be. The whole of the World's economic system depends on it.

There are no fewer than 6 Service intel agencies: Army, Navy, Marine, Air Force, Coast Guard, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. The DEA, FBI, CIA, NSA are all well-known large agencies. The DEA has about 11,000 employees but the others typically have about 40 thousand employees each. The vast majority of these people live in the Washington D.C. area and do not spend much time abroad, where of course most of the intelligence they are seeking is located. Like Americans in general, few speak or know any foreign languages. Yet due to their intelligence clearances and credentials they can look forward to being sought out for comfortable careers after serving in the government for a period of time. While in government, they are subject to periodic intrusive, at times embarrassing, polygraph exams and constant, restrictive oversight. It is not a fun atmosphere in which to work, but it can be interesting and challenging.

The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) is located in McLean, Virginia in the Liberty Crossing office center near Tyson's Corner, along with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Being in McLean, it is not far from the headquarters of the CIA. Officials from the CIA, FBI, DIA and other intel agencies work together at the center. Counterterrorism centers also exist elsewhere in the intel field, such as at Treasury. Presumably, some are not known at all, for obvious reasons.

The National Security Agency, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and National Reconnaissance Office are examples of Signals Intelligence Agencies. They focus on collecting foreign intelligence data from afar, such as from spacecraft, overhead flights, the internet and telephone systems. They are the "spies in the skies". Their work product is most often referred to as **Sigint** , Signals Intelligence. On the other hand, the FBI runs the primary counterintelligence function of the United States and looks for spies that may have, or which intend to, enter the country. The other intelligence agencies are expected to stay in their lanes and stay out of domestic surveillance. This is especially difficult for the NSA, as they must split the baby and focus only on foreign actors attempting to infiltrate the United States, while giving those Americans that they communicate with some privacy protections. They use FISA warrants to do this.

Opposed to signals intelligence is human intelligence, **Humint**. These are American spies in foreign, often adversarial, countries and they come largely from the CIA. Agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency occasionally use spies to get actionable military intelligence. This is the stuff of the Ian Fleming novels and countless spy thrillers, but in reality the work is often as boring as it is dangerous. Most of these personnel are assigned to local embassies and consulates under cover, and almost all countries can figure out who the spies are.

All the intel agencies making up the Intel Community act in many ways as independent agencies even though many are part of larger government departments. They obviously compete over intelligence and are known to stove-pipe each other by holding back essential intel from competitors in an effort to get a leg up on the competition. In this way they act much like individual bureaucrats act in their attempts to advance their careers. They steal the thunder of a great discovery in order to take the limelight and gain the attention of their superiors. With such favorable attention they can obtain further promotion and, ultimately, status within and power over their organizations. It is the primary way that individuals rise within complex organizations in general, and it is the way that government organizations compete with each other over budgets and personnel. The top of any human organization is reserved, of course, for the best ass kissers, the asses to be kissed naturally being those of the elected politicians in Congress.

Blind Ambition

This brings us to the topic of **Ambition**. Ambition has of course become a guiding human impulse arising out of our tribal origins. It is a basic principle of naturally competitive human behavior. Founding father James Madison had argued that the design of a democratic government cannot depend on trusting any one person or institution to do the right thing. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition," he had stated, along with "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." He knew that judges, politicians and government officials would seek to outdo one another out of self-interest, maximizing their power at the expense of the other branches of government.[100] So the Constitution enshrined the principle of separate and equal branches of government being able to provide a check on one another.

There is a weakness in Madison's argument, however. It is not always in the best interests of the ambitious to take responsibility for hard choices. Passing the buck has been a persistent problem when it comes to issues of surveillance, civil liberties, and national security. When any decision might result in criticism, either for a controversial surveillance program or for the failure to prevent the next terrorist attack, the ambitious may think the smarter move is to sidestep those choices. "Why not let someone else take the heat if something goes wrong?" might be a wiser, more considered decision.

Tim Edgar, Obama's first director of privacy and civil liberties on the White House National Security staff, explains how this works, or fails to work, in the case of executive authority granted to an organ of a secrecy state, a portion of the government granted the prime reserve of secrecy from direct public oversight:

"Checks and balances that operate entirely in the shadows can provide little more than the illusion of accountability. Without active pressure by an informed public to keep the government's powers in check, it is far too tempting to pass the buck. If the ambitious see little benefit in taking their oversight obligations seriously, they are sure to be too quick to give the government the benefit of the doubt—just as I was."[101]

This points out quite correctly that not everyone is ambitious. Ordinary bureaucrats are not ambitious. They are more interested in getting to retirement safely and securely. For example, take Brennan's Hobbits described earlier. The ordinary employees of the Federal government are too busy leading their lives to care that much about high advancement in restrictive, secretive bureaucracies where the rewards for standing out are modest at best. It is said that for the vast majority of men (and women) do lead lives of quiet desperation. The good news is that hobbits do not by definition have strong political views one way or another, and thus make very good public servants.

I Spy, They Give Merit Badges Don't They?

The U.S. Intelligence Classification System thrives on impossibly vague government speak and nonsense standards.[102] A Secret classification is to include information from a U.S. or foreign collection capability or interest, disclosure of which could cause "serious damage to the national security". A Top Secret classification is a Specific "collection capability, interest or vulnerability", disclosure of which could cause "exceptionally grave harm to the national security". Above Top Secret are individual code-named matters, also called special comparted information. Because so much open source material has been classified, much of classified material is in fact innocuous.

This makes it easier to understand how Hillary Clinton's possession of classified material on a personal server was at one time not exceptional, but rather a relatively dubious distinction. It also makes it rather clear that FBI Director James Comey's horror over her possession of such classified information was feigned to some degree. She continued the use of the private server long after she should have recognized that others had already given theirs up. Proving once again that in government following the normative actions of others is important. Follow the herd! But it also shows that in the fast-developing world of communications technology it's necessary to routinely overhaul practices and methods on a regular basis. Unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of thing that government is notoriously bad at. Remember, in government the most common management expression is "whaddya mean, we've always done it that way!" In that way, Hillary fit in perfectly. Problem is, Hillary needed to be a transformative figure, when in fact she had become just one of the other idiot boys. Did she lose her edge? Or did she ever have one? No one seems to know.

Just as the CIA is not entitled by its mandate to investigate American citizens within the U.S., the NSA as pointed out earlier isn't either. However, if an American becomes a person of interest to the NSA by virtue of the NSA's normal surveillance activities of foreign nationals, it is possible for the agency to file an application under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 **(FISA)** to a special FISA Court, seeking the power to surveil an American.

The **FISA** Court has 11 judges appointed for 7 years by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roberts, a Republican, has packed the FISA Court with conservatives likely to approve virtually any application. Americans showing up in NSA intel have their names masked until such time as a member of the Gang of Eight or other top officials sees fit to unmask their name, usually as it is obvious to everyone at some point who is being referred to. This is considered a way of protecting the name and civil rights of any American who shows up in NSA intel, which is of course classified so only 5 million people or so in or attached to the Federal government are aware of it. Supposedly, only 20 or so top officials in the NSA have authority to unmask the name of an American caught up in the agency's sweeping searches.

**FISA** Court applications play an important role in foreign intelligence gathering even though they have to do with obtaining permission to place Americans under government ordered monitoring of all communications, what would otherwise be a clear violation of Constitutionally granted individual civil rights. They are voluminous applications which require extensive lawyering. Still, a very high percentage of such requests are granted, thought to be well over 90%. It is estimated that as much as 75% of the President's Daily Brief is constituted of intelligence gleaned by use of FISA ordered surveillance of American citizens.

The **Gang of Eight** are the eight members of the Congress who have primary oversight authority over the agencies of the Intel Community. They are the leaders of each party in both the Senate and House, as well as the leaders of each party of both Senate and House Intelligence Committees. The Intel Committees conduct oversight on a regular basis of Intelligence agencies, but the **Gang of Eight** may be the only officials outside the Executive Branch to be informed of especially sensitive or time urgent intelligence matters by order of the President. They must review intelligence in specially constructed **SCIF** s (pronounced "skiff"), for Sensitive Compartmented Intelligence Facility, which can be permanent or portable, an entire building or just a room, but which are in any case made secure for receiving encrypted electronic communications. Military grade encryption, by which is meant American military grade encryption, is considered the best in the world, but it has many other competitors, all of whom claim that they are better.

Americans spy on everyone, on all other countries around the world except for a few. The few they supposedly do not spy on are known as the **Five Eyes (FVEY)**. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States formed this intelligence association during World War II for the purpose of sharing **Sigint** collected against the Axis powers. As they share such intelligence, they rarely find that spying on each other is necessary. They have in essence a pact not to do so. During the Cold War they created the **Echelon** program together, which collected information on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

It was the Bletchley Park code breaking office in the United Kingdom that broke the **Nazi Enigma Machine** and Code, a feat which had a lot to do with ending World War II at least two year earlier than it otherwise would have, saving 14 million lives. The Americans were anxious to participate in this unprecedented World altering development in signals intelligence. It was Britisher Allen Turing's development of an Enigma Code cracking machine during World War II that eventually led to the invention of the modern computer. Turing is also considered the father of Artificial Intelligence. He explored the idea that a computer might someday exceed the intelligence of man, something which is now widely known as passing the Turing Test.

The signals intelligence collected by breaking the Enigma Machine was called Ultra. The intelligence collected by breaking the Japanese codes later in the War was called Magic. The Japanese relied more on code books than a machine for their secret communications, but this code was broken during the War as well.

Americans did not get fully read in about the **Enigma** discovery until after World War II was over. By then, the **Five Eyes** had begun their signals intelligence collaboration in earnest. In the 1960's the **Five Eyes** developed **Echelon**. It focused on satellite and telephone communications, tapping into undersea cables and international phone exchanges. Later **Echelon** would expand to become the first mass surveillance apparatus in the world, scooping up vast amounts of communications, followed by challenging efforts to then sort through the bewildering collections for valuable intelligence.

The existence of the sweeping program would come to controversial public attention for the first time in the 1990's. It was known to have collected considerable surveillance on Princess Diana prior to her death, one of many instances where the program spied on citizens of its own member countries.[103] In signals intelligence, "no foreign" has come to mean that even the **Five Eyes** are to be kept uninformed of a particular piece of classified information. This would typically be designated as: TOP SECRET//SI//NORFORN.[104]

It should not come as any kind of surprise that the Dawn of the Computer Age came simultaneously as the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Neither was related, but the need to develop secret codes for wartime purposes led to the development of a machine for decoding secret messages by Allen Turing. Turing was, however, reverse engineering a machine, or computer, developed by the Nazi's for encoding secret transmissions, the Enigma.

That the Nazi's were too clever by half and actually invented a secret code that was used to outsmart them, also should come as no surprise. The very nature of a secret code is that it is usually not a secret for long. This also has become a basic principle of computer security in the modern age. Computer security has to be constantly updated to be any good, as any IT professional will endlessly tell you.

Computers and Codes go together. You can't have one without the other. Codes are complex and have to be written by Coders. Coders are jealous of their prerogatives as creators of something that is essential to computing so they make their codes a secret that must be paid for by others in order to be used. Coders are the original secret keepers and secret masters. Governments all over the world quickly realized the utility of all this for the routine spying that they always do against one another, in good times or bad, peace or war. The **Five Eyes** certainly understood this. Computers became instantly essential for modern spying and coders suddenly held the keys to all the kingdoms.

It is also hardly surprising then that the National Security Agency (NSA) was formed in 1952 to specialize in all forms of signals intelligence on behalf of the U.S. government. An early program of mass surveillance called Rogue Justice became Stellar Wind, the mass surveillance tool created after 9/11 by President Bush, which became Prism in 2007. The Snowden revelations have outlined a complex web of programs developed by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance. The **Prism** program is used to collect foreign intelligence focusing on messaging from big tech providers such as Google and Microsoft. **Upstream** focuses on the U.S. internet backbone but also gets paid assistance from telecom providers, both foreign and domestic. Keep in mind that all of this must comply with Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act 2008 regarding protecting the civil rights of Americans who might be inadvertently included in such communications. **Prism** collects about 90 percent of NSA internet traffic.

Snowden said, "These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power."[105]

Under these programs it quickly became the objective of the NSA in the post 9/11 era to capture all the world's communications for the purpose of combing through them for links to any adversaries of the U.S. It was nominally considered an anti-terrorism program, but it served many more purposes than just that. When asked to justify such a gross invasion of the public's privacy, officials resorted to citing the number of terrorist incidents that had been averted by use of such intelligence measures. Bulk data collection at the NSA was supposed to have stopped 54 terror incidents at first, then 12, then Zero, because the FBI did have access to the information provided by the NSA in the last 12 cases.[106]

The NSA earned a reputation in the intelligence community as the Wonder Boys, but along with it came the realization that along with technical mastery came troubling questions about the privacy of individuals. Stephen Budiansky observes in his book **The Code Warriors** :

"At its best, the agency galvanized innovation in computing and higher mathematics, delivered vital intelligence on foreign threats available in no other ways, and deftly and brilliantly targeted key sources with technical and espionage wizardry. At its worst, it obsessively pursued the unattainably grandiose scheme of collecting literally every signal on earth, undermined communications and Internet security for everyone, evaded legal oversight, and became the victim of its own secrecy with an unchecked culture of impunity, obfuscation, and byzantine bureaucratic politics."[107]

Going back to the days of FBI Director Louis Freeh and Motorola in 1994 there has been a desire on the part of the U.S. national security establishment to break the code on mobile telephones. Back then, there were serious discussions with Motorola and other providers to create back doors on phones that would allow the FBI to monitor communications. The back doors would be created by including a special "clipper chip" in the design of all phones. Talks broke down however and the chip was never used.[108] The Cypherpunks of the era fought back with lawsuits, abandoned by 1996. By 2000 the government had quit trying to stop the export of computer code and cryptography. Of course, this all came back recently with the Apple dispute over trying to break Apple phone encryptions in the case of the San Bernardino terrorist incident. The government hasn't really given up and probably never will, unless, of course, they succeed (in which case God help us all).

The principal competitors on the World stage to the Five Eyes are undemocratic countries like Russia, China, and Iran. Only China, with the kind of economic resources that come from its huge population, represents a real geo-strategic threat to the West. Bad actor countries like Russia, Iran and North Korea can assemble important cyber and counter-intelligence threats in asynchronous ways, putting the power of their governments behind efforts to hack and disrupt the West, but they can't compete against major western powers on the economic playing field or on the battlefield.

The approach of these adversarial countries to citizen surveillance is as would be expected somewhat different than that of the Five Eyes. Undemocratic regimes see unfettered communications technology as a threat to political stability and hence not only surveil their populations as aggressively as they can but also feel free to censor the content of all communications that their citizens receive, something that no self-respecting democracy would ever be willing to admit to.

Russia and Eastern European countries are well known for their long history of deep government intrusion into the lives of their citizens using surveillance and censorship. In the post-Soviet era these countries have especially branched out, leading the World in illegal hacking and other sorts of computer crime. For Russia, this has been a force multiplier, magnifying the country's Worldwide influence by trying and succeeding to a remarkable degree in influencing foreign elections and manipulating the daily politics of other countries on the web, a new form of counterespionage. Russia has multiple intelligence agencies, just as the U.S. does, and just as in the U.S., these agencies compete for agency budgets and top personnel by seeking the favor of the only decision maker in Russia who counts, Vladimir Putin, the country's President.

It is useful to keep in mind that Russia's total economy as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is smaller than that of the State of Texas. Furthermore, Russia has 144 million citizens while Texas has only 30 million by comparison. The GDP per person in Russia is a mere $8,000 versus $52,000 for the U.S. (the World average is about $16,000). In 2014, when Russia sold oil for over $100 per barrel, its shadow economy made up 40% of its GDP, while 24% of the country's wealth was held offshore.[109]

This means Russia has a third-rate economy. The country is often described as having a second world economy however, to distinguish it from the common expression "Third World". Third world economies are at the bottom of world economies, a distinction to be avoided and which makes the term disparaging.

Any government of today is defined by its own history, by the government that it once was. It is always a reaction to what went before. In the case of America, after 9/11 the country was indelibly altered, and became a noticeably less free country afterward. In the case of Russia, Putin's rise was a straight-line reaction to a post-Soviet period of international humiliation for his country. It represented a nostalgic retreat to the glory of the 19th century period of Russian empire.

Russia's economy is further hobbled by its dependence on extractive industries, especially oil, it's dysfunctional, corrupt economic and legal systems, and its large though poorly funded defense sector. It has nuclear weapons, but that's just about it. This is why Putin's initiative into cyber intrusion for the purpose of waging international political warfare has received substantial support within Russia. It continues to keep Russia on the World stage and this is popular with the Russian public. Russians have always had a conspiratorial nature and this tendency has been exaggerated by decades of government- imposed secrecy under Communism. Russians love nothing more than a conspiracy of secrets as a result. Their affinity for a former KGB leader as their President speaks volumes.

Putin is of course a former KGB colonel who went on to be a corrupt Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg and later was elevated to be Boris Yeltsin's Vice President in the mid 1990's. While the Soviet state divested itself of state assets to rich and ruthless Russian tycoons, Putin maneuvered to steal $200 billion from the Russian people. He did this with the help of the new class of oligarch billionaires. He made them subservient to him by using the power of the Russian state to prosecute individual oligarchs, usually for failure to pay taxes. Putin also used direct intimidation of his targets with repeated acts of violence, either to harm or kill.

The most famous of these attacks on leading figures in Russia was the Litvinenko case. Litvinenko was a former KGB officer who spoke out, along with his colleagues, against Putin. He was fired and later poisoned with polonium in London in 2006. Litvinenko had immigrated to London after having published widely on Putin's corruption, thereby becoming a famous dissident.

In July of 2006 Litvinenko published an article on Putin on the _Chechenpress_ website in which he referred to a video of Putin kissing the stomach of a small boy of five years or so. The video had received wide attention in Russia as exemplifying Putin's love of the Russian people. Litvinenko, however, interpreted the video differently. He stated that Putin had been given a low position in the KGB because "his bosses learned that Putin was a pedophile. The Institute officials feared to report this to their own superiors, which would cause an unpleasant investigation." Litvinenko further stated that when Putin became FSB Director he found and destroyed videos "which showed him making sex with some underage boys".[110] Presumably, that was enough to get Litvinenko killed, but there have been many Litvinenko's since.

In 2012 the Russians passed an Internet restriction bill. It was originally directed at censoring child porn, but it was quickly expanded to censor all anti-government criticism.[111] Soon it came to be called "the register", an Internet blacklist of which 97 percent of the web sites blacklisted had committed no offences defined in the law. Not only do the Russians surveil and censor all internet traffic crossing their territory, but they use the knowledge that they glean from such activities to familiarize themselves with non-state actors and criminals, with an eye to recruiting them to the cause of their security agencies. The use by the GRU (military intelligence) and other Russian agencies of these kinds of actors gives the Russian government plausible deniability in some of their more nefarious intrusions into the cyberspace of other countries. This was particularly on display in the 2016 American Presidential Election.

The FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, or internal security, has great powers of surveillance. It uses the SORM system which picks up all email, internet usage, skype, cell, text, and social networks, making it one of the most intrusive listening devices in the world.[112] Russian law requires all social media to keep their servers in Russia and to hold data for 6 months. Anti-extremist laws allow the Russians to block any websites they wish. To enforce all this there is the MVD, Ministry of Internal Security, which has 1.2 million employees, 200,000 of whom are military troops used to investigate crime and counterterrorism.

China is the world's miracle economy. Deng Xiaoping introduced capitalism in the 1980's. In 1986 the country's per capita GDP was $282 annually. In 2016 it had grown to $8100. It had a middle class of 4% of its population in 2002, whereas in 2013 the middle class had grown to include 31% of the Chinese people.[113]

The **GFW,** great fire wall, of China started in 1996 but was not very effective at first, leading Bill Clinton to remark that censoring Internet activity was like "nailing Jell-O to the wall".[114] The **GFW** is now a formidable achievement, one modeled by many countries in the Muslim Middle East as well as by various kinds of dictatorships around the Globe. The Chinese have taken the concept of surveil and censor to an extreme, one made more challenging by having the World's largest population and fastest growing economy. They have a formal government apparatus for conducting such activities in a Department that controls all national media and routinely goes after dissenters using extra-judicial detention. Internet discussion is closely monitored and sources of discontent are easily and quickly shut down.

Iran spent $36 million in 2016 to develop "smart filtering" technology that would allow authorities to selectively censor the internet access of its 80 million citizens. At the time, China was the main supplier of censorship technology. However, China's largest telecom firm, ZTE, was ordered to pay $1.2 billion to the US government in 2017 for violating trade sanctions on Iran by selling the country the product.[115]

The U.S. is also developing a cyber warfare capability to use against such adversaries, and has inaugurated its own vaunted Cyber Command. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has among its many efforts funded projects like the Internet (dubbed ARPANET at the time) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). It has funded these projects for decades by providing research grants to college and university Computer Science Departments in the United States. Such Federal funding goes to a host of Washington D.C, technical consulting firms and virtually all of the firms making up Silicon Valley in Northern California. The Cyber Command's greatest product to date however has been **Stuxnet** , a zero-day virus in development since 2005 but first uncovered in 2010, which was developed under contract to an Israeli firm, for the purpose of blowing up Iranian cyclotrons, devices that are necessary to the creation of an Iranian nuclear bomb.

No Such Agency, the NSA

Stuxnet was delivered by an **Air Gapped** device such as a USB memory stick brought directly into the Iranian uranium separation facility. In other words, it was not delivered over the Internet but by plugging the virus directly into the computers operating the Iranian cyclotrons. This probably required **Humint** , a daring undercover spy operating to penetrate Iranian security. It was created as a **Zero Day** virus, which are technical breakthroughs without precedent. As such, they have no existing defenses, making them very effective. Stuxnet was devised only to infect and operate against a very narrow range of devices, but it still spread further than expected. Stuxnet shut down the Iranian production facility for a time, buying negotiators of the six countries involved in the Iranian nuclear deal a much-needed opportunity to establish inspections and safeguards on the Iranian program. The impressive feat of cyber warfare had to have affected the Iranian's considerations in eventually coming to a deal.

As part of the NSA's mass surveillance programs, it completed construction of its Camp Williams facility near Bluffdale, Utah in 2014. It stores between 3 and 12 exabytes of data (10 to the eighteenth, or 1 EB = 1 billion gigabytes) on super computers in a facility of between 1 and 1.5 million square feet of floor area, which cost 1.5 billion dollars to construct and billions more to equip and staff.[116] It uses large amounts of power and water to operate. The **Utah Data Center** is officially known as the **Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center**.

While the exact mission of the facility is classified, it is logical to assume that it contains mass surveillance data mined by the **Prism** and similar programs. These programs ostensibly are focused on foreign intelligence collections. Placed in storage, such data can be further mined at any time to disclose a web of connections made over the phone or internet by any person being investigated by the government going back as far as whenever the data collection effort first began, generally assumed to be shortly after 9/11. This can provide a history of all known contacts, which can then be iteratively searched to form a secondary ring of contacts of the first set of contacts, and so on. Such searches quickly reveal whether an individual is acting alone or in concert with a group of others, of primary interest to the Intelligence Community and U.S. law enforcement. The facility was not without controversy in Utah, where a bill was introduced to prohibit a new water deal to serve the facility after 2021.[117]

As the above illustration from the NSA site shows, the collection effort is sweeping, to say the least. Somehow this doesn't feel like just your average foreign data collection system.[118] Should the NSA not seem sufficiently threatening of taxpayer civil rights, we have this sinister motto on the facility's entry sign:

Reassuring catch phrase or tin ear mind set?

**Reporters Without Borders,** or _Reports Sans Frontieres_ **,** which consults to the United Nations, reviewed international censorship of the internet in 2014 and reported adding the NSA, GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters, UK Intelligence), and India's Centre for the Development of Telematics as organizations that spy on their citizens and press in countries that traditionally favor the free flow of information and freedom of expression. The **RWB** cites these countries as therefore no better than the Chinese, Russians, and Iranians.[119] It also singled out for special opprobrium the activities of "surveillance dealerships", those companies who provide the means to dictatorships to surveil and censor their populations. It considers them to be additional enemies of the internet. While operating usually in the shadows these companies are known to actually have trade fairs and hold forums to discuss their products in friendly countries.

Nor is such activity strictly limited to intelligence agencies. The U.S. Marshall Service, part of the Department of Justice, ran a "Spy in the Sky" program using aircraft to capture the cell phone communications of those it had authority to surveil, according to the Wall Street Journal.[120] It started in 2007 and flew Cessnas out of at least 5 major U.S. airports, enough to cover the entire population of the country. DOJ wouldn't confirm or deny because to do so would put foreign agents and criminal suspects on alert. The surreptitious activities of law enforcement thereby evade public scrutiny. It is considered a necessity that collection efforts be secret, a tactic that has become especially familiar with Federal law enforcement. This virtually guarantees that the Feds can act with impunity, denying press claims of this sort when something slips and word of their dubious efforts to surveil the public accidentally surface.

The **Wall Street Journal** quoted Christopher Soghoian, Chief Technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACU) as calling it, "a dragnet surveillance program. It's inexcusable and it's likely, to the extent judges are authorizing it, they have no idea of the scale of it."[121] The technology was developed by Boeing and the devices were called "dirtboxes". A typical device would collect data on tens of thousands of calls per flight, supposedly only from the phones of suspects. It bypassed the phone companies themselves.

After 2007 the Federal agencies stepped up efforts to gain mass surveillance from major internet companies like Yahoo and Google based on government re-interpretations of existing law. Yahoo was threatened with $250,000 a day fines for non-compliance.[122] The issue went to the FISA Court and 1500 pages of redacted material on the case were released in 2014. Yahoo argued that the demand for intelligence included many American persons and violated constitutional protections against search and seizure, was similar to what is done in criminal cases, and was warrantless. Yahoo nevertheless did provide the requested information on what were considered priority cases. The sweeping program was ended in 2011, but was a good example of the kind of mass surveillance that was carried out during the time that the Snowden disclosures covered.

The bulk phone records metadata program authorized by FISA under Section 215 of the Patriot Act was renewed in the **2015 USA Freedom Act** , but the records must now be held by the phone companies instead of the NSA. They can only be accessed with permission of a Federal Court. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board created by the 9/11 Commission prepared a report at the behest of Obama that found that such eavesdropping had only minimal benefits (made no concrete difference) in countering terrorism, was illegal and should end. All five Board members said that just moving the data collection to a third party does not eliminate privacy concerns. Rand Paul famously opposed the 2105 Act, speaking in opposition to it for many hours on the floor of the U.S. Senate.[123] Similar concerns led to striking down provisions of the UK's 2016 Investigatory Powers Act, which required IP's to maintain 12 months of back records on virtually everything digital of their customer's records in April of 2018.[124]

The rapid development of the NSA's systems in the period from 2006 to 2009 led to confusion among tech professionals about how all the systems related to each other and how they worked, and, more importantly, led to misunderstanding among non tech lawyers representing the work to the FISA Court, which was charged with decisions about who should be investigated further.

"It appears there was never a complete understanding among the key personnel regarding what each individual meant by the terminology," lawyers wrote in March 2009 as the scope of the problems came into focus.

"As a result, the judges on the surveillance court, who rely on the NSA to explain the surveillance program, approved a program that was far more intrusive than they believed.

"Given the executive branch's responsibility for and expertise in determining how best to protect our national security, and in light of the scale of this bulk collection program, the court must rely heavily on the government to monitor this program," Judge Reggie B. Walton wrote in a 2009 order that found the NSA had repeatedly misrepresented its programs."[125]

The Obama administration issued a long report on the NSA's failure to comply with the standards set by FISA in August 2013, blaming complexity and a lack of shared understanding on the part of the main stakeholders involved in the process. Representative Sensenbrenner, a sponsor of the original Patriot Act, stated that he never intended it to be used to store the phone records of every American.[126] Yet it did, at least in metadata form, with all the calls' identifying information but presumably without any of the content of those calls. To get to the content of course required a FISA warrant.

What doesn't require a FISA warrant can also be surprising, and illuminating. For instance, there is the old, since 1976, mail cover tracking program known as the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program conducted by the US Postal Service. For this there is zero oversight and no judicial review of any kind. All that is required is that a person, any person, fill out a Postal form and the request is either granted or denied by the Service. Provided is whatever information is on the outside of any envelope sent or received by the subject of the request, in other words the identity and address of everyone with whom the subject is corresponding by old fashioned snail mail.

And you thought that was a secret, didn't you? Criminal requests number 15 to 20 thousand a year. For anti-terrorism requests there is no public disclosure.[127] Programs like this give the use of norms in government a real workout. They are often used as justification for other intelligence gathering programs. On the basis that mail cover information is not covered by any protection, then why can't this be a precedent for some other new intel gathering effort? They have, many times, and it works. Long forgotten programs become the basis and justification for new ones with even less protection for the public's privacy. A story appears in the press, there is some public discussion, then things quiet down and the bureaucrats go right back to work enhancing their power and authority, leaving elected officials off the hook for making any tough decisions about national security versus individual civil rights. The highly differentiated (17 intel agencies), often overlapping, opaque national security state with few constraints and little public oversight, churns relentlessly onward, gathering steam, intricate involvement with Silicon Valley and plenty of rightward Republican supporters along the way.

In 2015 Kaspersky Labs, the prominent Russian software provider, announced the discovery of a number of NSA programs aimed at the security of individual computers worldwide. One involved a deep plant in _all_ the most common manufacturer's hard drives that allowed NSA to control infected computers. Kaspersky found it on computers in 30 countries with the most concentrated infections in Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria.[128] The revelations involved programs that were prized by the NSA as highly as Stuxnet. Kaspersky software was subsequently banned from use in the Federal government, whether out of an abundance of caution or, more likely, a fit of pique. What it revealed was that the NSA "evaluations" of source code prior to the purchase of such products by US government agencies gave the NSA's "Equation Group" the means to use and manipulate such highly guarded product code. This is the same group that was supposedly involved in the creation of Stuxnet in conjunction with the Israeli's.

The Dutch newspaper **NRC Handelsblad** reported that the NSA used malware to infect over 50,000 computer networks around the Globe, the evidence of which is. supported by a power point slide leaked by Snowden.[129] Called "Computer Network Exploitation" or CNE, this total access to a network is hacked by the NSA's Tailored Access Operations or TAO team with software that can be turned on or off at any time. What is suggested by the slide is the scope of operations of the FVEY, or Five Eye, approach and its intent to scoop up virtually all digital data worldwide. It also shows the widespread use of planted malware used by expert government teams. Not exactly four hundred-pound hackers sitting on their beds, but a group of dedicated professionals capable of hiding their tracks and avoiding suspicion.

In August 2016, the NSA was hit with the loss of a variety of sophisticated intelligence gathering tools that was considered at the time to be a more serious breach of the agency's security than the Snowden leaks of 2013. It appeared that the TAO itself had been penetrated and that many of its most valuable cyber weapons had been stolen.[130]

The **New York Times** quoted Leon Panetta, former CIA Director, "These leaks have been incredibly damaging to our intelligence and cyber capabilities. The fundamental purpose of intelligence is to be able to effectively penetrate our adversaries in order to gather vital intelligence. By its very nature, that only works if secrecy is maintained and our codes are protected." And further, when such a leak happens, "Every time it happens, you essentially have to start over."[131]

As of a year later, using its counter-intel Q Group and the FBI, the NSA still wasn't sure if they had been hacked or exposed by an insider. The resulting ransom attacks and disruptions using these stolen tools and weapons have been much more costly than anything that resulted from the Snowden disclosures. What makes the Shadow Brokers, as they came to be known, so effective is their apparent knowledge of the very law enforcement agencies that are out to get them.

At an Association for Computing Machinery conference in 2015 a group of researchers published a paper that showed how large spy agencies with a few hundred million extra in the bank could break standard internet encryption protocols to eavesdrop on trillions of encrypted connections. This grants the agency the ability to break HTTPS, SSH and VPN traffic. Secure Shell SSH is used for many financial transactions and Virtual Private Networks VPN are used in countries like China to get around the Great Firewall (and where they are banned). This involves breaking the 1024-bit prime numbers that are used universally as a basis for encryption, what would normally be an enormous task that only governments might be able to afford to carry out.[132]

Few other nations except for the U.S. have the resources of the NSA however, so few could afford to climb such an expensive Everest. The authors of the ACM Conference study speculate that not only has the NSA probably accomplished this, but that it is working on newer more secure standards. Indeed, the Utah Data Center web site states that the NSA is working on a 256-bit AES, Advanced Encryption Standards, encryption key. Standard encryption protocol is such a challenge to break that it could be decades away using classified supercomputers. Or, as the Conference speculated, it may have already been done by the NSA. Stay tuned.

Oddly, technology has led to such economies of scale in the data processing field that 70 percent of all web traffic in the world passes through Loudoun County, Virginia, just outside Washington D.C., where all the major data centers supporting the Cloud are located.[133] Here, in sprawling corporate industrial parks, are the hulking server farms that serve the American data industry. They are conveniently close to their government overseers, the Virginia suburban offices of the many U.S. Intelligence Community agencies, readily available to the entire IC.

CBS focused a _Sundary Morning_ piece on American Web Services, the largest Cloud based web service, larger than its next 14 competitors combined, and Raging Wire, with its extraordinary entryway security measures. At Raging Wire, there are concrete barriers, armed guards, a retina scanner that can discern a live eye from a dead one (shades of _Minority Report_ ), a mantrap set of doors, and 9 password protected doors to enter the server area.

The facility is backed up for 10 minutes by batteries, giving the huge diesel- powered electric generators outside time to come on line to serve the servers and keep the internet running in the case of a power failure. Each facility is backed up in another location so that even if one or more is outright destroyed by terrorists, there would be no disruption of service. The servers spend 96 percent of their time idle, waiting to handle internet traffic spikes. Seven new centers were under construction at the time of the CBS piece in the fall of 2017, and this is in a field where the new centers number into the millions of square feet.[134]

A Prelude to Orwell's 1984?

Under the Trump Administration's Department of Homeland Security, DHS began monitoring the social media of all immigrants, whether naturalized, permanent or temporary residents on October 18, 2017. This includes 20 million naturalized citizens of the United States and 22 million permanent or temporary residents. The order specifically stated that this will include "social media handles, aliases, associated identifiable information and search results". The Modified Privacy Act System of Records will also include "publicly available information obtained from the internet, public records, public institutions, interviewees, commercial data providers, and information obtained and disclosed pursuant to information sharing agreements".[135]

This certainly stretches the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure without a warrant for probable cause to an entirely new level. It also creates a sub class of Americans who are subject to it, a dangerous precedent already used by the American government in the case of the Japanese internment during World War II, a precedent that lives in infamy. More importantly, the government does not appear to have provided any credible explanation for so clearly violating the U.S. Constitution. Presumably, this has something to do with the nation's security or the enforcing of immigration law. Or possibly it's just a run up to a more invasive surveillance state, say, like that of the Stasi secret police in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Only the judicial branch of the U.S. government may yet serve as a recourse to such Trumpian fixations on **The Other** , clearly an attempt to stimulate pre-historic tribal associations known to solidify the subconscious racial animus of his base behind his grandiose notions of himself as The Great Leader. In other words, it's just a sop to base and ego, Trump acting "on his gut".

Trump's alienation of the U.S. Intel Community may be a good thing in the end. It may be preventing an assortment of the kinds of abuses that we might otherwise be faced with once this strange era in American politics is over. In the meantime, the blind ambition of the world's hackers to become a part of the biggest show on earth at the NSA will only ramp up further. There are about 140,000 applications to the agency each year. Most don't hang around for long though. The pace of staying up with the cutting edge in the computer world comes with a high price. It is a price that can only be justified by quickly jumping into the grey and relatively lucrative world of computer security consulting, where all true hacker rebels go to fulfill their personal destinies.

The Forever War

In 2014 the Congressional Research Service provided an accounting of the cost of American military engagement between the years of 2001 and 2014 of 1.6 trillion dollars.[136] In equivalent terms, the Korean War cost $341 billion, the Vietnam War $38 billion, and the Persian Gulf War $102 billion, according to the Service. These costs were added directly to the national debt as there was never any attempt to cover them through the national budget or the ordinary appropriation process.

Wartime and peacetime rules are different. In declared wars some curtailment of civil liberties is usually expected by a populace. There are always concerns about infiltration of the homeland by the enemy that can lead to laws restricting the right of entry of persons from a hostile state. There are always public concerns in such instances that somehow manage to bleed their way into legislation. Over reaction by authorities to assuage such concern is more often condemned post facto or after hostilities end than during them.

Perpetual war blurs the distinctions. Mass surveillance of those having recently come from a hostile territory might be justifiable during war but not during peacetime. What if there are multiple conflicts with multiple parties, none of which are state actors, but all of which are of identifiable groups? What if one or more of these conflicts, which quickly widen into undeclared wars, continue without an apparent end in sight? Can America get trapped in "Forever War"?

We saw after 9/11 similar reactions to Muslim identity in the United States based on the fact that the 9/11 attackers were Muslim extremists, but we did not see a specific singling out of Saudi Arabians for instance, nor did we see a reaction against Muslims making rightful entry into the country until Trump. If anything, the delayed reaction seen in Trump's Muslim bans demonstrated a belief held by a wide segment of the American public in the idea of extended conflict.

A permanent war, waged conventionally as well as covertly, using extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, enhanced interrogation techniques well recognized to be torture, and warrantless mass surveillance, all ordinarily deemed to be emergency wartime policies, became the currency of the national security state established after 9/11. This was a **state of exception** , necessitated usually only in wartime, that threatened us the most after 9/11, but which still threatens us to this day.[137] These practices can, going forward, always be interpreted as precedent and be reinstated should a similar situation arise, not only because they did not receive adequate public airing and condemnation at the time, but because no one at the CIA was ever held legally to account for the injustice they occasioned. The extra-legal means that the Bush administration used at Cheney's urging to justify these actions, a series of legal memos written by government attorneys that holds no authority in any Court in America, have not ever seen a Courtroom. They have never been struck down by any Court. They have yet to see the day when they will be fully discredited.

The Torture Reports make clear that the transfer, interrogation, and treatment of detainees was approved through the Secretaries of Defense and State, the Attorney General, and the Vice President (Cheney). John Ashcroft, the Attorney General, verbally authorized on July 24, 2002 the use of 10 techniques, the attention grasp, walling, the facial hold, the facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, use of diapers and use of insects. Two days later he verbally authorized waterboarding. The National Security Council lawyers authorized the Director of Central Intelligence to have the CIA use these enhanced interrogation techniques and informed Dr. Rice, the National Security Advisor to the President that the President would not be briefed.

Was this extra-judicial or quasi-judicial? The real question is from where did they derive their official authority and has it ever been challenged in the courts? The following quote is large but the point is so important that it needs to be emphasized.

"The torture memos effectively tried to replicate this legal framework, but it did so in a unique manner. Instead of officially codifying the practices—which would have been impossible given the treaties and laws on the books and customary international law—the executive branch assumed a quasi-judicial function. The Bush administration formed itself as a mini-judiciary, with legal briefs going back and forth, legal arguments, and pretend judicial opinions. It "legalized" the practices by constituting itself as its own judicial system.

"Through the process of legalization, the president's men appropriated the judicial function. The lawyers at the White House and departments of justice, state, and defense filed briefs with each other, trying to persuade each other, contesting but ultimately deciding the questions at issue: they rendered judgment. The memos became "legal briefs"—in fact, it says so on many of them—and then, effectively, judicial opinions. The executive branch became a mini-judiciary, with no effective oversight or judicial review. And in the end, it worked. The men who wrote these memos have never been prosecuted nor seriously taken to task, as a legal matter, for their actions. The American people allowed a quasi-judiciary to function autonomously, during and after. These self-appointed judges wrote the legal briefs, rendered judgment, and wrote the judicial opinions that legitimized these brutal counterinsurgency practices. In the process, they rendered the counterinsurgency fully legal. They inscribed torture within the fabric of law."[138]

In Bernard Harcourt's book **The Counterrevolution** he refers to an American government running out of control and toward a tyranny that must be resisted, that has adopted the counter resistance techniques of warfare that General Petraeus had advocated for use in conflicts overseas, but this time against the American population.[139] We can see how the surplus military equipment program ran by the Pentagon would soon give paramilitary style to local police departments around the country in what some would call the militarization of local law enforcement. This created an unfortunate semblance to a police counter resistance to lawful demonstrations, and a kind of posse comitatus.

Much of the justification for these measures lie in the fear of _imminent_ attack. A good example most familiar to Americans is the ticking time bomb fantasy used so successfully in the post 9/11 TV series _24_ , which focused on the character Jack Bauer played by Keifer Sutherland, the Director of Field Operations of a government Counter Intelligence Unit, who famously resorts to various enhanced interrogation techniques to stop imminent attacks on the nation in the nick of time. It aired in November of 2001 and ran until 2010. _Imminence_ became a codeword used to justify similar actions in government circles at just the same time.

President Bush issued the order creating **Greystone** , or GREYSTONE, or GST, on September 17, 2001. The term **Greystone** was a codeword for Sensitive Comparted Information, a compartment containing over a dozen sub-compartments, for carrying out rendition, interrogation and counter-terrorism programs by the CIA. The mission was to conduct the Global War on Terror, GWOT.

According to the National Security Act of 1947 the President must issue a finding before undertaking a covert action, must comply with U.S. law and the Constitution.[140] But under **Greystone** the only oversite were the chair and ranking member of House and Senate Intelligence Committees who could not discuss briefings with anyone, effectively very little oversite.

The Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AMF) passed by Congress as its form of a Declaration of War only identified those who attacked the U.S. on 9/11, not all the groups and lower level persons that were about to be attacked and killed based on secret information using secret criteria provided by anonymous individuals in secret procedures.[141]

The CIA preferred to conduct extra-judicial kidnappings of high value captives in the Global War on Terror at **black site** locations in friendly countries with experience in such matters. Egypt was a favorite destination, as its secret police had a long history of torturing the political figures of its political opposition. But facilities also were established in Eastern Europe in countries like Poland and Romania, and in Africa. In Egypt the interrogations could be carried out by experienced Egyptian personnel, but in other facilities they were carried out by CIA personnel who often went to great lengths to seek indemnification for their actions ahead of time. Torture included water boarding, forced standing, sleep deprivation, stress positions, forced isolation and loud sound.

Later, Obama's prohibition of torture was formalized in the McCain-Feinstein amendment after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report on Torture, December 2014 (5 years, 6 million docs, concludes CIA's use of torture was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence). It was passed June 2015 even though torture had already been considered illegal (again) by federal and international law. Says Rosa Brooks in her book **How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, Tales from the Pentagon** :

"The fact that the amendment is needed at all reminds us that in the state of exception a determined executive with accommodating lawyers, a timid legislature, and deferential courts can run roughshod over the law, however plainly it is written."[142]

She goes further to state that Obama solved the interrogation problem by not taking any prisoners in the drone war (killing everyone instead) and that by not closing Guantanamo there was no longer any opposition in Congress to what he was doing, the public itself voiced no objections, and the politics of fear had won. By not punishing torturers Obama avoided controversy, which became a pattern with a President under continuous fire from Republicans in Congress and a far right being nurtured by **Fox News**.[143]

National sovereignty has come to mean little in pursuing terrorism threats with drones in countries effectively in the midst of civil war in the Middle East. Imagine however countries not in conflict receiving similar treatment, especially in the case of an **imminent** attack. Say China, Russia or North Korea found it necessary to conduct a drone attack in Europe because of an imminent terrorist attack planned against the homelands of one of these countries. There would be strident protest, the attackers would say their home countries were under imminent attack, proof would be required from those carrying out such an attack, and those using the drones would respond by saying it's classified.[144]

The definition of imminence has been undermined by the American military to the point of having "signature strikes" of drones based on the profile of movements of lower level members of many different terrorist groups. The Presidential Tuesday Hit List of names of hundreds of terrorists approved by the President for follow up drone kill shots was eventually expanded to include these kinds of more general strikes.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism as of April 2017 indicates based on its research that there had been 2250 confirmed drone strikes up to that time, with between 6248 and 9019 persons killed, including 736 to 1391 civilians, 242-307 of whom were kids. During the first 4 months of the Trump administration, this rate of hits increased to 4 times the number of hits in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.[145] For the first time in 2012 the USAF trained more UAV, unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone operators than fighter pilots.[146]

Americans narrowly support such flights in general, not seeing them as extra-judicial killing by a recognized state, but rather as a wartime exigency occasioned by imminent threat. However, an American acting as a terrorist and killed by a U.S. drone is more likely to be seen by Americans as an extra-judicial state sponsored killing and a violation of the 14th Amendment guarantee of due process, and doesn't receive widespread support. Such an actor presumably should be captured and tried by a jury of his peers in the United States.

In any event the use of drones for killing suspected terrorists has remained controversial through Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. The leading arguments against the practice are that drone killings are only being carried out by the U.S. at this time and are therefore only associated with American policies abroad, where they have created considerable antipathy and resentment against Americans among the populations where they are carried out. Targeted populations see such attacks as too indiscriminate, killing many non-participants. Pakistan has notably halted such attacks for periods of time because of this. There have been instances where strikes were carried out by mistake against civilians, resulting in major government and international investigations, as well as considerable negative press blowback in the United States. Still, the drone targeted killing program continues to expand, with UN investigations, but without any UN Sanctions. When other nations begin similar practices, the world will indeed become a much more dangerous, and lawless, place.

The drone killing program being prosecuted throughout the Middle East and Africa, along with the fighting in Syria and Iraq, and the continuing low-level warfare in Afghanistan show us how America has become mired in a **Forever War**. The American Civil Liberties Union states in its website:

"A program of targeted killing far from any battlefield, without charge or trial, violates the constitutional guarantee of due process. It also violates international law, under which lethal force may be used outside armed conflict zones only as a last resort to prevent imminent threats, when non-lethal means are not available. Targeting people who are suspected of terrorism for execution, far from any war zone, turns the whole world into a battlefield."[147]

The Gray Eagle drones of the Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment played an important role in going after ISIS. Known as Echo Company, it is based in Iraq, where its missions made up seven percent of total coalition airstrikes. It is considered the most lethal company sized force in the DOD.[148] The Grey Eagle is the successor to the Predator and the Reaper and can carry up to four Hellfire missiles. Able to read a license plate from 15,000 feet, it can stay airborne for 25 to 42 hours.

As of 2018, there are 170,000 American soldiers deployed in 150 countries around the world. This means the American military is deployed in well over two-thirds of all nations.[149] Of these, some 40,000 personnel are assigned to classified missions and their whereabouts are undisclosed. There are 600 to 800 American military bases or installations, owned or used, overseas, especially when all the lily pad bases of fewer than 200 persons are counted.[150] The American presence is everywhere. It is the only such unified command military force on the planet.

U.S. Operations are also much more sophisticated than ever. A deployment to a country like South Korea can be an almost unreal experience, with civilian contractors providing all the comforts of home. Take for example the $10.8 billion base at Pyeongtaek. It is America's largest overseas military base after a 10-year expansion.[151] It is located 45 miles South of Seoul and will be home to 45,000 troops, contractors and family members by 2022. At this distance it is out of range of North Korea's much vaunted 14,000 artillery pieces, all carefully arranged in impregnable mountain redoubts to rain down Armageddon on Seoul.

The new Camp Humphreys has 650 buildings that include four schools, five churches, a hospital, large gym, bowling alley and an 18-hole golf course. In addition, it has a 310,000 square foot shopping mall with American fast food vendors such as Popeyes and Arby's.[152] North Korea is paying 92% of the cost of the base and is paying $857 million for the year of 2018 for the cost of having the American troops.

Basing arrangements like this exist in other theaters where large numbers of American troops are stationed as well, and have become an expensive but favored model of deployment. Obviously, when the Americans leave, the bases do not go with them. A more representative form of American culture exported overseas has never really existed. It is the principle mark and the forever stamp and signature of the modern American Imperial State, certain to be left for future generations to find in the dry sands of history.

Unlike in earlier eras of human history, when the projection of any nation's military force could be expected to be used for conquest, the American military presence is not known as interventionist. An American presence is usually established to protect both individual nations and their international regions. Deployments are seen as extensions of American international interests and power, but they are accompanied by diplomatic agreements with each nation. These agreements are backed up by treaties and international membership organizations focusing on security such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, (NATO). The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), on the other hand, is NATO's Russian equivalent that includes many of the former Soviet states.

The most important development in the U.S. military in recent decades has been the emergence of the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), which is a combined forces approach to carrying out Special Operations around the world. Formed in 1987 as a response to Operation Eagle Claw, aka Desert One, the failed attempt under Carter to rescue the Iranian hostages which led to the resignation of his Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, the Command today includes 69,000 military personnel from all branches of the Service with a headquarters at McDill Air Force Base in Florida. It emphasizes inter-agency coordination and is mission specific. Within SOCOM is JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command.

Critical to the mission-based approach of JSOC has been the use of highly trained teams of Special Mission Units:

Army—First Special Forces Operational Detachment—Delta Force  
Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU—Seal Team 6)  
Army 75th Ranger Regiment's Regimental Reconnaissance Company  
Army Intelligence Support Activity  
Air Force 24th Special Tactical Squadron and  
160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Night Stalkers)

JSOC is headquartered at Pope Air Force Base and Fort Bragg in N. Carolina. The missions and the identity of special operators are classified. Their involvement in high profile missions can often become known after the fact when their actions, such as that of the killing of Osama Bin Laden, become international news. Special Operations teams are prized not only for military capabilities but also for their skill with local languages, their independent judgment in fast moving tactical situations, and their combat medical training. While Special Operations Command may have 69,000 personnel, JSOC has only 4,000.[153]

JSOC is often thought of as the tip of the U.S. military spear. It is increasingly used to rescue hostages and conduct clandestine military anti-terrorism and anti-drug operations. In spite of the Posse Comitatus Act that established that the U.S. military cannot be deployed against American citizens, Special Forces are authorized to train state and local police and have been deployed at a variety of special events in the U.S., such as at Presidential inaugurations. Special Forces Operators and their most high-profile missions have captured the American public's imagination in books, film and television, becoming a huge public relations bonanza for the Defense Department and creating substantial nationwide political support for their ever-increasing budget. Public support for the ongoing War in Afghanistan may have waned considerably, or U.S. military involvement in Syria may be controversial, but the military itself has remained popular.

One of the results of the military's popularity was the Pentagon's Excess Property Program, which transferred military assets to the nation's police forces. In 2006 the program transferred 33 million dollars-worth of used military equipment, but by 2013 it had transferred 420 million dollars-worth.[154] It had already transferred over $5 billion since the mid 1990's, and would go on to transfer a total of $18 billion of stockpiled goods between 2006 and 2014 according to the **Congressional Digest** , including 44 thousand night vision scopes, 93 thousand military assault weapons, 200 grenade launchers, over 600 mine resistant, ambush protected vehicles MRAPs, 475 bomb detonator robots, 50 airplanes, 400 helicopters and 12 thousand bayonets to state and local law enforcement agencies.[155]

The newly camo dressed SWAT teams and local PD's soon found their presence on American streets unwelcome, as was witnessed in the disturbances at Ferguson, Missouri with the death of Michael Brown in August of 2014. Aggressive dress and equipment more suitable for pressing a military engagement was obviously unsuitable for ordinary American policing. It compounded concerns raised by the deadly shooting of unarmed civilians, especially African Americans, by white police officers in routine street encounters. This in its turn led to the NFL player protests that have damaged the playing of America's favorite sport. Trump exploited it further to drive a political wedge into the electorate, red meat for his increasingly rabid and out of touch political base.

A military robot acquired under the federal program ended up in the hands of the Dallas PD and was used to kill 25-year old military reservist Micah Johnson. He had holed up in a parking garage after killing 5 and injuring 7 Dallas police officers. It was the first time an American police department had used a robot to kill an armed suspect.

On March 12, 2016, at the annual South by Southwest SXSW Conference and Festival, Obama gave an important national security address in which he stated that there can be no absolutist position between national security and privacy. The national security apparatus has become its own leg of the iron triangle. It is designed to stimulate national fears, stoke animosity, and generally do everything necessary to insure its survival, prosperity and dominance of the political agenda. It may not be structured in such a way as to virtually guarantee a subservience of public opinion, it has far too many disparate actors for that, but it has been provided the resources and the freedom to do so frequently throughout its history. It's institutional power, both inherent and derived, is more than sufficient to bully any President or Congress to submit to its will, making it therefore without question the largest single threat to national and world security in existence today.

The principal constraint is the non-partisanship professionalism required of those in the national security apparatus, and the norms of conduct that have grown up around it. Democracy is about impartial institutions. These institutions will need to remain so despite attempts to politicize them, as Bush did with the CIA in the run up to the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Due to the unpopularity of those Wars, which history is likely to declare as unnecessary and destructive of the delicate balance of power in the Middle East, President Obama took a more temporizing approach that many branded as timid. Under Trump, the great destroyer, the military has been given freer rein to prosecute Middle East conflict while the intelligence agencies have been largely scorned and discarded.

Harold Lasswell, the leading 20th Century political scientist, presciently coined the term **Garrison State** in 1941 to describe a modern state composed of a dominant political and military elite. He did so without being aware of the vast apparatus that the U.S. military and the Federal civilian administrative state would transform themselves into after World War II. Lasswell feared that indiscriminate aerial bombing of innocent civilians would be justified rather than condemned as criminal in future wars. As history has made clear his fears were realized in the fire bombings of whole cities during World War II in Dresden, Tokyo, London, and Hamburg, in the use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.[156]

As we face the reality of the new Forever War, it is important to remind ourselves what Eisenhower declared about the iron triangle of the military industrial complex, as well as warnings about the power of that military to assemble American overkill. To Eisenhower the great danger was the iron triangle, the collaborative effort of the military, defense contractors and the Congress to benefit one another in an unconstrained buildup of military power, even in times of relative peace. On January 17, 1961 Eisenhower addressed the nation for the first time on television in his farewell address:

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."[157]

Eike thought that 150 nukes would be enough in 1956 to defend the American mainland from a Russian nuclear attack. The Strategic Air Command SAC would eventually create a target list of over 20,000 sites in the USSR. As a result, in the period 1958-65 the U.S. nuclear stockpile went from 6,000 to 30,000 warheads. One Soviet city the size of Hiroshima would have been bombed 4 times a total of 7 million tons of TNT, when only 13 thousand tons of TNT were used in Hiroshima in World War II.[158] This was under the Single Integrated Operational Plan of the time. The goal became to kill 54% of the Russian population while destroying 4 in every 5 buildings across the whole of the USSR. President Carter, a nuclear engineer by training, proposed going to 200 nukes, knowing that would be more than sufficient to retaliate against the Soviet Union.

At one point the U.S. had 25 thousand deployed warheads and the Soviets 30 thousand. Today the numbers are closer to 6000 and 8000 for each, still many, many times the number needed to wreak total world destruction. Kennedy ran on a missile gap in 1960. There was no missile gap. The ability of a politician to create fear in the public over anything is directly proportional to the degree of that politician's cravenness and lust for deceit. It didn't take a Kennedy to prove this point.

Gene Healey in "The Forever War President: Obama's 'Transformational War' Powers Legacy" in **The Federalist** makes the point about Forever War while quoting Obama's speech at the National Defense University:

"In May 2013, some 11 years into the War on Terror, President Obama took a break from reviewing target sets and kill lists to deliver a much-anticipated "drone speech" at the National Defense University in Washington DC. "We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us," Obama admonished; "we have to be mindful of James Madison's warning that 'No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.'"[159]

In Roman days the Emperor satisfied his political base with blood and bread, the deaths exacted in the Roman circus for the public's amusement, and free bread. Today, that lust is for tempting but illusory glory in international conflict and the millions of jobs rewarded by the modern security state. Primitive testosterone driven impulses are rewarded by the predations of the military industrial complex and its only product: death.

Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Stellar Wind/Prism mass surveillance violation of the 4th Amendment lawsuit continues 10 years after it was first filed. The NSA has gone to ground, resorting to withholding the key information needed for such suits to proceed. In this case the NSA refused to confirm whether a leaked document detailing the broad powers being used by the NSA to carry out the government's warrantless surveillance program was authentic or not.[160]

By withholding confirmation Federal intelligence agencies maintain their monopoly on the pre-eminence of the security state in America. This helps increase their status and power. It promotes the law enforcement ethos that only wrong doers (those with something to hide presumably) need fear the Gulliver like organs of the state. The security state can easily frustrate the legitimate authority of the judicial branch. They may even feel both dominant and superior to the American system of checks and balances, the only means to reign in natural human ambition in a democratic system.

What drove the EFF suit was the revelation in 2006 by AT&T technician Mark Klein that the NSA was tapping into the AT&T internet backbone. He revealed that the NSA had a secret locked room, 641A, in the San Francisco facility where the NSA intercepted foreign and domestic communications in the government's warrantless surveillance program authorized after 9/11, and that AT&T had provided similar facilities to the NSA in other AT&T hubs.[161] In early November of 2018 Edward Snowden came forward to file a declaration to the Court handling the case that the document, 2009 Inspector General Report ST-09-0002, now public, is authentic.

Virtually all the big phone companies had cooperated with similar efforts by the NSA at the time, engaging in widespread illegal surveillance activities. Snowden's confirmation should permit the case to finally move forward, but in the world of the nation's spy agencies no one is going anywhere fast when it comes to making public revelations. There is always the threat of increased, real public oversight as a response to consequent public revulsion at what the agencies have been able to get away with for so long.

AT&T's hub network plays a special role for the NSA, giving it access to virtually everything on the internet's backbone, foreign and domestic. Further reach is provided by AT&T's 19,500 points of presence on the internet in 149 countries.[162] **The Intercept** in 2018 identified eight large nondescript, hardened data center facilities in eight U.S. Cities that comprise the backbone of this network and which exchange data with peer linked internet providers in the U.S. and abroad. The NSA pioneered the approach with AT&T in the FAIRVIEW program started in 1985 and continued today. The **Service Node Routing Complexes,** located in the core of America's major cities, are potential targets. Taken out, they would disrupt the country's principle communications systems. The American advantage is that much of the world's internet traffic flows through the United States at some point because of the dominance of American tech companies. The NSA and AT&T together have devised a system which provides total surveillance of the internet.

Another example of this also occurred in November 2018 with the disclosure by eleven former intel and government officials to Yahoo News that the CIA's method of communication with its foreign agents worldwide had been compromised by Iran and China. Discovered in 2013 the breach led to the roll up of dozens of agents recruited by the CIA in these countries. More than two dozen agents working for the CIA lost their lives in China in 2010 and 2011 as a result.[163]

In the 2000's the system that foreign agents were using to communicate back to the CIA was one developed for the war zones of the Middle East and was never intended for long term use by secret agents operating in foreign lands. The Obama administration announced they had found out about a secret underground nuclear facility in 2009, putting the Iranians on notice that the security of their nuclear program had been penetrated. Knowing this, the Iranians responded by gearing up one of the most sophisticated counter-intelligence operations of any nation and focusing it against the United States. They found and exploited the weak CIA communications system being used by American agents. By May of 2011 the Iranians had broken up a ring of over 30 CIA agents in Iran, executing and imprisoning them, while the CIA was able to exfiltrate some others.[164]

Iran and China may have cooperated to some extent on this discovery, but more likely China traded military goods to Iran in exchange for intel. As early as 2008 a CIA contractor, John Reidy, had blown the whistle on the flawed communications system, but it wasn't until 2013 that it became readily apparent that it had been blown. The response on Capitol Hill in the House and Senate Intelligence Committees was severe, as this was the largest intelligence failure since 9/11.

George Orwell just landed and I heard he's alright.
Chapter 5  
IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT  
or While I was Sleeping

I woke in a haze to the sound of a man's voice calling my first name, accompanied by a storm of pounding on my front door. I immediately thought there must be some kind of emergency in the neighborhood, such as with a gas leak and potential explosion, or possibly even a missing person being sought, as in the case of a local Amber alert. I imagined distraught neighbors running door to door, panicked at the thought that someone might have taken their child, the affected parents with them tear-stained and inconsolable, seeking any answers they could find. I jumped from bed and grabbed a pair of jeans off the old leather trunk at the foot of my bed, hopping into them quickly before running downstairs and to the front door. The shouting and pounding continued unabated. It seemed that war might break out at any moment.

I'm still not sure what I expected to find. Neighbors in house coats perhaps? An old lady looking for her cat? It was a nice summer morning, just after daylight, so nice that I had kept the windows of the house open overnight, a rare event in the Midwest. Why hadn't I engaged whoever this was, shouting questions back at them? Just like the neighbors could hear their shouting as well as I could, the guests at my door probably could have heard me pretty well with all those windows open. Never occurred to me.

It was an ordinary Monday and I was due back for another week at work. I had left my PC on overnight, had for several days, but I always did this. I was connected to P2P on one of the active programs, but not really using it. Instead I left it open figuring that I would download some music I had been looking for from others on the P2P networks. But it had become a busy weekend as I had started an experiment with placing a plastic liner down in the garage to stop the salty winter melt from my car from wrecking the paint job on the floor. Too busy to really get back to a PC program not doing anything. In the back of my mind I wondered if the computer could in any possible way have something to do with the call at my door, but that just seemed crazy.

Then I opened the door. In that instant my world I knew changed in ways that I couldn't even begin to fathom.

Standing there was a short, attractive, thirtyish woman in stylish office dress with a local police officer standing behind her. The noise, now understood as intended to confuse me, suddenly stopped.

I stood there in disbelief, of course. Also, I felt an immediate but weird serenity. These were my people after all. Other public officials, just like me. After an entire career working with a dozen cities and towns in 5 states all over America, these were the people I had come most to know and trust. I felt absolutely no fear. Rather, I was reassured with the knowledge that I was in the capable, well trained, and respectful hands of dutiful public servants. Public servants who no doubt no more wanted to be here at this hour of the day then I did. This was screwing over the day for a whole lot of people.

No matter what this was about or what was going to happen, I considered that the outcome of whatever this was had to be a one-of-a-kind sort of interesting. On the Richter scale of ordinary life hitting a towering spike like this is a very rare event. I considered how this might be an important experience and I was intent on paying close attention to every detail that I could. I knew these officials were multi-agency, had all had a series of meeting preps, had rehearsed their parts together in the coming drama, had practiced their lines with themselves if no one else, had even individually thought about and maybe even dreamt about what a moment like this would be like.

And now we were in it.

My days in theater, as a kid in community theater, later high school and college drama, came back to me. I was in a play. I had an assigned role to play and I wanted to do my bit. Life is a stage.

_Chris Hanson_ [165]

The young woman identified herself by name and said she was an attorney from the Illinois Attorney General's Office, handing me her card. I looked at it stupidly I'm sure. She went about the act of reading aloud the opening paragraph of what appeared to be a search warrant. Thereupon she handed that to me as well.

She and the officer then explained in a calm and courteous manner familiar to every professional government official I have ever known that the search that was about to commence would in fact take a while. The two suggested we needed a place to sit and wait for the search to take place.

I'm not sure who suggested the dining room but that's where we ended up. The Attorney, I think her name was Megan, seated herself in the captain's chair of a Duncan Phyfe set I had purchased from a barn one day on the South side of Sturbridge. That day the dining table had been covered in straw next to a wooden gate behind which stood a couple of chewing cows. It was the odd antique dining room set that was left over after the daughters had chosen theirs from the family heirlooms. It looked okay to me and I refinished it.

The young woman wasted no time in getting down to business, wanting to ask questions. It was Law and Order time. While this was happening, a rush of law enforcement officers, including a forensic specialist, came in. Finding the computer sent one excitedly back out front, at which point several came in, all heading to what soon became an encampment in the den.

There was no Miranda and I was not about to make the Attorney's life too easy. She followed the script closely, her voice consciously taking on a conspiratorial note, asking if I was some kind of expert with a computer. She clearly wanted me to brag that I was, but I told her I wasn't. I know little more than the average person on the street, probably less if that person is under 30, much less if that person is under 21.

She then asked what program I used for P2P, which of course was the final dead give-away as to what this was all about. I told her Shareaza, one of the most common at the time. After that I refused to answer any further questions. She asked for the warrant and her card back.

The clear bubble I was trapped in showed its shimmering surface in that moment. This was not some ordinary business call but a law enforcement action intended to leave the focus of its attention left footed at every opportunity. The Attorney had every desire to be forgotten as soon as this was over. She was acting as a ministerial instrumental of a much larger group of cooperating law enforcement organizations that operate at every level of a very expansive and multi-layered American government.

The young local police department detective identified himself and gave me a card I knew that I would be able to keep. He stood and remained so most of the time, probably in case I decided to take a run for it. Like that would make any sense. More probably he waited like this because he had orders not to get too comfortable, to always maintain a position of physical dominance, to always be in a position to restrain a suspect, any suspect, if necessary. Training shows.

Megan stuck around for a while but the focus of attention was entirely in the den. The Detective and I got to know each other. Really well. Or I should say he got to know me really well, as our conversation drifted lazily from one innocuous topic to another.

The sun finished coming up and the day grew warm and summerlike. It was perfect for an open house but this was no real estate shindig.

Things seemed to settle down for a while. Then Megan came out from the den, visibly moved, even dare I say teary eyed. A true believer.

I knew that Megan could not have seen anything as I was aware that the forensic specialist just ran a series of programs to identify erotic material that would fit the government's definition of illicit porn. This would be a highly coded system, probably encrypted, because of the widespread paranoia that anyone in the chain of custody would actually see the evidence, which was also illegal. The forensic search was automated, simply a case of the blind leading the blind.

I did however wonder how many hits they would get and I figured it could be a lot. The tower PC I used had a 500-gigabyte hard drive and it had about 350 megabytes of such material. In fact, I had recently set about getting software to edit some of the material down, which I had so far not had time to do. The problem is that you download a lot of material that you want to examine more closely to familiarize yourself with the content before deciding whether to hang on to it or discard it. Most of it had been downloaded from **Easynews** , a newsreader that reads the Usenet, a daily repository of postings of all kinds from the newsgroups on the internet, and P2P file sharing.

I had hundreds of videos and thousands of photos, enough material that it would take days, even weeks, to get through it all. There were over a thousand music files, enough to last for a week of continuous listening. Of this only a tiny percentage would be possibly considered illegal, but it would be enough. Over the years there had been many times that I had lost a computer through malfunction and had just started over. As a result, I had been familiar with the contents of the internet for twenty years and had abandoned much of the material over and over again, leading to newer and newer evolutions of what was in my possession.

As I sat there mindlessly talking, I was running an approximation in my mind. Would there be hundreds of items considered contraband? Or just a few dozen? How much drama would all this create? Does anyone ever survive this?

More importantly, how far up the food chain does this thing go? The Illinois Attorney General's Office personal perfect pick for the job, the young married lawyer with a kid or kids I'm guessing, is perfect for engendering the tender sympathies of a jury? The powers that be had days while the P2P connection was running, days to plan and make such perfect picks. I was toast. Burnt toast. Atomized toast.

If this were a great thriller, I would have packed my Go Bag with the necessary fake passports and cash. It would be sitting somewhere convenient and I would be contemplating how to get to it at this moment, then considering my path out of here, a path promising to give me the least resistance. If I were a spy, I would have my PC linked to a kill switch on my phone. Earlier they had permitted me to call in sick to the office, but had made me use one of their police phones to do it. This was 2011 and I didn't have a smart phone yet. Did they contemplate the use of remote kill switches tied to people's phones yet? My mind reeled with the possibilities, none of which had ever occurred to me before now. Just how national security state informed were these people? Had they had a crash course over the weekend?

All of this seemed a little Dudley Do-Right to me. For one thing, the affected files had to be a dozen or so recent Japanese files on my PC. For over two years, since about 2008, I had observed that the P2P site had become a phishing or spoofing site, a dummy replacing the ordinary screen appearance of the Shareaza programmed screen. It was a look-alike screen view, but not the real site. I could tell this because when I went to download anything it behaved oddly. Very oddly.

Instead of simply downloading an ordinary video file in an hour or two, now it took days to download them. In fact, at the rate it was downloading individual files it was likely that the subject files would never be downloaded. This would make sense if the government was running the phishing site, as they would not want to be accused of granting access to illegal material by the public.

I discovered an exception in 2009 when I found files from Japan. For some reason these files had not yet become subject to government censorship. Japan did not pass child porn laws until June 18, 2014. Perhaps this had something to do with that. Perhaps the videos I had downloaded were not illegal at the time that I downloaded them. My conclusion, however, was that I was clearly on a government created phishing site.

Going forward, I stayed largely away from this kind of file sharing but continued to download music as desired without difficulty. Occasionally, I would test to see if the phishing site was still there, humming away malevolently. It was.

What happened over this last weekend was that I stayed connected for too long, giving hidden, nameless authorities ample time to locate my IP address and take the necessary additional measures to arrive this morning at my oh so quiet door. Had I been the subject of an individual warrant? Yes. But had I been targeted for phishing by the government long ago? It would appear so. Did that require some kind of warrant? Presumably, but I had no way of knowing in the new mirrored world of the modern security state.

For everyone standing around thinking about their comp time in my house, I was just a rube who had accidentally fallen off the nearest turnip truck. Given that the Attorney General's Office was chasing my tail along with all the Kane County authorities, I had every desire and incentive to keep it that way.

Judge William Adams of Aransas County, Texas was upset by his 16-year old daughter's downloading of music from the internet.[166] Hillary suffered from cerebral palsy and lived with her father and his new wife. The $150,000 a year judge apparently couldn't think of anything better and he punished his daughter Hillary with a belt. Hillary uploaded a very unpleasant eight-minute video of the 2004 punishment to YouTube in 2011. The video promptly obtained 7 million views. The local police would take no action, saying the event had happened too long ago. The Texas Judicial Commission felt otherwise and suspended the Judge for nearly a year before reinstating him. He lost his next election in 2014. The blowback from his punitive actions with his daughter was national and overwhelmingly negative.

What, you ask, was up with that? The year 2004 was the heyday of downloading from P2P, **Rapidshare** , **Mega-download** and a host of others. The RIAA and MPAA were making great noise about illegal downloading, but the real threat was porn and that tiny proportion of porn that was considered illegal. We will probably never know the exact motivations of a judge and parent in such a situation, but for someone in the business of local law enforcement it might be possible to infer a connection and a legitimate parental concern if not even a reasonable fear. It is hard to know if the judge had a thing for the sadistic, but I seriously doubt it. It would seem more logical that he was concerned about the chance that his daughter might download something really illegal like child porn, and that the act of downloading could be observed and memorialized by law enforcement, ultimately bringing them to his door.

None of the national press took the story that far however, probably because such a possibility never occurred to them. The story seems to pose the question, can P2P file sharing be an attractive nuisance to the public if material deemed illegal to possess like child porn can be obtained thereby? If so, does the government have a duty to warn the public, users in general, or specifically identified users in particular? More importantly, is there a way, given the state of technological prowess possessed by the United States national security apparatus, to effectively prevent such material from appearing on P2P networks available to the American public? Keep in mind that any such effort by the U.S. would likely have ramifications worldwide, as the domination of porn by U.S. sites has to be acknowledged. Finally, if such capability exists and is not being deployed by the U.S. government, does that create a legal liability for the U.S., placing responsibility for unnecessary convictions at the feet of the government?

The moment of climactic denouement arrived by late morning. It seemed unceremonious by my lights, something out of a cheap thriller on tv and took but a brief moment. Stand, Cuff, Miranda. Fortunately, I had been permitted to dress by that point.

When we finally stepped outside it looked like everybody was gone and the squad was the only vehicle left at the curb. Must have been lunch time I thought, as I was certain they were far from done with going through the house. The local paper would later start their lead paragraph by describing the event as taking place, surprisingly, on a quiet suburban residential street, invoking images of a leafy, tony privileged place far beyond the possibility of the occurrence of an unseemly dark internet crime. Like all weekdays on my street, by this time of day there wasn't a soul around.

The officer packed me into the back seat, which had a hard, plastic back with a depression in it to accommodate my cuffs. I had to lean back against this, my legs angled to fit in the tight space, with a considerable, perhaps unintentionally intentional discomfort that I deemed appropriate under the circumstances. It was a short hop to the station and I managed to feel every bump and stop with a pronounced grimace that must have given the sole officer up front some measure of satisfaction.

In any case we reached the tiny station and I soon met the Detective from the house again as I booked in and had my photograph taken. I was informed that the charges call was waiting to come in and by the time we finished it had. I was being charged with 15 counts based on 15 videos. I wasn't sure whether to be scared or relieved. Rather I was more interested in getting my first call, which I made to my brother in law. I called him because I knew he would be the easiest to reach and I wasn't wrong about that. I suppose it would be natural to get rather testy while receiving a call like that, but true to his no drama nature there was none of that.

I was immediately relegated to the quiet of one of two cells that were available and told that I would be transferred to the County Jail the next morning. It quickly became evident that they followed standard procedures for suicide watch, as they checked in occasionally. They were certainly monitoring me continuously by cam. I got a Micky D dinner that was fine and settled in for the night, alone with my thoughts.

I was betwixt and between, neither up nor down. On the bright side I was about to retire permanently, which I was eligible for. That sounded like an adventure and I was excited about it, more so because it was so out of the blue. I felt the immediate sense of relief, as a burden I had been carrying all my life was lifted off of me. I had always been one driven son of a bitch and I knew it. I had never really considered retiring before.

On the other hand, I could not rid myself of the thought that I had somehow managed to discover a government child porn phishing operation on the internet. Who would authorize such a thing? I had no idea.

Later I would find that the Government Accounting Office, GAO, had put out a contract award notice on the internet for Siemens Group to develop child porn phishing software using all the major P2P programs that are readily available on the internet. The request was by Immigration. No doubt this was the ICE office that was the government's designated hitter for illegal porn classification. I had my answer. I could only assume that it was an old notice, even in 2012. I never saw it again. Siemens on the other hand is Europe's largest industrial, electronics and engineering company created in 1847 with nearly 400,000 employees worldwide. It is interesting but perhaps not surprising that it took one of the world's largest companies, and a foreign company at that, to win a bid on software intended to surveil the entire internet. The contract had to be for millions.

I was left to wonder how it could happen. How and why would the government of the United States take this kind of approach rather than deal with the thorny First Amendment issues posed by the P2P networks? Simple. Path of least resistance. Especially if you're an oversight politician being read into the government's plans. Especially if you're any kind of politician in a country experiencing a heightened state of hysteria over the dangers of the internet in general.

The second reason seemed to be more one of public relations for all the world's bureaucrats. Why prevent people from tripping into no man's land when it pays off so big for big government to use P2P as a honey pot (spy speak) to drive up the conviction numbers as a way to support ongoing and future government appropriations. This would be a bonanza for the FBI, Immigration, Homeland Security, the creation of individual law enforcement State Fusion Centers, some 60 regional law enforcement task forces to deal with cybercrime, the federally funded public relations machine National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), and any number of federally grant funded municipal police department cybercrime divisions.

With a tag line like _internet predators_ the possibilities were endless and could easily accommodate a huge octopus of healthy, growing and forever spawning bureaucracies. It was the ultimate organic solution because, like mushrooms, the details of the entire process could be legitimately hidden from the public, most especially the cost/benefit ratios per conviction, which of course would be insanely high. It was, in short, brilliant. Remember the remonstration of James Madison from Chapter 4? Remember the Blind Ambition of men, and dare we say of politicians and bureaucrats?

The idea also made great use of the government's greatest resource, the **Black Box.** It could create a secret **Black Box** by establishing the government's favorite pretense of expertise where none previously existed. The **Black Box** of what would be considered illegal would itself be illegal to access or know about. This is every government's dream national security program, and follows as the day the night the tendency of all government bureaucracies to leap onto any public hysteria about anything as the best way to get more funding. Mention internet child abusers to apprehensive voters and it could literally rain money for at least the next generation or more!

Kennedy knew about this tendency of public organizations. And he exploited it to full advantage. For John F. Kennedy was no shrinking violet. He used his fame, wealth, and privilege to use women with abandon. And he knew that if he created a phony missile gap, he could exploit it too, just like every other tinpot tinhorn dictator had exploited war or the threat of war throughout human history.

How many tribal walls had been constructed since the dawn of the Age of Agriculture by the stirring demagogic speeches of well-respected but power mad tribal chiefs spilling calumniously forth, on and on, about the evils of the tribe next door, their men's salacious lust for fields, food, goods and women not of their own tribe? How much social wealth since that age has been fruitlessly spent, how many generations of human lives lost, to the creation of those ancient walls and fortresses? What better way is there to build social cohesion and order that man has ever found? To devise purpose and meaning in human interaction? Human history has no other organizing principle even close to this, even within a light year of it. It is as old as human nature, except with humans it never gets old. It is rediscovered with every other generation not yet touched by the depths of the well of human stupidity and calamity.

Kennedy was a student of human history who had learned well that the truth can have many colors and many shades, so he came up with a few of his own to add to the growing pantheon of tried and true intentional falsehoods and shibboleths that make up the good old American political songbook. While Eike thought that 150 nuclear missiles was enough in the 1958-1960 period, much later Carter, a nuclear engineer, thought that 200 would be enough. But Kennedy while running for the Presidency posited many more as he contended there would be a yawning missile gap in a few years. Publicly cited estimates were wildly off and ran as high as 1500 by 1963. The background was information such as the following chart from the military at the time:[167]

Projected numbers of Soviet ICBM (Program A: CIA, B: USAF, C: Army&Navy)

The actual number of Soviet ICBM's at the time it turns out was 4, which included prototypes. Kennedy was informed by Eisenhower's staff in a formal briefing but Kennedy continued to mislead the American people about a fictional missile gap because of the huge advantage this gave him in the election. Then Senator Kennedy was quoted as saying at the time:

"the nation was losing the satellite-missile race with the Soviet Union because of complacent miscalculations, penny-pinching, budget cutbacks, incredibly confused mismanagement, and wasteful rivalries and jealousies."[168]

In other words, Kennedy relied on the idea that the current administration was simply badly managed and incompetent for his argument that there was a gap, an argument that suited the administration's critics and his election campaign. Eisenhower strove to protect the classified U2 information that showed otherwise by not challenging these assertions, a classic case of protecting the government Black Box, in this case at rather extreme political cost.

Was the Siemens software and the bugging of the entire file sharing apparatus of the internet a new American Black Box, one that the Federal government wanted to protect so that it could continue to pursue domestic internet surveillance on American citizens with impunity? What did the German government know about what Siemens had done and was doing to the internet?

Happy Town

The next morning after what was for me a rare, but good, Micky D breakfast, I was again loaded up with cuffs into the very uncomfortable squad and taken to the County Corrections Center. (I like that appellation, don't you? Implies that you need correction, like a spanking, from your Mom. Everywhere inside the facility signs referred only to detainees, not inmates, a distinction I came to appreciate. Word games have ineffable value to fragile egos and delicate senses of worth.)

I was placed in a detention area and geared up with shackles, _Silence of the Lambs_ style. If one could mistakenly get the impression of being on a big movie set, getting ready for one's big close up, this was probably it.

After a while in came my attorney, who I had been permitted to call the day before. He had been before my Plan Commission many times with various clients over the years.

"What in hell are you doing here?" he asked with a mock humor greeting after they let him join me in my transparent little meeting cell, me sitting there with my orange jammies and my clanking chains more appropriate for a Scrooge revival.

"I know, I know," I replied, while shaking my head.

We both engaged in some joint head wagging for a while.

"This is tragic," he said in commiseration.

We soon got down to business however, which was to prepare for a bail hearing. Moments later he was escorted out and not long after that I was accompanied into a nearby courtroom to be back among the living. This was a really efficient operation and before I knew it, I was in front of a judge with a clerk reading the charges. I involuntarily blanched, as any defendant in such a proceeding would, when read the maximum penalties for my offenses, easily enough time to exhaust my life, and could see that this one was for all the marbles.

Done with me for the day, I was sent into the general population without an opportunity to be more fully prepared by the jail staff. The Center was still new and housed about 600 detainees in 10 pods of 64 persons, all kept pretty much full all the time. There were several color-coded levels of housing, depending on one's status as new or otherwise. At least two pods were for new detainees and contained 2-man cells, but many of the pods held eight-man units, of which there were eight units on two levels. All pods possessed a central recreation area which held fixed tables, loose plastic chairs, and two elevated, large screen TVs. Only one out of the 10 pods were women.

My lack of preparation became instantly apparent as I entered at a morning time when the cells were open and the detainees were in the general recreation area. I was immediately asked, "What are you in for?"

This is the part I was not prepared for by the jail staff, so I was about to get a valuable lesson. My offense was fresh in my head as a matter of internet files so I said that. I said, "illegal file downloading" like this was really an explanation and not an obfuscation, which it clearly was. Technically legal. Not much more.

I found it interesting to meet these people. I would never expect to meet them in the course of my daily life and this seemed like an opportunity to learn a lot. I actively engaged a number of them and always they would end up asking me "the Question", to which I would give the same elliptic answer. I even met a nurse, we went over my medical needs, which were few that day, and she asked me "the Question". I didn't hesitate.

Well, this went on for a while and I soon decided that a good writer could easily write a book based on all the experiences of all the different people in here and it would be a great commentary on the state of our world, even our country. It seemed cool and worthwhile. I would never have had such an opportunity.

Then lunchtime came and we had to head back to our 2-man cells. I had an agreeable young kid with kids of his own, backed up on his child support, that I was sharing with. Once we were back in the cell, he became persistent, asking about me and my offense. His tone had already changed from friendly to hostile, indicating that there had been more than a little discussion of my earlier responses among the natives currently inhabiting the place. On guard, I TRIED TO APPEAR CASUAL.

It didn't work. Suddenly, uproariously, the place went slightly demented. Whistling and shouting, jeering more likely, issued like a storm from everywhere in the pod. I was rescued a moment later by an angry guard (uh, corrections officer) and escorted down to the carrel from which the pod was supervised.

I was still in a state of confusion about what had just taken place. After all, no one had shouted any insults or obscenities to really give me a clue. But the officer made it pretty clear.

"You must be the dumbest son of a bitch in the world," he spit.

I was insulted, what with that kind of language and everything. It struck me as unprofessional. But it was understandable.

"Just stay there. I'll get to you."

That didn't sound good and it was dawning on me that I had unwittingly disgraced myself to the maximum degree possible in the environment that I was now in. Obviously, this place operated on a different set of rules, rules that I should have been capable of divining for myself. I didn't know it yet, but now I was going to be here for a while longer than I might have planned, that is if I had some kind of plan, which I very definitely did not.

I was finally escorted by the disgruntled officer to what I later found out were a couple of cells reserved for medically separated detainees. Dumped there, I had plenty of time to ponder the buzzer on the wall and what it might be for, while I ate a sack lunch. Afterward, I used the buzzer liberally to convince a disembodied young male voice to grab my credit card, run it through for bail money, and pray that it would work.

It didn't. The bail was set at $150,000, which meant the card had to cover $15,000 in cash, but had a $12,000 limit. I had plenty in my checking account to cover but now I had to figure out how to get someone to access it. Over the course of the next two days I had my attorney use a check from my billfold, which was amongst my belongings at the jail, run to the nearby bank and return with the certified check to the jail. It was just within a few blocks but he had an hour drive from his office in the suburbs to get to me.

As evening came and the shift changed one of the senior staff, a Lieutenant, showed up to take me to my new pod. Now I was feeling like the most shunned man on the planet. He was, on the other hand, kind and understanding in a way that made me feel that I was back in the human race, as he escorted me to a new pod.

That night they gave me my own cell, for the protection of my loose tongue no doubt. They even gave me a couple paperbacks. During the next two days I alternated between reading and wondering about my press on the "outside". I planned my actions once I would be set free and thought about if I should buy a gun, while I still legally could, in case everything went south. The idea seemed a little too nutty and I soon put it out of my mind. At least I was still thinking ahead. Thinking was going to be my saving grace.

At last the day came when I could once again walk in the sun as a free man. It may have only been two days and nights but just being in the place was stressful. For one thing, in a newbie pod it was crazy loud all night, giving way not to sleep but to a kind of dazed stupor that soon invaded one's soul both day and night.

Conveniently, the new jail was part of a new County Judicial Center. This was located just to the north side of my Homeowners Association's property. I only had to walk through my subdivision to get home. I had watched for years as the new jail was being constructed, never thinking its new location might ever in the most remote world of possibilities be useful to me. As a NIMBY, Not In My Back Yard, everybody in the Single Family, Duplex, Townhouse, and senior Multi-family that make up my Association had been opposed to the new jail, but locating the facility next to the new modern Court House was a no brainer for County officials.

It was another beautiful summer day as I was driven home by my Attorney's wife, contemplating the wisdom of the County administration, arriving home to a house only slightly tossed. There were the cords and phones from the bottom drawer in the kitchen on the floor, the missing computers, phones, i-pods and the like. But a couple of windows had been left cracked open to get some air while the A/C had been left off. A couple pictures of my sister's kids had been placed accusatorily in a couple spots, no doubt by some female officer working the case and trying clumsily to make a personal point.

I checked the car and found that the battery was dead, the passenger door having been left ajar in an effort to drain it. A further commentary no doubt. A couple of days later I had it towed and the battery recharged.

Seeing that the damage was limited I hopped a bike and made my way to the nearest mobile phone shop in the adjacent shopping center. Here I got my first **I-phone**. There had been a prohibition placed upon my use of computers by the Court but I figured in the insane world of the modern Luddite judicial system, this One Step for Mankind tech development could not be contemplated and that I couldn't be expected to live without modern phone service no matter what new form it came in.

Within days I had resigned a career now up in smoke, set the wheels in motion for my pension, and found another attorney to represent me. Who knew that my mailbox would now be full of letters from local lawyers? I interviewed a few and chose one who was close enough to have other similar cases in the same court. He had me obtain the services of a psychologist from a list recommended by the County.

There would be some back and forth to the County Prosecutor's Office by my Attorney over the coming months but there had to be a certain amount of time for an investigation to take place. I inherently knew that this would involve a search of my electronic records, financial records, and maybe even interviews of people I might have worked with. Routine.

I also surmised that they would do a contact search, possibly including federal resources, to assemble a list of everyone I had contact with by phone and email, both first line of contact and then to some degree in outgoing concentric circles. They would be looking to expand their investigation should there be anyone that I was exchanging illegal information with. This did not concern me as I knew this was not the case. Knowing that such a thorough search is ongoing though is enough to give one a serious case of the hibby-jibbys. The possibility that being in this situation could give government officials additional prerogatives to monitor one's communications is enough to give anyone pause. I paused.

At one mid-point I met with my Attorney after some discussion had taken place with the Prosecutor. My Attorney told me that my travel had come under scrutiny as a result of the background search of my financial records, in particular of my credit card. Apparently, the thought was that I had managed to travel to destinations where child abuse was known to exist, presumably either to engage in such activity or to acquire evidence of it. My Attorney asked for me to respond to this canard.

"That's just beyond the pale," I responded, keenly aware that this was the profile that the government would want to construct if we should ever go to trial.

The ambitions of government investigators reporting their results to the Prosecutor were clearly in evidence. They wanted a big case with federal involvement and international implications if there was any way that they could get it. I was appalled but not surprised. My case was being handled more like a terrorist investigation than a local crime, something that I had long suspected was happening with these kinds of cases. It happens because of federal involvement, from the forensics being used to the techniques of investigation being employed. It happens because the federal government initiated the entire system of prosecution being used in the United States and because of the resulting federal intimidation of local law enforcement.

Adding to my Attorney's concerns were that the investigation also involved the Illinois AG's Office in oversight if not actual participation. Despite my Attorney's experience in working other similar cases, none of them involved this level of interest on the part of the State government. I think this may have intimidated him, putting him out of his wheelhouse a bit. In the moment that he questioned me about this I had the undeniable impression that he had become more of a tool of the Prosecutor than my Defense Attorney. He clearly had given too much credence to the Prosecutor's newly minted image of me as a devious international man of mystery and master criminal. I thought of Cary Grant in _It Takes a Thief_ and realized what a romanticized view lawyers harbor about crime and criminals. It was as if they were all James Cagney fans at heart.

Austin Powers

The Question was a Question with an implication of threat, a threat that would re-appear in a very unexpected way much later and which would come from the politically ambitious environs of the AG's Office.

**Russia, April, 1996, month, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok** **.** My career as a pretend Austin Powers began in 1996 when I was working for a City Manager who had been with the Peace Corps in Central America in the 1980's. Russia had thrown off its Soviet past and it was now five years later under President Yeltsin, a democratic leader compromised with poor health and too much drink in a country with a too young, too fragile democracy. The American government tried to provide aide to the country through its Agency for International Development (AID). It was doing this in many ways and one of these ways was a program called the Citizen Democracy Corps. I applied for it and was surprised when they came back offering me a one-month post in Khabarovsk, a City of 610,000 in the Russian Far East.

The City Manager permitted me to go for the month with pay, a very generous and cool thing for any City Manager or municipality to agree to do. I had traveled extensively all over the United States over the years seeking professional employment, but this would be my very first trip abroad.

I was assigned to the Population Employment Center of Khabarovsk Krai, the unemployment office of the regional government, part of a national social service agency created after the fall of Communism. Khabarovsk was located 500 miles North of Vladivostok, a vital Pacific port of the Russian fleet. Khabarovsk was on the border with China, separated by the Amur River. The two powers had contested the boundary in the past many times.

In 1996 the internet and the use of email was very new. The Krai was getting up its first internal network of computers to be used to track program eligibility and the actual payments from the new social service administration to citizens in the region. They had serious work to do and new ground to plow everywhere they turned. Apparently, the CDC Office in Washington mixed up some faxed paperwork with the Khabarovsk staff, which consisted of a young American dude in his thirties who had a smattering of Russian, a Russian secretary and a Russian driver. The Khabarovsk staff didn't realize that my name was somehow being incorrectly associated with an American economics professor. They had thought they were getting a professor of macroeconomics, but they got me instead. The mistake wasn't discovered until a week after I arrived on the ground in Russia. This was a typical federal government FOOBAR. My father, a former Army Staff Sergeant, would have found it funny.

So, I took the interminable Alaska Airlines flight, after staying over in a hotel at the Seattle airport, to the Russian Far East at the beginning of April of that year. I met a proselytizing Alaskan Baptist Bush pilot on board who bent my ear for the entire trip about how he and his Bush pilot sons were now starting up Baptist Churches in various Russian hinterlands. This was a truly open moment in Russian history. Everything that formed the fundamental basis of the normally closed up Russian character was being challenged. There was an excitement in the country that I suspected had not been seen since the time of Peter the Great. The Bush pilot was expansive and buoyant, his enthusiasm contagious. But in a few years the Russians would return to type, shut down any new church projects, and expel the Baptists entirely.

The plane faced headwinds near the Arctic Circle, using up our on-board fuel supply, so we had to stop at a Russian air base for extra fuel. Upon our landing, the harsh glare of a blinding sun did nothing to warm the freezing air we felt when the stewardess opened the plane's passenger door to the site of a rag tag Russian soldier sent to greet us. Nobody could get off the plane and the Russian guard, a kid really, had been sent to make sure of it. Side rifle slung oh so casually over his shoulder, the kid looked too young to shave. His army coat was in bad shape, like it had been slept in by a dozen other men. Out on the snow packed tarmac to the sides of an unmarked runway were the numerous wrecked remains of various unlucky aircraft. Maybe they had tried to land at night? Bruised and battered chunks of plane stuck up at awkward angles from the hard pack surrounding us, a sorry fate for the few planes that had managed to get this far North.

Upon my arrival in Khabarovsk I was picked up by my CDC host and taken to the local In-tourist Hotel in town. Russian In-tourism is a kind of halfway house for foreigners new to the country. It gets newbies used to being spied on and continuously monitored before venturing off with their minders. It is also, conveniently, the best whorehouse in town. This serves the first purpose, monitoring, and the second purpose, getting compromising material on everybody staying there. The girls were fresh faced underclassmen from the local teacher's college, where they had acquired a smattering of English.

I asked my interpreter, a junior at the same college, about it at dinner that night. She explained that some of the new girls thought it was glamorous to date foreigners. I found that hard to believe since some of the types of men I saw there were ancient fossils who should have known better. I suspected it really had more to do with the value of foreign currency and how impoverished, though stunning, these girls were.

Also, at the In-tourist I met two other gentlemen from New York City traveling separately on the program to assist a couple brave, small free enterprises in Khabarovsk. That first day we walked the downtown of Khabarovsk together and speculated how such a dowdy country could ever have been considered a serious threat to the security of the United States. It seemed that anyone venturing forth to actually see what Russia was like would know instantly that it is just too underdeveloped to be a real threat to America. Russian secrecy during the cold war had only served to mask the real Russia behind the bellicose rhetoric.

After a few days I was installed behind the gates of a small business in a dilapidated industrial park guarded by dogs. This private business had a weirdly located little apartment. Some dude was posted there to open the gate for me when I pressed a bell. They could have just as easily hung one around my neck. I had been warned by a Washington official of the CDC before my departure that the Director of the Agency wanted me to know that she was a Catholic and did not approve of Russia's well-known pay for play. I guessed that the living arrangement would pretty much take care of that.

Never having been exposed to the secret charms of fallen women, I took the Director's warning as practically a billboard for great Russian sex. My trip was full of great moments with Russians of all types, but most especially with the universally appealing Russian women. It struck me that Russian men had no idea how lucky they were. With family incomes at a fifth of Western standards, these women somehow made life for the men of the country an endurable adventure. These women's low expectations and their incomparable beauty made them gold in the West. The Beatles put it best:

Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out  
They leave the West behind  
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout  
That Georgia's always on my mind  
Yeah, I'm back in the USS.R.  
You don't know how lucky you are boys  
Back in the USS.R.

Before leaving after a month that had turned rather long, I had my fill of pelmeni, Russian meat dumplings with sour cream, Stoli, and Snickers Bars, which were everywhere. I traveled to Vladivostok on the Siberian Express for a weekend with the two other Americans. Our guide in the City told us her father was former KGB, so much the better to see you my dear, and Vladivostok was a fascinating and important Russia naval base of a City, every bit worth touring.

**Costa Rica, San Juan, February, 1998, 7 days.** There I found a woman plying her trade who had several children and was very careful about safe sex because they have a very active, successful sex worker education and health care program. Rumors about minors there being in the trade I suspected could be true. They have an active street scene, which would lend itself. But I never saw any evidence of the kind.

Our hotel was hit with a power outage. While we stood in front of the hotel to see what lights were still on in the downtown, another American roomer, who said he was former military, told me about a scuffle he had with several toughs in the downtown the night before. It did not turn out well for the attackers. The American broke a kid's arm and the police showed up to collar the perps. They dealt with the kids in a manner that Human Rights Watch would have decried. Apparently, the downtown tourist areas are kept safe by diligent policing. Transgressions are treated, well, not kindly.

One day I signed up for a launch to Tortuga Island. The sandy white ocean beach that we arrived at in time for lunch was spectacular.

The mountainous countryside and tropical rainforest in Costa Rica were heaven. I took a pass on the tour of the raging rapids.

**Netherlands, Amsterdam, the Hague, April, 1999, 10 days.** The Netherlands has a lot to see. There are many full and half day tours to fill out a single traveler's time. I found a close in hotel at a very reasonable rate. It had immediate access to the tourist areas and the added benefit of being close to the main train station at the end of the street. In late April the weather was good but the big dams outside the City that draw tourist crowds were not open yet. I contented myself with the Van Gogh exhibit at the national gallery, the incredible Vermeer paintings, the canal boat tour, and a tour of the big annual international flower show at **Kuekenhof**. The tour bus took us past endless fields of blossoming tulips and we stopped at a charming little German restaurant on the way.

At night were tours of the famous Amsterdam red-light district with its porn museum and shops, live sex show and window prostitutes. The peering crowds were at least as entertaining as the windows, as they were made up of many older Western tourists poo pooing and laughing nervously at what they were seeing. I found it interesting that much of the early Danish porn was familiar. It was already on the internet.

Before I left for the Hague, I tried the window experience to see what it was like. Statistics in the U.S. and worldwide show that only ten percent of men on average have ever visited a prostitute. It exists in legal and quasi-legal ways in most countries around the world other than the United States. Pay for play may not be a common thing for men but it clearly has its devotees. A burgeoning online industry had been created out of men sharing their travel experiences, something which at least promoted safety.

One of the beautiful window women was just as sweet in person as she appeared. She asked if I would take her home to the States, like someone fleeing persecution. I could not know her situation, but I certainly could see how real it was.

International sex sites see sex work as hiring a girlfriend who knows how to play her part for the reward of continuing or return business. Success stories are full of wonderful girls to be found in the major urban centers around the world, part of the milieu of international business. They offer what some travelers find to be an enriching experience, whether they are traveling on business or pleasure.

On the other hand, sex work exists in many countries and serves large populations. It exists in places like India and China where the practice has been institutionalized over centuries. How can sex work have become a social practice in so many places? Isn't the greatest liberalization a world where women never have to engage in sex work because they have better economic opportunities? In that world there would be very few people still involved in this kind of work.

I finished the rest of my trip by taking a train to the Hague. I left on Queen's Day lugging too many bags, struggling through the crowds along the parade route to get to Amsterdam's Romanesque Central Station. Street festivals were continuing in the Hague for Queen's Day when I arrived, Holland's countryside was great, the weather was fantastic, and I finished my trip that day with a tour of the City.

**Czech Republic, Hungary, Prague, Budapest, July, 2000, 7 days.** Eastern Europe had become attractive to tourists from both sides of the iron curtain, and Eastern European tourism was less crowded and cheaper than in Western Europe.

Prague is one of the few major cities of Europe that was not extensively bombed in WWII. Today it is considered the Paris of the East, with great architecture like the Prague Castle and the remarkable Charles Bridge. The Old Town Square has buildings a thousand years old. The City Hall's 600-year old astronomical clock is justly famous. The Square is a great place to meet other tourists, especially Americans backpacking around Europe. One of the days I was there they had a girl band playing American western music. Also, around the Square are people handing out flyers to many local churches and other venues featuring classical music performances either free or for small fees. It is a City with great history, music, and cafe culture. It has an evening "Ghost Tour" of the City. I loved it.

In an effort to see how real the internet was I tried getting hold of a girl I had seen on the web. This girl was up for anything, but when she showed up at my hotel the deskman wanted a fee that doubled the action. Seemed like an insult. I apologized profusely to her burly driver. I think I was more impressed that the information on the web was reliable than I would have been with anything that might have happened with the young woman.

After a few days I took the train to Budapest, Hungary where I enjoyed the Presidential Palace, Chain Bridge and other sights. I especially appreciated the attractive downtown tourist shopping district at night, which focused on art glass and lace. The city tour of Budapest showed a lot of good downtown classical architecture, but the buildings were noticeably dingy. Covered in soot, giving everything a grungy 19th century look, they needed a power washing. Also, the City still relied on the old Soviet era transit system and that added to the communist era funk that clung to the underlit streets and alleys. My hotel was a four-star marvel with a majestic breakfast spread served on silver for less than $50 a night. It was worth any excuse to stay there.

Memorials in Prague to the 1968 Prague Spring and in Budapest to the 1956 Hungarian Uprising were the highlight of the trip. Our tour guide of Budapest spoke of her father's involvement in the Hungarian events with pride and patriotism as moving as any I've ever witnessed.

I met a Russian woman and her teen daughter on vacation on the overnight train from Prague. I will never forget her. She was an employee of the Nielson Company in Moscow and worked in television ratings. Speaking of the newfound freedom in her country she said to me, "Whenever they come for any one person, you know that they can come for everyone." Putin had only been elected President in May and had not yet had time to roll back the beginnings of democracy in Russia. The fear of being taken at night by authorities not to be seen again would return to her native country. When a government has the power to instill fear, even terror, in ordinary citizens with the threat of nighttime arrests, that government runs the risk of appearing to the public to be a kind of illegitimate authority, a regime.

Prague has one of the best tourism information centers that I have every come across. There I found a trip to Terezin, an entire small town that became a Nazi concentration camp. No words can describe these ghastly monuments. They are tribalism at its worst.

**Russia, Moscow, St. Petersburg, September/October, 2001, 10 days.** This was a couple weeks after 9/11 when the airline industry was still recovering from the American flight stoppage. In the day you could still get great deals on local apartments directly from their owners in foreign countries, a great new use of the internet. Of course, the owners needed to have decent English skills to make this work with Americans. Two young entrepreneurs starting a small business of their own set me up in a very simple apartment that was quite rudimentary. One was willing to drive me around the City so I could see the Kremlin at night. I further convinced him to show me places where Russian girls in Moscow stood in lines for customers. One place was along a busy well-lit commercial avenue and the minder, a young woman, came to the car. Another was a dark dirt road off the beaten track, where the whole exchange took on a macabre air.

A new girl came back to my place. In the middle of the night she was crying in the tub. Because of the language barrier it was hard to find out anything. but she had to have been trafficked. Sex work here was obviously not as benign as it appeared to be in Khabarovsk. It's difficult to understand how powerful the Russian mob would have to be and how weak local law enforcement would have to be for this to be as accepted as it was. It spoke loudly about the nature of Russia, at least at that time.

Red Square, Basil's Cathedral, Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the State Museum and other sights around Moscow in October were wonderful. From Moscow I took the overnight train to St. Petersburg. I stayed on Vasilyevsky Island where I had a spacious apartment (the family that owned it was off to Sochi for a vacation). The subway and the bridge over the Neva made it easy to get to the Hermitage just over the bridge and to downtown St. Petersburg. It was a draw bridge however and one night I was late getting back to the Island. The bridge was up at midnight and I had to wait a couple hours. I met a young college girl from Minsk in the same fix. With nothing else to do but wait for the bridge, we went to McDonalds. She told me about her life. Amazing.

I visited the palaces of both Catherine (Winter Palace) and Peter the Great (Peterhof), toured the Peter and Paul Fortress and Cathedral where the Romanovs are laid to rest, the Kazan Cathedral with spectacular views high above the City, the magnificent Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood (Spas Na Krovi) with its beautiful enameled onion domes, learned some Russian history, and saw Swan Lake at the Mariinsky Theater. The nightlife in both cities was crazy and worth experiencing.

**Cuba, Havana, April 2003, 7 days.** Having served the City of Miami in 1981 after the Mariel boatlift and Liberty City/Over town riots, I was familiar with the Cuban community in South Florida. Cuban Americans in 1981 were very anti-Castro. Some fifty years after the Cuban Revolution times had changed and a new opening to the country seemed inevitable. I was curious to know what Cuba under Castro was really like, but I was also aware that the fifty-year American embargo was still ongoing.

In the age of the internet it was possible to get detailed information on the many Canadians and Americans who were traveling successfully to the country. Americans could go under the embargo if they applied for a valid educational or journalistic purpose with an institutional group approval by the U.S. State Department. Other Americans simply went through Mexico, typically Cancun, to get to Havana.

While doing my best Austin Powers impression, I stayed overnight in Cancun during a tropical rain in a tiny room with no A/C and then took a puddle jumper twin prop dating back to the 1950's from Cancun to the tiny Havana airport. Gorgeous aquamarine waters in various shades of violet and blue drifted in massive blooms beneath our low flying craft. I noticed that the stewardess seemed to be in an old Pan Am flight suit and that the plane's windows were dressed in dusty blue curtains from the same era. I imagined how many tedious hours had been spent keeping the old prop engines tuned to make the trip by dedicated ground crews in Havana.

Cabs were plentiful and cheap and the drive into the City was worth every penny. The sub tropics were an instant relief to my Chicago winter. Communist propaganda billboards were strategically positioned along the drive in, a reminder that you weren't in Kansas anymore. The billboard near the U.S. Embassy, now the Special Interest Section, was particularly interesting. There were no U.S. flags out front to denote the American presence inside the old office building. The Havana seawall and the Malecon highway along it created a constant ocean spraying of the promenade beneath a characteristic Havana skyline.

My driver left me off in Havana's Old Town section. I had arranged for the possibility of needing several options on where to stay and this had been my first choice. I was surprised at how dilapidated Old Town had become however, not just seedy, but collapsing. I later found out that old building collapses of some 300 a year are commonplace in Havana as the state nominally controls all private properties, but has few resources with which to maintain them. The United Nations designated the Old Havana area a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982 to help save and preserve it. I met the landlord at the appointed hour and he led me up four flights of narrow concrete stairs. As usual, I had overpacked so lugging my stuff became an unintended workout that left me sweating bullets in the Havana heat and humidity.

Shockingly, the apartment had no A/C, unless you count the battle axe window A/C unit blocking the only window in the only bedroom. It looked far too dangerous to try to turn on. A refrigerator from the 1940's and the provision of scratched kitchen linoleum covering the kitchen/main room combo completed the picture of skid row come to perilous life. There was a large walk out window which provided the apartment's only natural, however grim, light. The place hadn't seen paint in a millennium and I immediately backed out of the deal with the super peeved landlord. This was the moment when my limited Spanish fortunately saved me from understanding exactly what he was saying. I used his cell phone to call my escape route second choice.

This time I got an enterprising young family man who I immediately took a liking to. Engaging and solicitous to a fault, I soon found this trait in equal abundance with the numerous squads of Cuban "touts" found in all the tourist areas, street guys who could get you anything for a price, including I'm sure into some real trouble. The apartment he had was perfect, further West on the Malecon but still within a few miles of the National Hotel and downtown.

I could hear the surf strike the seawall all night in that apartment. This was due in part to being unable to sleep on a mattress that was for some reason suspended on ropes. There was an issue with the building's water pump, which was on the first floor, and some mornings it ran pretty slow. On the other hand, the Hi Rise across the street, a college dormitory, regularly had its water running out to the street gutter for some unknown reason. Public services here were obviously a strictly secondary consideration of the government. While my bedroom did have air, the apartment next door apparently didn't. Its door was always open to the cacophony of its family life, but I suspected this arrangement also gave cover to easily surveilling my goings and comings. Finally, I was introduced to an old man in the building who spoke good English and was a good source of local information, a concierge if you will for the apartment.

There was a lot to see in Havana, most particularly great musical performances. I could get around easily in motorized pedicabs. Flying back and forth on the Malecon at breakneck speed, the warm sea wind blowing in my face, became my favorite preoccupation. I ate lunch regularly at the National Hotel and imagined myself a Hollywood star stalking its beautiful environs. There weren't too many places to eat though as there were no Western chains. As you couldn't drink the water this meant that some of the most local food places could also be problematic. Eventually this caught up to me.

In the mean time I went to the local burlesque music theater for Havana's unique take on this time-honored classic. There were a number of nice girls approaching likely strangers and I grabbed one who had a little English to spare. She was quite fun to watch during the show, queuing my reactions. Afterwards she had no qualms about returning to my apartment.

We made out a little but it became clear I needed to have her take a shower. She was sweet though and I decided to just let it go. The next day I paid her the proper sum and sent her on her way, with a stuffed animal I had purchased for her the night before at the burlesque.

I took a day trip to Pinar del Rio. This was a tour bus to the Western end of the island to see a cigar making factory. We tasted the local rum at a store, toured a tobacco farm, and enjoyed a large and excellent lunch where they made fresh Pina coladas. It was a real look at an island frozen in time, a discarded relic of the cold war and yesterday's superpower politics. Even the great guide we had, as well as some of the English-speaking cabbies, confessed to the difficulty of surviving in an economy as broken down as that of El Jefe's.

I eventually got a good hit of the stomach flu and decided that the food situation wasn't going to get any better going forward, so I bailed early. I left loving the bohemian and romantic flavor of Havana. I could easily see why Hemingway liked it. I admired Cubans for putting up with what it had become. Visitors should not miss the Presidential Palace with its roomful of revolutionary memorabilia.

**Romania, Bucharest, Constanta, Suceava, Bucharest, May, 2005, 10 days.** I was contacted again by the Citizens Democracy Corps to work overseas for AID a few years after Russia and had my ticket punched for departure when I was contacted with a last-minute change in destination. Instead of going to Constantin on the Black Sea I was asked to go to a small industrial town in the boondocks that even the guidebooks warned against. This was to do work with municipal budgets, which would have been fascinating since I had a lot of experience with that sort of thing. I was not enthusiastic about the place they wanted to send me to though so I took a pass. Years later I decided to take 10 days to go to Romania with a stop in Constantin just to check it out.

I arrived in Bucharest and was put up by prior arrangement in a grungy high-rise apartment downtown that looked like it had seen better days during the War. The elevator was almost too small for me and my luggage. It was autumn shoulder season and I was enthusiastic to see the surroundings so after unpacking I immediately hit the street, even though it was late at night. I got no further than two blocks before I encountered a young woman on the make. She seemed nice. I took her up the creaky dilapidated shower stall of a lift to my ersatz apartment, which didn't phase her, though it made me think about the stabbing scene in _Psycho_. She was bright, kind, in charge, and clearly her own boss.

The next day however I got my contact to give me a new and much better apartment that was further from downtown. Being further out was not a problem as the cab fare was always cheap and the cabs were plentiful. After a couple days of taking in the sights of Bucharest I took a day tour to Brasov. This took our group north of Ploiesti through the famous oil fields that the Nazi's gained control of and which the Allies repeatedly bombed during WWII. Just outside Brasov is the 15th century Bran Castle, often referred to as the Vlad Castle, for Vlad the Great, a notorious butcher in Romanian history. This was all in the territory of the not really so mysterious and yet beautiful Transylvanian mountains, the many hillsides full of pastorally grazing sheep.

I took the train to Constanta to see what I had missed by not accepting the CDC's assignment a few years earlier. I had my choice of old Soviet style motels among which to choose on the Black Sea Coast, paying less than $20/night. I had the place virtually to myself as it was too early and cold for the beach season. There was not a lot to see in Constanta, except for the few resorts and typical Soviet shopping stalls along the beach. The view of the port of Constanta from the top of the nearby minaret though was spectacular. I intended to head next to Iasi, a college town in the North of Romania, but while in Constanta found out that it was overbooked by numerous events. So instead I took a travel agent's recommendation and boarded a train to the north of the country to the lovely regional outpost of Suceava.

The train from Constanta to Suceava was a night train. About midnight the beat-up old train arrived in the dark train yard. Instantly, a large and unruly crowd rushed forward toward all the cars. There was no one in charge and the result was a wild melee to board every car at the same time. With bags of food and satchels and suitcases and overnight bags flying in every direction, often at my face, I tried to find my berth in the murderous scramble. It didn't just feel _like_ being in scene from a movie, it was one.

Suceava was a pretty northern town that served as a local base for touring the UNESCO World Heritage designated churches in the surrounding countryside. Known as the Churches of Moldavia, it includes eight churches built in the late 1400s to late 1500s, all with unusually well preserved original exterior fresco paintings. The paintings exhibit Christian religious themes and are considered masterpieces of Byzantine art. The interiors are also filled with frescos and religious artifacts. At one church, I enjoyed the Romanians devoutly singing a spiritual hymn, very beautifully, without any need for accompaniment.

**Bahamas, January 2006, 4 days.** I stayed at the Nassau Hotel supposedly featured in one of the James Bond movies, ramping up my Austin Powers fantasy. Naturally I took a boat over to Paradise Island to see how the other half vacation. I walked through the maze of yachts at the front of the Atlantis resort and found a lobby worth the gander.

**China, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Macau, February, 2008, 10 days.** The Hong Kong Airport was a marvel of modernity and sophistication. The tourist class bus ride from Lantau Island and the sprawling airport into downtown Hong Kong was a feast. It took me past islands of clustered residential hi-rises that rose precariously from the water's edge. The bus ran over an elevated freeway before descending finally to street level in Wan Chai. It was a bit like the opening scene in _Blade Runner_. The Hong Kong night blazed with light as we slowed to a crawl upon hitting the crowded street.

My $100/night room in Wan Chai had a single twin bed and a single window. The window view was a concrete wall in the building next door, but at least you could tell if it was night or day. Oddly, the bathroom was as big as the main room was tiny. The hotel was excellent though. The college girl at the front desk was especially friendly, leading me to ask her lots of questions at every opportunity.

I explored the shopping districts of the City every day, quickly establishing a routine. I saw Victoria Peak by tramway, got to the other side of Hong Kong on a tour of Sidney and Aberdeen that included a harbor boat trip, and ventured for one day through Kowloon and Nathan Street, stopping at the museums in the Cultural District there. The view from the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade of Kowloon back across Victoria Harbor to the unequaled Hong Kong skyline is one of the best in the world. An even better way to view it is at night from one of the Star Ferries that service the tourist trade, as they ply their way around the Harbor during the evening laser light shows. The extraordinary shopping makes Hong Kong one of the most interesting places on Earth.

To visit Shenzhen, I needed a visa to enter the Chinese mainland. The desk clerk at the hotel had told me how she and her friends routinely traveled to Shenzhen to shop the flea markets, which increased my interest. At the time, Shenzhen had grown from a few hundred thousand people to 10 million, the fastest growing big city on the planet. Many of the new residents were young college educated Chinese from all over the country seeking new economic opportunities in a city of all young people. Hong Kong had rapidly expanded back office manufacturing in Shenzhen with companies like the Taiwanese Foxconn, which had a 100,000-worker campus that made all kinds of electronics, including the Apple I-phone.

I took a bullet train from the sleek station in Hong Kong through the mountains to a large and evidently brand-new station just outside Shenzhen. As it was during the week and off hours there were few passengers on the train or even in the massive, hollow modernist glass and steel station. It was a strange feeling to wander around such an impressive and modern complex, knowing that I had to be the source of considerable interest to those watching the CCTVs somewhere. This place felt like nothing and nowhere in America. It was eerie.

Downtown Shenzhen on the other hand felt like a very new section of some major American city. The architecture was international in style with creative Chinese embellishments. Shenzhen has some of the tallest buildings in the world. My hotel was four star and met that criteria in every way, but it was only $50/night. I had full internet, which I suspected was available to few Chinese, on an up to date PC. The room had a wide set of doubled windows that kept out the busy street noise below, while having a great view of wide, newly paved and striped streets, well-ordered traffic, and handsome office towers.

The City was a surfeit of riches. It was easy to explore on foot, one extraordinary building after another. In addition, there were hundreds of off brand merchandise stores in the central area. Nearby was an old area that had not yet been redeveloped. Here one could find a variety of local stores and native restaurants. Garage style stalls housed various owner-occupied businesses. A few, looking a lot like hair salons, sold sex. I was too much of an English speaker to ask. Almost no one in Shenzhen spoke anything other than Cantonese.

This turned out to be rather less of a handicap when dealing with an attractive young woman near the corner of my hotel late one evening. She accompanied me to my room and we were not hassled by the desk, surprisingly. Having pushed the boundaries of this kabuki dance this far, while she was quickly dis-robing I signaled that I wished to engage in kissing, which is not really on the menu. This was a bridge to far for her. Once she confirmed what I was asking, she dressed and stormed out, none too pleased by my business interruptus. I can't say that I blamed her.

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. I was expecting a big beefy guy with a mouth of garbled shorthand English ready to land me if I didn't pay up, so it was with a little hesitation that I opened up. I was surprised to see an even more attractive young woman there and we had a nice time. I had read to expect that many of these sweet girls were from poor country areas. I had no trouble believing that she was.

From Shenzhen I took a cab ride on a half hour trip along the heavily built up Coast, through a continuous stream of spanking new office and residential towers, to a high-speed ferry boat launch in Shekou. This craft seated hundreds and rose as if on rocket power to skim across the broad outlet of the Pearl River where it empties into the South China Sea. The launch travels to the former Portuguese colony of Macau. I immediately sat down in the wrong seat and paid for it with an angry display by one of the business type locals. Dumb Americans!

I had selected a hotel for Macau while in Shenzhen on the internet. It was a British style hotel near the strip of newer Casinos. This place was so British that it was truly Bond like. However, I discovered that the Cantonese have a bad habit of coughing death rattles when coming back from gambling in the middle of the night. What the purpose of all the hacking was I still don't know to this day.

The weather continued to be magnificent and Macau proved perfect for being endlessly explored on foot. It had a great art gallery and an excellent visitor's center. The Casinos were fantastic. The newest section, the off-shoot island of Cotai, has a facsimile of the Venetian in Las Vegas. The Portuguese and Catholic history of the peninsula is interesting. The main square is beautiful and the shopping street beyond it is fun. It takes you to the ruins of St. Paul's façade, the iconic image often associated with Macau. The Grand Lisboa Casino, Guia Fortress, and Macau Tower are just a few of the things worth seeing along with all the casinos.

By the third day in Macau it was clear that I was getting strep throat, probably from my country girl, and I struggled with it as I loaded aboard a turbojet ferry to the Hong Kong Airport. Later I missed my flight home at LAX, as the place was overloaded with travelers at mid-morning. Thanks TSA!

**France, Paris, April, 2009, 7 days.** I never had to leave the City of Lights except to tour Versailles, because there was too much to see. The day I went to Versailles was a Saturday and the usual subway line was closed for maintenance. I was led on a merry chase following other tourists to get to and from my destination. I love other tourists. They're friendly and full of useful information. The Louvre, D'Orsay Gallery, Eiffel Tower, and Notre Dame Cathedral were great. I managed to get off the subway from De Gaulle airport right in front of the Cathedral and knew exactly where to walk to get to my nearby hotel in the Latin Quarter. I never took a cab while there, preferring to see the sights on foot along the Seine whenever I could, but I did take a van with others to get back to the airport when I left. The most expensive airport trip I ever took but worth it. Being part of 30 million tourists a year isn't bad, but it probably helps to avoid the high season.

**Colombia, Medellin, January 2011, 7 days.** Having been to Cuba and Costa Rica I figured I could get by pretty well with my high school Spanish in Latin America, but I was really kidding myself. Fortunately, on my trip to Colombia I stayed in an apartment with two other guys. I arranged it over the internet. The other guys had much better Spanish and I'm indebted to them for their help. Using Spirit Air and shared accommodations made the trip inexpensive and a welcome departure from a cold January.

Medellin bills itself as the City of Spring. It's high elevation in the mountains gives it the advantage of year-round pleasant weather. It's recent investment in an elevated transit system gives residents and tourists easy access to every part of the City. A 2.5-mile cable car serves a hillside barrio at the Western end of the line and takes visitors to the Arvi National Forest Preserve. The City is graced with beautiful Spanish colonial architecture, has a vibrant downtown with excellent restaurants, and clearly benefits from good city planning.

Our shared apartment sat at the edge of the City's red-light district where my roommates, a Floridian and a Californian, had easy access to their main interest, girls. This was a monger's smorgasbord of young women from the Pais, or countryside. I focused on using the Metro to see everything of the City that I could. Medellin is the homeplace of Botero and has both a Botero gallery and a plaza featuring the monumental rotund sculptures characteristic of his work.

My roommates allowed me to accompany them on their sojourns to check out the girls in some of the bordellos around the town. One roommate was trying to set some kind of record of one hundred women in one month and I think he probably came close. (Sorry about the pun, it was just too easy.) Colombian women are extraordinary without question, more so for putting up with dudes like these.

People would ask me how safe I thought Medellin was. I would say that the City seemed quite safe, but it was also true that during my stay some kid was shot dead for trespassing on drug turf a block from our place. To the good, the street was well patrolled at night by well-armed police with scary automatic rifles. Medellin has every opportunity to advance economically, at which point the days of the red-light district will become a part of history. The airport search conducted before boarding your departure is not for those who sweat easily, just a note.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

It wasn't Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in _Beach Blanket Bingo._ The censored material on my pc that ticked the Fed's boxes came from Japan. In _Beach Blanket_ Annette was the female lead.[169] It was Frankie who always seemed to have a mischievous glint in his eyes though, who was fun to watch.

At the time the videos were not illegal in Japan. It didn't come up. I didn't want to be difficult. I had paid my attorney $10,000 to represent me in the matter, when the going price was $7500. He had two other cases before the same courts and had had other cases before that. The idea that having so many cases should warrant a discount rather than a premium failed to occur to him.

The Court's request that I not use a computer prior to the disposition of the case was too vague to be meaningful. Did this mean that I could not pay my bills online? Or use a smart phone to make telephone calls to my Attorney? I told him that I thought this was very Luddite. He grasped my meaning but said that the Court system, like any bureaucracy, is slow to recognize changes in technology. He thought it would be okay to use a smart phone. Good thing, because I even used it to file my taxes that year.

In December, six months later, we got the plea deal. At no time did we ever discuss anything else. It just wasn't feasible to take a case like this to a jury. No lawyer in his right mind would even consider it. Having penalties that make trials impossible is a legislature's way of saying, "go away, don't bother us, there is no such thing as due process here."

When the prosecutor came back there was a discussion but my impression was that it was more a formality. It was sixty days of custodial time and a fine that came to five thousand. The court ordered a psych evaluation, a joke as it was mostly retreaded word processing having nothing to do with me, and it was about a grand.

I paid my bills forward, unloaded my plants to my brother, and headed for Happy Town on February 16 for two months at the State's expense. Literally at the State's expense, as the State reimburses the County at $100 per day. Happy Town was full up and I don't think this was accidental. Someone has to pay off the $50 million in bonds it cost to build and you can't do that with empty cells. In fact, from the moment I entered Happy Town it became pretty obvious that the whole thing is nothing more than a set up to exploit the poor for being poor. Even more so, it was a set up for being poor while black or Hispanic, a barely disguised form of institutionalized racism.

I picked up quickly on the fact that over half the detainees (the more neutral term to inmate, for the euphemistically sensitive) were African American. This was the case in a suburban county of half a million residents, 75% white, of which fewer than 6 percent were African American.[170] The only significant enclaves of blacks in the County were in just two larger cities. If this racial composition wasn't the result of a concerted police targeting of the African American community within the County, I don't know what is. Maybe only a white guy would notice.

My whole frame of reference had to quickly adjust. This was no longer my white privilege world. My comfort zone was about to be tested in new ways that were sure to be a revelation. By the time I left Happy Town two months later I would not be hardened to anything. Instead I had become sensitized to everything, just like my pod-mates, by the perpetual lack of sleep. The telling of endless sad stories was just a bonus. It was as if the guys were being paraded before me on a red carpet of the forgotten and overlooked, the kind of guys who disappear after accidentally falling through the cracks of our workaday world.

I was in a two-man container for a week in condition yellow. This was for newbies. During this time, I had a couple roommates, one a young chap who had defied an order of protection from a girlfriend and the other a black kid just out of his teens with an Olympic snoring ability. This kid would wake himself with his own snoring. The first young man was a super nice clean freak and a calming, welcome presence. His girlfriend must have had issues.

The insomniac bellower however could be heard all night and everywhere in the pod of sixty-four Happy Town residents. His curse became my blessing. It taught me the skill of night reading. During the day it was pretty noisy, but night became my time to read everything they had available in the Pod. It wasn't long before I was nicknamed Shakespeare by the kitchen staff.

But I get ahead of myself. During the first week I was asked if I wanted to join the "Trustees Pod" which served alternating shifts in the kitchen. Coming with this privilege were a free dispensation from the commissary on a regular basis, some free phone time, no charge for medical services and free haircuts. What a deal! I was in. The biggest advantage of this was that the time would go faster because of being busy. That and the fact that kitchen staff by necessity had access to additional food, no small thing on a spare diet.

The perks were small potatoes. For one thing, no one could be denied medical care for lack of funds. The commissary typically over charged two to three times what a bag of chips or a honey roll were worth. It's a captive market, after all, and all under contract to Aramark, which also provides the kitchen staff. They have to make money or you don't get fed. As for the haircut, if you want to look like Charlie Manson that's your prerogative.

The Happy Town custodial personnel (guards) had only a few women. They were all well trained professionals. In addition, they were all dues paying union members, and it was clear that they were a clubby group.

Kitchen staff were all women. Contract employees, they had to reliably feed some six hundred detainees in ten pods three meals a day. With maybe four women on each shift they had to be efficient while working with a very limited food budget. To be successful they had to work hard while maintaining the respect of the kitchen trustees, no easy task when you consider that their safety rode on it as much as their job did. I cannot really think of a harder way to earn a living, and these women had my admiration in spades. They had brass. And they needed it.

The danger was greater than many know. No less than half the detainees lined up for meds twice a day. There's a reason the movie was called _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_. Admittedly that was no Happy Town. Any modern U.S. jail is half nuts, which in my mind qualifies them officially as the new asylums anyway. This means that a lot of detainees come with some pretty disturbing, potentially threatening, even dangerous behaviors. Fortunately, the highly professional staff is very sensitive to this and know when immediate isolation is necessary. They know to act quickly before the undesirable behavior escalates to the point of hazard. At no time during the two months that I was in Happy Town did I feel I was in an unsafe situation.

I should be quick to add that almost everyone has experienced depression, anxiety, or other mental disorder by the time they are middle aged, according to the **Journal of Abnormal Psychology**. In a study of 988 individuals only 17% said they had never experienced any of these conditions by the time they had reached the age of 38 years.[171] We all forget too easily how it is that we all lead such fragile lives.

All the detainees are sufficiently aware that inordinate misbehavior will lead to serious legal consequences. Still, some tread the line. One young man who was permitted to go to work during the day got into a heated argument with an officer. Their sharp exchange ricocheted like shots across the Pod. Later that day the kid was quietly escorted to punishment in the pod reserved for those in the dog house. I was told that privileges of any kind were revoked there and that you had to sleep on the steel bunk without a mattress. This makes Happy Town's normal sleep deprivation an agony.

Another time, one of my eight-person mini-pod mates acted out by puffing up his considerable chest in the kitchen when someone took what he considered to be his seat. He was quickly escorted to punishment directly from the kitchen. We never saw him again as they came to the mini-pod and got his stuff. Taking someone out of population is something they are very good at. It's a drill that they have down pat and they perform it so quickly and efficiently that it's scary.

While the guy who went to punishment was a smart guy to work with, he had a checkered past, including some form of manslaughter and some Hispanic gang associations. I was relieved he was on his way elsewhere, as his general harassment of others included bullying me. He kept after me about my conviction, which I was told not to discuss with anyone. Many of those in Happy Town took those who were quiet about their convictions to be inviting harassment. There were many persons who knew not to discuss their cases, whatever they may have been about.

I expected bullies and was not disappointed. I met my Hispanic friend the very first day as he made way for me to get to my new upper bunk. Testosterone practically formed a cloud in the air that afternoon. I think I could be forgiven if I believed that the staff just might be leading me into a potential "situation". It felt like that. You think, "This crowd couldn't get more f'd up!" but I think the next eight-man unit might be just the same, if not worse.

There was the guy who wouldn't shut up. He would go all night and always had to have an audience. He was a marijuana dealer busted for sending pot through Fed Ex. He had many prior convictions and was now set for another two years of time. He had an endless spiel and he was determined to go at it forever. Put a sock in it, dude. You're not Donald Trump.

Drug convictions of white guys like him seemed common. One dealer, approaching middle age, kept confessing to everyone that he had lost everything, again, as he had many times before, that convictions just weren't worth it anymore and that this was it for him.

There were numerous drunks. They call them DUI and they serve real time. These guys are all ages and races and they are mostly very nice when sober. We had lots of them with us in the kitchen. I was sorry for them all because it has always been my theory that alcoholism is a disease that should be treated, not punished. The fact that a number of them had multiple DUI's was a testament to how ineffective incarceration is for them. They knew better than anyone that as far as the criminal justice system was concerned, they were just hamsters on the non-stop wheel of addiction. It was insane.

The lives of these people had of course imploded with a thunderclap. They were a mess. One said he was the son of a scientist who had worked at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia. I believed him as he was quite smart. He came to us late one day literally from out of the cold. He had been living outdoors in March pedaling a bike with a cart to get discarded metal for recycling. This supported his lifestyle as an unreformed drinker who could no longer get a driver's license. He had been in and out of jail and rehab his whole life and was now in his fifties. His health had been affected negatively but he responded well to the much better conditions of the jail. He had five children by five women to hear him tell it. The last woman in his life had filed charges for assault (no doubt because he was inebriated). His favorite place to live, outside anyway, was somewhere along the River. Seriously.

The scientist's son was kind of a neat freak. He had me helping him clean the floors in the eight-man unit for instance. Kinda weird for a guy who had already gone full-on hunter gatherer. I liked him. His big voice put out a lot of encouragement to others. He was a positive influence in a place that needed it.

While half of detainees were African American, about a quarter were Hispanic and a quarter Caucasian. There were several Hispanics in my pod at various times who were undocumented. They had been picked up by the police for traffic issues and incarcerated for lacking documents. The County participated in the ICE program by making notification to the Federal government of these cases. Often, they had family members that they were concerned about. ICE officials arrived a few days later to pick them up for deportation. One had a young son who was being sent to the McAllen, Texas immigration center. The father needed to get back together with the son. It was all he could think about. Another had two small children that he was caring for and they were all in danger of deportation. It was an inhumane mess and Obama deported 4 million during this time, adding greatly to the human misery index in America.

Getting to meet these people was a privilege. Working for over a decade with the Hispanic community that made up such a large part of Addison (nearly 40%), most of whom were largely undocumented, had sensitized me. These individuals were placed in impossible situations, their families threatened with being torn apart, after living in the U.S. for long periods of time. It was a shameful way to treat the American immigrant legacy.

The ICE guys in their full-dress black uniforms with the big letters on their backs showed up, usually two at a time, to handcuff and escort these detainees out. I had come to know these Hispanic guys. They had placed the love for and the welfare of their kids above everything else in coming to our country. Now they were being treated to the worst of what America has to give the world these days. It was deeply offensive to me. I found it impossible not to draw comparisons to police depicted as the unthinking and amoral automatons of authoritarian history. It was disgraceful.

When you see certain things, you come to realize. You know when something is just off. You know when something is just wrong. This did. I challenge anyone to witness what I witnessed and tell me otherwise.

The kitchen work kept everyone in our pod busy. While we worked only every other day, those days could be quite long. There were times when the automatic dish washing machine broke down and we had to wash everything by hand, along with preparing three meals a day. There were a couple of days like that and they were pure chaos. It was extraordinary to me that the men I worked with would pull together the way they did. They had developed enough associations in the group to create real cooperation. In this way they acted much like humans always act. Tribally.

There were always interpersonal challenges. A couple young guys cooperated to use me as a useful idiot in the fast-paced food prep for a few days. Food prep requires the assembly of all the prepared food items in bins onto a serving table. The men surround the table with hair nets, beard nets and plastic gloves, ladles in hand, to place separate food items onto individual trays. The trays are then racked onto dollies and wrapped in saran wrap for distribution to each pod. Breakfast trays are prepared the day before and refrigerated until the next morning. If done successfully the food might still be warm by the time it is distributed all over hungry Happy Town. These two dudes had maneuvered me into handling the racks, which had me running to keep up. At one point the floor got wet and I slipped, spraining my wrist to catch a backward fall.

Spraining my wrists was not new to me. They help me play classical piano reasonably well, but they can be a pain. In any case, I was given an x-ray by a skeptical medical staff and the next day I had a hand that swelled to twice its normal size. They gave me an NSAID for the pain and I got about ten days to luxuriate in the 8-man unit, free to read unmolested. I had a few weeks left, the kitchen was really a lot more work than I had expected, and I needed the rest if I was going to stay there for the rest of my time.

After several weeks I was pretty comfortable with the work, taking a moment to look around when suddenly a plastic waste basket by the table decided to do its own thing. The table was where plastic gloves were dispensed each morning and afternoon to workers. The waste basket just jumped right off the landing it sat on and onto its side on the polished concrete floor. It did this without any means of locomotion. I still have no explanation in mind, but I did immediately associate it with an unworldly, potentially supernatural event, like someone was running a séance in front of me.

All the years growing up working in the cafeteria kitchens of grade school, middle school and high school came back to me in a rush, all the years of my mother working as a cafeteria food lady and baker in the nearby elementary school after we had grown up and were long gone, came back to me. She had passed a few years earlier. I couldn't resist the thought that came to me. I blush at the irrationality of it. There is no doubt to me that the mind is designed to be, in its most relaxed state, almost too suggestive.

On April 12 I was released and I walked home on a sunny spring day to find my tulips had blossomed. I got there just in time to mow a lawn that was getting overgrown. We had a very warm and early spring that year. I contacted Mike who was going to be my probation officer as ordered right away. He returned my call with _mucho gusto_ , like he was my crazy uncle calling after many passing years. I think he was probably the County's most experienced probie officer and he dealt mostly with SOs (sex offenders), with which he clearly had a ton of experience. His call was meant to be intimidating.

On the public side of the economy in particular I think there is a recognition that a certain amount of theater is involved in carrying out the job. I have had bosses confess to me that they practice before an important public meeting for instance. Mike was in that kind of a position. He knew that starting out with a dominating personality was the way to go. He could always soften it up down the road if occasion warranted it. One thing he could not afford to do however was have a probationer go bad on him. If that happened there would be blowback. In a high-profile case serious blowback is a career killer. He could act to intervene with an off the rails probie like the god of lightning and thunder if needed. No doubt his ability was the reason for his longevity. He was older than I was and I figured he had to be about the best officer they had. He was the cat's meow.

Onanism

Mastering one's domain became a permanent part of popular culture in the famous **Seinfeld** episode, "The Contest" on November 18 of 1992. I may have been familiar with the show, but I was still not prepared for what I found when I started the weekly SO group meetings.

I expected to find a bunch of sophisticated computer users teaching each other the tricks of the trade. I think that is the prevalent view of the public anyway, and I had absorbed that kind of thinking just like everybody else. Half were computer users goofing around with internet porn in a very ordinary way by using P2P file sharing software, but they differed the full gamut in age from teenager to senior citizen. Of those using P2P a number became familiar with downloading music files before downloading videos.

The other half of the SO group ranged from peepers to young people having sex with even younger people to flashers to adults actually abusing minors. The last group made up maybe 10-20% of those there. The therapy textbook we were assigned regular exercises in was really designed for abusers. The rest of us were just along for the ride, present by default. Supposedly, somebody in the judicial/county probationary/contract social services ethosphere thought it was a good idea to lump everyone together in this strange mélange for reasons of cost.

My lessons began with instruction in the proper use of the recommended group think terminology. The number one unwritten rule to be observed was, "do not masturbate!" Masturbation everyone knows is what leads to porn and censored porn in specific. Don't do it! What was meant by this was that neither the judge in your case nor the county government court services department (probation) can tell you not to do it, because it would violate your basic human rights, as well as your civil rights under the U.S. Constitution. The judge can order that you not view porn and they do. He can order you to serve your sentence standing on your head. The aim of therapy is to stop you from viewing sexually stimulating material of any kind and they enforce this rule with the improperly coerced use of the polygraph machine. To add to this abuse, they even make you pay for the coercion.

The government hired firm that provides counseling services to U.S. citizens under Court ordered probation can't tell you not to do it, as that would violate your basic human rights, as well as civil rights under the U.S. Constitution as well. Your therapist counselor can't tell you that it's in any way unnatural or something to be ashamed of, because it isn't. It is after all a natural function of the body. It is in fact the most natural thing in the world and all humans and all primates, to their credit, do it all the time, especially when young and new to the whole experience of sexuality. Human brains are wired to masturbate just as their progenitors, the primates, were before humans descended from them.

We had a great group therapist working for this tiny hand to mouth firm in charge of our group. Like my probation officer, he was at the end of his career, and was a well-trained, responsible, well-informed professional. What threw me at first was his pony tail and dress code from the 1970's. He never suggested that one could not masturbate during the course of the group therapy. To his credit. And I gave him every opportunity to screw up on this point.

The guys in the group would have told me different had I asked them about it. They knew, having been around group for a while, that masturbation was the key way that the group members are controlled.

Wait, you're going to love this. It is exactly how authoritarian dictatorships pervert science to their ends, turning truth to propaganda, turning human nature cruelly against itself. Democracy can be easily cowed by an atmosphere of public hysteria and fear. These things can be whipped into a frenzy by the law and order freaks and conspiracy theorists of the far right. This is how reason is chilled out of existence, how scientific conviction is hobbled by historically perpetuated social ignorance.

This is how the Soviet Union was able to put thousands of dissidents into mental hospitals, to shoot them up until they went insane, to curettage society from their truth and their influence. What is different in America is that there is liability that attaches to quackery such as gay conversion therapy. So, for American county governments running criminal justice systems it is best to get a step removed from scene of the crime. American counties just hire supposedly reputable social service agencies to run the unconstitutional anti-sex propaganda for them. They are easily aided by quack Doctors writing disreputable texts that tell SO's not to masturbate, all these so-called Doctor/experts given sanction by weak professional associations like the American Psychological Association, who give the quacks a veneer of respectability. Then the counties, if ever sued, can pretend they knew nothing and take no responsibility for the social service agencies, most of which are a day away from going out of business anyway. They come and go with regularity. Hard to sue for quackery when you are shooting at a moving target, especially one that's no longer there.

The truth is that the justice system will be held accountable for the abuses of these programs, county by county, or in some other way, eventually. With a million or so SO's in the U.S. there could be a lot of suing going on, if and when the public hysteria finally breaks on the corrupt and ineffective system of SO's. The system was started by the public fear and hysteria arising just at the dawn of the internet in 1994. The widespread abuses of the system, buried in darkness, will lead to convictions being overturned and compensation being paid by taxpayers, who, as always, will be on the hook for bad government policy gone awry. Since it was public hysteria that created the mess to begin with, it is only fair that the public should get the tab in the end. At least democracies pay for their mistakes.

Onanism is, of course, the practice of self-pleasuring (a subject which is itself a euphemist's dream). The term Onanism is from the Bible, Genesis 38:9 to be exact, where Onan, rather than have sex with his brother's wife to extend the family tree, "spills his seed". He is slain by God for this offense but it was in any event coitus interruptus, not masturbation, that he was guilty of. A confusing story at best for literalists.

Then a daring-do Frenchman named Tissot in 1797 had the temerity to write on the subject and it was of course all bad, as can be seen in the illustration. He coined the term onanism, for which euphemists shall forever be grateful, and his contribution was the term Onania. That the name is close to the word inane is just coincidental. Tissot claimed that masturbation caused epilepsy, blindness and paralysis.[172] So what your mother told you the first time she caught you doing it was probably pretty much along those lines. I don't think she actually knew Tissot however. On the other hand, maybe your great, great grandmother did.

Primates have hands, the devil's workshop to be sure, and that makes them the greatest suspects in this caper. This gives them the ability to take matters into their own hands, as it were. Self-rewarding or taking a bit of alone time has been found in 80 species of male primates and 50 species of female primates.[173] Other species that do so are cetaceans, elephants, walrus, rodents, bats, lizards, turtles, and penguins. It appears to be universal that in every species males trip the light fantastic more often than females do.

The therapeutic means of treating SO's was to put them on the "flutter", the "box" or the "poly". Each profession prefers not to stray too far from its core principles, or its usual modus operandi, or its standard pattern and practice, or its best management practices. Call it what you will, in every profession we rely on doing what we know, especially what we know best and are most comfortable with. In the law enforcement game, every case rests on who is telling the truth and who is lying. Often this is left up to a jury of one's peers to decide. They listen carefully to witnesses and decide who to believe and who to dismiss as being an obviously self-interested liar. Liars go to jail. That's just how it works.

As a result, law enforcement professionals rely on the only truth telling device known to man, the polygraph. It measures heart rate, blood pressure and respiration while an individual answers questions to see if anomalous changes occur when making responses. These responses can then be interpreted by an experienced and trained polygraph professional as truthful or not truthful. Squiggly lines on a page made by an instrument that looks more like a death dealing electrocution machine can literally mean the difference between life and death in a cell for thousands of people in America. For this reason, people can't be compelled to take a poly. Also, poly results are not admissible in a court of law because _they are not scientifically reliable_. That the machines and their questionable results can be variously interpreted is unquestioned. Still, it's all we have and the dependence of the judicial system on the devices has only grown over time.

Enter the latest coercive invasion by the State of the human mind. Each SO is required to have an initial "sexual history" polygraph. There is no way the government or the ad hoc contract service agency is going to be able to pay for this because it costs $300 a shot. Also, I would like just one crack at a public hearing where taxpayers are asked to pony up for SO polygraph exams. It would be the highlight, or rather lowlight, of anyone's budget career. Can you imagine that line item in a County Budget at the next public budget hearing?

"Say what?" you would hear, "You want the taxpayers of this County wasting their money having a bunch of SO's (you know they won't use that term and you know what term they will use) tested for truthfulness about jacking off as part of some cockamamie medical treatment?" Board members would never hear the end of it, and the poor guy preparing the budget would soon be out of a job.

The SO has to pay for it himself and if he can't, and many can't, then they try to squeeze a grant from agency funds in such a way that it can't be traced back to a government expenditure. The whole therapy game is dependent on maintaining the fiction that this is an essential part of treatment, when it's really just pure quackery. One of the true tenants of the public budget game is that all funds are, in the end, fungible, which is just a nice way of saying that in the end it all comes from the same pot: taxpayers. Dear tea-party taxpayer, enjoy your prurient peek into the minds of sex maniacs! I see Hollywood interest here.

The public purse is raided to fund the social service agency in general for the group sessions. This is found in an easily dismissed line item labeled treatment or some other such nonsense instead. The agency still requires that each SO pay $25 in cash at the beginning of each required weekly group meeting. (The group therapy services are priced in the open market, of which there actually isn't any market, at $75 per SO per group per week for purposes of irrelevancy.) There is nothing voluntary about the meetings. They are required by the Judge in each case and failure to comply wholeheartedly will quickly land you back before him with the inevitable outcome being a revocation of probation and back to the poky for you, turd face.

It is this threat of having to serve one's full term, always years, that keeps everyone in line. The social service agency hands out cute program evaluations like once a year, but once you catch on that smart mouthing will extend your stay in group, which comes as something akin to torture with a hot stick, you quickly get the message that complaining is not in your best interest. Comply, and like it, or you face the most severe of consequences. It focuses the mind for every boring second spent in group "therapy". Let's be honest. This is not any kind of therapy. It's public shaming and cleverly contrived further punishment intended to embarrass you in every way possible before bosses, fellow workers, family and friends. Not only is such treatment not therapeutic, it is positively counterproductive to the point of being harmful and injurious, a form of perpetuating the well-known cycle of abuse that is so often the subject of discussion in such "therapy". That this is sanctioned by the State and real American judges is a travesty. Welcome Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. In the meantime, the beatings will continue until morale improves.

The polygrapher was a young black woman working out of a Class A hi-rise office building near a major intersection of the Interstate in the Western suburbs of Chicago. She had cool digs and was using the latest in poly gear, i.e. a computer with the necessary sensors, not the big clunky machine that looks like if fell out of a 1950's B movie. They can ask you to do it again, for another $300 fee of course, so you don't want to mess up. This makes you even more vulnerable to suggestion, which only runs against your interests.

The action starts with a long questionnaire about sex. They ask do you like frontage, where people like to rub up against each other in public crowds, for instance. Have you ever had a three-some? How often do you masturbate? of course! Think of one hundred questions like this and you get the idea. It is intensively embarrassing knowing that someone who is not a psychologist is going to go over these results carefully and is sitting in the next room, waiting to follow up by asking even more invasive and detailed questions about the answers that you have given to questions that are already far too invasive to be a part of anything having to do with the government, civil rights, and privacy in an age where there no longer is any. If you are not jonesing to get the freak out of there, you're not human.

To her credit and the program's, they both warn you that you should not speak of or refer to any actual crimes, i.e. victims of sexual abuse, that you have not already been found guilty of abusing during the course of this part of your "treatment". The irony of this kind of weird acknowledgement seems to be lost on these unwitting participants in this preposterous demolition of our Constitution's guarantee of individual civil rights. Which is, of course, the greater crime. It is a self-invalidation.

The polygrapher then goes over your survey questions with you and asks how many people you have had intercourse with. You've been expecting this, and you figure that they will ask you questions like this once you are on the flutter so you try to answer truthfully. I am thinking that the intercourse with the street girl in Budapest was only brief, but the intercourse with the Chinese country girl in Shenzhen would probably count, as it was in different positions. I told her two and described the circumstances. She asked as to any lasting relationships that led to intercourse, and I responded that I had a three-year relationship in my late thirties, but it was with a much younger woman who wished to remain a virgin, so no. She acted surprised. I thought she really was.

Wired up, she asked me if I had been telling the truth during the interview. She also asked if I had ever manufactured porn, which led back directly to the AG's Office, where they believed that had I toured the world to make a profit on porn. To their credit, they had my financials, showing that I had invested intelligently over the years, and had done well. It was a small but possibly logical leap to be sure. Through the lens darkly, to the AG and feds who ran this through their designated profiles, the funds translated as malevolently suspicious, and as a due cause for investigative concern.

This meant that I was still in their oversight, even now, which did not surprise me. The DOJ would take over any international cases from the AG if it offered a big, career changing hit. No doubt they liked to keep a foot in just in case. Furthermore, it had been their big data that had led to so many convictions across the nation using phishing and spoofing techniques on P2P users nationwide. When I was on P2P they were able to associate me with many prior downloads, the gift that keeps on giving, as it was this record, with all its back up in the NSA's Bluffdale, Utah Data Center, that was used to obtain a warrant no doubt. It just never occurred that they might be recording as far back as 2007. That was not public knowledge until Snowden.

That the Federal officials were still in contact with the State AG and that the State AG was still overseeing the local case seemed obvious. These guys don't just quit and go away. For one thing, the Fusion Centers they have created with the States have to have something to coordinate. It was supposedly to coordinate terrorism investigations, but low there are not many of them these days. (Nor were there ever, it was the Bush/Cheney era, all smoke and mirrors meant to distract the public and create more bureaucratic power, while pushing the idea that only the brave Republicans could save you from Armageddon with the world's terrorists. It also gave law enforcement at the State level buy in to the power sharing with Washington when it came to the issue. It was a bust because terrorism was not the coming age of law enforcement nirvana, but rather the hysteria _du jour_ which people quickly moved on from.)

This situation even made Mike, the probie officer, nervous. It had made my Attorney nervous, so why not him too? If anyone called me to ask about what was going on with me, I didn't go into it. During that time, Mike and the group therapist both pointed out that there could be ongoing monitoring in progress. They sure as heck didn't know because any forensics like that would have to be Federal. They liked to scare us though as part of the drip, drip, drip of incessant torment that they loved to indulge in on a routine basis. They wanted fear to rule us just as much as it motivated them. The Theraperves (therapists who like to see what's on your computer) had discussed with upper level staff (code for county probation office dudes and duderettes) starting surprise (as in "surprise, we're here!") home invasion checks on our computers on a regular basis. Sure, we all sniffed. Under what Constitution?

I brought up getting a computer right away but it took two months for my probie officer to clear it with the Illinois AG's Office. I didn't have the full bundle of Constitutional rights as I was a criminal on probation and under a judge's supervision. Something like that is sure to cut into your civil rights. It's not that you don't have any. It's just that they are the sort of thing you need an attorney to litigate for you, and my Attorney had washed his hands of my case long before this. The judge: no rights for you! The Soup man: no soup for you! In this case there was an explicit form that I had signed as part of my release that said no porn for you! Its analogous to offenders who committed crimes while drunk: no drinking. They even put us on the same schedule for drug testing as other offenders. They assume everyone is a closet drinker or tweaker or pot head. It cuts down on the need for expensive judicial thinking, such as that required for making simple distinctions among different offenses.

The day I met with my probation officer to go over the results of the sexual history polygraph we spoke generally for a minute and then he turned to the topic of my results, taking a noticeable breath in the process. Or was that a sigh? Or what, maybe even a gasp?

The PO said I had passed all five questions asked of me on the flutter, meaning that I had been truthful. He seemed to admit that the manufacturing of porn issue was over his head, but he was glad to see that I had passed it. He was expecting a long sexual history and as there really wasn't one, well. My PO was an intuitive person. He had to be in order to succeed at his job. It was clear that he was a little embarrassed to have to discuss it with me. But hey, I could have been reading into his obvious discomfort.

Later, toward the end of 18 months of group sessions, I would give the group my sexual history, and there was literally no reaction. By then I would have taken another polygraph to ask me if I was fantasizing about "the wrong kind of sex". This was the real purpose of the flutter, to ask about a person's sexual fantasies. Fail the test and you would be in group for the full three years of probation, or for however long they could extend the probation. As long as you were on probation, they could go to a judge and say you weren't ready for group sessions to end (at $25 per week, payable in cash only). How many things do you fantasize about when you have sex? With the internet it can be hundreds, thousands of things, none of which have to be porn. To recall all of this on a flutter is, of course, scientifically, medically impossible.

My second and last flutter came back with equivocal results, according to the huge old fat man, former President of the State Polygraph Association, who performed it with a certain combination of high dungeon and wizardly gusto. The guy was using his full-on quack mode that day, stopping the test as part of a well-known technique, to question me directly on how honestly I was answering his questions. This was an evident form of intimidation, aimed at screwing up the results, and it worked perfectly. We took an instant disliking to each other. I knew just how much BS he stood for, and he knew I knew.

This was the summer of 2013, as I was ending my forced march through the tireless group meetings, each becoming more acerbic and dreaded as a new, very acid woman therapist was being brought online. The previous December I had used the internet to check out a little nudity. SCOTUS has made a legal determination that straight nudity is not pornography. I knew and they knew that this would then become an issue to discuss, even litigate, in group. I was reaching the point where I could no longer in good conscience look any further at these poor sods in group and not wish to get even with our tormenters just a little bit. This was an obvious challenge to the quack therapy. The quack therapists I was working with understood my challenge. Quite right.

The fat and unctuous polygrapher knew it too, as I explained the nudity to him before the session began. You are always supposed to tell the poly expert anything that might disrupt your results before you start. I don't think he would have scored anything as truthful after that. He ended up ruling the whole session equivocal. Not that I was lying, but that my answers were not clear enough to be scored as truthful. They may have been truthful. It was just impossible to know. So much for pseudo-sciences like polygraphs!

These people didn't know anything about SCOTUS and its definition of porn. They proved to me over and over again that they didn't know anything about internet pornography. They were guessing their way through, faking it to make it, goofing the system. There is a reason that asking people about their sexual fantasies on a flutter just doesn't make sense, scientifically or otherwise. But the nation's judges and the nations judicial system just doesn't care, nor do the one million attorneys in the U.S. who should be filing suit against such government forced invasions of individual privacy and civil rights. They are all just too swept up in the public hysteria and the politicization of pornography in America. They are all too intimidated by an atmosphere of fear and intimidation that has sent a chill over the legal community throughout the entire country. What shirkers. What cowards. Where is Atticus Finch when you need him?

If you want to challenge the flutters you will end up with a very unhappy judge who will be glad to send you back to Happy Town for a prolonged stay to ponder the consequences of your insolence. It doesn't make sense to take on the establishment directly. You'll just get squashed like a bug every time. What I had done at least threw some sand into the gears of an implacable enemy.

The group rallied in my defense. With two therapists on board at that time, the issue divided and conquered. Seeking to curry favor from the group to help her get hired, the new therapist sided with me and said she would sign my release while the old therapist, retiring to out West and understanding my gambit, refused. He wanted me to serve at least another year in group for the offense, bringing it to within six months of the full three years of my probation. Plenty of time for many additional petty torments to be visited upon me.

Therapists, complicit jailers, for that is what they really turn out to be, know that the constant paying in cash and the constant beratement that accompanies group is abusive and nearly unendurable. It is not supposed to be a picnic. You are being punished, after all.

The goal of therapy is to change a person so that there will _no_ be further victims of abuse. Group therapy could not do this in a million years. For the half of SO's in the program, there really are no victims. People whose abuse shows up on the internet to be viewed by others don't know if anyone is seeing it, so it is literally impossible for them to be re-abused. Law enforcement rationalizes their attack on porn as preventing the re-emergence of the recorded abuse on the internet, which they liken to a re-offending of the victim. This is clearly a nonsensical stand to take as it is without any real supporting evidence. It is supported by heuristic testimony of a tiny handful of often unidentified victims. It is in fact made up and there is no evidence to cite any support for this absurd position. The victims in reality have no idea if and when such material is being accessed. Presumably, various protections by the internet industry normally prevent the material from ever being viewed again, and this takes away much of that specious argument. SCOTUS has ruled that such victims can sue for damages if they can identify those who have accessed their imagery. SCOTUS also knows that this is an impossible test. Accessing the case files publicly is extremely difficult because of the illegality of the sought-after information. SCOTUS piled an absurdity on an absurdity.

Do your job law enforcement and industry! If you do, none of the thousands of professional lives and billions of government dollars spent on this problem each year are necessary. Go after the problem, not the public! Because that is what your mission is, that is what you are paid to do. Your mission is not to justify expanded public law enforcement budgets by inflating public fears to crush ordinary nobodies in an endless search to satisfy your lofty ambitions of power and public acclaim. That is so Roman, so 1930's, so last year.

Is this the way to thought crime? Is this the way to _Minority Report_ , 2002? Can the government gain access to the thoughts of those they suspect of crimes or of further crimes? Can they do this because the Courts have been granted by default the power to do so, a power they wield without adequate public oversight, victimizing probationers in their custody in spite of the Constitutional protections of privacy and due process? Can anything required of probationers ever be considered voluntary in any way? Can it be cruel and unusual? Of course.

These judicially sanctioned acts of abuse are a sustaining of the kind of abuse that led many of these people to commit their illegal acts to begin with, as there is a strong relationship between abuse and abusers. The abused become abusers and there never was a truer statement. To interrupt the cycle of abuse it is necessary to have compassionate therapy that deals with the heart of the distinct issues that arise in each individual case. This can't be done in group and it can't be done by a layman with a Master's Degree in psychology. That way lies madness and quackery.

It most especially cannot be done by a therapist who has always worked with victims of abuse rather than abusers. The female therapist we had in group was a harridan, a termagant, a harpy, and a vengeful angel of death. She never missed an opportunity to belittle, humiliate and excoriate every guy in the group, taking full advantage to force servility and various forms of degradation on each of us in front of each other. It was total emasculation. She literally reigned abuse on us and was well hated by all. After the gentle demeanor of our prior, very experienced therapist, she was a shock of cold water delivered from a fire hose to the sound of barking dogs. She was, in short, a beast. It took six weeks of bowing and scraping for me to get her to sign my release. She relished every minute of it like the true sadist that she was. They had to bump her up to administering the dumpy agency to stop her from pissing off any more clients. Petty indignities aside, I still want to sue for medical malpractice, but I doubt that, after her scorched earth practices, there could be anything left standing.

The Puzzle Palace

In the movie _M_ by Fritz Lange, 1931, Peter Lorre portrays a child killer who has an _irresistible impulse_ to kill innocents, thus creating an iconic belief in the modern mind that there is something inherently wrong with a person who would harm an innocent child, that such a person is mentally wired differently, aberrantly, deviantly, in a form of irrecoverable mental illness. On the other hand, the fantasist, like the voyeur, is conceived as someone who is more comfortable with imagining than doing, more comfortable watching than participating. Then there is the unimpassioned observer, attempting to take on a neutral role with a desire to evaluate what one is seeing. The latter is more likened to a scientist trying to comprehend and make sense of an otherwise as yet unknown phenomenon, in what is often today referred to as basic scientific research.

After seeing Lorre's depiction of a child killer, people are much less inclined to ask why there are child killers. There is recognition that such persons do exist, but as if they were already formed that way straight from the moment of their birth. In that view, child killers just are. They're a thing, that's all, which is a very deterministic way of seeing behavior. A better way to deal with the question is to ask, when did Lorre's character become a child killer and why? That would be an even more interesting movie, and would take us much deeper into the realm of the psychological thriller. Indeed, that would take us into the realm of modern therapeutic psychiatry.

The idea in modern therapy is to explore the elements of one's behavior that led to the offense in order to break the offense cycle and not re-offend. This is the purpose of therapy. Typically, one has to go back through one's personal history to seek out this pattern in an attempt to resolve it.

A few of the types from group therapy now follow. Pull out your ick-o-meter and be hereby forewarned of the coming dark side. On the other hand, remember how fragile our shared humanity really is and how rarely we share our most intimate moments with each other. Think about how hard we work to avoid bringing up, or slipping on, the widespread slick of ick that exists just below the surface of our lives. In other words, if we could be convicted on our thoughts, we'd all be in jail.

1) A father, Mr. 1, gets involved in kissing his daughter, eight, under the pretext of the sex talk. He turns himself in after a couple months of discussion with his pastor (and presumably his wife) and serves 9 months in custody. In therapy he proves voluble, domineering, and condescending. He attempts to gain the focus of the group so that he can repeat his assertions that he was abused by his own father, apparently taking comfort in the belief that all abuse is part of a cycle. It is clear that he is very manipulative, but it is a mystery why he sought to publicly punish himself in such a way.

2) A middle-aged man in his forties, Mr. 2, performs cunnilingus on two girls, sixteen. For reasons that are not clear, one or the other girl lets the story get out and presumably later serves as a witness. The man serves 18 months.

3) A young man in his twenties, Mr. 3, gathers illegal porn using P2P software. The P2P software, like all such software, allows other PC's that are connected to it to also download the same files. The prosecutor in his case classified this as distributing illegal material and he served 18 months. There were other unrelated charges.

4) A reserved young man about thirty, Mr. 4, obtains a few illegal files by visiting a foreign site. It is five years later that he is charged with a crime. The FBI breaks the foreign site and finds a record of his download. The FBI then sends him a phishing email and he opens it, thereby giving away his identity and location. He is arrested, but the suspect files have long ago been deleted from his computer. However, a forensic investigation of his hard drive allows the illegal files to be recovered. He serves a short time in custody. During his sexual history he explains that he first had sex at the age of eleven with a girl of similar age. I find this forced admission to be an admission against his interest. It is also both cruel and unusual.

5) Mr. 5, 35, African American, son of two local area teachers, was also a very talkative, manipulative, attention seeking man. With a poor employment record, a drinking problem and his driver's license revoked, he readily acknowledged that he was the troubled kid in his family. He had been cited by forensic investigation, having previously downloaded illegal files deleted from his PC. A music downloader.

6) Mr. 6, mid-life husband with CP conviction who was forced to sell business, subsequently wrote novel.

7) Mr. 7, 20, had sex with step sister and sister, while he was of age and they were not. Had not seen sister in over 5 years and on probation for 4 years, when it was usually three years. Could not pass a polygraph so had to go to group torture for four years. Step mother engineered the conviction as part of divorce, making him the resulting road kill. Only 10 years of sex registration required in his case.

8) Mr. 8, 20, son of retired cop. Initially charged as adolescent with possession of illegal files, but received light treatment. Sent laptop in to be fixed and charged again, as adult. Served 14 days custodial time. Clear fixation on illegal material. Sentencing reflected the influence of his father, who acted to intervene in the sentencing process. Sexually confused and searching.

9) Mr. 9, middle aged very blue-collar guy was convicted of masturbating in front of minor daughter, having her undress. Charge reduced to misdemeanor as incident occurred many years before being reported in divorce.

10) Mr. 10, a man in his fifties, exposed himself to a young boy. Not the first time. Registration for 10 years. A poem for everyone on their departure. A rare repeat offender in need of higher-level psychiatric intervention but clearly not getting it.

11) Mr. 11, about 20, oral sex with a 12-year-old boy while being 17 at the time.

12) Mr. 12, 66, navy veteran, retired, married, adult daughter at home. Convicted on two charges of illegal porn, 12 days in confinement, 180 days of house arrest and four years of probation. He and his wife enjoyed eroticism together. During his time in the navy he said he had seen much more questionable material than he had found on the internet.

13) Mr. 13, Latino, late 20's, father of several children, impregnates a 12-year-old and gets 3.5 years. He has multiple violations of parole.

14) Mr. 14, middle aged, illegal files. Anger issues, molested as child by family member.

15) Mr. 15, Latino man recently out of military service, homeless, convicted of solicitation of a minor on the internet, illegal files on computer. Wait listed by the VA, he was sleeping on Metra trains and unable to stay at homeless shelters in the area because of his conviction.

16) Mr. 16, Middle aged man engaged in oral sex with his young son, who was autistic and the son revealed this fact at school. Served 9 months. His case was eventually taken over by a psychiatrist and he was removed from group. He and wife were forced to move from their apartment complex by neighbors' complaints to landlord.

17) Mr. 17 is a middle-aged man who, with his wife, takes care of several foster children. He is convicted of sexual abuse and serves time. In therapy he and a few others convicted of the more serious crimes have no trouble challenging the therapists on the whole onanism issue, which they see as a necessary outlet. Given the nature of their crimes, I have a hard time not agreeing with them. I respect their right to have a real voice in their therapy. All the rest of us saw forced therapy as just another demeaning blow to what little was left of our rapidly dwindling self-esteem.

18) Mr. 18 is a kid in his late teens caught having sex with a 13-year-old girl in a car on the street by a police officer. This is the kind of case that the therapist called a "Romeo and Juliet case". Police officers can't really be expected to know the difference, but once people are in the system it's a no go on the let go. Oh, for a simpler time.

For all the above there was of course a requirement for sex registry for life, unless otherwise stated. Ethnicity was Caucasian for all the Misters unless otherwise stated. (It was a white suburban County.)

Our very experienced group therapist pointed out that the sexual history polygraph should come later in the process and not at first, as was being done in our cases. By taking the sexual history test first everyone could know if someone might pose an unusual threat based on that information.

The Able test was also relied on to identify an unusual threat. It showed if someone had a specific attraction for pre-teens. Some therapists would not treat these kinds of individuals, presumably because they needed a different form of treatment, or because some therapists believed that they could not be treated.

I had to go back and take an Able test administered by the County mental health department in order to stay in group. My initial evaluation had not included it, and the group therapist indicated that they would not take a person in group who failed it.

In the test, the person being tested looks at an image of the opposite sex and then clicks to the next image. The program evaluates the length of time that the viewer ponders the image before clicking next. I can do this extremely fast so I was asked to slow down. In any event, the program can determine if the viewer has an interest in women and teens, which is considered normal, versus a specific interest in pre-teens, which, at least in therapy, is not considered normal. The program can see if a person has micro seconds of interest lingering on a picture or not.

The fact that the internet, with its surfeit of imagery, blurs age distinction into irrelevancy is a fact which did not even enter into the test. Instead, the line between pre-teens and teens on the test was very clear to me. On the other hand, I could have easily designed such a test using some of the internet's most artistic material that would have had everyone miserably failing the Able test.

The therapist also pointed out that the most difficult person to pass a polygraph on sexual subject matter is the person with a rich fantasy life. Such a person can easily get confused by how questions are asked or worded. The mind is a lot trickier than your blood pressure, pulse and breathing are. The polygraph is merely a blunt instrument at best and its results are excluded from legal proceedings because the results are not considered reliable. I think they should be banned from law enforcement entirely, mainly because what was once a useful tool has now become a treacherous crutch. They inherently violate due process and privacy protections and are far too often used coercively. Their use in national security may be justified in some instances, but their routine application is mis-applied and violative of basic principles of citizenship, especially _American_ citizenship.

Allen Frances, MD, former chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Duke University School of Medicine and former chair of the DSM-IV task force, put it well in **Twilight of American Sanity** :

"As a psychotherapist, I should have known better. The best predictors of a successful treatment are therapist and patient liking each other and working well together. You don't have to like your patient from minute one. And you don't have to like everything about your patient. But to develop a healing alliance, you must eventually find enough redeeming virtues to balance any initial aversions. And it helps a lot to figure out precisely what you don't like about him and what in you makes him seem so bothersome. Most people become much more likable the better you get to know them—the more you understand their plight and your personal reactions to it. And the more people you get to know, the better and faster you are at picking up and taming your own prejudices. Eventually, most people turn out to be likable enough to work with. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people I couldn't treat because I could never find something valuable in them. But there were many hundreds I started off not particularly liking, but who I would end up liking a lot."[174]

I had much the same experience with the group. As I came to know the group's members, I began to like them as individuals. I could see past the person's offense to the human being behind it. I could see the abusive acts that they were convicted of as logical outcomes of the kinds of choices that they were making. In each case there was a mental mechanism at work, constructed over time by that individual, which lead to a kind of inevitably bad outcome. These bad outcomes could have and would have been avoided by more self-aware individuals.

They say that only 4.9% of the total mass in the universe is observable, that the rest of the universe is made up of 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy, neither of which can be seen. I think an individual human's psychology is something like that. Most of it is dark and most of it is just energy. It is worthy of an individual's lifelong pursuit to find the substance somewhere within it.
Chapter 6  
CENSORSHIP  
aka Sex, Lies and Video-tapped

A State of Nature

If over the course of the last 100,000 years or so man has been governed primarily by the dictates of mob rule, the leader feeding off the adulation of the hordes for personal satisfaction in a social exchange for the responsibility of providing leadership, then we are not far from the primeval, even primordial, in other matters of human behavior as well. What we learn quickly in examining man's historic development, however, is that the genetic or scientific, the survival of the species or Darwinian, ideas of evolution lack the social narratives that were behind the enlargement of the human brain during this period. So far, we don't know what happened during those eons and we are left to wonder how we behaved, whether well or badly, with 4 million of our kind in groups under 100 spread across the explosively life filled surface of a large watery planet.

The Tribal model of development only goes so far. It may in some circumstances be able to describe mating rituals, wedding rituals, religious rules, and customs of different societies and periods based on archeological findings, but it doesn't tell us if tribes were primarily monogamous, just for an example. The safe bet is that sex and monogamy has been pretty much the same throughout most of the Pleistocene until recently. A principal factor in favor of this view lies in the very short lives that humans lived up until about 1800.

If homo sapiens had average lifespans of 25 years throughout all of the last 70 thousand years of the Cognitive Era up until about 1800, with a small worldwide population of only some 4 million persons until the start of the Agricultural Revolution 10 thousand years ago, in tribal groups of 100 or fewer members, as itinerant hunters and gatherers, sexual activity had to normally begin near puberty. Children would normally have lost their parents at just about the time they reached puberty. The tribe would have provided some support during these life changing events, but it is hard for us today to imagine what such a life would be like.

Humans were fur bearing mammals until they began to eat meat and get larger brains. Human brains today use about 16% of the energy that the body produces, so supplementing the human diet with higher calorie foods like meat and dairy was necessary for the brain to grow larger. More developed intellect gave sapiens more effective hunting and scavenging skills, leading to an ability to procure higher calorie food and game. The two characteristics went hand in hand.[175]

Mammals usually become active at night, late in the day, and early in the morning, avoiding the heat of the day when their fur would exhaust them. Sapiens could hunt other mammals more effectively when the other animals would be taking it easy in the heat, but this meant that the fur that helped protect Sapiens during numerous ice ages and cooling cycles had become a natural disadvantage. Fur would need to be discarded through the process of further evolution. Mankind's fur evolved to become very fine peach fuzz over time. Further adaptation was needed to stay cool because now the skin was exposed directly to hot sun and this came in the form of the skin's sweat glands.

Skin color it turns out is an adaptive mechanism tied to the degree of latitude on the planet that humans live at. A closer distance to the equator where the sun is the hottest would mean that the skin would have to be darker to protect against the more intense ultraviolet light that burns there. Race is not a biologically meaningful category among human traits. The idea of race is purely a social construct.[176] Skin color is only a handy adaptation of the human body to protect against radiation from the sun, the skin's ability to produce melanin from melanocytes to darken the skin. Evolution has a way of evening things out in the long run, however, and the ability to sweat meant that humans were now more dependent than ever on having nearby sources of water in order to sweat and stay cool while performing their hunting and gathering activities. This also changed the way that pre-Agricultural man lived. As Sapiens move out of Africa about 200,000 years ago, man was dark skinned but evolved to be less so as he spread elsewhere in the world.

In 2015 David Reich at Harvard published research showing that the light skin of Europeans has been around for only a short time, meaning that the evolution of light skin is a relatively recent phenomenon. He estimates that it has been around for less than 5000 years.[177] During this time agriculture had already been developed about 5000 years earlier. The Northern Europeans were dependent on a diet of cereal grains, lacking sufficient Vitamin D for good health. Given time, they evolved, one could say mutated, quickly to produce much less melanin with even a small amount of direct sunlight, thereby producing more Vitamin D through sun exposure.

Vitamin D can be produced by the non-fur skin so that humans in environments without a lot of meat and vegetables can survive in northern exposures with less sun. Northern Europeans depended a lot on grain, so they mutated quickly to very pale skin in a short time. They also mutated to eating dairy and drinking the milk of animals they husbanded, becoming lactose tolerant when humans before were mostly intolerant, and this became a principle source of Vitamin D.

In the tribe children would be suckled for years, which disrupted the female cycle and postponed the next pregnancy, allowing the itinerant mother to carry only one child at a time. By the time civilization was made possible by agriculture, women were no longer itinerant, this practice was curtailed and populations exploded, placing even greater burdens on agricultural production.

Population explosions fed increased genetic diversity and sped up evolution of the species. With 7.6 billion people inhabiting 10% of the planet surface and 50% of humans living on 1% of the earth's surface, we are changing faster genetically all the time. Over the past 5000 years humans have evolved 100 times faster than previously. Homo sapiens is now longer living, taller, smarter, more disease resistant and more adaptable as a result.

The Fall and Shame

The modern world has an uncomfortable co-existence with the idea of original sin. That nakedness was the symbol of the fall represents a western squeamishness derived from antiquity about nakedness and by association about sex. Rather than positive attributes of the beauty and nobility of being human, the human body and sex are forever associated with shame before divinity. Instead, human sexuality is diminished by associating it with the purely animal, a lower world without consciousness or sin. Thus, only sin defines the human experience and only nakedness, desire and sex are its primary behavioral targets. Without this construct would there really be a basic human need for religion?

Why is this a so basic need in the human experience? Presumably because eons of human behavior have sought to control with evolution patterns of behavior that were part of our not fully human progenitor's behavior. Instillation of shame protected generations from what would otherwise have become biologically dangerous behavior, even though shame's usefulness in modern evolved societies is somewhat diminished. Is the perpetuation of sexual shame a throwback? Is the elimination of sexual shame an advancement?

Socially dangerous sexual behavior, such as sex without responsibility for newborns and children, threatens the existence of the species. Such behavior has been seen through human history to be an existential threat. But societies that share child care and rearing can liberate people to explore their sexuality free of restraint. While many a dystopian novel has toyed with this idea, the most famous of all being Aldous Huxley's **Brave New World** , 1931, there are few people today who would see this kind of child rearing as a social advancement. Nevertheless, we see it practiced in most modern cults and in micro societies around the world.

The pro child care policies of societies and governments in Northern Europe are often deemed to be progressive advancements of important social norms that are worthy of being emulated by other advanced societies around the globe. America is often seen as lacking in such progressive social policies, as trailing most other advanced economies. These policies have been determined to be a rational way to mobilize more productive and competitive work forces filled with people who can lead happier and more fully realized lives. It seems to fit the very notion of what a progressive social policy should be.

Leaning toward such modern intellectual forces in a more competitive global economy does challenge long held belief, and does raise the specter that a **Brave New World** poses of a sex crazed society of the future. But Huxley's book was much more of a challenge to the still primarily agrarian way of life in America at the time it was published than today. It's moral qualms now seem a bit quaint in an age dominated by the emergence and importance of the role of, say, the single mother.

Literary Censorship

Literary Censorship began in the middle ages. The Catholic Church had a list of works prohibited for either sexual or heretical content, which was known as the Index _Librorum Prohibitorum_. The Index started in the 9th century. Its first modern edition was produced in 1559.[178] Things that incited lust or challenged church doctrine were thus considered dangerous and threatening to the church's moral authority in such matters. This reflected a political position that undoubtedly had existed for thousands of years under any number of religious regimes. It defines the essence of religion, that some behavior is religious and some is not, which makes religion law based. Religious law resulted from social pressures condemning behavior that was deemed bad. If bad acts were accepted as bad by a large enough group, they could attain the status of a religious prohibition. They became prohibited through a form of political consensus. They achieved political viability and could be just as equally valid law by civil action as by religious law. Religious law and civil law became intertwined and reinforcing throughout human history.

Ethics would not be enough, as in ethics everything is relative, not absolute. Men's brains called for something that a sufficient group of people would agree to enforce, and this had to become abjurations of the most heinous kinds of behavior, at least at first. As orthodoxy spread and was given life through generational change, it could be expected that the concept of what was religious and what was not would broaden. The handing down of religious tenants from generation to generation would give these principles additional power, as they would be handed down along with the practical knowledge required to survive, such as that of hunting and gathering. Generationally derived knowledge has always had this special significance.

In France and England obscenity statutes were passed in the 19th century. In England this took the form in 1857 of the Obscene Publications Act, which criminalized the sale of censored materials. The first literary censorship trial in the United States was prosecuted in 1821 over the printing of **Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure** written by John Cleland in 1749, otherwise known as **Fanny Hill**. The case was brought in Massachusetts and went all the way to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, where the conviction was upheld.[179]

During the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in America there were many vice societies whose job it was to identify material in need of censorship. Foremost among them was Anthony Comstock, a protestant and founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Comstock had so great an influence that his efforts result in the passage of what became known as the Comstock Law of 1873, **An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.** This law required imprisonment and steep fines for possession, publication, sale or mailing of any printed object, image, or instrument deemed obscene, including any article for the prevention of conception or the causing of abortion. **Search and Seizure** warrants were needed by a judge to take and destroy such materials. There was no controversy over the law and many states passed similar laws so they too could prosecute these crimes in state courts.[180]

The Comstock law made the distribution of contraceptive information illegal and reduced the work of midwives as a result. Margaret Sanger, a radical feminist of her time, led the movement toward reproductive rights in the progressive era and earned the enmity of Comstock, who saw to it that her weekly sex education column, "What Every Girl Should Know", was banned from publication. Sanger started her own magazine, **The Woman Rebel,** and was subsequently arrested and charged on criminal counts that carried a possible 45 years in jail. She fled to Europe, only to return after Comstock died in 1915. Comstock caused the arraignment in state and fed courts of 3697 persons, of whom 2740 pleaded guilty or were convicted.[181] Sanger wrote five years later that "the evil that he did lives after him", forcing ignorance on the people and oppressing them with his "witch hunting" crusade.

The Comstock and Sanger crusades led to the eventual acceptance of birth control in marriage in the United States. Women's suffrage in 1920 gave American women empowering voting rights and a political voice, though that voice was insufficient to stop the coming of the American Plan. Instead, enforcement of censorship was seen as preserving purity and decency in an era through the 1920's that was characterized by mass immigration, urbanization, modernization, feminism, temperance and anti-prostitution.[182] For much of this era and beyond it was the Post Office that played the most important role in the censorship of any material, preventing its distribution by the most common means available, postal inspections. Federal prosecutions ruled the day. But in 1953 **Playboy** came along. Hugh Hefner acted in defiance of authorities and succeeded in mailing his new magazine.

The Abuses of the American Plan

Scott Stern reveals in his 2018 book **The Trials of Nina McCall** how hundreds of thousands of young women were jailed by local authorities in America for being suspected of having STDs such as gonorrhea and syphilis, starting in 1917 with World War I and continuing through much of the 1950's.[183] A federally funded effort to protect American troops, it became known as **The American Plan**. In their efforts many states and localities created what were in effect concentration camps to quarantine prosecuted women for extended periods of time. They used dangerous mercury and other treatments of limited value and efficacy. The incarcerated women frequently fought back, rioting, burning down their buildings, going to the press, escaping, and suing. All of this was initially done in the name of the American war effort, resurging during World War II, and finally subsiding after the war with the emergence of the widespread use of penicillin.

The government effort to create and sustain a system that routinely violated the due process rights of hundreds of thousands of young women over a period of decades by placing them in what were in effect concentration camps rivals the blot on American history made by the simultaneous internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It was a psychologically driven tribal response by a patriarchal society to control female sexuality in a period of wartime exigency. Women, especially young women, were deemed an imminent threat to the nation's war machine, and had to be dealt with by any means necessary, of whatever dubious legality. Sex was not a two-way street but rather a pathway for disabling otherwise able-bodied troops.

A proposed amendment to the Selective Service law proposed by the **Commission on Training Camp Activities of the War Department** with the support of the **American Social Hygiene Association** was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on May 18, 1917.[184] It created a "moral zone" within a 5-mile radius of every military installation in the country. This zone was then the responsibility of local officials to enforce "absolute repression" of alcohol and prostitution, as well as beyond, if these vices were available to military personnel. At the time the US Army was ranked only 17th in the world, but by the summer of that year nearly 2 million men had been called to arms.

The federal government funded The Plan through participatory grants to states and localities. Soon State and local Boards of Health created regulations tying in with The Plan known as **Contagious Disease Acts**. Police arrested known prostitutes from existing brothels of the time and those suspected of having a venereal disease based on local rumors, incarcerating them with the involvement and consent of local judges who sentenced them to be held. State and local facilities to incarcerate and treat young women were established throughout the country.

The women thus victimized by the system were largely poor and minority, easy targets for prosecution as they were largely unable to afford adequate representation, not that it would have mattered. Their youth and inexperience, as well as the fact that many were targeted as the result of vicious jealousy, envy, rumor and innuendo, meant that few were prepared to fight back in any effective way. They were the **Other** of polite, older society, ostracized often for social reasons. Forced to undergo humiliating examinations for VD, much of their normal resistance was obliterated by the official and very public shaming that their initial detentions visited on them.

The ability to accurately diagnose STDs was limited. It was done primarily by microscopic slide examination. Many women were declared infected who were not. Conditions inside facilities for detention were often pitiable and unsanitary. The Michigan State Industrial Home for Girls at Adrian had such poor conditions as:

"steel bars on the windows, no equipment for recreation, freezing baths (for those lucky enough to get baths), and a disgusting, hopelessly outdated hospital. Some women were refused clothing and had to stay in bed, naked. The home was overcrowded and understaffed, with one nurse for sixty-five infected women. Even worse was the "heavy rule of 'silence'"— except for a handful of minutes each day, inmates were not allowed to speak or even to smile at one another. Disturbingly, the silence was all too common in American Plan Institutions."[185]

The American Social Hygiene Association members and State and local Health officials organized patrols to go out and identify suspicious women to law enforcement. Law enforcement in turn conducted raids against houses of prostitution. (A whole new kind of neighborhood watch.) That such a program was intentionally discriminatory and cruel toward women, the poor, minorities, foreigners, the ill-educated, those of "ill repute", the genuinely ill of mind or body, and basically almost never white males made it the perfect tool for tribal domination and social control of women throughout its period of implementation. The fact that it came from on high, the Federal Government, imbued with the imprimatur of ultimate authority in a time of war, gave it legitimacy that would otherwise have been easily dismissed in more normal times by officials at lower levels as hokum and huey, possibly by local magistrates as even violative of at least the 1st, 5th and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

The denial of civil rights, the humiliation and abuse, became the most obvious at first in the major cities of New York and Los Angeles in 1919 and from there opposition began to grow. Initial lawsuits of course sided in favor of the government, stating that the reasonable suspicion of local officials was sufficient to arrest, examine and isolate individuals. The Federal government took notice of the lawsuits and decided to try and prevent them from even being brought. The old boys' network was in full force when the military **Commission on Training Camp Activities, CTCA** , met with the **American Bar Association** executive committee to persuade the lawyers not to oppose the American Plan in 1919.[186]

After the War the Chicago police continued to detain thousands of "reasonably suspect" women every year, forcibly treating infected women in Lawndale Hospital, an old fire hazard on the outskirts of town where thousands of incarcerated women were forcibly treated without benefit of education, having nothing to do but clean and prepare meals. The City's corporation counsel ignored questions about the Plan's obvious forms of discrimination.[187]

Nevertheless, after the War the Federal government discontinued the use of matching funds and this dealt a real blow to the continuation of the Plan. It did not however squelch it. The laws at all levels remained on the books and police everywhere continued to use them as they saw fit.

New York, Chicago and LA stopped enforcing The Plan in the 1930's as the Great Depression robbed localities of the funds necessary for it to continue. By this time there were stories coming out about secret forced sterilizations having been carried out on those who had been incarcerated, especially in California and Kansas.[188]

This sorry chapter in American history was then repeated with the onset of World War II, but this time with the assistance of hundreds of FBI agents. The FBI put the **May Act** into effect in June 1941, creating anti-prostitution zones around military bases, primarily in Tennessee and the Carolinas.[189] A massive quarantine hospital capable of handling 2500 women was opened in Chicago as one of many "rapid treatment centers", many of which were former CCC camps built during the Depression. There were more than a dozen such facilities by 1943.[190] Some of the most famous liberals of the era supported the effort, including Earl Warren, Franklin Roosevelt, Fiorella La Guardia, John D. Rockefeller, Eleanor Roosevelt, the **American Bar Association** , the **American Civil Liberties Union** , and Pat Brown of California, later Governor.[191] The execution of The Plan the second time around was even more racially motivated, with some facilities having more than half minorities.

With the end of World War II, the funding for the **Social Protection Division** , which oversaw the Federal effort ended as well. The **American Social Hygiene Association** continued to wage its never-ending war on women however using the laws of The Plan. The use of penicillin to treat gonorrhea and syphilis led the medical community to privatize treatment for venereal disease, but the vigilance of the Health Departments of States and the Health Boards of localities, in conjunction with cooperating law enforcement agencies, continued to find ways to victimize women until well into the 1970s.

The Health Boards were fighting an uphill battle however against the dawn of an age of sexual liberation initiated by Kinsey, Playboy, the 1960's Counterculture and the pill. All the laws created for establishing highly discriminatory, civil rights busting, vindictive campaigns against those with social diseases remain on the books to this day, a testament to whipped up public hysteria and the way nations at war are quick to throw away the civil liberties for which they fight. Ironically, the women that they victimized were very much a part of the War effort at home, many working in factories and offices for the first time, who contributed to the extraordinary production of allied armaments that were to be credited with winning the war.

"Each of the laws that enabled the American Plan- those laws passed at federal behest in 1917, 1918, and 1919- remains on the books, in some form, to this day. Not one of them has ever been struck down by an appeals court. Yet the Plan's legacy is not merely these laws and these precedents. It is the philosophy they helped to cement: that women and promiscuous people are dangerous and morally inferior; that they need to be stopped, locked up, and reformed. This philosophy, and the practice of policing the sex lives of stigmatized groups, especially women, has a long history. This philosophy endures to this day."[192]

War Censorship, the Sedition and Espionage Acts 1917-1918

The limitations on free speech imposed by the **Comstock Act** and the **American Plan** had their corollary in the ill-fated **1918 Sedition Act** , part of the **1917 Espionage Act**. Repealed at the end of 1920, it nevertheless resulted in 1500 prosecutions and over 1000 convictions. It notably led to the famous socialist Eugene Debs being sentenced for 10 years in prison for speech criticizing the government for going to war. Deb's sentence was later commuted by President Harding at the end of 1921. President Wilson had to release or reduce the sentences of some 200 persons convicted under the Act in 1919 per his Attorney General's request.[193] The Act proved to be a government overreach, the kind that would be unlikely to receive constitutional sanction in later eras.

An Act like the **Sedition Act** was in many ways an attempt to silence those who would publicly contradict national propaganda at a time of declared war, a way of socially enforcing a party line deemed important to achieving victory during conflict with another nation, perhaps while even in an existential struggle for the country's survival. Free speech rights were considered inconsequential, especially if the nation itself ceased to be. Later generations of Americans have been far more adamant that it is just such freedoms of speech that are the reason why Americans would seek to fight a war in the first place.

The Life and Death of Free Music—The MP3, RIAA and FBI

A 2013 study revealed that 45% of Americans downloaded copyrighted material from the internet on a regular basis and that 70% of those that did were under 30 years of age.[194]

Stephen Witt describes in **How Music Got Free, Then End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy** how he got into pirating music in college when it was all a very new thing in 1997.[195] Students used underpowered computers to connect to their university's internet networks. These networks were of course designed to facilitate education. On the other hand, access to the internet was supposedly not designed to facilitate the free dissemination of the entire universe of the world's copy protected intellectual property. But, for a while anyway, that's exactly what happened.

By the 2000's the internet became a spy-crafter's hunting ground and the world's spy agencies took over, obliterating privacy forever and bringing a semblance of order to the internet for the first time by joining forces with the law enforcement agencies of their countries. Suddenly everything that happened on the net was fair game, not just the nefarious. Big business joined the fray, making Silicon Valley rich in the process. Business created large IT Departments that began finding means of cloaking, cyphering, and walling off various parts of their operations online, seeking to detect and frustrate intrusions into their proprietary networks. Government created Cyber Commands to measure and deter the cyber capabilities of other governments. Talented personnel began wandering between these universes, trading their skills and acquiring new ones. Silicon Valley became an arbiter, its executives aligning their firm's policies either with the anti-privacy positions most often put out by government agencies seeking to deter terrorism and crime, or, as with other executives and firms, by aligning with the policy of a free and open internet safe from government control and privacy intrusion. ATT frequently cooperated with the government's thirst for meta-data. Apple frequently fought the government's efforts to break the company's data protection on their iPhones.

Tim Berners-Lee devised the source code for the internet in 1989 while working at **CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research**. He remembers his time at CERN as relatively free of heavy government oversight. "The spirit there was very decentralized. The individual was incredibly empowered. It was all based on there being no central authority that you had to go to ask permission. That feeling of individual control, that empowerment, is something we've lost." He thinks the net has become "anti-human", a place for corporate monopolization and government spying.[196]

But during Witt's time at college, downloading music wasn't even called pirating, it was just downloading music and nobody thought about calling it anything else. Witt had 1500 gigabytes of music by 2005, most of which he never listened to. He obtained all this music from P2P networks like BitTorrent, peer-to-peer (other people's computers), Napster, websites, and chat channels. He had the equivalent of many basements full of albums stored digitally on a number of computer drives, the sum total of which would together fit in a shoebox. He admits that curiosity, competition and interest in the subculture of those leading a digital download trend were his primary motivations.[197]

The invention of the MP3 in Germany in the mid 1990's brought about the use of file compression technology to convert digital music files to much smaller file sizes than were then available on CD's. Dell Glover and the online group known as Rabid Neurosis (RNS) became adept at converting some 20,000 albums that Dell snuck out of the Polygram CD factory where he worked in rural North Carolina. Over the course of 11 years they distributed the music free online. They created suspicion by going public with new music two weeks before the CDs even hit the market.[198] They became, for a time at least, the World's biggest music pirates.

Between 2000 and 2007 music sales dropped by 50 percent as a result of the downloading of pirated music around the world, leading to the collapse of popular firms such as Tower Records, and transforming forever the landscape of the world of music. A music industry model, one of wrapping a few popular songs by an artist with a dozen other songs in order to sell a full album at an inflated price, a model that had worked so well for decades, collapsed. The shoe was now, finally, on the other foot. An industry known for its greed and lack of regulation now suffered the long overdue consequences as music became free, widely available, and universally shared. The market disruption caused by the internet for the industry was total.

"The industry's initial response was ham-fisted: a campaign of "educational" lawsuits aimed not at pirate masterminds but at individual file-sharers, many of whom were too poor to cough up damages."[199]

The **RIAA, Recording Industry Association of America** , strategy was ineffectual, and, by going after the "little guy", alienating to most of America's ideas about fairness and justice. Music executives and top performers had long achieved the highest compensations of anyone on the planet. To see their industry representatives beating up on ordinary citizens exercising their first amendment rights became politically toxic. It damaged the image of the industry even further. By 2005 the RIAA had brought 16,837 "educational" lawsuits against mom and pop downloaders. At one point, these suits clogged the American courts with more than half of all intellectual property lawsuits on the federal docket.[200]

The development of the compact portable media player for listening to mp3 music, especially the iPod by Apple, seemed to solidify the trend toward downloading music files. It put the imprimatur of Apple, the leading technology firm of the era, on the practice of downloading, creating a new social norm, the RIAA be damned. Apple soon offered iTunes, a means of downloading songs one at a time for about a dollar, which quickly became the new industry model. Downloading free music on sites like **Napster** and **Pirate Bay** came under fire during the 2000s. Both companies were driven out of business by crippling lawsuits and the actions of various governments. Even the mainstay programs of P2P, computer to computer networks, were sued, and for a time went out of business as software sites refused to make their free programs available for download. Soon, however, Spotify and other streaming media sites came into wide dissemination, dominating the music business. Performers no longer looked to music sales as their principal source of earnings, turning instead to live performances in large arenas and sport stadiums, where they could make a million dollars or more in a single night. Physical album sales dropped to one third of U.S. sales and half of world sales of music by 2013.[201]

On September 12, 2007 Dan Glover left the former Polygram Plant in North Carolina for the last time. Glover's associates at RNS performed their last leak on January 19, 2007, after which the group shut down, spooked by the disappearance on the web of one of their primary distribution servers in Hungary. Glover had just made his last album leaks. Warned by a coworker at the end of a double night shift about the presence of an unknown person standing around in the parking lot, he walked out to his car at 6 am while it was still dark. He saw three men as he approached and pressed his fob remote, the truck chirping in response. The three men simultaneously drew their guns and told him to put his hands in the air.[202] From the Cleveland County Sheriff's Office, the officers told him that the FBI was searching his house. He was allowed to drive his truck home, but on getting there was confronted with half a dozen FBI agents wearing bulletproof vests. Also there to greet him was a fully kitted out SWAT team. For the FBI, this moment was the result of years of effort.

The FBI's **Operation Fastlink** netted hundreds of convictions. Glover got 3 months, which he served in 2010. Adil Cassim, an LA 29-year old living at home with his mother, the leader of RNS, was found not guilty in a jury trial by means of jury nullification. In nullification the jury concludes that the defendant is guilty but believes that the punishment for a conviction is unjust. The jury in effect declared the law invalid and refused to convict.[203]

Censorship in the Movies—The MPAA

Since the 1915 Supreme Court case of **Mutual vs. Ohio** , movies were not considered protected speech or accorded the protection of the First Amendment in the same way as print media.[204] As a result, six states and hundreds of local communities had film censorship boards across the United States. The American film industry, under the old studio system until the fifties, exercised its own strict form of censorship called the movie **Production Code** , which also became known as the **Hays Code**. In 1952 the State of New York tried to prevent the showing of _The Miracle_ , Rossellini, 1948, which went to the US Supreme Court in 1952, where the Court ruled that movies were now to be protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court's further decisions on the matter in the fifties gave full freedom of expression to film making by the early 1960's.[205]

This led to the now familiar movie rating system known as the MPAA code, which sets forth standards for the ratings G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17. It went into effect in 1968 and has been revised a number of times since. Today, the MPAA is made up of a board of 12 parents, half men and half women, who evaluate each film. Various rules of thumb apply, such as one f-word is allowed in a pg13 rated film, after which the film will be rated R. The MPAA code is voluntary and films are not rated unless submitted.

Since the adoption of the MPAA code, American films have included more sex, violence, and offensive language than ever before. They have dealt more often and more effectively with many important social issues such as addiction, abuse, racism and crime. They have been able to do this with more realistic drama and without having to fall back on obviously moralizing about their subjects. Still, the most daring and even painful to watch of such independent films, such as _Eighth Grade_ , 2018, have miniscule audiences in the United States and have trouble making back their costs of production. The ability of these films to reach beyond the merely auteur is limited.

Modern Censorship/Regulation of Adult Materials and Uses

Traveling box shows, or peep shows, started in the mid-17th century, showed various kinds of 3-dimensional miniature entertainments. For a time, peep shows migrated to children's toys. They used peep holes or open sides for viewing. By the mid-19th century the camera obscura was used to project entire scenes in private rooms, leading to the portrayal of sexual activity, and this led to peep boxes being used to portray pornographic images.[206] Peep shows began using a series of cards that could be cranked through, thus depicting moving pornographic images, and these were made available for viewing at bars and cafes for small fees.

By the 1990s there were many new moving picture inventions being created to advance the fledgling field of cinematography, the most famous of which became the kinetoscope of Thomas Edison. Edison started the first Kinetoscope Parlor in New York City in 1994 with a host of machines designed for individual viewing. Fifty feet of celluloid film were strung on sprockets within the machine to show 1.5 minutes of moving pictures, creating the 35mm film standard.[207]

With the advent of the film industry came the modern peep show, the development of the peep show booth which allowed for self-pleasuring, and the live peep shows of the latter half of the 20th century. The booths became outdated and anachronistic in later day video rental porn stores, but lasted in many until the age of the DVD.

While the Supreme Court gave first amendment protection to adult uses such as pornography, local jurisdictions were given the power to zone it in restrictive ways. Typically, this took the form of restricting such uses at least 500 feet away from any school or church. Later it became common to restrict adult uses such as pornography or nude night clubs to being 500 feet from a residential area, with the result that they almost always ended up in the industrial areas of incorporated cities.

Many porn stores ended up outside metropolitan areas on rural highways in unincorporated areas. Patrons had the assurance that in driving some distance from their cities and homes to shop for rentals they would be unlikely to encounter their boss or next-door neighbor. Soon however, these adult businesses were overcome by the success of internet porn in the late 90's.

By the 90's porn on tape had become so prevalent that it had popped up in the "adults only" sections of local downtown and shopping center stores where previously there had only been regular cinematic tape rentals. These new uses were permitted as ancillary zoning to regular video stores and their largely male preserves were often cloaked behind lurid red curtains and warning signs against entry by the casual and underage. Entering them became, of course, a male rite of passage.

In 1929 standardized sound production for Hollywood films became available and this led to the distinct departure of narrative film from non-narrative film, which was mostly made up of erotic shorts at the time. Erotic shorts continued to develop albeit in an underground manner, as they were generally considered illegal in most jurisdictions. Many had no sound and relied on explicit sex, filmed on distant tripods or with indecipherable closeups. They became the "stag" films of their day, finally eclipsed by the emergence of commercial pornography exhibited in theaters in the 1970s.

In 1969 Denmark became the first country in the world to legalize pornography. Denmark did not make child pornography illegal until 1980. In 1980 it established a minimum age of 18 for actors.[208] The law requires that pornography in Denmark must be kept out of view of children and cannot be sold to children under the age of 15. Sex with animals was not made illegal until 2015.

Now considered vintage, the Color Climax and Rodox brands became the basis of modern pornography, emphasizing themes such as teens, incest and watersports. A small but significant part of Danish porn of the 1970s included underage actors and is now considered illegal, forming the basis of what today is frequently targeted by government censors. The underage material got its full airing in the early days of the internet, prior to government intervention, and thus became a staple on the internet for a number of years while being widely disseminated.

In Denmark it is not illegal to possess material with actors 15 and above if the actors have given their consent, the age of consent being 15 years of age. Such material is prevalent on the internet and is not usually censored by the major U.S. search engines. The assumption one is left with is that it is not generally considered child porn by Western government standards. The images and films of Tove Jensen (Tiny Tove), a 15-year old whose mother was a well-known porn star of the era, are especially prevalent on the web, where in at least one film the mother and daughter both perform.

European production of commercial sex films in the 1970s led to the establishment of adult film houses in the United States. Their creation led to the Supreme Court ruling in favor of "community standards" for judging the legality of their content, giving local jurisdictions wide leeway in what they could declare illegal, while at the same time granting first amendment protection to such adult uses for the purposes of local zoning administration. This was a contradictory set of opinions that enabled major cities like New York to create tenderloin districts using erotic theaters as their basis. Subsequently, Times Square became a disreputable haven for pornographic theaters and prostitution in the 1970s, a pattern repeated in many cities across the nation. Independent film making became much more experimental with sexual content everywhere around the world, even to some extent in Hollywood.

The 1970s also led to the open production of pornography in the U.S., much as portrayed in the film **Boogie Nights** , which highlights how an entire industry dedicated to making such films began in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles. Simultaneously, the video cassette recorder, VCR, was being developed and released to the public, gaining wide distribution for both mainstream and erotic films.

The Post Office had its long history of enforcing standards on printed materials available through the U.S. mail and the U.S. Customs Service had a similar responsibility for screening printed and filmed matter coming into the country from sources abroad. With the advent of VCR tapes this responsibility expanded. Confiscation was the usual response of the Service and prosecution for importing illegal materials was rare to non-existent. Content such as underage, incest, and beastiality were censored. Suddenly large volumes of VCR tapes were being sent through the mails, making it difficult to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate films. Further, advertising adult films, primarily to men, through the mail became a virtual cottage industry of its own. Never before in the history of the nation had American men been so thoroughly exposed to such a feast of fast burgeoning adult film content. This placed the Post Office in the unenviable position of facilitating the wide dissemination of the kind of highly lurid printed material it had once vigorously censored.

With the new internet all restrictions on content were gone and sexual material of every kind flooded unimpeded into the U.S. in short order. The internet was a worldwide, free and open means of communication between individuals and web sites. The creation of new web sites with illegal content became an immediate priority for the newly strained law enforcement resources of major western countries.

The monitoring and interception of individual communications about illegal content was a much harder nut to crack in the incipient stages of the internet. Such dissemination was greatly aided by the existence of new IRC chat rooms that enabled people of like interest to congregate in thousands of chat rooms labeled for thousands of interests in hundreds of languages. The anonymity that existed on the internet at the time emboldened people to speak of things in a frank and open manner that had never existed before and many people took advantage of the opportunity. This also meant that topics of discussion that had never been open to public discussion before suddenly had their outlets. Legitimate discussions of taboo topics like incest and underage sex became popular channels.

IRC chat could lead to the exchange, usually by email, of materials depicting sexual activity. Soon, the advent of the MP3, the digital song file, exploded onto the internet. In short order, P2P, person to person, became available as free software programs, allowing the free exchange of files directly between individual computers, further facilitating such file transfers. Soon I-pods were filled with hundreds, even thousands of song titles, all downloaded for free from P2P programs easily available on the internet. This led to the proliferation of file transfers of every kind imaginable, including files containing sexual content. Movies, books, and other copyrighted material were targeted. Films could be pirated by unsophisticated means such as videotaping them at theaters, or by the hacking of DVDs. Information about how to carry out such procedures, in essence instructions on how to exploit built in protections on CDs and DVDs, were not hard to find on the internet by the early 2000s.

A wild west atmosphere reigned by 2007. File downloaders like **Rapidshare** and **Megaupload** hit their heyday, feeding the exploding demand for free content. Early speeds of downloading on the internet had been measured in kilobytes per second, taking many hours to download a single feature film, but by the turn of the century such speeds began to increase. With DSL broadband one could generally expect that a feature film could download in a few hours and increasing numbers of people were taking advantage of the opportunity. Old Danish, Swedish, German, Russian, and Japanese sex films long past their prime were suddenly given new life. Americans in particular, having never had access to this kind of content before, were able to finally bypass U.S. Customs to see sexual content from around the world, much of it making similar American content look conservative, white bread and tame in comparison. Homemade amateur sex filmed with cheap cameras took off, providing a reality tinged alternative to the commercial market.

All this was enough to get some very enterprising people into trouble however. By 2011, after the role up of **Napster** and others by lawsuits and government action, the bit torrent P2P file downloader **Pirate Bay** was raided in Sweden at the instigation of the MPAA and Swedish film and music producers. Like many similar internet related trials around the world the amount of evidence was daunting, but prosecutors settled on the charge of downloading just 33 copyright protected files, the number no doubt being the function of a purely arbitrary decision, and the reality that it is much easier to prove beyond a reasonable doubt a much smaller universe of violations than a very large one.

**Pirate Bay** was founded in 2003 by a Swedish think tank called simply enough _Pyratbyran_. The three founders were Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredik Neij, and Peter Sunde and they were put on trial in Sweden in 2009, found guilty, fined about $6.9 million, and each was sentenced to a year in prison for violation of copyright. Final sentencing for Sunde was in 2012, after which he went on the lam, wanted by Interpol, for 2 years before being caught in the southern county of Skane, Sweden in 2014.[209]

Warg and Neij also went on the lam. Warg was arrested by local police executing a warrant in Cambodia in 2012. Neij was arrested in November of 2014 at the Thai-Laos border.[210] His wife was with him when he was arrested. According to the report, Thai authorities had been contacted apparently by Swedish authorities and a U.S. film group a month prior with his photo. It appeared that the MPAA rode the Swedish government for years on the case. That American corporate interests played a major role like hounds of hell in what was really a European case is both telling and an indication of how interconnected our world has really become.

Pirate Bay as a bit torrent site continues in existence to this day, claiming that is a non-profit located in the Seychelles. It was raided by the Swedish police in December 2014 and has faced other challenges from the U.S. government and others since. Most of the files downloaded are television shows, 44%, followed by porn, 35%. Only 9% is estimated to be audio files.[211]

Then there is the story of Kim Dotcom, featured in places such as _60 Minutes_ and major publications around the world. A large flamboyant man, Kim Schmitz founded **Megaupload** and ran it from 2005 to 2012. It became the 13th most popular site on the internet, accounting for 4% of all traffic. At the time he was charged by the U.S. Justice Department in 2012 Kim was a New Zealand resident. He was charged with copyright infringement, money laundering, racketeering and wire fraud.[212] In 2017 a New Zealand court ruled that Kim could be extradited to the U.S. to face charges. In 2018 a New Zealand appellate court upheld the ruling. Kim is currently appealing that ruling to the New Zealand Supreme Court.

Two weeks after the filing of charges by the Justice Department, Kim faced an armed raid of his home in New Zealand led by 76 police officers and two helicopters. They seized $17 million in assets including 18 luxury cars and art, and froze $175 million in 64 worldwide bank accounts. The Crown was later challenged in court and the warrant used was held as too broad in terms of seizing relevant evidence, specifically that turning over all of Kim's hard drives to the FBI for analysis was a breach of extradition law. The FBI had made copies of all the hard drives and sent them to the U.S. The right of Kim to the resulting FBI investigation files then became a major subject of litigation, the FBI vigorously fighting having to turn them over to Kim's defense.

Kim Dotcom sued the local police over the excessive force of the raid and won a substantial judgment, saying, "We were shocked at the uncharacteristic handling of my arrest for a non-violent internet copyright infringement charge brought by the United States, which is not even a crime in New Zealand."[213] In 2014 the appellate court ruled that the FBI's taking of evidence was illegal. The U.S. tried to have his bail revoked. In the same year a High Court in Hong Kong ruled that Kim could sue to get back $60 million held there as there was no clear path to serve legal summons on **Megaupload**.

The **GCSB, New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau** , New Zealand's NSA, had surveilled Kim for weeks prior to the raid on his home at the request of police, illegally helping the police to locate him and tap his phone. Just as in the U.S. the **GCSB** is targeted on foreign agents and not permitted to spy on the domestic citizens of New Zealand, or legal residents within its own country. The Prime Minister John Key had to make a very public apology to Kim and New Zealand voters for this very illegal government activity. In 2012 a Chief High Court judge ordered the release of information as to who got the illegally obtained information, thus allowing Kim to sue for damages. The decision was upheld on appeal the following year.

The case created a media firestorm in New Zealand and widespread condemnation of the actions of the government by media personalities in New Zealand. The view became that in pursuing Kim Dotcom at the behest, constant urgings, and legal involvement of U.S. officials, New Zealand had compromised and made subservient its sovereignty and independence to that of the United States, something that it should never have permitted.

The **Pirate Bay** and Kim Dotcom cases highlighted the lengths that the Justice Department and FBI would go to pursue their anti-piracy agenda, an agenda set for them by the MPAA, RIAA, Hollywood and big corporate media in the United States. Their power led to their dominance of and eventual evisceration of conventional P2P file sharing, a rogue act that made them little better than the pirates they were pursuing, damaging a worldwide communication medium in favor of black box government intervention and censorship, all done without the knowledge or participation of the American public. And it was all done for one reason and one reason only: American profits and corporate enrichment. There were no good guys anywhere anymore.

Internet Privacy

The American approach to the development of the internet was to let the market decide how it should regulate itself. Section 230 of Communications Decency Act of 1996 freed websites from liability for the content posted by their users. If advertisers used sites to track or gather data on users, they were free to do so. In contrast, the European Union adopted the **General Data Protection Regulation** for its 34 countries in 2018, which lays much more responsibility on service providers for security and privacy.[214] The American approach was useful during the heyday of the internet when everything was new and platforms needed some protection from their most errant users. The law was seen initially at least to protect the fastest growing and often leading part of the internet, porn, from excessive government intrusion. Privacy at first was also not a concern, as everyone just assumed that users were, for the most part, anonymous.

The fine small print on user agreements composed by the internet's first giants, firms like Google on search and Facebook on identity, was happily ignored by most Americans for the time being. Only in the current time, when bad actors on the net include whole nations like Russia and Korea, does it become apparent that internet privacy is indeed a very important thing. It can spell the fate of nations. The EU's new, more rigorous approach is the **GDPR,** intended to assure individual privacy over corporate profit. It is making operations for the big internet firms in Europe both more complex and expensive than in America. For the time being.

The number of mobile phones has increased from 750 million to over 5 billion between 2000 and 2010 (now over 7 billion). The number of users of the internet increased from 350 million to 2 billion persons during the same period.[215] As of 2019, 4.3 billion people had internet access, or 56% of the world's population.[216]

China and India have both experienced major economic impacts from the internet because they are its two largest markets. There are 1.3 billion mobile phone users in China and 1.18 billion users in India.[217] China, where citizens are more comfortable with mobile payments than with traditional banking, consumers spent $17 trillion a year on making payments by mobile phone in 2017.[218] In comparison, Americans make less than $125 billion in payments by mobile phone, placing them far behind the Chinese.[219]

Whereas China is trying to wall the internet off in order to control the information that its citizens see, India has tried to develop the kinds of technology offered by the big American internet companies as free public goods. India created since 2009 the **Aadhaar** identity system for its citizens, which now includes 1.21 billion people identified by face, fingerprints and iris scans. Citizens can use the system to verify identity for a variety of purposes. 500 million have done so. More importantly, government benefits for hundreds of government programs have been sent to Indian citizens billions of times, saving billions of dollars to the Indian government in the process.[220]

Events of recent years have overtaken the internet, changing its image from that of a disruptive agent of change, freedom and open expression to that of a communication medium easily exploited for commercial purposes and weaponized by nations. This has been characterized by a succession of well publicized hacks of some of America's biggest retailers, in which credit card records of millions of customers have been stolen. The Stuxnet virus cyber weapon, developed by the Americans and Israelis, was publicly revealed to have been used against the Iranian nuclear development program in 2010. There was the North Korean hacking of Sony in 2014, virtually shutting down the company for months, by the country's dictator, Kim Un Jong, in retaliation for the pointed comedy film _The Interview_. There was the theft of 21.5 million personnel records from the U.S. government's Office of Personnel Management by the Chinese in 2015, which included theft of 5.6 million fingerprints, an action capable of putting covert intelligence agents lives at risk. In 2016 North Korea hacked and stole tens of millions of dollars from the Bangladesh central bank in an effort to subvert international economic sanctions.[221] And of course, there is the Russian hacking of the U.S. 2016 Presidential election to add to the mix. And these are only some of most famous events that have occurred.

According to a report by the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, U.S. losses from the theft of stolen intellectual property are between $225 and $600 billion dollars per year.[222] Most of these losses are attributable to China, which uses its vast security state apparatus to exploit the internet in every way that it can.

Russia is no different. In 2008 Russia used denial-of-service attacks against Georgian television stations to take them off the air just as Russian tanks invaded in order to gain tactical advantage against the Georgian population. It is considered highly probable that Russia was behind the 2015 hack of Ukraine's electrical grid, cutting off power to 225,000 Ukrainian customers in the midst of that conflict.[223]

It is what is not known about the actions taken by bad actors on the internet, what is kept secret for reasons of defense and national security or to secure important commercial interests, in other words what is not publicized, that should probably be even more a cause of concern to the world. Often, we will only know about these events after some time has passed. Waiting for a hot issue to cool down may make disclosure less problematic, but that only means that the hottest issues to arise with internet privacy may not be made public for decades, if ever.

Ripley's Believe It or Not

By the mid 90's the internet was everywhere. Email became the newest means of communication, along with chatrooms and Usenet. At first there were not many websites, though there was a major proliferation of internet search engines. Telephone connections ruled at first, their strange atonal startup cries easily heard in the apartment next door. The slow speeds of telephony would soon impede the progress and growth of the net.

But humans are a creative lot and are often good at exploring, discovering and exploiting new ways to communicate. I once had a rat who ate his way through the heavy plastic lining at the bottom of both my garage doors to get to a tasty, abundant supply of birdfeed that I kept there. I discovered what I took to be a mouse one morning when I opened the garage door and he/she literally leapt out of the top of the bag, charging to freedom beneath the nearest garage door.

I moved the birdfeed to the basement, thinking that this way I had heard the last of my unwelcome guest. I was wrong about that. Weeks later I noticed something odd. The bucket of birdfeed sitting in the basement seemed to have been disturbed. Birdfeed littered the floor around the bucket in a way that suggested something more had happened than just a gust of wind. So, I moved the bucket to the top of a table and soon observed in following days that the same thing was occurring with the bucket there. Birdseed was everywhere! How a mouse could have lept onto the table and then into the bucket mystified me. And surely this could not be the same mouse from the garage?

I set a mouse trap and went to bed, relaxing as sleep swept over me, when I heard a loud click emanating from the basement. Got 'em I thought!

The next day I ventured cautiously down to check things out and found the trap completely flipped over with a very large mouse indeed, one with a very long tail. Only when I turned the trap over with gloved hands, I found the real Night Marauder, not a mouse but a full-grown rat with thick palomino and white fur, a handsome rat at that I thought, but very dead. Now it made sense that a rat could have carried out the spectacular gymnastics in my basement, leaping onto a table and so on.

This was not, however, the end of the story. Months later, after a minor invasion by numerous tiny field mice via the basement, I began to wonder what could possibly be going on. Finally, early in March one day my kitchen suffered an incursion by a colony of red lawn ants that I had seen in the backyard during the summers. I reacted just the same as I did on those summer days, with an all-out assault that left little doubt as to the existence of a dominant species.

Only later, upon subsequent sightings, did it finally occur to me that I should follow the ants to see where they traveled, finding their runs. They led me to a corner of the patio and a hole covered with leaves that burrowed deep into the house foundation. The hole penetrated into the basement just above the sill plate, and while small, was big enough for the Night Marauder to do as he pleased.

_I had discovered that Rats are among the few animals that can scratch and bite their way through just about anything that humans use for habitation, including but not limited to materials such as concrete._ This is a well-known fact in every major and minor city in the world, where buildings are routinely constructed to withstand such invasions. Still, it came as a kind of revelation that an ordinary animal can compromise the modern concrete of a suburban home.

It just seemed to defy logic. How could such a rat have evolved to deal with concrete, when rats haven't had time to develop such a skill, at least in evolutionary terms? Rats are mammals, just like humans, and are notoriously co-existent with human habitations. They have lived among humans for pretty much as long as there have been humans. They have developed ways of observing human behavior, including how humans store food, so much the better in terms of finding their next meals. They also eat people. On occasion. Or at least bite them, for a bite, and thus the scourge of the bubonic plague which decimated Europe in the middle ages. What have we learned from all this? Simply: _Rats have always and will always find a way_.

That's how it was with the internet. It was just there. A new fact of life. Waiting for people to figure out how to use it.

People who push erotic material are human beings, just like the rest of us, and they certainly aren't rats, such an assertion being the very height of de-humanization, which is in itself a kind of slander on our species. But in determining the value of the internet, it quickly became apparent that what was unique about this new form of communication, which so clearly placed it apart from anything known before in human history, was its inherent anonymity. That anonymity unleashed the negative side of human nature, _its darkness_ **.** This was an open invitation.

For the first time in human history ordinary people could and would gladly talk to each other in complete anonymity. What about 900 numbers you say, which came first? They are, or were, anonymous too? Not really. They've got your phone number, just like the Feds would have it if you were a suspected criminal and the Feds had a warrant to tap your phone. Even worse, if you were under criminal suspicion, they would have the ability to use a warrant to get your call records from your phone company, showing all those 900 calls you made.

Personally, I just think that when people first got on the internet and found that they could talk about anything with impunity, things just naturally turned to the subjects that humans find the most interesting, but which they are the least interested in discussing with anyone they know. Given that early users of the internet were overwhelmingly young male techno files, geeks for lack of better identifiers, the preferred topic of discussion was, of course, sex.

It quickly became evident that attractive young women were not waiting in large numbers to fill the brand-new chat rooms with available prospective dates. Instead men discussed sex with each other, and boy did they discuss sex. Every kind of sex, including some kinds of sex that hadn't even been invented yet. Sex stories proliferated for amusement and whole new kinds of genres were created, such as the ever popular "Mind Control" genre, where the idea is to be able to control the mind of anyone one wishes to have sex with. (This wasn't one of my childhood fantasies, but it seems that I'm very alone in this.)

This might have been considered nothing more than adolescent fantasizing, but that was just the start. As soon as a few websites with erotic materials burgeoned, chat rooms filled with people trading such material, and the Usenet, with its hundreds and then thousands of channels, began trading in eroticism. Peer to peer programs hit within a few years. They were championed by traders in newly digitized music. The burner program for converting digital files to compact discs soon came along. It didn't matter that there were so few women on the net. The guys had effectively carved out a niche. Even Ebay at first thrived with internet porn, on video tape of course. Porn was the first real currency of the internet. It could be folded, spindled and mutilated. It didn't matter. If it could be done with porn, it was done with porn. Best of all, it might turn you on.

The prevalence, some would say the dominance, of internet porn in the early days of the net gave rise to a thirst for more. More processing speed, faster downloading times, more hard drive space, everything that everyone was seeking in their newest PC upgrade. This fit well with the American consumer ethic, and let's face it most of the early netizens were young, highly consumer driven American males. Soon there was a booming PC business that poured forth new versions of laptops and PC towers in an endless parade of increasing power and ability. Prices soared to $1000 or more for a competent model in just a few years in the late 1990's. Apple and Microsoft led the Dotcom boom.

Major publications suddenly became aware of the explosion of internet porn and led with feature articles, citing one another on a small number of egregious cases of inappropriate material, creating a hypersensitive, highly exploitative public hysteria and fashioning the early media echo chambers of today. America, where porn had become regulated since the 1980's, where the production of porn had been turned boring and white bread by corporate overseers, suddenly was being invaded from off its shores for the first time, and not by communists or Russians, but by German, Japanese and other pornographic imports. Material like incest and animal sex acts, strictly forbidden in the U.S. and always previously caught by U.S. Customs before entering the country, now flooded in indiscriminately across the nation's underseas telephone cables.

Usenet suddenly had every kind of material, copyrighted or not, being posted to its channels. Special providers able to host huge archives of the material popped up. One of the most successful, **Easynews** , made it possible to access well compiled and up to date archives of virtually everything by subject matter. Instantly searchable and with reliable preview thumbnails, it was possible to zero in on anything being posted on Usenet, no matter how obscure or remote. At first this meant any kind of content, but soon steps were taken to remove underage content. For the next 10 years **Easynews** was the place to go to monitor the internet, during which time websites dedicated to porn at first exploded, then imploded, while porn entered a pop-up phase, then a virus pop-up phase. Sites advertising illegal porn content never stayed up for long but they began to be hunted down by authorities in various countries, often with the help of the FBI and Interpol, often focusing on countries in the former Eastern Block, where an abundance of homegrown computer expertise combined with weak local law enforcement to benefit the unscrupulous in a hurry to make a quick buck.

Sex, always a conjunction of the physical and psychological, it turns out can take many forms. That a large part of sex takes place in the brain has always meant that there is basically no limit to what the mind of an individual can find sexual, from the real to the very unreal. Sex is in no small part an act of imagination. Long before an individual has sex, he or she has imagined it hundreds, even thousands of times. That humans developed outsized craniums to house outsized brains has helped un-tether sex from the merely mechanical and has sustained it with the power of an ever-increasing capacity for both transcendence and illusion.

In the realm of transcendence, the most basic human drive is for understanding. It is an aspiration for knowing as much about the world as possible in order to improve one's chance for survival. The ultimate in understanding is therefore transcendence, defined as the all-knowing, a being that given the infinite nature of knowledge, can't exist in the real world but can exist in the world of the transcendent, a world that is also admittedly not real.

All this is perfectly rational. It forms the basis of much of human thought. However, a short step further and we have the existence of the wise man, so often cited in religious literature of every kind in the world. The wise man is venerated for his depth and breadth of knowledge, which aides his whole tribe. Wise men are men though and soon they see that it is possible to use their authority to make moral assertions. They can enhance their political support in the tribe by allying with whoever is currently the alpha male and pretty soon you have tribal rules. Alpha males and religious wise men both benefit from basic rules governing human behavior lived in small groups, and together they have ruled much of human behavior for tens of thousands of years. They have done this while human brains were still growing in their complexity and understanding.

Governing, setting rules, and religious moralizing were self-reinforcing group behaviors that became dramatically more formalized after the Agricultural Revolution. They became the basis for organizing the first human empires that led to the Romans and the death of Christ. During the Middle Ages these two forces strengthened their grip on the human imagination, becoming the pillars around which feudal life was constructed.

All of this is to say that religious influence on sexual behavior is a normal regulator of human behavior in general and it has _always_ been closely associated with the political power of the state in terms of its power of rule-making. With the advent of the internet, sexual material was freed from political constraint, the governing states of each country and their laws about porn, and rose into an unregulated global universe that existed above, or at least apart, from the nation state.

The thing about real pornography is that there are no rules, no means of interfering in the process of discovering sexuality in its infinity of mental interpretations. What is sexual is whatever we want to imagine it to be, which for the individual is any way that the individual wishes it to be. It is unlimited, but only if we want it to be. We can want that it be limited to experiences of religiously ordained matrimony, or not. We can want that it be an expression of the self, fulfilled in the act of loving another, or not. We can define it however we want, in the way of true ethical relativism, if we believe that it is just one of many complex mechanisms of the brain designed to foster maximum procreation in a game of survival in which only the fittest shall survive. Sex seen this way is unlimited.

To get an idea of this here is a list of some of the most common kinds of erotic material that can be found on the internet.

The **American Taboo** series of films, starring Kay Parker, started in 1984 and became the most successful films in American porn. In the 1980's porn was still based on narrative story-telling. For a while, these made up sexual situations had to possess some plausibility to conform to the Supreme Court's community standard for what was acceptable porn.

Incest is a recurring sexual theme throughout all of human history and religion, so it should not be surprising that it is practically a gold standard of porn. Incest has played a big role throughout human genetic history, but probably much less so in modern societies. No one knows how much incest is occurring in modern societies because there is no reliable way to survey for it. The assumption is that most people would be unwilling to acknowledge participating in this practice as it is almost universally illegal everywhere on the planet. Even the most thoroughly anonymous survey under such circumstances is likely to yield unreliable results. Estimates of health professionals commonly are in the few percentiles of the population for incidences of parent/child incest and perhaps twice that percent for sibling incest. But nobody really knows.

Some societies are thought to tolerate incest to a greater degree than others. The popularity of German, Japanese, Italian, and Russian films on the subject would seem to argue for a more relaxed view in those countries than in the rest of the world. Of course, the grounds for making consanguineous sex illegal are the harmful health effects on offspring with a higher propensity for genetically induced disease. The scientific and medical grounds for this might not be so convincing in a future with sophisticated genetic testing. In any case, with new databases being created everyday of tens of millions of individual genetic codes, further research into our genetic history can be expected to advance quickly. The success of genetic testing companies like _23 and Me_ suggest that the day may not be far off when researchers will be able to assess more accurately just how often consanguineous births have occurred in the human past. Such research should be able to provide considerable insight into what role incest has played in human development, both in the past and the present. It may be much more significant than we currently know.

**Inzest** —German incest, hundreds of films apparently made while it was still legal to do so in Germany, some under the label of **Horny Heaven**. The variety of family sex seems infinite in this series, but most of the participants are from a small number of German families well known in the German porn industry. Old Stefan was the _pater familias_ , giving a whole new meaning to the term family tree. **The Family Immerschaff** was an earlier now vintage series.

**Max Hardcore** —There have been hundreds of series of American porn, but Max was known for skirting the line with 18-year-old actresses, lots of anal, pissing, and underage motifs, all of which bordered on the abusive. His signature series was **Cherry Poppers** , which made no bones about the intentions of its subject matter. He has protected much of his material, originally released on video in the 1990's, making the full scope of it hard to find on the net. One of Max's big stars was a tiny girl going by the name Cinderella, who also appeared in the mainstream movie about the making of the early American porn films of the 1970's, **Boogie Nights** , featuring Mark Wahlberg.

**Teeny boppers** , like innumerable American teen series, featured all the young U.S. starlets of the day. The big draw is finding young performers starting out whose innocence appears to be the most real. Kinzy Jo stands out in this regard. In similar work so does Molly Rome and Kara Mynor.

**Private Castings** with Pierre Woodman or Marc Dorsel, also chasing the reality show style so often used to capture youth and innocence, in his case in Europe.

**Backroom Casting** , an American version of the bait and switch, bringing in amateurs wanting a shot at porn celebrity, and using them for their naivete, a kind of sleazy exploitation, but only if the girl is really as naïve as she appears to be.

**Casting Couch Teens** , a series like many others in America and Europe that thrive on portraying innocence, when most of if not all of the participants are just porn stars getting their starts in what are really professional productions.

**Japanese Game Show Incest,** was one of many professional television porn productions in Japan that combined interest in Game Shows with sex. The idea that the contestant didn't have to know what was going to happen strains credulity to the breaking point, but it is a form of reality tv and like that genre it thrived on the conceit that somehow this was all coming to the contestants as some kind of surprise. The lack of condom use, internal cum shots, and lots of excited talk, in Japanese but sometimes translated into English, about getting pregnant adds to the titillation.

**Bea Snuckel—** Prolific tiny German porn star. Apparently, there was nothing she would not do, including scatological. Don't know what scat is? Look it up big boy. Her best work was with older male stars where she played the little girl to older teachers, neighbors, and grandpas.

**J-spot Duty** —Japanese incest. Italy, Germany and Japan seem to have the incest market cornered, but there is a small amount of French and Eastern European.

**NetVideoGirls—** This late 90's series was particularly successful at fostering the conceit of young college girls being maneuvered unwittingly into performing sexually before a camera by mixing amateurs just starting out with a professional. Relying exclusively on Point of View (POV) camera, the series provided an immediacy of the sexual encounter that was relatively new and inventive at the time. Popular during the heyday of live chatroom internet sex performers.

**Genie Mormon and Family—** A series of a couple hundred stills, is supposed to show what appears to be a German family getting too friendly. The apocryphal existence of one or more videos from which the stills originate is often debated, but to little effect.

**Best Teens** was a series by a fat guy traveling around Europe and filming his sex with teens by using standard tripod, a pretty dull technique for filming sex. Often mislabeled as a hundred other things.

**Rodox, Color Climax, Tiny Tove—** Danish porn, vintage.

**Seventeen** —Swedish porn, vintage.

**Teenfun, Teenburg (Russian), Video Teenage (French), Libertines, Student Sex Party (Russian), Teensexmov** —examples of the many Euro-teens series.

**Galitsin—** Beautiful Russian teen girls, often in pairs with superior video quality.

**Chrissy—** American amateur incest with father. 2 vids, vintage

**Incest Taboo** —Incest Taboo was a leading website discussion forum for about 10 years that was eventually investigated and shut down by the government. During its time up it created 20 or so amateur incest videos that remain well known and are notable for their rarity and for the fact that each begins with a discussion by the participants. The videos were not commercial incest porn, which remains illegal in the U.S.. The series has been resold (as New Deal) more than once but continues to go by the original name of Incest Taboo. Websites featuring incest discussion forums once abounded but have nearly disappeared as a result of government oversight warnings about possible underage content. Discussion of incest has become almost impossible on the U.S. internet as a result of sensitivity around this issue.

**Exploited Teens and Trike Patrol—** series based on Americans filming sex as tourists in the Philippines.

**Brandy Bell—** probably the best example of a reality porn career, she was an actress who filmed having sex with a fan (not very good it turns out) and in public, such as on a bus, where the viewer is left wondering if everyone else in the scene is a plant.

**Motherless** —With a strictly observed policy on underage content this site has been able to avoid site killing controversy and has become the motherlode of amateur porn submitted by its viewers. It says it has 25 million viewers a day, but who is really counting? Good search engine but could be better.

**Maniado 1** – French, the incestuous family

**Maniado 2** \- French, the incestuous vacation

**Souvenirs Incestuous** – French incest war period drama

**Carol Marnie** —French incest family vintage

**Couples, Groups, Gangbangs—** Professional and amateur, the Czechs have more than their share of entries in this category and probably the premier series in Czech cream pie gangbang.

**Young Throats, Tryteen, Double Teamed Teens, Girls Got Cream, Double View Teens** —A euro series that started with **Tryteen** and ended with **Young Throats.** In the latter they pretty much defined the genre. The girls are young and cute and when one of them says she doesn't know what deep throat is in fractured English you somehow believe her.

**CFF – college fuck fest** , and numerous other dorm room variants of reality porn. Stay away from these colleges. **Party Hardcore** is the Euro equivalent along with its many knock off competitors, where dozens of sex parties are filmed in various bars in Europe. Condoms required.

**Raincoat** videos involve surfeits of ejaculate, usually on women's faces, examples of which are Bukkake videos, which have their origin supposedly in Japanese culture, and GGG videos, which are German.

**Chikan, Grope, Schoolgirl, Japan, Dr. Exam, Library, Tied,** —Chikan means molestation and the Japanese have taken to trains, buses, public restrooms, doctors' offices, libraries and just about everywhere else to film it. The most unsuspecting the victim the better, which of course leaves the viewer wondering how that could in any way be possible. I don't have the answer.

**Olekid** —Some old guy hits on his young secretary but it gets mislabeled as American incest all the time. A short but ubiquitous series.

**Defloration** —Some cultures are more interested in this than others. Eastern Europe and Japan.

_Tradizioni di Famiglia_ —Italians have a small cottage industry of incest but it would appear that much of it is of questionable veracity. This one is real.

**Girls Do Porn** – Featured Miss Teen USA beauty contestant, Miss Delaware, Melissa King. **Reality Kings** – Featured Duke University student, Belle Knox. Publicity ensued.

**Russian Swingers** is often misrepresented to be incest when younger and older couples are filmed swapping. The Russians also have a fair amount of what is claimed to be incest, but none of it, like the Russians themselves, seems very convincing.

**Sindee and Scott** —Amateur American brother sister with half a dozen videos where they discuss their relationship and have sex. One features her pregnant by her brother. Exceptional both for frankness and for the obviously committed nature of their relationship.

**Beastiality** —This is largely vintage material under the name of Z **ooskool** or similar. There is a great deal of this material out there but it is hard to understand why.

**BDSM** —Bondage, Discipline, Sadism and Masochism is fetish sex and there are any number of other sexual fetishes out there, many very obscure, like squashing bugs with high heels. Dominance and Submission fit in here, hello Christopher Grey.

**Spanking, Whipping and Caning** are BDSM too of course, but probably deserve their own category. English spanking is peculiarly formal and staid, totally its own thing. **Lupus** films is a leader and appears to be very Russian.

**Facial Abuse** —There have been many versions of oral sex videos but by far the most aggressive have been **Young Throats** and **Facial Abuse. Facial Abuse** takes this kind of video to its ultimate conclusion. Fortunately, all the participants appear to be either professionals or aspiring actresses. Otherwise, charges would be in order. Logan Sinns sets the standard.

**Miasia and Don Hollywood** – popular video in which typical sexual grooming behavior is modeled. Grooming behaviors are rarely depicted though I think many people tend to think of them when the subject of questionable erotic material is brought up.

**Candydoll** —There are hundreds of young model sites on the net. This is one of the few which also has videos. **Candydoll** is in a class of its own with high quality professional production values. Controversial because of ages but also a well defended overseas copyright.

**Stickam, Omegle** —There are a number of American websites like Stickam or Omegle that have accepted online videos of amateur teens in solo performance before their video cams. Ages are unverifiable, making any kind of censoring very difficult. The First Amendment protects this kind of speech but expect that the government will be forced to act to shut down these sites for underage violations at some point. In legal terms this is anything but low hanging fruit. Where are the parents anyway?

**Snuff** films are not known to really exist on the internet. For one thing, they would be evidence of a crime and would have to be pulled down for law enforcement reasons. Paul von Stoetzel, a documentarian, director of _SNUFF: A Documentary About Killing on Camera_ , (2008) makes the point that even ISIS beheadings and terrorism can potentially fall into this category of film. More commonly found however are the homemade films of serial killers who are known to make such films with a desire to relive their experiences.

Von Stoetzel cites the case of Dmitri Vladimiovich Kuznetsov, a 30-year-old Russian mechanic arrested in Moscow in October of 2000 as someone who appears to have made such films. He was in possession of some 3000 videos that he had made of several hundred mostly Russian boys being violently abused and killed. Kuznetsov started in 1998 and even traveled to the U.S., but sold his videos on the internet for several thousand dollars apiece. MI5, the British counter-intel agency, closed in and had him and two associates arrested. Kuznetsov served 11 years in a London prison and the associates were sent to Russian prisons.

In recent years porn on the internet has become easily available through the principal search engines and is primarily streamed. By streaming, viewers do not have to bring the files they view onto their hard drives as saved files, much more discrete than having a hard drive filled with porn. Still, the major porn websites make it easy to download their content if so desired. They make their money by chocking up viewers for advertisers. Websites like **XVideo** have a broad sampling of just about everything that is available on the net. Usenet and P2P access have greatly diminished but continue.

The onus for controlling content has fallen on the major search engines, Google, Yahoo, Bing and others. Their file content is remarkably similar for virtually any search of erotic material, a uniformity which would seem impossible by accident but may perhaps represent a consensus of opinion was to what is acceptable. It does not appear to be under any direct influence by authorities. If there were official influence there would certainly be less potentially controversial material than currently appears. The possibility of discovering questionable content exists but is limited. It may pop up from time to time but is usually removed in a relatively short period of time, probably by being brought to the attention of the search engines by internet users themselves, a case of the self-policing nature of the internet.

Junk Science

In the April 2014 issue of the American Psychological Association's **Monitor on Psychology** Kirsten Weir points out that the viewing of erotic material is widespread. She cites Gert Hald, Phd, and his colleagues in the **APA Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology** volume 2 stating that various international studies have shown that between 50 and 99 percent of men and 30 to 86 percent of women view such material.[224]

Currently researchers are trying to understand this better. They are hindered by the lack of funds for an area of research that is generally eschewed by the research establishment in general. The very study of Porn is taboo. Porn may be harmful to some marriages and may lead to unhealthy behaviors such as sex addiction and sexual aggressiveness in small numbers of those exposed to it, but it may also enhance sex lives and be a safe outlet for sexuality for many. For instance, a famous study done after the legalization of pornography in Denmark in 1969 showed a measurable drop in sex crime.

With virtually entire populations viewing porn, and large portions of populations doing so quite regularly, because it is now so free, accessible and anonymous on the internet, the question arises as to whether porn addiction is even real. Obviously, if eroticism is used excessively it can interfere in real romantic relationships, but this would appear to be more a result of habituation rather than anything more serious.

In the U.S., national addiction rates are 9% for marijuana, 15% for alcohol, and 32% for tobacco. If there were a percentage of persons with a compulsion for pornography it would be much less than any of these. In the preparation of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in 2013 experts considered the addition of an addiction known as hypersexual disorder with pornography as a subtype, but concluded there was not enough evidence to support it.[225] Despite the many studies, there remains no conclusive evidence that porn addiction exists. For those who have marital problems with porn there is little therapeutic literature to even guide health care practitioners. What is apparently a habit, not an addiction, is treated by ordinary therapeutic means by many modern-day professionals in health care allied fields.

Yet despite the lack of scientific findings to support the porn addiction hypothesis, the U.S. has been overrun by unqualified quack therapists holding out a battery of simplistic treatments for a disease that the DSM, the bible of the American Psychological Association, refuses to recognize. Lack of proper research has ceded this ground to the tent revivalist, holy rollers, rogue therapists, and American Judiciary, and with what you would expect for a result from a misguided government: total, unmitigated confusion. Finally, many studies from around the world indicate that child pornography reduces physical victimization and that the production of simulated child porn in which there are no real participants may be an effective strategy for reducing crime. For an excellent review, including an opposite view, check out Wiki.[226]

The Breakdown, Foreign and Domestic

According to the **National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC** ), a private non-profit created and funded by Congress since 1984, there were 859,500 registered sex offenders in the U.S. in 2016.[227] This includes those on the federal level as well as all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Registration is intended for public notification. Offenses requiring registration are usually mandatory, i.e not given to individual judicial determination, and vary widely according to jurisdiction. Offenses requiring registration vary from public urination to adolescent sexual experimentation with peers to underage porn, sexting and violent sexual offenses. Juveniles account for 25% of those listed, including those as young as 9 years old.[228] Registration in most jurisdictions is often for life.

There are not a lot of available statistics on child porn cases because the 50 states report them as part of a larger group of sex offenses in most cases and don't provide a breakout. Below are federal prosecutions that do.

**Table 1: Federal Prosecutions of Child Pornography Cases** [229]

Source: EOUSA

Note: There is not necessarily a correlation between cases referred, prosecuted, or declined in any particular year. Cases referred may have been prosecuted or declined in a subsequent year; cases declined may include those cases referred from a prior year.

As can be seen, child porn cases prosecuted by DOJ went from about 100 in 1992 to about 2000 per year in 2013. Of course, these are cases that have mostly been referred up to DOJ by the states, most likely because of the complexity involved in the case and certainly if a case had international law enforcement implications. At the state level child porn cases in recent years have increased as a portion of all sex offenses, rising at times to nearly half of all cases, depending on the aggressiveness of local prosecutors. It would not seem out of the way to guess that there have been at least 50,000 such cases since the dawn of the internet age, given that there are nearly a million persons now on all the registries.

One of the great problems in analyzing the problem is the lack of reliable data and the lack of a place to aggregate it in a meaningful way. One would think that state legislatures would be as interested as anyone in seeing such information as a way to gauge the effectiveness of the laws they have established. Part of the problem, it should be obvious, is the taboo that comes along with the subject, even for legitimate researchers, and the chilled atmosphere that law enforcement has wittingly or unwittingly created in the United States for public disclosure about the topic.

The chill extends to Europe and countries around the world. While websites like the Internet Watch Foundation exist that keep track of things like the number of URLs reported to various governments that contain illegal content, it is still difficult to find out the number of prosecutions in different countries around the world. Countries and internet service providers around the world cooperate to block and take down rogue URLs and illegal content, but even the United Nations does not track what is going on specifically with prosecutions for illegal content by country around the world. The fact that different countries treat the subject differently adds to the complexity of data gathering. A few countries, primarily Muslim, have few laws on sexual behavior and age of consent to begin with. The focus of international organization's attention is primarily on the trafficking of persons between countries rather than on internet content restrictions.

Still, most Americans would be surprised that their country is the source for most of the porn on the internet.

More concerning to U.S. law enforcement was the use of P2P, peer to peer, internet users using the direct PC to PC connections offered by P2P software to share and download file content. As there were copyright protections on many of the digital files being shared, which ranged from sheet music to television and movies, the U.S. media establishment, Hollywood and the music industry, hemorrhaged tens of billions of dollars of content per year in the early 2000's, labeled P2P as essentially illegal, and fought to get the federal government to prosecute in any way they could. As a large part of the stream, upward of half, was eroticism, what better way to stomp on P2P users than to go after the tiny fraction of illicit content also being shared in an attempt to clean up and do away with P2P altogether. **That this might be the largest attack on free speech directly by the central government of the United States in the history of the country came to no one's attention, so great was the public hysteria about the issue.** This was obviously so hot an issue that no politician worth his salt would go anywhere near it. As a result, the problem was shoved down to the lowest levels of U.S. policymaking institutions and thoroughly bureaucratized in a way that would give everyone at the top of the pyramid a way out.

Internet porn made up the majority of the internet in the early days of the mid 1990's but had settled down to 30-40 percent of total content by the turn of the century, as the internet became increasingly practical for ordinary commerce. Illegal porn was always a tiny amount in comparison, made up of the old Danish Rodox and Color Climax materials, which were in turn based on printed material from northern European countries put out in the early days of porn in the 1970's. The comparison was often that if regular internet porn was a gushing fire hose, then illegal porn was a trickle from a garden hose. Without internet content restrictions in the U.S. in the early days of the internet, even **Easynews** appeared to be accidentally cataloging the content for their paid users.

P2P provided the Federal government a target rich environment, one which corporate America very much wanted to shut down. In the end almost all file sharing software disappeared from CNET Downloading for a period of time. I-Tunes thrived and took over the music downloading business while streaming music became ever more popular on all platforms.

The FBI has been known to use any number of techniques in addition to monitoring P2P networks. Spear fishing is one of them, the practice of sending targeted emails to suspects, who in opening them reveal identifying information back to the agency. Regular phishing uses sites made to resemble the P2P software being used so as to lure users into conducting searches that then can be monitored and tracked. The FBI has even been known to use straight hacking and arrest hundreds off a single secret domestic warrant (not a FISA).

Basically, the government will stop at nothing, including breaking the law, to pursue their quarry. This is especially troubling given the nature of domestic spying by the agency. It is the inevitable consequence of the new surveillance and national security state writ large. The following graphic is from the FBI itself.[230]

The Playpen case was the largest known government hacking operation in U.S. history. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, defendants are fighting back, challenging the basis on which the warrant was obtained and the FBI's refusal to explain how their software worked.[231] The FBI received a tip about a site with illegal content, launched **Operation Pacifier** , and was able to find and seize the server in North Carolina, which it continued to operate for two weeks from February 20 to March 4 of 2015, allowing the downloading of material. The FBI infected users with malware that could reveal their IP addresses even though the users were operating on TOR from the dark web.[232] The FBI ended up with about 1300 IP addresses.

In legal terms, the government's behavior is the rough equivalent of a police officer having sex with a prostitute and then arresting her for prostitution. What is amazing is that some courts are upholding these cases. It becomes less surprising when considering the lack of knowledge that judges exhibit. They do not seem to know anything about the technological implications of the cases they are deciding. It is not clear if the federal judge understood the implications of the scope of the warrant he was signing.[233] More disturbing, it would appear that Congressional oversight is not doing its job in policing the police, i.e. the DOJ and the FBI, but rather it would appear that Congress has given some kind of carte blanche to break the law to these agencies.

Studies of Sex Registration have shown that there is no impact of registration on re-offending and a group has been established to work at returning the civil rights of those whose names end up on the registries, the **Alliance for Constitutional Sexual Offense Laws, ACSOL** , based in LA. Human Rights Watch and the ACLU are only some among a growing number of institutions that have joined the sex offender reform movement in the United States. Prior to 1994 only a few states had registries, but starting at that time a number of highly inflammatory cases were brought to national attention that resulted in widespread adoption of registries in the U.S. The cases that had the most attention were statistically very rare kinds of violent sex crimes by strangers, given that almost half of those serving time for sexual abuse had victimized their own child or a relative.[234] There are only 100 or so child abductions in the U.S. per year.

About 30 states have adopted laws that limit the distance that registrants can live from places where children are known to congregate. Called Exclusion Zones, they range from 500 to 2500 feet from schools, parks, daycares, and bus stops, a 1000-foot requirement being the most common. In a 2007 report Human Rights Watch found that only 4 states limit exclusion zones to only child sex offenders, so that the zones often apply to many sex offenders whose offense has nothing to do with children.[235]

Registrants are often excluded from homeless shelters that fall within exclusion zones. The location of the 140-person _Julia Tuttle Sex Offender Colony_ came to public attention in Miami in 2007, much as a result of the implementation of these kinds of local government policies. Not only did the existence of such a large number of homeless persons give Miami a public relations black eye, it emphasized how unsafe a place Miami had allowed itself to become. The Miami incident also gave a face to the problem of exclusion zones that has stuck with the public, especially law enforcement, ever since. Similar incidents have notoriously been found all over the country, frequently in large cities, where over-use of restrictions has resulted in over-concentration of the problem.

Homelessness is often associated with drug and alcohol abuse, but there also appears to be a connection to traumatic brain injury (TBI). A St. Michaels Hospital study of homeless men in a Toronto shelter found that 45 percent had a TBI prior to becoming homeless.[236] Another study of 16 to 18-year-olds coming into the New York City jail system showed that about half of the 300 boys and 84 girls surveyed had prior TBI leading to unconsciousness or amnesia.[237] In both studies the most frequent cause of the TBI was assault followed by sports injury. A South Carolina corrections department survey of inmates found that 60 percent had suffered prior TBI.[238]

Homelessness costs local social services much more than just providing the homeless a place to live and receive support services. The largest study of homelessness in the nation was performed in Santa Clara County, California where it was discovered that the County was spending $520 million during the 2007-12 period on the largest homeless population in the U.S. Costs came from social services, healthcare and the justice system for 104,206 persons between 2007 and 2012, but centered on just 5% of the homeless population, 2800 people who were persistently homeless, costing $100,000 annually.[239] The study shows that giving housing to this 5% of the homeless is the best way to lower the public costs associated with homelessness.

According to the DOJ Office of Justice Enforcement's SMART office there is no empirical evidence that registration or residency restrictions have any effectiveness, this despite their wide adoption in the U.S. Further, a 2007 study shows that a majority of the American public perceives the likelihood of sexual offender recidivism to be _very high_ , even though it is in fact very low. Further, the study showed that the majority of Americans tend to think of all sex offenders as a single homogeneous group regarding that risk.

The idea that sex offenders re-offend is based on a 1986 article in **Psychology Today** that cited a re-offense rate of 80% without authoritative attribution. It was picked up by the media and law enforcement and has been a well-known shibboleth among experts ever since.[240] The registries and related policies are, according to criminologist, treatment expert, and professor Alissa Ackerman, University of California, Fullerton:

"absolutely and fundamentally flawed. They do nothing to support prevention, are not a deterrent, and do nothing for people who have survived sexual violence."[241]

Other commonly held but wrong beliefs are that treatment does not work (it does) and that such crimes are of the "stranger danger" variety, when in fact the vast majority of crimes are committed by persons well known to the victim and in a vast majority of cases are first time offenses. Connecticut's Office of Policy and Management performed two 5-year longitudinal studies, one in 2012 and one in 2017 and found that they had 3.6 and 4.1 recidivism rates.[242] This places such offenders among the least likely to re-offend of all criminal offenders. And these numbers are consistent with those found in similar studies performed in other states such as Alaska, New York, Nebraska, Maine and California. A federal study of 10,000 such offenders who had committed rape or sexual assault from 1994 found a 5.3% recidivism rate three years out from release.[243]

The **stranger danger myth** is perhaps the most destructive, as it is perpetrated constantly by the national network media, who always fail to mention the rarity of the cases they focus on in their rush to capitalize on the ratings that sensational crime stories generate. In 2011 the U.S. Department of Justice reported 105 kidnappings by strangers, only some of which involved sexual assault, in a country of 74 million children.[244]

A huge problem with the internet has been the slow recognition of the problems it creates and the slow response by authorities in dealing with these problems. The judicial system of the U.S. and other countries requires legislation in order to respond. It takes time and effort, information gathering, analysis, and public hearings prior to proposing new legislation. Government has to have the ability to seek counsel and expertise in order to adequately research problems and propose reasonable legislative solutions. Along with their passage new civil and criminal laws require devising new judicial directions and guidelines. They require the creation of new modern practices and normative ways for government organizations and individual officials to respond. Bureaucracies, devised to deal with old problems in old ways, have to be revamped, trained, and supervised in new kinds of problem solving.

None of this is easy and it all requires that people who have been doing their jobs for a long time have to learn, train, and adapt their thinking to new requirements. Finally, in the public sector, from clerical to high court justices, everyone has their own views about highly controversial subjects like sex crimes. They would be less than human if they did not. Some may be unwilling to deal with subjects that they find unwholesome and have to be re-assigned. Others may engage in conduct that is prejudicial but under the radar enough to get away with it. People have instinctive tribal traits that have to be managed in every public organization to achieve impartial and fair treatment of the public.

Sexting

Sexting is considered a sex crime when involving minors, but it has been resistant to easy solutions. Is sexting between children a crime, or is it part of growing up in a wired world?

Sexting is the sending, receiving or forwarding of messages including text, photographs, and images between persons primarily by mobile phone, but can involve any kind of computer or digital device. The practice did not reach popular currency until the development of the smart phone in the last 10 years or so, which made photographing oneself and transmitting the photograph to others very easy.

It did not take long for the new generation of phones to completely take over the youth market and for teenagers to discover the dark side of this trend, using it to send suggestive, even nude photographs, to current and prospective girlfriends and boyfriends. Applying the age of consent to such cases immediately bogged down in a thicket of ethical questions regarding how a minor cannot give consent even when they are the person sending the lewd image. The question has entered the national conversation, as evidenced in the film _Eighth Grade_ , where the protagonist uses the idea as a way to interest a boy that she likes. What seems a rite of passage becomes a cry for help.

Sexting has become even more commonplace among college students. One 2011 study found that 54% of college students had sexted.[245] The prevalence of the practice, especially between minors, has led to proposals to lessen the penalty for child porn in such cases from a felony to a misdemeanor, but state laws have to be changed to reflect the new reality.

Criminal cases involving these kinds of youth produced sexual images was the subject of a study reported in 2012 in the journal **Pediatrics** using a nationally representative sample of 3477 cases during 2008 and 2009.[246] While an arrest occurred in 62% of the cases where an adult was involved, in 36% of the youth cases that involved some kind of malice, and in 18% of the cases that were youth only, few of the cases resulted in a requirement for sex offender registration. In other words, in actual police practice across the country, most youth involved in sexting _are not arrested_.

While there have been many high-profile media exploited cases to the contrary, the truth is that local law enforcement has attempted to be both sensitive and responsible in responding to the problem. New and better laws in this area would dramatically help their case. Hysteria about the issue is probably the only reason why legislators have failed to act: none wish to be seen as voting to diminish children's safety in any possible way, such as by reducing penalties from felonies to misdemeanors, for fear of the inevitable electoral blow back.

The Catholic Church

Unsurprisingly, the United States is the country with the highest number of Catholic Church sex abuse cases in the world.[247] In 2004 the **John Jay College of Criminal Justice** performed a study about this for the **US Conference of Bishops** and concluded that 4,392 priests had been plausibly accused by 10,667 persons (mostly males) for abuse of minors taking place between 1950 and 2002. According to a 2010 **Newsweek Magazine** article **,** the 4% of priests that this represented is similar to the rate by which such abuse occurs generally in America.[248]

It is not that priests have taken a vow of chastity, are a part of an out of touch ecclesiastical hierarchy, or exclude women that leads to the abuse, but rather the access to children granted to them by their profession. Those who suffer abuse overwhelmingly do so from persons in their families or that they know well, a category that priests fall into. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the problem is unique to the Catholic Church or any religion in particular. Ask your local insurance company. Their insurance against risk of sexual abuse shows that in America the Catholic Church does not have a higher risk than other churches.

An investigation by **The Houston Chronicle** and the **San Antonio Express News** found 700 victims of child sexual abuse over 20 years by 400 Southern Baptist Church leaders and volunteers.[249] While most perpetrators were convicted of sex crimes, the Southern Baptist Convention had a history of mishandling complaints and hiding them from the public. This pattern of misfeasance is consistent with that of the Catholic Church and of all religious denominations in the U.S. and abroad. It is consistent with how most modern institutions react as well, whether it be American gymnastics, local school systems, or colleges and universities.

The problem is that the American public doesn't see sexual abuse as universal, because they don't want to. Rather, most Americans believe that Catholic Priests have a unique problem and that it is pervasive. A **Wall Street Journal/NBC News** poll in 2001 showed that 64% of Americans thought that Catholic Church priests "frequently" abused children.[250] In light of this widespread public misperception, Pope Francis has had to reverse himself in 2018 on the issue. He now recognizes that there is a problem, but he has failed to mount a serious effort to deal with it.

The truculent stand of the Catholic Church over the years is what has most hurt the denomination. In American PR terms, it has been a nightmare, a situation which will continue until the American Bishops are given adequate tools with which to fully engage the American media on the true specifics of the issue. The reporting has been more fulsome in Europe, America, Canada, Australia and Chile, in other words in countries with large numbers of Catholics and good law enforcement. For instance, in Germany a 2018 study was conducted for the German Bishops Conference that 1670 clerics and priests had abused 3677 minors, mostly male, between 1946 and 2014, this according to **DerSpiegel** , which obtained a leaked copy of the report.[251]

The Catholic Church will have to learn how to mount vigorous public relations responses in these and other countries, including full disclosure, if it is going to be able to get out in front of the wave of negative publicity that inevitably comes with long decades of ineffectiveness and neglect. It would appear that the Catholic Church has become a victim of the same kind of silence and human fear that just naturally surrounds any mention of child abuse.

Similar Catholic Church abuse studies are being released in various U.S. States such as Pennsylvania and Illinois, all with the same problem of unpunished priests. The drip, drip of the forthcoming years of disclosure will be exceptionally painful for the Catholic Church and its parishioners. The legal conundrum of dealing with prosecutions long delayed far beyond current statutes of limitation will further frustrate public will to bring perpetrators to justice. In the end, the legal liability for the Catholic Church in America could be immense, even beyond what American membership in the Church is willing or able to pay.

Trafficking

Prostitution is no longer just prostitution. Increasingly, prostitution is being considered sex trafficking when it crosses international borders, which it frequently does. Prostitution is being redefined as itself involuntary, something that is resorted to when there are no other economic opportunities. The fantasy of the happy hooker has gone the way of the dodo bird.

This is a much more progressive understanding of an ancient practice. To suggest that prostitution is indentured, a form of slavery, is an idea with a lot of support among those who deal with the problem every day in social welfare and law enforcement circles. Indentured servitude of the underaged in particular supports the belief that worker and sex trafficking is involuntary and a kind of slavery, because the underage by virtue of age of consent laws are deemed unable to give consent.

Ordinary prostitution of adult women engaged solely on their own in the practice is, of course, different than sex trafficking. This kind of prostitution doesn't inspire the same outrage as the pimping of teen girls from foreign countries, something which is not uncommon in areas of extreme economic deprivation around the world. It has become clear that there really is no such thing as ordinary prostitution, because as a form of behavior it is inevitably highly self-destructive. For male clients, however, the "girlfriend experience" will always remain a powerful fantasy, one that is easily perpetuated and frequently exploited.

The lurid impression that films like _Taken_ with Liam Neeson have exploited of western college girls being abducted on trips to Europe, only to be tied and taped up before being transferred to Middle Eastern countries, where they will then be traded to rich Saudi's for sexual enslavement, is, to say the least, a bit over the top. Instead, what is common in the United States are migrants from Latin America making their way into the Rio Grande Valley, only to be taken hostage by a local criminal gang in Texas. They then become subject to labor and sex exploitation while being held for ransom sought from their families.[252] Most are labor trafficked to domestic work with little pay and substandard living conditions in America.

The **Immigration Law Project** of New York's **Safe Horizon** describes the typical trafficked migrant as a woman (76%) aged 18-49 (76%) from Southeast Asia (31%), Central America (11%), or Mexico (23%) who has been trafficked by an employment agency (25%) or intimate partner (27%).[253] They are recruited and offered help getting a temporary work visa by someone in the United States who is misrepresenting a form of employment. Notably, they travel by air to U.S. ports of entry. According to the **National Human Trafficking Hotline** , most of the 5147 cases reported in the U.S. in 2018 were either U.S. citizens or permanent residents, many fewer being immigrants.[254] Not exactly movie land stuff.

Human history is replete with many instances of whole populations being forced into bondage, as the Bible makes clear, and as evolutionary history prior to that time also indicates. It should therefore not be surprising that some remnant of this problem should remain in the world today. It is estimated by the **Walk Free Foundation** of the **Global Slavery Index** that in 2015 there were about 30 million people held in slavery around the world, with about half in India alone.[255] See Chart following page.

According to the UN National Labor Organization there are more than 3 times as many people in forced labor today as there were in the 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade.[256] Included are 25 million in debt bondage and 15 million in forced marriage in an international black market of $150 billion a year. Only drugs and weapons are more lucrative.

The problem is growing in Africa, where half a million sub-Saharan African migrants are now trapped in Libya because Europe has closed down entry. However, many were getting into Italy, where the flow spiked at 163,000 in 2016 and has now fallen 89%.[257] Italy's system of press-gang labor, called _caporalato_ , relies heavily on migrant labor for agricultural production of tomatoes and other crops. Also in Italy, Nigerian women are replacing the Eastern European women who once dominated the illicit sex trade.

The 2018 Global Slavery Index of the G20 countries shows that they import 354 billion dollars of products at risk of being produced with slave labor. The problem of migration from Africa can be expected to continue to grow. By 2050 40% of the world's poorest people will be living in Congo and Nigeria alone, according to the 2018 Gates Foundation goalkeepers report.[258] Nigeria's population grew by 80 million between 1990 and 2015 to reach 190 million today. The UN projects that the population of Nigeria will exceed that of the United States by the year 2050.

Chapter 7  
LAST CALL  
Heaven Can Wait

Man is forced to fight natural inclinations toward tribalism that are no longer socially useful. Eventually random genetic drift, aka mutation, will result in less tribalism being passed on to future generations. Eventually, cognitive responses will replace automatic tribal ones.

That Republicans and Democrats think differently about things in general and that the way they think is influenced significantly by evolutionary differences in brain development and chemistry is a giant stretch, to be sure. That there is a distinct blue- collar preference for Trumpian politics would suggest that the difference is more about nurture over nature, rather than the other way around. But there is more predisposition at work in influencing people not to go to college than there are real differences in ability, I would contend. Educational attainment is more than about brains, or how brainy a person is. It's about the desire to learn new things, including some new things which may be threatening to one's long held beliefs. It's also about when one perceives that a certain amount of learning is going to have to be enough, given one's other responsibilities to family, friends, husbands, wives and children.

Various studies have looked at the differences in personality that make up Republicans and Democrats. They have found real scientifically verifiable kinds of personalities that describe each.

In the book **Prius or Pickup? How Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America's Great Divide** , the authors, Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, describe the political spectrum as divided into fixed and fluid, conservative and liberal, and acknowledge how brain science appears to support this.[259] They asked liberals and conservatives which they would prefer in their own children:

1) Independence vs respect for elders  
2) Self-reliance vs obedience  
3) Curiosity vs good manners  
4) Being considerate vs being well behaved[260]

Liberals tended to choose the first set of answers and conservatives tended to choose the second set of answers. Clearly, liberals place a greater emphasis on independence and curiosity, while conservatives place more emphasis on respect, obedience, manners and comportment. In **Prius or Pickup** , the authors go on to show how this is just a small sample of the big differences that liberals and conservatives have in their world views. Conservatives are just more-hard wired to a primal alertness to the dangers of their environment than liberals. They tend to interpret the world as more threatening and act accordingly. Liberals on the other hand tend to see the world as an exciting place to explore and revel in. If the world is indeed fraught with danger, as a conservative would tend to think, then it is better to make the world as orderly and predictable as possible. These are very different takes on reality.

Another way to look at it is to look at historical political science efforts to understand the character of authoritarian voters. In "Is There Such a Thing as an Authoritarian Voter?" Molly Worthen writes in **The New York Times** that a typical authoritarian preaches xenophobia, beats up on the press and places themselves above the law while extolling law and order for everyone else.[261] These are deep seated psychological traits of an authoritarian personality that are highly recognizable in our current day, but they have been studied ever since World War II. **The Authoritarian Personality** , written by Theodor Adorno with help from various social scientists at UC Berkeley, came out in 1950. It created the F-scale (for fascist) as a form of measurement of antisemitic authoritarian voter personality. The profile of high scorers on the F-scale disdained the weak and marginalized, fixated on sexual deviance, embraced conspiracy theories, and aligned themselves with domineering leaders in order to serve powerful interests and participate in their power. Further, high F-scale persons focused unduly on childhood primitive and irrational wishes and fears. Is the Authoritarian Personality a reality, relic or prophecy?

Fascists are known for provoking deep seated fears in their followers, but they do so in clandestine ways that allow them to avoid being explicit. If they were explicit in such fear mongering, they would be condemned by society as a whole. So the fascist utilizes dog whistles to message over the heads of the electorate in its entirety with the intention of signaling the followers and true believers that he is with them in his prejudices.

The fascist plays on the sexual anxieties of men that they cannot protect their wives and daughters from the actions of men of other races, religions, or creeds. Tribal living always meant that one tribe could wipe out the men of another tribe in order to own the women of that tribe. There is plenty of genetic evidence that this was a common occurrence during our evolutionary history. That homo sapiens males have had such long-standing fears and that these fears are easy to play on in our modern political games can be no surprise, as they have a real genetic basis and we are disposed toward them.

"Highlighting supposed threats to the ability of men to protect their women and children solves a difficult political problem for fascist politicians. In liberal democracy, a politician who explicitly attacks freedom and equality will not garner much support. The politics of sexual anxiety is a way to get around this issue, in the name of safety; it is a way to attack and undermine the ideals of liberal democracy without being seen as explicitly so doing."[262]

It is easy to see how Hitler's appeal to racial purity was a monumental application of this principle. Also, notice how the appeal to public safety is the legal basis for sexual registries in the U.S. Other restrictions on individual classes of offenders as established by law are created for the same reason, namely the protection of the male ego threatened by sexual anxiety. No laws in America are more severe than for those offenses popularly deemed to be of a sexual nature.

Sexual anxiety is also used by fascist states to draw a dichotomy between the virtuous rural and the profligate urban, the virtue of agricultural family life and the sin of city promiscuity.[263] These feelings of resentment, resurging in our own day, are intended to divide the nation and make the city the home of urban educated "elites" who despise the backward rural inhabitants, feelings that both Hitler and Trump have been very good at exploiting.

When it comes to human behavior, there is no normal, only gradations of it. Similarly, to label some human behavior as deviant or abnormal, as psychologists like to do, and as authoritarians love to do, is to fail to recognize the full spectrum on which behavior exists. In **Predisposed, Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences** , John Hibbing et al, the authors cite the case of a 40-year-old married man who developed an intense interest in child porn, as well as painful headaches. Neurologists found a large tumor in the OFC, orbitofrontal cortex, of the man's brain. The tumor was removed, with the result that the man no longer harbored such an interest.[264] Even the most extreme behavior can have other physical, rather than psychological or mental, causes.

Homosexual orientation has now generally been accepted to be a biological predisposition though at one time it was generally deemed to be aberrant or deviant sexual behavior. Rather than taking the view that behavior can be categorized into the normal and the deviant as lawmakers and the judicial system find convenient, a more accurate view consistent with an evolutionary view of human biological development would assert that behavior is more of a tabula rasa that virtually anything can be written on. In the latter view, which more precisely accounts for the incredible variability inherent in human genetics, there are in fact infinite possibilities for individual human development. This much more scientific view includes human sexual preference as well and the **Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders** more or less takes this point.

At the same time, accepting dispositional differences like homosexuality for what it is "calls into the question the assumption that down deep people are all the same".[265] Instead, dispositional differences are biologically inherent and make us all different from the moment we are conceived.

"Dispositional differences suggest that behaviorists, evolutionary psychologists, classical microeconomists, experimental social psychologists, political theorists, Communists, social engineers, popular commentators, standard social scientists, legal authorities, diagnosticians, and fans of the noble savage theory all miss the same important part of the story.

"Are political orientations immune from the shaping influence of deep-seated, behaviorally relevant biological predispositions? In point of fact, given the emotionality suffusing it, politics more than most elements of life is shaped by individual predispositions—or at least it can be."[266]

One of the ways to see all the differences that have been identified as being either liberal or conservative one can go to _Neurolopolitics.org_ , where one can find that conservatives like beef, liberals like vegetarianism etc.[267] More importantly, Liberals and Conservatives have different ways of processing information, according to **Predisposed**.

"Conservatives acquire the information they believe necessary to draw adequate conclusions, then call it a day. Liberals go on acquiring new information even if they don't like what they find and even if they might not be able to fully absorb all the information they keep collecting."[268]

These are broad psychological and cognitive tendencies. Rapid responses to information, such as the threat response, are programmed into the body to help the individual survive dangerous situations. One might describe such persons as quick thinkers and quick reacters. The threat response appears to be stronger in conservatives. They find new information alone to be threatening.

Many other responses are more subtle, such as that **all societies are based on human imagined hierarchies** , just different ones. Conservatives love hierarchy and seek to reach the top of each that they encounter. They are the lords of all that they survey, the kings of their mountains. They see themselves as authorities in their own right and do not like to have that authority, once recognized, however briefly, or as acceded to by their kin groups, questioned. They are alpha, others are beta. They may be seen as selfish, stubborn, inflexible, set in their ways, strong, domineering, bullying, stupid, Neanderthal, luddite. They may be lawyers, excessively seeking out the most authoritative in everything rather than the most scientifically observable and provable truth. They may take wild sophistic rides to buttress, defend and uphold their hierarchical visions. They may choose to stigmatize others in an effort to gain a wider group's support.

"People who seek out new information are simply much more likely to arrive at different political conclusions than those who are comfortable avoiding the risk and uncertainty accompanying new information."[269]

It isn't surprising then that conservatives enjoy having their opinions confirmed as frequently as possible, whether it be via twitter or Fox News. Conservatives actively limit the amount of information they are willing to process. There can be no **Fox News** for liberals. Why? Because liberals don't think that way. They are always seeking _new_ information.

This problem explains a lot about why Americans have trouble understanding how conservatives and liberals just "dig in", refusing to adjust their political views when presented with contrary evidence. American conservatives have a stubborn streak that has permitted generations to hold beliefs that are contrary to known science, and this pattern has been aided by a political system that is not sufficiently moored to scientific evidence and factually supported truth necessary for the efficient and effective administration of social goods.

The problem is that conservative ideas are based on the idea of authority and which authority to lend credence to is always at the heart of conservative ideologies. For conservative Americans the hierarchy doesn't start with scientific truth at the top but rather a religious authority, i.e. God. To conservative Americans, liberals are Godless, not so much because they do not place God at the top of the hierarchy as much as because their placing of science before God questions religious authority. That liberals question the pre-eminence of religious belief is what conservatives find most galling, not that liberals do not follow God over science. If you held fast to a religious belief you too would be offended if it was openly questioned by nonbelievers. That was why America created separation of church and state. It was to give everyone a level playing field, that no one would question religious beliefs as motivations but rather that in the public square all such beliefs, however different, would be respected equally in egalitarian societies. In a democracy the question was recognized for what it was and immediately put aside.

Today we are looking at innate behaviors not influenced by nurture and scientists are seeing increasing evidence of their existence in human behavior through genetic research. We are well beyond the old arguments of nature vs nurture. There is reason to believe that everyone was a conservative once upon a time, because the threats to survival were more pressing and immediate in past ages. The world has grown more complex since the dawn of the Agricultural Era and there has been an increasing need for curiosity and venturing beyond handed down, standard tropes in life. There has been a survival need for more learning and human progress, giving way to increasing advantages for those who process information differently by actively seeking it out.

This doesn't mean that it is inevitable that human progress will continue or that liberals will be able to realize their visions of a more progressive society. Conservative caution will no longer be as viable in future societies, following the trend of history, but it can still be a powerful interest holding societies back from moving forward. Its influence can be expected to wane as it confers fewer and fewer advantages over time. Nor is it to say that conservatives are the political Neanderthals of our era, doomed to fail to reproduce adequately to retain their footholds in our future societies. But it does appear that liberals have certain natural advantages that will likely prosper in the information age which is our common future.

In a sense, conservatives have been dying out ever since man formed human societies beyond the scale of the tribe, in other words, since the dawn of the Agricultural Era. It is just that the Information Revolution is likely to, and I think already demonstrably has shown, that dramatic acceleration of this trend is inevitable. Already, male dominant privilege is being widely challenged around the world and this places on the table the real possibility that men with **MeToo** acceptability will be favored over those who cling to ideas about male dominance. The dominants will be selected against by women in general, leading to fewer of their number being present in societies of the future. This decline will be unlikely to be reversed unless for some reason the World returns to an early form of nasty, brutal and short Hobbesian lives.

A certain proportion of Americans, presumably made up largely of conservative thinkers, have long displayed this strong sense of belief over reason. For instance, it is well known that 40% of Americans do not believe in evolution, the bedrock theory on which the science of modern biology depends. In contrast, when it comes to knowledge about evolution in Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, France, Japan, UK, and Norway 80-90% of the residents of these countries agree that "humans developed from earlier species". Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus, and Turkey are on the low end of the international scale when it comes to this, with Turkey being the real turkey here, where only 23% agree that evolution is real. The U.S. ranks just above Turkey at 40%. Most Americans are willing to accept evolution, but only so long as it doesn't include humans. That 40% apparently believes in spontaneous generation as a possible explanation for the existence of human beings, a biological theory tossed out the window hundreds of years ago.[270] Pew Research has also established that those who reject evolution in America skew heavily Republican and white evangelical protestant.[271]

Sure, you say. You can find 40% of crazy Americans in favor of anything. Like Trump for instance. Like anything! America is 40% crazy, everybody knows that. Forty percent Republican or Republican leaning you mean. **Public Policy Polling** in North Carolina asked a series of political questions of 532 Republican primary voters in 2015, including the question, "Would you support or opposed bombing Agrabah?" Agrabah is the fictional kingdom of Disney's **Aladdin**. Despite this, 30% of respondents said they favored bombing and only 13% said they opposed it, the remaining 57% saying they were unsure.[272]

An AP-NORC poll conducted at the end of 2018 of the American public found that 7 in 10 Americans would favor gene editing to prevent an incurable or fatal disease, but that 7 in 10 Americans would oppose using the same technology to improve intelligence, athleticism, or physical traits.[273] This despite the fact that the same poll showed that 48% of Americans opposed using human embryos to test gene editing versus 26% who were in favor. Without such testing, the technology is problematic at best. Nine in ten in the poll said that gene editing would be used unethically and that it won't be affordable to the average person, so there is an evident lack of trust in the scientific community. Either that, or they believe that supervillain Blowfeld will certainly steal it to make real his plans for world domination, using of course his privately gene edited army of superbeings to take it over.

The tendency that conservatives in society have for processing information in a restricted way shows up strongly in polls of Americans relating to scientific issues that most people should be familiar with as part of any general education. Beyond the obvious religious problems with an issue like evolution, there remains a strong American, I would argue Republican, bias against much of scientific fact.

In 2014 Pew Research polled 2002 Americans and 3748 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to find a large gap in understanding of scientific matters by the public. When it came to GMOs, genetically modified foods, 88% of scientists believed such foods are safe to eat while 57% of the public believed such foods are unsafe to consume.[274] Global warming got 87% recognition as real from the scientists but only about half the public. Two-thirds of the scientists favored addressing this problem by building more nuclear power plants while only 45% of the public agreed. Four of five scientists thought population growth was a major problem but less than 3 out of 5 of the public. 84% of scientists believed that lack of scientific understanding by the public is a major problem and 97% blamed the U.S. educational system.

One need not necessarily be a Republican or conservative to have unjustified fears in American society, however. These fears, stoked by an unprincipled media, affect everyone's life in America, to the point that they have changed the way that Americans live their lives. In Switzerland and Mexico children are given far more autonomy to go back and forth to school alone at young ages. In these countries, children play outside among themselves and on the streets well past dark. Not in America, not anymore. As the authors of **Jumping at Shadows** point out, kids in the U.S. are no longer allowed to go anywhere without adult supervision.[275] Today Montessori is more likely to emphasize their security systems and cameras and view blocking fences than their creative curriculum. States have massively expanded the definition of sex offenses, 13 require public urination offenders to register as sex offenders, 29 require that sex between two underage kids should be considered a sex offense requiring registration.[276]

The result is an orchestrated assault on reason by those wishing to invoke public fear to advance political agendas. Government overreaction is often the outcome. Much of the $81 billion spent annually on the federal national security apparatus of the United States is used to fight (nominally at best) foreign terrorism, when the U.S. suffers substantially more at the hand of domestic terrorists. Worse, government overreach and the violation of the nation's individual civil liberties occurs with increasing frequency and impunity. The knock on the door in the middle of the night has become a standard police law enforcement tactic at all levels. Once reserved for only the most extreme cases because of its negative associations with Europe under the Nazis, the Soviet Union under Stalin and the Stasi in Eastern Europe, Americans now tolerate it at will. Local police departments, who could object to such tactics in the past because they associated too much with storm troopers and a state of occupation, now willingly acquiesce. The dawn knock on the door has become _de rigueur_ for everything from porn to lying to the FBI. When, we have to ask, did this happen? How really necessary is it for a democracy to adopt tactics long associated with evil dictatorships and a desire to instill fear of the government in the public mind? Are there really no limits to how far we'll let our law enforcement go? Is this an expression of concern for public safety or the hallmark of an atavistic and panicked public?

Martin Niemoller, a German Lutheran pastor who survived Sachsenhausen and Dachau between 1937 and 1945 was released by the allies, formed a resistance clergy and became known for making the following observation, which was also made to me by the Russian woman on my train in Eastern Europe in a simpler but no less effective way:[277]

First, they came for the communists, and I did not speak out -  
Because I was not a communist.  
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out -  
Because I was not a trade unionist.  
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out -  
Because I was not a Jew.  
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The expression, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" is often attributed incorrectly to Edmund Burke, the conservative political philosopher, but it was John Stuart Mill in 1867 who came up with it, the original version being "Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, then that good men should look on and do nothing".[278]

The War on Normal People

**The hyper-partisanship that was started by Newt Gingrich and the Republicans in the 1990's was greatly aggravated by the Great Recession.** After Reagan's big tax cuts for the rich, the Republican Party wedded itself to an anti-government, anti-tax policy that would devolve over time to squeeze out all other policy objectives that the party had embraced in the past. Perot led the anti-taxer, anti-deficit, anti-debt wave to reach 19% of the Presidential vote in 1992, by far the highest ever achieved by a third-party candidate in the U.S., and a sure sign of the future direction of American populism.

The 2007-2008 Recession was also much more than just a Great Recession. The Great Recession was the most serious financial crisis in world history, greater than the Great Depression. But what was not well understood at the time was how the crisis really occurred. Yes, it was a problem with sub-prime mortgage backed securities known as "credit swaps", a way of bundling many mortgages together for resale that failed to take into account the poor quality of those mortgages. Criminal activity had taken over a substantial part of the U.S. mortgage market with widespread lending to unqualified homebuyers. As professor Adam Tooze of Columbia explains, the problem did not really begin with Lehman Brothers but with the French bank **BNP Paribas** on August 9, 2007.[279] **Paribas** froze several investment funds as a result of volatility in U.S. asset backed securities and the **ECB, European Central Bank** , Europe's Federal Reserve, reacted by injecting $131 billion of liquidity into the European banking system.

Tooz explains that financialization of world markets, the ability of banks to finance their operations through wholesale short term lending between institutions rather than old fashioned retail lending with depositor's funds, had left the world's major banks over leveraged. Still, the real problem was underlying. Non-U.S. banks needed dollars which they obtained in wholesale currency swap markets to do business in the United States, creating large liabilities that had to be paid in dollars. If the currency swap markets failed, the banks would fail.

The first bank to fail when this happened was **Northern Rock** in England, which used the wholesale system of short term borrowing extensively and which had no subprime mortgages. **Paribas** ' investment fund freezing action triggered the collapse of the currency swap market, which collapsed **Northern Rock**. It was the beginning of a trillion-dollar transnational bank run. The Bank for International Settlements estimated that by the end of 2007 European banks needed over $1 trillion to cover the difference between dollar assets and dollar funding.[280]

The relationship between U.S. and European banking systems took center stage. The U.S. banking system was exposed to European banks dumping all of their dollar holdings, which would have led to the collapse of the banking sector in the U.S. Washington bailed out its banks with TARP. The UK effectively nationalized **HBOS** , **Lloyds** and the **Royal Bank of Scotland**. Belgium, France, Ireland and Switzerland rescued their banks. It was the **Federal Reserve** which resurrected "liquidity swap lines" to the European banks that prevented the European banks from dumping American assets and precipitating a worldwide meltdown. These provided a swap of dollars to the foreign banks in exchange for equal amounts of local currency, an innovation that saved the worldwide financial system. By 2010 the **Fed** provided $4.5 trillion in liquidity to foreign banks, of which $2.5 trillion went to the ECB.[281]

Just as the U.S. dollar had become the world's reserve currency, the **Federal Reserve** became the world's lender of last resort. This was kept secret however until 2011, when the **U.S. Supreme Court** ordered the Fed to release the data to Bloomberg reporters. The Fed had simply not wanted to stigmatize banks accepting liquidity swap lines, exposing them to potential runs. Keep in mind however, that much of the funding went to international central banks, which re-lent it to their domestic banks. Today, European banks have made themselves less reliant on U.S. financing, but the trend for the dollar is that it is now the anchor currency for 70 percent of global GDP, up from 60 percent at the beginning of the century. The Fed's swap lines are now permanent. China is now the largest lender of dollars and thus the greatest risk to the world economy. No one knows if the Fed's policies used in the financial crisis will work again should a similar event revisit the increasingly dependent, still emerging, world financial system.

The U.S. knee-capped a middle class and created a lumpen proletariat, going from a democratic ideal to a Marxist one over the course of thirty years. The Reagan Revolution was the elimination of high tax rates on individual marginal income, and the following Republican administrations cemented the trend with even further income tax cuts. The last cut, from Trump, forgot to even pretend to be anything but a tax cut for the richest Americans and largest corporations. The rest of America could do nothing but look on and ask, "May I have another, Sir?" as they got the backs of their hands rapped for the fourth time in a generation.

Today, federal income tax rates are about as low as they have ever been in our entire history, that is since the income tax began in 1913. This is how in both 1929 and 2007 the top 10 percent were getting half the national income, while the top 1 percent were getting about half of that, at both times. It has taken only 100 years to completely reverse the effect of early 20th Century American progressivism into one today of gross inequality.

Chapter 3 laid out how America has become a very expensive place to live because of an out-of-control half public, half private health care system and the rising costs of housing, education, and child care all being experienced in the face of stagnating wages. Average American households have responded with plunging personal savings and sky rocketing household debt in a way that is not sustainable.

In addition to Roosevelt's **Four Freedoms** for internationalism, Roosevelt also announced a **Roosevelt 2nd Bill of Rights** in January of 1944. Both were intended to explain what America had fought WWII for and for what half a million Americans had sacrificed their lives in that war. The **Bill of Rights** included: the right to a job, the right to earn enough for food, clothing, recreation, the right of a farmer to sell product at a return adequate for a decent living, the right of a business to trade in a fair market, the right of a family to a decent home, the right to health care, the right to protection from economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment, the right to a good education. The radio speech to the nation described what people were fighting and dying for overseas, but it came too late in the era to be politically influential.[282]

Americans increasingly feel that they are being taken advantage of by big business and government, that they are being extorted for goods and services, both public and private. When half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck this should not be surprising. Here are but a few examples.

1) **Enron and the Great Recession.** Enron was the run up to the Great Recession, in which America suffered a $20 trillion loss in household value and a 10 million-person loss in jobs. What followed was poor government accountability, big institutions being bailed out, and homeowners being screwed. Most Nobel prize economists believed that bank nationalization and loan write downs were the only fair way to deal with the crisis in 2008, but that's not what happened.

The Enron Scandal in 2004 set the stage for what became the Chickenshit Club, a Department of Justice unwilling to prosecute individuals responsible for major financial failures and a reliance on deferred prosecution.[283] The policy changed by 2016. By that time the 2008 crisis had resulted in $190 billion in fines and settlements. After that there were no longer deferred prosecution agreements but rather company guilty pleas.

DOJ still has a problem with taking big cases to court against big corporations. They are difficult and require a lot of resources. Congress and the Supreme Court are not highly supportive. It is easier for DOJ lawyers to just take jobs in the private sector. Fortunately, it is still prestigious to be chosen for important DOJ jobs and a culture of support exists within the agency and with the SEC, **Securities and Exchange Commission**. Deferred prosecution agreements had been used where company officers were not prosecuted unless the corporation failed to pay a large penalty. The criticism was that the penalty became a cost of doing business illegally. These arrangements were in turn a reaction to the Enron problem of killing companies like the Enron accounting firm of Arthur Anderson with just the threat of prosecutions of individuals like Skilling and Lay. In the Enron case the Supreme Court eventually sided with Anderson but it was too late as they had already gone out of business.

2) **Health Care.** Prescriptions can't be legally renewed in the U.S. without a doctor's prescription. Doctors use this fact to extort Americans into office visits and lab tests. Birth control pills even require a prescription and therefore a doctor's visit. They and many other routine drugs should be over the counter (OTC). Lab test companies have created virtual monopolies, charging uninsured patients upwards of $1000 for a set of routine test results. **Obamacare** only scratched the surface and still left millions of middle-class Americans with nothing but sky-high premiums, while preferring to fund Medicaid expansion to the poor.

**Any** reform should allow private health care insurance to stay, permitting the middle class the right to choose a public option as individuals. Companies should be allowed to shift all employees to a public option and have the right to negotiate how fast or slow they choose to do this.

Drug costs in America are the highest in the world due to a lack of regulation. Simply requiring that the Medicare price regimen apply across the board in America would pretty much solve the problem. The inability to regulate and reform this sector shows how easily democracy can be subverted by the influence of powerful economic interests. The first and prime directive in all democracies should be to limit the power of the powerful and the Congress has failed miserably to do this.

On a per capita basis, inflation-adjusted retail prescription drug spending in the U.S. increased from $90 in 1960 to $1,025 in 2017.[284] Medicare Part B was initiated in 2006 to help deal with these costs, but the lack of a price control in the program, which was necessary just to get Part B passed in Congress, has contributed greatly to the fast-rising cost of brand name pharmaceuticals.[285]

The same has generally not been true of generic drugs, but even in the case of generics there have been salient examples of market manipulation to concentrate the number of suppliers of a particular drug in order to raise prices (insulin). Johns Hopkins found that _External Reference Pricing_ has been applied by 29 European nations to set or negotiate fair prices for their pharmaceuticals. They simply compare drug prices from other countries.[286] The U.S. in contrast pays 3.2 to 4.1 times as much for brand name drug prescriptions.[287]

Clearly the **Epipen** disaster was just the tip of the iceberg and clearly there is going to be a lot company for the Martin Shkreli's of the future (in jail). What is so disconcerting is the amount of greed and callous disregard, even cruelty, that is associated with the actions of the drug companies. Their legacy will live forever in infamy.

**Online Prescription Medication for Personal Use —** Some tens of millions of Americans have taken advantage of an FDA and Customs Enforcement exception to enforcement of the ban on importation of drugs without US labels through online purchases. Technically speaking these are called misbranded drugs, because they do not have required U.S. markings.

Customs may intercept misbranded drugs sent through the mails if they appear to be more than for a personal use and send them to the FDA for further inspection. Such shipments for personal use are usually limited to a 90-day supply of common medications. Interdiction usually means that the purchaser is sent a notice by the FDA that such purchases remain illegal.

Personal drug importation has been further facilitated by Congress by its explicit prohibition of the use of funds to enforce the ban on such illegal importation, including the prohibition in consecutive Homeland Department appropriations bills.[288] No one has ever been prosecuted for importing small amounts of prescription drugs for their own use.[289]

The current legal situation allows Congress members to maintain that a ban exists on the importation of prescription medication into the U.S. in a way that keeps Congress out of hot water with big pharma. On the other hand, Congress has clearly created an explicit policy of not enforcing the ban on individual Americans buying their medications online. The "Canadian" online pharmacies have website locations in Western and Eastern Europe in countries like the Netherlands and Romania, but their medications may come from India, postmarked through China. The FBI may investigate and shut down websites in other countries that are deemed fraudulent.

Congress has therefore permitted a little-known practice that has been in place for decades, but which has since moved to the internet and global commerce. They have had to do it clandestinely and on the sly while publicly, patently disavowing their own dissembling hypocrisy in order to remain sufficiently servile to their real masters, Big Pharma and the AMA. They are permitted to continue the practice as long as they don't advertise it. It remains a case study in how to lose a democracy, bit by bit, to the ascendance of overweening corporate power and greed. Have I been sufficiently harsh in characterizing the era of untrammeled greed unleashed by the current War on the Middle Class? Not even.

3) **Americans lack a right of privacy over their insurance claims.** Americans have no say over sharing their insurance claims information. The big insurance companies share all claims data so that consumers can't change to other insurers to lower their costs after a claim and must then endure much higher rates.

4) **In America, internet and cable providers prey on Congress to prevent regulation of their consumer rates.** They conspire among themselves to distort the free markets, dividing up geographic market areas between them in oligopolistic ways and extorting consumers. This was one of Senator McCain's pet peeves. Congress should get out of the way and allow telecom to be regulated as public utilities in all the states in which they operate. Just like everybody else, no more preferential treatment.

5) **Exorbitant Pre-school and child day care expenses** create huge costs to the economy by keeping women from working. This can be easily handled by mandating these programs in all school districts. Rich school districts should be required to go first in establishing these programs.

6) **Lack of Professionalism**. Since the Great Recession there are more and more doctors, lawyers, and dentists who are adopting hard sell tactics more familiar to Americans during the Great Depression. Egregious practices run rampant. There is aggressive up selling by the entire dental industry, lawyers who only work on retainer, doctors who sell themselves to corporations or who become little more than drug pushers. There is a widespread failure of ordinary consumer protection that contributes greatly to the sense on the part of ordinary Americans that it is all about dog eat dog.

7) **Income tax prep.** There's death and taxes, and then there's H&R Block. The IRS now has the capability to tax virtually anyone without the need to have that person actually file a return. The IRS can file each taxpayer's return and payers can accept the result or file on their own if they wish. Instead, the companies that make money from preparing taxes have interfered to prevent the IRS from doing this. Get out of the way blockheads! IRS, show some independence! Congress, stop being the corrupt patsy for every corporate interest in town! Pigs at troughs.

8) **Pension Calculations.** Most people don't know how much their pension checks will be and are afraid to ask. Planning retirement makes this essential. New internet platforms will increasingly be available to help. Of course, early retires also have to contend with inadequate information about their health care options since they will not be ready for Medicare until 65. They will need to know their employer's COBRA and the employer's longer-term health care option. They need to know about Obamacare as a possibility. Keeping the U.S. economy moving requires giving people the knowledge they need to make good personal finance decisions. Employers especially need to do better at this and need to be incentivized to do so.

8) **Higher Education**. New York University built an endowment over the years sufficient to make the Medical School tuition free and many other medical school deans are considering the same thing. Having only a wealthy class of students filling the country's professional schools is incredibly bad for democracy. So is having Harvard give 30% of its undergraduate slots to "Legacy" students. As all smart but under-privileged students can tell you, going to school with all rich kids is a drag. It's also wrong.

9) **Opioid Crisis**. With 400,000 opioid overdose deaths from 1999 to 2017 and some 70,000 deaths in 2017 according to the CDC, the issue is finally receiving the public attention that it deserves. Dealing with the underlying causes however is where advances are greatly needed.

10) **Take the abuse out of treating mental illness.** In the U.S. this is a problem with cognitive therapists but not so much with medically degreed, licensed professionals. Stronger laws limiting the activities of ordinary therapists, prohibiting abusive practices like conversion therapy and the maltreatment of offenders are greatly needed. Avenues to seek remedies other than civil lawsuits need to be provided by the therapeutic community itself or that community will surely face more serious forms of regulation.

11) **Retirement**. Earlier it was pointed out what the average American expects from life in this country: a good life defined as owning a house and car, raising a family, and having a retirement that you can take before you get too old and crippled to enjoy it. What should be a modest ambition has been detonated by income and wealth inequality in the U.S. in the last 30 years. Yes, wages have stagnated, but equally and perhaps worse has been rising household debt. And the debt that is reducing the size of the American middle class the most has been created by much higher mortgage debt as the cost of housing has exploded, the much higher health care debt as a result of an out of control economic sector that is rapidly descending into chaos, the exploding tuition debt caused by a lack of government support for higher education, and much higher personal debt on cars and credit cards. All of this has gotten worse since the Great Recession. Americans do not know how to manage their money or how to budget for regular needs, let alone for retirement. Their failure to budget sensibly for retirement is based on a misunderstanding that prior generations did not have to. Economic conditions have changed in just the last few generations, making reliance on mechanisms like social security and the modest savings plans of their parents no longer adequate.

 [290]  
It is so bad that 25% of Americans expect to die in debt.[291]

The Second Progressive Era, Globalization, Gender Equality

**Worldwide inequality will drive future migration** as populations seek better economic opportunities transnationally. Migration is already occurring in China from agricultural areas to the cities, and a substantial part of it is happening in spite of government policy. It is the largest human migration in human history. In China this migration creates an underclass of unpermitted workers who can be easily exploited by the Chinese economy for cheap labor. This is also an explosive mix for a one-party state that must rely on economic progress to stabilize its political scene.

Countries like Japan have a major economic problem with aging populations but have not welcomed immigration. Their economies continue to underperform. Countries like Germany, where Merkel welcomed a million refugees from the Middle East, continue to outperform. The equation is a simple one. To the extent that income and wealth inequality can be addressed by countries across the globe, dictatorships and authoritarianism will be quashed and migration pressures will diminish. This, like addressing climate change, is a policy prescription that all nations need to embrace.

Otherwise, wars, famine, national economic failures, dictatorships, and coups will add to international migration. The patterns that are established by these migrations will test completely different parts of the globe. These migrations will require international planning and cooperation by wildly different national polities, but we can be sure that there will be few countries where the door will be wide open to new migrants, no matter how deserving they may be. Most countries will have problems with their own economies and few will see immigration as a solution. Holding them back will be age old tribalism and large nationalistic minorities with strong anti-other predispositions.

In the coming age, however, it will eventually become recognized as common sense and not just economic fact that the ability to grow economies is dependent on a free flow of labor across international boundaries. No issue will be more important to world growth going forward as this issue. The nations of the world need to be organizing to address it successfully, while education of their publics is fundamental and necessary. Income, wealth and gender equality will have to be addressed by all countries to prevent the flight of labor. Issues like human trafficking will figure prominently into international strategies to control the legal movement of human resources around the world.

The Progressive Era of the early 20th Century may have been cut short by the Great Depression, but the Great Recession of 2007-2008, arguably worse than the Great Depression, is giving birth to a new Progressive Era in our own time. The economic centers of every nation have become unmoored. Without these centers, without the middle classes that they represent in every country, no modern nation state can exist for very long in a globalized economy.

Chinese leadership knows better than anyone that the continued existence of their one-party state is dependent on the center holding. In the largest, fastest growing economy in world history, supervising the largest migration of human beings in the history of the planet from rural to urban, many things can go wrong, and will. But if they can control the normally corrosive influence of public and private corruption while simultaneously sustaining high growth, they can win the good faith placed in them by their publics. To do anything less will lead to their demise.

Chinese citizens will continue to forgo freedom of expression and support a one-party state only if this bargain is kept. Unfortunately, nothing is forever. Not even in the oldest society on earth. The day will come when high growth is no longer sustainable and when corruption veers out of control. On that day the middle will no longer hold in the great Middle Kingdom, the great Chinese experiment will come to an end, and the empire that it has created will fracture into pieces. There will be at least three pieces corresponding to the each of the great river valleys and cities: The North centered on the Yangtze River and Beijing, the Center based on the Yellow River and Shanghai, and the Southern located in the Pearl River Valley with Hong Kong at its heart. The interior is most likely to splinter into separate Muslim countries.

It is global inequality that creates the need for people to immigrate in the first place. To address inequality in societies around the world is to address the worldwide movement of labor. There will be many societies that need labor who will open their doors, if for no other reason than to keep their economies from failing as their populations' age pyramids turn unfavorably against them. It is the ultimate irony that aging populations, those most discomfited by social change, will in the end be forced to accept the very immigrants who foster those changes. It is a new kind of social awareness and justice that will result, and at the top of this pyramid will be a greater value being placed on human resources.

The **MeToo** era is thankfully without a Phyllis Schlafly, the woman who epitomized opposition to the **Equal Rights Amendment** in the 1970's. In fact, there does not seem to be any push back to the new feminism this time around. Still, there are U.S. government structures that remain paternalistic and dis-empowering of women.

1) **On college campuses** women are still subject to inappropriate levels of misogyny and poor law enforcement. Getting municipal law enforcement back on campus instead of relying exclusively on campus police is needed. Proper taxation of higher education by municipalities would greatly support this goal, instead of the system of negotiated _in lieu_ payments for educational institutions that dominates across America. It leaves college women without the protections normally provided by local police departments.

2) **Sexual assault in the military** reached an all-time high in 2017 of 7000 reported cases. In the military there needs to be a shift away from the current process, which is based on using the chain of command to deal with claims of sexual abuse and harassment, toward a system of jurisprudence independent of that chain of command. The current system just institutionalizes abuse.

If the United States had Norway's female workforce participation rate, it would add 1.5 trillion to the nation's Gross Domestic Output.[292] Once near the top of the OECD countries in the 1990's in terms of female workforce participation rates, now the U.S. is near the bottom.

Iceland's Parliament was 48% women in 2016. Sweden's Ministry and Parliament are almost equally men and women. In Sweden, all parents receive 16 months of paid family leave. Finland's Parliament has 42 % women. It provides subsidized day care and a subsidized higher public education system. The **World Economic Forum** ranks the U.S. 49th in gender equality, behind Nicaragua, Cuba, and Belarus.

The **World Bank** has created the **Human Development Index**. It uses development indicators and provides an exhaustive rundown for every country in the world of how it ranks. There are many other measures of international economic development progress, government transparency, and normative performance on a raft of important political, social and economic objectives for every country in the world. All of them have become increasingly useful in an era of ever greater interdependence in assessing the value of new investments in the world's developing economies. Financialization requires the evaluation of the risks inherent in every investment and the result is that the world is exploding in ways to make these kinds of decisions.

When it is clear that man's tribal history depended on devotion to tribe and willingness to die, if necessary, for its survival, as a rather singular evolutionary technique for the survival of the species, it also becomes clear that an important characteristic of our species, bred into us over tens of thousands of years of social evolution, are the many behaviors that support it. They are primarily male.

On the other hand, that women were depended on for nurturing behaviors having to do with the health and welfare of children, would appear to have evolutionarily embedded a certain amount of that behavior. Today, in male dominated politics we see a great investment in "security", in military preparation and engagement in conflict. Male politics seem to be heavily invested in such nationalism and its consequent behaviors. Female emergence in the national political scene seems to emphasize the importance of equality and equal access to _national_ health care and education. Why should an emerging consensus not be trying to re-balance the budget priorities of such issues? Why shouldn't suburban women, groups of women with college educations and without, all figure somewhat differently into the calculus required to move the country forward?

When looked at in this way, which is of course vastly simplistic, it is easier to comprehend how modern issues in the polity have evolved into a cross cutting across formerly well-defined party lines. The result is an historical re-alignment that relies on the differences between traditional male and female roles that had previously been reinforced by the differences in how male and female brains evolved. How our species further evolves through better education and improved socialization away from these former norms based on male aggressiveness will cut further across party lines and lead the way to a new era of progressive politics in the nation and abroad.

Babies in Cages

Shows like _To Catch A Predator_ have done more to exploit public fears than to assuage them, but that is their attraction. _60 Minutes_ , it should be pointed out, started out much the same way. Who can forget Mike Wallace with a huge microphone in his hand chasing someone around a parking lot, a cameraman in tow? It's iconic. There is nothing that substitutes for the vicarious thrill of watching a bad guy getting his well-deserved comeuppance on the national telly. It is part of a wider true crime fascination that has gripped the American public for many years, spurred on by programs like the ubiquitous _Dateline_ and its many imitators. That there is an ongoing demand for low brow, poorly produced accounts of ordinary crimes, especially if they're against women, is now a widely accepted principle of what constitutes "good TV" in the present age. It's a staple for late night viewers, low information voters, and lots of women who may not yet be feeling exactly empowered by the still nascent **MeToo** era.

But what shows like _Predator_ do is give a face to the Other, one worthy of fears that reside deep within us all of assault, sexual or otherwise, that can be mocked and vilified, as if we were exorcising our own demons. That there is an element of sexual prurience that arouses the reptilian parts of our brains adds to the interest. It becomes an unholy alliance of a survivalist instinct with a sexual one. These things are as hard wired in our brains as the bios in a computer.

_Predator_ ran successfully from 2004 to 2007 and was cancelled in 2008 after the shooting suicide of an Assistant DA in Texas. A TV crew entered his house to confront him about his talking to one of the show's plants, an adult posing as a 13-year-old boy. Chris Hansen, the on-air face of the show, returned to television with recurring segments of the old formula on a new series in 2016.[293] The story behind the show is a seedy one, filled with the participation of a large number of volunteers with questionable motives, the reluctant participation of law enforcement officials in cases of clear entrapment, the heavy exploitation of the show by the network purely for ratings, and the DA's family suing the show for an undisclosed settlement, a story detailed by **Rolling Stone** in its 2007 article, **'To Catch a Predator': The New American Witch Hunt**.[294]

TV shows that invade privacy are subject to legal action and at least monetary remedies. Government actions that invade privacy by exploiting media to further the aims of ambitious or over-zealous public officials not so much. Many politicians in America routinely play on public fears of every kind, often making the press complicit in their endeavors. They frequently justify wholesale surveillance by the government for a variety of public safety purposes, most notably national security. They do so often without facts. They do so often without proof of necessity. They do so usually without acknowledging what kind of surveillance is even going on.

Glen Greenwald notes that they take advantage of one of the worst attributes of U.S. political media, an excessive closeness to the government, reverence for the institutions of the security state, routine exclusion of dissenting voices.[295] He refers to Brandeis in the 1928 Supreme Court case of **Olmstead vs U.S.** for a definition of privacy: "the right to be left alone is the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by a free people".[296] The value of privacy "is much broader in scope" than mere civic freedoms. "The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfaction of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be left alone." Only when we believe no one is watching do we feel safe to truly experiment, to test boundaries, to explore creativity, to dissent, to challenge orthodoxy. Mass surveillance by the state is inherently repressive.[297]

There is a special power in repetition. In it we can find divine inspiration, an incantation. I have a large bird outside my house. She has a distinctive warble. It sounds like the jungle bird call that opens every scene of Tarzan. She has taken to attacking my chimney cap with an amazing rat-a-tat assault, creating her own snare drum, and she does it every day. Not a woodpecker but like a lot of birds who can use their beaks this way, she has a brain evolved with a cushion inside the skull to prevent brain injury. They say the definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over again while, stupidly, expecting a different result. (A favorite line of anyone subjected to cognitive therapy, whether forced or not.) We might say that big bird here is insane.

Big bird draws her strength in between times by singing her big warble. She found my chimney cap especially attractive no doubt because it looks down on an open grassy field and all the wildlife that it attracts. Beyond the field lies an ordinary Midwestern farmstead, now surrounded by the suburbs. My chimney cap is a thirty-foot-high perch from which an aerial combatant can easily swoop down at incredible speed at any moment on her prey, probably why this bird seems to prize it so much. When big bird warbles the sound ricochets off nearby buildings with a magnified echo. This is apparently attractive to the mate, who warbles back weakly from a distance.

I don't know how long this is really going to go on, day after day, but clearly something in big bird has been aroused to the point of over-riding urgency. This has become so urgent that she will not let go of her intention to build a nest where everything has been designed to prevent it. Big bird's incantations give her strength, as do the responses from her mate, no matter how impossible the task. The other birds in the neighborhood make their calls to each other in the meantime, laughing or crying, I don't know which.

Life is like that. Life is designed to do the impossible. It is designed to survive in an environment that is hostile. The only way to survive is to be stubborn when faced with obstacles, not to give up. At least, not to give up too easily. I don't see how that is _not_ genetic. Unfortunately, it makes for a lot of very stubborn humans whose genetic makeup (predispositions) are being quickly outdated by a surge in worldwide population growth and social change that demand more inquisitiveness, curiosity, and creativity than ever. Pre-programmed genetic responses to every new eventuality are no longer enough. The human environment is simply changing too quickly. Seven point seven billion sets of human genes are at least giving us a chance to evolve over a shorter time. The earth from which we have sprung? Maybe not so much.

The power of incantation is real. The media uses it to exploit sex offenders in every sensationalized report about a fallen Catholic priest and every report of another sex offender found re-offending. Since the initiation of the SO system in the U.S., they do not point out with every iteration of "ick" news that the rates of re-offending by SO's is 3.5% or anything like the following.[298]

"In 2010, research published in the American Journal of Public Health suggested that strict laws about registration, surveillance and residency can create a feeling of hopelessness and isolation that can actually facilitate re-offense. Several studies show that rehabilitative therapy, when paired with legal measures, can give offenders a sense of hope and progress and reduce recidivism rates by as much as 22%."

These media reports do not point out that the rate of offending among Catholic priests is no different than the rate of offending by leaders of any other religious denomination, or that the rates of offending by leaders of religious institutions is in any way different from the rates of offending in the general population as a whole, either in America or anywhere else. Incantation takes hold. Incantation takes its toll on the public discourse and on a society's politics. Incantation can become dangerous propaganda. It may be designed to comfort, but it expresses a false outrage. It is inherently dishonest, and its bad journalism.

Reiterating Babies in Cages over and over again in the media has some social utility. It may be morally justified. Making an incantation out of it, however, is wrong. That way lies only madness. What is really needed is addressing the immigration issue as a whole. The media fails to stay focused and resorts to a mere incantation, relying on genetically predisposed outrage to capture the eyeballs of viewers and ratings watchers. When it fails like that it fails in its responsibility to our democracy.

Clean Up on Aisle 5

The national security state is led in many instances by the FBI in the U.S. Its mandate takes it into Counter-intelligence in much the same way that MI5 does in Britain. MI5, the Security Service, and MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, operate in similar fashion to the FBI and the CIA in America. They work along with the GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters, in much the same way as the FBI and CIA work alongside the National Security Agency (NSA). The GCHQ and the NSA are both signals intelligence agencies and focus on information/data collection from around the world. The GCHQ is the modern successor of Bletchley Park, the British WW2 code breaking agency, and it has a massive spectacular donut shaped home building in Cheltenham that looks more suitable for interstellar travel than for sifting through data from international satellites and ocean telephone cables.

Both American and British intelligence have split foreign and domestic intelligence operations into separate agencies to promote and protect the civil rights of their country's citizens. The FBI has a mandate not to intrude on the communications of American citizens unless that communication poses a threat such as international terrorism or is deemed criminal in nature. This is why it was so important to criminalize the possession of images of minors and sex no matter from where they originated, no matter why they were created, no matter how they could be interpreted by the courts. Only if possession could be punished by a felony would the Federal government acquire the right to pursue it with all the legal and quasi-legal tools at the government's, particularly the NSA's and FBI's, disposal.

To do this, the relevant federal agencies had to set up a full court press across America to promote the idea that they could provide evidence to local jurisdictions so that they could prosecute people that would need to be arrested in their jurisdictions if their States set criminal penalties, specifically making possession a felony.

The criminal courts in the U.S. are located primarily at the County government level. Only counties at the local level have the resources to run all three of the main elements of enforcement: Sherriff's Offices, Courts, and Jails. County Sherriff jurisdictions operate in the rural or unincorporated areas of Counties that lie between municipalities, whereas municipal Police Departments operate exclusively within the City Limits of their municipalities. Police officers in one municipality have no jurisdiction in any other municipality nor do they have power in unincorporated areas. Municipal and County boundary agreements may set forth special circumstances of intergovernmental cooperation for distinct elements of geography. They do this for traffic enforcement, for example, with boundaries for streets and highways, usually having police of each jurisdiction split N-S or E-W directions for highways not otherwise under State or County control. Similarly, cooperation agreements between sectors of law enforcement are common between County and Municipal governments, often known as mutual aid agreements.

Only the FBI counterintelligence task forces and later divisions could create a system using NSA assets, while developing their own, that would result in the Rube Goldberg apparatus that resulted. Lists of people violating the P2P network prohibition soon flowed to Prosecutor's Offices across the country. Prosecutors had their pick of many cases and often chose to prosecute the most high-profile cases first in an effort to provoke strong media and public reactions. They hoped that high profile cases would reduce illegal activity. My "group therapist" explained to me that there were literally hundreds of such cases awaiting prosecution in our county. No one stopped to consider, or even cared to consider in the very heated public atmosphere, how this might violate due process standards about arbitrary and capricious or selective prosecution.

There was little fear of investigation by the press or by other government authorities, little fear of being effectively challenged in Court proceedings, so chilled had the atmosphere become. The government told everyone who came close to back off, that shedding light on the subject would scare away those most in need of prosecution and interfere with ongoing investigations.

No one dared to go to trial and risk many years of harsh punishment at the hands of a politically whipped-up jury. Defense Attorneys now knew that they were up against the Feds and their ICE/Missing and Exploited Children's lists of what was illegal. The new system was based on intimidation. For such a system to work effectively, it could not have been constructed any better. It could not be challenged in any real way and anyone who argued against it could be accused of having the kind of knowledge (of the illegal materials) that would immediately place themselves under suspicion as well. For Defense Attorneys it was a clear _Catch 22_. It was as if a big yellow sign had been posted on every case, "Keep Out". There simply were no legal defenses.

In 2018, the Electronic Frontier investigated cooperation between Best Buy's "Geek Squad" and the FBI and found that the FBI was paying Best Buy's employees as informants to flag customers found with illicit materials on their computers amounts such as $500.[299] The FBI would not say what other, if any, computer repair companies were cooperating in a similar manner, but my experience tells me that there were many more doing so from around the country. Some 20 states have laws that require reporting such incidents to authorities.[300] This is in spite of the 4th Amendment and Due Process rights of U.S. citizens not to be exposed to unreasonable search and seizure. To my knowledge, no one has sued Best Buy.

For all intents and purposes, these searches turned Best Buy into an arm of the FBI. The bridge separating domestic surveillance from the reach of the full power of all of the national security agencies has been more than breached. The incursion reaches deep into the whole structure of state and local law enforcement. It is now a super highway and there is no one in or out of government who will speak against its recent construction or raise the issue of its unconstitutionality. Discussion is taboo and seemingly _verboten_. It is, as Stephen Miller, the White House white nationalist, no doubt would point out, an "unquestioned" authority.

How, you say, could a bunch of computer geeks down at the corner Best Buy even know what files would be considered illegal? After all, as has been pointed out, this material is but a tiny cache, much of it old porn from Denmark added to by a smattering of amateur travel porn shot with shaky handhelds. None of it is even close to any kind of modern commercial porn in quality or content. None of it beyond the Danish is attributable to any particular source or even country, except in the case of the obviously Japanese tourist stuff, though in the case of Japan such filming wasn't illegal until 2014. How did they know? Did the FBI tip them off by giving them one of their flash drives filled with detection software?

There is an inherent problem in all of this: unconstitutionally vague distinctions in the materials selected. The government's Center for Missing and Exploited Children may be able to add a million questionable items to ICE's list of vetted, certifiably illegal material each year, but nobody really knows. Why? Because it is itself illegal to possess such information. It becomes an Orwellian hall of mirrors designed on another planet.

Half of men surveyed in the U.S. think the gender pay gap is made up. Half of men are living in their own little worlds. Given the naturally self-deluding nature of human beings, how does the government make such fine distinctions about what PC files are really illegal? Why doesn't the government focus on those who are instrumental in creating and posting files rather than on the young and curious who may trip upon them? When does thinking about sexuality become crime? How easy is it to be too harshly judged, like Hester Prynne in _The Scarlet Letter_? How shitty does it feels to be an outcast, warranted or not, as observed in _Easy A_?

The idea behind America's new obsession with prosecuting porn in the land of the First Amendment is to stop the downloading in order to prevent material from being posted. The same rationale could be put forward for the downloading of material posted by extremist white nationalists, supremacists or jihadists, but we don't break down people's doors for it. When do the actions of the government become too disproportionate and extreme, violating revered principles held dear by a free people?

In _Gattaca_ , society is able to prevent disease by gene manipulation, creating a superior class of human beings envied by everyone else. The lead character seeks by illicit means to assume the identity of such a gifted person, thus becoming part of a class of individuals known as _De-gene-erates_ , socially despised gene fakers. In _Gattaca_ the world is turned upside down and being born normal is longer desirable but instead is a source of shame and regret, deviant in itself, stigmatizing, ostracizing, isolating. Normal makes one a modern leper, a scarlet letter, an outcast. The idea of The Other is turned on its head, but it remains a part of our future anyway.

The other explanation for government action is that the constant re-posting of such representations is re-victimization. The **Supreme Court** has allowed persons portrayed to sue those convicted of possession of a representation on the logic of this reasoning and there are a few cases where the Courts have upheld such awards when it was possible to connect actual material back to an individual.

The situation is however more analogous to that of marijuana possession and what Obama said about such laws including legalization. On the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado and Washington he said, "it's important for it to go forward because it's important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished."[301] In fact, this is the case as viewing porn on everyone's personal devices these days is so common and a significant portion of what is being viewed falls under the government's definitions of what is not legal. We may have a million SO's in America now. Imagine having 20 million, the number of people who at one time were estimated to have illegal porn on their computers.

Only a select few are being punished. This makes such laws universally a form of selective enforcement, one that is troublingly arbitrary and capricious. Add to this the well-known practice of permitting offenses by minors to be selectively ignored or given very light treatment that falls far below that of a lifetime felony conviction and lifetime registration and you have a prescription for laughable enforcement, deserving of public derision, promoting a widespread scorn for the fairness and equity of the country's criminal laws and legal system.

There is the argument that the **Supreme Court** has defined free speech as having been restricted by constitutional interpretation to the time, place and manner of speech. National security, hate speech and underage porn have had special protections carved out of the Constitution to allow their prohibitions. Still, nudity is permitted as free speech by the **Supreme Court**. When does underage nudity become pornographic? No one knows. Or at least no one is saying.

Again, it is argued that in the U.S. we have more draconian laws about sex than other more advanced countries because we are a more heterogeneous society than other advanced countries. Being a more heterogeneous society than Sweden with 10 million inhabitants or Finland or Norway, each with 5 million, means that we are less trusting of our neighbors and are more likely to fear them.

Our diversity of origin, large population, and geographic dispersion argue against having a single national government, one without 50 states to intermediate between ourselves and the Federal government. Instead we have the 50 states to help express our political diversity and give voice to our individuality. So why has the Federal government taken charge of the field with, of all things, a national porn law, without the explicit permission of our States and Congress? When did Americans sign on for this kind of pervasive and intimate mass surveillance in the name of something so nearly impossible to define, fairly supervise, or keep free of corruption?

There have been muckrakers like Upton Sinclair's, **The Jungle,** and Ralph Nader's, **Unsafe at Any Speed,** and dystopian writers like Aldous Huxley, **Brave New World** , Ray Bradbury **, Fahrenheit 451** , George Orwell, **1984** , and Jack London, **The Iron Heel.** All these writers have received praise for holding up mirrors to the societies of their day. In doing so they have strengthened the cause of democracy. Dystopia in the current political climate has had a resurgence in interest because democracy has come under stresses it has not seen since the 1930s.

The Federal government classifies the kind of abuse they are trying however ineffectively to reduce as _child exploitation._ We tend to think of an abuser as the kind of person who would have fun drowning kittens, pulling the wings off butterflies or killing Bambi, the ultimate Boogeyman of our nightmares. Instead we create our monsters out of sex laws rather than rehab them with laws intended to reduce abuse. Instead, sex laws make it hard for offenders to be rehabilitated. They make it hard for offenders to go back to old professions and to find a place to live. They make it hard for offenders to live normal sex lives, reducing causes for recidivism.

England has seen the problem and dumped their registration laws. France is just now changing their laws to an age of consent of 15. Prior to this sex with a person under 15 was considered illegal only if forced, this after high profile cases of men accused of having sex with 11-year old girls.[302]

David Brooks, **New York Times** columnist, notes that there has been an adoption these days of a dark world view in which people are/or can be considered irredeemable, a belief that previously no religion would continence. We see that in laws that deny our essential humanity and the nature of our human condition.

Ostracizing and stripping rights from groups based on the acts of a few of its members has much in common with how **Kristallnacht** , "The Night of Broken Glass", was brought about by the murder of a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, by a Polish Jewish teenager at the German consulate in Paris in 1938, as a form of retaliation by the Nazis against the Jews prior to WW2.[303]

The murder of vom Rath was nothing more than a pretext for the Nazis to carry out the reprisals of **Kristallnacht** , after which the writing of **WW2** was on the wall. It was also in Paris, on two consecutive days in July of 1942, that the Paris police were forced by the Nazis to round up 13,152 Jews (including more than 4000 children) and congregate them in the Paris Velodrome, a bicycle stadium, prior to their being sent by rail to Auschwitz. Called the **Vel' d'Hiv Roundup** , it stands as an historic act of complicity by the French in the extermination of the Jews.[304]

The idea that one must stop the cycle of abuse in a person's life instead of punishing that person and thus giving life to that cycle, seems as lost today as history's most valuable lessons. If we don't fight for our democracy, we'll lose it. If we become too lazy, apathetic, stupid, blind, and greedy we'll throw it away. A just society should be a generational obligation, not a platitude. We created just societies out of cruel empires thousands of years ago. _Equal protection_ is the same reason for which they exist today.

Take Out

1) **White identity politics** are here to stay. That's the bad news. The good news is that the white electorate has been split by class and education by Trump in a cross cutting political realignment. In a largely suburban nation, educated suburban white voters have moved Democratic in response to Trump. All the while lunch bucket Democrats have hunkered down with Trump, effectively becoming Republican much as they did in the 1980's with Reagan. In fact, Reagan started the alienation, reducing taxes for the rich, and Trump has simply exploited it further. Lunch bucket Democrats that have voted for Trump care more about cultural issues and themes of disenfranchisement than even an obvious policy issue like taxes. They care more about the resentment they hear in Trump's voice than the words he says. They have experienced decades of being marginalized by political, educational, health, income and wealth inequalities. They have been preyed upon by heavily protected U.S. corporations in what has amounted to a war on the middle class and they don't know where to turn at this point. That a significant proportion of Americans are content with the politics of grievance is an indictment of the direction of the country.

2) Our genetically influenced **tribal origins** make it all too easy for human beings to objectify and de-humanize one another. Humans are particularly good at ignoring any evidence to the contrary of their deep-seated prejudices, and embrace without thought any ideas which they perceive support their prejudices. Humans join in a **shared narcissism** with a narcissistic leader. This can lead to violence and the breakdown of social order. The logic that lead the males of one tribe to annihilate the males of another, to dominate and enslave the other tribe's women and children, is still a part of the functioning of the human brain.

3) American white identity will weaken as America ages, but **America is likely to retain its demographic advantages.** Human impulses going back to the Agricultural Revolution have led to the formation of large human organizations based on shared myths of presumed hierarchies. Human history is the story of this history. White identity politics are emerging as the driving political force in western societies just at a time when European, Russian, Chinese and Japanese societies are entering an era of economic struggle caused by unfavorably aging demographics.

America has been able to continue to grow its population and its economy in the face of such change, but it too will eventually experience an aging population and the need for continued economic growth to sustain its economy. Between 1950 and 2015 nearly 50 million people immigrated to the United States, which was almost half of the developed world's immigration during that time.[305] It has been about a million persons a year on average. Between 1980 and 2008 the U.S. was the only rich country with replacement fertility as well. The country's population is estimated to grow to 380 million by 2040 when it will have a younger population than other rich countries, the working ages will still be expanding, and it will have more births than deaths, unusual among advanced countries.[306]

On the other hand, between 1870 and 2010 Americans were the most highly educated in terms of years of schooling among those of working age, but the trend seems to be stalling out. Also, U.S. fertility has fallen by 10% after 2008 and may not recover to former levels.[307]

4) The **free flow of trade (globalization)** has started to reverse worldwide trends such as extreme poverty, but addressing income and wealth inequality will need more. To truly address inequality will require that all wealthy nations organize to address the free flow of human capital across transnational boundaries, in other words, immigration, and by indirection the international refugee problem and human trafficking. An overarching consensus is required for planning resettlement to a variety of countries for Venezuelans, Syrians, Nigerians, Sudanese, and many others. The economic benefits will be substantial on all sides and the political benefit will be immeasurable in terms of a more secure world. This and greater worldwide financial transparency will go far to reduce the threat to world security of one-man despots and abusive regimes, by kicking the twin underpinnings of a captured population and a means to hide the wealth of the nations that they sack out from underneath them. The effort to welcome immigrants from around the world to new countries in a peaceful and orderly way can transform the planet.

5) Also transformative is achieving **gender equality** around the world. This should be an especially high political priority in the Islamic world, where it will neutralize the ferocious tribalism inherent in Islamic extremism. More egalitarian sexual equality is a key to countering the worst impulses of our tribal heritage. It also plays an equally important role in reducing growing income inequality. These should be considered twin political and economic goals to be given the highest priority in every corner of the globe.

6) **Religious fanaticism** has in some cases become politics. The separation of church and state is a necessary development of western thought, as the primacy of one over the other creates an instant conflict. Epitomized in the abortion issue, anti-abortion is primarily represented in the American electorate by religious conservatives. They hold that religion must rise above politics to such a degree that they demand that 29% of the U.S. population should be able to dictate their view that Roe vs. Wade be overturned onto the other 67% of Americans that wish to preserve the ruling.[308] These people don't believe in democracy if they think they have any viable chance of winning their argument. In democracies minority views, no matter how strongly held, cannot prevail over much larger majorities. This extreme view of politics has taken a destructive turn in America, placing the religious right in opposition to the Constitution itself. There is something to Bill Maher's view that religion has played a destructive role in human history. Trends predict the decline of religious conviction and will lead to the eventual elimination of tax-exempt privileges received by religious institutions in America, privileges that all the rest of us pay for. Furthermore, the organizations representing religious extremes in America already have far too much impunity to act politically, and do not deserve tax exempt status any longer.

America was a rural country until well into the 20th Century and that society benefited from the scientific revolution in agriculture on the one hand while celebrating the rugged independence of the individual and the right to worship on the other hand. Only in the 21st Century has America become fully urbanized (or suburbanized some might say). Religion has been weaponized by politics. Science has been ignored in the name of religion. Separation of church and state have been torn asunder. Consensus is gone. What the Constitution held in check has been exploited for short term political gain.

7) **Disrupt the Suburban Hierarchy to address Segregation and Income Inequality**. Suburbia is where racism and economic inequality are cemented. America is now a suburban nation and will become more so. The hundreds of suburbs of a typical American urban area range the full gamut of income and racial composition. They determine the quality of education that an American receives, from poor to excellent. They stagnate the economic opportunity of future generations of Americans, most particularly enforcing racial, and now income, segregation in the United States in a way that **Plessy vs. Ferguson** could never have imagined. To remedy the ill effects of this new arrangement, educators need to speak out against it, and legislatures need to implement fair education laws that require the redistribution of property tax resources from high income districts to low income districts to create equal education opportunity. Better yet, legislatures need to fund these efforts from increased state income taxation while mandating that property taxes be lowered commensurately. The solution is not to open the floodgates of higher education to those with poorer educational preparation to create opportunity, but rather to make sure that everyone has a fair shot at a good education to start with. Federal law may be needed to incentivize state governments to move in this, the proper direction. Making rich suburbs less attractive by taking away their incentives to fund rich school districts will lead to greater housing opportunity for all. The tax incentives of the current system have to be reversed long term for this to be the result, but we can create a more integrated society by doing so.

Sexual abuse is not deviant behavior. It is not aberrant behavior. It is typical human behavior. It is a socially unacceptable form of sexual expression, but it continues to exist in all societies. It expresses dominance, authority, and power. It expresses freedom from social rules and restrictions by persons who see themselves as in positions of sufficient power and authority over others that they can express themselves abusively without thought or concern for the consequences from other persons in lesser power or authority. It is easy for the narcistic leader and the leader's followers suffused with the leader's shared narcissism to engage in abusive behavior toward others not in their group, whether sexual in nature or not. History is replete. It is an expression of political power and it is thoroughly political in every way. The modern television series of **The Handmaid's Tale** makes this pretty clear, while managing to throw a ton of shade at American Christian fundamentalist fanaticism.

Sexual abuse is also cyclical in nature. Those who have been abused are much more likely to abuse others. This does not have to be in age disparate relationships, though the cycle of abuse is much easier to establish in such relationships.

That is what we know. There is a lot we don't know and much of the reason we don't know it is that sex research has somehow earned a bad name in research circles. Maybe this is because there is too much guessing about human sexuality to begin with to easily keep at bay all the falsehoods and misleading research put out by the fringe, the quacks and the conspiracy theorists. Maybe it's because when it comes to sex, we prefer to be ignorant or to do just what comes naturally. Introducing a sense of mystery may enhance the sexual experience and help to perpetuate the fantasies which make good sex. To attack the myth is to attack the individual ability to enjoy sex, or so it may be feared.

We know we enjoy sexual shame for instance. It is essential for many to the experience of sex. Knowing this, I expected SOs to be interested, even fascinated, to talk about their experiences, the more shameful the better, and I wasn't wrong. Teaching people that sex should be a positive expression of the self was what was missing. You can't teach people what is bad if you can't teach them what is good, which is what almost no time was spent on. Instead, people were asked to constantly relive their shame, which was always reinforcing of their cycles of abuse. This was treatment that was worse than no treatment. It was treatment that no taxpayer should be putting a penny forward for. It was treatment that should be sued out of existence.

Other points.

1) **Jury Nullification**. Very few cases go to juries these days because the costs are prohibitive. While much can be done to bring these costs down, it is still necessary for juries to handle cases with inadequate censored evidence. Nullification, in which a jury simply decides that the evidence is sufficient for a conviction but that the law requiring punishment doesn't suit the crime, will become the norm in these kinds of internet cases. Placing officials on the stand to defend their actions will also become more common in leading to the same result.

2) **Other social standards for Censorship**. There is an absence of standards for censorship. This will always be the case, but developing a world standard and world oversight is the best way to obtain any result at all. Perhaps the entire effort will fall apart for a lack of consensus over the tiny number of files actually involved. Maybe the absurdity of what is intended to be accomplished will become apparent and frustrate such efforts. Maybe cordoning off a portion of the internet is impossible. Maybe none of this makes any sense to begin with.

3) The **Supreme Court** has been **unconstitutionally vague** as to what should be illegal. Registration is cruel and unusual, and ultimately counterproductive. These laws do not decrease recidivism or crime. The hundreds, even thousands, of state and local laws resulting from the registration movement had placed an undue burden on law enforcement, especially local police. The registration acts only place targets on people, increasing crime rather than decreasing it. They create a class of people who are required to have a higher level of protection than the rest of the public, which is the inverse of what was originally intended.

4) **Emphasis on non-judicial social services approaches** in responding to all non-violent sex offenses are, no doubt, being developed worldwide. The U.S. should be the leader, not the follower, in this regard.

5) **Widespread worldwide decriminalization of nonviolent abuse should be a UN goal.** You can't heal the world without first finding a place to start.

6) **US regional cyber/sex crimes task forces** have become something like an old western posse. Saddle up! They create sex crimes by creating honey pots. These should be curbed or disbanded. Defer to local police departments. Refer bigger cases involving multiple persons engaged in suspicious conduct to the FBI. Police should have wider discretion in dealing with minor sex offenses. They should be redirecting people to social services and stop clogging the courts with abuse and substance abuse and divorce actions centered on abuse. Getting rid of SO registration would free up their time, now used to protect SOs from random cuckoos.

7) **Dump the Federal State Fusion Centers**. They are absurd for terrorism and ridiculous for internet censorship.

8) **Educate the public with public service announcements about P2P and other means of downloading illegal files, rather than perpetuate the existence of honey pots and attractive nuisances.** Law enforcement's insistence that this is giving a roadmap to users defies the logic of the casual internet user. It is a secrecy argument that no government should be allowed to make. It sets up the ultimate **Black Box** and **Catch 22**. Most importantly, it betrays the true intent of ambitious bureaucrats to create new and ever-expanding sources of power by stoking unjustified fears, panic and hysteria. P2P can censor their own search words or the government can do it for them. Call Seimens.

9) **Commission a blue-ribbon panel declassified report to the Congress** and the American people showing where funds are being spent and the number of staff positions from all agencies of the government involved in internet censorship and sex investigations and prosecutions. Spare no one. The tally would be huge. The cost per conviction would insult the conscience of America.

10) **Establish an MPAA for internet censorship**. It would be voluntary, much like the current MPAA. It would assign ratings, including a prohibited rating, so that every American can be on the same page. The main internet Search Engines could be sure to use the system and that would cover a very high proportion of all material being viewed on the web. It would be instantly effective and get rid of the Center for Missing and Exploited Children's highly politicized role in such matters. Protesting the Center's role in misleading the public using American tax dollars should be a high priority for those who value the First Amendment.

11) **Media.** Anyone reporting abuse stories for the establishment media should be required to cite statistics such as that of the Jay Report or the reports issued variously by legitimate authorities on abuse in the Catholic Church or elsewhere as to real incidence of abuse. Whether it's the Boy Scouts or youth sports, the numbers are sad but they simply reflect the rate of incidence of abuse as it occurs in society as a whole. The media should be required to hold up such facts in the face of all the outrage, anger and fear that their stories are intended to generate. To do anything else is to mislead the public.

12) **Use of the pejorative term Pedophile to incite hysteria and irrational hate**. Technically speaking, this refers to persons who have a sexual preference for sexual activity with the pre-pubescent. The Able test is intended to determine if a person has this tendency. A person with this preference might still have other sexual preferences as well. It may be exclusive or non-exclusive, but generally the term is used to refer to persons with an exclusive preference. In any case, the term should, if used properly, be used narrowly. It isn't. Not even close. It is rarely used in law, probably because it is inflammatory and imprecise. The term is used by the media to splash headline medical diagnosis of anyone accused of sexual misbehavior with someone in their minority. It is used by most law enforcement to refer to any SO. It is almost always intended to be pejorative, demeaning, and de-humanizing. We know that using dehumanizing language to describe any human being is wrong. Like certain other words that have similar connotations in society, it is a word that is an uncloaked insult, and should not be used by the public media, public service professionals or medical professionals in referring to such persons.

Singling any group out for special diminishment of rights is a dangerous path for any society, especially for democracies. Tribalism automates the typical human's response to othering, and it is othering that is modern society's most potent boogeyman. Every democracy needs to know that this is the wrong way to go every single time.

13) **Censorship is the absence of political expression**. Sex is the essence of human expression. Making certain kinds of sexual expression illegal is a distinctly political act aimed at free speech. Until society learns to tell the difference between abusive sex and caring sex, it will continue to struggle with issues surrounding underage sex. Society will continue to politicize sex. Sorting this issue out by government proxy through censorship and prosecutions is not the course that would be chosen by a sane society. We have to find better, more human, more humane solutions to what should be considered in many instances a social issue, not a political one and not a law enforcement one.

14) **What is the provenance of censored matter targeted by the U.S. government?** Can the government provide any background information to defense attorneys to support their claims? Can they prove beyond a reasonable doubt that censored matter has not been manipulated? Of course not. Is Pandora's box a fantasy of the government's creation? What is the background of people rating material for censorship? What are their qualifications and expertise? What makes them capable of making such determinations in the government's mind? Are they accountable to the American taxpayer for their actions? We simply don't know, but it doesn't look like it.

15) **Expungement.** Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers in 1977. Some were conscientious objectors. Some weren't. In state statutes de-criminalizing marijuana, provisions are being made to expunge the records of those convicted of minor possession convictions in the past. Inevitably public sentiment will begin to change in the face of more news describing how the government has abused citizen's rights in the panic and public hysteria following the adoption of censorship laws. Hopefully, sex offender laws will also be reformed, possibly even eliminated by some states. Legal recourse in cases of egregious violations of personal liberty and constitutional rights will be inevitable, and there is no doubt that there will be many of these cases that will be brought to the public's attention. Federal law enforcement is already flirting with high rates of long incarceration and this will have to be pulled back or done away with. Expect taxpayers to be on the hook for large settlements for overzealous prosecutions at all levels.

Unfortunately, the politicians who passed all these nonsensical laws will for the most part be long gone, thereby escaping the ignominy they so richly deserve.

16) **Liability.** The government's practice of seizing personal devices also possesses an inherent flaw that exposes all Americans to liability for the finances of those being investigated. Financial accounts, codes and passwords can be just as easily broken by forensic experts as entry into the devices is obtained. We don't know because of the government black boxes how many persons have been victims of robbery as a result. We don't know how big the losses have been. We don't know how many convictions have been borne out of such practices as the government is engaged in.

17) **Research.** The governmental black box extends to statistics on who is being convicted for what by what levels of government and in which states. Crime stats, those few which are being kept, throw everything together in a mixed bag that defies any process for sorting. How many censorship related convictions have there been by what states over what periods of time is a total unknown. Mandatory detailed reporting is necessary to help direct methods and resources for real, effective treatment and for developing appropriate protocols for dealing with the extremely wide variety of offenses that are covered. If we are going to deal effectively with over a million offenders in the U.S. and find ways to direct them away from antediluvian solutions like expensive and ineffective incarceration, we need to develop new science, which of course would be much cheaper to apply. We can't develop that without having some idea what we are dealing with, and the government right now is just covering up the data. The **Code of Hammurabi** , 1754 BC, with 282 laws, one of the oldest deciphered writings of human history, may call for an eye for an eye, but this isn't ancient Babylon baby.[309]

18) It is nearly impossible to identify the cause of suicide in every case. Still, there are many suicides caused by the current system of registration. These constitute the state and national registration system's death count. It can be gleaned just on the basis of press reports. A study is needed.

In the end, and as the babies in cages crisis demonstrated amply, you have a democracy that people can believe in when that nation doesn't have to wait for a Trump to come along in order to realize that the country's immigration system is in need of massive reform and re-organization. Kids in cages was happening, although to a lesser degree, during the Obama administration, when deportations reached their peak. Nobody cared then. When Trump made immigration a central issue in the American political landscape, that changed. Where was Congressional oversight all along? Where was the perp walk for Republicans, who consistently led obstruction to reform for 15 years, long ago?

The fact is that how a democracy treats its people matters. Locking up kids in cages, or separating them from their parents, was never a good idea. Treating non-violent sex offenders like hardened criminals, or as criminals at all, or even treating them all in the same way, is also never going to be a good idea. Pre-dawn raids on ordinary non-violent Americans is just too Gestapo for America. Stigmatizing any group of Americans by denying them their ordinary civil rights is always going to be found at the heart of every tyrannical regime. It is not America. Censoring the internet may be necessary to protect against hate speech, incitement to violence, and a host of social ills. The government's ability to control the internet is now total. It is no longer responsible to hold individual citizens to account for what they see on it. Anything else is just an excuse to conduct a witch hunt for non- existent sexual predators, for people like you and me, people who have an undying curiosity. a thirst for knowledge, and the desire to pursue that knowledge burned into us by our very own, and very unique, DNA.
Chapter 8  
THE LIST  
or I Know What You Did Last Summer

Have you ever wanted to make a list of all the S*** that America needs to fix really badly?

All Time Greatest Hits:

**1) Increase High Bracket Federal income taxes.** High marginal Federal individual income taxation should return to levels of 60-70 percent in order to address growing inequality as indicated in Chapter 3. Of course, this assumes that the U.S. shuts down the Delaware LLC mill and the International Banking regulators shut down the off-shore tax havens in London's protectorates in the Carib, China's Hong Kong, and the multitude of others around the world in politically corrupt and protected remote places like the Seychelles. The outrageously prevalent secrecy of international banking practices is a menace to globalism and to the economies of every single country in the world, let alone the danger that such secrecy represents to political instability of the world's governments by virtue of the growing wealth gaps it helps to create. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has the right idea on this when she calls for the return of the 70 percent income tax bracket.

**2) Teach Political Science, Economics, and Personal Finance in High School, especially Political civility.** Scientific facts are stubborn things. Elected School Board members around the country may want to select social science textbooks that fail to teach climate change in order to fall in line with their conservative voters, but politicizing education in such a fashion should be controlled, if necessary, by legislation. In the meantime, hyper-partisanship creeps into the electorate through bad education. Civics education is great. We can do more.

For example, while global warming was considered to be happening by 70% of Americans in a 2018 poll by **Yale and George Mason Universities Centers on Global Change** , it was also thought to be caused by human activity by 57% of respondents. In an **NBC/Wall Street Journal** poll of the same year 66% of Americans thought climate change was a serious problem needing action, up 15% from 1999, whereas 30% thought that it needed more research, concern being unwarranted, down 13% from 1999. When it came to all groups, such as whites, blacks, Hispanics, urban, suburban, and rural voters the results remained in the same 60-70% wheelhouse for those Americans who shared a concern about climate change.

Only when it came to political affiliation did it become obvious what group in America consistently rejected claims about the reality of global warming and climate change.[310]

There are a couple factors at play here. First, Republicans are overwhelmingly older voters, who failed to get the message about climate change back in their high school days, when the idea was then much more disputed than it is today. Second, school systems in Republican areas that choose to avoid texts and teaching about the subject have clearly skewed American voters in some areas of the country toward their unscientific viewpoint. This is why education reform in the U.S. is so important.

**3) Fix the Government and Private Sector Black Boxes.** All Federal and State laws should be compiled in a ready reference format on the internet. Special effort to identify laws needed when crossing state lines is very important, and it might just lead to the reform of a lot of bad Lincoln Law that should have been taken off the books a long time ago. This would create an outstanding opportunity for government reform and could lead to federalization of a lot of areas of the law that would benefit from greater consistency in public policy. It could create more uniformity and greater fairness in the application of commons laws across the country. Nothing serves the narrow special interests of the legal profession and politicians more than laws that are not consumer friendly. We are an educated public now and deserve better than what we've been getting in this regard. If lack of knowledge of the law is no excuse for breaking it, then the least that can be done is to make the law reasonably accessible to everyone. Tell that to the judge.

**Fix the Private Sector Black Box. It violates Democracy's inherent principle, that the public has a right, and need, to know, which argues for more not less public transparency in an age of increasingly undisclosed nefariousness in American corporate affairs.** Ninety percent of elder care facilities require arbitration agreements for all their patients. Corporate arbitration protections with employees have supplanted many worker protections throughout many industries. The use of NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, have become a matter of public concern since the dawn of the MeToo Movement. Court orders for sealing settlements have become all too common. A culture of secrecy has been fostered throughout American jurisprudence, much to the compromise of the original protections provided by public transparency, which is needed to promote the public's safety from unscrupulous corporations and shady economic actors of all kinds. Forced arbitration and settlements allowing for nondisclosure should be made unavailable except in extreme circumstances, especially for sexual harassment suits. The use of nondisclosure agreements should be dramatically scaled back by law throughout industry and the courts. Companies should not be permitted to enter into forced arbitration agreements to deny full legal rights to their employees to negotiate and sue.

**4) National Media Leadership.** The National media need to lead, not just follow. Instead of questioning the legitimacy of things like single payer health care, gun and football bans, they need to get out in front of such issues, demonstrating their competence in understanding and explaining the facts. Where was the media on cigarettes, the Wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan? Always following public opinion.

TV has the power demonstrated in country after country to be a positive force for change. Why is it that in modern revolutions the first move is to take over the national television network broadcasts? Because alone TV has the power to reach the largest parts of the public the most quickly.

In the U.S. TV has become a force for the elites of society to compete for eye grabbing local crime, celebrity news, salacious stories of every kind and ratings grabbing controversies. Not to mention what a force TV has become for sheltering misinformed parts of the public from reality and truth.

The media serve at our pleasure. We own the airwaves. We have to demand more responsibility. More importantly we need more insightful and far-sighted information to be presented to the public to move forward public debate and opinion, something that we are not presently getting.

Internet media who purvey forms of news need to take responsibility for filling that role in society. This may take regulation, but in any case, it is no longer permissible for sites putting forth the news to wantonly highlight stories lacking journalistic integrity from marginal and extreme news sources just because they are getting dubious attention online. Fostered popular misconceptions, cloaked bigotry and racism, and outright hatred being echo chambered and bandied about should be punished by an appropriate authority. A regulatory body without the partisanship of the FCC is needed.

**5) Expand Social Security.** The average American is poorly equipped to plan for retirement. We are seeing the virtual disappearance of the Defined Benefit Pension Plan. It is becoming obvious that many of the government and private sector DB Plans will have to drastically cut benefits for their recipients in the future because of exceedingly bad overpromising and lack of adequate funding. All this is making it necessary for government to dramatically improve old age programs. We are down to about 10 percent of the workforce having DB Plans, with virtually all of them being union, and half of that being government workers. Unreformed DB Plans have instigated the worst public sector economic crisis in a generation, plummeting States like Illinois, New Jersey and California into monumental debt. Clearly, other measures are going to have to be taken. For one, Defined Benefit Pension Plans are going to have to be phased out by a public sector that could never afford them in the first place. Social Security will have to be enhanced, but of course this can only happen by raising Social Security taxes on all employees and employers.

**6) National Criminal Justice Reform.** This starts with establishing a basic criminal code for all 50 states to follow, eliminating the wildly unfair laws that some states still retain on their books. Such a uniform criminal code would have many advantages and few drawbacks. It would reduce discrimination, prison overcrowding, and mass incarceration.

In America, 1 in every 100 persons is in jail. The US has a recidivism rate over 75% after 5 years, much higher than in other countries. Increasingly in Europe, the criminal justice system emphasizes rehabilitation and education and is getting better results. Such a system is now being used in Connecticut on an experimental basis.

According to the Sentencing Project, since 1980 the number of federal prison detainees has grown by 800 percent, with half there for drug offenses. Twenty-one hundred people have been sentenced to life in prison based on crimes as juveniles. Sixty-seven percent of persons in federal prison are persons of color, where such persons make up only 37% in the population.

There is a near universal need for better police training everywhere around the world. This is especially true in the United States. The U.S. Department of Justice is not doing its job and turns down 96% of police civil rights cases referred to them, when the normal rate of rejection for all cases is 23%.[311] The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review studied cases referred to DOJ from 1995 to 2015, to discover that DOJ turned down 12,703 civil rights cases out of 13,233 referred. Clearly, police officers in the U.S. are not being held criminally liable for their actions at an unprecedented rate. Just as clearly, local prosecutors across the nation have demonstrated reluctance to bring prosecutions against police officers accused of unjustified killings or brutal treatment of African American citizens time and time again. DOJ has responded with numerous Court supervised consent decrees against big city police departments to reform and retrain entire departments with tens of thousands of officers, Chicago just being the latest.

A simpler system of criminal justice will be a fairer one. The legal rights and penalties of an individual should be much more the same regardless of state. The current system is too arbitrary and capricious, increasingly burdensome to a citizenry that cannot be expected to know the multitude of variations of the laws that exist between states. The current system only enriches the legal community and stymies law enforcement. Many modern citizens should be quite capable of representing themselves legally if the bureaucracy of the law could be eliminated. Much of this will be eliminated as a result of the greater and greater transparency certain to be mandated by the Courts themselves. Better, clearer distinctions between state and federal jurisdictions is needed.

Nearly one-third of working age adults in America have a criminal record, a dramatic increase over the last 30 years. State criminal histories number over 100 million records in the U.S. according to a DOJ survey.[312] The FBI maintains the Interstate Identification Index (III) which includes everyone arrested and fingerprinted at the local level. As of July of 2015, the number of individuals identified on the III system totaled 70 million persons. Nearly half of black males and nearly 40% of white males have been arrested by the age of 23 in the United States.[313] In fact, one in three Americans will have been arrested by the age of 23.

The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that if an arrest record in the U.S. was universally disqualifying for a job the U.S. economy would implode, that having an arrest record is joining the biggest club that no one wants to belong to.[314]

It costs $14 billion to hold people on bail in the U.S. The Sentencing Project is proposing that cash bail be eliminated because of its unequal effect of holding poor and minority persons unable to afford bail, and this has been successfully tried in Washington D.C and elsewhere. Without such reforms American jails will descend into mere 19th century British debtor's prisons. They are at least halfway there already.

The fact that there are 67% people of color in jail vs 37% in the American population demonstrates how the American justice system has a problem with institutionalized racism. The system is 5 times more likely to lock up black kids in juvenile detention than whites. Blacks are 3 times more likely to be killed by police as whites.

**7)** **Public Pension reform**. Government employee pension systems should be sued by a group of state Attorney Generals in order to reform them. The Illinois Constitutional provision protecting public pensions should be invalidated as well as other public sector union pension provisions that block reform. They are unconstitutional as against public policy simply us they are mindless and robotic and cut off public debate, discussion and the reaching of sensible public policy. They are anti-democratic in the extreme and should have been struck down in California, New Jersey, Illinois and other states where such strictures have been imposed by out of control public sector collective bargaining.

National legislation is needed to define the rails of ethical public sector collective bargaining in this country. Untrammeled public union power is inimical to rational democratic institutions, something that was well understood as early as way back in the 1970's. At that time the principal threat that public sector unions seemed to pose were long public sector strikes, and as a result many states banned them. What was not well understood at the time was how public sector collective bargaining could be used over time to exploit foolish state politicians to create exorbitant pension and health care systems that would have to be paid for in the future. State politicians created future obligations knowing that they would be long gone from office before the tab came due on long-term public costs.

**8) Increase Consumer Protections, Re-organize Federal Commissions**. Cable and Telecom franchises go largely unregulated by Congress. Their bait and switch advertising practices show anti-trust collusion, unfair pricing, and exorbitant fees that have targeted Americans with a gusto that hasn't been seen since the days of snake oil salesmen. Senator John McCain was a frequent advocate for such protections and a frequent critic of how Congress is bought and paid for by the big Cable and Telecom franchises. These powers need to be removed from Congress and be given to Federal and state regulators, where they have always belonged.

Packing FTC and other Consumer based Federal Commissions with political appointees has gone a long way toward enforcing these unfair policies. New laws on how regular citizens without political backgrounds should be in charge of these Commissions are extremely necessary. They all need to be highly interactive with the public on the internet.

**9) Eliminate Tax Havens, Money Laundering, Dark Money, Worldwide**. Estimates of the amount of wealth held in tax havens around the world range between $24 and $36 trillion dollars.[315] It is perhaps 10% the world's economy. It is illicit financial activity that is often tied to the looting of public treasuries by political tyrants. It is also frequently engaged in by international corporations to evade taxation. Finally, it is also the laundering of money earned through criminal enterprises of all kinds both large and small. It is at the very heart of the world's **Black Box** , in that not enough is being done by the United States and international banking regulators to render transparent the practices on which this dark money depends. With $2.6 trillion in profits being held offshore by U.S. Corporations to evade taxation, clearly the problem has had a substantial negative effect on the U.S. economy. As closely allied to black money, it needs stronger laws and more aggressive law enforcement.

Massive public corruption can be hidden behind the walls of this system, which has a great effect on undermining the political systems of legitimate democracies. The current system is a menace to the world, bolstering kleptocracies that manage to hide the looting of their governments.

The three most influential financial centers in the world are New York, London, and Hong Kong. Hong Kong and London come in for special opprobrium for the extent of their laundering facilitation, Hong Kong laundering for China, and London laundering through its many dependencies in the Caribbean. In the United States the problem is more the creation of secret financial entities devoid of necessary oversight. Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming and other states encourage the creation of shell companies or LLCs that become fortresses of financial secrecy very difficult for the government to penetrate.[316]

A concerted effort by international authorities to crack down on these and related practices is needed to dispel the **Black Boxes** and create open and accountable transparency of financial transactions before the current system corrupts every corner of our political and economic systems. It's current power for evil is so corrosive that it even threatens elections in the United States, the core of our democratic process. It's power for good can also be seen in the very significant way that countries like Iran, Russia and North Korea react when confronted by the threat of being frozen out of international banking systems. The only reason why these practices have continued is because very powerful interests are behind them, interests powerful enough to upset the current rules- based world order.

Raising the jurisdiction over rules of incorporation to the Federal level and away from the level of the States where there is widespread abuse, would be a good first step, but more needs to be done internationally to require international rules over the same areas of finance, the creation of corporate entities, the disclosure of ownership of assets of all kinds, and of financial transparency in general. Such an effort would do a lot to stem the tide of transnational crime and the existence of the international criminal organizations that depend upon it.

**10) FBI Style Financial Audits Required for Candidates for elected Public Office.** This should be required, including regular financial audits, including full tax disclosure, to certify for office. Public corruption in the age of international financialization, terrorist financing and the Office of Foreign Assets Control requires that the public be assured its representatives are obeying all financial laws. The FBI, Federal Elections Commission, Treasury or some other well-respected body should be given oversight responsibility which could be delegated to state and local bodies, assuming they are given enough authority and insulation from ordinary political processes to do their jobs effectively. This would of course involve all the financial history of the subject persons, so it is a substantial undertaking in some cases. More importantly it would prevent persons from considering office who would clearly fail certification (like Trump). It would also put the public on notice for those candidates who may not have broken laws, but who may have avoided and evaded them.

**11) Join the International Criminal Court in the Hague.** The U.S. is the only major non-signatory of the convention establishing the ICC and by that means has avoided prosecution of its citizens accused of war crimes, thereby letting them escape international justice. This impunity has given rise to American torture and extraordinary rendition practices that violated international norms. Eventually, those responsible for such practices will be brought to justice in the United States, but to prevent such a recurrence it is important that the U.S. place itself under the jurisdiction of the Hague. This might also help close Guantanamo and prevent such an extra-judicial system of justice from ever being re-created. Guantanamo will stand forever as much as a rebuke to the American justice system as it is to an American political system that also sought to violate international norms.

**12** ) **Immigration Reform**. That there are 700,000 pending immigration cases in the U.S. demonstrates the failure of the country's judicial system to hold the Executive branch to account for basic law enforcement. It is hard to imagine how such a failure could have occurred, unless of course the judiciary has become too politicized to take its mission seriously. The various functions of the DOJ, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, ICE, and Customs need to be centralized into a single agency charged with the administration of the laws having to do with immigration. A special judicial arm should be created and fully funded to eliminate the backlog.

Deportation of illegal immigrants needs to be put on hold until reform and reorganization is in place. Obama led deportation with 400,000 in 2012, a number that even Trump will have a hard time duplicating. Normally this is about 200,000 persons a year. Its primary negative effect is splitting up families and potentially leaving their American born children with relatives in the States. It may not be as cruel and unusual as children in cages, but its close.

**13) Means Test Farm Programs.** Created in the Great Depression, farm subsidies were intended to keep family farms going during a difficult economic period, while establishing a stable food supply for the nation, but since then they have expanded to the point that in 2017 there were 400 recipients receiving between $1 million and $9.9 million under the program.[317] Forbes provides mapping of all recipients of over $1 million in the United States at **OpenTheBooks.com** where they have found over 6,618 recipients over $1 million since 2008. While America remains the world's largest food producer, billions are wasted sending subsidies to dead farmers and to farmers not to farm their land. The some-60 subsidy programs of the USDA need to reformed and means tested so that only true family farms qualify, to eliminate the waste, rank corruption, lobbying, and graft that so obviously infest the current programs.

**14) National Service.** All citizens should be required to fulfill a set period of service to the nation, which could take many forms. Along with much improved civic education throughout all the years of public education, the virtue of this practice is well known, as it promotes national identity over tribal identity. This is sorely needed at a time of extreme national hyper-partisanship derived from identity politics, growing worldwide nativism, and decades of increasing economic inequality at home and abroad. In America, this means having citizens who are more conscious of the social and civic arts, who value them more than the arts of military conflict and wealth accumulation. On one end of the scale, we would long ago have funded national health care and much more of universal education if we had stopped being the world's number one supplier of arms to the world with military expenditures equal to that of the next 20 countries combined, on the other end of the scale. We could establish a better sense of our national priorities by promoting those values early in the educational lives of our citizens.

**15)** **Address Hate Speech with National Laws**. Follow Europe's example by adopting strong laws against hate speech. The Alt-Right and characters like Alex Jones who perpetuate hate filled conspiracy theories need to be made accountable for their dangerous and reckless speech. That such speech increases during electoral seasons is proof that it is poisoning the American discourse in substantive ways that threaten democratic processes and principles. Social media needs to be regulated to promote free speech and attack hate speech. Social media will not do it on their own because the economic incentives work in favor of divisive speech on the internet.

**16)** **Change the Role of FEMA from Responder to Planner.** FEMA has a tragic history of only responding to disasters in the U.S. after they occur, providing failing government flood insurance to property owners to essentially stay in flood zones. Flood zones are needed to mitigate flood damage to everything and everyone else. Protecting flood zones allows the U.S. to prepare for disasters. The Federal Core of Engineers does a lot in the U.S. to propose flood mitigation measures but the Core's mission and FEMA's mission need to be combined. Much of the huge cost of natural disasters in the U.S. can and eventually will have to be addressed through much lower cost investments in disaster preparedness and prevention, much like the Dutch have done since their great disaster of 1953. In the U.S., Hoboken NJ has begun to address flooding concerns in just such a manner and may prove to be a good model of this new government approach. We can learn a lot from the Dutch. At least Hoboken thinks so and that's a start.

Everything should be up for consideration, including controlled burns in much of the nation's Western forests and lowering dykes and seawalls where feasible to accommodate controlled flooding. Most importantly, the millions of people living in flood zones in America need to be re-located to safety out of these zones. This will be a major long-term investment of the United States that will take a cooperative approach in partnership with state and local governments.

**17) Eliminate 501c3 nonprofit tax status for Religious and Educational Institutions, Revoke Religious Freedom Restoration Acts at all levels of government.** The problem here is that these institutions pay no income or property tax, meaning that they do not pay property taxes for their fair share of police, fire, and roads, as well as other necessary public services provided by state governments. All of these levels of government provide public safety to these institutions. By not paying they shift these costs to other taxpayers. In Manhattan, half of all real estate is non-taxable by the City because of this broad classification, a very inequitable arrangement. Some major universities do pay in lieu of property taxes to their local jurisdictions as compensation for some services, but in general such payments are woefully inadequate. State universities have no problem paying millions to their famous coaches but cannot pay for police protection? State educational institutions should not have to pay federal and state income tax, but should not be exempt from local taxes and fees.

Some argue that granting 501c3 status to eleemosynary institutions has helped maintain the line between church and state by establishing that churches cannot engage in political activity without losing their tax-exempt status. However, religion plays a powerful role in politics already, as other chapters of this book have demonstrated. The larger argument in the future will be why religion should have their taxes paid by everyone else, many of whom are not religious. This will become more of an issue as the vast majority of Americans cease to have any religious affiliations.

The Religious Freedom Acts at Federal and State levels have been used primarily as a cudgel to beat up local authorities attempting to enforce local zoning laws on churches. They provide little of social value and are a violation of the separation of church and state. They should be revoked, with prejudice.

Finally, the system of colleges and universities supplying their own on campus law enforcement regularly fails to protect women. Having these institutions pay for proper law enforcement and having local law enforcement on campus would dramatically improve the quality of campus law enforcement and give much greater protection to women. It would help break down the structures in American society that place women's safety in such a compromised position.

**18) Reform the U.S. Educational System**. In 17 of the 50 largest cities in America fewer than half the students graduate from high school.[318] This obviously disadvantages kids of color more than anyone and is a national disgrace. It also demonstrates the failure of integration in the U.S.

The problem with U.S. education is the geographically based system of local education funding. While it grants local autonomy in education an important role, it has resulted in a highly inequitable system of education that favors rich suburbs over all others. The nation has an overweening interest in equitable public education for reasons of sustaining a democratic form of governance. Furthermore, only Federal law can oversee and correct the inevitable inequities imposed by an educational landscape formulated on the basis of 50 states. The system needs Federal oversight that can assure a quality of education to everyone in the country.

The overall system should be structured pyramidally with at least 10% federal funding, 30-40 percent state funding, and 50-60 percent local funding. Federal and State mandates to improve education to maintain funding participation should be reasonably acceptable under this formula. A system of local funding evaluation such as the evidence based system just enacted in Illinois is also needed to make sure that all school districts have fair funding and equal opportunity for their students based on the needs of each district.

The Illinois system encourages over taxed high end school districts an opportunity to lower their taxes through referendum while providing more funding to low end school districts to bring them up to minimum equivalency. The transfer of wealth between districts occurs through the state budget and state taxation. Correcting an inequitable property tax system in this way is inefficient and more direct measures to reduce reliance on local property taxes is still needed.

Such a system would correct for the grievous racial and housing segregation patterns inherent in the American model of suburbanization, but only Federal and State Courts adhering to principles of equal opportunity in education can correct generations of racial segregation. The only escape from generational poverty and endless discrimination in this country is education. It should be America's first priority, always. We should wish to avoid at all costs the idea that being a member of the American educational establishment is to be a member of a league of practicing racists.

**19)** **Create a National Police Academy.** One of the great problems of our day is improving the professionalism and competence of police officers everywhere. A National Police Academy could have a number of branches and would not have to be difficult for trainees to reach. Some local departments have excellent training facilities in house and could be certified to forgo the national training facilities, but for most departments in the country, which are quite small, a high-quality training facility is needed. Reforming the criminal law with a national uniform criminal code for all 50 states would lend itself well to the creation of national training facilities.

**20)** **Eliminate Federal Income Tax Healthcare Subsidy.** Surprisingly, the Trump Administration left this carrot in the shopping bag when it passed its version of a tax reform giveaway in 2017. Worth a whopping $250 billion a year to the federal treasury, it permits the health care benefits of employees to remain exempt from federal income taxation to the individual.[319] It therefore subsidizes individual employer paid health insurance, which only benefits the insurance industry. Believe me, these boys don't need your help.

**21) Optional Pre-natal Testing Guaranteed**. Down Syndrome has largely been eliminated through voluntary testing in Iceland since 2000, and termination of Down pregnancies are 67% in the U.S. (1995-2011), France 77% (2015), and Denmark 98% (2015).[320] Genetic counseling should always be available.

Formal medical education and counseling should be required for those refusing vaccines. For those facing end of life decisions it should be routine to have end of life counseling services. End of life should be a legal option in all states and at the federal level.

**22)** **Revoke the Non-profit status of the NRA**. Who are we kidding here? These guys don't deserve non-profit status. They are now an arm of the Republican Party and gun industry, only 10 percent of their budget is for education, and most of it is spent on media promoting an anti-social gun culture.

23) **Re-establish the United States Information Agency**. In the era of social media, a new agency to provide truthful information to the world's oppressed people is needed to counteract the propaganda of dictatorial regimes.
Chapter 9  
AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM  
Tempus Fugit but Hopefully not for our Democracy

We need to **Make it Easier to Amend the U.S. Constitution**. We need to **Pass New Amendments to Strengthen Our Democracy**. Here are some ideas:

**1) Amend the Amending Process**. There are many arguments as to why the US Constitution has become a flabby unworkable guiding document for a country that just happens to lead the world. Hundreds of years down the road from its creation, few argue that it has become nearly impossible to correct or change it. The amendment process is entirely too cumbersome to be useful in rapidly changing times, and the strained interpretation upon re-interpretation that takes place to find some slender thread of reason for all the areas of law that it doesn't touch on has become a kind of national joke, one that is being played on the legal system, our citizens and democracy itself. What the United States needs is a new process for amending the Constitution, which, unfortunately, would probably have to be passed by the current Amendment process. It would also permit the U.S. to adapt to the changing world more quickly. Other large democracies around the World have already created modernized constitutions, with the result that their democracies are more representative of their people. We have fallen behind.

**2) Fix The 2nd Amendment.** Should a new, expeditious means of amendment be put in place, the first target should be re-defining the Second Amendment. Its current ambiguous language should be laid bare to reveal that it is not an excuse for untrammeled gun rights and the mass killing of children in schools or young people at concerts. In the current political atmosphere, it has become taboo to suggest that the rights of gun owners in a country of over 300 million privately held guns should be curtailed or that many of those guns should not be in private hands to begin with. As a result, we live on a troubling mountain of hypocrisy when 3 percent of our population owns half the guns in America and Americans own half the privately held guns in the world. This can only be called a form of mass temporary insanity. The NRA can only be thought of as a kind of pathological death cult.

**3) The U.S. Senate**. The second target of a new Constitutional Amendment Process should be re-aligning the upper house of the Congress, the Senate, so that the gross disparity between states and population is addressed. It makes no sense to permit Mountain and Southern states such a large voice in the Senate while denying California fair representation. This disparity has only dramatically increased over the time that the current Constitution has been in effect, and it has unfairly distorted the political landscape so that Americans have lost a substantial degree of democratic control with a small "d" over their own legislature. A state like California should have more than just 2 Senators and states like Wyoming should have only 1 Senator. Either the least populace states should share Senators or the Senate should be made larger to accommodate the largest states. Either way, states should be represented in the Senate in a way that more closely accords with their populations. To do less is to deny the Constitution's implicit promise of **1 man equals 1 vote**.

**4) Abolish the Electoral College.** The Electoral College also interferes with the right to have **1 man 1 vote.** It should be abolished with all due prejudice and the Presidency thereby be chosen by popular vote, allowing the U.S. to join the World's other democracies in so choosing their chief executives. The requirements for running for the Presidency should be qualified further however to require **full financial disclosure and the ability to obtain an ordinary security clearance** prior to election (say 90 days for instance). Indeed, such a requirement is already in place for most top appointed Federal officials. It should apply to all Federal elected and appointed top level officials, as they all play in the same sandbox. Immediately after election or before appointment, all should be required to divest in areas deemed sensitive to their security clearances, according to well established rules of professional ethics. No one should be permitted to work in the White House without the necessary clearances.

**5) Control of Campaign Finance.** Limit severely campaign contributions from all sources for all federal, state and local elections. Require full and up to date campaign disclosures. Limit total spending so that even billionaire candidates do not have an unfair advantage. Elections should not be for sale. Overrule _Citizens United_.

Limit the length of all campaigns much as they do in Europe. Require that all candidates participate in at least three professionally moderated broadcast debates in federal elections. Too many candidates in safe districts refuse to even debate their challengers, which is offensive to all democratic traditions and should be prohibited by the Constitution. Require that all federally elected officials conduct totally open public Q&A meetings, or town halls, twice a year in their districts. Too many Congressmen are scared to answer to the very publics they serve and this kind of behavior should be prohibited by any democratic Constitution.

**6) Control of the Federal Budget and Debt.** Prohibit federal budget deficits and accumulation of national debt except for 1) domestic and foreign disasters as well as humanitarian relief and 2) declarations of war. Create a national sovereign wealth fund in which shall be deposited any funds remaining at the end of each annual budget cycle. Funds deposited in the **National Sovereign Wealth Fund** would be eligible to receive at least some preferential treatment. It would serve as a national source of wealth creation for the nation's worst rainy days, but not for another TARP.

**7) Attack Hyper-partisanship, Reduce Parties to Federal Politics Only.** Prohibit national parties from being involved in state and local elections. Require that all state and local elections be _Non-Partisan,_ or at-large, to reduce the overweening influence of political partisanship on the country's politics. This would probably not stop all informal influences on the down ballot, but it should at least initially be enough to reduce hyper-partisanship and allow voters to concentrate on local issues when voting.

**8) Gender Neutral Party Spending**. Political parties should be required to spend equal amounts on female as well as male candidates, an action that would result in women receiving more party support should they be fewer in number than their male colleagues, evening the playing field between men and women.

**9) Mandatory Voting for Federal Offices.** Trump got 46.1% of the national vote, but only 26.8% of eligible voters. Democracy is stronger when everyone participates. States should be encouraged to enact reasonable similar requirements. **A legally verifiable form of Internet voting** should be created for all forms of election in the United States.

The FEMA presidential alert of 10/3/18 hit 225 million cell phones simultaneously, giving pause to everyone about the power of this technology to unite a nation. Why can't national voting be this easy?

**10) Control of Congressional Lobbying.** There needs to be a rule-based system allowing first amendment rights to be properly balanced by the competing interest of having a democratic process untainted by undue influence. If a Commission to regulate this industry is necessary that's fine, but it should be appointed in a truly non-partisan manner. What constitutes bribery versus what is actual lobbying needs attention, with much greater emphasis on avoiding the appearance and criminal liability for bribery. A stronger definition of the emoluements clause and stronger penalties for this and bribery need to be set forth, probably by such a Commission.

**Prohibiting** Congressmen and Senators from lobbying Congress after they leave office would do much to end the practice of self-interested persons going to Congress for a few years only to cash in afterward by joining the influence peddling industry. When the Constitution was written this industry didn't exist, but today its power to corrupt our democratic process is immense. That the recent Congress, dominated by Republicans who quickly converted to Trump supporters, was mostly made up of the self-interested and not the politically committed, became only too abundantly obvious.

**Prohibiting** the sale of access to a government official at any level, with criminal penalties much harsher for the sale of political access to foreign agents.

**11) Strengthen the War Powers** provision to require more Congressional involvement in overseeing the President's powers to deploy and command military force. Currently, the abdication of the Constitution's War Powers, or the ceding of them to the Executive, has weakened American democracy to an unacceptable degree and resulted in costly, insufficiently declared and poorly supported wars and military adventures that were later regretted by the large majority of American voters. If the President cannot get the support of Congress, he should be greatly constrained in what actions he can take. The reasonably limited actions he can take on his own should be carefully defined and should fall far short of major, extended conflict. This should also reassure the World that if the U.S. Executive does take an ill-advised, imperialistic military action, that it will necessarily have to be of short duration unless Congressional approval to continue can be obtained. This would prevent the President from acting like an emperor even if the country he leads has become imperialistic. Failure to break off military actions in these cases by the required time limit would create an automatic forfeiture of the Presidential office and replacement by normal line of succession.

**12) Lengthen House Terms and Impose Term Limits on All Members of the House and Senate.** House terms have become too short, exacerbating hyper-partisanship by requiring members to be in constant campaign mode. The current length of the House terms also contributes to the wide swings between the dominance of the parties that the country is currently experiencing. These effects are especially pernicious at mid-term elections, always undercutting the party of the President. The electorate suffers from a certain political sea sickness as each party concentrates on the next election rather than on governing. Some offsetting of elections is necessary to smooth out political transitions.

In addition, the number of terms should be limited, probably to no more than 3 for the House (3 X 3 = a total of 9 years) and 2 for the Senate (2 X 6 = a total of 12 years). Further, this provision should require term limits for all state elective offices nationwide, but should leave the determination of the length of terms up to each state with some outside limits for all states. It should reinforce that all state and local elections are required to be non-partisan.

Interestingly, the Chinese profit sharing with bureaucrats led to innovation, accountability, and a transition to capitalism. Limits on age, 70, and term limits on the top leadership also helped create separate waves of leadership of different ages that could fill the nation's leadership in successive waves. While the Chinese have a very different model than the U.S., it is instructive. We need to pay better attention to encouraging youthful entry into national politics and move away from a legislature of the old, grey and addled safely ensconced in politically dead districts. Gerrymandering to create such dead districts should of course not be allowed, but rather scientifically neutral means of drawing districts should be adopted nationwide at all levels as established in the U.S. Constitution.

**13) Adopt National and State Plebiscite and Referendum.** A National Plebiscite and Binding Referendum should be possible with verified signatures of 5% of the number of registered voters in the last national election on a national petition. A similar requirement should be established for all 50 States but with a signature requirement of 7% of all registered voters in the last statewide election. All efforts to suppress voting should be definitively ruled unconstitutional. **A legally verifiable means of Internet voting** should be required for all forms of election in the United States.

**14) Prohibit Government Subsidies of Private Interests.** Right now, it is almost axiomatic that all levels of government provided tax and other incentives to businesses for a variety of purposes. These purposes vary from getting a company to locate in a state or locality to building NFL Stadiums. A free market democracy should not be favoring individual money-making enterprises and Republicans generally support this principle. In reality though, they often do vote for tax incentives as ways to garner votes. This practice should be made explicitly illegal. For one thing, it leads directly to corruption of public interests in general and elected officials in particular. A Constitutional limitation is sorely needed so that the practice of competing jurisdictions handing out ill-considered freebies to the powerful and influential moneyed interests of the country can finally stop. It is such a normal form of everyday professional economic development bribery that it has become institutionalized in American politics. Whole courses in graduate urban planning schools revolve around this, but it has nothing to do with good or progressive governance at any level. Let's leave this for tin horn dictators and sleazy assed developers like Trump.

On an additional note, dumping all the trade barrier inducing Federal and State subsidies to milk, ethanol, and electric car producers would save the Federal and State budgets, and American taxpayers, hundreds of billions of dollars a year no doubt. Should it really be a national priority that milk is $1 per gallon? Free market, free trade.

Finally, all taxes on goods and services should be required to be indexed by Constitutional law. The idea that a tax is a set amount in the era of the computer is inane. Taxes on gasoline and other items should be legitimate enough to be automatically indexed to a government inflation index or they shouldn't exist at all. This way the Federal and State road trust funds, set up to direct revenue to vital infrastructure improvements, would not need to be voted on again and again to catch up with inflation. Of course, what happens is that legislatures fail in their responsibilities to keep up with inflation and soon these funding mechanisms become inadequate. All taxes at all levels should be required to meet this Constitutional test.

There should be a national cap on local property taxes added to the Constitution that they not exceed 1% of market value. This would also create a much fairer playing field for real estate and politics at the local level, while forcing greater state funding of education everywhere.

**15) Expand the Number of Justices on the Supreme Court, drop lifetime appointments.** This is often referred to as packing the Court, but the rational for doing this has strengthened considerably since the beginning of the Republic. More importantly, a new process for selecting Supremes is needed that is not so fraught with political considerations. It is true that the Court has been over-politicized at the same time that American politics has become hyper-partisan, and that increasingly the Court is being turned to for what are political rather than purely legal decisions. The connection between the Constitution and the Court's many hair-splitting decisions has been largely lost over time, whatever the so called "strict constructionists" would have you believe.

Limited term appointments for the highest courts in advanced countries has become the norm. It is time for the U.S. to follow this practice. The U.S. Supreme Court term of office has averaged 17 years. The 90 judges who completed their terms of office by 1970 averaged 15 years and retired at 68, but the 10 who have retired since 1970 have averaged 25 years.[321] Something like 17 years or a mandatory retirement age (Usually 70) is needed. This can prevent having justices who have lost the ability to perform their work effectively and have come to rely too heavily on their clerks to perform all the real work of the position. The **Carrington/Cramton** proposal is to phase in for 18-year terms so that a new appointment would take place every two years, giving every President in a four-year term the ability to appoint two new justices.

A **National Legal Commission** of legal scholars should be given the task of selecting judges to fill SCOTUS vacancies and their mandate should be a simple requirement of excellence and evidence of true impartiality. Members of the National Legal Commission would in turn be selected based on simple criteria by State Commissions elected by members of State Bars. Again, the criteria would be evidence of true impartiality. This would tend to exclude candidates with political backgrounds, rather than selecting them solely on their political backgrounds, as is currently the case. Such a process should also be made transparent to the public.

Justice is anything but blind in America, and the idea that judges should be truly impartial in such a diverse society was always nothing more than an unattainable ideal. Nevertheless, the American system of jurisprudence is usually admired by the rest of the world, if often poorly emulated. If we are to strengthen our Democracy, there can be no better place to start than with advocating for greater impartiality.

**16) Establish that the President lacks immunity to criminal prosecution, conviction and imprisonment.** Such a provision needs to be added to the Constitution to clarify once and for all that the Presidency is not above the laws of the country. Define the role of Special Prosecutors to investigate the President and the limits of their powers to refer matters to the Congress for possible impeachment. Provide protections against their removal and unassailable ground rules for the conduct of their investigations.

**17) Toss Sovereign Immunity and Civil Immunity in General.** States should no longer have immunity from civil lawsuits. This practice has permitted untold harm against individuals for arbitrary reasons and allowed States to act with impunity to violate their citizens' rights. No one should ever be immune from civil lawsuits, just as no one is above the law, or, more importantly, beyond the reach of the law. Immunity has given States the powers of authoritarians, which they never deserved to begin with. These are anachronistic powers that defy proper explanation in a modern society.

Just as States should not be able to hide from their misdeeds behind a wall of civil immunity, so too should gun manufacturers have no immunity from suit, as they do now. It needs to be made unequivocal that Congress shall pass no law granting legal immunity to any individual, company, corporation or other legal entity. Claims of immunity, even in matters of criminal law, should be reconsidered, refined and limited.

The U.S. has 5% of the World's population and 50% of the privately held guns with 101 guns per 100 persons. Of these, only 3% of Americans own half the guns in the country. The rest of the World is mostly under 10 guns per 100 persons. British police fired their guns only 3 times on average last year. States have passed many reasonable restrictions on the ownership of guns, but the patchwork system in the United States has failed to stop the ever-increasing level of gun violence and mass killings that blot the national character. The gun industry is undoubtedly one of the most effective politically organized commercial interests since the Dutch East India Company. Gun ownership should be so limited that only a few Americans would have them, such as to allow possession of antiquities, and the reason should be to protect law enforcement officers.

**18) Affirm a woman's right to making medical decisions for herself. Affirm equal rights for women.** No brainer.

America is indeed an exceptional nation, exceptionally screwed up that is, and these reforms would do much to correct a situation where real democracy has been permitted to lapse as the result of a failing Constitution.
APPENDIX

### Chapter 10  
A PRAIRIE STATE OF MINDLESSNESS  
Perfectly Dysfunctional Democracy

Illinois has Chicago, LSD (Lake Shore Drive), Lake Michigan, the Bears, the Cubs, windy arctic circle winters and sub-tropically hot and humid summers. Illinoisans are regularly basted like overcooked geese in humid warm fronts that bulge northward from the Gulf of Mexico in the summers, while freezing the tips of their noses off in the violent polar vortexes that descend from Canada in the winter. Illinois has something even more unique though. It has over 8000 units of overlapping local government, known for their overweening complexity and mind-numbing opacity, as well as a State government that regularly competes for the worst run in the nation.

Illinois' complex government is nearly the thirstiest for tax dollars in the nation, because it has way too many taxing authorities.[322]

In arriving at its analysis **WalletHub** looked at real estate tax, vehicle property tax, income tax, and sales tax. New Jersey came in worst at 8.13% and Illinois came in second worst at 7.71%. A similar 2018 study by Kiplinger showed Illinois' tax burden in the top five of all states in the nation.[323]

On top of this is the problem of Chicago, a major point of transshipment for the nation as a whole and for illegal drugs in particular. The drugs come from ports of entry with Mexico in the American Southwest and can be shipped by highway, rail, and air to much of the central and Eastern parts of the country. The Mexican cartels deal the drugs to rival street gangs in Chicago, making the City the street gang capital of America with 100,000 members in 700 factions, according to the DEA.[324] All too many live in "trap houses", foreclosed or abandoned homes, living together because of poverty and homelessness. The presence of gangs has hollowed out property values in large parts of the South and West sides of the City. The problem is so long standing in Chicago that it has become multi-generational. Emergency room visits for heroin overdoses lead the nation in Chicago, while Mexican heroin production has tripled and the purity of the drug has increased thirty percent.[325]

Chicago itself is a study in contradictions. It is one of the most economically and ethnically diverse major cities in the country. In the lakefront neighborhood of Streeterville, home to Northwestern University and three hospitals, life expectancy is 90 years of age. In Englewood, the city's most violent neighborhood, life expectancy is 60 years of age, according to a study by New York University.[326] The study showed that the two neighborhoods had the greatest difference in life expectancy of any two neighborhoods in the same city in the United States. Median household income is about $100,000 a year in Streeterville, $25,000 a year in Englewood, which is in the middle of Chicago's South Side.

Chicago has about one million persons living in or near the poverty line out of its 2.7 million population. The Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area, or MSA, includes 9.5 million persons. The same Combined Statistical Area, or CSA, has 9.9 million. The total State population is 12.6 million. Down-Staters make up 2.7 million of the State's people, oddly enough the same number of residents as the City of Chicago, or only 21% of the state's voters. The suburban voters of the over 200 suburbs which form a concentric ring around Chicago end up with the balance of 7.2 million persons, 57% of the statewide vote.

Traditionally, suburban voters are overwhelmingly Republican in the United States. Downstate Illinois voters have always been rock-ribbed Republican. Adding these two groups together gets to the nearly 80% of the Illinois population that would likely be Republican. Why then is it true that in Illinois the legislature is not only overwhelmingly Democratic, but the Illinois Senate and House both have had super majorities? In some years the supermajorities have been large enough to override any veto of the Governor on any legislation.

The first part of the answer is simple. Illinois suburbs are voting Democratic against trend. With over 200 suburbs and a mix of incomes reflecting the country at large, many of these suburbs represent working class and lower middle-class voters who tend to vote Democratic. The trend is most visible in the Southern suburbs close to the City. Pew Research's 2014 Survey of Illinois voters showed that 48% identify as Democratic, 33% as Republican, and 19% as Independent.[327]

The second part of the answer is also simple. Gerrymandering by the Illinois Democratic Party. Gerrymandering is a tool available to political parties who have legislatives majorities in individual States. The Constitution left the matter of state political districting to each state to figure out using whatever means they deemed appropriate. This has always been interpreted in every State as the party in power has the right to re-shape voting districts in a way that favors that party and that disadvantages the other party. Throughout the 250-year history of the U.S. this has come to be considered settled law. It is widely seen as a political form of "to the Victor go the Spoils".

But a problem arose. In a word: the computer. More specifically, the ability of computers to draw districts in the most favorable manner for one side of a two-party system. Districts can be created that permit the favored party to win almost all the time. It has also been possible to keep voters of the opposition party in minorities in districts, effectively "wasting" their votes and dissipating the opposition party's strength. The result may be wildly sprawling, nonsensically shaped districts, but again there is no Constitutional requirement that says that they must be compact. The problem is that after 250 years it just became too easy to do this. Now, gerrymandering is done with such precision because we have learned so much about the political identity of voters based on where they live. This is **Identity Politics** writ large. And it works.

It works so well that in Illinois the system for redistricting has always dramatically favored the party in power. In 2000, when the legislature was roughly even in terms of partisanship, with 32 Rs and 27Ds in the Senate and 62Ds and 56Rs in the House, redistricting came up and the two parties could not, predictably, come together to create a consensus map. Under the State's Constitution, this meant that the decision would then go to a Bi-Partisan Commission made up of 2 persons, one a legislator and one a regular citizen, chosen by the Chair and Minority leader of each House (4 people with a total of 8 selections). A ninth member would be chosen following the law by have one member of the State Supreme Court from each party choose names to be chosen out of Lincolnesque hat. Treating politics as a game, a rube Goldberg apparatus, or the plaything of an in-crowd, elite group of old-time pols, is of course an Illinois tradition, something that the law clearly understood too well.

The result was a dramatic and highly partisan shift toward Democratically drawn districts in the State Senate. In 2010, the Illinois Senate flipped, Democrats gaining as much control as the Republicans had once had, and the House remained pretty much the same. 2010: Senate—35D, 23R House—64D, 54R 2018: S—37D, 22R House—66D, 49R

Singularly, the State's Hispanic population had grown by 33% between 2000 and 2010 to 2 million.[328] In 2011, both Houses and the Governorship were under one party control during redistricting for the first time since the new State Constitution in 1973, and they took full advantage to gerrymander, creating some of the worst gerrymandered Congressional Districts in the nation. They weren't just bad, they were awful. Notice how Illinois Congressional District 4 virtually surrounds District 7.[329]

But Illinois became a true Case Study in Dysfunctional Democracy in 1983, the year that it's House of Representatives elected Michael Madigan Speaker of the House for the first of many, many times. Madigan has gone on to be the longest serving leader of any legislative body in the history of the Nation, for all that time until the present, except for 2 years. What followed was the longest running experiment in One Party rule in the country, one that has become a deeply cautionary tale for everything that has gone wrong with how State governments are empowered. As a result, Illinois has become a virtual authoritarian state where the State's Governor has often been little more than a vassal to an enigmatic but all-powerful Party Boss.

It is true that Madigan and his law firm have become rich by representing clients seeking to appeal and lower their property tax bills on homes and businesses, but it is probably unfair to suggest that this has anything to do with Illinois having one of the highest property tax systems of any State in the country. For one thing, what Madigan as a private lawyer does is legal. For another, he didn't create the system. It was there long before he came around. He and his Democratic colleagues have just been more successful in gaming the system for their personal corrupt benefit than their predecessors.

The existing system thrives on creating inequality among School Districts. **Rich School Districts** attract high income residents who can afford more expensive homes that come with higher property taxes. Such rich districts also have the effect of excluding lower income persons, who tend to be more racially and ethnically diverse. So **Rich School Districts** end up being primarily white and upper middle class. Their higher cost educational opportunities open more doors to an affluent higher education, the inheritance of expensive homes, and more advantaged life styles in similarly exclusive **Rich School Districts**. This becomes a self-fulfilling privilege passed on from one generation of American whites to another. To join this growing elite, get thee to the nearest high-income suburb! Claw your way there if necessary. It's for the good of your progeny!

This system has allowed Americans to sort themselves out by income across a range of suburban housing costs that correlate closely with the quality of their local school districts. The result is de facto racial segregation, continued racial discrimination, and a total failure of upward mobility. Have you ever wondered why poverty in America is so hard to get rid of? Ever wonder why some minorities continue to have the same levels of poverty generation after generation. Unequal educational opportunity is the number one cause and American government policy has been rendered for generations to keep things this way.

Again, one can hardly place all the blame for these results on a mere functionary such as Madigan. Even though he and his always beholden Democratic colleagues have gamed this system by refusing to place any real limits on the Illinois property tax. They have routinely starved State funding of local schools, forcing further reliance by the schools on the upward spiral of the property tax. They are just doing what comes both easily and naturally. What is worse, however, and what they are really most responsible for, is how they have managed to lock all the doors of the House of Illinois so nobody can get out.

One exception to this trend however is the recent Illinois School Funding Bill passed by the Illinois legislature in 2017. In a throwback to the Progressive Era of American politics, educators in the State got together to devise a sophisticated "evidence based" school funding formula based on measurable standards that addresses many of the real resource inequities that exist between the local school districts. Of course, to do this required a higher level of commitment on the part of the State of Illinois to higher funding levels for all districts in general. There is no question that if the new system is to be successful, it will require a series of continuing increases of funding from the ever-depleted coffers of Illinois.

Finally, a system has been created that at least attempts to address the rising inequality and excessive privilege that has been built into the current system. Will it ever really address geographic stratification in the suburbs and the resulting racial discrimination that comes with it? Probably not. But it may slow down the rapid race toward a world of inherited privilege, where men and women born in one zip code are a lot more equal than everybody else. (The Constitution may say we are all born equal, but at this point, who is kidding who? As the Three Fifths Compromise made clear, America was always a dream intended to be enjoyed by the few anyway.)

Interestingly, the **Illinois Adequacy School Funding Bill** does provide the 100 or so highest property tax districts, of some 400 Districts statewide, an opportunity to reduce their School District property tax rate by 10 percent through referendum. Most of these Districts are quite small, however, and such changes would have minimal effects. For the larger **Rich School Districts** this experiment in direct democracy, about the only one available in Illinois these days, will be intriguing to watch. Will the **RSD** s seek to preserve their educational advantages, passing them on to future generations of equally privileged kids, or will they seek to alter the natural trajectory of privilege, even a little bit, by cutting their property tax rates back by 10 percent? I don't think the Democratic Party dominants of Illinois believe there is much likelihood of such referendums taking place. Control freaks that they obviously are, they wouldn't have provided the option to begin with if they had thought it would either be easy or popular.

Speaking of depleted coffers, it is important to point out at this juncture just how fast the House of Illinois is crashing around its residents' ears. Electing billionaire Republican Rauner as Governor, who campaigned on term limits and a property tax freeze in one of the nation's highest property tax states, led to a 2-year budget standoff with Madigan and the Democrats which by the summer of 2017 had created $14.6 billion in unpaid bills, a running annual deficit of $6 billion, and an outstanding pension liability of $130 billion. The cost of additional unpaid bills was another $1 billion in interest and penalties because of the stand-off. The situation was a blow to higher education in the State, where rising tuition and continued financial instability brought about declining enrollments. It reduced Medicaid care to vulnerable populations. It even brought the Illinois lottery, a sure revenue winner, to a standstill. The State's bond rating went to junk status, many levels below any other State in the nation.

In defense of the State, most of the pension ballooning came after 2000, although it was clearly known about and fully anticipated. Also, the previous Democratic Governor, Quinn, had led the push for a temporary increase in the income tax, although clearly inadequate, that only helped to spur the ascendancy of Rauner. Rauner was a rich Republican coffer filler and neophyte politician. The budget war finally ended in the summer of 2017 when a handful of Republicans, including some who would decide not to run again for office, deserted the Republican base to vote for the budget. The budget included an increase in State income taxes to nearly 5 percent, borrowing authority to pay down at least some of the overdue bills, and the new **School Adequacy Funding** formula.

Illinois taxpayers can be excused if they believe that the State's budget is filled with waste and abuse. There are some legitimate reasons to think so. Forbes performed a 2018 Study to determine that there are over 30,000 Illinois teachers who take home salaries or pensions of over 100k a year. Interestingly, this comes in a year, 2018, when the State also passed a new minimum pay initiative to set a floor for teacher pay throughout the State at 40k a year. Teacher pay varies extremely in Illinois, again by school district.

The Forbes Study explodes the Illinois Schools **Black Box** and identified 11,766 Illinois teachers in 2017 drawing pensions in excess of 100k, costing Illinois taxpayers $3.7 billion annually.[330] This is at a time when the national average for pensions in the U.S. is about $50k. Forbes goes on to identify the educators by name, providing a searchable map of what communities they reside in across the U.S. Six had pensions over $300k a year. Even the union bosses of teachers get their pensions from the system, as they have managed to corruptly add themselves onto the gravy train system. The vast majority of the pensions over $100k go to the 9,699 employees of the most expensive suburban school systems in the State, demonstrating that steps by suburban representatives and Springfield to rein in these systems have failed (more on that in a second). Forbes points out the really egregious cases of Superintendents of School Districts retiring on pensions worth several hundred thousand a year coming from Districts with largely poor students. (Though let's face it, these high pensions are all egregious, corrupt, and abusive of the public trust to the very max. It's a heist, a raid on the public treasury by civil servants who should know better and have better morals, showing that the educated can be the most immoral and craven in a society that has fallen so far, lost its moorings, and discarded any sense of public shame.)

Also, keep in mind that the State of Illinois has picked up teacher pensions for all teachers in Illinois for a long time, with the sole exception being for the Chicago Public Schools. This has allowed local school districts to shift this cost elsewhere (the State of Illinois) when it is normally something that any public or private organization would be required to pay. Further, since pensions are based on the average of the last four years of salary under the system, local districts have a history of being generous in those years by granting extraordinary salary increases in the last years to puff pensions. Local Districts have therefore been allowed to make the State's pension problem much worse by billions annually, escaping any responsibility to hold down such costs when negotiating salaries with local teacher unions. This was bad, very bad, public policy from the start. Now, it permits billionaire Democratic gubernatorial candidate JB Pritzker, Hyatt heir, to advertise that Rauner wants to dump a billion dollars of pension costs on the local school systems by asking that some of that responsibility be shifted back to where it always belonged.

Rauner's recognition of the problem is laudable, but even the State's Democrats have recently caught on to the rising tide of public indignation about teacher pension abuse and have passed legislation in 2018 outlawing so called "spiking" of salaries. The new law reduces the annual percentage increases now allowed from 6% to 3% in the last four years of teacher employment. Should a District exceed the allowed amount, it would be on the hook for the difference, which could be as much as $250k over the life of the pension.[331] The measure is estimated to save $38 million a year, not much in such a fiscal crisis, perhaps a sop to the critics of the State's Democrats, but at least a means to deflect the inevitable criticism that they receive about failing to address the roots of the State's debt crisis, i.e. the teacher's pension system.

Divisive politics hijacked the Illinois School system long ago of course. You don't isolate virtually the entire 14% of a State's population by race on the South side of Chicago, underfund its educational system, dust it with more than its fair share of corruption, and then expect it to outperform its circumstances. It's just not going to happen. This is, in the end, officially sanctioned segregation and it's about as unequal as it gets anywhere in the U.S.

Illinois political parties routinely arrange their rhetorical tactics accordingly. Traditionally, the Republicans charge that Chicago, represented overwhelmingly by Democrats, freeloads off the rest of the state and should regularly be starved of State resources. The Democrats respond in kind, arguing that Chicago is the economic engine of the State and has to resist the strong policy pull of Republican suburbs and the Republican downstate. For instance, the crisis in gun violence in the City has led to many gun restrictions in the City, whereas elsewhere in the State guns are readily available. The State picks up all Illinois teacher pensions, but has traditionally underfunded Chicago Schools. Republicans rejoice in fingering Democratic leader Madigan as the Boogeyman of Illinois politics, whereas Democrats love painting Republicans as budget cutting enemies of the poor, old, sick, disabled, and defenseless. The battle lines are so well drawn that every cast member knows his lines by heart and can sing them lustily even while comatose. (Many are forgiven for thinking that most already are.) Pitting the City and its School system against the rest of the State is sport and has become nothing but a jerk of the knee on both sides.

In any case, Illinois politics are about race writ large. Think big capital letters. News site **24/7 Wall Street** examined the issue and found that Illinois has the fourth-worst level of black-white inequality in the country.[332] While the national averages for white and black household income are $71,300 and $43,300 respectively, in Illinois the numbers are $66,237 and $33,950. In the **24/7 Wall Street** study, data from government sources and the Sentencing Project were combined to rank each state. Worst was Wisconsin, followed by Minnesota, South Dakota, Illinois, and Iowa.

The inclusion of the Sentencing Project data was important. Blacks are incarcerated at a rate 5 times that of whites nationally. Illinois, like a lot of poorly managed States, has yet to figure out exactly how costly this is, not just in terms of taxpayer dollars, but in terms of the lives forever altered, the local workforces decimated, the gangs enabled and the crime fostered. Finally, there is the toll on families and children of those incarcerated in lost incomes and much needed parenting. The social costs of incarceration may in many instances outweigh the need for victims and society to exact revenge for crime, to serve as a form of draconian deterrence to other crime, or to prevent future crime by taking perpetrators off the street.

The benefits of education, treatment, rehabilitation, job counseling, and other supportive mechanisms as a response to crime, especially non-violent crime and addiction, have yet to be fully implemented in the American system of jurisprudence. Instead, politicos rail against being soft on crime and criminals. Every politician since Ozymandias knows that they can count on this position for popular public support in a practice as old as Empire itself. It is why equal protection in the Constitution is such an important part of the modern social contract. It is why America departed ways with work houses for the poor, virtually criminalizing poverty. Yet American politicians, including many former federal, state and local prosecutors, never tire of ringing this bell. It remains a sure vote getter.

In 2015 the **Illinois Department of Corrections** had 11,600 employees with a budget of $1.4 billion.[333] This represents only half the real cost, as benefits and capital costs have to be added, as done in a study by the **Vera Institute of Justice**. Their work shows the total comes to $38,268 per inmate per year, or $105 per day. The study places Illinois at 17 out of the 50 states in cost. New York was highest at $60,076 per year per inmate, followed by New Jersey and Connecticut.

In 1982 Illinois had only 15,000 inmates in 25 adult correctional centers. As of 2015, that number had increased to 46,240, an over 200% increase. At the current rate of increase this would result in 55,450 inmates in a system designed for 32,000 by 2025.[334] It is necessary to also include some 20,600 in 2013 held in the 102 County Jails and related facilities, the 122,814 persons on probation at the end of 2014, and the 28,478 on parole in 2015. The State contributes financially to these facilities on a per inmate basis of about $100 per inmate. Needless to say, especially when considering the cost of building modern County detention facilities, running well into the tens of millions of dollars each, Illinois' system of incarceration is taking in billions of dollars per year, making it its own industry.

With half this population being non-violent offenders who can be dealt with in many more effective, substantially less costly ways, the current ticket punching system, run by prosecutors and judges who are more bureaucrat than legal scholar, elected by a tragically uninformed public that could care less, has become an unaccountable, at times corrupt, oppressor of the young, poor, uneducated, addicted, misguided, mentally ill, and unfortunate. The elimination of bail for many, the proliferation of diversion programs for the non-violent, and the institution of major sentencing reform by legislatures is desperately needed to begin to reverse the serious wrongs that the system commits in the name of badly applied justice. States pursuing this course of action have found that reducing their rates of incarceration has reduced crime rates even faster.[335]

It was Republican Governor Rauner who accused the Democrats of "spending our state into the toilet". In fact, despite the fact that Illinois has among the highest property taxes in the nation and the largest pension debt, it remains really quite average in terms of its budget when compared to other states on a per capita basis. There is little evidence that the State government has significant fat or waste, which flies in the face of Illinois Republican orthodoxy about state employee unions constantly engaged in massive featherbedding. This also flies in the face of what most of the State's citizens think. Most taxpayers objected vehemently to increases in the State income tax to address backlogged bills and gross pension underfunding because they believed their taxes were already too high.

Instead, Illinois ranks 37th in per capita state spending in fiscal year 2015 according to the **Kaiser Foundation**.[336] Including local government spending, Illinois ranked 24th in a 2014 **Tax Policy Center** study, just below average. In a **Federation of Tax Administrators** 2014 study Illinois ranked 27th in total taxes and fees collected by state and local governments as a percentage of personal income. (The rollback of the 25% increase in the state income tax did not come until the next year.) The **Better Government Association** , based in Chicago, states in their report "Bringing Illinois Back: A Framework for Our Future":

"On a per capita basis, no state government employs fewer people than the State of Illinois. No state picks up a smaller percentage of local education bills (and) per patient Medicaid spending is well below national norms."[337]

The problem in Illinois is not waste and abuse, but rather a weak political system where elected leaders cower before an intransigent public, afraid to lead and afraid to express anything other than tired party biases, many of which are not based in fact but are known from decades of experience to work in elections. The politicians and the public are both had at the same time, kidding each other that this time things are going to be different, that the state's real problems will finally get addressed. The only problem with this kind of logic is that the State's problems never were addressed and now the chickens have come home to roost. Decades of deterioration in the basic state of Illinois' democracy have led to an ossification under Madigan, now 76. Had the State's politics been even slightly more accessible to the citizenry, such a sad state of affairs could never have persisted to begin with.

When machine politics dominates for generations, as it has in Illinois, one is forced to look for structural reasons. How can the public's will be so easily frustrated for so long?

Well, for one thing there have been a number of attempts to bring about change. From the earliest days of the State of Illinois, amending the Constitution has been made extremely difficult, relying mostly on statewide Constitutional Conventions, the last taking place in 1973. The 1973 Constitution further restricted the Amendment process, leaving it largely in the hands of the State Assembly, which can vote to place an Amendment on the ballot for the voters to decide as either binding or non-binding.[338]

Alternatively, the voters of Illinois have sought an Initiative and Referendum authority for over 100 years to no avail. In 1901, under public pressure, the legislature established a non-binding initiative authority requiring the signatures of 10% of the number of registered voters in the last election. The Referendum League of the time then placed a number of such advisory referendums on the ballot that were approved by the voters. The Assembly ignored all of them except one calling for primaries over conventions.

In 1910 the League put up an initiative for binding referendum that passed with a 78% vote. The State Legislature refused to enact the measure however. Under pressure from the passage of Proposition 13 in California, Governor Thompson put up an advisory referendum to cut property taxes on the ballot in 1978, which passed easily. He was re-elected but failed to get the legislature to act.

Per the 1973 Constitution, the only referendum permitted is to amend Article IV of the Illinois Constitution, which has to do with the formation of the legislature. In 1980 such an Amendment did pass, reducing the size of the legislature from 177 to 118. Since then any attempts have been met with substantial political opposition, resulting in court fights that end up at the **Illinois Supreme Court**. The Court is elected and 4-3 Democratic and has made a series of decisions that have so narrowed the definition of what kind of Amendment is permitted as to almost entirely rule them out altogether. A recent Amendment to create impartial political districting was thus ruled unconstitutional in such a clear and decisive way that it made it appear that there is no way to subvert the lock on political power held by a tiny, elite cabal of Democrats in Springfield, all of whom appear desperate to hang on to their perks of power.

Thus, there is no real initiative and referendum and no real means of Amendment left to the voters of the State. The legislature wants less responsibility to fund education, not more. It refuses to do anything to limit the skyrocketing local property taxes upon which the existing educational system depends because this would require more financial help from the State, resulting in higher state taxes, and spelling the death of virtually every legislator's career. The heavy reliance on the property tax, as has already been pointed out, serves merely to further entrench economic and racial divides across the whole of the state. Attempts to reduce exclusionary zoning in the suburbs and to encourage the creation of low-income housing in response to the problem have largely failed to get anywhere. Governor Rauner even threatened to dump the costs of teacher pensions, currently paid by Illinois taxpayers, back onto local school districts, which would explode property taxes even further.

Presumably, Illinois voters could sue the State of Illinois in federal court for violating the right of citizens to free speech by denying meaningful means of constitutional amendment or binding referendum, this being a violation of the U.S. Constitution, but States under the U.S. Constitution have what is known as sovereign immunity, a legal theory that goes back to the Kings of England. This has been interpreted to mean that States are sovereign and cannot be sued without their consent.

This principle was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution by the 11th Amendment after the case in 1793 of _Chisholm vs. Georgia_ , where Georgia refused to pay Chisholm for war goods and the judge in the case ruled in Chisholm's favor _._ [339] In 1908 in _Ex parte Young_ the US Supreme Court ruled that a State official enforcing an unconstitutional law is a private person who can be sued in federal court to enforce the federal law. In 1993 in a more modern case, _Martin vs. Voinovich_ , the US Supreme Court ordered the Governor of Ohio to construct housing for the disabled under the **ADA, Americans for Disabilities Act**.

What these cases demonstrate is that States have only partial immunity. Should Illinois citizens choose to sue the **Illinois Supreme Court** that its rulings limiting the rights of citizens to amend their State Constitution violate the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, they might well be granted some remedy. Preferably the remedy would be to find the Illinois Constitution violates free speech by limiting the initiative and referendum and the amendment process itself to **Article IV of the Illinois Constitution** as it is currently written, and instead require that the entire of the Illinois Constitution may be amended by such processes. This would effectively do away with the Illinois Supreme Court's tortured interpretation of the state constitution's amendment powers. The U.S. Supreme Court would certainly find that the Illinois Supreme Court has defined the entire process of amending the state's constitution out of existence, which is in no way reasonable but is rather arbitrary, capricious and overly restrictive of free speech.

To bring this result about, a suit would have to be brought against the individual majority members of the Illinois Supreme Court that have so ruled, bringing the suit in federal court. The U.S. Supreme Court would have to strike down the overly restrictive Constitutional Amendment interpretations that the Illinois Court has constructed. They would have to strike down the Constitutional provision limiting amendment to Article IV. Further, the U.S. Supreme Court would have to abjure the justices from such obvious attempts to subvert the free speech of the citizens of Illinois.

There is a reason why political speech is considered the most important form of free speech and has been given special protections, especially by the current U.S. Supreme Court ( _Citizens United_ ). Free speech is at the core of a democratic society. In Illinois, authorities have conspired for generations to fix the playing field of politics in their favor, limiting that free exercise in every way that they can, insulating themselves successfully from the full effects of public opinion.

It can be argued that the State of Illinois has conspired to prevent the free exercise of its citizen's speech by its various actions to stop initiatives, referendums, and constitutional amendments. When added up over the years, Illinois has a substantial record of doing this in a pattern of behavior that is truly undemocratic. Illinois citizens cannot, for instance, mount a Proposition 13 measure to lower property taxes, like voters did in California. They are denied the means with which to express their views in politically meaningful ways and the results have been disastrous.

A very good proposal was approved by supermajorities of the state legislature in both houses in 2013 but was controversially ruled invalid by a majority of the Illinois Supreme Court as violating the 1973 Constitutional provision that pension benefits can't be "diminished or impaired". The Supreme Court's take that the technical changes being proposed 40 years later would violate this implicit promise was a stretch by any legal means. Perhaps members were concerned about being re-elected, as Supreme Court justices are in Illinois?

In any case, the proposal protected already earned pension benefits but changed the accrual of future benefits.[340] This is something that the Illinois Supreme Court should have been able to recognize as a key difference from what the 1973 Constitution was talking about. Could it be that Illinois high court justices were unfamiliar with actuarial science? Or perhaps they really didn't care to know about a science that would have made clear that their decisions were purely political, that they deprived every Illinois taxpayer of a voice in the matter? The Illinois anti-democratic steamroller crushed onward.

"Changes to future benefits focused on three areas: The first was increasing the retirement age for current state workers younger than 45. The second was capping workers' maximum pensionable salary, with future growth in the cap pegged to inflation. And the third was to eliminate 3 percent guaranteed post-retirement raises in favor of a true cost-of-living increase tied to inflation."[341]

The entire pension debt of $130 billion would have been retired by 2045. The annual budget cost to Illinois would have fallen to 1% by 2040, whereas today it is over 25% for decades to come. The problem would have been solved.

Clearly the validity of the Illinois Supreme Court decision must be challenged by every legal means that can be brought to bear, as it is unconstitutional in many ways, most especially because it has deprived Illinois voters of their ability to propose constitutional amendments. It has narrowed the standards by which amendments can be proposed to an unreasonably, impossibly narrow window that denies the voters their free speech rights and their ability to petition their government for redress.

If Attorney General Madigan can be faulted during her term in office it is especially here, because she failed to appeal the decision to the US Supremes. It is only reasonable that Illinois citizens should have standing to sue individual Illinois Supremes to correct this great injustice. It is an injustice that threatens the very tenure of the State. It is an existential crisis that cannot carry greater import for every one of its citizens.
END NOTES

1] [ http://www.pewresearch.org/2009/11/23/polling-wars-hawks-vs-doves

[2] A Generation of Sociopaths, How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, Bruce Cannon Gibney, Hachette Books, New York, 2017.

[3] Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, Amy Chua, Penguin Random House, 2018.

[4] Against Democracy, Jason Brennan, Princeton University Press, 2016, p. 41

[5] Democracy for Realists, Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels. Princeton University Press, 2016.

[6] The American President, Rob Reiner, 1995, Castle Rock Entertainment, film.

[7] Neural Correlates of Maintaining One's Political Beliefs in the Face of Counterevidence", Jonas T. Kaplan, Sarah I. Gimbel, and Sam Harris, Scientific Reports 6, Article 39589, Dec. 2016.

[8] White Protestant Nation – Allan J. Lichtman, 2008, Atlantic Monthly Press, p. 2

[9] Ibid, p.2-3

[10] Ibid, p. 5

[11] The Paranoid Style of American Politics," Harpers Magazine, November, 1964. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, Richard Hofstadter, Alfred A Knopf, 1965, New York.

[12] Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 558 US 310 (2010)

[13] Cooper v. Harris, 581 US __ (2017)

[14] 82 University of Chicago Law Review 831 (2015)

15] "Extreme Gerrymandering and the 2018 Midterm," Laura Royden, Michael Li, Yurij Rudensky, March 23, 2018, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. [ https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/extreme-gerrymandering-2018-midterm

16] "How Anti-Immigration Passion Was Inflamed from the Fringe," Michael D Shear and Katie Benner, New York Times, June 18, 2018. [ https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/US/politics/immigration-children-sessions-miller.html

17] "What 7 State Discovered After Spending More Than $1 Million Drug Testing Welfare Recipients," Covert and Israel, Think Progress, Feb. 26, 2015. [ https://thinkprogress.org/what-7-states-discovered-after-spending-more-than-1-million-drug-testing-welfare-recipients-c346e0b4305d/

[18] "Christians are Twice as Likely to Blame a Person's Poverty on a Lack of Effort", Washington Post, 8/3/2017.

19] "Human Population Through the Ages," Bryan K. Long, Econosystemics, May 1, 2009. [http://econosystemics.com/AphetaBlog/?p=9

20] "Cultural Hitchhiking and Competition Between Patrilineal Kin Groups Explains the Post-Neolithic Y-Chromosome Bottleneck," Tian Chen Zeng, Allen J. Aw and MarcUS W Feldman, Nature Communications 9, Article 2077, 2018. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6

21] "Men Nearly Caused Human Extinction 7000 Years Ago New Theory States," Jaime Seidel, New York Post, May 31, 2018. [ https://nypost.com/2018/05/31/men-nearly-caused-human-extinction-7000-years-ago-new-theory-states/

[22] Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari, Harper, 2015.

[23] Ibid p. 138.

[24] Ibid p. 172.

[25] Ibid p. 367.

[26] Progress, Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, Johan Norberg, One World, 2016, p. 157.

[27] The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, Bandy X. Lee, St. Martin's Press, 2017, p. 57-58.

[28] Ibid p. 106.

[29] Washington s Editorial Board, "Donald Trump's Campaign Conspiracy Theories", Washington Post, David Brooks, February 19, 2016.

[30] "Who Goes Trump? Tyranny as a Triump of Narcissism," Elizabeth Mika, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, Bandy X. Lee, St. Martin's Press, 2017, p. 278-318.

[31] Ibid, p.303

[32] Ibid. p. 305-6.

[33] Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, Michael Kimmel, Nation Books, New York, 2013.

[34] "Who Goes Trump? Tyranny as a Triump of Narcissism," Elizabeth Mika, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, Bandy X. Lee, St. Martin's Press, 2017, p. 308.

[35] Ibid, 310-316.

[36] Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, Grand Prairie, AB, Canada: Red Pill Press, 2007.

[37] How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, Crown, New York, 2018, p.36-7.

[38] "Still Crazy After All These Years, America's Long History of Political DelUSion," James A. Morone, Foreign Affairs Magazine, Mar/April 2018, p. 161.

[39] See the Straus Military Reform Project, Center for Defense Information at POGO. They provide an excellent breakdown of the Federal budget and the true cost of the US military machine.

[40] See How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, Tales from the Pentagon, Rosa Brooks, Simon and Schuster, 2016.

41] "[America's Changing Religious Landscape". Pew Research Center: Religion & Public Life. May 12, 2015.

42] [ https://www.prri.org/research/american-religious-landscape-christian-religioUSly- unaffiliated/

43] [ http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projection-table/

[44] Ibid.

45] PEW Research Center and Meet the Press, NBC, 3/25/17. [ http://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/wide-gender-gap-growing-educational-divide-in-voters-party-identification/

46] "The U.S. Is Retreating from Religion," Allen Downey, Scientific American, October 20, 2017, [ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-u-s-is-retreating-from-religion/

47] Geneseo, Illinois. Wikipedia. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneseo,_Illinois#Demographics

[48] Future Shock, Alvin Toffler, 1970, Random House.

[49] Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties, Joyce Maynard, iUniverse, 2003.

[50] Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig, 1974, William Morrow and Company

[51] "From Firebrand to a Bit of a Grump, a 'Hippie Mayor' Evolves", Dirk Johnson, New York Times, September 10, 2011.

[52] "Budgeting for the Future: Target Base Budgeting", Thomas W. Wenz and Ann P. Nolan, Public Budgeting and Finance Journal, June, 1982, vol. 2, issue 2, pp. 88-91.

53] [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Vrdolyak#Federal_indictment_and_conviction

54] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Raines

55] [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Schulz_(politician)

56] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pampered_Chef

[57] Progress, Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, Johan Norberg, One World, 2016, p. 156.

58] [ elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/piketty-saezOUP04US.pdf

59] [ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/06/a-closer-look-at-who-does-and- doesnt-pay-u-s-income-tax/ A closer look at who does (and who doesn't) pay US income tax, Drew DeSilver, PEW Research Center, October 6, 2017.

[60] The Divide, Jason Hickel, WW Norton & Company, 2018, p. 50-51.

61] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

62] [World Bank. "Poverty and Prosperity 2016 / Taking on Inequality" (PDF) Figure 0.10 Global Inequality, 1988–2013

[63] The Divide, Jason Hickel, WW Norton & Company, 2018, p.53. Anand and Segal, The Global Distribution of Income, Oxford

[64] The Divide, Jason Hickel, WW Norton & Company, 2018, p. 244-254.

65] [ https://www.statista.com/statistics/270267/united-states-share-of-global-gross- domestic-product-gdp/

66] [ https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fileID=BCDB1364-A105-0560- 1332EC9100FF5C83

[67] "Health Without Wealth, The Worrying Paradox of Modern Medical Miracles", Thomas Bollyky, Foreign Affairs Magazine, November/December 2018, p. 175.

[68] NBC news 1-20-14

69] [ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/millionaire-opolis--which-cities-do-the-rich-call-home- 171003747.html "Millionaire-opolis, Which Cities Do the Rich Call Home?" Shawna Ohm, Yahoo Finance, 8/6/14.

[70] "Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data," Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2016, 131 (2), pp. 519-578.

71] [ http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/USappblog/2014/10/29/the-explosion-in-u-s-wealth-inequality- has-been-fuelled-by-stagnant-wages-increasing-debt-and-a-collapse-in-asset-values- for-the-middle-classes/

[72] Ibid.

73] [ http://fortune.com/2014/10/31/inequality-wealth-income-US/?xid=yahoo_fortune

74] Balestra, C. and R. Tonkin (2018), "Inequalities in household wealth across OECD countries: Evidence from the OECD Wealth Distribution Database", OECD Statistics Working Papers, No. 2018/01, OECD Publishing, Paris, [https://doi.org/10.1787/7e1bf673-en.  https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/07/05/where-financial-inequality-is-rampant-infographic/#489e1eb34a48.

75] [ https://www.statista.com/chart/14581/where-financial-inequality-is-rampant/

76] [ https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories- of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304 D4893B382B992B/core-reader, Cambridge University Press, Volume 12, Issue 3, September, 2014, pp. 564-581.

[77] OECD Health Data, 2009

78] "These are the US Colleges where Tuition has Skyrocketed" Zach Wener-Fligner, Quartz, Dec. 4, 2014. [ https://qz.com/301999/these-are-the-US-colleges-where-tuition-has- skyrocketed/

79] "Student Loans Just Got a Lot Moe Expensive for Our Snowflakes," Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge, 5/11/17. [ https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-11/student-loans-just-got- lot-more-expensive-our-snowflakes

80] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_debt

[81] Ibid.

[82] Ibid.

83] "Health-Care Industry Debt Turns into "Systemic Recession Risk"", Wolf Richter, Wolf Street, 3/27/18 [ https://wolfstreet.com/2017/03/27/health-care-industry-debt-turns-into- systemic-recession-risk/

84] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19501347

85] "Health-Care Industry Debt Turns into "Systemic Recession Risk"", Wolf Richter, Wolf Street, 3/27/18 [ https://wolfstreet.com/2017/03/27/health-care-industry-debt-turns-into- systemic-recession-risk/

86] "The Shallowest Generation," James Quinn, The Big Picture, 11/2008 [ http://ritholtz.com/2008/11/the-shallowest-generation/

[87] "Next Time Someone Says 'White Privilege Isn't Real' Show Them This," Kevin Short, Huffpost, Dec. 6, 2017. regarding results of the study: "Equality of Opportunity," Richard Reeves and Isabell Sawhill, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, October 2014.

88] Black-white Wage Gaps Expand With Rising Wage Inequality,", Valerie Wilson and William M. Rogers III, Economic Policy Institute, September 20, 2016. [ https://www.epi.org/publication/black-white-wage-gaps-expand-with-rising-wage-inequality/

89] Massey, Douglas S. (2004), "[The new geography of inequality in urban America", in Henry, Michael C., Yale University Press, pp. 173–187 as quoted in:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_wage_gap_in_the_United_States.

[90] "Segregation Lingers in US Schools 60 Years After Little Rock", Errin Haines Wack and Andrew DeMillo, Associated Press, September 24, 2017.

91] "The Financial Impact of Winning (and Losing) the Birth Lottery," Lydia DePillis, CNN Money, March 6, 2018. [ https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/06/news/economy/wealth-gap-birth-lottery/index.html

92] "One Chart that Shows How Much Worse Income Inequality is in America than Europe," Emily Stewart, Vox, July 29, 2018. [ https://www.vox.com/2018/7/29/17627134/income-inequality-chart

93] "Virtually All Americans Wealth Has Dropped to Where it Was Three Decades Ago," Bryce Covert, Think Progress, Oct. 21, 2014. [ https://thinkprogress.org/virtually-all-americans-wealth-has-dropped-to-where-it-was-three-decades-ago-4e8ed77b16ef/

[94] "The Free-Trade Paradox, the Bad Politics of a Good Idea," Alan S. Blinder, Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2019, p. 119.

[95] Ibid, p. 121.

[96] Ibid.

97] "What 17 Intelligence Agencies?" WeaponsMan, <http://weaponsman.com/?p=38272> This entry was posted in [Intelligence and Espionage, Lord Love a Duck on January 13, 2017 by Hognose.

[98] Linda Qui, "Fact-checking a comparison of gun deaths and terrorism deaths," PolitiFact, Oct. 5, 2015.

[99] "What Terrorist Threat?" Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy, August 13, 2012.

[100] Beyond Snowden, Privacy, Mass Surveillance, and the Struggle to Reform the NSA--Timothy H. Edgar, Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC, 2017.

[101] Ibid, p. 95.

[102] Ibid, p. 73.

103] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Workings

[104] Beyond Snowden, Privacy, Mass Surveillance, and the Struggle to Reform the NSA--Timothy H. Edgar, Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC, 2017, p. 73.

[105] Open letter to Brazil, 12/17/13

[106] Beyond Snowden, Privacy, Mass Surveillance, and the Struggle to Reform the NSA--Timothy H. Edgar, Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC, 2017, p. 94.

[107] The Code Warriors, NSA's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union, Stephen Budiansky, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2016, p. xxi.

[108] The Darkening Web, The War for Cyberspace, Alexander Klimburg, Penguin Press, New York, 2017, p. 46.

[109] US Vs. Them, the Failure of Globalism, Ian Bremmer, Porfolio, Penguin, New York, 2018, p. 82

110] House of Trump, House of Putin, Craig Unger, Duton, New York, 2018, p. 176. quotes from Litvinenko Inquiry, UK govt national archives, [www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/hearings

[111] Ibid, p. 227

[112] Orders to Kill, the Putin Regime and Political Murder, Amy Knight, Thomas Dunne Books, 2017, p. 35

113] US Vs. Them, the Failure of Globalism, Ian Bremmer, Portfolio, Penguin, New York, 2018. "How Well-Off is China's Middle Class?" China Power, Center for Strategic and International Studies, [http://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/.

[114] Orders to Kill, the Putin Regime and Political Murder, Amy Knight, Thomas Dunne Books, 2017, p. 91.

115] [ http://www.newsweek.com/iran-internet-censorship-sees-protesters-turn-dark-web-772182

116] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

117] [ https://www.wired.com/2014/11/utah-considers-cutting-water-nsas-monster-data-center/

118] [https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/index.html

119] "Enemies of the Internet, 2014, Entities at the Heart of Censorship and Surveillance," Reporters Without Borders, March 11, 2014, Updated on January 25, 2016. [ https://rsf.org/en/news/enemies-internet-2014-entities-heart-censorship-and-surveillance

120] "US Using Fake Cellphone Towers on Planes to Gather Data, WSJ", Reuters, November 13, 2104. [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-Using-fake-cellphone-towers-planes-gather-data-001053901.html

[121] Ibid.

122] "US Threatened Yahoo with Huge Fine Over Surveillance", Rob Lever, AFP (Agence France Presse), September 11, 2014. [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/US-threatened-yahoo-huge-fine-over-surveillance-212454410.html

123] "US Privacy Board Says NSA Phone Program Illegal, Should End," Alina Selyukh, Reuters, January 23, 2014. [ https://news.yahoo.com/u-privacy-board-says-nsa-phone-program-illegal-005349352--finance.html

124] "UK Mass Surveillance Regime Dealt Another Blow in Court," Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch, April 27, 2018. [ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/uk-mass-surveillance-regime-dealt-131645392.html

125] "The NSA Machine, Too Big for Anyone to Understand," Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press, September 11, 2013. [ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nsa-machine-too-big-anyone-133115788.html

[126] Ibid.

127] "The Government is Snooping Through Your Snail Mail," Rebecca Greenfield, The Atlantic Wire, July 3, 2013. [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/government-snooping-snail-mail-203300998.html

128] "Russian Researchers Expose Breakthrough US Spying Program," Joseph Menn, Reuters, February 16, 2015 [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/Russian-researchers-expose-breakthrough-u-spying-program-194217480--sector.html

129] "Map Shows the NSAs Massive Worldwide Malware Operations," Connor Simpsons, The Atlantic Wire, November 23, 2013. [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/map-shows-nsas-massive-worldwide-malware-operations-200455601.html

130] "Security Breach and Spilled Secrets Have Shaken the NSA to its Core," Scott Shane, Nicole Perlroth, and David E. Sanger, New York Times, November 12, 2017. [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/US/nsa-shadow-brokers.html

[131] Ibid.

[132] "How the NSA Broke Encryption on Trillions of Secure Connections," Chris Smith, BGR, October 20, 2015. <http://bgr.com/2015/10/20/nsa-encryption-flaw-spy/> Halderman, Heninger, and 12 other coauthors, ACM Conference on Computers and Communications Security, "Imperfect Forward Secrecy, How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice".

133] "The Heart of the Cloud is in Virginia," David Pogue, CBS News, Sunday Morning, October 22, 2017 [ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cloud-computing-loudoun-county-virginia/

[134] Ibid.

135] "Americans are Horrified by DHS Plan to Track Immigrants on Social Media," Violet Blue, Politics, September 9, 2017. [ https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/29/dhs-to-track-immigrants-on-social-media/

136] "The endless $1.6 Trillion War on Terror," Eric Pianin, The Fiscal Times, Dec. 23, 2014. [ https://news.yahoo.com/endless-1-6-trillion-war-110000840.html

[137] Spiral, Trapped in the Forever War, Mark Danner, Simon and Schuster, 2016, p. 87.

[138] The Counterrevolution, How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens, Bernard E. Harcourt, Basic Books, New York, 2018, p. 70-71.

[139] Ibid, p. 65

[140] Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield, Jeremy Scahill, 2013, Nation Books, p. 24

[141] How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, Tales from the Pentagon, Rosa Brooks, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2016, p. 295.

[142] Ibid, p. 113.

[143] Ibid, p. 126.

[144] How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, Tales from the Pentagon, Rosa Brooks, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2016, p. 280.

[145] Ibid, p. 78.

146] Will UAV's Replace Fighter Jets Soon? Migflug.com Blog, Oct 28, 2012, [ http://www.migflug.com/jetflights/uav-replace-fighter-jets.html

147] [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_killing#Legal_opposition

148] "The Army's Killer Drones, How a Secretive Special Ops Unit Decimated ISIS," Sean D Naylor, Yahoo News, March 7, 2019. [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/how-a-secretive-special-ops-unit-of-killer-drones-decimated-isis-100000657.html

149] [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_deployments

150] [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military_bases

[151] "The Korea Alliance Stays Strong," Joseph Hincks, Time Magazine, July 30, 2018, p. 8.

[152] Ibid.

153] [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command#Security_support

[154] How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, Tales from the Pentagon, Rosa Brooks, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2016, p. 131-2.

[155] Ibid.

156] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garrison_State

157] [ https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_address_(press_copy)

[158] Raven Rock, The Story of the US Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of US Die, Garrett M. Graff, Simon & SchUSter, New York, 2017, p. 97-98.

[159] "The Forever War President: Obama's 'Transformational War' Powers Legacy", Glenn Healey, The Federalist, October 10, 2014.

160] "In a Court Filing, Edward Snowden Says in a Report Critical to an NSA Lawsuit is Authentic," Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch, 11/3/2018. [ https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/03/edward-snowden-nsa-lawsuit-jewel-authentic/?yptr=yahoo

[161] Ibid.

162] "The Wiretap Rooms, The NSA's Hidden Spy Rooms in Eight US Cities," Ryan Gallagher, Henrik Moltke, The Intercept, June 25, 2018. [ https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hubs/

163] "The CIA's Communications Suffered a Catastrophic Compromise It Started in Iran," Zach Dorfman and Jenna McLaughlin, Yahoo News, November 2, 2018. [ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cias-communications--catastrophic-compromise-started-iran-090018710.html

[164] Ibid.

[165] "To Catch a Predator Host Chris Hansen Arrested, Charged with Issuing Bad Checks," Jodi Guglielmi, People Magazine, January 16, 2019.

166] [https://ballotpedia.org/William_Adams  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2229077/Judge-William-Adams-suspended-beating-cerebral-palsy-daughter-returns-bench.html

167] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap

[168] Ibid.

[169] Beach Blanket Bingo, 1965, American International Pictures. Also featured Linda Evans as Candy Kane, whose singing voice was dubbed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Blanket_Bingo

170] [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kane_County,_Illinois#Demographics

171] "If You Live Your Life Without Mental Health Issues, Science Says You're the Weird One," Mike Wehner, BGR, Feb 8, 2017. [ https://bgr.com/2017/02/07/mental-health-study-percentage/

172] "Masturbation: Self Abuse or Biological Necessity?" Robert D. Martin, PhD, Psychology Today, November 16, 2017. [ https://www.psychologytoday.com/US/blog/how-we-do-it/201711/masturbation-self-abuse-or-biological-necessity

173] "9 Animals that Masturbate," Diane Kelly, Gizmodo, 8/12/15. [ https://gizmodo.com/9-animals-that-masturbate-other-than-humans-1723592357 [Thomsen and Sommer 2015 |  Morisaka et al. 2013 |  Norris 1977 |  Jainudeen et al. 1971 | Shadle 1946 |  Waterman 2010 |  Greenhall 1965 | den Bosch 2001 |  Wikelski and Baurle 1996 |  Rit et al. 2010 |  Russell et al. 2012]

[174] Twilight of American Sanity, A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump, Allen Frances, MD, William Morrow, 2017. P. 115.

[175] Close Encounters with Humankind, Sang-Hee Lee, WW Norton & Company, New York, 2018, p. 86.

[176] Ibid.

[177] "Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians", David Reich et al, Nature 528, No. 7583 (2015) 499-503

[178] Moral Combat, How Sex Divided American Christians & Fractured American Politics, R. Marie Griffith, Basic Books New York 2017, p. 59.

[179] Ibid, p. 57.

[180] Ibid, p. 3.

[181] Ibid, p. 6-7.

[182] Ibid, p. 58.

[183] The Trials of Nina McCall\--Scott W. Stern, Beacon Press, Boston, 2018.

[184] Ibid p. 45.

[185] Ibid, p. 109.

[186] Ibid, p. 143.

[187] Ibid, p. 181.

[188] Ibid, p. 199-200.

189] A [ https://www.archives.gov/research/investigations/fbi/classifications/018-may-act.html

[190] The Trials of Nina McCall\--Scott W. Stern, Beacon Press, Boston, 2018, p. 219.

[191] Ibid, p. 229.

[192] Ibid, p. 261.

193] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918

194] "New Study Says Online Piracy Isn't Hurting Entertainment Industry," Eric Pfeiffer, The Sideshow, Oct. 3, 2013. [ https://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/new-study-says-online-piracy-isn%E2%80%99t-hurting-entertainment-industry-220006729.html

[195] How Music Got Free, Then End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy, Stephen Witt, Viking, 2015, p. 1.

[196] "The regrets of the Father of the Web," The Week, July 27, 2018, p. 9.

[197] Ibid.

198] [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/stephen-witts-how-music-got-free-explains-just- that/2015/06/18/4885108e-09fd-11e5-9e39-0db921c47b93_story.html?utm_term=.1a505c03dcee

[199] Ibid.

[200] How Music Got Free, Then End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy, Stephen Witt, Viking, 2015, p. 193.

[201] Ibid.

[202] Ibid, p. 223.

[203] Ibid, p. 257.

[204] A History of Narrative Film, David A. Cook, W.W. Norton and Company, New York, fifth edition, 2016, p. 335.

[205] Ibid

206] [ https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/peep-shows

207] [http://precinemahistory.net/1890.htm

208] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_Denmark

209] [ http://time.com/2804948/pirate-bay-peter-sunde-arrested/

210] [ https://www.cnet.com/news/how-5g-pits-the-fcc-and-carriers-against-local-governments/

211] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay

212] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom

[213] Ibid.

[214] "Data to the People, India's Inclusive Internet," Nandan Nilekani, Foreign Affairs Magazine, September/October 2018, p. 20.

[215] The New Digital Age, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2013, p 4.

216] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_USage

217] [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_Use

218] [ https://www.pymnts.com/cash/2019/mobile-payments-cash-china/

219] [ https://www.statista.com/statistics/312492/mobile-payments-in-the-united-states-by-segment/

[220] Ibid, p. 22.

[221] "Battlefield Internet, A Plan for Securing Cyberspace," Michele Flournay and Michael Sulmeyer, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2018, p. 42.

[222] Ibid.

[223] Ibid.

224] "Is Pornography Addictive?" Kirsten Weir, Monitor on Psychology, April, 2014 [https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/04/pornography.aspx

[225] Ibid.

226] [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_child_pornography_and_child_sexual_abuse

227] [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_offender_registries_in_the_United_States#Exclusion_zones

[228] Ibid.

229] Review of Child Pornography and Obscenity Crimes, Office of the Inspector General, July 19, 2001 Executive Office of United States Attorney [ https://oig.justice.gov/reports/plUS/e0107/results.htm

230] [ http://copylinemagazine.com/2017/05/05/playpen-creator-sentenced-to-30-years/

231] "Playpen The Story of the FBI's Unprecedented and Illegal Hacking Operation," Mark Rumold, Electronic Frontier Foundation, September 15, 2016. [ https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/playpen-story-fbis-unprecedented-and-illegal-hacking-operation

232] "How the FBI Became the World's Largest Distributor of Child Sex Abuse Imagery," Bryan Clark, The Next Web, January 28, 2016. [ https://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/01/28/how-the-fbi-became-the-worlds-largest-distributor-of-child-sex-abuse-imagery/

[233] Ibid.

[234] Review of Child Pornography and Obscenity Crimes, Office of the Inspector General,

July 19, 2001 Executive Office of United States Attorneys  https://oig.justice.gov/reports/plUS/e0107/results.htm

[235] Ibid.

236] [ http://www.stmichaelshospital.com/media/detail.php?source=hospital_news/2014/20140425_hn  https://news.yahoo.com/study--nearly-half-of-all-homeless-men-suffered-brain-injury-before-losing-homes-203628194.html

237] [ https://news.yahoo.com/study--nearly-half-of-all-homeless-men-suffered-brain-injury-before-losing-homes- 203628194.html

[238] Ibid.

239] "The Cheapest Way to End Homelessness is Ridiculously Simple, According to the Largest-Ever US Study," Drake Baer, Business Insider, May 28, 2015. [ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cheapest-way-end-homelessness-ridiculoUSly-191417117.html <https://economicrt.org/press-release/2349/>

240] "Sex Offender Registry, More Harm than Good?" Tom Condon, CT Mirror, May 21, 2018. [ https://ctmirror.org/2018/05/21/sex-offender-registry-harm-good/

[241] Ibid.

[242] Ibid.

243] "Recidivism of Sex Offenders Released from Prison in 1994," Patrick Langan et al, Bureau of Justice Statistics, November, 2003. [ https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1136

244] "Sex Offender Registry, More Harm than Good?" Tom Condon, CT Mirror, May 21, 2018. [ https://ctmirror.org/2018/05/21/sex-offender-registry-harm-good/

245] [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexting#cite_note-Drouin_2011-13 Drouin, Michelle; Landgraff, Carly (March 2012). "Texting, sexting, and attachment in college students' romantic relationships". Computers in Human Behavior. 28 (2): 444–449

246] "How Often Are Teens Arrested for Texting? Data from a National Sample of Police Cases," Janis Wolak et al, Pediatrics, January 2012, Volume 129, Issue 1. [ http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/129/1/4

247] [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_cases

248] "Priests Commit No More Abuse Than Other Males," Pat Wingert, Newsweek Magazine, 4/7/10. [ https://www.newsweek.com/priests-commit-no-more-abuse-other-males-70625

249] [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2019/02/10/pure-evil-southern-baptist-leaders-condemn-decades-sexual-abuse-revealed-investigation/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9323f7dbd662

[250] Ibid.

251] "Catholic Church Admits 'Shameful' Legacy of Abuse After Study Leaked," Riham AlkoUSaa, Reuters, September 12, 2018. [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/study-details-sexual-abuse-german-catholic-priests-over-122224908.html

252] "The Tale of the Tape: the Reality of Human Trafficking is Nothing Like Trump's Version," Caitlin Dickson, Yahoo News, February 1, 2019. [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/tale-tape-reality-human-trafficking-nothing-like-trumps-version-013531493.html

[253] Ibid.

[254] Ibid.

255] [ https://news.yahoo.com/thirty-million-people-slaves-half-india-survey-062719818.html  https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/findings/highlights/

[256] "Africa's New Slavery Problem, The Trade in Human Beings Thrives on the Road to Europe", Aryn Baker, Time, Mar 25 2019, 36-41.

[257] Ibid, p. 37.

[258] Ibid. p. 39-41

[259] PriUS or Pickup? How Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America's Great Divide, Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2018.

[260] Ibid, p. 14-15.

[261] "Is There Such a Thing as an Authoritarian Voter?" Molly Worthen, The New York Times, December 15, 2018.

[262] How Fascism Works, the Politics of Us and Them, Jason Stanley, Random House, NY, 2018, p. 138.

[263] Ibid.

[264] Predisposed, Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences, John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Alford, Routledge, Taylor and French Group, New York, 2014, p. 83. Haidt, et al, "Above and Below Left-Right: Ideological Narratives and Moral Foundations"

[265] Ibid, p. 86.

[266] Ibid.

[267] Ibid, p. 92.

[268] Ibid, p. 139.

[269] Ibid, p. 140.

[270] Ibid, p. 203-4. "Public Acceptance of Evolution," Miller, Scott and Okamoto, poll of 34 OECD countries

271] [ https://news.yahoo.com/one-third-americans-reject-evolution-poll-shows-191426764.html. This 2013 Pew poll showed 33% of Americans rejected evolution. Case law in America demonstrates that this has largely been interpreted by the Courts as a fundamental issue of religion, not science.

272] "Poll: 30% of Respondents Want to Bomb Agrabah (from Disney's Aladdin)", Michael Walsh, Yahoo, Dec. 18, 2015. [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/poll-30-of-republicans-want-to-bomb-agrabah-from-210925490.html

273] "AP-NORC Poll: Edit Baby Genes for Health, Not Smarts," Lauran Neergaard, Associated Press, December 28, 2018. [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/ap-norc-poll-most-support-gene-editing-protect-130327179.html

274] "Poll Shows Giant Gap Between What Public, Scientists Think," Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, Jan. 30, 2015. [https://apnews.com/db5d16d790cc446885b4bf991df5707e

[275] Jumping at Shadows, The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream, Sasha Abramsky, Nation Books, New York, 2017, p. 211.

[276] Ibid, p. 233.

277] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_..

278] [ https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-top-10-misattributed-quotations-a7910361.html

[279] "The Forgotten History of the Financial Crisis, What the World Should Have Learned in 2008," Adam Tooze, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2018, p. 203. Also see his book Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World.

[280] Ibid, p. 205.

[281] Ibid, p. 207.

[282] Not Enough, Human Rights in an Unequal World, Samuel Moyn, Belknap Press Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2018, p. 68.

[283] The Chickenshit Club, Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives, Jesse Eisinger, winner of Pulitzer Prize, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2017, p. 317.

284] Kaiser Family Foundation, feb 20, 2019, Chart Collections, Health Spending, Kamal, Cox and McDermott [ https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/recent-forecasted-trends-prescription-drug-spending/#item-per-capita-spending-rx-hospital-physician-services_nhe-projections-2018-27

285] Drug Costs for Older Adults Still Soaring," Candy Sagon, AARP, 2016. [ https://www.aarp.org/health/drugs-supplements/info-2016/drug-costs-for-older-adults-still-soaring-cs.html

286] "Johns Hopkins: External Reference Drug Pricing Could Save Tens of Billions," ASPPH, May 10, 2019 [ https://www.aspph.org/johns-hopkins-external-reference-drug-pricing-could-save-medicare-tens-of-billions/

[287] Ibid.

288] "Personal Drug Importation is Protected by Congress," Gabriel Levitt, PharmacyCheckerBlog, Oct. 5, 2018. [ https://www.pharmacycheckerblog.com/personal-drug-importation-is-protected-by-congress Article includes analysis of current laws that define an exception to the ban on importation of prescription medication for personal Use.

[289] Ibid.

290] [ https://www.quotacy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/retire-age.png

291] [ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/americans-expect-die-debt-214615984.html

292] "The US Economy Could be $1.6 Trillion Bigger If It Were Like Norway's in One Way," Julia LaRoche, Yahoo Finance, Mar. 13, 2018. [ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/US-economy-1-6-trillion-bigger-like-norway-one-way-183913481.html

293] [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Catch_a_Predator#Investigation_by_20/20

294] "To Catch a Predator: The New American Witch Hunt," Vanessa Grigoriadis, Rolling Stone, August 9, 2007. [ https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/to-catch-a-predator-the-new-american-witch-hunt-75418/

[295] No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald, Metropolitan Books, 2014 p. 54

[296] Ibid, p.172

[297] Ibid, p. 174.

[298] Time, may 21, 2019. sex offender recidivism 3.5%, looked at studies in Conn, AL, Del, Iowa, SC, incl parole violations, p. 46.

299] "FBI Hired Best Buy's Geek Squad Employees as Paid Informants to Flag Child Pornography," Josh Hafner, USA Today, Mar 8, 2018. [ https://www.USatoday.com/story/tech/nation-now/2018/03/08/fbi-hired-best-buys-geek-squad-employees-paid-informants-flag-child-pornography/406822002/

[300] Ibid.

301] "Obama Reckons With a Trump Presidency," David Remnick, The New Yorker, 11/28/2016. [ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency

[302] Time, Mar. 19, 2018, p. 15.

[303] Go Back to Where You Came From, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Nation Books, 2017, New York, p. 10.

304] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vel%27_d%27Hiv_Roundup

[305] "With Great Demographics Comes Great Power," Nicholas Eberstadt, Foreign Affairs Magazine, July/August 2019, p. 152.

[306] Ibid.

[307] Ibid.

308] [ http://media3.s-nbcnews.com/i/newscms/2018_26/2481786/180629-roe-v-wade-poll-al-1038_006ecef13828b ee52ed08418af0239d9.jpg Conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 2018. 77% polled they wanted to keep Woe v Wade versus 13% to reverse in a June 2019 poll by NPR, see  https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-overwhelmingly-support-roe-v-wade-but-still-favor-abortion-restrictions-2019-06-07

309] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi

[310] Meet the Press, NBC 12/30/18

311] "US Police Escape Federal Charges in 96% of Rights Cases: Newspaper," Reuters, Mar. 13, 2016. [ https://news.yahoo.com/u-police-escape-federal-charges-96-percent-rights-151212798.html?nf=1

312] "Just Facts: As Many Americans Have Criminal Records as Have College Degrees," Mathew Friedman, Brennan Center for Justice, November 17, 2015. [ https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/just-facts-many-americans-have-criminal-records-college-diplomas

[313] Ibid.

[314] Ibid.

[315] "How to Crack Down on Tax Havens, Start with the Banks," Nicholas Shaxson, Foreign Affairs Magazine, March/April 2018, p.98.

[316] Ibid, p. 99.

317] "Mapping the US Farm Subsidy $1 Million Club," Adam Andrzejewski, Forbes, August 14, 2018 [ https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2018/08/14/mapping-the-u-s-farm-subsidy-1-million-club/#3375c5cd3efc

[318] Breakout, Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America's Fate, Newt Gringrich, Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2013, p. 174. Associated Press, "Big cities battle dismal graduation rates", cbs news, feb 11 , 2009, cbsnews,com/2100-201_162-3985714.html

319] "The Hidden Subsidy that Helps Pay for Healthcare Insurance," Kate Zernike, The New York Times, July 7, 2017. [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/health/health-insurance-tax-deduction.html

320] "What Kind of Society Do You Want to Live In?: Inside the Country Where Down Syndrome is Disappearing", Julian Quinones, Arijeta Lajka, CBS News, August 14, 2017. [Https://www.cbsnews.com/news/down-syndrome-iceland/

321] "Life Tenure is Too Long for Supreme Court Justices," Stuart Taylor Jr., The Atlantic, June, 2005. [ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/06/life-tenure-is-too-long-for-supreme-court-justices/304134/

322] "The Best and Worst States for US Taxpayers," Adriana Belmont, Yahoo Finance, April 11, 2019. [ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/taxes-best-and-worst-states-125830381.html

[323] Ibid.

324] "How Mexican Cartels Prey on Chicago's Chaos," Jeremy Kryt, The Daily Beast, 7.29.17. [ https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-mexican-cartels-prey-on-chicagos-chaos

[325] Ibid.

326] "'It's Totally Unfair': Chicago, Where the Rich Live 30 Years Longer Than the Poor," Jamiles Lartey, The Guardian, June 23, 2019. [ https://www.theguardian.com/US-news/2019/jun/23/chicago-latest-news-life-expectancy-rich-poor-inequality

327] [ http://www.pewforum.org/religioUS-landscape-study/state/illinois/party-affiliation/

328] [https://ballotpedia.org/Illinois_General_Assembly

329] [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois%27_congressional_districts

330] "30,000 Six-Figure Illinois Educators Cost Taxpayers $3.7 Billion," Adam Andrzejewski, Forbes, June 4, 2018. [ https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2018/06/04/the-exclUSive-100000-club-meet-30000-members-at-the-illinois-teachers-retirement-system-trs/#6deb78b46129

331] "Illinois Tamps Down 'Pension Spiking' for Teachers; Educators Fear Disincentive for Hiring," Kevin McDermott, St. Louis Post Dispatch, June 4, 2018. [ https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/illinois-tamps-down-pension-spiking-for-teachers-educators-fear-disincentive/article_7855c184-c2a4-52cc-805e-97d4025adc86.html

332] "Illinois Among Worst States for Racial Inequality: Study," Shannon Antinori, Patch, August 24, 2017 [ https://patch.com/illinois/across-il/illinois-among-worst-states-racial-inequality-study

333] "This is How Much Illinois Spends per Inmate Each Year," Roger Schlueter, Belleville News-Democrat, August 12, 2017. [ https://www.bnd.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/answer-man/article166830882.html

[334] Ibid.

[335] Ibid.

336] "Is Illinois a Big-Spending State: Analysis Says No," Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune, May 30, 2017. [ http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/zorn/ct-zorn-spending-illinois-rauner-budget-crisis-perspec-0531-jm-20170530-column.html#

[337] Ibid.

338] [ https://ballotpedia.org/History_of_Initiative_%26_Referendum_in_Illinois

339] "The US Constitution's 11th Amendment," Michael Arnheim, US Constitution for Dummies, [ https://www.dummies.com/education/history/american-history/the-u-s-constitutions-eleventh-amendment/

340] "Berg, the Solution that Never Was to Illinois' Pension Crisis," Austin Berg, Chicago Tribune, December 7, 2018. [ http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/daily-southtown/opinion/ct-sta-berg-column-st-1209-story.html

[341] Ibid.
