Perot, Buchanan, Trump: Early Warning Shots

The mainstream media are having a great time with Donald Trump. He is the gift that keeps on giving. But while they "pile on" to reveal all his flaws, they have failed to place him in the proper political and economic context. The people who support Trump are angry and cynical, very much like those who supported other "outsider" presidential candidates in the past.

The first one that comes to mind is Ross Perot, who ran for president as an Independent against Bush and Clinton. He is remembered mainly for having pulled enough votes from Bush to give Clinton a victory. Perot received 18.9 percent of the popular vote, and no electoral votes. Among his most memorable lines as a candidate is the following: "This city is fueled with sound bites, shell games, handlers, media stuntmen who posture, create images, shoot off Roman candles, but don't accomplish anything. We need deeds, not words, in this city."

After the election, Perot continued his political activity by opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). He is remembered for his predictions about NAFTA by telling the American people to listen for the "giant sucking sound" of American jobs heading south.

The second memorable presidential candidate was Pat Buchanan, the political commentator who ran for president in 2000 as the Reform Party candidate. Among his more colorful lines was to tell his listeners that "the people with the pitchforks will soon be coming to take what was rightfully theirs."

And now we have Trump, who from the very first moment he spoke told us of the "rigged system" that confronted the American people. The press would spin the meaning of the rigged system to be the political system, but that was not Trump's original meaning. He was talking about how he used his money to support all the political candidates he needed "to grease the skids" for all his real estate ventures.

Perot, Buchanan, and Trump are the continued expressions of the anger and cynicism of the American people, and should be understood as "early warning shots" against a rigged system where wealth and concentrated corporate dominance shape the political system that produces "free trade"
agreements and tax policies that benefit mainly the privileged class elites.

Immigrants and Ex-Cons

We have read of the impressive efforts of some communities to embrace and support immigrants from the Middle East, especially Syria and Iraq. The collective effort by these communities should be emulated as they provide financial, emotional, and material support for immigrant families to become integrated into the communities in which they have located after coming to the United States.

We think it would be great if an effort of this sort were directed at helping some of the 600,000 inmates who each year are released and returned to the community. Unfortunately, more than one-half of those released will be re-incarcerated within three years of their release. After serving time in prison, ex-offenders face major challenges in finding jobs, housing, and general assistance to deal with reintegrating into the community.

The needs of ex-offenders are very much like those of new immigrants. What is needed is a program sponsored by State and Federal agencies to connect ex-offenders with community support groups and to provide the consistent message that there is a second chance for those who want to work at it. 

Election Prediction

All social scientists know that it is dangerous to predict, but the forthcoming presidential election is so overheated that we cannot resist. Thus, we predict that: 

Trump will win the popular vote, but Clinton will win the electoral vote. This will allow Trump to claim that "the game is rigged" and the battle between their followers will continue, as it is another gift to the media. On a more serious side, Clinton will seek to unify the country and will become more hawkish in foreign relations, as we "discover" that Crimea and the Ukraine are vital to our national interest, leading to a new Cold War with Russia.

Post-election comment.
We were correct in predicting a split decision, but we got it wrong as to who would win the popular vote and who the electoral college vote. The turnout for Trump in all the blue-collar union states was greater than expected. He obviously had an appeal to the tens of millions of blue collar workers and their families and friends who believe that their jobs are at risk, who have worked without a wage increase for many years, and who have lost their benefits (pensions and health insurance) as their employers have sought to reduce costs. We can now watch to see what President Trump will try to do for them.

Crime and Time

On September 2, 2016, the New York Times published an article by Josh Keller and Adam Pearce with the title: "This small Indiana County sends more people to prison than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., combined. Why?" The article began with a statistical documentation of the decline in prison admissions from 2006 to 2014 across many cities in the U.S. Yet despite this national decline the "small Indiana county" sent convicted offenders to prison at exceeded national trends. The preferred "explanation" for this odd statistic seemed to focus on the fact that the county was composed of citizens who were white, rural, and politically conservative. Since these maligned citizens were not involved in sentencing offenders, attention and criticism turned to the power of local prosecutors who were presumably elected by the citizens who were white, rural, and politically conservative.

Apparently preferring the "hick" explanation to this practice of sending convicted persons to prison, the article fails to examine the expansion of drug-related activity outside of the cities and into surrounding counties (that is, "rural areas"). Anyone who has studied the illegal drug business knows that you must treat it as a business, so the spread from cities to surrounding counties is evidence of the business practice of seeking new markets for the illegal drugs. Thus, when the "hicks" and their "out of control" prosecutors send drug offenders to prison, they are sending a message to the urban drug entrepreneurs that their business is not welcome in the county. It's like saying "no" to Wal-Mart because you prefer the local mom-and-pop stores.

We encourage you to read the article and see what you think may be responsible for this hard line version of "if you do the crime, you do the time."