Business Ethics Links 8-9-2016 Trump has gone too far edition

Sounds like incitement to violence to me

Addressing a rally in Wilmington, the Republican presidential nominee said: “Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks.

“But the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Trump hints at need for assassination of Hilary Clinton

Donald Trump has hinted at the assassination of Hillary Clinton by supporters of gun rights.

The Republican nominee was speaking at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, about the next president’s power to appoint supreme court justices. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” he said, adding: “Although the second amendment people – maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Donald Trump’s full remarks

Hillary wants to abolish, essentially, the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I dunno. But I tell you what, that will be a horrible day. If Hillary gets to put her judges in, right now we’re tied. You see what’s going on. We’re tied ‘cause Scalia, this was not supposed to happen. Justice Scalia was going to be around for ten more years, at least, and this is what happened. That was a horrible thing, So now look at it. So Hillary essentially wants to abolish the second amendment.

Now speaking to the NRA folks, who are great: when you, when you, and I tell you, so they endorsed me. They endorsed me very early. My sons are members. I’m a member. If you, we can add, I think the National Rifle Association, we can add the Second Amendment to the justices, they almost go, in a certain way, hand and hand. Now the justices are going to do things that are so important. And we have such great justices. You saw my list of eleven that have been vetted and respected and have gotten great, and they, a little bit, equate.

But if you don’t do what’s the right thing, you’re not going to have – either you’re not going to have a Second Amendment or you’re not going to have much of it left. And you’re not going to be able to protect yourselves, which you need. Which you need! When the bad guys burst into your hours, they’re not looking about Second Amendments and ‘do I have the right to do this.’ The bad guys aren’t going to be giving up their weapons. But the good people will say, ‘oh, well, that’s the law.’ No, no. Not going to happen. We can’t let it happen. We can’t let it happen.

New Charges Against Roger Ailes

005-1Mark Singer on Trump

Singer blames Fox News and the web for what seems to be a growing disregard for the truth, but also acknowledges that widening inequality, leaving a large swathe of Americans essentially abandoned by the two main parties, has helped account for Trump’s rise – along with “the haters”, racists and xenophobes excited by this promises to keep Mexicans and Muslims out of America.

Half of All Americans

“Half of all Americans are backing away from the net due to fears regarding security and privacy,” longtime tech security guru Dan Kaminsky said in his Black Hat keynote speech, citing a July 2015 study by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. “We need to go ahead and get the internet fixed or risk losing this engine of beauty.”

Self Driving Car delivers man to hospital

This might be the wave of the future. Every car could be programmed to deliver itself to the nearest hospital if the driver become impaired. The car could also communicate with the hospital telling the facility its arrival time while transmitting data about the driver. jp

Joshua Neally’s brand-new Tesla Model X didn’t exactly save his life when he started having severe chest pains, but it helped him get most of the way to a hospital.

The 37-year-old was driving in his electric car from his law office in Springfield,Missouri, when the air was sucked from his lungs and he felt a sudden biting pain in his chest – a blocked artery in his lungs. Distracted by the pain and still in traffic, he let the car’s controversial autopilot carry him down the road toward a hospital.

“It was the most excruciating pain I’ve ever had,” he later told local KY3 news. “It was kinda getting scary. I called my wife and just said, ‘Something’s wrong.’”

“I just knew I had to get there, to the ER,” he said.

The Failure of Corporate News Coverage

To bracket out the racism, bigotry, and hateful behavior at Donald Trump’s rallies also requires a high amount of willful denial regarding the type of poison he represents in the American body politic. Here, The New York Times is ignoring their own excellent reporting on Donald Trump’s rallies by writers such as Jared Yates Sexton.  The New York Times is also somehow separating the violence inside Trump’s rallies where Black Lives Matter and other protesters have been threatened with being burned alive—an ominous allusion to America’s horrific and unique history of spectacular lynchings against its black citizens—from what is taking place outside. Most troubling, The New York Times, in now “discovering” the racism and bigotry among Trump’s supporters, has chosen to transform the mountains of public opinion and other social science research that has consistently demonstrated the role of racism, white racial animus, and authoritarianism in driving support for Donald Trump into mere curiosities and outliers, the equivalent of empirical anthills. This is intellectually dishonest.

Empathy and Schools

We all know what a Danish pastry is — that delightful caloric bomb of glazed breakfast deliciousness. But what about a Danish classroom cake? And moreover, how can this help teach empathy?

While researching our book “The Danish Way of Parenting; What the Happiest People in the World Know About Raising Confident, Capable Kids,” my co-author and I interviewed numerous teachers and students across Denmark to learn how they incorporate empathy in schools and at home. Notably, in the Danish education system empathy is considered as important as teaching math and literature, and it is woven into the school’s curriculum from pre-school through high school.

The Danes’ highly developed sense of empathy is one of the main reasons that Denmark is consistently voted one of the happiest countries in the world (this year it is once again number one). Empathy plays a key role in improving our social connections, which is a major factor in our overall happiness.

Business Ethics Links 8-7-2016 The Self Healing Computers Edition

Self healing Computers? 

Computer, heal thyself! With menacing bugs and viruses floating around the internet, such a command would be useful. In fact, it may be moving toward reality.

A glimpse of “self-healing” computers unfolded in a massive Las Vegas ballroom Thursday night, and the moment evoked crucial leaps in computer development, such as when IBM’s Deep Blue beat a reigning world master at chess in 1997 and more recent experiments with computerized self-driving cars.

Brazil Takes Gold for credit card fraud

“The use of credit card cloning devices and radio frequency interception (RFI) at restaurants, bars and public areas is epidemic in Rio,” the department’s Overseas Security Advisory Council warned in a February report published on its website.

10!!@@#dddddd444Home Associations can be a serious problem 

Homes associations wield far more power than homeowners realize. That’s because local governments have saved money by ceding HOAs more and more authority over such responsibilities as streets and sewers. Associations can fine you for leaving a garage door open and seize your home over late dues.

“A lot of people don’t realize, especially first-time homebuyers, that when you purchase into these homeowners associations you are giving up some of your constitutional rights and some of your due process rights,” said Dave Russell, who rescued a troubled Arizona condo association and now runs it to much acclaim.

Latest Polls – Trump and Clinton

Roger Ailes and his war on enemies

Where are the Republican Women?

This growing disparity, with Democrats electing ever more women and Republicans ever fewer, repeats at every level of government: U.S. Senate, statewide offices, upper and lower state legislatures, and municipalities. (The Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University maintains useful records on this.) What that means is that there’s no sign the GOP’s current woman problem is going to get any better any time soon. Quite the opposite: The pipeline is dry and getting drier, all the way down.

***

The decline of the Republican woman is a public relations disaster for the GOP.

It means that every time a male Republican officeholder or candidate puts his foot in his mouth about women—from former Congressman Todd “legitimate rape” Akin to Donald “blood coming out of her wherever” Trump—effectively the only Republicans who can rush to their defense are other men. Whenever Republican leaders gather to speak about welfare, abortion, the minimum wage or pay equity, they look like a bunch of men telling women what’s good for them. The GOP’s few female national officeholders the tend to tire of playing the role of token woman—especially when they think it’ll come at the expense of their reputation back home. You don’t see New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez or New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte on national television much anymore.

Is Corey Lewandowski the worst business ethics hiring decision in modern memory? 

Climate Change changes sports

But Brazil’s rivers are just the tip of the melting iceberg. To paraphrase Naomi Klein, climate change changes everything—including sports. In the sinking island nation of the Maldives, kabaddi players have told my collaborator Adam Flynn that they are adapting their traditional tag game to be played in shallow water. In Alaska, snow was hauled in by train in March to make the Iditarod sled race possible, and even then parts ran over a bone-jarring mixture of ice and dirt. Climate change combines with countless instances of wrecked ecologies—poisoned waters, polluted skies, and dead landscapes—to form a larger environmental megacrisis that will profoundly shape how we spend time outdoors.

A better minimum wage leads to healthier babies

 

Business Ethics Links 8-5-2016 Sizes are random numbers edition.

Sizes are random numbers edition (For women, anyway.) 

Today we discover the women’s clothes sizes are virtually random numbers surely a business ethics problem if ever there was one. Denying women the most basic information about what they buy is a wrong that takes money out of women’s pockets every single day. 

If Donald Trump were elected he could use nuclear weapons on his own authority. If suffering from a concussion, get rest – do not resume sports immediately. And Congress fails in its duty one more time. 

James Pilant

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Sizes are random numbers edition

The sizes on women’s clothes are random numbers.

“Vanity sizing was done as a marketing tool. I don’t think it’s done as a marketing tool anymore. I think it’s done because the women are getting bigger, and we’re just addressing that,” said Lynn Boorady, chair of the fashion and textile technology department at SUNY Buffalo State, in the video. “The original sizing charts never had sizes 0 and 2. Now we select sizes 0 and 2 because the sizes are getting smaller and smaller and we’re getting larger and larger but we’re also adding at the other end.”

Yes, if he were President, Donald Trump could use nuclear weapons 

If the United States appeared to be under nuclear assault, the president would have minutes to decide whether the threat was real, and to fire as many as 925 nuclear warheads with a destructive force greater than 17,000 Hiroshima bombs, according to estimates by Hans M. Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington.

 The commander in chief can also order the first use of nuclear weapons even if the United States is not under nuclear attack.

“There’s no veto once the president has ordered a strike,” said Franklin C. Miller, a nuclear specialist who held White House and Defense Department posts for 31 years before leaving government service in 2005. “The president and only the president has the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.”

Don’t continue playing after a concussion!

But if I had known that continuing to play the same day after hitting my head could have done so much damage, I would not have pushed myself. Now that the information about concussions is available, there are more ways to manage the symptoms once they arise. Coaches and athletic trainers are more aware of the negative effects of a single hit to the head, and most of the time, they won’t allow their athlete back onto the playing field. There are preventative measures that youth sports are taking, such as requiring softball pitchers to wear face masks and soccer players to wear padded headbands.

Is congressional concern over a possible ban of the confederate flag stopping action on the Zika virus? 

President Barack Obama asked Congress for $1.9 billion in February to deal with the impending outbreak of Zika in the United States. Congress finally began working on the request in May, with the Senate passing a bipartisan compromise that was about $800 million short.

The bill got tanked in a partisan squabble last month afterRepublicans decided to add in contraception restrictions, a pro-Confederate flag provision, extra cuts to Obamacare, and a measure to exempt pesticides from the Clean Water Act, even though those pesticides don’t target Zika-carrying mosquitoes.

They then departed for a seven-week break while sending a sternly worded letter to Obama, saying he should take aggressive action to battle Zika using the $589 million the administration transferred from other programs, taken primarily from the ongoing Ebola response. GOP lawmakers have also complained recently that the money is not being spent quickly enough, with nearly two-thirds still available.

Is Data Our Problem?? (This is an interesting take on modern politics – I recommend careful reading. This is a good one.) 

In this year’s election cycle, the restless, anti-establishment anger is palpable, and shared by voters on the left who felt the Bern and on the right who love the Donald. Both are animated by a conviction that the moneyed class and corporations have hijacked our democracy. Emerging from their conventions, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will vie to win over these disaffected voters. Right now, both candidates are missing a potent opportunity to publicly recognize that it is not only money producing outsized influence in our democratic system. It is data.

Congress failed to act on the Zika virus (Yes, this is another article on the same subject – I have a lot of anger on this topic. A deadly virus that also causes birth defects is predicted to enter the United States and our congressional response was an extra long vacation. Yes, they did pass a bill to fight the Zika virus — it also defunded parts of Obamacare, defunded Planned Parenthood, protected the confederate flag and removed regulations from some pesticides. Apparently holding the lives of Americans hostage is good politics.) 

Irresponsibility of this kind should outrage the nation, but our stores of outrage are largely spent. Members of the House and Senate turn every issue into partisan Kabuki theater — a ritual performance of ideological difference in which real-world problems are never solved. And so the status of 11 million undocumented immigrants goes unaddressed. Crumbling bridges and roads remain unrepaired. Social Security and other entitlements go unreformed. A proposal to prevent people on terrorist watch lists from buying firearms dies in committee. The Zika battle is starved of funding. On and on it goes, even as these public servants spend much of their time fundraising for their next re-election campaign. When Donald Trump supporters are asked why they support someone so rude and reckless, they say, “Washington is broken. We need someone who’s a little crazy to shake it up.” Even if their choice of medicine is questionable, you can’t argue with the diagnosis.

How dirty is the water at the Olympics?

Absolutely filthy. A cleanup was promised ahead of the Games, but the state government spent only $170 million of a pledged $4 billion on the effort, citing a budget crisis. Surf still churns with sludge, and garbage floats freely; in many places, raw sewage flows directly into the streams and rivers that feed Olympic sites. “Foreign athletes will literally be swimming in human crap,” Dr. Daniel Becker, a Rio pediatrician, told The New York Times. The Associated Press found dangerously high levels of viruses and bacteria in the waters. In some cases, the virus loads were up to 1.7 million times the level considered hazardous on a Southern California beach. The U.S. rowing team will wear seamless double-layered unisuits made with antimicrobial material to help protect them from the contaminated water.

Hilary opens up a 15% lead

Clinton opened up a 15-point margin in theMcClatchy-Marist survey, 48% to 33%, which was conducted as Trump feuded publicly first with the Muslim parents of a slain American war hero and then House Speaker Paul Ryan, one of the GOP’s most popular and powerful figures.
Last month, Clinton held a narrow 3-point advantage, 42%-39% in a McClatchy-Marist poll.
In an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, Clinton’s edge is 9 points (47% to 38%), cushioning what was a 5-point advantage in early July. A CNN/ORC poll this week showed Clinton with a similar 9-point edge over Trump nationally.
Fennell’s organization urges parents and caretakers to read its safety tips, which include looking in the back seat each time you get out of the car and putting something you need in your back seat — a cell phone, handbag, employee ID or briefcase — to ensure that you check.
KidsAndCars also suggests leaving a large stuffed animal in the child’s car seat and then placing the stuffed animal in the passenger seat as a visual reminder to remove the child when he or she is in the car seat in the back.

Since oil prices began to fall in mid-2014, cheap crude has been blamed for 195,000 job cuts in the U.S., according to a report published on Thursday by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

It’s an enormous toll that is especially painful because these tend to be well-paying jobs. The average pay in the oil and gas industry is 84% higher than the national average, according to Goldman Sachs. The cuts have occurred at a time when many other corners of the American economy have been adding jobs.

A police officer in southern Virginia was convicted of manslaughter and jurors recommended a sentence of two and a half years in prison on Thursday for his fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old during a confrontation over a suspected shoplifting.

Business Ethics Blog Posts 8-3-2016 Is Trump Dropping Out Edition

What if Trump drops out? 

If Trump withdraws from the presidential race, the responsibility for choosing his replacement will fall to the RNC. (That’s the Republican National Committee, made up of about two hundred party leaders, not the Republican National Convention, made up of thousands of delegates. The Committee could theoretically reconvene the Convention to hold the vote, but they won’t.)

So the Republican National Committee would get together somewhere, and elect a new nominee. This would likely be Mike Pence, since he’s the veep nominee—picking anyone else would divide the party further, and that’s the last thing they’ll want in the wake of a Trump schism. Pence isn’t widely hated, and putting him in the slot could be framed as a pro-forma thing, so that’s what they’d be most likely to do.

Donald Trump’s America

When the Trump train grinds to a halt, mainstream outlets will see more lost funding and more layoffs, leading to poor coverage of the new administration and an even more fractured political discourse. The media has learned that the exploitation of violence, riots, and bigotry brings clicks and cash. This is not a new lesson — as the old saying goes, “if it bleeds, it leads” — but the 2016 campaign has shown the mainstreaming of extremism to be uniquely lucrative. As the two disaffected white fan bases described above lash out at Clinton, her supporters, and non-white citizens, we should expect these men to be portrayed as one of two equally legitimate “sides” — not as a threat to the safety of other Americans, but as a mainstream perspective. As with Trump, the shock will eventually fade, and continual exposure to extremist views will make it harder for Americans to recognize them as such.

What does it mean to be a Democrat, if anything?

The emphasis on diversity and identity politics reflects the extent to which the Democratic Party has become the party of the well-off professional class. For party leaders, it’s easier to target voters on pure identity than it is on class, because the former doesn’t impede the neoliberal economic order to which Democrats have been utterly complacent. Of course, this isn’t really a problem for people who are well-off, because people who are well-off have the luxury of focusing solely on identity politics. Meanwhile, the vast majority who aren’t well-off must resort to identity politics (see: God and guns) because their economic concerns are of ZERO concern to the professional political classes in both parties.

Donald Trump and Doing Good

Trump probably wasn’t deliberately referencing the most famous joke in Zoolander when he demonstrated his ignorance of/contempt for the distinction between adjectives and adverbs.

Not knowing the difference between doing good and doing well is more than a grammatical error – it is a severe ethical and imaginative failing as well.  It’s possible to re-organise the English language to reduce or amplify the number of parts of speech.  Horne Tooke, in the eighteenth century, thought that only nouns and verbs were essential categories, and every other part of speech was merely a contraction of what might be a periphrastic application of nouns and verbs.  But Horne Tooke, eloquent writer that he was, still  knew the difference between describing a thing and describing an action.

James Bloodworth and Unpaid Labor!   (Read it – it’s funny.) jp

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Is Trump Dropping Out Edition

Himmler Diaries Found

It’s hard to believe that these dairies will expose even more hideous crimes committed by Himmler (although it is possible). But their main value lies in the hope that they will help shed light on one of the world’s most revolting crimes against humanity.

Business Ethics Links 8-3-2016

Did NBC mess up when it bid for the Olympics?

Iris Scanning comes to mobile phones. 

Flossing, “there’s a possibility that it helps” 

United States Okays Flight to Moon

Taiwan about to give Uber the boot. 

 

 

Business Ethics Links 8-2-2016 The Tobacco Divestment Edition!

Today, we discover in our first story that a single person, a doctor, made life much more difficult for the tobacco companies. In our second story, Washington State is suing Comcast on behalf of the state’s consumers. According to the law suit Comcast violated consumer protections slightly less than two million times. (Ouch!) And will noise cancelling headphones make listening to music safer and more common? That’s a little of what’s going on today! 

James Pilant

  1. Tobacco Divestment, a new front in an old war. 

In an old war, a new front had opened. Tobacco kills six million people a year: the McKinsey Global Institute deems it humankind’s greatest self-generated social burden, ahead even of war and terrorism. Yet as an issue, observes King’s colleague Clare Payne, it has receded in public consciousness: “There’s this tendency for people to think: ‘Oh we’re done with tobacco, aren’t we? Everyone knows. It’s just a choice thing for people now.’ When we’re actually in an epidemic – history’s first epidemic of a non-communicable disease.”

To restore it to the headlines, then, is no mean feat. “She’s a star,” says Cary Adams, CEO of the Union for International Cancer Control, who just over a year ago put King in charge of the Global Task Force for Tobacco Divestment. It’s not a mantle that rests easily with King. All the 41-year-old oncologist at Melbourne’s Epworth Healthcare feels she’s done is take to heart her hippocratic oath, especially the injunction to “do no harm”.

2. Washington State Sues Comcast for 3.7 Billion

“This case is a classic example of a big corporation deceiving its customers for financial gain,” Ferguson said in a statement. “I won’t allow Comcast to continue to put profits above customers – and the law.”

“Not every Washington consumer can hire an attorney to take on a powerful interest who doesn’t play by the rules,” Ferguson said in a press conference Monday morning. “A lot of times you don’t even know they’re not playing by the rules.”

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The Tobacco Divestment Edition

Amazon is attempting to develop “smart” headphones

 

Noise-canceling headphones have microphones that listen to the sound coming from the outside world – the chatter, traffic or building work – and actively mute those frequencies. Amazon is proposing a design, for which the company has just been awarded a patent, that would analyze the incoming noise and listen for specific trigger words, phrases or sounds – for example, “Hey, Judy.”

Upon recognizing the keyword or phrase, the device would temporarily stop canceling noise so that the headphone wearer could hear outside sounds. The patent documents suggest that the same temporary suspension of the noise-canceling capabilities could also be triggered by an electronic, non-audio signal sent from a second device, such as a doorbell.

The Moral Policing of Women’s clothes doesn’t add to the political dialoque

Women whose fathers, brothers or husbands happen to have political careers are treated as mere appendages of their male relatives – to be judged, critiqued and shamed for the sole purpose of reflecting embarrassment back on to the male politician. Just consider the media treatment of Justine Miliband, who was torn down for not having a homely enough kitchen, or Samantha Cameron, who was eviscerated for wearing a sleeveless dress to a church service.

Parents and Trump Voters? 

(This is a good read!) 

Since 2000, nearly five million American manufacturing jobs have disappeared– a third of the entire manufacturing workforce. Using government statistics, one group estimated that over 60,000 US factories have closed in the last 15 years.

One of those factories belonged to my mom and dad.

Just find another job? 

If Donald Trump’s daughter was sexually harassed at work, “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case,” the Republican candidate told an interviewer on Monday.

The question, specifically framed around the allegations against former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, came in an interview with USA Today. Ailes has been accused of sexual harassment by over 20 women since former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit against him on 6 July. Most recently, Laurie Luhn, a former Fox News booker, has accused Ailes of maintaining a sexually coercive relationship with her. Ailes has denied all the allegations.

So, forget about that justice thing, just move on to the next job! jp

Anthrax revived by global warming

Seventy-two nomadic herders, including 41 children, were hospitalised in far north Russia after the region began experiencing abnormally high temperatures

Doctor Sentenced for death of patient during FGM does three months in jail.

Second Story – same topic. 

“There is a lack of political will, meaning no pressure to implement the law – it doesn’t even stop at the stage of failing to arrest those who are already sentenced for practising FGM,” she explained. “The clear fact that there was no single report coming from the state itself shows the state doesn’t fulfil its role to protect the women right to health and life. The state has a responsibility to supervise the clinics – plus public and private hospitals,” she added.

I can’t help but believe that if you’re cutting flesh off of a woman to protect your manhood, you haven’t got much. jp

Your mobile device’s battery status can be used to identify and track you online.

Trump compares the loss of a son to his sacrifices

“I think I have made a lot of sacrifices,” he blustered. “I’ve worked very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I’ve done – I’ve had tremendous success.”

Stephanopoulos appeared incredulous. “Those are sacrifices?” he asked.

“Oh sure,” said Trump. “I think they’re sacrifices.”

If you think this will disturb or cause second thoughts in Trump voters, you’re mistaken. His appeal isn’t based on the more common moral standards. jp

In today’s Internet world, can truth conquer lies? 

Mikkelson owns and runs Snopes.com, a hugely popular fact-checking site which debunks urban legends, old wives’ tales, fake news, shoddy journalism and political spin. It started as a hobby in the internet’s Pleistocene epoch two decades ago and evolved into a professional site that millions now rely on as a lie-detector. Every day its team of writers and editors interrogate claims ricocheting around the internet to determine if they are false, true or somewhere in the middle – a cleaning of the Augean stables for the digital era.

“There are more and more people piling on to the internet and the number of entities pumping out material keeps growing,” says Mikkelson, who turns out to be a wry, soft-spoken sleuth. “I’m not sure I’d call it a post-truth age but … there’s been an opening of the sluice-gate and everything is pouring through. The bilge keeps coming faster than you can pump.”

Democrats struggle to understand economic insecurity

At the DNC Labor Caucus meeting on Wednesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo gave a similar warning, urging Democrats to make a stronger case to the working class.

“You see a real economic anxiety and anger. That’s what’s driving this election,” he said. “There has been an economic recovery under Obama, but who has had the benefit of the recovery? Not the working man or woman. Wages have been flat for 20 years while everything else has gone up. And no one is talking enough to that issue.”

Workers Congress privatized abused by private contractors 

Two companies that run food service at the U.S. Capitol will pay a million dollars in back wages to almost 700 workers who they cheated out of their pay, the Department of Labor announced Tuesday.

The men and women who serve Congress its food clawed their way into Washington’s conscience over the past couple of years with a series of strikes and walkouts as part of a campaign for higher wages and union rights. The strikes at the Capitol and in other federal buildings in the Washington, D.C. area helped persuade President Obama to issue three executive orders mandating higher wages and stronger workplace protections for workers hired by federal contractors.

A handful of workers became the face of the union-backed Good Jobs Nation campaign with wrenching stories about earning too little to survive in D.C. or to keep their families together. But the penalties handed down Tuesday suggest the federal contractor taxpayers pay to staff cafeterias on Capitol Hill were not just paying too little to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of living. They were outright breaking the law.

Jamie Dimon Cares?!

Dimon forgot to mention in his op-ed that he received a raise this past January himself, which looks very different than the one given to front line bank workers. JPMorgan Chase’s board raised Dimon’s salary from $20 million to $27 million.That’s a 35 percent increase in just one year!

Dimon makes roughly $13,000 an hour. In three hours, he earns the same salary as a full-time Chase employee making $15 an hour.  Raising wages for bank workers is the right thing to do, but a miniscule raise—estimated by the Economic Policy Institute at just 3.2 percent annually when adjusted for inflation over the next three years—doesn’t go nearly far enough toward addressing income inequality or the hostile work conditions for frontline bank workers.

Business Ethics Links 8-1-2016 The Hot Air Balloon Edition

The Hot Air Balloon Edition

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The Hot Air Balloon Edition

Today’s edition opens with a report that the pilot of a downed hot air balloon had problems with drunk driving and was it the Russians who attacked the Democratic party’s computers? 

A disgraced trader says banking hasn’t changed while Kevin Roberts explains women – badly. Women may or may not (probably not) get a fair shake from the media while Massachusetts ends previous salary inquiries to help women make more money. Finally, the feds are cracking down on debt collection practices.

Have a great day!!

James Pilant

Pilot of downed balloon had drunk driving convictions

The pilot killed along with 15 other people in the crash of a hot air balloon in central Texas on Saturday had numerous convictions for drunk driving and at least one drug-related charge dating back to 1990, according to online records.

The balloon, flown by Heart of Texas Hot Air Balloon Rides chief pilot and owner Alfred “Skip” Nichols, hit a power line, setting its basket on fire, and plummeted into a pasture near Lockhart, about 30 miles (50 km) south of the state capital Austin, killing all aboard.

Did Russia attack the Democrats to de-stabilize politics in the United States? 

The Kremlin says it had zero involvement in the hacking of Democratic Party emails while U.S. officials say the hack originated in Russia. We may never know who is right, but one thing is for sure – Russia had motive, capability and form.

Seen through Kremlin eyes, Moscow would only be doing what it feels the United States has been doing to it for years anyway – interfering in a geopolitical rival’s domestic politics in an attempt to destabilize and shape events.

Rogue Trader Says Banking Hasn’t Changed

I asked him if behaviour in banking had changed since he was found guilty in 2012 of two counts of fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison.

“No, certainly not,” he answered.

“I think the young people I’ve spoken to, former colleagues I have spoken to, are still struggling with the same issues, the same conflicts, the same pressures to achieve no matter what.

“And this goes back to the structure of the industry. People are required to take risk to generate profit, because yields in the industry are consistently compressed.

Kevin Roberts Disciplined over the following remarks!!!

In the interview, published on Friday, Mr Roberts said the “debate is all over” about gender diversity in the advertising industry.

He goes on to say that rather than holding ambitions to progress into the higher echelons of management, many women – and men – simply want to be happy and “do great work”.

He adds: “…they are going: ‘Actually guys, you’re missing the point, you don’t understand: I’m way happier than you.’ Their ambition is not a vertical ambition, it’s this intrinsic, circular ambition to be happy.

“So they say: ‘We are not judging ourselves by those standards that you idiotic dinosaur-like men judge yourself by’. I don’t think [the lack of women in leadership roles] is a problem.

“I’m just not worried about it because they are very happy, they’re very successful, and doing great work. I can’t talk about sexual discrimination because we’ve never had that problem, thank goodness.”

Is there media bias toward female leaders? 

Researchers at Kellogg business school in Illinois found that companies which appoint female chief executives and receive a lot of media attention see a decline in their share price.

Companies that appoint female bosses and don’t receive a lot of attention are more likely to see a rise in their share price.

How deeply do the British want the Chinese involved in nuclear reactors in England? 

Under the existing terms of the £18bn project, a Chinese company is to finance a third of the new Hinkley Point C reactors and may later build a Chinese-designed nuclear power station in Essex.

So what’s the difference between a French company and a Chinese one when it comes to the UK’s critical infrastructure?

How you answer that question depends on your assessment of China and its intentions.

This is a fiendishly difficult calculation.

Massachusetts bans employers from asking about previous salaries

The law takes a step that is completely unique: it prohibits employers from asking prospective hires about their salary histories until after they make a job offer that includes compensation, unless the applicants voluntarily disclose the information. No other state has such a ban in place.

Many employers require applicants to give them a salary history at the outset or during the initial steps of the hiring process, usually to determine how much they should be paid and whether the employer can afford their salary. But this disadvantages women, who, thanks to a variety of factorsthat can include outright discrimination, make less than men on average. Women make less than men in their first jobs even when education and field are taken into consideration, and they are also penalized in salary negotiations, while men get an advantage. If the next employer bases a salary on the previous one a woman was earning, that discrimination will only be furthered.

Debt Collectors Face Federal Regulations

Debt collectors, either in-house or third-party entities in the business of trying to get people to pay up debts that they owe for things like student loans or medical bills, have become notorious for their often harassing tactics. Consumers have complained of debt collectors calling them endlessly while threatening violence, lying, and using profane language in trying to cajole them into paying, sometimes for debts they don’t even owe.

But on Thursday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the watchdog created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform act, released new proposed rules to rein in the industry, the first time a federal regulator is cracking down on the industry in nearly four decades. It wants to limit how many times a collector can contact a consumer, require them to have better information about the debts they try to collect, and make it easier for consumers to fight debts they say they don’t actually owe.

Business Ethics Links 7-31-2016 The Convention Bounce Edition

Hilary’s convention bounce? 

The first post-Democratic convention polls are coming out, and it looks like Hillary Clinton is regaining the advantage over Donald Trump. Trump came up in the polls last week after the Republican convention, but since the focus was on the Democrats all of last week, this week’s new polls will likely reverse that trend.  

This election just like “Game of Thrones?” 

With the divisiveness plaguing the upcoming presidential election,“Game of Thrones” fans have been quick to point out the remarkable similarities between the fictional show and the race for one of the most important positions in the world. According to Tumblr, the presidential candidates could easily be stand-ins for “GoT” characters, and vice versa. 

Trump not invited to billionaire’s club. 

As 400 wealthy conservative donors in the Charles and David Koch network gathered at a luxury resort at the base of the Rocky Mountains here, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump took to his normal form of communication, Twitter, to blast the activist brothers, saying he “turned down” a meeting request with them.

The Game is Rigged and People are Angry. 

The most powerful force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a system rigged by big corporations, Wall Street, and the super-wealthy.

This is a big reason why Donald Trump won the Republican nomination. It’s also why Bernie Sanders took 22 states in the Democratic primaries, including a majority of Democratic primary voters under age 45.

The new Ghostbusters is telling a different story than the last one. 

The Milton Friedman economic fantasy of unfettered markets rewarding talent and effort with success and upward mobility has been laid to waste by the current state of economic inequality and social stagnation.

Jail denies female inmates pants. 

Dreadful Murder

But above all, authorities pointed to the stacks of penny dreadfuls found in the boys’ room. These cheap, sensational tales of adventure and (sometimes) violence, often set in the criminal underworld or in exotic locales, were the scandalous comic books and video games of their time, sold to the tune of a million copies per week to working-class boys made newly literate by the educational reform movement of the previous two decades. The yarns published in these pamphlets, often with an intrepid boy as the hero and a fabulous treasure as his reward, would remind modern readers of the adventures of Indiana Jones or Tintin. Nattie told theEast London Advertiser that Robert read these stories passionately and had promised his younger brother that once they were free of their mother, the two of them would head off to India with Fox as their sidekick, in search of “romance and riches.”

Are 2016 Republicans, a throwback to the past? 

This fabricated and fear-driven narrative is nothing new; politics in the United States has often fed into national trends of antipathy toward immigration and non-traditional religious practices. American history is fraught with examples of non-white, non-Christian groups being conspicuously excluded from the American promise – simply because enough Americans acquiesced to the politics of fear. Idealists may point out that the social proclivities of the United States have evolved to be more tolerant, compassionate and emotionally intelligent, but the reality is that the nation is bearing witness to a resurgence of these lower-brained mentalities in the 2016 presidential campaign; where an “us vs. them’” binary, oversimplified worldviews and a tendency to negatively stereotype entire religions, nationalities and cultures has proven to be a successful formula for elevating a boorish reality TV star to fully legitimate presidential candidate.  

The Doctrine of Fear. 

Conservative-authoritarians possess very strong death anxieties. “Terror management theory” explains how they manifest these existential fears through militant nationalism and an obsession with “guns, god, and the flag.” The Republican Party has relied on ginning up white racial resentment and overt racism as its primary way of winning elections. White “Christian” America feels besieged by demographic change. Social scientists have documented an increase in death rates among poor and working-class lower-educated white Americans from drug and alcohol abuse as well as chronic illnesses. “The silent majority” who live in rust-belt America and dying red-state suburbia feel increasingly obsolete because of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Both the right-wing media and the Republican Party profit (economically and politically) from stoking the fears and worries of White America.

It’s time to take the Democratic Party back from the donor class. 

The second (and most powerful) reason that I believe this rebellion will persevere is that it’s organic. Not an artificial marketing creation sprouted in some D.C. hothouse by national groups and moneyed interests, this is a wildflower movement that sprang up spontaneously, took root, and seeded thousands of zip codes.
Despite supporters’ natural disappointment that their efforts ended short of the Oval Office, the majority are not petulantly giving up on politics, as most pundits predicted. Why would they? After all, this corps of pro-democracy activists seemingly came from nowhere, won 22 states, virtually tied in five others, and revolutionized the Democrats’ message, policy agenda, and method of campaigning. Having proven their mettle as a talented and inventive grassroots network, they’re eager to push forward. I’ve been out there among them for months — from Great Falls to Cedar Falls, Albany to Albuquerque, Carson City to New York City, and more — and I’ve witnessed their creativity and grit. No way they’ll “Bern out” and fold, for they have audacious, long — term ambitions. 

Besides, the gross inequality and corporate rapaciousness they’re fighting will not just go away — and are likely to deepen and spread. Unlike the political and media establishment, which treats elections as periodic games to be “won” with pollsters, funders, and tricksters, this populist team is engaged in REAL politics: the ongoing struggle by everyday people to democratize America’s wealth and power to benefit all and serve the common good.

Indentured Servants? 

What if millions of American workers were being denied health insurance, job security and the most basic legal protections, from overtime pay to workers compensation to the right to join a union? What if tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer revenues — money desperately needed to address everything from crumbling roads to education to health care — were never making it to local, state and federal treasuries? What if thousands of companies were violating the law with impunity?

That is exactly what is happening in the United States today, thanks to a rampant practice known as worker misclassification — illegally labeling workers as independent contractors when in fact they are employees under the law. In some cases it’s occurring in plain sight, in others it’s more hidden — but regardless of the circumstances, it is taking an enormous toll on the country.

Our Lady of Birth Control

That war continues to rage, but without the contributions of pioneers like Margaret Sanger, we’d still be stuck in the trenches. Born in 1879 to Irish parents, she was a complicated woman, one who’s best remembered as the tireless birth control advocate who scandalized the country, energized a generation of women and founded the nation’s first birth control clinic, planting the seed for the organization that would eventually become Planned Parenthood. She was also a radical activist, a mother, a wife, a nurse and an extremely savvy media wrangler who excelled at stirring up publicity for her cause (and landed herself in jail a few times as a result). Sanger’s refusal to back down or be silenced is echoed in the steadfast approach of Planned Parenthood itself, even as the problem she labored to correct — American women’s government-sanctioned lack of bodily autonomy — remains ingrained in our supposedly modern society.

Bulletproof and Black! 

Was the Democratic Convention a little odd? 

I was deeply troubled by the discordant tone of the Philly spectacle, by the haphazard leaps it made from a Bernie Sanders-lite progressive social vision to war fever to a Katy Perry concert. I feel absolutely no doubt that the same insanity virus that destroyed the Republican Party from within has infected the Democrats, and the normals are completely unaware of it. (Case in point: the paranoid desire to believe that Trump is in league with Vladimir Putin to destroy America, rather than just an idiotic, blustering troll.) I’m tempted to issue a heartfelt plea about how we can’t afford the usual left-liberal thing of saying, “Whew, we didn’t elect a monster” and then retreating into our info-consumer bubbles for four years. But who would I be kidding? That’s exactly what will happen. That’s the normal person’s way.

Firefighter Revives Cat

Bruce Lee shaped both mind and body. 

John Little, who examined Lee’s papers after the actor’s death, says he was stunned when he first entered Lee’s library. He had at least 1,700 heavily annotated books. That’s when he realized that Lee sharpened his mind as much as his body.
“The philosophy of Lee is more powerful than the martial arts of Lee,” says Little, author of “The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee.” “Everything that Bruce Lee did flowed from his mind and his thinking.”
Indeed, many believe Ailes’ derogatory language played a role in his departure from NBCUniversal in 1996. Officially, Ailes then president and CEO of the CNBC and America’s Talking channels resigned from the network because he was “uncomfortable” with recent restructuring. But a year earlier, according to biographer Gabriel Sherman, Ailes had called NBC executive David Zaslav “a little f—–g Jew prick,” prompting NBC to launch an investigation.

Obama visit highlights invasion of McMansions

Bena argues that the giant homes – often referred to as McMansions – are not only out of proportion with their environment but are wasteful symbols of the over-reaching vanity of their absentee owners. Over the past 20 years, what started as an aberration is now a trend – Mansionisation, or the practice of building the largest possible house on a plot of land.

“For me, this is more gross than mere conspicuous consumption,” says Bena. “It’s another type of gentrification. We need to start taking care of our communities and be more careful with land use and zoning.”

The Police are most likely to die when responding to domestic disputes

Hack Attack 

A key question in any criminal investigation is: who benefits? Looking at the above chronology, the answer is clear: Donald Trump. Which then leads to a second question: why would agencies of the Russian government wish to undermine Clinton and benefit her opponent? Here the conspiracy theories move up a gear. Trump has boasted of his admiration for Putin as a “strong” leader with whom he can do business. His admiration has been reciprocated by Putin. Trump has also made clear his disdain for Nato as an organisation that enables European nations to have security without paying their fair share of its costs. So if he were president and Putin made aggressive moves against the Baltic states, would he support a strong Nato response? Who knows? But if you were in Putin’s shoes, you’d regard Trump as clearly preferable to Clinton, who is an old-style American hawk.

299m
The Convention Bounce Edition

Extremists Thrive

I don’t throw the word “fascism” around, but can we at least accept that Trump follows the Führerprinzip? He has no colleagues, only followers. He is a racist. Not a closet racist, or a dog-whistle racist, but a racist so unabashed that the Klan endorses him. Above all, he has the swaggering dictator’s determination to bawl opponents into silence with screams of “loser”, “dummy”, “fraud”, “puppet,” “biased”, “disgusting”, “liar” and “kook”. As with the web trolls Trump so resembles, it is never the point and always the person. Female news presenters have to explain that they are not asking him difficult questions because they have“blood coming out of whatever” or surrender to him, as Megan Kelly of Fox Newsdid to her shame. Latinos have to explain why they are not rapists and murderers or shut up and give up. Muslims have to explain that they are not terrorists or they lose the right to a hearing. At every stage, the argument is shifted on to the troll’s terrain of ethnic and religious loyalty tests. Except here the troll could become the world’s most powerful man.

Justice Department Investigates Shooting

Shipley’s training records show two of his fellow officers had serious concerns that he was too quick to go for his service weapon, that he ignored directives from superiors, and that he was liable to falsify reports and not control his emotions.

A day before Shipley’s training ended, nearly three years ago, a police corporal recommended that the Winslow police department not retain him.

 

Business Ethics Links 7-30-2016 The 3D Printed Structure Edition

3D Printed Structure

fig56-57
The 3D Printed Structure Edition

3-D Printed Five Story Apartment Building

NASCAR Team and Ransomware

Ransomware attacks have generally been used to hit individuals, but recent months have seen the attacks evolve and lock down files at a much larger scale. Several instances of hospitals and healthcare providers being hit have created considerable scare, while several universities have also been locked out of their extensive databases by the cryptoviruses. In total, the extortion tactics are expected to cost nearly $1 billion in losses to businesses and organizations going forward according to the FBI.

When is a cat not a cat? 

Neither of the two candidates is tech savvy. 

The tech-aloofness of the two nominees marks a sharp break from President Barack Obama, who fought to keep a mobile phone when he entered the White House, spends downtime surfing his iPad and wrote about his awe at the power of the internet in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope.” That raises the prospect that the next occupant of the Oval Office — charged with making decisions on issues like encryption, the fight against a social-media savvy Islamic State, and the growing automation of the American economy — will be less familiar with consumer technologies than the average citizens who use them.

“These are two candidates who don’t have their hands on the technology, and that’s unfortunate, because without that it’s difficult to understand this stuff on a deeper, more visceral level,” said Peter Leyden, a futurist and former managing editor of Wired who was an early Obama backer in Silicon Valley.

Republicans Legislators hold Americans lives hostage hoping they can use the leverage to weaken the clean water act. 

President Barack Obama asked for $1.9 billion to fund the Zika response back in February. The Senate eventually passed a bipartisan measure in May that would have provided $1.1 billion. But that measure differed from a version taken up in the House, and Republicans ultimately modified the bill to add provisions targeting Planned Parenthood, preserving the Confederate flag, taking money from Obamacare and weakening the Clean Water Act regarding pesticides.

Democrats objected to the added riders and voted against the bill just before Congress left, saying that Republicans should ditch the ideological additions and just use the original Senate bill that had gotten 89 “yes” votes. Republicans declined.

Does a British Shetland Pony need its own AA group? 

Accounts of sexual harassment at Fox are sickening. 

The Trump Narrative!

Successful politicians don’t choose political narratives at random. They understand that voters’ beliefs about the state of the nation are inevitably shaped by their life experiences and the ideological and cultural lenses through which they interpret them. That was as true in the 1980s as it is today. Consider a blue-collar worker who moved from a devastated Rust Belt town to a bustling Sun Belt suburb in 1984, just as the local economy was starting to boom. To this young woman, the idea that it was “Morning in America” felt exactly right. She had chosen to leave her past behind, and all the union bosses and tax-and-spend liberal politicians that came with it. Reagan’s individualistic ethos resonated with her experience, and it made her feel like the author of her own life.

But what of the blue-collar worker who remained in that same Rust Belt town and who lived through the nightmare of deindustrialization? What if this other woman saw friends lose their jobs and their homes, and what if she herself had to turn to food stamps to keep her family afloat? It’s easy to imagine her scoffing at Reagan’s rhetoric and feeling drawn to darker rhetoric. Democrats in the Reagan era didn’t sound downbeat and nostalgic because they hated America, regardless of what their Republican critics might have claimed. They came across as pessimistic because they wanted to craft messages that resonated with their voters, many of whom felt their world was crumbling around them.

Donald Trump Apocalypse Watch

It has taken this country a long time to come to the realization that prescription drug abuse is a crisis that cuts across class and race. Decades of normalization allowed a Caucasian, middle-upper class, male ex-marine to spend four years feeding an increasingly destabilizing drug habit and suffering virtually no social or economic consequences for it. The fact that his drug use was not directly responsible for the tower shooting does not render its existence irrelevant. Ignoring this side of Whitman’s life only helps perpetuate the myth, just now slowly beginning to die, that drug abuse is primarily a problem for minority communities and the poor.

Picking Tim Kaine was foolish.

Thus, Trump is a Frankensteinian monster, created by Republican elites who thought they could pander to their reactionary base indefinitely while serving Wall Street and corporate America in Washington. Trump is a demagogue, of course, and it’s hard to tell what he truly believes in and what he says to rile up resentful, paranoid and bigoted Americans. But it’s clear what his movement — let’s call it Trumpism — is and what it isn’t.

Trumpism is not a conservative ideology or movement, nor is it rooted in conservative principles. Its adherents do not want to safeguard traditional institutions or preserve the status quo; rather, they strive for its complete destruction. Reporter James Kirchick provided an interesting insight into the mind of a typical Trumpets when he asked prominent Trump supporter and writer Milo Yiannopolous what actual Trump policies he favors, to which the writer replied that Trump supporters don’t care about policies, “They [just] want to burn everything down.” This is nihilism, not conservatism.

Just like Bill and just like Obama, Hilary figures we liberals will finally in the end hold our nose and vote for her. So she selects Tim Kaine to show us who’s the realist, who’s the boss, who’s running this show. It might not work this time. jp

One Facebook Troll Taken Down

“This kind of behaviour is what we call ‘normalisation of violence against women’ and it is really, really scary and damaging,” she wrote. “… Every time you ‘playfully’ tell a woman to get back in the kitchen, every time you smack a girl on the bum because it’s funny, every time you make a joke about rape, YOU are contributing to a society where unfortunately women are not safe.”

Is Trump doing well in the polls because we live in a country where it is better to be in prison than on the streets? 

Trump Voters

Most of all, Trump voters want respect. They want respect for their long hours of work that risks their bodies, for the hands caught in vices, backs wrenched by weights, and knees torn. They want respect because they are doing dangerous work, but their pay has been flat for decades.

They want respect because they haven’t just lost economically, but also socially. When they turn on the TV, they see their way of life being mocked and made fun of as nothing but uneducated white trash.

With Trump, they are finding someone who gives them respect. He talks their language, addresses their concerns. Sometimes it is celebrating what defines their neighborhood, what they in Parma have in common: being white. They and Trump are playing in dangerous territory, with the need for respect tipping into misplaced revenge.

 

Business Ethics Links 7-29-2016 Hilary Can Lose Edition

Hilary Can Lose

She’s certainly the best possible next president, as everyone from Obama to Michael Bloomberg has been lining up to say at the DNC all week. But she’s also certainly a representative of the global capitalist status quo; she is campaigning for a pro-business, pro-markets, essentially anti-working-class system. She won’t talk about this, just as aw-shucks Biden and neither of the glorious Obamas would talk about it; like them, she’ll talk about “America”. Which, for a minority of us, is a pretty privileged place.

But where are her new ideas for making life better for people who feel exploited? What is she saying about taking back this country, not from the immigrants (a ridiculous notion in a country almost entirely composed of immigrants and their descendants) but from an economy of theft and extraction and transfer from the poor to the rich?

What if I’m afraid, not of a terrorist attack – only marginally more likely than a personal lightning strike – but of an impoverished old age or a house foreclosure, or simply of my car breaking down and not having enough money to fix it? For too many Americans, these are real fears, and Hillary represents the class responsible for causing them.

Hilary is the establishment candidate and our establishment is rotten, corrupt and incompetent and people are getting fed up. jp

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Hilary Can Lose Edition

Turbo-Capitalism and Decay

But most of the social mayhem now rising around us is driven by the seductions and stresses of public decay under a capitalism that’s no longer tempered by Adam Smith’s moral sentiments but that is occasionally still challenged by “liberal education,” which conservatives assail whenever it suggests that “economic violence” does exist and disrupts the village that raises the child.

Totalitarian anti-capitalism was so brutal and duplicitous two generations ago that the “Free World” embraced a taboo against criticizing capitalism at all. But today’s casino-like, predatory, intrusively degrading capitalism has degraded even that taboo by ruining social equality and republican habits of the heart — and doing it mindlessly as much as malevolently.

“Not sure why Trump would openly ask Russia to spy on Americans,” Meyers added. “But I’m sure he has his treasons.”

Sanders Delegate Can’t Forgive Clinton

Harris added: “Particularly Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigning in disgrace, and then Clinton rewarding her with a job 32 minutes later is very insulting to the Sanders campaign. It’s not unifying.”

The Sanders delegate said he took an oath to support the Democratic Party’s nominee, but he confessed that it’s very difficult to get behind Clinton and the party establishment.

“When you personalize that decision about, am I going to reward this person with my support, it’s a very difficult decision that we have to wrestle with as black men,” Harris concluded.

Bill O’Reilly decides that slaves were well fed. 

The antebellum American South was not a “Gone with the Wind” fantasy of “magnolias mint juleps.” It was a military state organized around oppressing and controlling black bodies for the purposes of profit and wealth creation for white people. The slave plantation was a charnel house and place of mass rape, where white men and women could sexually abuse black boys, girls, men, and women at their whim. As historian Edward Baptist explains in his excellent book “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism,” the “plantation” is more accurately described as a slave labor camp.

Feminist Writer Jessica Valenti Leaves Social Media After Rape Threats Against Her Five Year Old Daughter

Clinton Can Lose II

But Democrats are nervous that even while Trump has failed to build a modern political organization, squandered most the past two months, been accused of racism by his own party, neither aired TV ads nor reserved time for the fall, has praised foreign strongmen including Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin, the race is essentially tied.

Trump has taken the lead in some surveys after the GOP convention, despite the disunity and disorganization on display in Cleveland. He has inflamed controversy almost daily, the latest this week with his public call for Russia to “find the 30,000 emails that are missing” of Clinton’s from her private server, essentially inviting a foreign nation to hack correspondence from her time as as the country’s top diplomat.

Colorado Professors Condemn Trump

“Mr. Trump has repeatedly stated that crime in the United States is rising and that we live in a society that is growing more dangerous,” the letter stated. “A preponderance of evidence at the nationwide level contradicts that claim; but more importantly, Trump then uses such specious reasoning to fuel fear of certain minority groups.

“Second, Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated statements have been used to impugn entire groups of people, including Muslims, Mexicans, women, and disabled people,” the letter continued. “We contend that his divisive language prevents the kind of civil discourse that is the life blood of a democratic society. Mr. Trump’s claim that the majority of immigrants from Mexico are criminals, including murderers and rapists, is contradicted by documented evidence. Similarly, Mr. Trump’s call for the use of torture would contravene the United Nations Convention against Torture.”