The Legislature must act now to protect Californians Trump anti-California War Second Wave begins with new orders, expanded forces

The most obvious truth about Donald Trump's January 25, 2017, Executive Order titled Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements now being implemented by the Department of Homeland Security is that it only orders the securing of our southern border which is defined as "the contiguous land border between the United States and Mexico."

The United States has 5,525 miles of border with Canada and 1,989 miles with Mexico. Our maritime border includes 95,000 miles of shoreline. That is 102,514 miles of porous border, 1.9% of which Trump and the Deplorables are apparently concerned about. Securing the other 98.1% apparently will not allow us to keep out foreign terrorists [... oops, there we go with the lies intended to create confusion ...] will not facilitate going back to the government sponsored bigotry of the 1930's.

In a November blog post I wrote:

The 2016 election discourse set off loud alarms.

Since it would be easy to dismiss the election discourse as meaningless election rhetoric, I feel the need to explain in some detail why this old Native Californian thinks it is time to recognize just how different California is from Ohio and North Carolina and why proposing that Congress authorize the separation of California from the Union is urgent.

Let's begin with a statement of historical facts. Migrants created the California we know today while white illegal aliens from the United States made California a part of the Union. What 96%+ of Americans don't know is the United States government run by the ancestors/predecessors of the current Deplorables...

• from 1880-1943 prevented the families of one group of Californians - the U.S. citizen children of Chinese immigrants - from bringing their family members into California, targeting only this ethnic group of Asians,
• from 1930-1946 in the Mexican "Repatriation" rounded up and deported one group of Californians - American citizens of Hispanic heritage
• from 1942-1945 rounded up another group of Californians - American citizens of Japanese heritage - and put them into concentration camps, and
• in 1954 Operation Wetback was begun which resulted in 1,078,168 arrests and deportations by the U.S. Border Patrol resulting in several hundred United States citizens being illegally deported without being given a chance to prove their citizenship.

Sorry America, but we Californians cannot permit a repeat of this kind of bigotry, discrimination, and violence against our people again. After the election, as well as during the campaign, we can observe that focused violence and bullying is growing in the U.S. as a result of Donald Trump and he isn't even President yet.

Well, he is President now. In a Washington Post article this week Trump administration seeks to prevent ‘panic’ over new immigration enforcement policies we learn:

...Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly’s memos have alarmed immigrant rights groups because they supersede most of those issued by previous administrations, including policies from the Obama administration aimed at focusing deportations exclusively on hardened criminals and those with terrorist ties.

Kelly’s directives seek to expand partnerships with local law enforcement agencies to apprehend undocumented immigrants, hire 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and 5,000 new Border Patrol agents, and broaden expedited deportations, currently limited to those in the country two weeks or less, to those who have been in the country for up to two years.

The provisions mandate that the government detain immigrants until they are granted a hearing before an immigration judge, ending the Obama administration’s policy of releasing some to live with relatives until their hearings. Backlogs at immigration courts have delayed hearings for more than a year.

And yet today the headlines are focused on bathroom use in schools, bathrooms controlled by local school districts and the states, all of which have elected governing bodies. It is almost as if Americans don't understand our governments, don't remember our history and/or don't think the government-caused bigotry that caused untold psychological and physical trauma in the 1930's could happen again. Consider Immigrants: The Last Time America Sent Her Own Packing:

A 9-year-old girl stood in the darkness of a railroad station, surrounded by tearful travelers who had gathered up their meager belongings, awaiting the train that would take her from her native home to a place she had never been. The bewildered child couldn’t know she was a character in the recurring drama of America’s love-hate relationship with peoples from foreign lands who, whether fleeing hardship or oppression or simply drawn to the promise of opportunity and prosperity, desperately strive to be Americans. As yet another act in the long saga of American immigration unfolds today, some U.S. citizens can recall when, during a time of anti-immigrant frenzy fueled by economic crisis and racism, they found themselves being swept out of the country of their birth.

Emilia Castañeda will never forget that 1935 morning. Along with her father and brother, she was leaving her native Los Angeles. Staying, she was warned by some adults at the station, meant she would become a ward of the state. ‘I had never been to Mexico,’ Castañeda said some six decades later. ‘We left with just one trunk full of belongings. No furniture. A few metal cooking utensils. A small ceramic pitcher, because it reminded me of my mother…and very little clothing. We took blankets, only the very essentials.’

As momentous as that morning seemed to the 9-year-old Castañeda, such departures were part of a routine and roundly accepted movement to send Mexicans and Mexican-Americans back to their ancestral home....

We do not want a repeat of this trampling on the U.S. and State Constitutions known as the Mexican Repatriation in which bigotry became public policy. In the book Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s authors Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez you can learn more about the subject. But in response to questions in an NPR interview Balderrama explains:

There was not a federal deportation act, even though in some of the literature, it makes reference to that. That did not occur. What one has to be sensitive to to understand this history, is that it occurred in different forms. During the Hoover administration in the late 1920s and early 1930s, particularly the winter of 1930-1931, William Mitchell, the attorney general who had presidential ambitions, instituted a program of deportations. And it was announced that we need to provide jobs for Americans, and so we need to get rid of these other people. This created an anxiety, a tension in the Mexican community. And at the same time, U.S. Steel, Ford Motor Company, Southern Pacific Railroad said to their Mexican workers, you would be better off in Mexico with your own people....

Now, there was the development of a deportation desk from LA County relief agencies going out and recruiting Mexicans to go to Mexico. And they called it the deportation desk. Now, LA legal counsel says you can't do that. That's the responsibility, that's the duty of the federal government. So they backed up and said, well, we're not going to call it deportation. We're going to call it repatriation. And repatriation carries connotations that it's voluntary....

Downtown Los Angeles around the area of the LA Plaza next to Olvera Street right across from, today, Union Station, near Our Lady Queen of the Angels Church. That particular area was cornered off February 26, 1931 - very different approach of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, who had not planned to do that until the unemployment coordinating committee in LA County announced that raids were going to happen in Los Angeles and then after the fact, informed Washington D.C. about that. And then they followed suit and had raids in Pacoima and San Fernando Valley. But the one here in Los Angeles received a great deal of publicity because it was cornering off a popular area of the city and even rounded up a Mexican vice consul and had him in custody as well. Now, the raid itself didn't net that many people that were deported. But more significantly is those are the banner headlines - that here in Los Angeles, the historic founding of Los Angeles, this great Mexican city, this is what happened. And with that, then we have days and weeks that many Mexicans are not visible publicly because they're afraid of these raids that are occurring.

In the Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program, the California Legislature on behalf of Californians officially apologized for the what was done to 9-year-old Emilia Castañeda and the thousands of other American citizens. As explained in 2006 by the Apology Act's author State Senator Joe Dunn:

Repatriation is, in fact, a misnomer. That was the label put on this program by the Hoover administration starting back in 1930 and 1931. In essence, their theory was, `We're going to repatriate those born here in the United States but of Mexican descent back to their, quote, "mother,"' end quote, `country.' That was their words, not mine. And it was a misnomer because the vast majority of those that were illegally deported under this program were born and raised right here in the United States. And the numbers actually, Melissa, if I may for just a moment, are staggering. Almost two million individuals were illegally deported to Mexico, and it's estimated that almost 60 percent or more of those two million were actually United States citizens born right here in the United States.

The phrase that the Hoover administration used was `American jobs for real Americans.' Well, if you were born and raised right here in the United States but just happened to be of Mexican descent, in the Hoover administration's eyes, you were not a, quote, "real American," end quote.

In a 2006 USA Today article (which today seems a naive time), the lack of awareness of the Mexican Repatriation was explained along with a proposal for an apology to come from Congress, while a new 2006 legislative proposal leading to today's situation was defended and a "justification" was offered for what was done because non-Hispanic white people were unemployed:

...His mother was cooking tortillas when 6-year-old Ignacio Piña saw plainclothes authorities burst into his home.

"They came in with guns and told us to get out," recalls Piña, 81, a retired railroad worker in Bakersfield, Calif., of the 1931 raid. "They didn't let us take anything," not even a trunk that held birth certificates proving that he and his five siblings were U.S.-born citizens.

The family was thrown into a jail for 10 days before being sent by train to Mexico. Piña says he spent 16 years of "pure hell" there before acquiring papers of his Utah birth and returning to the USA.

If their tales seem incredible, a newspaper analysis of the history textbooks used most in U.S. middle and high schools may explain why: Little has been written about the exodus, often called "the repatriation."

That may soon change. As the U.S. Senate prepares to vote on bills that would either help illegal workers become legal residents or boost enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, an effort to address deportations that happened 70 years ago has gained traction.

On Thursday, Rep. Hilda Solis, D-Calif., plans to introduce a bill in the U.S. House that calls for a commission to study the "deportation and coerced emigration" of U.S. citizens and legal residents. The panel would also recommend remedies that could include reparations. "An apology should be made," she says.

Co-sponsor Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., says history may repeat itself. He says a new House bill that makes being an illegal immigrant a felony could prompt a "massive deportation of U.S. citizens," many of them U.S.-born children leaving with their parents.

"We have safeguards to ensure people aren't deported who shouldn't be," says Jeff Lungren, GOP spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee, adding the new House bill retains those safeguards.¹

"It was a racial removal program," says Mae Ngai, an immigration history expert at the University of Chicago, adding people of Mexican ancestry were targeted.

However, Americans in the 1930s were "really hurting," says Otis Graham, history professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. One in four workers were unemployed and many families hungry. Deporting illegal residents was not an "outrageous idea," Graham says. "Don't lose the context."

"We need their jobs for needy citizens," C.P. Visel of the Los Angeles Citizens Committee for Coordination of Unemployment Relief wrote in a 1931 telegram. In a March 1931 letter to Doak, Visel applauded U.S. officials for the "exodus of aliens deportable and otherwise who have been scared out of the community."

In fact, the United States Congress refused to pass a similar apology resolution even though it had taken action to apologize to the Japanese for the WWII internment program. Then again, Congress may not have wanted to be forced to bring up the 1950's Operation Wetback. So it should not be surprising but should be disturbing to all Americans that a similar program is about to recur today.

Trump's order includes these provisions:

 Sec. 10.  Federal-State Agreements.  It is the policy of the executive branch to empower State and local law enforcement agencies across the country to perform the functions of an immigration officer in the interior of the United States to the maximum extent permitted by law.

(a)  In furtherance of this policy, the Secretary [of Homeland Security] shall immediately take appropriate action to engage with the Governors of the States, as well as local officials, for the purpose of preparing to enter into agreements under section 287(g) of the INA (8 U.S.C. 1357(g)).

(b)  To the extent permitted by law, and with the consent of State or local officials, as appropriate, the Secretary shall take appropriate action, through agreements under section 287(g) of the INA, or otherwise, to authorize State and local law enforcement officials, as the Secretary determines are qualified and appropriate, to perform the functions of immigration officers in relation to the investigation, apprehension, or detention of aliens in the United States under the direction and the supervision of the Secretary.  Such authorization shall be in addition to, rather than in place of, Federal performance of these duties.

(c)  To the extent permitted by law, the Secretary may structure each agreement under section 287(g) of the INA in the manner that provides the most effective model for enforcing Federal immigration laws and obtaining operational control over the border for that jurisdiction.

The California Legislature is considering SB54 which would make the State of California what is called a "sanctuary state." What that means is that state and local officials including law enforcement officers will be severely restricted in how much information they can provide to and how much they can work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal officials involved in implementing immigration laws. But as explained in California could become a sanctuary state. What that means:

The current version of the bill would kick ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection out of local jails and restrict their access to some state databases. It also would ban state agencies from asking and collecting anyone’s immigration status.

Police departments and sheriffs’ offices still would work with ICE and Customs and Border Protection on multi-agency task forces, which sometimes result in deportations. Federal immigration authorities still would have access to fingerprint data from everyone booked into a local jail.

Neither federal nor state laws have defined sanctuary cities, so the term means different things to different people.

“The biggest misconception is that people think that when you declare yourself a sanctuary it means that there is absolutely no contact with ICE, and that is not true,” said Marissa Montes, co-director of the Loyola Immigrant Justice Clinic at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. “If ICE wanted to have a raid in downtown LA and did everything procedurally correct, like get a warrant, the city would not be able to stop them.”

The bill has yet to complete its way through the various Senate committees and then must get through the Assembly. If it does all that, and Governor Brown signs it, it could become law almost a year from now. In the meantime, the feds are moving forward.

The California Constitution and various codes do allow the California Attorney General to engage in the strong and vigorous enforcement of state civil rights laws and protect from violations of their rights enumerated under the California Constitution all persons in the State. The California Department of Justice under the Attorney General has a Civil Rights Enforcement Section deals with the civil rights of all persons including immigrants through the Office of Immigrant Assistance.

From a legal standpoint California has had a very long history arguing against the federal government exceeding it's authority on issues involving immigrants. As part of the Compromise of 1850, California was admitted to the United States. Five years later the State Supreme Court set forth it opinion on the primacy of states regarding citizenship in Ex parte Knowles, 5 Ca. 300, 302 (1855) in which the decision reads as follows:

I come now to the consideration of the main question, whether the State courts of California...have the power to naturalize....

In the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution, enumerating the powers of Congress, is the following separate clause: "To establish an uniform rule of naturalization and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcy throughout the United States." By metaphysical refinement, in examining the form of our government, it might be correctly said that there is no such thing as a citizen of of the United States. But constant usage - arising from convenience, and perhaps necessity, and dating from the formation of Confederacy [this refers to the pre-1789 United States, not the South in the Civil War] - has given substantial existence to the idea which term conveys. A citizen of any one of the States of the Union, is held to be, and called a citizen of the United States, although technically and abstractly there is no such thing....

At the time of the adoption of the Constitution, the States had power to make citizens of aliens. Does the clause of the Constitution above quoted deprive them of it ? The true rule of construction as to the exclusiveness of the power of Congress is, First - That it must be granted exclusively ; Second forbidden to the States; Third - from the nature of the power, exercise by both must be incompatible and incongruous. Does power under review come within either of these positions ? If examine the language closely, and according to the rules of rigid construction always applicable to delegated powers, we will find the power to naturalize, in fact is not given to Congress, but simply the power to establish an uniform rule. The States are not forbidden to naturalize, nor is there anything in the exercise of power by them, incongruous or incompatible with the power of Congress to establish an uniform rule. That the States, if they choose to exercise the power as an original one, must abide by the rule which Congress makes, there cannot be the slightest difference opinion. The power given to Congress was, according to my appre- hension, intended to provide a rule for the action of the States, and not a rule for the action of the federal government....

...The District Courts of this State are fully invested with power and jurisdiction to naturalize foreigners who exhibit the qualifications fixed by the laws of the United States.

Now one might hesitate given the year in which the decision was made, before the Civil War and the Fourteenth Amendment. And the fact is that it was made in liberal California. So let's turn briefly to a more recent frequently quoted ruling in a case involving whether a person could become a sheriff by being a citizen of the state while not a U.S. citizen Crosse v. Board of Supervisors of Elections of Baltimore City 221 A.2d. 431, 243 Md. 555 (Md., 1966) made by the Court of Appeals of Maryland on July 1, 1966:

Both before and after the Fourteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution, it has not been necessary for a person to be a citizen of the United States in order to be a citizen of his state. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, 549 (1875); Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 73-74 (1873); and see Short v. State, 80 Md. 392, 401-02, 31 Atl. 322 (1895). See also Spear, State Citizenship, 16 Albany L.J. 24 (1877).

However, just before the government put Japanese-American Californians into concentration camps the California Legislature modified the statutory definition of a state citizen to defer to Congress. That is unfortunate, and that law needs to be amended as suggested here.

It is important that Californians and the California Government act rapidly and firmly to legally disrupt any reinstitution of federal actions resembling Mexican "Repatriation" and Operation Wetback. If the institutionalization of bigotry isn't enough to generate a sense of urgency, there is this headline which you can click on to read the story:

In the meantime, there is this article:

__________________________

Footnotes:
¹ Jeff Lungren, GOP spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee, in 2006 was defending HR4437, which was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives but not the U.S. Senate, and which contained the following Trumpian provisions among others...

• Requires up to 700 miles (1120 km) of double-layered fence along the Mexico–US border at points with the highest number of illegal border crossings. (House Amendment 648, authored by Duncan Hunter (R-CA52)
• Requires the federal government to take custody of illegal aliens detained by local authorities. This would end the practice of "catch and release", where federal officials sometimes instruct local law enforcement to release detained illegal aliens because resources to prosecute them are not available. It also reimburses local agencies in the 29 counties along the border for costs related to detaining illegal aliens. (Section 607)
• Mandates employers to verify workers' legal status through electronic means, phased in over several years. Also requires reports to be sent to Congress one and two years after implementation to ensure that it is being used. (Title VII)
• Requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to report to Congress on the number of Other Than Mexicans (OTMs) apprehended and deported and the number of those from states that sponsor terrorism. (Section 409)
• Formalizes Congressional condemnation of rapes by smugglers along the border and urges Mexico to take immediate action to prevent them. (House Amendment 647, authored by Ginny Brown-Waite)
• Requires all illegal aliens, before being deported, to pay a fine of $3,000 if they agree to leave voluntarily but do not adhere to the terms of their agreement. The grace period for voluntary departure is shortened to 60 days.
• Requires DHS to conduct a study on the potential for border fencing on the Canada–US border.
• Sets the minimum sentence for fraudulent documents at 10 years, fines, or both, with tougher sentencing in cases of aiding drug trafficking and terrorism.
  Establishes a Fraudulent Documents Center within DHS.
• Increases penalties for aggravated felonies and various frauds, including marriage fraud and document fraud.
• Establishes an 18-month deadline for DHS to control the border, with a progress report due one year after enactment of the legislation.
• Requires criminal record, terrorist watch list clearance, and fraudulent document checks for any illegal immigrant before being granted legal immigration status.

    ...which is why that article seems so naive - a product of Americans refusing to learn anything about their history and government.

Regarding "When We Rise" How history repeats itself and why we must protect "San Francisco Values"

San Francisco Values. The term has been associated with same-sex marriage, high minimum wages, anti-war activism, pro-choice politics, marijuana decriminalization, and free migration. But it was first created and used in a pejorative sense by conservative commentators and politicians to describe a secular progressive culture commonly associated with the city of San Francisco.

In fact San Francisco is the home of California Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism. It is under attack and we must defend it. Next week, ABC will be airing on its channels and through Hulu an eight hour miniseries that provides the historical context for San Francisco Values. This post offers some reflections on this event.

---

From When We Rise: My Life in the Movement by Cleve Jones, (pp. 113-116), Hachette Books, 2016, Kindle Edition:

     We all still began every morning with strong coffee and Herb Caen’s column in the SF Chronicle. But before we read Herb, everyone was reading a delicious new series called "Tales of the City," by a previously unknown writer with the improbable name of Armistead Maupin. Like Harvey Milk, Maupin had been a naval officer and a Goldwater Republican. Also like Harvey, Maupin came out a bit late in life, at 30. Born in Washington, DC, he grew up in North Carolina, a big fan of archconservative Jesse Helms. But he took a job with Associated Press in 1971 in San Francisco, a move that transformed him as he fell in love with the city and its characters.
     The city soon fell in love with Armistead as well, and delighted in reading the various escapades and dramas of Mary Ann Singleton, Michael Tolliver, Mona Ramsey, and the pot-growing landlady Anna Madrigal as well as the other characters, many obviously based at least partially on real people. For years people would love to claim that they or someone they knew was referenced in one of the installments.
     The news from south Florida was getting grim. The fundamentalist Christians that Anita Bryant had aroused with her libelous campaign equating homosexuality with the sexual abuse of children were on a roll. Money for their campaign to defeat Dade County’s nondiscrimination law poured in— raised by the faithful in churches across the country. The gay community sent Jim Foster and others to try to assist the locals, but Harvey— ever the outsider— was not impressed, seeing them as emblematic of the old strategies of keeping the spotlight away from gay people and relying on straight supporters and vague slogans of “human rights.”
     We all wanted to help, though, and a local producer decided to organize a benefit variety show at the Castro Theatre called Moon over Miami. Harvey got behind the idea and asked me to help get the word out. I was pleased that he’d asked me to get involved, so my friends and I plastered the neighborhood with posters. I started spending more time hanging out in his camera store.
     A few days before the show, Harvey was concerned that ticket sales were lagging and decided to hold a press conference to publicize the effort. We scheduled it at the Eureka Valley Recreation Center, sent out the announcements, and followed up with phone calls to the local media....
     The night of the event, the venerable old theater was packed and the audience loudly applauded, cheered, and stamped their feet after every performance and each speaker. Then Armistead Maupin took the stage and announced that he would be reading from his as yet unpublished next installment of "Tales of the City." The crowd hushed as Maupin began to read what turned out to be a coming-out letter written by Michael Tolliver to his mother, living in Miami. At the end of the letter Michael appeals to his mother to vote against the repeal effort. When Maupin finished there was a moment of silence, broken only by the sound of people sniffling and crying throughout the theater. Then we rose as one in a foot-stomping standing ovation.
     On June 7, 1977, Dade County voters, in record numbers, overwhelmingly voted to repeal the gay rights ordinance, and Anita Bryant danced a jig on TV and vowed to take her campaign nationwide.
     Large protests erupted in cities across the country, particularly in San Francisco. Thousands of people shut down Castro Street, and Harvey Milk stood among the crowd with a bullhorn and spoke for us, channeling our anger into a march that ended finally without violence at Union Square. The tension deepened when gay bashers randomly murdered a young gay man named Robert Hillsborough in the street just days after the Dade County vote.


From "How Great", a song from the Chance the Rapper album Coloring Book, 2016:

     The book don't end with Malachi.

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On Monday, February 27, 2017, ABC will begin airing a four part docudrama miniseries "When We Rise", a 50-year history of the gay rights movement as experienced by four real people:

• San Francisco AIDS and LGBT activist Cleve Jones who worked for Harvey Milk when he was a county supervisor amd was there the day he was assassinated, who in 1985 conceived the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and who served as a historical consultant to this mini-series, staying in filmmaker Dustin Lance Black's home in the Hollywood Hills while writing his own memoir quoted above;
• Early San Francisco women's rights leader, social justice activist and policy leader in public health, poverty, and homelessness, Roma Guy;
• Bay Area African-American community organizer and Vietnam Veteran Ken Jones; and
• San Francisco LGBT community health related issues and transgender rights activist Cecilia Chung.

Starring in the mini-series are Guy Pearce, Mary-Louise Parker, Rachel Griffiths, Michael K. Williams, and Ivory Aquino. Guest stars include Henry Czerny, Whoopi Goldberg, Arliss Howard, Sam Jaeger, T.R. Knight, Mary McCormak, Kevin McHale, Rosie O'Donnell, Denis O'Hare, Pauley Perrette, David Hyde Pierce, Richard Schiff, Phylicia Rashad, Rob Reiner and William Sadler.

As explained by ABC, the drama presents "the real-life personal and political struggles, set-backs and triumphs of a diverse family of LGBT men and women who helped pioneer one of the last legs of the U.S. Civil Rights movement, from its turbulent infancy in the 20th century to the once unfathomable successes of today."

"Unfathomable successes of today."

The project was initiated four years ago by filmmaker Black whose 2008 film Milk received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and winning two, for Best Original Screenplay (Black) and Best Actor in a Leading Role (Sean Penn). As a New York Times article noted:

But the world is a different place than it was when ABC first commissioned the project four years ago. Barack Obama was in the White House, and gay leaders were celebrating a series of court and statehouse victories, which would soon include the Supreme Court’s recognizing a constitutional right to marry by same-sex couples. After President Trump’s election, questions that seemed largely settled about gays in American society — same-sex marriage, equal treatment in the workplace and in housing — suddenly seem in doubt.

Mr. Trump is hardly a champion of gay rights, and Mike Pence, his vice president, has a record of explicit opposition to gay rights measures. Mr. Trump could well end up altering the ideological composition of the Supreme Court that handed down the marriage decision.

Still, as celebration has given way to intense anxiety, Mr. Black argues that the election’s outcome has made the mini-series even more urgent.

Black's argument is correct. We only have to remember the Tales of the City miniseries which interestingly has not been mentioned in any review.

Mentioned above in the excerpt of Cleve Jones' book is Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series of novels, set in San Francisco. Jones references the first portions of which were published initially as a newspaper serial starting on August 8, 1974, in a Marin County newspaper, The Pacific Sun, picked up in 1976 by the San Francisco Chronicle, and later reworked into the series of books. The first of Maupin's Tales novels was published in 1978. Five more followed in the 1980s, a seventh in 2007, an eighth in 2010 and a ninth and final volume in 2014. In Babycakes, published in 1983, Maupin was one of the first writers to address the subject of AIDS.

HBO acquired the rights to the first two Tales of the City books in 1982 in the hopes of turning them into a weekly show. Pre-production began in the fall of that year with a pilot script by Richard Kramer. But in the face of the rising AIDS epidemic and a changing social climate in the conservative Reagan era, HBO reportedly felt that the book's attitude toward homosexuality and marijuana usage would not be deemed acceptable by the viewing public. The channel ultimately scrapped the project.

Finally, six-part miniseries was produced by Britain's Channel 4 Television Corporation in conjunction with San Francisco's PBS station KQED and PBS' American Playhouse. It premiered on Channel 4 in the UK on 28 September 1993, and was screened by PBS in the US in January 1994. Tales of the City gave PBS its highest ratings ever for a dramatic program. Despite the ratings success, PBS bowed to threats of federal funding cuts and backed out of producing or airing any followup installments.

Channel 4 eventually teamed up with Showtime to produce the sequel, "More Tales of the City", which premiered in the US and UK in 1998. The third installment of the series, "Further Tales of the City", was produced by Showtime (without Channel 4) and was originally aired in the US on Showtime in May 2001.

In 2005, Entertainment Weekly named "Tales of the City" one of the ten best miniseries on DVD. I would agree. We have them all on DVD. If you've never seen them, get the DVD set

IMDb indicates that the Production Company is ABC Studios with Distributors being the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) and Disney-ABC Domestic Television. That "When We Rise" is appearing on an American broadcast TV channel after the last election is surprising and indicative that indeed to some degree we do have "unfathomable successes of today", sort of.

What is really ironic is that "When We Rise" was originally set to air its entire eight hours over four consecutive nights beginning Monday February 27 but Donald Trump accepting Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s invitation to address Congress that Tuesday has forced ABC to shift the schedule skipping Tuesday with the last episode now on Friday.

The show has been attacked, mostly by the alt-right. One story led with "How much does liberal ABC-Disney Television Network  respect middle America?"

But let's reverse the question. How much does middle America respect San Francisco Values? It appears that answer is "not at all." When one realizes that San Francisco Values include love, peace, tolerance, diversity, creativity, freedom, spirituality, prosperity, community, truth, justice, and care for the environment it is a little hard to understand why anyone would not respect San Francisco Values.

Commentator O'Reilly said San Francisco values "seek to exclude spirituality from the public square but embrace displays like the bay city's gay pride parade, where Christianity is often mocked and demeaned."

In a sense, O'Reilly is wrong. And that brings me to the second quote above from "How Great", a song from the Chance the Rapper 2016 album Coloring Book: "The book don't end with Malachi." That refers to the last book in the Old Testament, the point being there is some confusion in the world of Christianity about the priority of the New Testament and Jesus of Nazareth.

By the time of the founding of the United States, that confusion was so bad and so warped that Thomas Jefferson assembled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jefferson Bible, a book constructed by Thomas Jefferson in the later years of his life by cutting with a razor and pasting with glue numerous sections from the New Testament as extractions of the doctrine of Jesus. He explained in a letter to John Adams dated October 13, 1813:

In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their logos and demiurges, aeons and daemons, male and female, with a long train of … or, shall I say at once, of nonsense. We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines.

Holders of San Francisco Values permit spirituality, but are careful how it infects "the public square." Their spirituality is Jeffersonian when it comes to Jesus, relying upon the words of Jesus. For instance:

• With regard to those "Christians" who were following Anita Bryant in Florida the response might be: Judge not, that ye be not judged. He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.
• When it comes to "Christians" accumulating wealth, the response might be: And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
• When it comes to "Christians" resenting taxes, the response might be: Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? They say unto him, Caesar's. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.
• With regard to "Christians" responding to insults and wishing to save face with violence, the response might be: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
• And with regard to "Christians" telling you about commandments and rules offered in the Old Testament, the response is to explain that in the New Testament Jesus replaced all those with this simple commandment now known as The Golden Rule: Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

But even those words revered by Jefferson are not allowed to be embraced by a government guided by San Francisco Values because the separation of church and state is a necessary American tradition and the law of the land.

And so the four part docudrama miniseries "When We Rise" is about us. We will embrace it and defend ABC because we know that again we will have to defend vigorously its values: love, peace, tolerance, diversity, creativity, freedom, spirituality, prosperity, community, truth, justice, and care for the environment. We will continue to need people like Cleve Jones, Roma Guy, Ken Jones, and Cecilia Chung honored by "When We Rise" so that ordinary people like those portrayed in "Tales of the City" will not be deported or jailed or beaten or killed or simply abandoned to a death from disease.

Why you should fear Trumpism's Steve Bannon: war with China within 8 years and other reasons

Wisely observing the Donald Trump Presidency is difficult because of the deliberate fog-of-confusion created by seemingly random iWorld emanations coming from Administration officials and directly from the President.

One of the thickest fogs surrounds Steve Bannon, the most significant manipulator in the Administration. With their usual attitudes, the Democrats and main stream media have focused on Bannon's association with Breitbart News deepening the fog that hides Bannon more effectively than he could achieve on his own - and he's the fog expert. He is also far more effective and dangerous than Karl Rove.

Factually Bannon is a 63-year-old Baby Boomer from an Irish-American working class family and Breitbart News was not the center of his being for those 63 years. Simply, most people do not consider their 50's and 60's as their formative years.

Yes, Bannon was on the Board of Directors of Breitbart News Board since its beginning in 2005 when he was 52, but from 2007 through 2011 Bannon was the chairman and CEO of Affinity Media. In 2012 when founder Andrew Breitbart died unexpectedly at age 43 and when Bannon was 59, The Hollywood Reporter reported:

Stephen Bannon, the filmmaker responsible for the pro-Sarah Palin movie The Undefeated, has been named executive chairman. Bannon, a former naval officer with masters degrees from Georgetown University and Harvard Business School, was a mergers and acquisitions investment banker at Goldman Sachs and has also been a Breitbart News board member since its founding.

What we know about Bannon beyond Breitbart is much more informative about him. Here's a quick rundown:

• His working class, Irish Catholic family were pro-Kennedy, pro-union Democrats and his father was a telephone lineman.
• Like a lot of Baby Boomers from working class families, he went to college - Virginia Tech - graduating in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in urban planning, but unlike a lot of Baby Boomers he was president of the student government association in 1975-76.
• Like a lot of Baby Boomer college graduates, after college he was an officer in the United States Navy for seven years, first serving on the destroyer USS Paul F. Foster as a surface warfare officer in the Pacific Fleet (in 1980, the Foster was redeployed to the Persian Gulf during the aborted Desert One mission to rescue American hostages being held in Iran); unlike a lot of Baby Boomers he then served as a special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations at the Pentagon.
• While at the Pentagon, he obtained a master's degree in national security studies from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.
• After leaving the Navy Bannon received a Master of Business Administration degree with honors in 1985 from Harvard Business School.
• After Harvard he worked as a mergers and acquisitions banker with Goldman Sachs beginning at the peak of Wall Street's hostile takeover and junk bond booms and after achieving the title of vice-president, in 1990 Bannon and some Goldman colleagues left to launch a media-focused boutique investment bank called Bannon & Co. before it was purchased in 1998 by French bank Société Générale.
• From 1993 to 1995, while still managing Bannon & Co., Bannon was made acting director of the Earth-science research project Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona; under Bannon, the project shifted emphasis from researching space exploration and colonization toward pollution and global warming.
• In 2006 Bannon persuaded Goldman Sachs to invest in a company known as Internet Gaming Entertainment, a company that made its name and fortune as an online marketplace to sell virtual gold to World of Warcraft players and other online gamers; following a lawsuit, the company was rebranded as Affinity Media and Bannon took over as Chairman and CEO from 2007 through 2011; Bannon was involved in Hollywood for several years, financing and producing films while gradually getting more and more involved in Breitbart.
• Bannon became a Director of Cambridge Analytica which describes itself as a unique mix of data scientists, engineers, marketing specialists, political strategists and research psychologists; Cambridge Analytica was involved in 44 U.S. congressional, US Senate, and state-level elections in the 2014 midterm elections working with the John Bolton Super PAC which advanced Bolton's pro-war national security agenda.
• Bannon has been married three times; with his first wife Cathleen Houff Jordan he has one daughter, Maureen Bannon who is a West Point graduate and lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division who has served in Iraq; Bannon had twin daughters with his second wife, Mary Louise Piccard, an investment banker. 

Bannon served in the Navy in his late 20's and early 30's which can be critical years for forming adult behavior patterns. One report indicates:

“He constantly used military terms, used military terms to describe people who worked for him… like, ‘grunts,’” one former Breitbart staffer recalled. “He always spoke in terms of aggression. It was always on-the-attack, double down... macho stuff. Steve has an obsession with testosterone.”

“Steve is a strong militarist, he’s in love with war—it’s almost poetry to him,” Jones told The Daily Beast in an interview last year, well before Trump won the election and Bannon landed his new job. “He’s studied it down through the ages, from Greece, through Rome... every battle, every war… Never back down, never apologize, never show weakness… He lives in a world where it’s always high noon at the O.K. Corral.”

Bannon has been said to have a love affair with war - not from any direct experience getting shot at, just a little-boy-pro-war bent offered from an ideologue's armchair view. Listen and learn when on his radio show in a March 2016 discussion with Neoliberal Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation he justifies the U.S. starting an inevitable war with China in order to save face because of a perceived insult:

Because he talks rapidly with a lot of emotion, here is a transcript:

We’re going to war in the South China Sea. I was a sailor there. We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years. There’s no doubt about that. They’re taking their sandbars and making basically stationary aircraft carriers and putting missiles on those. They come here to the United States in front of our face – and you understand how important face is – and say it’s an ancient territorial sea. That's a throwdown, is it not sir.

One might be tempted to dismiss this as rhetoric to make a radio show appeal to a particular audience. After all, it conflicts with what would be called the Administration's  February 2017 "China policy."

On February 10 we saw this headline in the Washington Post Backing away from a fight, Trump to honor one-China policy which offers:

President Trump just backed down from what could have been a serious fight with China.

On Thursday evening in Washington, he appeared to shy away from confrontation with Beijing by agreeing to honor the one-China policy, during a lengthy telephone call with China’s President Xi Jinping.

The move is set to ease tensions between the world’s two most powerful nations: relations had been inflamed after Trump suggested he would only commit to the one-China policy if Beijing addressed his concerns about trade and currency issues.

On the same date theXinhua News Agency, the official press agency of the People's Republic of China, in a story with this headline Xi, Trump agree to boost win-win cooperation, develop constructive China-U.S. ties, told us:

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump pledged Friday to boost win-win cooperation in a variety of areas and develop a constructive China-U.S. relationship.

Trump expressed his satisfaction with the close communication the two sides have maintained since he took office and admiration toward the Chinese people for the historic accomplishment they have achieved in developing their country.

Developing U.S.-China ties has won wide support from the U.S. people, Trump said, adding that the two countries, as cooperative partners, can make joint efforts to help the bilateral relationship reach an unprecedented level.

The United States is committed to enhancing win-win cooperation with China in economy, trade, investment and international affairs, Trump said.

USA Today provided commentary:

Trump’s pullback from his provocative words and softer tone after accusations against China of unfair trade and militarism in the South China Sea could be a negotiating tactic, said Michael Auslin, a China analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Until this week, Trump seemed to go out of his way to antagonize Xi. After his election, he took a congratulatory call from Taiwan’s president, which is a break in protocol under "one China." He then used Twitter and interviews with Fox News to assail China’s military installations in disputed waters in the South China Sea, its failure to control North Korea's nuclear weapons development and China's unbalanced trade policies toward the United States.

Trump politely repeated the "one China" mantra of previous U.S. administrations "to make Xi Jinping happy," said Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Arlington, Va. “What America has to do in order to deter China from here on out is not going to make (Xi) happy at all.”

At stake is whether Trump will acquiesce to China’s long-term goal of pushing the U.S. out of Asia and become the world’s sole and dominant superpower, Fisher said. If that "underlying tension" is not dealt with now, the U.S. will “face the prospect of real disaster in the not-to-distant future.”

So here we are with a question. Was Bannon's expressed opinion about war with China irrelevant?
Bannon is an ideologue who is creating policy for Rust Belt President Donald Trump as White House chief strategist. That position already made him one of the most powerful people on the planet.

Nonetheless, over the last weekend in January 2017, he was given more power as explained in The New York Times:

But the defining moment for Mr. Bannon came Saturday night in the form of an executive order giving the rumpled right-wing agitator a full seat on the “principals committee” of the National Security Council — while downgrading the roles of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence, who will now attend only when the council is considering issues in their direct areas of responsibilities. It is a startling elevation of a political adviser, to a status alongside the secretaries of state and defense, and over the president’s top military and intelligence advisers.

In theory, the move put Mr. Bannon, a former Navy surface warfare officer, admiral’s aide, investment banker, Hollywood producer and Breitbart News firebrand, on the same level as his friend, Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser, a former Pentagon intelligence chief who was Mr. Trump’s top adviser on national security issues before a series of missteps [resulted in his resignation].

About China, as Bannon well knows, there is a model for behaving aggressively towards another country then moderating. In fact one might think Trump's "backing down" from his China threats is akin to the methods used by Hitler when the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed as a delaying tactic to give Germany time to achieve other goals before engaging in a surprise invasion of Russia. But Hitler had an ideology that favored war. He wrote several early works on his beliefs before at age 36 he completed Mein Kampf which published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, eight years before he became Chancellor of Germany; in it he wrote:

"The soil on which we now live was not a gift bestowed by Heaven on our forefathers. But they had to conquer it by risking their lives. So also in the future our people will not obtain territory, and therewith the means of existence, as a favour from any other people, but will have to win it by the power of a triumphant sword."

Donald Trump has not written an ideological doctrine book nor has he publicly embraced any ideology. One review of his eight books (all but one openly co-written or ghost written) offered that the only consistent theme is: “We need a leader that wrote ‘The Art of the Deal,’ Trump declared during his presidential campaign announcement in June, and he has repeatedly cited that 1987 book in other appearances"; from his media interviews, his"speechifying" and his "tweeting" one can see that he has held conflicting views lacking a clear ideological orientation; with regard to war, all we have is in The America We Deserve by Donald J. Trump with David Shiflett (2000):

My rules of engagement are pretty simple. If we are going to intervene in a conflict it had better pose a direct threat to our interest- one definition of “direct” being a threat so obvious that most Americans will know where the hot spot is on the globe and will quickly understand why we are getting involved. The threat should be so direct that our leaders, including our president, should be able to make the case clearly and concisely....At the same time, we must not get involved in a long-festering conflict for humanitarian reasons.

On the other hand, Bannon has a different backstory that would allow him to define Trumpism in different ways. And he has an ideology that seems to appeal to Trump as explained here:

“I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed.

“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

As the Bolshevik leader once said, “The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.”

Which brings us full circle back to the Democrats. The Democrats in power think the blathering media are important. Apparently they are too stupid to realize that of the 330,000,000+ Americans, less than 1% are watching Fox News and Breitbart.com ranks #107 in "news and media websites" in terms of internet traffic. If you are evaluating what to focus on to win elections, forget either one of those. They didn't win the election for Trump, though Democratic politicians and liberal media talking heads focusing on those right wing news outlets allow those outlets to create the conversation.

Be smart like Steve Bannon and focus on using Facebook and other social media sites. You see, listed above is the fact that he is on the Board of Directors of Cambridge Analytica. You probably don't know who they are, but using their tool psychometric profiling, they divided the US population into 32 personality types and focused on just 17 states to get Trump elected.

CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander James Ashburner Nix, 41, on September 19, 2016, in a lecture outlining why 20th Century blanket advertising is dead:  "My children will certainly never, ever understand this concept of mass communication."

Nix has also explained: "We have profiled the personality of every adult in the United States of America—220 million people." Cambridge Analytica wants to become a key player in marketing and advertising, not just politics. From their webiste, you can see this:

If you're interested in how the world was radically changed by a young PhD candidate Michal Kosinski beginning in 2008 read The Data That Turned the World Upside Down which includes the following:

"In the Miami district of Little Haiti, for instance, Trump's campaign provided inhabitants with news about the failure of the Clinton Foundation following the earthquake in Haiti, in order to keep them from voting for Hillary Clinton. This was one of the goals: to keep potential Clinton voters (which include wavering left-wingers, African-Americans, and young women) away from the ballot box, to 'suppress' their vote, as one senior campaign official told Bloomberg in the weeks before the election. These 'dark posts'—sponsored news-feed-style ads in Facebook timelines that can only be seen by users with specific profiles—included videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators, for example."

A recent Forbes writer said about the Trump Campaign and Cambridge Analytica:

I speculated that this apparent lack of interest beating his opponent at the data-crunching game was likely to be a hindrance at the last leg of the contest, when he would be in a head-to-head race with a Democrat with access to the same data and technology as Obama had at his disposal.

Well, it turns out that what I (or most other people) didn’t know was that Trump – while vocally proclaiming that he thought personality, not processing power would win the election – would just weeks later quietly engage the services of UK data analytics providers Cambridge Analytica. I say “quietly” as this was actually done by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, through a group he set up to campaign on Trump’s behalf.

Kushner is said to have been the brains behind Trump’s election technology strategy but is also a recent adoptee of Big Data. He became aware of the power of online marketing while experimenting with Facebook targeted advertising, and noticing how quickly he could increase sales of his father-in-law’s branded merchandise by a factor of 10 – from $8,000 to $80,000 per day – simply by refining the target demographic.

Trump’s data campaign followed a different strategy than the Democrat one which had been credited with playing a large part in securing the last two elections. Obama’s operation focused on identifying swing voters who could go either way, in areas with a likelihood of high voter turnout. Trump’s campaign, on the other hand, centred around deciding which of his key political platforms – for example cutting immigration or “draining the swamp” of corrupt or incompetent politicians and bureaucrats – would work best with segmented voter groups. Once up and running at the end of the summer, it was soon sending out tailored messages to 100,000 targeted voters every day.

What the writer of that story either did not know or failed to report is important - Steve Bannon has been on the Board of Directors of Cambridge Analytica since its creation. On August 17, 2016, Bannon was appointed chief executive of Donald Trump's campaign. The Forbes story says "the Trump data campaign" was "up and running at the end of summer." Perhaps that timing was just a coincidence.

It is not as if there is no warning. We have been given a picture of what goes on in his mind such as this from The Hollywood Reporter Ringside With Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect's Strategist Plots "An Entirely New Political Movement" (Exclusive):

"Darkness is good," says Bannon, who amid the suits surrounding him at Trump Tower, looks like a graduate student in his T-shirt, open button-down and tatty blue blazer — albeit a 62-year-old graduate student. "Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power. It only helps us when they" — I believe by "they" he means liberals and the media, already promoting calls for his ouster — "get it wrong. When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing."

On that precise point, The New York Times, in a widely circulated article, will describe this day at Trump Tower as a scene of "disarray" for the transition team. In fact, it's all hands on: Mike Pence, the vice president-elect and transition chief, and Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, shuttling between full conference rooms; Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and by many accounts his closest adviser, conferring in the halls; Sen. Jeff Sessions in and out of meetings on the transition team floor; Rudy Giuliani upstairs with Trump (overheard: "Is the boss meeting-meeting with Rudy or just shooting the shit?"), and Bannon with a long line of men and women outside his corner office. If this is disarray, it's a peculiarly focused and organized kind.

It's the Bannon theme, the myopia of the media — that it tells only the story that confirms its own view, that in the end it was incapable of seeing an alternative outcome and of making a true risk assessment of the political variables — reaffirming the Hillary Clinton camp's own political myopia. This defines the parallel realities in which liberals, in their view of themselves, represent a morally superior character and Bannon — immortalized on Twitter as a white nationalist, racist, anti-Semite thug — the ultimate depravity of Trumpism.

The focus on Bannon, if not necessarily the description, is right. He's the man with the idea. If Trumpism is to represent something intellectually and historically coherent, it's Bannon's job to make it so. In this, he could not be a less reassuring or more confusing figure for liberals — fiercely intelligent and yet reflexively drawn to the inverse of every liberal assumption and shibboleth.

That last paragraph summarizes why we should fear Bannon.

At the end of the article Bannon is quoted as saying: "I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors."

While some called Cromwell a doctrinaire hack, others consider him the presiding genius handling the break with Rome and creating the laws and administrative procedures that reshaped post-Reformation England by translating royal supremacy into parliamentary terms, creating powerful new organs of government to take charge of Church lands, and largely removing the medieval features of central government.

Bannon should keep in mind that despite his successes as an insider revolutionary, ultimately Cromwell was executed by the ruler he served.

Nonetheless, that self-characterization should remind us to keep in mind that Bannon:

• Is the White House Chief Strategist.
• Advocates a disruptive political revolution as defined by Lenin "to destroy the state" and "to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment."
• Believes Lenin's statement “the art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive" which we must recognize in the context that Bannon is an expert on using big data to target propaganda to generate public political support for political goals including warfare.
• Favors Militarism (his daughter is a West Point graduate serving in the 101st Airborn, a fact that must reflect on her father in some way) and he believes in going to war "to save face."
• Sits on the National Security Council alongside the Secretaries of State and Defense, and over the President’s top military and intelligence advisers.
• Expects, perhaps even relishes the prospect of, a war with China before the end of Trump's second term, which could easily be triggered as I will explore in a future post.

The Second American Civil War begins in an assault on the most dynamic people in California's tech, farm and service sectors

Match these names...

1. Sergey Brin
2. Elon Musk
3. Jerry Yang
4. Pierre Omidyar
5. Steve Chen

...with these descriptions...

1. Co-founder of Google and President of Google's parent company Alphabet Inc.
2. Founder, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX; Co-founder, CEO, and product architect of Tesla Inc.; Co-founder and Chairman of SolarCity; Co-chairman of OpenAI; oc-founder of Zip2; and Founder of X.com.
3. Co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo! Inc.
4. Founder of eBay
5. Co-founder of YouTube with fellow immigrant Jawed Karim

Which of them are immigrants? If you can't match them and/or didn't know they were all immigrants, you don't know much about what makes the California (and the U.S.) economy work in the 21st Century.

So last week the Second American Civil War was launched by the President of the United States of the Rust Belt against the California Republic as an attack on the our farming, technology, and service economic sectors. We began to get battlefield stories:

Click on image to see the complete story!

See if you can see a subject matter theme running through the headlines below (you can click on the images to link to a story or Google the headline):

As explained in detail in another post, migrants, both legal and illegal, have been the force that has made California's economy work for the past 150 years. And we intend to protect that economy.

But we are not alone. Microsoft, mentioned as taking the lead in the pushback against the immigration polic of the President of the United States of the Rust Belt in one of the headlines above, is located in Washington State. On November 14, 2014, Microsoft overtook Exxon Mobil to become the 2nd most valuable company by market capitalization, behind only Apple Inc. Satya Nadella is Microsoft's CEO and an immigrant.

And as indicated in the headline above, Oregon has had a statewide sanctuary law since 1987. In the article we are told:

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said she will enforce that law.

"They mow our lawns. They pick our grapes," Brown said last week. "They take care of our children and they take care of our seniors, and I want to make sure they feel welcome in Oregon."

With all of that said, I hope we will recognize just how badly California's California Empirical Egalitarian Progressives failed in the past few decades.

Consider the current outrage about the combination of the deportation issue and "The Wall."

Regarding deportation, the number of deportation during the 16 years of Presidents Bush and Obama was roughly double the number deported in the 105 years between 1892 and 1997. A record number of people were deported from the U.S. during Obama's tenure as President. The reason for this has nothing to do with Bush or Obama - there were after all only Presidents, perhaps the least important politicians you elect to office.

The current deportation program is a Congressional program that began with the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IIRCA) of 1986. The increased deportation is the result of the immigration detention bed quota which has steadily increased since its establishment in by Congress in 2009 during Obama's first year in office.

The quota refers to language in the annual congressional appropriations law that currently requires U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to maintain 34,000 immigration detention beds on a daily basis. No other law enforcement agency is subject to a statutory quota on the number of individuals to hold in detention.

Congress expanded the Border Patrol's budget from $5.9 billion 2003 to $11.9 billion in 2013, while ICE's grew from $3.3 billion to $5.9 billion. As of 2013, the two agencies had a total budget of nearly $18 billion, and that number increased to nearly $20 billion in 2016.

Despite all the publicity generated by the President of the United States of the Rust Belt which has resulted in California's politicians loudly proclaiming its cities and schools as "sanctuary" locations, they weren't all making the same loud proclamations during the Obama administration's record deportation years.

Regarding "The Wall" we might want to look at a picture or two before we get all hot and bothered by that publicity:

National Geographic offered this California image in 2016:

Click on image to see the original and story!

But this "wall" isn't perfect as the map above indicates because there are two areas where the fence ends leaving gaps such as this one not far from the fence pictured by National Geographic:

Still, California's southern border is mostly fenced as these photos indicate:

My problem is I forget a lot. So perhaps I'm forgetting the outrage over the "walling" of California's southern border when the work was being done. Yes, some complaining like in this story:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plunged into politics on both sides of the border Thursday -- praising the midterm election results as change that will bring "new blood" to Washington, and criticizing the 700-mile border fence favored by GOP legislators and President Bush as an "incomplete" solution to illegal-immigration issues.

The governor made the comments at the start of a busy day in the Mexican capital following a private breakfast with outgoing President Vicente Fox at Los Pinos, the official presidential residence. Schwarzenegger, accompanied by first lady Maria Shriver, met with Fox to discuss immigration and trade issues and to encourage further efforts on both sides to control greenhouse gases.


But let's not pretend that California has led the way. In 2011 the New York Times in this story States Resisting Program Central to Obama’s Immigration Strategy explained:

A program that is central to President Obama’s strategy to toughen enforcement of immigration laws is facing growing resistance from state governments and police officials across the country.

Late Wednesday, Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois said he was pulling his state out of the program, known as Secure Communities, the first time a state has sought to withdraw entirely. In California, where the program is already under way throughout the state, the Legislature is considering a bill that would allow counties or police agencies to choose whether to participate.

Under the program, the fingerprints of every person booked by the police are checked against Department of Homeland Security databases for immigration violations. That is in addition to routine checks against the F.B.I.’s criminal databases.

In fact, in 2011 the Legislature approved the bill mentioned in the story but Governor Jerry Brown vetoed it!

The Democrats in California in 2017 subscribe to California Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism. But the truth is, starting with Brown in his first term, we saw intermittent shifts in Democratic Party politicians away from Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism - instead terms used nationally such as New Democrats, Centrist Democrats, Clinton Democrats, Moderate Democrats,  Blue Dog Democrats, and Third Way Democrats started to be used to label California Democrats. Historically many like Brown and U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein are instinctively conservative for California Democrats particularly when it comes to law enforcement.

Thus in 2011 as a result of Brown's veto, San Francisco, which became a sanctuary city in 1989, took action to stop participation in the Secure Communities program and city officials strengthened the stance in 2013 with its Due Process for All ordinance. Obviously, since the Legislature had approved the bill Brown vetoed, most California Democrats had serious problems with U.S. immigration policy.

Hopefully, in the future California's governments at all levels will offer a strong defense of our economy's farming, technology, and service sectors as reflected in these headlines:

It appears that we are now unified and moving to get a handle on a broad range of related issues. For instance, this year the California State Senate is considering two bills that would create a database firewall between California and the federal government.

State and local governments in California possess myriad databases that the administration of the President of the United States of the Rust Belt might try to use to locate and deport immigrants and to register Muslims. Many government agencies (including police, human services, and universities) gather and store a host of personal information (including names, addresses, and social security numbers) from vast numbers of people. Federal data miners could abuse these state and local databases to pursue immigrants and Muslims.

Senate Bill 54, authored by Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin de León would prevent law enforcement agencies in California from sharing department databases or private information with the federal government for immigration enforcement. It would also require California state agencies to update their confidentiality polices so that they stop collecting or sharing unnecessary data about every Californian.

Senate Bill 31, authored by Sen. Ricardo Lara, would prevent local and state government agencies from collecting data, sharing data, or using resources to participate in any program that would create a registry of people based on their religion, ethnicity, or national origin. Police agencies would also be forbidden from creating a database of religious minorities in California.

Organizational supporters of these bills include the ACLU of California, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the California Immigrant Policy Center, the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

Fortunately the Silicon Valley culture stimulated the creation in 1990 of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), located in San Francisco, to assure that these kind of tech efforts can work. EFF was founded by three eccentric internet and computer technology pioneers John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor in response to a series of actions by law enforcement agencies that led them to conclude that the authorities were gravely uninformed about emerging forms of online communication, and that there was a need for increased protection for Internet civil liberties.

For many years, EFF mong other things has fought government use of cutting-edge technology to target immigrants. EFF opposes biometric surveillance of immigrant communities, rapid DNA analyzers as a tool of immigration enforcement, and social media monitoring of citizenship applicants and foreign visitors. Likewise, they resist street-level surveillance, such as the broken CalGang database, which all too often has an unfair disparate impact against immigrant communities, as well racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.

In the wake of the inauguration of the President of the United States of the Rust Belt, EFF has redoubled its opposition to high-tech government attacks on our immigrant and Muslim friends and neighbors. It is going to require Californian's like those in the EFF organization to protect the future of California and the Earth.

Finally, consider spreading the words and images of this Bloomberg video which was included with the story This Is America Without Immigrants: Give up your iPhone. And no more Googling. Or Boeing:

21st Century California vulnerabilities to active Neoliberal political opportunists

To paraphrase a wise Californian the late John Steinbeck, too many under-50 Californians see themselves as temporarily embarrassed capitalists.

When you have economically frustrated persons in a political entity like California, the Neoliberals will target them as potential voters in order to unseat those officials who advocate California Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism.

The truth is even Californians in the top 1.5% income group impacted by 2016's Proposition 55 (the extension of 2012's Proposition 30) are not a large enough group to vote a politician into statewide office or approve a ballot measure. But Neoliberal strategists target frustrated groups to create a political revolt on which they can piggyback their agenda advocacy.

As noted in an earlier post California is home to 13 organizations which are members of the Neoliberal Atlas Network: the Ayn Rand Institute, the Benjamin Rush Institute, the California Policy Center, the Claremont Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Independent Institute, Liberty International, the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Pacific Research Institute, the Reason Foundation, Seasteading Institute, Smock Media, and Taliesin Nexus. Each of those 13 actively attack California Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism by using alternative-reality, iWorld propaganda supported by alternative facts.

If you check their websites, you will have difficulty finding anything related to immigration or women's issues. Instead they focus on an ideological message. Perhaps it is most accurate to use the Ayn Rand Institute's words to give a sense of the thrust of these organizations: "Discover how reason, rational self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism can make a positive impact on our world." The Atlas Network gives as its mission: "Our vision is of a free, prosperous and peaceful world where limited governments defend the rule of law, private property and free markets."

These organizations are vehemently opposed to the distributive justice process critical to California Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism.

As explained in the previous post, while other activists were focused on "flower child" issues in 1960's California - free speech, drugs, the Vietnam War - Neoliberal spokesman Ronald Reagan was elected Governor.

The next effort by California Neoliberals came with the California Electricity Crisis of 2000 and 2001 which should be required case study on how to disrupt California politics.

In 2000 California had an installed generating capacity of 45GW. Demand was 28GW. A demand supply gap was created by energy companies, mainly Enron, to create an artificial shortage. Energy traders took power plants offline for maintenance in days of peak demand to increase the price. Rolling blackouts adversely affected many businesses dependent upon a reliable supply of electricity, and inconvenienced a large number of retail consumers. Traders were thus able to sell power at premium prices, sometimes up to a factor of 20 times its normal value.

Because the state government had a cap on retail electricity charges, this market manipulation squeezed the industry's revenue margins, causing the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) and near bankruptcy of Southern California Edison in early 2001.

The crisis was possible because of partial deregulation legislation (AB 1890) adopted in 1996. Then Republican Governor and Neoliberal Pete Wilson, who is currently a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, was the driving force behind the historic change. In 1993, a 200-page report generated within the PUC, referred to as the "yellow book," spoke favorably of deregulation in response to complaints from industrial customers and to national trends that had seen the deregulation of airline, telephone and savings and loan industries. A year later, another PUC report emerged, this one called the "blue book," that openly declared the regulatory body’s intent to "dissolve the old power monopolies and create an open market within two years".

By then, going by the "alternative" name of "restructuring,’’ the call to deregulate the power franchises had also reached Sacramento. Versions vary on with whom and in what form the idea took root among elected state officials leading to the eventual unanimous approval of AB 1890 in 1993, which placed in law the creation of a wholesale market for electric power in California for PUC-regulated utilities.

The collapse of the system started seven years later. The public, due to the complex nature of the energy crisis, held then Democratic Governor Davis partly responsible. General speculation regarding the factors influencing the recall's outcome continues to center on the idea that Californians simply voted for a "change" because Davis had mismanaged the events leading up to the energy crisis. Perhaps, but....

The effort to recall Gray Davis began with Republicans:

• Ted Costa who was mentored by Paul Gann during the Prop 13 campaign and who supported Proposition 23, an oil industry measure supported by the Koch brothers to suspend California's 2006 global warming law; 
• Mark Abernathy, an advisor to then Congressman Bill Thomas, a member of the  American Enterprise Institute; and 
• Howard Kaloogian, Tea Party Express co-founder.

The effort was not taken seriously, until Rep. Darrell Issa, named a number of times as the wealthiest currently serving member of Congress, donated $2 million towards the effort.

While many think that celebrity Donald Trump's election as a Republican-who-wasn't-a-Republican is unique. However, in California on November 17, 2003, a celebrity and nominal Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger won the California Governorship in an open no-primary popularity contest that at the time was peculiar to recall elections. (It's worth noting he replaced Trump on "The Apprentice" NBC series.)

But Arnold Schwarzenegger was not a Neoliberal ideologue and the Democrats retained control of the Legislature during his terms.

The point here is Neoliberals leap on every potential opportunity to disrupt the status quo while gaining influence. They understand there is not a "one California" consistently voting Democratic despite what the 2016 Presidential election results seem to the politically inexperienced.

Instead, the voters are fickle, think of themselves as temporarily embarrassed capitalists, and can be persuaded by the effective use of propaganda as can be seen on these maps:

California has overhauled its election system from that where party primary winners face off in a general election to an open primary where the "top two" vote-getters face off in the general election. Further, the California Republican Party is not a force in California politics. Today all elections in California have a format similar to that won by Schwarzenegger.

This creates a situation where, in each state legislative and executive office election, Neoliberal groups with money can find a candidate to support. Parties are not really a focus point for Neoliberals. They don't need the support of one to organize a strong political campaign. And we are moving in the direction of "let's all support independents" which is a euphemism for we don't need to know who these candidates are politically.

The problem is the non-partisan ballot was a project of the Independent Voter Project which as explained in this story and this story is a cover for corporate interests. It is even tied to Charles Munger, Jr., who has used his family's billions to keep the California Republican Party on life support.

Additionally, we should keep in mind that as Neoliberalism has evolved, it has become an ideology which asserts that 21st Century market metaphors, metrics, and practices should permeate all fields of human life. Consider this from a December 2016 article by Ben Tarnoff, a San Francisco journalist who writes about technology and politics:

No industry has played a larger role in evangelizing the neoliberal faith than Silicon Valley. Its entrepreneurs are constantly coming up with new ways to make more of our lives into markets. A couple of decades ago, staying in touch with friends wasn’t a source of economic value – now it’s the basis for a $350bn company. Our photo albums, dating preferences, porn habits, and most random and banal thoughts have all become profitable data sets, mined for advertising revenue. We are encouraged to see ourselves as pieces of human capital that must ceaselessly enhance our value – optimizing our feeds and profiles, hustling for follows and likes and swipes.

If Silicon Valley is turning our personal lives into a business, then Trump hopes to turn our government into one. Like all of Trump’s ideas, this isn’t especially original. For decades, neoliberal politicians of both parties have promoted the notion that government should not only serve business, but operate like one. They’ve argued that public services should be privatized, or at least model the “efficiency” of the private sector. They’ve claimed that business is the highest form of human endeavor, and that the role of the state is to empower and emulate it.

We in California are vulnerable to Neoliberal opportunists. There are now tech billionaires who do favor Neoliberal ideas and put their billions where their ideas are. There are open elections that favor eliminating political parties which provided some vetting of candidates. And there are a lot of frustrated "temporarily embarrassed capitalists" in California.

California Empirical Egalitarian Progressives need to be vigilant within the State's political system or we won't be able to protect our future or the Earth.

The Counter-Ascendancy of California Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism

Free college tuition. Interesting idea, Bernie.

In 1962 when I entered the University of California there was no tuition. Nor was there tuition at any other state college in California. Let me introduce you to California Master Plan for Higher Education implemented by bills adopted by the Legislature and signed into law in 1960 by Governor Pat Brown, the late father of current Governor Jerry Brown which states:

For the state colleges and the University of California it is recommended that:

1. The two governing boards reaffirm the long established principle that state colleges and the University of California shall be tuition free to all residents of the state.

Unfortunately, one of the impacts of Proposition 13 sponsored by corporate interests and approved by the voters in 1978 was to force the modification of that policy. Because the State had to fund from its General Fund more of the costs of primary and secondary education, the tuition-free college policy could not be sustained.

Literally, inexpensive college education in California was one of the first victims in the United States of the Neoliberals who used a populist backlash against rising taxes to eliminate working class opportunities for higher education established under the Empirical Egalitarian Progressive movement. (Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism is always attacked by Neoliberals as "socialism" despite the fact that it does not advocate in any way against the private ownership of property.)

California has struggled as an imperfect home for Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism which can be summarized as follows:

• Empirical means that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience, from science, engineering, and art.
• Egalitarian means the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.
• Progressivism asserts that advancements in science, technology, economic development, and social organization are vital to the improvement of the human condition when bound to the recognition of the intrinsic importance of all forms of life within the Earth's biosphere.

As implemented, the California version of Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism includes:

• A process of mixing industrial and technological progress with active governmental intervention to assure equal opportunity and a proper balance of distributive justice.
• A social compact recognizing the common needs of a disparate peoples and a trust in direct democracy as the final arbiter of public policy with particular focus on those needs.

Distributive justice is about how rewards and costs are distributed among members of a group (or a city, state, or nation) which takes into account five conflicting "norms" that typically confront groups. These can be summarized as:

1. Responsibility: Group members who have the most should share their resources with those who have less.
2. Need: Those in greatest needs should be provided with resources needed to meet those needs, regardless of their input..
3. Equity: Members' outcomes should be based upon their inputs. Therefore, an individual who has invested a large amount of input (e.g. time, money, energy) should receive more from the group than someone who has contributed very little.
4. Power: Those with more authority, status, or control over the group should receive more than those in lower level positions.
5. Equality: Regardless of their inputs, all group members should be given an equal share of the rewards/costs

With the goal of assuring the long term survival and success of California and Californians, these norms are used within society, economics, and government, giving priority in the order they are listed above to set the course for the ship of state. The first four are understood as requirements applied to keep the ship running.

The last is then used to adjust (meaning to "tweak" not "reverse") the final heading - it is used as the "fairness" standard of mediation that keeps everyone on board and avoids a mutiny.

It all requires commitment and compromise.

"Need", or more accurately in this setting "common needs", is a term not limited to economics. In terms of the individual perspective,  Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs applies:

Advocates of California Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism understand that The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 placed the burden on government, with the obligation of support from every person and organization, to assure that the physiological and safety needs of all persons are met.

Further the Universal Declaration also placed the responsibility on every person, organization, and government to see that everyone's needs for belonging and for esteem are met to the limited extent the norms of distributive justice allow.

California courts have cited the Universal Declaration to support their interpretation of the right to practice one’s trade, the right to privacy, the meaning of “physical handicap,” the right to freedom of movement, and the scope of welfare provisions.¹

In the United States advocates of Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism in the first two-thirds of the 20th Century achieved much through our national government. But that stopped due to an increasing Neoliberal influence beginning in the mid-1970's under both Republican and Democratic Presidents and both Republican and Democratic Congresses.

California always leads the way, and the rise of  Neoliberalism is no exception. A mid-20th Century Neoliberal attempt to crush California Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism became a springboard for a future nation-wide movement. The Neoliberals failed in California only after the anti-flower-child populist backlash of the 1960's ended with Proposition 13.

In California the Neoliberal influence became evident in 1967 when Ronald Reagan defeated Pat Brown. Governor. Reagan went on to become President in 1981 because he was the America's most effective spokesperson for Neoliberalism using the alternative reality game. His internship among the Neoliberals started 26 years before he was nominated for President.

Reagan was hired by General Electric (GE) in 1954 to host the General Electric Theater, a weekly TV drama series and to give talks to over 200,000 GE employees as a motivational speaker. His speeches carried the Neoliberal re-education message. Reagan was influenced by Lemuel Boulware, a senior GE executive whose ideas have been called "Boulwarism." In a 1949 address at Harvard Boulware stated:

We have simply got to learn, and preach, and practice what’s the good alternative to socialism. And we have to interpret this to a majority of adults in a way that is understandable and credible and attractive.

You can learn more about him at the Foundation for Economic Education website. The Foundation for Economic Education, founded in 1946, is the oldest free-market think tank in the United States. It has had common board members with the Atlas Network.

After Reagan's two terms as Governor, in 1975 Jerry Brown began his first two terms as Governor. Even though there were Republican Governors following Brown's second term, beginning in 1975 the Democrats controlled both houses of the Legislature except in 1996-96 when the Republicans had a majority in the Assembly, though the wily Democrat Willie Brown continued as Speaker for the first half of 1995.

But, of course, in 1978 Proposition 13 was passed which gave corporate owners of industrial, commercial, and apartment properties a significant long-term tax break at the expense of public education at all levels and the stability of the State's finances. It's not that the populist backlash against property taxes had no underlying causes. But most of those causes were essentially the result of bad judgement by local officials elected and reelected by the the same voters who voted for Proposition 13.

To fund education and healthcare, in 2016 California voters approved a measure continuing until 2030 the provisions of a 2012 measure increasing personal income taxes on incomes over $250,000. This impacts the top 1.5% of Californians with a single income filing of at least $263,000 or a joint income filing of at least $526,000. This tax to fund education and healthcare reflects the first two elements of distributive justice that drives California Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism - Responsibility and Need.

And for the most part, since 1975 the Legislature has leaned towards California Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism. As a result, as of 2017 California voters elected to the Assembly and the Senate Democratic super-majorities (over ⅔'s).

So it would appear that California Empirical Egalitarian Progressivism is strong in this state. But that can be misleading.

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¹Bixby v. Pierno, 4 Cal. 3d 130, 143 n.9, 145 n.12 (Cal. 1971); Santa Barbara v. Adamson, 27 Cal. 3d 123, 130 n.2 (Cal. 1980); Am. Nat’l Life Ins. Co. v. Fair Employment & Housing Comm., 32 Cal. 3d 603, 608 n.4 (Cal. 1982); In re White, 97 Cal. App. 3d 141, 149 n.4 (Cal. Ct. App. 1979); Boehm v. Superior Court, 178 Cal. App. 3d 494 (Cal. Ct. App. 1986).