IMPORTANT READS

DEBATING THE DEBATES-The vice-presidential debate Tuesday night was rated by some commentators as generating more heat than light. At times, that certainly seemed true when watching Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Mike Pence hurl charges at each other, insert practiced digs and cut each other off. 

But it pays to read the transcript and remind yourself that this debate did raise some points of real consequence about the economy, race relations and policing, immigration, reproductive rights, and foreign policy. It is true that this debate did not address much of what we would expect in a real “people’s debate” that focused on the real concerns of struggling Americans. But there were ample moments of real contrast between the America that works for all people that is promised by Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the mix of alt-right nationalism and tea-party policies that would surely be ushered into Republican Donald Trump’s administration. 

Here are a few: 

• On wages, Kaine pointed out that while Clinton supports raising the minimum wage, Trump has indeed said that wages are too high for American companies to be competitive, and Pence has been a “one-man bulwark against minimum wage increases” as both governor of Indiana and as a conservative leader in Congress before he became governor. 

• Kaine said that the Clinton administration would “never, ever engage in a risky scheme to privatize Social Security,” while pointing out that Trump embraced privatization (in a 2000 book, “The America We Deserve”). PolitiFact gave Kaine a “mostly false” for the implication that a Trump administration would embrace privatization. But here PolitiFact gets it wrong by omitting that Trump’s admittedly vague statements about how he would restore Social Security’s long-term solvency by economic growth alone – a statement no serious expert on Social Security finances on either side of the aisle believes – leaves a policy vacuum that would be likely filled by Pence’s embrace of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan for Social Security, which does include allowing Social Security trust funds to be diverted into private stock market accounts. In a word, privatization. 

• Pence sounded less strident than Trump when talking about policing in African-American communities, leavening a reference for “law and order” with support for community policing. But then he undercut that attempt at moderation by saying that talk of implicit bias and institutional racism in policing “has got to stop” and echoed Trump’s support of “stop-and-frisk” police practices that were ruled unconstitutional when they were practiced in New York City. The lessons learned in dozens of cities – that training police officers of all colors in recognizing implicit bias and how to use de-escalation strategies to prevent unnecessary use of force makes for safer neighborhoods and more safety for police – continue to be rejected by the Trump-Pence ticket, to the peril of not only people of color but the nation at large.

Kaine and Pence also reprised the well-known differences between the candidates at the top of the ticket on immigration, sparred on Clinton’s foreign policy record as secretary of state, and highlighted a sharp contrast on reproductive rights, which Pence unapologetically opposes. 

It was here that Pence left himself most vulnerable, not simply because of his faith-based stand against reproductive rights for women, but because his willingness to defend what he believes his Christian faith says about the immorality of abortion under any circumstances did not extend to what his Christian faith says about the immorality of Donald Trump. 

Kaine kept pressing Pence to defend Trump’s slurs against women, the disabled and people of color. He kept goading Pence into defending Trump’s extreme use of the tax code to avoid paying taxes for the government he now seeks to lead. He referenced Trump’s unethical business practices and the thousands of workers and vendors who have been stiffed by Trump’s businesses over the years. He noted that because Trump has not released his tax returns, we have no evidence of Trump’s charitable giving (but we do have a growing number of news stories about his abuse of the Trump Foundation). The Bible that Pence uses as the guide star for his political life contains denunciation after denunciation of people who abuse wealth for their own gain at the expense of those who do not have wealth or power. 

After the debate, the spin room was full of pronouncements that Mike Pence won. But Pence himself had to know in his heart of hearts that he was being asked to defend the morally indefensible, and that never makes you a winner. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

(Isaiah J. Poole has been the editor of the OurFuture.org blog since 2007 and is also communication director for People's Action. This piece appeared in CommonDreams.org.)  Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

ELECTION 2016--Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party presidential candidate, is currently having a moment with younger voters. Presumably this is because he has emphasized his pro-marijuana stance and stayed away from touting his views on nearly everything else, which, as AlterNet has reported, are very right-wing. Yet look behind the curtain, and you’ll find that Johnson’s candidacy is fueled by money provided by funders who are driving forces behind things most young voters abhor, like the privatization of public education and the “right” to pollute the environment.

A combination of engaging social media launched by pro-Johnson PACs and the candidate’s goofy, likable personality add up to 29 percent of voters between the ages of 18-34 telling pollsters for NBC News that they plan to vote for the third-party candidate. (His “What is Aleppo?” gaffe seems not to have made a dent in his numbers.) Several respected pollsters and political scientists have deduced that Johnson’s totals cut further into votes that would normally accrue to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton than to Republican nominee Donald Trump. Young voters comprise a critical constituency in the Democratic coalition, and Clinton has struggled to engage them, even gaining the endorsement of Bernie Sanders, the primary challenger who garnered great enthusiasm among young Democrats.

Johnson’s plan, as reported by Politico’s Ben Birnbaum, is to siphon enough votes from both major-party candidates to deprive each of the 270-electoral vote majority a candidate needs in order to win the White House. Then the race gets thrown into the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, where the third-party candidate quixotically expects to win. But even if this long-shot scheme had a chance, it’s hard to imagine members of the Republican majority in Congress voting to hand the White House to someone other than their party’s nominee. That all raises the question, what is Johnson really up to, and whose interests does he represent?

Birnbaum reports that the Johnson campaign has “recently reshuffled its map,” focusing on states “with large numbers of disgruntled Sanders voters,” which he identifies as Iowa, Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington. In addition, the Johnson forces are also making television and radio ad buys, according to Advertising Age, in Nevada, Colorado, New Hampshire and Maine—all states identified by FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten as more-or-less “must-win” states for Clinton (meaning her chances of winning the general election drop precipitously if she loses any one of them).

While the Johnson airtime buys are tiny compared with Clinton’s, they amount to gauntlets thrown, especially when you factor in the Johnson forces’ clever online strategy. If your target is young voters, television buys probably aren’t a great use of your resources. But creating viral videos probably is, and the pro-Johnson AlternativePAC is doing just that.

Despite the fact that Johnson’s poll numbers—he’s at 8 percent in the Real Clear Politics average—are higher than any previous modern-era third-party candidate at this point in the election cycle, he still has a long climb to make the 15 percent threshold required for inclusion in the presidential debates. So, the campaign’s present focus is on elevating his profile so his poll numbers go up, with the hope of making it onto the debate stage October 9. (Read the rest.) 

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DEBATING DEBATES-Before the face-off between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, many were pleading for Lester Holt (above left), the NBC anchor and moderator Monday night, to be a “fact checker.” 

Any delusions in that regard should have been dashed right away as he perpetrated a root falsehood at the very start of the event. 

Holt claimed that the event was “sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. The commission drafted tonight’s format, and the rules have been agreed to by the campaigns.” 

While the CPD certainly controls much of the event, it’s not a “nonpartisan” organization at all. It’s about as far from nonpartisan as you can get. It’s totally bipartisan. It’s a creation of the Democratic and Republican parties designed to solidify their dominance over the public. 

Its origins are in an agreement “Memorandum of Agreement on Presidential Candidate Joint Appearances” from 1985 signed by Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., then Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Paul G. Kirk Jr., then Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The two would go on to head the CPD. 

But that original agreement didn’t even have the word “debates” in it. This commission is the mechanism by which the Democratic and Republican parties came together to push aside the League of Women Voters, which had organized presidential debates before 1988. It was to make sure that the campaigns, not some independent entity, would decide on moderators, on formats—and to critically exclude other participants unless both sides agreed. They simply wanted to ensure “televised joint appearances”—which became emblematic of a pretense of democratic discourse.

Holt’s fabrication—he can’t possibly be ignorant of this—is really a root problem of our politics. All the lies and spin from Clinton and Trump largely manifest themselves because each side excuses them because “the other” is worse. That is, the very “bipartisan” structure of our elections is in large part responsible for the dynamics we’re seeing. 

Normally decent people ignore all of Clinton’s deceptions because they loathe Trump, and normally decent people excuse Trump’s fabrications because they detest Clinton. That’s why candidates with incredibly high unfavorability ratings—as Clinton and Trump famously have—may still have millions voting for them, like two crumbling buildings helped up by each other. 

And the voters have “nowhere else to go” because they are in effect held prisoners by fear. Millions of people who might agree with other candidates—Jill Stein of the Green Party or Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson or the Constitution Party or socialist parties—do not actually coalesce around those candidates because they fear helping Trump or Clinton. This mindset probably prevents stronger challengers to the duopoly from ever coming forward in the first place.

There are two ways out of this that I see:

Pollsters 

Pollsters can find ways of finding out what the public actually wants. That is, every tracking poll today has the same format—some minor variation of “if the next election for president were held today, with Donald Trump as the Republican candidate, Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate, Gary Johnson the Libertarian candidate, and Jill Stein the Green Party candidate, for whom would you vote?” (NBC / Wall Street Journal) 

What pollsters are not doing is asking people who they actually want to be president. That is, there are lots of people who want Johnson or Stein, but feel like they have to vote for Clinton or Trump to stop the other. So while media outlets claim that Gary Johnson is at 8 percent in “the polls” and Jill Stein is at 3 percent in the “opinion polls”—that’s not accurate. They are not opinion polls. Polls are not gauging the actual views and beliefs of the public. They are ostensibly predicting a future event. But they are molding that reality as we go along. Most brazenly because the CPD has set 15 percent in these polls as the criteria for exclusion. 

USA Today, in a refreshing departure from usual polling, recently found that 76 percent of the public want Stein and Johnson in the debates. And here’s the kicker: When reformers suggested that someone should be included in the debates if a majority wanted them in, the heads of the commission rejected the effort. Paul Kirk, now co-chairman emeritus of the CPD, said: “It’s a matter of entertainment vs. the serious question of who would you prefer to be president of the United States.” But that’s the problem: The polls the CPD is relying on don’t actually ask the public who they prefer to be president. We could have a “third party” candidate with plurality support and we wouldn’t know it because the question to gauge that isn’t asked of the public.

Obvious recommendation: Pollsters should actually have an interest in the opinions of the public and ask them who they prefer to be president. 

Voters Can Unite 

The other way out of this seemingly perpetual duopoly bind is that voters come together. That’s what I outline at VotePact.org: People who feel compelled to vote for Clinton because they detest Trump can team up with their opposite number. This requires real work. Instead of stopping Trump by voting for Clinton, a progressive can stop Trump by taking a vote away from him. 

That is, instead of a husband and wife who are actually unhappy with both Clinton and Trump casting votes that in effect cancel out each other—one voting for Trump and the other for Clinton—they can both vote for candidates they actually prefer. Each would be free to vote their preference—Johnson, Stein, whoever. 

The progressive would undermine Trump not by voting for a candidate they don’t trust—Clinton—but more skillfully: by taking a vote away from Trump. The conservative would not feel they have to suffer the indignity of voting for a candidate that’s distasteful—Trump. They would instead succeed in depriving Clinton of a vote. 

It’s that kind of outside-the-box thinking that’s going to get us out of the binds that the ever-duplicitous duopoly attempt to impose on the citizenry. 

(Sam Husseini is founder of VotePact.org. This piece first appeared in TruthDig. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

NEW GEOGRAPHY--Whether he loses or, more unlikely, wins, Donald Trump creates an existential crisis for the Republican Party. The New York poseur has effectively undermined the party orthodoxy on defense, trade and economics, policies which have been dominant for the last half century within the party but now are falling rapidly out of fashion among the rank and file. 

In this sense, Trump’s nomination could be seen as both an albatross and something of a life preserver. His rallying of a large working-class base, particularly in the Heartland, provides a potential new direction for the party that has lost irretrievably the business elite, the coastal states, minorities and the educated young. Clearly, the party needs to revise its electoral strategy. 

Geography and economics 

Trump’s raw and poorly considered economic nationalism positions the GOP against Hillary Clinton’s crony corporate establishment — anchored by Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the coastal media. This resonates broadly among many Americans, who are increasingly disaffected with the oligarch-dominated, big-bank-driven economy. 

Now the Democrats have become the party of the urban gentry, public employees and the government-dependent poor, an identification that hurts them elsewhere. In contrast, Trump’s strongest support comes from small towns and, to a lesser extent, the suburbs. In these geographic heartlands, low labor participation rates, declining incomes, struggling Main Street businesses and collapsing opportunity incite resentment and a call for radical change. The disconnect with the power centers is further stoked by the celebratory coverage received by the asset/inflation-driven “false economy.” 

Clearly, the traditional Republican path to victory — pandering to the ultrarich — seems misplaced, if not a trifle masochistic. Trump may boast about how he benefited from cronyism, but his critiques resonate more with the owner of a bar on a small town Main Street or a 20-person machine shop who knows that he can’t count on the Treasury Department defending his tax avoidance, as has occurred in the case of big-time Democratic donor Apple. 

Similarly, Trump’s crude assault on undocumented immigration makes more sense to many lower-skilled Americans who compete with them for jobs. Additionally, Trump’s attack on the Democrats’ ever more strident decarbonization drive has brought Appalachia firmly into the GOP realm, and may also deliver some key Midwestern swing states, such as Iowa and Ohio. 

Bill Clinton, who once effectively reached such voters, now denounces the “coal people” like they are a bunch of mindless Bubbas. His wife’s recent attack on Trump supporters as homophobes, racists and xenophobes revealed an unflattering glimpse at the inner thoughts of the “party of the people.” 

Not just the white people’s party 

Trump’s shameless, needlessly provocative antics clearly appeal to those with residual racist and nativist sentiments, which undermine GOP efforts to break into the increasingly racially diverse electorate. But, surprisingly, Trump isn’t doing much worse than more temperate Republicans, such as John McCain and Mitt Romney, among Latinos. It’s shocking how little appeal country club Republicans, despite their nicer manners, wield outside the county club. 

The challenge now is to expand Trump’s class-based appeal in ways that can also win over minorities. Becoming the white people’s party is not the road to long-term success; better to reach across the racial divide and make common cause with the new party core. 

Most Latinos and African Americans, after all, share many economic concerns with the white working class — the loss of blue-collar jobs, lack of affordable housing and diminished prospects for homeownership. They also are most likely to suffer from the efforts to protect poorly performing public schools, which are fervently defended by Clinton’s core supporters in the teachers unions.

And as most Latinos are, themselves, not immigrants, and are becoming ever more native-born, they may prove more amenable to such basic economic appeals than focusing on people crossing the border. 

But perhaps Trump’s signature achievement may prove to be the marginalization of the religious right, exemplified by the embrace at the Cleveland convention of gay billionaire Peter Thiel. Religious conservatives have posed a mortal threat to Republican future prospects, not only among millennials and educated professionals but across a broad swath of an increasingly secular electorate. 

The only way to relevance: Exploit the weaknesses of the other side 

In the post-Trump future, Republicans need to focus on issues that exploit the Democratic disconnect with middle- and working-class voters: absolutist arrogance on environmental issues, the increasing embrace of radical social engineering and issues related to law enforcement. It may help that there does not seem to be any great progressive tide out there, since Congressional Republicans, although burdened with Trump at the top of the ticket, are doing better than expected. 

Ultimately, the GOP strategy needs to incorporate the populist aspects of Trumpism – economic nationalism, respect for blue-collar labor, opposition to political correctness -- while ejecting the New Yorker’s bile. A positive, inclusive message embracing economic growth – now abandoned by the Democrats years ago – could make the GOP attractive enough to avoid being tossed into the dustbin of history.

(Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org. This column was posted most recently at New Geography.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EPPERHART ON POLITICS--I, along with about 84 million or so of my fellow Americans, myself Monday evening watching the Democrat and Republican candidates trying to not make fools of themselves. (One of them, anyway.) This will be my 11th presidential campaign as a voter and, like just about everybody, I’ve never seen one like 2016. 

A year ago, few took Donald Trump seriously. His Republican opponents certainly didn’t. Over the following months, what their campaign operatives came to understand was that a rock solid core of G.O.P. voters (about a third) started out for Trump and never wavered. This was all he needed to carry him through the early primaries. As his opponents fell by the wayside, he picked up enough to keep going all the way to Cleveland and the nomination. 

Trump’s strategy, if you can call it that, has been to drive home the same message that America is a dark place, broken and in desperate need of the remedies that only he can provide. It is a pitch that works, but only for those who want the product. Who are these people? 

They are the “disaffected” — folks whose vision of the United States got obscured when all those black and brown and gay people proliferated on their TV screens. They wonder why The Simpsons and South Park are still on and King of the Hill isn’t. They don’t understand why an NFL player, who should be grateful for the opportunity afforded him in this great nation of ours, won’t stand for the National Anthem. 

No matter what Trump says or how he behaves, these folks will stand with him. But they are not enough to get him past the finish line ahead of Hillary Clinton. 

Despite the back-and-forth in national polls, electoral vote prognosticators consistently predict a Clinton win. None have shown Trump at or near the 270 electoral votes he needs to become president. To do that, he will need to persuade the handful of undecideds who could swing the outcome in his favor. 

It’s the deal of his lifetime and he’s blowing it. 

Monday night he tried and failed to make the pivot to “Teleprompter Donald” (as the media have dubbed the more presidential persona.) The split screen showing both candidates provided a stark contrast between the constantly moving Trump and the still, poker-faced Clinton. She looked cool and collected. He looked like he needed to use the restroom. 

Trump’s constant interruptions didn’t rattle Clinton. She is the consummate pro and it showed Monday night. When he tried to distract her, she kept on talking like he wasn’t there. 

His assertion that not paying taxes made him smart (as opposed to us dummies who do) and making money off people who lost property in the recession is good business was a naked display of ego. Telling people you’re bright and they’re dim isn’t a winning strategy. 

Donald Trump has his solid 40 percent of the electorate. They live in his alternate reality and will turn out for him come hell or high water. But, the other 10 percent he needs aren’t buying his sales pitch. With every day that passes, it’s looking more like a done deal.

(Doug Epperhart is publisher, a longtime neighborhood council activist and former Board of Neighborhood Commissioners commissioner. He is an occasional contributor to CityWatch and can be reached at: [email protected]) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

TRUTHDIG-As I interview blue-collar workers about their jobs, their futures and their struggles with an unequal economy, I’m struck by how compelling their stories are compared to the rhetoric of the presidential campaign. 

I get caught up in the details of their work and lives, their concerns about how automation is changing their jobs, their worries about child care. So interesting—and sometimes moving—are their stories that I almost forget to ask them how they feel about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. 

That’s what happened this week when I visited Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, a community college centered on vocational education and preparing students for the increasingly technological workplace. Carpentry, plumbing, diesel and electric engine repair, air-conditioning installation and repair, the culinary arts and nursing are among the many trades and professions taught. The student and faculty experiences were more interesting than hearing campaign correspondents and anchors excitedly report on a 1-point shift in the polls. 

Trade Tech proudly considers itself the college of the second chance—another chance for those who messed up in high school, served time in prison, are looking for a trade after time in the service, or have been laid off because of downsizing or job obsolescence. Some are there because they’ve found themselves stuck in a dead-end job. It’s a cross section of working-class America, and I wondered how people were coping in this time of factory closings, the loss of millions of blue-collar jobs and growing incomes for the rich. 

I saw no posters, tables of volunteers, banners or other signs of the presidential election. It’s hot on cable television, but this campus seems to be in another world, grittier and grimmer than the political news.

The school’s unassuming buildings occupy 25 acres near the gaudy Staples Center —the multipurpose sports arena next to the restaurants, clubs and theaters of L.A. Live—in the increasingly luxurious downtown Los Angeles. The contrast is striking. 

Trade Tech has a student body of 25,000: 56 percent Latino, 27 percent African-American, 6 percent Asian and 6 percent white. Nearly half of the students work more than 30 hours a week. 

Carlos Gonzalez (photo above) was fired from his dead-end job as a supervisor for a chain that sells food to poor people with government food-stamp vouchers. An Army vet, he served in Iraq since the beginning of the war. East Los Angeles College didn’t work out. Neither did his job in the food stores, where, as a supervisor, he made $15 an hour after eight years. So he enrolled at Trade Tech to study plumbing. After a year and a half, he has a 3.8 grade-point average, has won two awards from deans and one from the college president, and is president of the plumbing club. 

“In my family, there are welders and electricians, but we don’t have a plumber,” he said.

The work involves more than fitting pipes together or fixing stopped sinks and toilets. Gonzales studies architecture and how to use the computer to make blueprints, plus a thick book on building codes. “A union job, that’s my goal,” he said. “Jobs are not hard to get for a plumber.” 

Not far away, I sat down in the smoking tent with Angel Carrizosa, 18; Eric Chavez, 21; and Raul DeLeon, all carpentry students. 

“I wanted to learn a trade, get a job,” said Chavez. 

“My dad is a carpenter and I want to follow in his footsteps,” said Carrizosa. 

I asked him what was different about what he was learning at Trade Tech compared to what his father taught him. 

“Blueprints,” he said. “He never learned blueprints. Blueprints tell you where everything goes.”

Math, computers, and complex, quick decision-making are all involved in the process. Jobs await those who make it. 

“It’s a prime time for carpentry,” said DeLeon. 

I asked them about the presidential election. 

“I’m not voting,” said Chavez, who’s not registered and doesn’t intend to register. “I’m not really into it.” 

Carrizosa said he was voting for Clinton.

Then, Chavez ended the conversation. “Sorry, Bill,” he said, “but we have to go to class.” 

Bianca Alvarez, a chef coming back for more education, had made her mind up—to vote against Trump. “I don’t like the racist stuff,” she said. “I know he is not directing it against me personally, but I hate him. I am Hispanic. My own father comes from Mexico and his [Trump’s] words of hate, I don’t like that.” 

What about Clinton? 

“I don’t know much about her,” Alvarez said. “There’s the fraud thing.” 

She and Christian Oso, 23, another culinary student, are more interested in how they will cope with their challenging profession, where, as he said, “people in our industry burn out in two or three years.” 

Federal and state governments can do much to help them on their way. Veteran Carlos Gonzales is attending Trade Tech on the GI Bill. Many advocate that all community college students in the United States should get tuition, books and a living stipend from the government. 

Downsizing or being shipped overseas? Government should pay them a minimum salary whether or not they find a new job. Let the corporations pay from the big profits they earn by eliminating jobs, or from their new clean-energy facilities that are heavily subsidized by government. If coal is obsolete, why should unemployed miners starve? 

As I saw at Trade Tech, jobs are available. But it takes determined students and instructors such as those on the faculty—skilled carpenters, plumbers, designers, nurses and many others with the ability to teach their skills—to make it. 

That’s what I learned at the college of the second chance. If the candidates talked about this, about something truly relevant to people’s lives, the students I met and millions of Americans across the country might be interested in this election.

(Bill Boyarsky is a columnist for Truthdig, the Jewish Journal, and LA Observed. This piece was posted first at Truthdig.com.) Photo: Bill Boyarsky. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

TRADE WINDS--I never stood a chance. Of course Russia would seduce me.

It was the early 1980s and Robert Massie had just published his riveting Peter the Great biography (I devoured it on a family cruise, which surprisingly didn’t impress the teenage girls onboard); Warren Beatty had produced his magisterial (super long) Reds; and the ABC TV network broadcast The Day After, a movie about a Soviet nuclear strike that millions of high schoolers across the land, myself included, were encouraged to come together to watch, and then discuss. Because, you know, that really could happen. And so, the adults wanted to know, how did that make us feel?

ELECTION 2016--For those of us struggling to pull ourselves from our summer distractions, and who are now confronting this November's elections, it's an easy choice. Some of us looooove Clinton, and some of us looooove Trump. Some of us love neither...and may even hate both of them. So what to do...what to do...hey, I know! We should reach for our Johnson! 

Gary Johnson, that is, the Libertarian candidate who also ran in 2012. Now which Johnson you'll reach for is up to you, presuming that this is a "protest vote.” (For those who genuinely like Gary Johnson and his political platforms, you might want to stop reading right now.) 

Many who claim to support Johnson (but really don't know which Johnson they're actually reaching for) may not be aware that: 

--Johnson not only favors "amnesty" for those here illegally, but strongly opposes the term "illegal immigrant" altogether. 

--Has viewpoints on legalization of drugs that place him further to the left than anyone else running for President. 

--Wants to cut the federal budget by approximately half, which includes education, the military, Social Security, and just about everything else...yet chose William Weld, known as a "Big Government" Republican from Massachusetts, as his running mate. 

But for the rest of us who are STILL enraged and/or disgusted and/or offended and/or put off and/or distrusting of and/or annoyed by and/or oblivious to BOTH Trump and Clinton, there's always the option of grabbing your Johnson. 

Will you grab your anti-Democratic Big Government Johnson, or will you grab your anti-GOP Christian Nation Johnson? 

Hillary Clinton's health got you concerned -- they've got a catchy tune for her coughing. No need to reach for your Advil...reach for your Johnson! 

Donald Trump's verbal antics got you down? They've got a catchy tune for that, too. No need for seizures...seize your Johnson instead! 

Sick of Clinton's endless claims of chauvinism and sexism?  Then take hold of your Johnson -- he's a dude and he won't accuse you of gender discrimination if/when you disagree with him! 

Sick of Trump's endless calls for "the wall?"  No worries, just grapple your Johnson instead -- he favors open borders and empathizes with our neighbors to the south! 

Hillary's laughing off the inquiries and accusations leaving you with the impression she's just too evil for your tastes? Then nab your Johnson! 

Donald's statements got you wondering if Hitler's been reincarnated? Then lay your hands on your Johnson, and never let go! 

Will Mitt Romney, both former Presidents Bush, and John McCain take hold of their collective Johnson and go third party this year?  

Will former Sanders supporters snap up their collective Johnson and vote third party this time around? 

Colin Powell and several other major political figures haven't taken a break on making their living from book-writing and the speaking circuit, and yet they still refuse to endorse either Trump or Clinton at this time. Are Colin Powell and the others each clutching their Johnson because they think the two main candidates are jerks, and they prefer a Johnson to a jerk? 

Certainly the two-party system appears to have devolved from a real choice to an oligarchy of the "same ol’, same ol’," with the base of each party having to figure out which political leadership listens to and cares about the needs and hopes and fears and goals of average Americans. 

Which means that each and every one of us, come Election Day, will have to choose between reaching for the lever to vote for the lesser of two evils...or reach instead for our own personal, private Johnson.

(Ken Alpern is a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at  [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

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LATINO PERSPECTIVE--Here in the United States September is Hispanic Heritage month, and I like to talk about what it means to be Hispanic or Latino in America. This subject is something that growing up in Mexico City I never really thought much about. 

In Mexico when it comes to identifying yourself in official government forms like the passport they don’t ask you whether you are Hispanic or not, they just ask what kind of skin shade or tone do you have. So it was either tez blanca or tez morena meaning white tone or brown tone or shade, none of these Hispanic, or white non- Hispanic classifications. 

Unlike America, Mexico is a very homogeneous country, and they don’t collect census data on ethnicity. But according to the Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook Mexico is composed of mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish) 62%, predominantly Amerindian 21%, Amerindian 7%, other 10% (mostly European). You will never see forms asking you whether you are Latino or Hispanic, in Mexico that is irrelevant. 

However, here in the United States it is important being that our country is very diverse. So which is it? Hispanic or Latino? What are we? What does it mean to be Latino? Or, Hispanic in America? – The answer to this question depends on who you ask. The two words are most of the time used interchangeably. So which word to use? Ever since I started college at USC I have been asking myself this question, and here we are many years later still trying to figure this out. 

I did a little research online and I think I finally found a definition that I can settle with, and of all places I found it in The Tennessean, this paper is part of the USA Today Network and their Education reporter Jason Gonzales explained it very well when he said that “for those of For those of Spanish or Latin American origin, the terms describe a shared experience in the United States and by their definition includes a broad category of people with different cultures and heritage. Both words are to be celebrated because they represent our many differences.” 

He added “Latino means those from Latin America and includes Brazil, while Hispanic means those of Spanish-speaking origin and includes Spain.  The term Hispanic was first used by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1970 to describe the numerous Spanish speakers in the United States. And Latino was adopted by the U.S. Census Bureau in the 2000 count. Neither word specifies a certain ethnicity, but speaks more to a broader group of people.” 

A broader group of people who share the same experience of being Americans of Latin decent. The word Latin and Hispanic unites us in a common bond that in many ways is, ironically uniquely American. 

Let’s celebrate Hispanic Heritage month by remembering that we are Hispanics, we’re Latinos, and we are Americans. Whichever word you use to describe yourself be proud of it, and always keep in mind that no matter where we came from, or what’s our cultural heritage Latinos, Hispanics have made, and continue to make America great. Happy Hispanic Heritage month to all.

(Fred Mariscal came to Los Angeles from Mexico City in 1992 to study at the University of Southern California and has been in LA ever since. He is a community leader and was a candidate for Los Angeles City Council in District 4. Fred writes Latino Perspective for CityWatch and can be reached at: [email protected].)

-cw

URBAN PERSPECTIVE-There’s been a fierce debate about presidential debates. The debate is whether they really do make or break a presidential candidate. This starts it all over again in the run-up to the three scheduled debates between GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The hard political reality is that unless a candidate makes a whopper of a misstatement, looks blurry and bleary on stage, or is simply flat-footed, and grossly unprepared with his or her answers, they don’t mean much in deciding who ultimately bags the White House. 

Most voters cling to their party affiliations, political beliefs, and personal likes and dislikes of candidates no matter what the candidates say on the issues. The mass of voters just aren’t swayed by a candidate’s verbosity, good looks, or seeming erudition on the issues. 

However, this go around, the debates do have real significance because Trump and Clinton have a lot to prove to a lot of voters who don’t like either one of them, and are deeply uneasy about the prospect of either one of them in the White House. 

Trump’s high mountain to scale starts with Trump. He’s loathed by millions as little short of a stupendously unqualified carnival barker pitchman who parlayed wild and deliberately inflammatory “birtherism” and racist- immigrant- Muslim- and Obama- bashing into the top GOP spot. 

The added knock is that he got where he did in great part because of a slavish media that at times has acted as his unofficial PR team in shoving him down the public’s throats. His job is to try to undo, soften, or instill collective amnesia about his dubious history and ploys to get attention. His management team has already given a big hint at how he’ll try to pull off this Houdini trick. 

He palavered with the Mexican President. He went to two black churches. He went to Flint, Michigan. He talked about jobs and police abuse both places. He pithily back-pedaled from birtherism vis-à-vis Obama. He laid out a detailed policy position on child care, promised to lay out even more detailed positions on tax reform, foreign policy, health care and social security. He’s trying mightily to take off the table that he’s little more than a Klansman in a suit, has a zero policy program, less than zero ability to govern, and is totally incapable of being anything other than an arrogant, know-it-all blowhard. 

The charm image he’ll try to project is Trump the reasoned, thoughtful, stick to the script, disciplined, play by the established political rules candidate with the right temperament to work with Democrats, make sound political decisions, and show cool judgment on the thorny and at times crisis issues that confront all presidents. 

It’s a tall order. But in the debates and everything surrounding them, Trump must convince the independent conservatives and moderates in the handful of swing states that will decide the White House -- who don’t think much of Clinton, but just can’t bring themselves to pull the lever for a guy who they see as an overt racist and an egomaniacal political neophyte -- that he is neither one. 

Clinton has a high mountain to scale too. It also starts with Clinton. In the early going, the election seemed almost a forgone conclusion for an easy Clinton win given the trainload of baggage Trump dumped on the political platform. But the continued pulverizing of her over the emails, the Clinton Foundation doings, and now health questions all of sudden have turned a seeming rout into a real dogfight. 

Clinton’s bigger problem is the nagging perception that is shown in the polls, and that is that millions see her as everything from a congenital liar to a crook. The most charitable in all of this negative voter perception of Clinton is that she’s untrustworthy. 

Clinton must undo, offset, or instill collective amnesia about these negatives. She must play hard on her strengths, dependability, experience, and her cast iron grasp of the big ticket policy issues from the economy to foreign policy. 

She must tie herself to the Obama positives where needed and project a people friendly-no academic think tank policy wonk-plain English speaking demeanor when answering debate questions. When the inevitable questions come up about the emails and the foundation and her health, she’ll have to act and show physical vigor, look directly into the cameras, admit that she made mistakes with the emails, learned from the mistakes, and it will never happen again. 

And, while the foundation has done phenomenal work and improved conditions for legions globally, say that she’ll be completely out of the Clinton Foundation business, and that includes Bill and Chelsea too. 

There’s little margin of error for Trump and Clinton in the debates. Both have a lot of hard work to do to try to turn their mountain high pile of negatives into some semblance of positives. Millions will be watching to see if they can do that. This time the debates really do mean something.

(Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of Let’s Stop Denying Made in America Terrorism, (Amazon Kindle) He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

INFORMED COMMENT--A Brown University political scientist estimates that as of 2016, The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars have cost the American taxpayers $5 trillion. That number isn’t important when we consider the human cost: Some 7,000 US troops dead, 52,000 wounded in action; hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead who wouldn’t otherwise be, 4 million displaced and made homeless, etc.

Just to put that $5 trillion in perspective. Let’s say you chose five individuals.  Each of the five will spend $10 million a day.  That’s the cost of Heidi Klum’s mansion.  They’d be buying the equivalent of five of those each day.

They’ll do that every day of their lives.  All five of them.  And then each of them will be succeeded by one their children, who will spend $10 million dollars a day, and one of their grandchildren, and one of their great-grandchildren, until 270 years have passed and it is the year 2286.  That’s the equivalent of a stardate for Captain Picard of the Enterprise. 

Neta Crawford, a professor of Political Science at Brown University published the study for Brown University’s Watson Institute. 

Professor Crawford writes:

“As of August 2016, the US has already appropriated, spent, or taken on obligations to spend more than $ 3.6 trillion in current dollars on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria and o n Homeland Security (2001 through fiscal year 2016). To this total should be added the approximately $6 5 billion in dedicated war spending the Department of Defense and State Department have requested for the next fiscal year, 2017, along with an additional nearly $3 2 billion requested for the Department of Homeland Security in 2017, and estimated spending on veterans in future years. When those are included, the total US budgetary cost of the wars reaches $4.79 trillion.”

The US has spent $1.7 billion for combat and reconstruction.  I have a sinking feeling that first they spent half of it on destroying things and then they spent the other half on rebuilding them.

Through 2053, the US government owes the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans $1 trillion in medical and disability payments along with the money to administer all that.

Crawford adds:

“Interest costs for overseas contingency operations spending alone are projected to add more than $1 trillion dollars to the national debt by 2023. By 2053, interest costs will be at least $7.9 trillion unless the US changes the way it pays for the wars.”

Of 2.7 million military personnel who served in those two theaters, 2 million have now left the military and have entered the Veterans Administration system.  Some 52,000 of them were wounded in action and many need care.

Because the Bush administration borrowed money to pay for the wars, we’ve paid half a trillion dollars in interest alone.

At least al-Qaeda had been based in Afghanistan.  Iraq had had nothing to do with September 11.  It was Bush’s invasion that brought al-Qaeda there, which later morphed into ISIL.

We were lied into that war, and it has weakened our economy.  If anyone can tell me what benefits that war brought the average American, I’d like to hear it.

The Iraq War was a government-led Ponzi scheme and as usual the little people are the ones who took a bath.

(Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf and South Asia.  He lived in various parts of the Muslim world for nearly 10 years and speaks Arabic, Farsi and Urdu. This post originally ran on Juan Cole’s website.)  

-cw

EASTSIDER-Full disclosure: I’ve always been a news junkie. Until lately, when I stopped watching for a week because it was all the same stuff and I couldn’t take it anymore. I had been channel surfing, and trying to figure out why all 200 news media outlets have the same 10 stories every day, like synchronized swimming. It used to be that local stations actually did local news, newspapers did investigative journalism, and it was only the one or two big national news items that got any system-wide attention. 

That’s all changed in the last decade. There are no real reporters anymore, because they all got fired to save money. Heck, even the old wire services like the AP, UPI & Reuters are going down fast. For those of you who don’t recognize any of these names, they are havens for journalists to sell their news stories to whomever is willing to buy them. They are great for avoiding the cost of having to pay employees to cover overseas events, with all that payroll overhead. You can read more about them here.  

One way to look at wire services is that they were the harbinger of the new cost cutting measures to provide no news at all. If you think about it, those brave wire service men and women were the first wave of our new “gig”, or “sharing” economy, where there are really no employers as such, hence no nasty overhead costs or liability for the big corporations who pipe out the news. 

Kinda’ like the Los Angeles Times of Chicago we have now, with under 400,000 subscribers and one centralized source of non-content. Leavened by a few casual help. Or the local television stations and cable networks, where all the money goes to the few talking heads, who have to fix their teeth and regularly visit the plastic surgeon to look just like their employers want, and spend hours just getting through makeup so we can adore them on air. 

So what happened to the news? Now we have the same formula across the 200 or so media outlets. Ninety percent of this “news” is the same identical regurgitation of every single shooting, mass protest, car chase or international terrorism event in the universe, plus a couple of the same national political events. This pablum is then bookended by stories about Tech and Social Media. 

The only way we can tell the difference between a national and a “local” show, is that the local news has traffic and weather. 

So what’s the new source of news? 

After a week away from the news, I tried again, and Eureka! I suddenly understood what’s replaced reporting. We now have TWEETS! It finally occurred to me that over time, all the faces we see on television have been paying more and more attention to their iPhones and tablets and laptops. They have shifted to tweets for their news to share with the masses who tune in with bated breath, albeit in fewer numbers. 

Tweets are perfect for the new news. They are cheap (free), mindless (at 140 characters or less, they can’t really convey much detail,) and by concentrating on what’s “trending,” you can leverage the burned out attention span of the masses to the folks who have zillions of followers. Yes sir, what’s trending now is the new mantra of the people who don’t want us actually thinking about the decline of our country by the corrupt politicians, their political parties, and the billionaires who own it all. 

In short, it’s the absolutely perfect environment for Donald Trump. Think about it. He’s all flamboyancy, tweets instead of talks, he has tons of followers, gets off on controversy and creates all kinds of groovy stuff that the mindless talking heads can riff off of everyday. Wow, in our 24-hour endless news cycle, he is the perfect tool to increase audience share. Heck, sometimes he even tweets a bunch and then we get updated news flash tweets. 

What a brilliant news concept. No cost here -- tweets are free. Even better, the personalities who inhabit the 200 news outlets don’t have to do any research, much less think. Just report the tweet, pump up the controversy and wait for the outrage. 

Perfect. The twits who give us the news can handle tweets. No danger of substance there. No nasty facts. Revenues up. The owners of the outlets are happy. More advertisers. 

Hillary Clinton doesn’t stand a chance. Character defects aside, the shortest sentence she knows is a paragraph. Face it, she’s a policy wonk at heart. She knows that this President stuff is complicated, darn it, and she is determined to share her expertise with us whether we want it or not. 

So even as they go say “oh my goodness, see what Donald has done now,” the media love him – he’s the absolute paragon of tweets for twits like them. Hillary is boring. Unless, of course, she gets sick or has the two hundredth “new” report come out about her email server. Then it’s hot news, at least as a soundbite. 

After all, the captains of industry who own the news media don’t really want to spend too much time talking about how she’s a member of the billionaire club. Not on air. After all, club members don’t rat each other out when it comes to money. 

Now I am not saying that all news media personalities are twits. Some are probably smart – smart enough to swap millions of dollars a year in their personal services contracts in exchange for being a professional twit. And increasingly, they have their own twitter handles, so that people can follow them as they follow .... 

Partly as a result of all of this pablum, and the shift away from print media, more people use smartphones than desktop computers these days. Recent studies would indicate that all this is simply increasing the gap between the haves and have nots when it comes to news.

­

These information shifts create all kinds of problems in terms of learning about what is really going on in the world that affects our lives and our money. People with crummy internet access, or none at all – something that is particularly prevalent in rural and low socioeconomic areas -- aren’t getting much real news at all. And the news that the rest of us get on our smartphones tends to be soundbite news -- most folks aren’t reading long articles on their phone. 

So, how do we get informed? 

The most important way to get informed is to have a population that has learned to learn and think for itself. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be a big goal of the current educational system, which focuses on career choices and specific occupations, even though most of the jobs that this produces won’t be around in a decade. 

On the other hand, most people I know are pretty pragmatic and have at least developed a solid BS meter as they grow up. So let me share with you how I find the news. 

Reading CityWatch is a great beginning. You will get more truth here about the machinations of our local political elite and their lords and masters than you will ever find in commercial media outlets. At least until Ken Draper makes a bundle of money and sells the website to MSNBC or Fox News. 

More generally, given that we’re all time challenged, I use a news aggregator called Feedly.com, although there are lots of other web based sites that do the same thing. You take all the online information sources that you want to know about and these web apps deliver the summary content of each. That way I can look through the headers to choose which full articles to read. I also subscribe to the electronic editions of the LA Times (sigh) and the Sacramento Bee. Told you I’m a news junkie. 

This system allows me to skim the posts for issues I’m interested in to get different points of view. Instantly. It’s a handy way to sort the crud from solid information. Otherwise, the temptation for us is to only get information that simply reinforces our existing beliefs. I believe the growth of this kind of niche media marketing is how we got to the place where people are challenged to have a civil conversation about matters political. Everyone reinforces his or her own belief system. 

Honestly, to find out real information has never been easier. Even though we are all stressed with the realities of our everyday life -- making rent/mortgage/bills, trying to get/keep a job or series of gigs, kids and all that entails, figuring out health insurance, and a pension or anything that will allow us to retire – it’s important to take time to figure out the who, what and why of how we got into this mess. So that we don’t get surprised by the next financial meltdown, or at least get some notice to do our best to survive. 

We all know that politicians won’t suddenly take the pledge and get honest, and that the icons of the financial services industry and corporate CEOs who control the entire global economy aren’t going to suddenly get religion and start paying the taxes on what they’ve been hiding overseas. We need to get smart and learn how to see who’s doing what to whom for ourselves. 

Otherwise, it’s tweets, twits, and mindless mainstream media.

(Tony Butka is an Eastside community activist, who has served on a neighborhood council, has a background in government and is a contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.)

URBAN PERSPECTIVE-Let’s get one thing out of the way. When I ask Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos: Why Amazon is still listing on its site for sale Agatha Christie’s classic crime who-done-it, with its original racially offensive name, Ten Little Niggers, it’s not yet another PC screech for censorship of a beloved crime classic. In fact, I resolutely opposed the demand a few years back to get rid of Mark Twain’s timeless classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, because it uses the word nigger countless times and one of its principal characters is “Nigger Jim.” 

I said then that it was much ado about nothing because Twain was not a racist. The goal in the book was to show the ugliness and evilness of slavery and to do that he had to use the rawest racist language of his day. Huck Finn reflected not only the times but was a beautiful poetic, literary gem that readers young and old could learn from and admire for its historic and artistic content and quality. And, in any case, to pull it from libraries and curriculum was censorship in its rawest and ugliest form. 

Christie’s Ten Little Niggers and Amazon’s sale of it, though, is a horse of a totally different color. The “n word” is not buried in the novel for added literary effect. It’s the cover title in bold letters. In some editions, in case the intent is missed, there’s a picture of an upper crust white couple with a look of fear and revulsion staring at a semi-naked black boy on a pedestal. In others there’s a circle of Sambo-caricatured blacks dancing around in a circle. Christie based the title on a racist poem with this ditty: 

“Ten little nigger boys went out to dine; 
One choked his little self and then there were Nine…

Two little nigger boys sitting in the sun; 
One got frizzled up and then there was One. 
One little nigger boy left all alone; 
He went out and hanged himself and then there were None.” 

The title was clearly meant to shock and pander to the prevailing racist sentiment of the day. It had absolutely no relation to the story line of the novel. 

Christie’s unabashed racist views read like a “what’s what” of racial stereotypes, vilification, and condescension in her mystery novels when there’s even the faintest mention of blacks and other non-white characters. She seemed to have a special fascination with their hair, eyes, or other physical characteristics that she found odd, different and always disgusting. 

Now there’s Amazon. Amazon clearly states that it takes a close look at the appropriateness of items sold on its site that may “offend cultural differences and sensitivities.” It has pulled, or flagged, several items from its site -- from racially offensive DVDs to the Confederate Flag. To call for Amazon to pull Ten Little Niggers then is hardly a case of censorship, but purely a call for the world’s largest online buying and selling commercial product site to cease profiting off the sale of a horrid racially demeaning title. 

It’s also a case of a company doing what legions of other companies have done that have had to come square with the fact they were selling and thereby profiting off of a racially, sexually or environmentally degrading product -- and that’s to pull it. In doing that, they have simply done more than pay lip service to their oft-time stated pledge to be a good corporate citizen. The removal of Ten Little Niggers from Amazon would in no way prevent buyers and collectors of the work with this offensive title from buying it. There’s a plethora of online book sellers and sites that sell the book, and they’re readily accessible to one and all. 

Twain could not have conveyed the sentiment of the evil of slavery and racial bigotry that’s a part of America’s shameful racial legacy by sugar coating the language or guarding his vocabulary against racial epithets. Huck Finn, with all of its racial crudities, provided then and now an insight into a time and place in America that should not be forgotten. Nothing of the sort can be said of Christie’s Ten Little Niggers. There’s no redeeming literary value in the title -- a title that has nothing to do with the book and everything to do with pandering to crude and vicious racial stereotypes. By continuing to sell the book, Amazon is doing the same as Christie did, for profit and nothing more.

(Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of Let’s Stop Denying Made in America Terrorism, (Amazon Kindle) He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EDITOR’S PICK--Donald Trump has a zero percent chance of winning California in November, according to the reigning expert in presidential polling interpretation, Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com. He has the same chance to carry Los Angeles.   

But if he wins the presidency, something that Silver rates at a 30 percent chance of happening and rising, he would set himself up as the first Dictator in America. And a favored target of his hubris would be to attack California and its Democratic despots with all the force the federal government has at its disposal.

Clearly, as a man who blackened the eye of his fourth grade teacher who tried to stop him from bullying his fellow students and has gone on to establish himself as one of America’s most famous bully-cowards, Trump intends to act just like the autocrats he says inspire him: Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Kim Jong Un and, of course, Muammar Gaddafi.

If he beats Hillary Clinton, he will be in a position to do just that.

He will pack the Supreme Court with a rabid pit bull like Rudy Giuliani, put the servile and corrupt Chris Christie in charge of the Justice Department and Joe Arpaio or someone like him as FBI chief. He has made it clear he will fire generals and anyone else who gets in his way of making America Great Again. (Read the rest.)

-cw

GUEST WORDS-As this election season comes to a full boil, we should remember the importance of civil disobedience to our history. It is one of the few tools ordinary people still have to organize for change. With corporations spending unlimited campaign cash, and states requiring photo ID at voting booths, it’s through protest that we loudly proclaim that we won’t be silenced. 

Where would we be if the colonists hadn’t staged the Boston Tea Party to protest their lack of representation? Where would we be without protestors sitting where they were told not to sit, marching across bridges and to our Nation’s Capital, and standing in solidarity fully aware of the physical, legal and financial consequences awaiting them? 

Speaking in Reno, Nevada, in late August, Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton could have listened to some advisors and refused to take the hate-bait that floods daily from Republican candidate Donald Trump. But to her credit, she decided to speak up. As OurFuture.org’s Terrance Heath wrote:  

“In a scorching takedown of Donald Trump and his alt-right allies, Hillary Clinton reminded Americans that silence never defeats hatred, but that it must be called out and exposed for what it is.” 

Her choice was a clear reminder that we cannot defeat hate by being invisible – it’s up to each of us to stand up and step forward. We must all confront a challenger aiming to make racism mainstream. We are called at this moment to make sure that never happens. Decency will defeat hate, but we must speak up and speak publicly. 

When I’ve confronted racism in my life, I didn’t do so by complaining about it to my friends and going home. I organized and took action. One way I did this was through protest. 

After finishing high school in Virginia, I went to college in Pennsylvania, where I was the only African American in my class. Coming from the state that prides itself as the home of the Confederacy, I didn’t expect Pennsylvania would be the first place where I’d protest for racial equality, but that’s what happened. 

One evening, I went with a group of friends to celebrate a classmate’s birthday at the local café. We waited patiently to get served even after others were served. My white friends didn’t know why service was so slow. I knew why. 

“It’s because of me,” I said. But they didn’t believe me because their experience of racism was limited to atrocities of hate groups. One of my friends approached the waitress, who told her the restaurant’s owner wouldn’t let her serve us. 

We protested. We staged sit-ins and lobbied our student government, which voted to boycott the restaurant. Finally, the restaurant changed its practices. 

More than 50 years later, one of the friends with me that evening recalled how painful it had been for her. Seeing the discrimination that I’d spent my young life steeling myself against opened her eyes to an experience she hadn’t seen before. 

Our protest was about more than vindicating the right of black and brown people to eat in a restaurant without discrimination. For me, protest was a way to exert my humanity and claim that I am a person exactly like everyone else in our free nation. 

That’s why, at the age of 70, I engaged in civil disobedience to support my friends who need a path to citizenship, and was arrested. I decided to stand with them, just as my friends stood with me. 

We need to do a lot of soul-searching, remember our history lessons – and stand together. 

When we’re willing to put our lives on hold and use our bodies to stand up for good, we demonstrate that we’re not afraid, and that we reject the politics of prejudice and paranoia. I’m willing to stand up for what is right, just like so many before me. Are you?

(Janice “Jay” Johnson is the board president of People’s Action, a national organization with members in 29 states advancing economic, racial, gender, and climate justice. Johnson is a longtime youth advocate and community activist in Hampton and Newport News, Virginia. Previously posted by Janice "Jay" JohnsonPermalink.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

AT LENGTH-Francis Scott Key, the author of the National Anthem for these United States of America, came from a prominent legal family in Frederick, Md. 

During the War of 1812, which some have called the Second War of Independence, Key was appointed to act as the prisoner exchange agent and was aboard the HMS Tonnant the night Fort McHenry was bombarded during the Battle of Baltimore. 

The British confined him to the ship that night. He had become familiar with the strength and position of the British units. The British were intent on attacking Baltimore. 

Key witnessed the attack, from which came the lines, “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air.” He was better known for his legal skills than his skills as a poet. After its first publication, more than a century would pass before the song was adopted as the primary national anthem for the United States -- first through an executive order from President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, then ratified by Congress and signed by President Herbert Hoover in 1931. 

The only reason this history is pertinent today is because of the action taken, or lack thereof, by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who refused to stand during the national anthem, inviting criticism from all corners of the sports world. This followed the seemingly innocent act by Gabrielle Douglas of the Gold Medal-winning U.S. women’s Olympic gymnastics team, who neglected to put her hand over her heart while the anthem played during medal award ceremonies. Both athletes are black. 

Kaepernick’s protest was not accidental. “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag. I know that I am a black man in a white world,” he said. 

Kaepernick is not the first black American athlete to use his position as a platform to protest injustice -- think Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, Tommie Smith and John Carlos during their medal ceremony at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. 

What partially explains this perspective are the uncommonly sung lyrics of our National Anthem: 

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

The mention of “slave” is not entirely remarkable. Slavery was alive and well in the United States in 1814. Key owned slaves and was an ardent anti-abolitionist who once called black people “a distinct and inferior race of people.” At the time, the British offered freedom to any slave who chose to fight against these rebellious former colonials. 

This core issue of human bondage versus the expanded interpretation of liberty and justice for all would come to tear apart this nation in our bloody fratricidal Civil War two score-and-a-half years later. It is this fundamental crucible at the very heart of the American experience that shadows us these many generations later. This dichotomy is expressed by yet another American writer, Richard Henry Dana Jr., also a famous lawyer and the author of Two Years Before the Mast. 

Dana, who came from the blue blood Brahmin society of Boston, Mass., was a bit of a rebellious non-conformist. He left Harvard in his junior year and instead of taking a grand tour of Europe, as was the privilege of his class, signed on as a merchant seaman aboard the Pilgrim and sailed off to the coast of California. This turned out to be a pivotal life-changing experience that would color the rest of his life and career. 

His experience as a seaman in those years was not much better than that of a slave. After witnessing a flogging on board the ship, he vowed to help improve the lot of the common seaman and developed a lifelong dedication to fight injustice. 

In a recent biography on Dana, Slavish Shore—The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr., Jeffrey L. Amestoy wrote: “Dana’s sense of justice made him a lawyer who championed sailors and slaves and put him at the center of some of the most consequential cases in American history: defending the fugitive slave Anthony Burns, justifying President Abraham Lincoln’s war powers before the Supreme Court and the prosecution of Confederate president Jefferson Davis for treason.” 

Dana and Key are two prominent examples of the argument over abolition and racism that shaped the history of this nation -- an argument that continues this day. And, oddly enough that argument is held mostly by white people amongst themselves over the rights and actions of blacks -- just watch who’s criticizing Kaepernick. 

In Kaepernick’s defense, the words of Dana himself might be of some use: 

We have got to choose between two results. With these four millions of Negroes, either you must have four millions of disfranchised, disarmed, untaught, landless, thriftless, non-producing, non-consuming, degraded men [women had not yet been considered for suffrage at this point], or else you must have four millions of landholding, industrious, arms-bearing, and voting population. Choose between the two! Which will you have? 

Clearly there have been many eloquent black voices over these intervening decades arguing for liberty, equality and justice, including Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Dubois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X to list just a few. 

However, it still remains an argument for white America to resolve with itself over the inherited and inherent injustices in this country -- a country that regularly pledges to support liberty and justice for all but falls short of this fundamental creed. 

What is needed at this point is a far more inclusive discussion about what it means to be a “patriot in the home of the brave and land of the free.” 

I think that those of us who side with Richard Henry Dana Jr. should thank Colin Kaepernick and all other voices over the generations who have demanded, protested and died asking, “if not now when?” 

Our nation’s most courageous patriots aren’t just ones in uniform fighting in some distant land for often-questionable political ends, but include ones without a flag, fighting for human rights and justice here at home.

(James Preston Allen is the Publisher of Random Lengths News, the Los Angeles Harbor Area's only independent newspaper. He is also a guest columnist for the California Courts Monitor and is the author of "Silence Is Not Democracy - Don't listen to that man with the white cap - he might say something that you agree with!" He has been engaged in the civic affairs of CD 15 for more than 35 years. More of Allen…and other views and news at: randomlengthsnews.com.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.  

ALPERN AT LARGE--Watching the government pundits, I suppose we're all supposed to be singing that song, "Everything is Awesome" from the Lego Movie. 

But despite the Big Lie (the economy is better, things are improving,) there are enough Americans to respond by quoting that song from The Who, “We Won’t be Fooled Again!” 

Certainly, we all want things to get better, but we're killing ourselves with the self-destructive -- and self-inflicted -- wound of low, low, low expectations. Americans are, by nature, fiercely independent and willing to work hard to get ahead ... and most of are getting ahead, sort of ... but is that because or despite the efforts of our federal and state governments? 

So, while maybe the Huffington Post is (sarcasm!) "anti-Obama,” it's to be reasonably and realistically referenced when roughly 2/3 of polled Americans acknowledge we're on the wrong track. 

And maybe CNN (accused of being the "Clinton News Network") is also (sarcasm!) "anti-Obama" when it acknowledges that, while Americans are "vastly better off than they were eight years ago," we are still in a nation where "most are worried." 

1) Politically, this is the last Labor Day before the post-Obama era, and this means that Ms. Hillary Clinton will have to thread the needle of maintaining the support of Obama voters while distancing herself from what many voters (including those supporting the President) want to change after President Obama leaves office. The "Obama Economy" isn't exactly the stuff of legends. 

And of Mr. Donald Trump? He will certainly have no problem distancing himself from President Obama, and that same CNN article above notes that the low GDP growth (2%/year) during the entirety of this President's tenure is a real story. Furthermore, worker pay, student debt, government debt, and income inequality have also become very, very real stories. 

And perhaps those following the news have noted that Mr. Trump trashed the "Bush Legacy" on his way to winning the GOP primary race? So his big question will be, "We all hate President Bush, but after eight years, is President Obama also guilty of keeping the American Economy down?" 

Translated, that means, "If Bush was responsible for the Great Recession, is Obama responsible for the Second Great Depression?”   

After all, could President Obama have listened to former President Bill Clinton's suggestions to make it easier for large employers to come back home to the United States, and could President Obama have listened to GOP leaders to make "Obamacare" less painful for both employers and employees alike? 

While the 2008 election was an autopsy of the Bush Presidency, won't the 2012 election be an autopsy of the Obama Presidency? The President might have roughly half of Americans polled giving him a "favorable" rating, but stocks and housing prices being up doesn't really help Main Street as much as it does Wall Street and the better off. 

2) We hear that the Unemployment Rate is down, but isn't that just more smoke and mirrors? 

There's a high likelihood that Mr. Trump will raise this issue again, just as he did during the GOP primary debates, of distinguishing between the Unemployment Rate (4.9%) and the Unemployment and Underemployment Rate (9.6%). 

CNBC reports on the vital distinction of the U-3 rate versus the U-6 rate and it's hoped that the reporting of the U-3 rate of "unemployment" will be discarded by our next Presidential administration in favor of the U-6 rate of "unemployment plus underemployment.”   

Because if you're underemployed, life still sucks. 

And if you're working 2-3 jobs and 50+ hours a week, and still barely making ends meet, your life still sucks. 

And for those giving up on looking for employment, and don't even register in the "unemployment rate?” Your life really sucks! 

A quick look on various websites even those unsympathetic to Mr. Trump will acknowledge that our economy is very unhealthy. 

And the proof? Why else would the Fed keep rates so historically low for so many years in a row?   

3) So while some of us are doing well, perhaps we should be thankful for what we have while sparing a few moments for our less fortunate friends and neighbors. 

Are those who've given up looking for work, or who've remained underemployed for years, real people or just a figment of our imaginations? They are Americans -- human beings with real needs and real hopes and real dreams. Ignoring them is just inhumane for this (or any other) Labor Day. 

The freeways and roads and rails are filled with people spending money and going to or from work. But too often it's for lousy jobs without benefits. Furthermore, thanks to both state and federal shackling of employers, it's too often for jobs that are only 30 or less hours per week. 

Both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump have put the pharmaceutical industry on notice that we're paying too much for prescription medicines. The "Affordable Care Act,” despite its good intentions, was too politically-motivated and written by the health plans who helped cause our nation's growing crisis in affordable health care. This leaves health care still too darned unaffordable for too many. 

Utility costs are also too darned unaffordable for too many so that our quality of life is yet again impacted negatively while trying to make ends meet and actually (gasp!) afford a vacation. 

There's a limit that we all, as adults aware of the limitations of the real world and of physics, must confront with respect to infrastructure costs and the limits of "green" energy. Rebuilding our infrastructure is something we will have to pay big bucks for, but are we doing it wisely and efficiently, or just benefiting those in the energy industries? 

And let's not kid ourselves: a home is all but unaffordable for anyone making less than six digit figures in the major metropolitan areas of California. 

To conclude, Americans are to be commended for their never-ending fight for financial freedom and independence. Using our cars for Uber or Lyft, or using our homes for Airbnb, might be innovative and smart...but these "cottage industries" are not the cornerstone of an economy that favors the middle class as much as they help the rich while enabling a few smart, tough middle-class folks stay in their income bracket. 

So here's to American Labor! Hanging in there, despite and not because of Washington, D.C. or Sacramento. And it's probably a labor force that is collectively looking forward to shedding the Big Lie in favor of embracing the Big Hope.

(Ken Alpern is a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at  [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EDITOR’S PICK-Twenty-four years ago I was raped at gunpoint in the cold, dark backroom of the Payless shoe store where I was then working. Two years ago I signed on to a brilliant script called “The Birth of a Nation,” to play a woman who was raped. One month ago I was sent a story about Nate Parker, the very talented writer, director and star of this film. Seventeen years ago Nate Parker was accused and acquitted of sexual assault. Four years ago the woman who accused him committed suicide. (Photo above center: Gabrielle Union performing in the movie Birth of a Nation.)

Different roads circling one brutal, permeating stain on our society. A stain that is finely etched into my own history. Rape is a wound that throbs long after it heals. And for some of us the throbbing gets too loud. Post traumatic stress syndrome is very real and chips away at the soul and sanity of so many of us who have survived sexual violence.  

Since Nate Parker’s story was revealed to me, I have found myself in a state of stomach-churning confusion. I took this role because I related to the experience. I also wanted to give a voice to my character, who remains silent throughout the film. In her silence, she represents countless black women who have been and continue to be violated. Women without a voice, without power. Women in general. But black women in particular. I knew I could walk out of our movie and speak to the audience about what it feels like to be a survivor.

My compassion for victims of sexual violence is something that I cannot control. It spills out of me like an instinct rather than a choice. It pushes me to speak when I want to run away from the platform. When I am scared. Confused. Ashamed. I remember this part of myself and must reach out to anyone who will listen — other survivors, or even potential perpetrators.

As important and ground-breaking as this film is, I cannot take these allegations lightly. (Read the rest.) 

-cw

EDITOR’S PICK--By most accounts and most polls, Hillary Clinton is headed for a landslide victory over the know-nothing/believe-in-nothing narcissist Donald Trump. 

That is true this weekend — the traditional Labor Day weekend campaign kickoff — despite Clinton being badly-damaged and reviled in the eyes of most Americans just like her rival. 

Still, she is acting like someone with a lock on the presidency and a great chance to win control of the Senate and weaken the Republican stranglehold on the House. She doesn’t meet with the press. She isn’t even campaigning, preferring to immerse herself in thousands of pages of cheat sheets and training with a large support group for the first debate at the end of the month. 

It’s a dream come true scenario for Democrats so what could go wrong? 

Trump in the third resurrection of his deranged campaign has turned to racists, fascists and ideologues of the dark side of the American political experience. He has placed his only hope in shocking revelations that would confirm for one and all that Hillary is the lying, crooked amoral self-server that Republicans and rightist fanatics have been claiming for so long. 

Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, the accused rapist holed up in the Ecuador Embassy in London, says he’s got the dynamite ready to drop on Hillary just as he exposed how despicable the Democratic Party was in its treatment of Bernie Sanders. (Read the rest.)   

UNRAVELING RAPE-Over the last year, two serious threats students face on college campuses have made headlines. Young women are being raped at such an alarming rate -- one out of every five, according to a survey conducted by the Association of American Universities -- that the problem of sexual assault on campus is being described as epidemic. 

Young women aren’t the only ones under assault. Young men are being threatened by violence in another way. If they participate in America’s favorite sport – football -- they may incur repeated blows to the head, running the risk of suffering from a life-altering, progressive neurological impairment called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Symptoms of CTE include memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, aggression and suicidal thoughts and can lead to conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, dementia and even ALS -- amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. 

But with both problems, university administrators, coaches and other officials charged with protecting students have been slow to respond or take serious measures to protect students. And aside from the fact that in these cases, we appear to have abandoned the least modicum of care for our young, there are other, deeper ways these issues are connected -- not only to our ideas of gender, but to an eroding democracy with a social order in which the wealthy have garnered inordinate power over the rest of us. 

The treatment of football players reflects an economy so driven by outsize greed that, in too many cases, individuals, institutions and corporations have forsaken the most elementary decency toward their fellow human beings. Football is perceived as a cash cow for higher education, attracting media coverage and thus drawing alumni to donate. Even if these programs lose money, potential donors are feted at games with elaborate parties, often held in luxurious rooms dedicated for this purpose. And while tuition rises, ever more impressive stadiums are being built. At the University of California at Berkeley, according to The Washington Post, the mortgage on athletic buildings rose from zero to $23.4 billion in just 10 years. 

Beyond financial gain, football plays another role in an economy ruled by ruthless aggression. This sport is a prime example of the triumph of physical power, a metaphor for the reigning ethos which, whether consciously or unconsciously, is based on the notion that might makes right. Watching a game in which young men batter each other feeds the sense that somehow the larger game -- in which a privileged few take up the vast majority of resources, leaving the rest to fight for what’s left -- is the natural order of existence. In this way, football acts as a live-action demonstration of social Darwinism. 

By this logic, it may seem like business as usual if young men’s bodies have to be sacrificed in order to witness the triumph of will played out in college games. So why should it be surprising that this drama is played out in other ways, too? 

News stories from California to Kentucky to Florida have alerted the public to a spate of rapes committed by football players, on and off campus. 

Indeed, the link between football and rape is more than anecdotal. On game days, the rate of rape on campuses goes up by as much as 28 percent, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Athletes are not by any means responsible for most of the rapes that occur on campus. But it is revealing that, according to a study conducted by sociologist and criminologist Laura Finley, athletes who play certain sports are disproportionately represented among the perpetrators of rape, attempted rape and assault, namely “power and performance sports” such as football, hockey, wrestling and boxing. 

Finley and others have recommended that we try to unravel what for decades feminists have called “rape culture” -- the idea, for instance, that football stars are entitled to bevies of women and the accompanying notions that women really never mean “no” when they say it and that, in fact, women like being raped. The perspective feminists brought to bear on the issue of rape in the 1970s has apparently not yet created the radical shift in consciousness they hoped for. 

Decades ago, feminists challenged conventional wisdom about rape, including the more liberal notions that rapists are sexually frustrated, lack impulse control or are propelled by an overwhelmingly strong sexual drive. Before this challenge, the typical perpetrator was often portrayed as a forlorn figure suffering from deprivation, or was secretly admired as a dashing character, one who, even if villainous, was also enviable. The conservative view tends to be more judgmental toward both the attacker and the attacked. Rapists are victims of seduction, it is suggested, except when not, and then they are simply monsters. Yet as diverse as these explanations are, one thing unites them: the assumption that rape is primarily motivated by physical desire, and that it is thus essentially a sexual act. 

Women who have been raped know otherwise. Though I have never been raped, in the course of researching a book I wrote about the subject, I heard many women’s accounts. What all of them had in common was the terror and pain the perpetrator inflicted. Far from taking pleasure in the assault, women who are raped are traumatized, suffering after-effects for years. Research conducted in the late 1960s and early ’70s by sociologist Menachem Amir supplied the other side of this disturbing picture. Studying a group of men serving time in prison for sexual assault, he concluded that they did not suffer from any sexual abnormality so much as an exceptional tendency toward aggression. 

Understanding rape as a cruel act of aggression has lifted the onus from the victim and helped restore dignity to women who have been raped. But it has done little to prevent rape. And perhaps this is because -- despite former Republican presidential candidate and current Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s recent suggestion that to prevent being raped, young women should not drink alcohol -- the problem does not lie with women but with the men who assault them. 

What, then, shall we do? I doubt most men or, for that matter, women believe that all men harbor an inborn tendency to rape. As Amir’s study makes clear, the qualities that differentiate rapists from others have little to do with either anatomy or desire. Rather, the motivations for rape often appear to stem from a toxic mixture of sexual arousal and aggression, desire shaped by the will to conquer, to take by force, to win and dominate. This formula becomes especially dangerous when coupled with pervasive ideas about women that cast them as objects willing, even wishing, to be dominated, to be taken by force. 

Yet it is clear that young women and men are being victimized in a similar way. Ultimately, despite all the fanfare, football players are treated like meat, commodities to be used up and discarded. Sound familiar? 

Creating a sense of connection between two groups that are exploited and abused will not be easy. This understanding does not excuse athletes who have raped women, nor does it constitute grounds for forgiveness. Rather, it offers a path to prevention, one that challenges the ways men and women alike are abused. Just as historically working-class whites have been pitted against African-Americans, when young men whose bodies are being exploited attack young women, ultimately they are serving the powerful by dividing the victims of a rapacious system. 

Moreover, for those brave enough to do so, to acknowledge our common cause offers a path of escape from damaging stereotypes about gender, including the idea that masculinity equals domination. And uncoupling brutal aggression from what it means to be a man could upend the entire social structure.

(Susan Griffin is the author of 20 books. In 1972, she published her groundbreaking essay, “Rape: The All-American Crime,” in Ramparts magazine. A Guggenheim fellow, she is also a recipient of the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement. Her book “A Chorus of Stones,” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. “Woman and Nature,” a work that inspired the eco-feminist movement, will be issued in a new edition by Counterpoint in September. This piece was first posted on TruthDig.com.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS-Research shows that adults make somewhere in the neighborhood of 35,000 choices on a daily basis. The comforting news is that we don’t need the really powerful part of our brains for most of them. That’s a good thing because, as anyone who has scrolled through a lineup of 1,000 cable channels or perused the cereal aisle in a major supermarket can attest, decisions – even the most seemingly mundane – can be agonizing. 

But there are many decisions we make every day that do have wide-ranging impact. Let’s start with a surprising one – the choices we make every time we open our wallets. Six years ago, on Labor Day, I decided to try an experiment for three months to focus my buying decisions on ethical choices that would help create jobs in my community, and around the country. I chose to see if it was possible to purchase only union-made products and services in America today. I found out quickly it wasn’t always easy for me to do. But it was the right choice, and I had plenty of resources. Having spent much of my professional life working for or within the labor movement, I knew which cereals, beers and cars were made by companies that treat their workers fairly. 

These are the choices that we enjoy as free market American consumers, and while we may occasionally debate over Coors vs. Budweiser, we don’t lose too much sleep over it. Heck, Americans spend more than $5 trillion per year on consumer products alone. Shopping is in our DNA. In 2015, consumers spent $770 billion on groceries, more than $780 billion in restaurant sales and nearly $100 billion on hotels and motels. 

What if we captured just a portion of that tidal energy to generate a revived American economy? 

Our purchasing decisions – if made with some consideration – can be focused into what I like to call an Ethical Consumer Movement. I’m talking about a national movement through which we use the power of our spending dollars to speak out in favor of responsible businesses and against those that do not pay their workers the wages and benefits that they deserve. 

During the primary season this year, Americans were treated to spirited discussions on both sides of the aisle about our country’s increasing problem with income inequality. According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 2015, CEO pay rose to 276 times the annual average pay for the typical worker. This is up from what now looks like a very reasonable 20-1 ratio in 1965. All the while, productivity continues to rise, but wages have stagnated. Consider, the federal minimum wage is still $7.25 in 2016, stuck at the same rate it’s been for more than seven years. 

One of the responses to this inequity, naturally, is to raise the minimum wage, and cities from Los Angeles to New York have taken action. I applaud this, as no one should be making poverty wages for an honest day’s work. But simply increasing the floor isn’t enough. Change doesn’t have to come from the top down, or from the ballot box. Change can begin at home, every day, and progress incrementally for a long-lasting impact. 

If we as consumers only spend our hard-earned dollars on high-road businesses, the “rising tide lifts all boats” argument would take care of the rest. American businesses that pay their employees fairly and treat them well would prosper, and the others would pass by the wayside. The middle class, and America, would strengthen, and that pesky income inequality problem would slowly shrink. This is grassroots at its simplest. 

All this comes back to making decisions. This Labor Day, and every day, when at the supermarket or looking to buy a car, an appliance or considering which hotel to stay at, keep in mind where your money is going, and how those people making a product or providing a service are treated. Consider if they’re being paid fairly and justly. 

How can you help? 

By making the right choice.

(Cherri Senders is the founder and president of Labor 411, a consumer guide to union-made goods and services.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.