THE DON JONES INDEX…	GAINS POSTED in GREEN LOSSES POSTED in RED
	9/11/17… 15,636.30 9/5/17… 15,651.03 6/27/13… 15,000.00

(THE DOW JONES INDEX: 9/11/17… 21,797.79; 9/5/17… 21,987.56; 6/27/13… 15,000.00)

LESSON for September 11, 2017 – GIVE ME LIBERTY (or at least give me an i-Phone 10)!

Back in the day… the day being May 29^th of this year… we considered a fellow by the name of Greg Gianforte, elected to Congress from Montana (the only Congressman from that state, as a matter of fact) who did what probably ninety percent of the politicians want to do to nosy journalists, socked him in the face.

He got arrested, even though it was Montana, had to pay a fine and do some community service but was otherwise unharmed and seems to have since disappeared into the swamp that Washington was and remains – before and after Trump. The journalist would seem to have recovered and Montana has gone back to worrying about wildfires (an early snow may come as a welcome solution to that problem) while the rest of the country has moved on to worrying about further tricks that Mother Nature may have up her sleeve.

Anyway, Congressman Gianforte’s display of fisticuffs inspired us to determine what purportedly unbiased (but clearly left-leaning) NGOs like Reporters Without Borders thought of press freedom in America… which led to a broader scrutiny of the rest of American freedoms as analyzed by Freedom House and then, to be fair and balanced, a consideration of the freedom of corporations to do business (including cheating and hoaxing their customers, exploiting their workers, despoiling the environment, anything and everything on the table) as expressed by the Heritage Foundation… a bought-and-paid-for think tank servicing the corporate elite and snuggled up with that font of dark money into politics, the Kochtopus.

Quite surprisingly, there turned out to be not much difference between the quarreling three… Heritage denying China’s swallowing Hong Kong but concurring with the others that most of the winners were rich and white, while the losers were African and/or former, unrepentant Commies. America lost to Jamaica, true, but… at 34^th… we eked out victories over Lithuania and Burkina Faso.

Of Reporters Without Borders, we reported this back in May:

Reporters Without Borders uses three criteria to measure press (and by extension, citizen) freedom in the same 180 nations… legal, political and economic… and ranked the United States as the 35^th most free nation, just ahead of Italy, but behind Slovakia.

While America still remains officially “free” (Freedom House has downgraded us to third from the top on a scale of seven), its scores of 6, 12 and 5 respectively gave it a total of 23 (where higher is better), which was down from the 2015/6 standing of 21. The dropoff was from a score of 10 in “political” which is probably attributable to apprehensions about the Trump victory in November.

If RWB found America to be slightly less free this year than last, what are they going to make of Mister (now Congressman) Gianforte. Fortunately, we have the peanut galleries – left and right – to thank for providing us with certain insights into the future of press freedom well before RWB conducts its 2017/18 survey.

This year, they ranked Norway as the freest (if not best) place for journalists and North Korea only the second worst, behind war-torn Syria. Due to the age of the data for some of the viciousness categories and for prison population, Syria finished out of the bottom ten… which would not be the case at present. Then too, some of the economic data on small Caribbean islands is likely to be blowing in the wind as a result of the recent storms.

Freedom House also ranked Norway as #1 for the general public and did put the North Koreans last. This from the May DJI…

The 2017 Freedom House report singled out “populists and autocrats” and warned that the principles of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law will give way to “a world in which individual leaders and nations pursue their own narrow interests without meaningful constraints, and without regard for the shared benefits of global peace, freedom, and prosperity.” They wrote that 67 nations had suffered net declines in human rights over 2016, while only 36 recorded gains. It was the eleventh straight year that the world was less free than in the previous year.

Some of these declines were in countries previously categorized as “free” as opposed to Third World hellholes. FH called President Trump “a mercurial figure with unconventional views on foreign policy and other matters” and cited Brexit, the failed democracies of Italy and Poland and the “hubris” of Russian tinkering with the U.S. elections, invading Ukraine and supporting Syria’s mad dictator Assad. Chinese military moves in the Pacific threatened its neighbors, while “unscrupulous leaders from South Sudan and Ethiopia to Thailand and the Philippines engaged in human rights violations of varying scale with impunity.

“Authoritarian powers engaged in brazen acts of aggression, and grave atrocities went unanswered in war zones across two continents.”

Freedom House, reporting while Barack Obama was still President, could rank the United States no better than 43^rd among some 180 nations… ahead of Comoros but just behind Burkina Faso. America has never finished higher than 20^th in this millennium; and those scores were achieved in the first two years of the Obama administration, during which Democrats also controlled Congress. Even with the campaign still in progress, the United States received a downward trend arrow because of “the cumulative impact of flaws in the electoral system, a disturbing increase in the role of private money in election campaigns and the legislative process, legislative gridlock, the failure of the Obama administration to fulfill promises of enhanced government openness, and fresh evidence of racial discrimination and other dysfunctions in the criminal justice system.”

Speaking of private money, the Heritage Foundation (see past Indices like this) didn’t have much good to say about America either…

While RWB and Freedom House gave their highest marks to small, cold European democracies (both picked Norway as #1), Heritage named Hong Kong as the most economically free place in the world (unilaterally divesting it from China). Another tiny Asian state… Singapore… ranked second (all those reports about caning did not figure into their matrix).

What Heritage did consider of importance were twelve free-market criteria, these being (with the scores for Hong Kong appended)…

Property Rights 93.7 Tax Burden 93.0 Monetary Freedom 83.2

Government Integrity 80.3 Fiscal Health 100.0 Trade Freedom 90.0

Judicial Effectiveness 84.0 Business Freedom 94.6 Investment Freedom 90.0

Government Spending 90.0 Labor Freedom 83.2 Financial Freedom 90.0

The United States finished 17^th, its best showing among the three agencies, but they still trailed Lithuania and finished barely ahead of Denmark and Sweden. Obviously, some of the positive Heritage criteria might be interpreted as negatives in the other two instances as both espoused a liberal bent regarding tax cuts for the rich and deregulation (which, liberals will cry, lead to safety issues, pollution and the full Republican agenda… lower wages, higher rents).

Hong Kong is now, of course, the sole property and bitch of the Chinese Empire, but its economy has been allowed to flourish, so long as a slice of the profits flow back to Beijing. Communism, after all, is drab… capitalist economies have i-Phones, Hollywood movies, glitzy retail outlets and exploited foreign workers (in the case of China, thousands of North Koreans who work basically for free with their “wages” shipped back to Mister Kim… an arrangement that may be threatened by the recent bellicosity of the NorKor military.

The two new categories added to the list are also old categories, taken from an old DJI report on the most vicious countries in the world. The first, stand-alone topic is prison population… bad people certainly have to be locked up, but the figures still indicate that the United States has (almost) the worst people in the world, second only to the Seychelles Islands which is full of incarcerated Somali pirates. On the other hand, it may be… and certain others, including some conservatives… are coming round to the conviction that a lot of convictions and incarcerations are simply a way to sweep the poor, the dark-skinned and those as might give lie to the American Dream into cages where nobody will see them and the carnival can party on.

Admittedly, these figures may have some problems… there are nations which are, in fact, gulags in and to themselves. Other places have small prison populations because they kill the people that they deem unworthy to partake in society, such as it is. The data is old, the provenance suspicious… does any serious person believe that Syria locks up fewer people than Norway, Denmark or Switzerland (perhaps they do, briefly, before taking them outside to be shot)? But it is what it is, remains an important signpost of national health.

Finally, we condensed and incorporated the Viciousness data (see here or note Attachment 2) and gave it one fifth of the whole, despite… being a construct of wealthy institutions and global bodies like the OECD, it had less than a third of the countries of the globe on its roster. (We also detached prison population and erased the sexual differentiation… the result being that 2014’s most vicious state, Thailand, plummeted (or rose) to the middle of the pack. And, because we are speaking of Liberty, the highest marks went to the most vicious countries (like the Ukrainians, Russians and Americans) who enjoy their sex, booze, drugs, smokes and calories far more than the abstemious Islamic states. This may seem backwards, at least as in respect to our previous categorization of health, but we and the Russkis and some others have the liberty to indulge our baser instincts and, by Satan, we do so!

Bolstered by a high Viciousness score and good grades from Heritage, New Zealand takes the gold as the freest nation in the world, followed by a bunch of Scandinavians (obviously) as well as Jamaica (which beat out the Americans, mon) and the feckin’ Irish.

And here are the findings…

Note: We designated the best of the category in green, the worst in red. There were a few adjustments – these amounted to no significant change at either the top or bottom of the chart and are noted in italics. Heritage, strangely enough, ranked slightly different than it scored… perhaps considering other, occult factors, and a few of their ranked nations did not have a recorded score.

We included a number of small and contested places that do not appear in other categories and in the case of two European microstates (Andorra and Liechtenstein), they scored rather high. We also included Hong Kong because so much of the data was old that they were still considered a free, independent country at the time.

As mentioned above, some of the Heritage findings were incoherent, but are reprinted as stated… we can’t blame them, they’re rich.

		Heritage Foundation		Reporters w/o Borders		Freedom House		Prison Population		Viciousness (from 7/16/14)
		Rank	Score	Rank	Score	Rank	Score	Rank	Pop.	Rank	Score	Average
1	New Zealand	003	98	006	16	013	13.98	42	69	8	22.75	14.6
2	Iceland	022	97	011	14	010	13.03	17	45			15.0
3	Sweden	019	100	002	10	002	8.27	25	53	29	16.5	15.4
4	Finland	024	100	003	11	003	8.92	27	55	24	17.6	16.2
5	Denmark	018	97	010	12	004	10.36	33	61	22	20.0	17.4
6	Norway	025	100	001	10	001	7.6	44	70			17.75
7	Ireland	009	97	012	16	014	14.08	50	79	12	22.2	19.4
8	Switzerland	004	96	014	12	007	12.13	54	84	28	16.7	21.4
9	Canada	007	99	005	20	022	16.53	70	114	6	24.3	22.0
10	Liechtenstein	X	91	029	14	032	20.31	5	27			22.0
11	Andorra	X	X	019	13	035	21.03	23	53			25.7
12	Germany	026	94	022	17	016	14.97	49	78	25	17.3	27.6
13	Austria	030	95	018	21	011	13.47	60	97	20	20.3	27.8
14	Luxembourg	014	98	007	12	015	14.72	76	120			28.0
15	Belgium	049	95	017	11	009	12.75	61	98	27	16.9	30.6
16	Australia	005	98	008	21	019	16.02	103	152	19	20.75	30.8
17	Netherlands	015	99	004	11	005	11.28	127	202	26	17.2	35.4
18	Japan	040	96	016	24	072	29.44	18	47	39	12.0	37.0
19	Cyprus	048	94	025	25	030	19.79	51	80			38.5
20	Portugal	077	97	013	17	018	15.77	91	137	11	22.25	42.0
21	France	072	90	033	22	039	22.24	65	103	4	24.7	42.6
22	Estonia	006	94	021	16	012	13.55	132	221			42.75
23	South Korea	023	82	048	31	063	27.61	66	107	17	21.2	43.4
24	Spain	069	94	024	27	029	18.69	89	131	7	24.0	43.6
25	Czech Republic	028	94	023	19	023	16.91	130	211	15	21.9	43.8
26	Costa Rica	063	91	028	18	006	11.93	160	352			44.25
27	Chile	010	94	026	31	033	20.53	142	242	13	22.1	44.8
28	United King.	012	95	020	21	040	22.26	161	365	5	24.4	47.6
29	Malta	050	96	015	22	047	24.76	88	131			50.0
30	Slovenia	097	92	027	24	037	21.7	45	73			51.5
31	Italy	079	89	036	33	052	26.26	56	89	36	14.75	51.8
32	Jamaica	041	75	063	18	008	12.73	98	145			52.5
33	Hong Kong	001	X	72	35	073	29.46	71	115	45	7.7	53.3
34	United States	017	89	035	18	043	23.88	172	693	3	27.75	54.0
35	Lithuania	016	91	030	24	036	21.37	144	254			54.5
36	Burkina Faso	093	63	082	42	042	23.85	12	41			54.75
37	Latvia	020	87	039	28	028	18.62	136	224			54.75
38	Romania	039	84	043	42	046	24.46	94	142			56.0
39	Poland	045	89	037	26	054	26.47	122	187	23	18.9	56.2
40	Uruguay	038	98	009	26	025	17.43	154	291			56.5
41	Slovakia	057	89	034	22	017	15.51	121	184			57.25
42	Mauritius	021	89	038	30	056	26.67	116	174			57.75
43	Taiwan	011	91	031	26	045	24.37	149	267			59.0
44	Namibia	078	77	059	31	024	17.08	96	144			64.25
45	Comoros	121	55	094	49	044	24.33	2	19			65.25
46	Croatia	095	87	041	40	074	29.59	52	81			65.5
47	South Africa	081	78	055	35	031	20.12	155	292	9	22.5	66.2
48	Greece	127	84	044	41	088	30.89	57	91	18	20.75	66.8
49	Senegal	120	78	056	52	058	26.72	35	62			67.25
50	Benin	096	82	049	34	078	30.32	47	77			67.5
51	Botswana	034	72	066	41	048	24.93	124	193			68.0
52	Qatar	029	26	134	67	123	39.83	24	53	46	7.25	71.2
53	Israel	036	80	052	31	091	31.01	147	265	32	15.8	71.6
54	Côte d'Ivoire	075	52	099	61	081	30.42	29	56			72.0
55	Indonesia	084	65	075	49	124	39.93	41	69	38	13.0	72.4
56	Georgia	013	64	078	49	064	27.76	146	262			72.75
57	Bulgaria	047	80	053	37	109	35.01	83	125			73.0
58	Colombia	037	64	081	53	129	41.47	141	240	10	22.5	73.6
59	Kosovo	046	52	100	49	082	30.45	63	100			73.75
60	Tonga	073	74	064	29	049	24.97	110	166			74.0
61	Argentina	156	82	047	52	050	25.07	106	160	16	21.75	75.0
62	Tanzania	105	X	108	51	083	30.65	39	64			75.7
63	Armenia	033	45	109	61	079	30.38	87	130			77.0
64	Hungary	056	76	062	36	071	29.01	119	183			77.0
65	India	143	77	060	38	136	42.94	7	33	40	11.75	77.2
66	Seychelles	085	71	068	56	087	30.86	173	799			78.25
67	Madagascar	113	56	091	66	057	26.71	53	84			78.5
68	Papua New Gu.	152	64	077	28	051	25.07	38	63			79.5
69	Malaysia	027	44	112	64	144	46.89	114	172	14	22.0	80.2
70	Serbia	099	76	061	36	066	28.05	95	142			80.25
71	Trin./Tobago	087	81	050	26	034	20.62	150	272			80.25
72	Mali	102	45	110	46	116	38.27	8	33			81.5
73	Cape Verde	116	90	032	27	027	18.02	152	286			81.75
74	Mauritania	131	30	129	47	055	26.49	15	44			82.5
75	Sierra Leone	148	66	074	49	085	30.73	28	55			83.75
76	Albania	065	68	072	49	076	29.92	123	192			84.0
77	Iraq	X	27	133	67	158	54.03	82	123	47	3.7	84.0
78	Kuwait	061	36	122	59	104	33.61	67	112			84.0
79	Niger	154	49	105	58	061	27.21	16	44			84.0
80	Lesotho	134	64	079	49	068	28.78	58	92			84.75
81	Fiji	071	59	088	56	067	28.64	115	174			85.25
82	Am. Samoa	108	80	051	29	021	16.41	162	382			85.5
83	Peru	043	72	067	43	090	30.98	143	251			85.75
84	Singapore	002	51	103	67	151	51.1	131	219	42	11.4	85.8
85	Belize	101	87	040	22	041	23.43	163	410			86.25
86	Bosnia/Herz	092	55	095	49	065	27.83	93	140*			86.25
87	Togo	138	X	159	70	086	30.75	36	62			86.7
88	Mongolia	129	85	042	37	069	28.95	148	266			87.0
89	Nigeria	115	50	104	51	122	39.69	9	35			87.5
90	Macedonia	031	57	090	56	111	35.74	109	166			88.75
91	Malawi	149	63	083	53	070	28.97	43	70			88.75
92	Oman	082	25	137	71	126	40.46	10	36			88.75
93	Nepal	125	52	101	58	100	33.02	34	62			90.0
94	Liberia	161	62	086