It is periodically reported that California’s Prop 14 (Non-partisan Top Two Primary) was drafted in the middle of the night in the back rooms of the California Legislature. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Here is the truth:

Many Americans will be staying out of the voting booth for the 2018 elections, disillusioned by the promises of politicians and convinced that the political system is irreparably corrupt.

At least that's what respondents told poll takers at USA Today and Suffolk University in a recent survey:

“If something cannot go on forever, it must stop.”

In economics, this is known as Herb Stein’s law. We ignore it at our peril.

In the 2000s, economists and other observers pointed out that real estate prices could not continue to rise at such a blistering pace. They didn’t. The entire global financial system was put at risk when that unsustainable trend came to a screeching halt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih9Ir0B5uGE

At a briefing on Capitol Hill, the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation presented new public opinion data that shows American voters are eager for three key electoral reforms that would give voters a greater voice at the ballot box and more fair representation in government, while tempering the partisan rancor that currently dominates our politics.

Americans are angry about the apathetic approach to our online data security by our state and federal governments, as well as tech giants. Repeatedly our data is compromised. The thieves are sometimes hackers, hell-bent on creating false identities or worse, and sometimes the culprits are big businesses making a buck off the personal preferences we offer up for free.

T.J. O’Hara,the host of Deconstructed, is joined by two guests this week to discuss their work between the partisan political space, Debilyn Molineaux and Cheryl Graeve.

The two discuss their organizations' activities in the pursuit of expanding civic engagement across the nation, as well as improve our political processes.

Several Arizona teachers are set to walkout of their classrooms Thursday in protest of low teacher salaries and in-classroom spending that put Arizona below nearly every state. School districts are even closing hundreds of schools in anticipation of how many teachers will participate.

It's a topic that has educators, voters, and some candidates riled up as Republican and Democratic policymakers fail to do anything about it.

In an interview at the World Economic Forum earlier this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said his company is not only committed to but always believes that "Data always belongs to the user and as companies we are only stewards of it."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R-oTS1KOT8

The comments come as the tech giant is funding opposition to the California Consumer Privacy Act. 

Last week, Attorney Michael Attanasio and those representing the SoccerCity initiative, filed a lawsuit to toss out the SDSU West initiative on the grounds it violates state law. Attanasio said, “Public university names are the property of the state and its citizens, and this law was specifically intended to prevent their exploitation by private business interests.”

We are facing a terrifying fact, lying has become an industry.

And it as been proven that information manipulation can, and does. create reality. We have to ask ourselves; are we, in fact, learning to live with lies?

The recent Facebook scandal has shown that gathering information about people and then using that information to create an alternate truth is a marketable, and profitable, business.