Thursday, August 16, 2012

Ayn Rand: The Right's Weirdest Idol of All


(From the Aug. 1, 2011, issue of The Progressive Populist, Hal Crowther takes down Ayn Rand, the atheist Russian emigre who inspired young Paul Ryan, among others, to become a right-wing Republican.)

By Hal Crowther

The Republican Party’s slapstick search for a leader would be heartwarming and sidesplitting, but for the tragic knowledge that one of these scrambling midgets will collect tens of millions of votes in the presidential election of 2012. Never have so many amounted to so little, talked so much rubbish, dreamed of an office so far above their abilities. Blood pressures rose among party elders when Donald Trump, marginally Republican and one of the greatest fools in the solar system, momentarily tossed his hairpiece into the ring and became the instant favorite.

The GOP dilemma — a golden opportunity to rule but nothing to say and no one to say it — is so desperate that my instinct is to help them sort it out. Could we make a start, at least, by dismissing candidates who called for President Obama’s birth certificate or raised the specter of Sharia law in America, followed briskly off the stage by lunatics who dismiss global warming as a socialist plot?

That would leave plenty of unbalanced extremists still in the running, yet reduce the stench of sheer evil and madness. The “birther” and Sharia cults reek of cheesy talk-radio racism; climate-change denial is a stranger faith yet, a political assault on basic science that insults a ground squirrel’s intelligence and casually threatens the survival of life on earth.

The party that produces birthers and global-warming deniers no doubt harbors End-of-the-Worlders, too, Christians who packed their bags for heaven with the senile prophet Harold Camping on May 21. Though none of them, I suppose, would commit to the time and expense of a presidential campaign just to preside over a nation of sinners expiring in fire and pestilence. Leo Rangell, the prominent Freudian analyst whose obituary is in this morning’s Times, once lamented that the American public is “gullible or easily seduced, and susceptible to leaders of questionable character.”

Dr. Rangell wrote that in 1980, long before gullibility became such an epidemic that we began to doubt the value of our schools, before media demagogues made a billion-dollar industry of manipulating our most credulous citizens, before the Republican Party dedicated itself to gathering most of them into its fold. Before Rush Limbaugh, before Fox News, before the Tea Party.

“Finally, people’s stupidity will break your heart,” observed my father, a small-town politician and a loyal Republican of the moderate traditional strain that has been systematically exterminated by the radical Right.

My father lived long enough to vote for George McGovern and against Ronald Reagan, but the rhetoric GOP candidates churn out to charm this Tea Party would sound extraterrestrial to most Republicans of his generation.

The odious hypocrite Newt Gingrich, who considered himself a serious presidential candidate until his entire staff abandoned him in disgust, rests his appeal on his intellectual superiority to Sarah Palin and Rick Perry — a distinction much like being a faster runner than Dom DeLuise. In his obligatory pre-campaign book Gingrich claims that Barack Obama, a cautious centrist if there ever was one, drives a “secular-socialist machine” that “represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”

Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Father Coughlin, move over. Newt is just full of Shariah, among other things, and accuses Obama of “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior,” a blatant pitch for the racist vote the Tea Party has re-energized. A colossal irony — demonstrating how hopelessly divided America has become — is that the radical philosopher Cornel West, a black Princeton professor, calls Obama “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.” This is not helpful of Dr. West, nor even responsible. He and Newt Gingrich are equally useless if a calmer, more logical and coherent political culture is what we’re after. But if I had to say which of these two hostile portraits of our president is less preposterous, I’m sure I’d choose West’s. Virtually all the valid criticism of Barack Obama has come from the left.

When Tea-stained legislators gut environmental laws to protect corporate profits, when they sneer at climate change while America bakes in its bedrock like a big green casserole — when Republican educational reform means classrooms with fewer teachers and more guns — there’s a temptation for reasonable Americans to throw up their hands and succumb to despair. Is it a death wish or a scheme to kill the rest of us, when “conservatives” fight against clean air laws, or legislate to place a loaded pistol in every yahoo’s holster? I’ve reached the second half of my seventh decade, and I’ve never seen such an intimidating swarm of fanatics and fools marching under one banner. The election of a non-white president has brought out the worst in the worst of us. But who guessed that there were so many, or that their worst was so awful?

The late Albert Einstein, of my father’s persuasion if not of his party, once wrote despairingly, “The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time.” But the coalition that poisons this struggling republic is an unnatural one, made up of rich cynics who supply the money and poor ignoramuses who supply the votes. They have nothing in common, except that the cynics will say anything and the morons will believe it. There must be something, optimists insist, that could drive a wedge between the exploiters and the exploited — some irresistible revelation, some fraud or contradiction so flagrant that the most obtuse voter could see how callously and criminally he’s being used.

How about Ayn Rand? The latest Republican poster boy, congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, stole the media spotlight with a slash-to-the-bone budget proposal that Fox News heralded as the Magna Carta of fiscal responsibility in America. I lack the expertise to take on Rep. Ryan’s budget digit-for-digit, but I place considerable confidence in the opinion of the Times’ Paul Krugman, who won a Nobel Prize for Economics in 2008. “The proposal wasn’t serious at all,” Krugman wrote. “In fact, it was a sick joke. The only real things in it were savage cuts in aid to the needy and the uninsured, huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and Medicare privatization. All the alleged cost savings were pure fantasy.”

That sounds about par for the current Republican course, with fresh infusions of Tea Party belligerence and unreality. But what frightened me most about Rep. Ryan was the report that he is an avowed disciple of the writer/philosopher Ayn Rand, and has declared in public that Rand is “the reason I got involved in public service.” Good grief, she’s back. She died in 1982, but someone neglected to drive a stake through her heart.

A passion for the prose and philosophy of Ayn Rand tells us a great deal about an individual, none of it good. There are few surer signs of a poor reader, a poor thinker and an unpleasant person than a well-thumbed copy of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead.

In 2005, Rand’s acolytes gathered in Washington for a symposium to celebrate her 100th birthday — the occasion for Rep. Ryan’s disturbing confession — and I admit I’d give anything to see the seating chart. If there was some way to ban everyone in that room from holding public office, we could probably turn the United States of America back toward the generous light of reason.

She was to literature what Rod McKuen was to poetry, what Fabian was to rock n’ roll, what Guru Maharaj Ji was to religion. Look them up. Like them, she once enjoyed a huge audience of admirers. Unlike them, she was never harmless and she’s enjoying an alarming revival.

Since Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, it has sold seven million copies. It’s possibly the most polarizing book ever written. For every Paul Ryan who finds it life-shaping, a dozen readers are mystified and a dozen more appalled. Few actually finish the 1,200-page novel, which ends with the mysterious Galt drawing a dollar sign in the air with his finger. If you wade into this stuff up to your ankles — the hokey melodrama, the backlit macro-characters posed like Easter Island monoliths, the cruel and obvious message stamped on every page—-you begin to fear that you can never wash it off.

At times her critics oversimplify Rand’s beliefs, which embody any number of contradictions and opacities. But essentially she glorifies the will and celebrates Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, the superman whose blazing passage through the world need never be impeded by the interests or opinions of mediocrities like you and me. It’s the same string of arrogant assumptions that spawned the Master Race theories of Herr Hitler: ego-deification, social Darwinism, arbitrary stratification of human types. Adapted for capitalism, it becomes the divine right to plunder — a license for those who own nearly everything to take the rest, because they wish to, because they can. Because the weak don’t matter. Let the big dogs feed. This repulsive theology was the work of a fairly repulsive person.

For an eyewitness portrait of Ayn Rand in the flesh, in the prime of her celebrity, you can’t improve on the “Ubermensch” chapter in Tobias Wolff’s autobiographical novel Old School.

Invited to meet with the faculty and student writers at the narrator’s boarding school, Rand arrives with an entourage of chain-smoking idolaters in black and behaves so repellently that her audience of innocents gets a life lesson in what kind of adult to avoid, and to avoid becoming. Rude, dismissive, vain and self-infatuated to the point of obtuseness — she names Atlas Shrugged as the only great American novel — Rand and her hissing chorus in black manage to alienate the entire school, even the rich board member who had admired and invited her.

What strikes Wolff’s narrator most forcefully is her utter lack of charity or empathy, her transparent disgust with everything she views as disfiguring or disabling: a huge wen on the headmaster’s forehead, the narrator’s running head cold, the war injury that emasculated Hemingway’s Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.

To the boy, she appears to be exactly the sort of merciless egotist who might have designed a fascist philosophy that exalts power and disparages altruism. Rand is wearing a gold pin in the shape of a dollar sign. After meeting her, he can no longer read a word of The Fountainhead, which as an adolescent romantic he had enjoyed.

This division of the human race into the elect few who are destiny’s darlings and the “second-rate” multitudes above whom they soar—-this Ubermensch nonsense—-is perilously thin ice on which to rest a philosophy (Nietzsche, you recall, went hopelessly mad.)

Since there’s no agency that rates human beings the way we rate bonds, the elect are always self-elected supermen and superwomen. Super, says who?

If it’s supposed to be intellect as much as will that sets them above us, I sense a critical problem. Whenever a person of superior intelligence begins to comprehend the human condition, the first fruits of his knowledge are humility and irony—-those two things Rand and her heroes most spectacularly lack.

Personally, I never feel more superior than when I see someone carrying a copy of Atlas Shrugged. What actually sets the self-styled super race apart is an unrepressed infantile id, a raging “I want” that defies socialization. These are damaged children, people of arrested development drawn to an ugly philosophy that legitimizes narcissism and socially unacceptable behavior. Donald Trump would be a perfect example. For an apostle of self-willed happiness, the goddess of greed led a troubled life, marked by depressions, amphetamine addiction, messy love affairs and betrayals. But you could say that she had a capacious mind, if not a healthy or an orderly one.

She was well educated, she had actually read Aristotle and Nietzsche before she hobbled them and hitched them to her wagon. Her unlikely 21st-century resurrection is the work of much smaller, often almost invisible minds that cherry-pick the vast creaking structure of her oeuvre for their own ends, just as they cherry-pick the Bible or The Wealth of Nations.

If corporate feudalism is your dream for America, she’s the prophet for you. Her naïve faith in capitalism and contempt for “the welfare state” are just what the right-wing doctor ordered.

Much of the rest, alas, will never fly in Alabama. Pundits have been delighted to note that the heroine of the new Republicans was a pacifist who opposed the Vietnam War, a feminist who supported abortion, an adulteress who preached free love, a bohemian who mocked family life and child-bearing, an elitist who sneered at the common man, and, after all her “nanny state” rhetoric, a recipient of Social Security and Medicare and a late, sick convert to the benefits of socialized medicine.

Worst of all, for tea-stained Christian Republicans, she was a militant atheist. In Rand’s ideology religious faith was the most abject form of weakness, a sniveling retreat from the hardheaded, self-centered “objectivism” her heroes impose on the world. She not only would have rejected Jesus and his gospels, she actually did—-repeatedly. Christ’s message that the poor are blessed and the meek will inherit the earth is antithetical to Rand’s belief that the poor and meek are no more than mulch where the dreams of the mighty take root.

So adamantly did she denounce the altruism and self-sacrifice at the center of the Christian message, it’s no exaggeration to call her the intellectual Antichrist.

It’s no great exaggeration to say that praising her is like spitting in Christ’s face.

How do Paul Ryan, Ron and Rand Paul and company manage to pass off this radical atheist, this subversive Russian Jew (born Elisa Rosenbaum) as an iconic role model for Christian conservatives?

Apparently they don’t think they need to get into the details, not with their particular constituency. Assuming that they know the details themselves. The careless condescension of their leaders is not yet a scandal to the tea-baggers of America’s unlettered hard Right. But Ayn Rand seems like the biggest joke of all, one that might yet blow up in the party’s face.

The plutocrats she worshiped are so few, the plebeians she scorned are so many. The GOP’s little people can’t all be totally illiterate, and Limbaugh and Glenn Beck actually urge them to read this woman’s books. It’s in-your-face deception that reminds me of the old stage villain, the silent-movie heavy with the waxed mustache, cackling behind his cloak and inviting the audience to share the cruelty he’s about to inflict on his innocent victims. It’s as if Wall Street is surreptitiously giving the finger to Main Street Republicans, laughing at the gullible recruits as they march to the polls to lower corporate taxes and deregulate markets. Ayn Rand, indeed. She would have applauded the big dogs’ ruthlessness but rolled her eyes at the Christian-family rhetoric they’re obliged to use for bait.

She wasn’t one of them, of course; she certainly wasn’t one of us. She was one of a kind, thank god. In her defense, you might argue that her love affair with capitalism was rooted in a Russian Jew’s horror of the totalitarian systems that devastated Europe in the 20th century.

That offers her a gravitas she doesn’t share with ultra-light Midwestern reactionaries like Paul Ryan or Michele Bachmann. But the more Americans read her books, the better for liberals and the worse, I think, for Republicans.

Her work illustrates conclusively what a few brave clergymen and a few ink-stained relics like me have been saying for years to anyone who would listen, and to Republicans who refuse to listen — that Christianity and the wolverine capitalism of a John Galt are totally incompatible systems, two mutually exclusive human possibilities. They cancel each other out. Any political party that pretends to integrate them is a party of liars, and doomed.

 Hal Crowther’s most recent book is Gather at the River. Write him at 219 N. Churton St., Hillsborough, NC 27278.
From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2011

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Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Why would a science writer go on a campaign to belittle education and celebrate ignorance?

By Marc Jampole

Tooling around the Internet, I found two recent Forbes articles by a science writer named David DiSalvo that denigrate education and knowledge. Both are lists, one of do’s and the other of don’ts. But instead of just titling the articles, “Some stuff I’ve learned along the way,” DiSalvo prefers to take pot shots at those with degrees and smarts.

The names of the two articles say it all:
The two lists mostly come down to ways to get along with people: “Don’t talk down to others” and “You can learn something useful from everyone,” although the lists do take occasional snide sideswipes at learning, such as “Learning is good; doing is better” (which turned out not to be true in the case of the atom bomb). Basically, it’s Horatio Alger-Dale Carnegie kind of advice.

So why did DiSalvo tie both lists together with insults to the educated? It is possible that he learned the positive lessons he lists from people who didn’t go to college, just as it’s possible that he saw people he considers brilliant do the dumb things he lists. But that’s his anecdotal experience. Most of the stuff on DeSalvo’s do-this list I learned from people who went to college. His don’t-do list seems to apply equally to people of all intelligence and educational levels in my experience. Those are my anecdotes.

As a science writer, DiSalvo should know that anecdotes don’t prove a thing. If he wants to show some trait that we usually admire, such as brilliance or the discipline to complete college, may be tied to something unadmirable or dangerous, he should cite a study. That’s what a science writer usually does, even when sharing something personal. For example, a recent series of studies gave strong evidence that wealthy people behave less ethically. Of course, no Forbes writer would ever allude to these particular studies, since the Forbes ideology glorifies the wealthy as deserving masters of the universe.

Thus DiSalvo uses a very unscientific approach to make assertions that undercut his profession, since both doing and writing about science require education and a certain modicum of intelligence.

In all of these attacks on intellectualism in the American mass media is a certain smugness, as if to say, we don’t have to read and we don’t have to study. I can understand climate change deniers or those who don’t want to teach evolution in the classroom having such an attitude. But someone who writes about science?  You’d think DiSalvo would find another way to unify his lists of disparate homilies. For example, he could have just as easily written, “Ten Smart Things You Don’t Have to Go to College to Learn,” which is less confrontational and not overtly anti-intellectual.

I would be hard pressed to limit to 10 or even 25 the important things that I learned at college and graduate school—important principles of my profession of writing, ways to deal with people especially in big bureaucracies, success strategies for the real world, the scientific method and other ways of thinking. I’m just listing the topic areas, not the lessons.

And don’t get me started about the things I have learned from the many brilliant people among my relatives, professors, clients, colleagues and friends.

I bet DiSalvo’s list of things he learned from brilliant people and things he learned in college would be as long as mine.

Of course, no one would pay him to write an article around a list that praises science, at least not in the current mass marketplace of ideas, which prefers to celebrate ignorance.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Romney’s Ryan play to the core will only work if the Republicans can suppress enough votes.

By Marc Jampole

For those who have trouble telling Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor apart, Ryan is the thin one with the angular jaw, full head of hair and arrogant demeanor.

I guess that didn’t help much.

All kidding aside, Mitt Romney’s selection of Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan as his running mate is, to state the obvious, another play to the right. It’s now clear that those who thought that Romney would “reset” and move to the “kinder, gentler” center once he won the nomination were wrong. Whatever Romney’s stands were in the past, he now represents the rightwing that has become the Republican Party’s core constituency.

The question of course is why would Romney still be playing to the rightwing instead of trying to snap up independent voters by tacking to the center with another VP selection? Why would he select as his vice president the poster child for the calls to end Medicare?

The common thought is that Romney is still trying to win over the extreme right that still distrusts him because of his previous more moderate stand on key issues. But I’ve come to believe that from the start, Romney and the Republican Party have had a two-prong strategy. One prong is to energize the rightwing base to vote and the other is to suppress the votes of those outside the base by passing and enforcing laws at the state level that make it harder to vote.  Plenty has been written about each strategy by itself but no one seems to have noted that the two strategies work hand in glove and could synergize to yield a Republican victory.

On the national level, the math seems as wrong as the immoral imperative to subvert democracy by preventing people from voting: common sense would suggest that there are many more independent voters that Romney is turning off with his bows to the rights than there are poor, minority and student voters shut out of voting by new rules and de facto poll taxes in Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Ohio and elsewhere. But the math might very well work in a handful of swing states, and that’s where the election will be decided.

Might work, but I don’t think it will, and Paul Ryan is the reason why. He wants to gut Medicare, taking $750 billion in federal funding from the program and turning it into a voucher system.  After the Democrats hammer the airwaves with Ryan’s Medicare plan, Romney’s standing is bound to drop among independents. Ryan also gives core Democrats, many of whom are a bit disappointed in Obama, another reason to vote.  Republican lies about death panels and government takeovers may have made many Americans distrust the Affordable Care Act. But study after study shows that Americans love Medicare just the way it is.

The combination of supporting lower taxes for the wealthy while gutting Medicare will prove deadly to the Republicans.  There are just not enough Democrats whom they can keep from voting to offset the independents who will be turned off by Ryan’s Medicare stand.

Changing the subject: I’ve been meaning to mention that Professors Richard l. Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff recently updated their seminal essay on diversity among chief executive officers. Zweigenhaft and Domhoff find that while there is greater racial and sexual diversity among the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, the overwhelming majority of them still come from an upper middle class or wealthy background (except among African-American CEOs). The implication of the article is that while we may have a more diverse society, there is still little social mobility (movement between economic classes). It’s a fascinating article!

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Editorial: Beat a Rigged Game


Two years ago, Republicans took advantage of liberal disappointment that President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats were not more aggressive in addressing economic troubles, health care and reckless Wall Street bankers.

In 2010, backed by the Tea Party irregulars on the far right, Republicans gained control of statehouses in two dozen states. Republican legislatures, spurred by the right-wing industrialist-dominated American Legislative Exchange Council, passed bills targeting public-employee unions and gutted programs to help the working poor in order to pay for corporate tax breaks. In a dozen states the GOP also passed “Voter ID” bills that require people to show a driver’s license to vote, which places a hardship on working people, the elderly and the disabled who don’t have a car or the resources to get the paperwork and take the day off to stand in line at the driver’s license office to get their state-issued IDs.

(If Republicans really had been concerned about in-person voting fraud — which is virtually non-existent — they could have implemented an ID card system without disrupting voting rights for an estimated 5 million citizens. Implementing the rule in a few months without a massive outreach effort to help citizens get their IDs so they can vote in the presidential election was not a good-faith effort.)

Meanwhile, with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 that allowed corporations to participate in political campaigns, Republicans have rushed to organize “super PACs” to raise money anonymously from wealthy individuals and corporations, including corporations controlled by foreign interests, to run attack ads. It is legal as long as they operate independently from the candidates — although in some cases the independence appears to be little more than a cubicle partition on K Street in Washington. Republican super PACs expect to raise more than $800 million for this election cycle and they probably will outspend Democrats by more than 8 to 1.

Even under the more straightforward fundraising regime, Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee outraised President Obama and the Democratic National Committee for the third straight month in July, this time by more than $25 milion. In June the margin was $35 million and in May is was $16 million. It looks almost certain that the incumbent president will be outspent by the challenger. And when you factor in the advantage Republicans enjoy in super PAC money, Democrats are right to be concerned. In the first week of August, $50 million was spent by the campaigns and outside groups, virtually all of it in a small number of swing states, and not all the ads were truthful.

In the House, when Republicans took control in 2011, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the 20 standing committee chairs — of which at least 10 were members of the 75-member Progressive Caucus — were replaced with John Boehner and the Tea-Party-tempered hardliners of the GOP. Republicans now have a 49-seat majority, which seems like a lot, but with only 12% public approval an electoral tide could wash the teabaggers out and Dems back in.

In the Senate, where Democrats currently hold a 53-47 majority, 16 Dems can be categorized as progressive populists, plus independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, based on their votes on key amendments to the financial reform bill in 2010. They include Mark Begich of Alaska, Barbara Boxer of California, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Ben Cardin of Maryland, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Al Franken of Minnesota, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Pat Leahy of Vermont, Carl Levin of Michigan, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Harry Reid of Nevada, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Jim Webb of Virginia, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Ron Wyden of Oregon.

Another two dozen Democrats can be persuaded to vote populist. That is short of a Senate majority, which is why we ended up with a health reform that relies on an individual mandate instead of expansion of Medicare to cover everybody and the Dodd-Franks bill tinkering with regulation of the financial industry instead of the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act. But allowing Republicans to keep control of the House and/or gain control of the Senate does not do working people any good.

This year Democrats are defending 23 Senate seats. They must replace seven retiring senators, including Joe Lieberman of Connecticut (no great loss, and likely to be replaced by a progressive Dem, Rep. Chris Murphy); Daniel Akaka of Hawaii (for whose seat the winner of the Aug. 11 Democratic primary between US Reps. Mazie Hirono, the more progressive candidate, and Ed Case, the more conservative Dem, likely will face Republican former Gov. Linda Lingle); Ben Nelson of Nebraska (probably the most endangered seat, but Democrat Bob Kerrey is the candidate most likely to throw Social Security under the bus in pursuit of a bipartisan budget deal); Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico (where Rep. Martin Heinrich is a progressive Dem candidate), Kent Conrad of North Dakota (where former state Attorney General Heidi Heitkamp is running a strong campaign as a prairie progressive), Webb of Virginia (where former Gov. Tim Kaine, a moderate Dem, stands a good chance of beating Republican former Sen. George “Macaca” Allen Jr.) and Herb Kohl of Wisconsin (where Rep. Tammy Baldwin is a strong progressive candidate).

Among the 15 incumbent Dems (and one progressive independent) seeking re-election are Brown, Cardin, Casey, Sanders and Whitehouse as well as occasional populists Bill Nelson of Florida, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana, Bob Menendez of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Maria Cantwell of Washington and centrists Dianne Feinstein of California, Tom Carper of Delaware and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

The best Democratic pickup opportunities are in Massachusetts, where Elizabeth Warren is a progressive populist Democrat challenging banking industry cutout Sen. Scott Brown (R); in Nevada, where interim Sen. Dean Heller (R) faces Rep. Shelley Berkely, a progressive Dem from Las Vegas; and lndiana, where the Tea Party ouster of veteran Sen. Richard Lugar (R) in favor of right-winger Richard Mourdock, with support from the anti-government Club for Growth, gives Rep. Joe Donnelly, a moderate Democrat, an opportunity to court centrist independents. Republicans likely will lose a vote with the retirement of Olympia Snowe in Maine, but Angus King, the moderate independent former governor who is the odds-on favorite to succeed Snowe, has sent mixed signals as to which side he would caucus with.

It’s hard to predict how the big money enabled by the Citizens United ruling will affect the presidential race, but it might have a more pronounced effect down the ballot.

The New York Times reported that while three Republicans were vying for the honor of challenging Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), pro-GOP super PACs have hammered McCaskill with $15 million of negative ads. “Not surprisingly, McCaskill is probably the most endangered Democratic Senate incumbent right now, trailing all three Republicans in polls in a state that is friendly to the GOP but hardly unwinnable for a Democrat (at least under normal circumstances),” Steve Kornacki noted at Salon.com.

In Ohio, Sen. Sherrod Brown is better-positioned than McCaskill to survive. But Newsweek’s Andrew Romano reports that GOP-aligned outside groups like the US Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS have invested $11.5 million in attack ads against Brown. As a result, Romano writes, “Brown’s average polling lead over his Republican opponent, State Treasurer Josh Mandel, has been cut in half.”

Races like these have the potential to be the real campaign money stories of the year, Kornacki noted. “Voters know far less about the average Senate candidate than they do about Obama and Romney ... The same is even more true when you get farther down the ballot to contests for the US House and state and local offices. This is where the Republican super PAC advantage could really be felt in November ...”

Democrats, particularly progressive Dems, will be outspent this fall. That doesn’t mean we’ve lost our democracy. That means democracy has to outwork the corporatists on the ground.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2012

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Friday, August 10, 2012

Romney’s welfare lies meant to energize the Tea Party crowd

By Marc Jampole

The question for the day is why a public figure lies when it’s so easy to refute the lie?

This question develops naturally from the latest Romney fiasco—his accusation that President Obama has loosened the work requirement for welfare. This accusation is such a blatant lie that virtually every mainstream media outlet has covered it, with each story explicitly stating that Romney is not telling the truth. Romney comes out looking bad in stories in the The NewYork Times,  National Public Radio,  News & Observer, and CBS News, for example.

Make no mistake about it: Romney did not commit another spontaneous faux pas, similar to offering to bet $10,000 or making a snide, offhand remark about Olympic security. The campaign actually thought this one out and made a conscious decision to go after the President because his administration proposed giving individual states the flexibility to change welfare work rules if they could come up systems that got people off of welfare quicker. As with the health care law, the idea of giving states flexibility on welfare requirements was a central core tenant of the Republican Party for decades that Romney and Republicans now conveniently ignore for political reasons. Instead, Romney avers that Obama wants to end the work requirement for welfare, the lie that the mainstream media jumped right on.

Romney continues to repeat the accusation in the face of the bad publicity, and with good reason. The same people who believe the birther myth and the lie that African-Americans get a disproportionate share of welfare and food stamp benefits will believe that Obama has gutted the welfare work requirements. Romney is feeding the fires of ignorance to make sure that these supporters—now part of the Republican core—come to the polls in November.

But even as Romney plays to this core group he weakens his case with independent voters. While many independents would be incensed by a welfare system that didn’t have a work requirement, they are irritated when one candidate tells a bald-faced lie. In Romney’s case, the welfare lie not only helps to build the case for Romney’s mendacity; it also builds the case for his campaign’s lack of direction and maybe to the idea that Romney is a bit out of touch.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death gets more coverage than dropping of Hiroshima atom bomb

By Marc Jampole

Perhaps because 67 is not a round number and has no magic attached to it, I should have expected the news media to pay little attention to the anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, the first of only two times that a weapon of mass destruction was used to purposely kill people, in both cases, primarily civilians.

I wonder, too, whether the continuing story of the Fukushima nuclear disaster may have diminished media coverage of Hiroshima Day 67. After all, not a week goes by when we don’t have a story about the aftermath of Fukushima—another report about the extent of the damage, technical incompetence or government-industry cronyism; a new message from apologists for nuclear-generated electricity; or a new protest by those vehemently opposed to recommencing nuclear generation of electricity in Japan. It would be easy to believe that a Hiroshima commemoration was merely this week’s Japan nuclear disaster story, relegated to under the fold on page eight.

All caveats aside, though, what does it say about our mass culture when the anniversary of the most horrific day in human history—a day we commemorate so as to not repeat—gets so much less publicity than the 50 year anniversary of the death of a celebrity?

First the facts: I googled the following terms in Google News and here are the results, presented as pairs:

·         Hiroshima anniversary 17,700; Marilyn Monroe death 91,700
·         Hiroshima 109,000; Marilyn Monroe 4.6 million

By comparing the first pair of searches, there were just over five times as many mentions of the anniversary of Marilyn’s death as about the anniversary of the dropping of the bomb. Use the second comparison, and it’s 50 times as many. In the normal course of daily reading, I personally encountered 3 stories about Hiroshima and 14 about Marilyn’s death, which is in line with the first pair of searches.

I’ve always felt that the remembrance of Marilyn Monroe was a shameful stain on American culture.  Let’s not debate her merits as an actress (I propose that others like Carole Lombard, Judy Holiday and Carole Channing played the dumb blonde better) or as a great beauty (as the most beautiful woman of the 50’s, I might go for Ava Gardner, Lee Remick, Janet Leigh or Audrey Hepburn). Let’s take a look at what her type is and why she is famous.

It’s hard to decide if I’m more bored or disgusted by the type Monroe played: stupid and/or naïve, uneducated, childish and childlike, interested primarily in material possessions, unsubtle about her sexuality, a cheap flirt, a drug addict, emotionally fragile.  A vision of ideal womanhood only to those who want to control a woman or treat her as a pet.

I parenthetically mentioned women I liked more as comediennes or beauties. Of course none of these rivals bagged as many powerful and talented men as Monroe did, including, among others, one of greatest athletes of the era, one of the greatest playwrights in 20th century American theatre and a President of the United States. 

And that’s the point: she was known as an American courtesan, which Merriam-Webster defines as a prostitute or kept woman often with a clientele drawn from a court or from the wealthy or the upper class. The public is attracted to a courtesan because of her life, not her accomplishments. The public wants to know who she does, not what she does. The courtesan, in other words, is a celebrity.

Without the frequent and prominent sexual partners, the drug abuse and the death at an early age, Monroe would reduce to a footnote list of mid-century dizzy blondes like Mamie van Doren and Carole Wayne (Johnny Carson’s “Matinee Lady”). Unlike Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, John Lennon and others in the highest pantheon of dead celebrities, Monroe was just a celebrity.

But just a celebrity means quite a bit to the mass media, which instead of reporting real news, would rather describe a celebration of Marilyn impersonators, the latest theory about her death, birth and/or early life, the way the police would investigate her death in the 21st century, previously unpublished photos, the release of five of her movies on Blue Ray—the ways to squeeze another few paragraphs or minutes out of Monroe’s death seem endless.

And so are the ways to cover the anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima: people who lived through it who are still around, the various protests around the world, comparisons to Fukushima, how children are celebrating throughout the world, a comparison of nuclear technologies then and now...

The news media chose to ignore the many opportunities for spin-off stories in covering Hiroshima Day, but jumped right into the pool of clever angles for Marilyn.

In trying to understand mass culture, we should always keep in mind that mass culture is consumer culture and consumer culture is always about consuming—about buying things as a way to manifest every celebration, emotion and motive. What compels us to buy more: Thinking of Marilyn Monroe or thinking of Hiroshima?

Do we focus on the products like DVDs and downloads?  Or do we think of the branding opportunities—the tee-shirts, mugs, photo books, dolls, statuettes, posters and key chains?

Or perhaps we should consider how much consumerism is part of the experience of Marilyn Monroe and Hiroshima. In “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “How to Marry a Millionaire,” “Bus Stop’ and many other movies, Monroe often starred as a gold digger who reduces all things to how much they cost and who only wants the most expensive.  Where does Hiroshima stand on the “does it make you want to spend money” scale?

Perhaps the public does clamor for more information and speculation about Marilyn Monroe than Hiroshima. Perhaps not. But there’s no disputing that advertisers interested in putting consumers in a buying mood would rather see stories about dead celebrities who had a lot of sex than masses of dead and mutilated people lying motionless among senseless piles of ruble.

Friday, August 3, 2012

Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XXVIII

Steve Benen notes at Rachel Maddow's Blog another 26 of Mitt Romney's lies from the past week. This is Benen's 28th installment in the weekly series.

2 studies suggest how much more of the wealth pie the rich take nowadays.


Two studies released over the past few days both beg a simple question: what happened/happens to the money? In both cases, the answer is the same: it’s going to the wealthy.

In one study, Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a think tank that leans left, created a definition of a “good job” and then added up all the jobs that met that definition 30 years ago and all those that do today. 

We should all wonder about the criteria by which CEPR determined if a job was good or not. By clever criteria selection, it’s possible to fix an argument one way or the other.

While I don’t think CPR is fixing anything with the criteria it selects, you be the judge:
·         Make at least $18.50 an hour, or $37,000 annually (the median hourly pay in 2010, which means that in 2010, exactly half of all employees made more and half made less than $18.50 an hour).
·         Get any employer-sponsored health plan, no matter how paltry, for which the employer pays some portion, no matter how small, of the premium.
·         Have an employer-sponsored pension or retirement plan.

Using these criteria, CEPR found that the share of all jobs that could be considered as “good” fell from 27.4% in 1979 to 24.6% in 2010 despite the fact that gross domestic product increased by 63% per person. Americans were being 63% more productive and yet it wasn’t leading to better compensation. In fact there was a decrease in “good” jobs.

What happened to all the money produced by the additional GDP?

The answer, of course, is that rich folk got more, as avariety of studies have shown us over the past few years. The wealthiest 1% and 5% of Americans get a bigger slice of the wage and wealth pie than 30 years ago, leaving less for the rest of us.

Where’s the money going? We could ask the same question about a study conducted by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which found that if Mitt Romney’s proposed tax plan were enacted that it would cut the taxes of the wealthiest 5% of the population while raising taxes for everyone else.

This study, too, rests on assumptions that are open to question. The assumptions in this case fill in the blanks where Romney has been fuzzy on the details of his tax plan. But let’s assume that the highly reputable Tax Policy Center got the Romney details mostly right.   We’re left with the same question and the same answer:

What happens to the money? It’s flowing to the wealthy from everyone else.

Because they are based on assumptions, these studies prove nothing, but they certainly do suggest that over the past 30 years the wealthy have perpetrated class warfare against the rest of the country.

The study on Romney’s tax plan also indicates that the wealthy are ready to continue their assault. For 30 years, tax policy has been one of the weapons of choice in the economic war against the non-wealthy. Other weapons have included privatization of government functions, cutting of social welfare programs such as support for education, suppression of the minimum wage and anti-union policies.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Romney’s foreign faux pas suggest a lack of presidential timber.


By Marc Jampole

Of the four highly reported mistakes that Romney made on his foreign trip, two seem to have been calculated in advance, one rightly and one wrongly.

When I say calculated rightly, I don’t mean that Romney said the right thing, but that it worked to attract or solidify votes.  Romney’s comments about the superiority of Israeli culture leading to its higher standard of living were incorrect and odious in light of the restrictions under which Palestinians have lived in the occupied territories.

But Romney’s subtly racist remark plays into a myth of Jewish voters and another myth of many voters of all persuasions (except Islam). Jews are taught from a young age that they are the chosen people, chosen to be, as Isaiah put it, a “light unto the nations.” Romney’s talk about cultural superiority is something that Jews everywhere will take for granted. The superior culture remark also reflected the views of many Americans, expressed vehemently by Samuel Huntington, that we are in a cultural war with Islam and that our western (Christian) civilization is superior, as demonstrated by our standard of living.  Again, I reject this thinking, but at the same time I understand that a large number of my fellow citizens share these wrong-headed notions and Romney has made himself a more attractive candidate to them.

On the other hand, Romney’s distancing from his wife’s Olympic sport had the opposite effect than intended. Romney wanted to rid himself of his image as a patrician of wealth who can’t relate to the average Joe-and-Jane. Instead, he portrayed himself as an insensitive husband, the type that won’t take his wife to a “chick flick” for her birthday or go to the garden show displaying her orchids.  Instead of portraying the image of a warm and loving husband, he ended up looking like a complete dolt to both men and women.

That leaves us with the two foreign faux pas that I believe Romney did not say on purpose; of course we’ll never know for sure: His whining concerns about security and his revelation that he had been to a secret meeting. Both of these mistakes show a certain lack of what used to be called “presidential timber.” Have you ever noticed that ex-presidents mostly say good things about the current office-holder or they keep their mouths shut?  Romney is the former leader of the Olympics and while there is no written law, most ex-leaders will support the current regime, unless a complete disaster occurs, which clearly has not happened in the very well-run London games. When caught in what I think was an unguarded moment, Romney chose to be competitive, not presidential. It’s something that none of our recent presidents would have done.

Not knowing or forgetting that he had attended a secret meeting reveals a lack of knowledge in the customs of the host. It was a mistake in etiquette, and again, presidents of companies, charities, business associations and countries don’t tend to make those kinds of mistakes.  Presidents know the custom in advance or they tend to understand what it is from the subtle cues of others.

Romney has frequently shown himself to be out of touch with the American public, and those who have commented always link this inability of Romney to connect with his life of luxurious wealth. But complaining about a non-existent security problem of your former enterprise and not following the proper etiquette of your hosts (which others through the years have managed to figure out) have nothing to do with being wealthy. Presidents and other leaders tend to have more money than anyone else, and so any behavior that we classify as “presidential” has qualities of wealth attached to it. Being presidential is a kind of grace that makes everyone feel at ease and important.  From Reagan through Obama, all of our recently elected presidents have had it, and curiously, none of the candidates they defeated had it, except for Al Gore who actually won the popular vote.  

We like our leaders to look and act like leaders. Romney may look presidential, but he is having extreme difficulty playing the part.

Monday, July 30, 2012

Hacker wants to cripple students by denying them basic tools of a complex society


By Marc Jampole

That Andrew Hacker would advocate ending the requirement to study algebra to get a four-year college degree is mildly surprising. There has been no hint of such anti-intellectualism in his many fine essays on demographics, race and the education system in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere throughout the years.  On the other hand, he has not been afraid to express a controversial opinion, usually backed by a slew of empirical evidence.

That he would use cheap and transparent propaganda tricks to advocate anything, let alone the deep-sixing of algebra, as he does in his article in last Sunday’s New York Times opinion section, is both shameful and disappointing. The article makes a shambles out of truth by defining algebra by its hardest and most advanced features.

Hacker sprinkles his article with examples of “algebra” as proof that it’s just too hard for most kids:

·         (x² + y²)² = (x² - y²)² + (2xy)²
·         Vectorial angles and discontinuous functions
·         Quadratic equations
·         Fermat’s dilemma (I think he means Fermat’s Last Theorem)

Hacker is right to say that no one except engineers, scientists and the occasional financial analyst will need to know any of his examples, which are all very hard. But correct me if I’m wrong, these are all subjects for the second year of algebra (I think the first year includes some simple quadratics).

But let’s take a look at what else Hacker wants to keep children from learning (except the lucky few who will get technical degrees):

·         X + 5 = 10
·         2X – 3 = 5
·         .08x = 80
·         a/b = c/d, so ad = bc


That’s all math from the first year of algebra and all necessary for most people in our technology-oriented society.
 
The uses for my first three examples come every time we buy anything, be it in a supermarket, department store, laundromat or stadium. These basics of algebra allow us to figure our taxes and balance our checkbook.
 
The last example is particularly noteworthy, because since I began working at my first job running a closed circuit television studio for a subsidiary of the old Ma Bell in Seattle and writing/directing such classics as “Safe Pole Climbing,” not a week has gone by when I have not needed this basic equation.

Here is a classic example: I am billing an employee’s time at $65 an hour and paying her a total compensation of $38,000, meaning I break even once she has billed 11 hours to clients every week. To what level do I have to raise her rate to get the same break-even point if I increase her total compensation to $45,000?  In the basic equation a/b = c/d, so ad = bc: a is what she makes, b is her hourly billing rate and c is her new compensation.

Let’s plug it in:

$38,000 times d = $65 times $45,000
 
And now solve, using the simplest of algebra that is taught about a third of the way through the first year (and a calculator for the arithmetic!):

38,000d = 2,925,000
d = $76.97, which I would round up to $77/hour or down to $75/hour.

In one form or another, week after week for decades I have faced a problem that this equation helped me to solve—as a university instructor of foreign languages, as a television news writer and reporter, as a would-be Hollywood screenwriter, as a marketing manager, as a public relations executive.

Hacker draws a picture of algebra that has nothing to do with the real-world needs of people.

I won’t dwell on the fact that learning mathematics is good for young brains because it entails developing a new way of thinking—similar to studying Chinese or Spanish—since Hacker freely admits it himself and proposed an algebra-free math curriculum for the liberal arts type that focuses on finding the mathematical beauty in the visual arts, music and poetry.

I don’t think it’s unfair to ask college or even high school students to pass a first-year algebra class. The key word is “pass.” Getting a C because the last few weeks got a little rough is no shame. It just means that someone shouldn’t consider going into any science or technology career, as the kids best suited to those careers whiz through algebra, trigonometry, calculus and beyond. And it probably also means that you’ll have a deficit in one area when competing against those who excel in higher math courses in liberal arts fields such as writing, law, business administration, sales, human resources and even the visual and performing arts. For example, my understanding of physics, which hinges on an understanding of the rudiments of calculus—has helped me win the advertising and public relations work of many technology companies.

There are plenty of fields that don’t require that someone got through trigonometry, and many of them pay very well.

But the world has become too complicated for anyone who can’t figure out that two cans of beans that are $5.00 each cost $10.00 total. That’s 2X = ?, if X is $5. And that, Mr. Hacker, is algebra.

Let’s close with a  slight subject change: Unfortunately, many non-college jobs pay very little money and much less than what they used to pay, which is why contemporary parents are in a panic to get their kids into the colleges associated with success in the high-paying fields. These parents would be better off campaigning for a higher minimum wage, laws that help unions organize and other laws that raise salaries so that one can attain and maintain a middle class lifestyle whether one is a Harvard-educated lawyer or a community college trained security guard.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XXVII

In the 27th installment in a weekly series, Steve Benen at Rachel Maddow's Blog notes 72 lies told in the past week by the Republican presumptive nominee.

"What's especially striking, in addition to the volume and frequency of the falsehoods, is how often the dishonesty is obvious, Benen wrote. "Jonathan Bernstein has labeled this 'lazy mendacity' -- untruths based on 'the indifference to any fact-checking,' and 'the insistence on continuing to use a lie long after it's been definitively debunked.'"

Selections from the August 15, 2012 issue


















Friday, July 27, 2012

Portable Internet Player Offers Progressive Lifeline


By Jim Cullen

For those of us who have resisted the siren call of smartphones — and we are still in the majority, although the gap is closing — there is a workaround that can give us much of the convenience of remote Internet access without paying hundreds of dollars more to cell phone providers.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project in February found that 46% of Americans say they have smartphones, while 41% of Americans get by with regular cell phones and 12% have no cell phone at all. Smartphone adoption rates of 60% or more were reported among college graduates, 18-35-year-olds and those with an annual household income of $75,000 or more. Among seniors, just 13% of those ages 65 and older have smartphones. But 53% of seniors (and 78% of American adults) use the Internet.

If you don’t have a smartphone, portable Internet access can be particularly useful if you live in the 90% of the country where conservative radio executives deny us access to over-the-air progressive talk radio. A portable media player such as the iPod Touch, which costs $199 to $399, depending on the “flash memory,” is a little thinner than an iPhone but has most of the same functions when you are in a “wi-fi” area, and you don’t have to pay the extra $100 monthly cost of remote Internet access.

(Similar portable media units that use the rival Android operating system include Samsung’s Galaxy players 4 and 5, which cost $229 and $269, and Sony Walkman Z, at $249.)

I got the iPod Touch (or iTouch) two years ago, partly because I needed to understand how these portable devices worked so that we might figure out how to incorporate The Progressive Populist into them. We still haven’t figured that out, but I found the iTouch was useful as a substitute for a smartphone.

If you’re looking for tablets that have the same functions as the iTouch but with a larger screen, which is especially useful when reading books and long texts, browsing the Web or watching videos, consider the iPad ($399 and up) and its less-robust Android rivals, the Kindle Fire ($199) and Google’s Nexus 7 ($249). But if you want something you can put in your pocket or purse, an iPod Touch, for my money, is the best choice.

The iPod started out as a device for storing music, and it’s still useful as a repository for your digitized album collection, but the iTouch debuted in 2007 as the iPhone’s poor cousin, though its features have been upgraded until it has most of the functions of an iPhone except the cell phone.

Since October 2011, when iPhone Operating System 5 was released with the fourth generation iTouch, you no longer need a computer to activate the iTouch, although you need to be in the vicinity of a wi-fi signal to get Internet access and obtain third-party applications (apps) from the App Store through iTunes. And it’s useful to have access to a computer that you can use as a base for your iTouch.

The iTouch comes with about 20 apps pre-installed, including email, calculator, calendar, camera, clock, contacts, FaceTime video telephone software, iBooks, iTunes, maps, music, notes, newsstand, photos, Youtube, stocks, weather, voice memos, videos and the Safari web browser.

The only apps for which I have paid money are TuneIn Radio (99¢), which allows you to record online broadcasts if you have a wi-fi signal, and RSSRadio Premium ($1.99), which allows you to download podcasts when you have wi-fi access and play offline. Among the podcasts I download are the Stephanie Miller Show (which is telecast as Talking Liberally on Current TV — if you can find Current TV on your cable); Sam Seder’s Majority Report; the Ed Schultz radio show; and Best of the Left, a compilation of progressive radio offerings. I also record Thom Hartmann’s radio show, among assorted online broadcasts on TuneIn Radio.

Other podcasts that are available include many NPR and Pacifica shows, Counterspin, Democracy Now!; Mike Malloy; Randi Rhodes, Ring of Fire with Mike Papantonio and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., WTF with Marc Maron; and many foreign radio shows. An iTouch can be a lifeline for progressives who are stuck in a small town or even a good-sized city, such as Austin, where talk radio is dominated by Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the local right wingers.

Among my most-used apps that I can use offline — that is, when I am away from home and don’t have a wi-fi signal — are the Calculator, Calendar, Contacts, Clock, Dictionary, Music, Photos. If I have downloaded the current edition of the New York Times and The Nation, I can browse them offline.

Useful apps at home (where I have a broadband wi-fi signal) include the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com), so I no longer need to bug my wife about who that character actor is on TV, and where else I have seen that actor, and the Safari web browser. Also handy are Facebook, Twitter, Weather and various news and sports apps.

Useful apps on the road, which you can check at wi-fi places, include Maps, which in addition to telling directions will tell whether highways are congested or closed, GasBuddy, to check gas prices down the road, the Weather Channel, which is particularly useful when traveling to or from Iowa in February. And podcasts and audible books that you can download to the iTouch are a pleasant diversion when you’re driving long distances in areas where the radio choices are evangelists, right-wing talkers or bad country music.

Places that offer free wi-fi include most Arbys restaurants, Barnes & Nobles bookstores, IHOPs, McDonalds, Starbucks and other coffee shops and most public libraries and many roadside rest stops support public wi-fi.


Comment on your favorite podcasts, apps and players. In case you wonder, we didn’t seek or get any consideration from Apple for this article.


From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2012

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