Cultural literacy tells us what we should know, whereas cultural vocabulary tells us what people do know

By Marc Jampole

The concept of a shared cultural vocabulary is related to yet different from that of cultural literacy. Cultural literacy comprises the knowledge of general history and of great works of literature, music, art and philosophy essential to be a good citizen. Too often conservative critics present lists of what constitutes cultural literacy that focus almost exclusively on the traditional works of white European males. More progressive critics will include the works of non-westerners and women and of newer art forms such as film and graphic novels. These critics—both conservative and progressive—all postulate cultural literacy as proscriptive: here is what you need to know.

Cultural vocabulary takes a different approach—one that describes instead of prescribes—by defining the cultural vocabulary as the body of information that most people in a culture share. Whether or not we should have read T.S. Eliot is not relevant to a description of the cultural vocabulary; what counts is that in 2014 a business magazine such as The Economist will cleverly reference Eliot’s “The Waste Land” by opening an article with “April has been a cheerful month for the Affordable Care Act…”

Those like E.D. Hirsch and Harold Bloom who construct lists of great literature and other cultural artifacts with which every culturally literate person should be familiar must frown dyspeptically at the symbolism of a TV commercial becoming as much a part of our cultural heritage as Huckleberry Finn or the founding of Jamestown. I’m sure that Bloom’s prescriptive cultural vocabulary would exclude Mean Joe Greene throwing a jersey or Mikey liking a dry cereal.

The argument concerning what constitutes cultural literacy and therefore should and should not be part of the cultural vocabulary goes back centuries. In Greek times, critics argued whether the low art of pottery carried the weight of painting. In late medieval times and the Renaissance, the argument was between Latin versus the vernacular. For the past 200 years, the argument has been about the relative merits of high and low culture, between serious novels and potboilers, literature and comic books, Beethoven and the Beach Boys. In all these instances, critics have argued about the relative merits of high and low (or popular) art.

But a television commercial is something different from both high culture and low culture. It represents commercial culture. Its makers intend not to edify nor to amuse, but to sell a product, service or idea.

Commercial culture has a history that may be as long as that of either high or low cultures, thanks to the fact that those who pay for propaganda are usually those who control the social order. The cultural dictators of all ages, especially the conservative ones, have tended to warmly embrace commercial culture. The Aeneid, a piece of propaganda purchased by the Roman Emperor Augustus, makes all the lists of the cultural essentials. I think one can make a compelling case that the psalms were works of pure propaganda meant solely to influence public opinion: King David (or the writers he hired) created our beloved psalms to improve public opinion about his actions, which was at a low after he had used the armies of Israel’s enemies to take over the country and then sent his best general out to die so he could cavort in the streets with the man’s wife. English literature students still read early Irish poems, which were little more than paid political announcements for Irish chieftains. We see print and poster advertisements by Toulouse-Lautrec, the Russian Constructivists, Depero and other visual artists hanging in art museums all over the world. Every serious film buff lauds the technical aspects of Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films, made for and financed by the Nazis. Many commercial works have managed to make it into the exalted cultural literacy pantheon of authoritarian critics of all ilks.

Before the advertising of products and services began sometime in the 19th century, virtually all works of commercial culture were either masked as entertainments or part of a liturgy. Nowadays, commercial culture will sometimes mask itself in movies which have as their sole purpose the selling of merchandise, e.g., movies about comic book heroes that spin off action figures, costumes, masks, toys, clothing, book marks, calendars, coasters, decorative boxes, jewelry, jigsaw puzzles, mugs, napkins, note cards, pens, tote bags, trays, lunch boxes and other branded merchandise. But more often than not, commercial culture today involves a naked sales pitch. That our cultural vocabulary so quickly consumes the naked sales pitches of “where’s the beef” and “can you hear me now” reflects the crass materialism of the age.

The development of the mass media of advertising, and then of film, radio, television, video games and the Internet has led to commercial culture playing a far great role in determining our cultural vocabulary than before World War II. We can see the hegemony of commercial culture everywhere: the enshrinement of commercial or decorative artists such as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons in our pantheon of the visual arts; the widespread tattooing of Coke and other brand logos on body parts; and the widespread interests in celebrity culture (which I define as a preoccupation with the commercial transactions of people who are famous for no reason except perhaps for being wealthy). All represent the hegemony that commercial culture has achieved.

That hegemony shines through the recent ending of the Madman series, which, like the end of the first season, asserts that commercials are an art form by setting up situations in which the protagonist Don Draper transforms the discontents of his life into seminal TV commercials—at the end of the first season, his memories of his family, now fractured by his infidelity, becomes the Kodak “Moments” commercial; the last scene of the last episode of the series shows Draper, having found peace through transcendental meditation, dreaming up the wildly popular “I’d like to teach the world to sing” Coke commercials. The sublimation of real life into art has a long history—Dante, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, the list of authors whose works are at least partially autobiographical seems endless. With Mad Men, we see commercial art imitating life in a work of dramatic art about commercial art.

Tomorrow I take a look at some of the ways that words and phrases are added to our cultural vocabulary.

From Moses to Mean Joe Greene: our changing cultural vocabulary

By Marc Jampole

It seems as if it were only yesterday that America first saw the heart-rendering TV commercial in which Mean Joe Greene, a professional football player from the 1970s, throws a jersey to a young boy who offered him a Coke. The commercial, first introduced in 1979, makes all the lists of Top 10 or Top 25 American TV commercials of all time.

A recent TV spot parodies the Mean Joe commercial of decades ago. In the new spot, Joe throws his jersey to a housewife, played to soccer-and-bake-sale-mom perfection by sometimes raunchy comic actress Amy Sedaris. The camera angle exaggerates the difference in size between the characters much more than the original spot did. The housewife tosses a bottle of Downy laundry detergent to Mean Joe, looking sharp and very buff for a guy in his mid-60s. When Mean Joe lobs his jersey to her, she smells it, makes a disgusted face and throws it right back to him.

A great spoof.

TV commercials have parodied TV shows, movies and other art forms for decades. And parody or travesty sometimes enters into the occasional revival of an old ad concept like the resurrections of Mr. Clean, Joe Isuzu and Charlie the Tuna, which are all cases of a TV commercial making fun of itself.

But this laundry soap commercial may mark the first time we’ve seen a television commercial that pays homage to a commercial for a different product. 

What does it say about our cultural vocabulary when to understand and appreciate a television commercial, you need to know about a 30-year-old television commercial for something else?

Cultural vocabulary comprises the quotes and images of literature, the visual arts, entertainment, current events and other cultural phenomena that people need to know to understand the cultural references that abound in the mass media, the popular arts and general conversation. Our cultural vocabulary consists of many artifacts:

·         Real and fictional people, such as Adam & Eve, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Pascal and Don Quixote.

·         Events, e.g., Hannibal crossing the Alps, the Battle of Waterloo, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Neil Armstrong stepping foot on the moon.

·         Phrases, e.g., quotes from poems, books, movies and songs, anything from “No can do” and “Let’s get it on” to “To be or not to be,” from “Four score and seven years ago” to “I have a dream.”

·         Inanimate objects, e.g., the Bible, the Holy Grail or a Super Bowl ring.

·         Archetypes, e.g., the henpecked husband, the genius who is inept with women, the good prostitute, the cop who can’t follow orders, the stupid or buffoonish strongman, the evil businessman, the evil stepmother, the bumbling leader and the tragic young lovers. These archetypes are often embodied in people or characters who enter the cultural vocabulary: Archie Bunker, James Bond, Hercules, Stepin Fetchit, for example.

Over the next week, I’m going to take a break from political reporting and analyze some aspects of the concept of cultural vocabulary, including its relationship to cultural literacy, the concept of commercial culture, how the cultural vocabulary develops and what I call the cannibalization of cultural icons.

Editorial: Stop TPP in the House

President Obama finally got the bipartisan deal of the sort he has been pursuing for over six years on May 22 when the Republican Senate approved a “fast-track” process to review the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Unfortunately, Obama’s push to grease the skids for the TPP sells out his longtime supporters among environmental groups and organized labor. Obama finds himself allied with Republicans who have been working to sabotage every progressive initiative that he has come up with heretofore.

The blue-green alliance is understandably suspicious of the TPP negotiations that have been going on behind closed doors with representatives of a dozen Pacific Rim countries and multinational corporations with financial interests there, while labor and environmentalists have had little input.

Opponents of the trade pact were encouraged on May 12 when all the Democrats except one stood against the “fast-track” trade promotion authority. In that early vote, 52 senators — mainly Republicans — voted to take up the bill, short of the 60 needed to overcome the Democratic filibuster.

McConnell revived the bill by promising Democrats votes on some controversial amendments. He also swung Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both of Washington, and several other pro-trade Democrats to vote yes by promising them a vote in June on an amendment reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank, whose charter expires on June 30. Obama also got on the phone to cajole reluctant Democrats.

That one-two lobbying combination brought in a 61-38 vote on May 21 to shut down debate and let the Senate move on to pass the Trade Promotion Authority, which grants expedited review of trade agreements for up to six more years, which could empower the next president to negotiate new trade deals in secret.

Thirteen Democrats sided with 48 Republicans to clear the way for the fast-track bill. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) voted against cloture but ended up voting for the bill, which passed 62-37 on May 22. (See the breakdown in Dispatches item 3.)

Sen. Ron Wyden D-Ore.), the main Democratic co-author of fast-track, said the legislation would set a higher standard for trade deals. But he and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) beat back several amendments that could have strengthened those standards.

The closest vote was on an amendment sponsored by Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) to require that future trade agreements include enforceable provisions to stop currency manipulation by foreign partners to give them an advantage over US manufacturers. It failed 48-51, after President Obama reportedly worked the phones to urge Democrats not to support the amendment.

Hatch, Wyden and McConnell also defeated an amendment sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), 39-60, that would bar corporations from using an arbitration process to settle disputes with foreign governments and multinational corporations. Warren argued the so-called Investor State Dispute Settlement process would unfairly shield corporations from state and federal laws.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), also lost a 47-52 vote on his amendment to require prior congressional approval of negotiations to expand the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, noted that under the Hatch-Wyden-Ryan Fast Track bill, the trade pact, whose details are being finalized after six years of negotiations, would remain secret from the public until 30 days after its text is locked. The text would be made public 60 days before the formal signing ceremony, but that is irrelevant, because it would be too late to fight for needed changes.

“Thanks to WikiLeaks, we know the TPP includes an expanded version of the investment provisions found in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that incentivize the offshoring of high-wage American jobs and the investor-state dispute settlement system that exposes US policies to attack in foreign tribunals.

“The administration chose to use the weak labor and environmental standards that President George W. Bush included in his last trade deals. It was the 2007 Peru Free Trade Agreement, not the TPP, that was the first US trade agreement to have labor and environmental standards in core text enforceable by the same terms as the commercial provisions. A 2014 Government Accountability Office investigation found these labor and environmental standards now also used for the TPP failed to improve working conditions.

“What has leaked out already is deeply troubling. Many members of Congress who – unlike the public – are allowed to read the TPP are warning us that this is a bad deal.”

Speaking at the Nike headquarters, of all places, President Obama said that those concerned about the TPP rolling back food safety, environmental or financial regulation “are making stuff up” and no trade agreement can do that.

In fact, these rollbacks have happened repeatedly under past pacts. The “sovereignty” provisions found in Section 8 of the Hatch-Wyden-Ryan Fast Track bill are nothing new and appear in implementing legislation for past US trade agreements under which US food safety and environmental policies have been rolled back already. Examples of rollbacks due to trade deals include:

• Gutting rules about importing only food that “meets or exceeds” US safety standards, so we now import food that does not meet US standards; and

• Rolling back environmental laws and regulations – from Clean Air Act regulations to US labeling of dolphin-safe tuna and more.

Just a few days before the fast-track vote, a tribunal at the World Trade Organization ruled that the US cannot require meat producers to identify the country where their meat comes from.

Republicans also propose to pay for Trade Adjustment Assistance to retrain displaced workers with $700 million in cuts from doctor and hospital reimbursements under Medicare, starting in 2024.

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, said the agreement “failed to address even one of our six criteria for creating a more democratic and transparent trade negotiating process, will undermine efforts to raise wages and create a fairer economy. If we want a different economy, one that levels the playing field and doesn’t just benefit those already at the top, we need new rules on trade, not the same failed policies with a ‘new and improved’ sticker on them.”

The fast-track bill now faces a tough slog in the House of Representatives, where a sizable group of Republicans and a majority of Democrats are believed to be opposed to the bill, but Obama and the lords of global trade will be working to close that gap. If your Congress member is a Democrat, tell him or her to stand against the fast track bill.

If the TPP ends up being a good agreement (we have no way of knowing because its contents are classified top secret), it should be able to stand up for review under the regular order of business. If your rep is a Republican, tell them they cannot in good conscience support “ObamaTrade” after Republicans have opposed Obama at every turn for the past six years. Refer Republicans to ObamaTrade.com, a website run by conservative populists who are opposed to the trade giveaway. Ask them why they would trust Obama on this issue.

Then, after you have expressed your opinion to your Congress member, go ahead and contact your senators and either congratulate them for opposing fast track or ask them what the hell they were thinking in supporting fast track. Particularly needle the charlatans who are running for president on anti-Obama platforms, such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), as well as other prominent Obama bashers in the Senate and the House, about their newfound trust of Obama which fast-track approval implies. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2015

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Selections from the June 15, 2015 issue

COVER/Richard Eskow
The left matters — now, more than ever

EDITORIAL
Stop TPP in the House

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

JOHN YOUNG
The bloodbath down the street

EMILY SCHWARTZ GRECO
A fossil-fueled fantasy

DISPATCHES
Bernie’s proudly radical as Ike;
Hillary stuns journos by listening to people;
Repubs find new way to alienate Latinos;
Fossil fuel subsidies $5.3T a year;
Texas lacks flood infrastructure
Huge insurance company divests from coal;
Hillary would be most liberal nominee in 40 years ...

DON ROLLINS
Can gay-friendly John Kasich run for president?

GENE NICHOL
The Supreme Court fails a nation

BOB BURNETT
Hillary Clinton: First impressions

RANDOLPH T. HOLHUT
Hillary is no progressive, Bernie is no pipe dream

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Housing costs remain too high

SETH SANDRONSKY
Minimum wage grows in Emeryville

WENONAH HAUTER
Protect land from fracking

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Prisoners: The fiscal boomerang

SAM URETSKY
Journalism exposed nail workers’ plight

WAYNE O’LEARY
The TPP blues

JOHN BUELL
The agony of the Motor City

JASON STANFORD
The governor in the tin foil hat

JAY WALLJASPER
Little town on the prairie steps it up

and more ...

Foreign Affairs writer compares today’s Islamic wars to 17th century wars between Catholics & Protestants

By Marc Jampole

In the latest Foreign Affairs, political scientist John M. Owen IV starts to make the case that we can compare the current state of unrest in Islamic territories to the European wars of religion of about 450 years ago, in an article titled “From Calvin to the Caliphate.”  It’s a point that I’ve wanted to write about for some time now, but haven’t gotten around to yet. Reza Aslam has made a similar observation in the past.

Too bad Owen IV misconstrues what’s taking place today and so makes the wrong comparison and draws the wrong conclusions. Owen characterizes today’s wars in the Islamic world as a battle between secularism and Islamism, the idea that the original religious laws as laid down by Mohamed in the Koran should guide society and government. He compares this battle to the more than 100 years of almost constant warfare between Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th century. The comparison, as we will see, is very apt, but the terms of comparison are incorrect. The contemporary element in the comparison is not a war between secularism and Islamism, but between two forms of Islam, Sunni and Shiite. In several nations we see a struggle between the secular and religious, just as in United States and Israel, but the major wars and the larger battle today are between two kinds of Islam.

The comparison between two eras of warfare in which the antagonists represent two forms of the same religion resonates in many ways: Both the Reformation era wars and the current ones between Shiites and Sunnis in Syria, Iraq and Yemen came about 1,500 years after the original establishment of the religion. In both cases, the religious wars begin a short time after the war zone, once unified under a religious autocrat, broke apart; the Reformation Wars came a hundred or so years after the emergence of nation-states from the ruins of a Christian Europe led by the Papacy; today’s wars in Islamic territories come about a hundred years after the breakup of the Islam-based Ottoman Empire. In both cases, the major battles are in transitional territories in which neither form of the religion predominates: in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, it was the German territories; today, the worst battles are in a transitional zone between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran. In both cases, an influx of new military technology developed in another part of the world exacerbated the conflicts, making them more brutal and deadly: during the Reformation it was gunpowder, imported from China; today it’s primarily American military technology.

By asserting that the important battle today is between secularism and religion, Owen views the current state of unrest in the Islamic world completely from a Western perspective. Westerners of course identify with the secular over the religious, at least when applied to other cultures. Today’s secular world culture is, for better or worse, the American consumerist culture, and whenever new countries embrace our model, we are bound to make a lot of money out of it.

The opposition of the secular to Islamism enables Owen to imply a good and a bad side to the war, but in doing so, Owen insults the Moslem religion. Owen clearly prefers secularism, and subtly treats Islamism as inferior. He doesn’t take sides, however, when it comes to discussing the 17th century wars.

The illustrations that accompany the article visually communicate that while both sides of the Reformation Wars had their reasons, Islamists are nothing more than barbaric thugs. On the left side of the page we see a bearded white man dressed in Renaissance garb, clutching a large white cross to his side in one hand and raising his other hand as if to make a point. On the opposing page we see the Islamic soldier also with one hand pointing up, but the other hand contains an automatic weapon, and except for white sneakers, he is clothed entirely in an ominous one-piece black outfit that covers all of his face except his eyes. The look in the Christian’s eyes is one of fear. The look in the Moslem’s eyes is menacing and dangerous. This conflation of a pious scholar with a terrorist goon drains the blood from the extremely bloody Reformation wars, while subtly delegitimizing Islamism by reducing it to violence. Incidents of war-related barbarism were common in both the 17th century and today, but the imagery suggests that only Islamic wars have driven men to despicably inhumane acts.

Owen’s article is a piece of a propaganda machine that spews out justifications for American actions in the Middle East almost on a weekly basis. Framing Middle Eastern unrest in terms of the secular versus the religious provides our leaders and our country with the ideological rationale to intervene. It also allows us to take a side with which we are sympathetic, the forces of western modernity. By contrast, focusing on the fight between two forms of a religion which has few adherents in the United States might strike most as not our business.

The real reasons we are fighting a series of disastrous wars and actions in Islamic territories are economic and political: controlling sources of oil, developing markets for our weapons industry, supporting our Saudi and Israeli allies (who themselves are at odds), and the still unknown real reason the Bush Administration decided to take down Saddam Hussein and destabilize a country sewn together after World War I from three distinct regions and cultures.

Concealing political and economic motives behind idealism also characterized the Reformation wars, in which religion stood as a proxy for the various economic interests of the German principalities, France, Spain, Sweden and other countries. Behind the fight between Sunnis and Shiites stands the geopolitical elbowing of Saudi Arabia and Iran, and probably of Egypt and Turkey as well.

Owen ignores these points of comparison, which would help make the case for pulling out our troops and drones. His intent in “From Calvin to the Caliphate” is not to learn from the past, but to use a misreading of history to provide further justification for American imperialism.

Anyone interested in ideological foundation of contemporary culture should read R. Williams’ Keywords

By Marc Jampole

In 1976, British cultural philosopher and novelist Raymond Williams published Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, which analyzed the origins and uses of 110 words that are important to the way we organize concepts about society and politics. Forgotten now by most, Williams was once a key theoretician of the New Left. A random sampling of the words he analyzed suggests how deeply Williams dug into the thought structures that form how we look at a broad range of human phenomena: unemployment, revolution, underprivileged, consumer, alienation, technology, family, genetic, experience capitalism and cover the full range of human experience, including politics, economics, society, culture, the arts, science and religion. Williams focuses on British word uses, but also covers this side of the Atlantic.

Oxford University Press has now republished the updated edition of Keywords that came out in 1983, and it is a treasure for anyone interested in the ideological basis of contemporary culture. While Hip-Hop culture, blockbuster movies, text messaging, social media and digital technology have all contributed copious words and phrases to our cultural vocabulary since the mid-1980s, little has changed in the basic concepts by which we understand society and formulate actions. Far from obsolete, Keywords still lives and breathes the assumptions of capitalism and the consumer society.

Here are a few of the many insights I have culled from reading Keywords:

·         Many words with positive associations, like interesting and improve have their origin in financial matters. Interesting derives first from having an interest in land or a business operation and then getting interest on an investment; improve and improvement first applied to land and economics before people started using it generally to denote making something better. As Williams writes, about interesting: “It seems probable that this now central word for attention, attraction and concern is saturated with the experience of a society based on money relationships.” The language certainly underscores my theory that contemporary society reduces all human relations and experiences to buying and selling.

·         Consume and consumer originally had a negative connotation, meaning “to take up completely, devour, waste, spend.” A disease of the lungs was even named consumption. American advertising has now transformed consumer into a positive trait. Consumer still focuses on using up something, i.e., what manufacturers produce. We use it positively, as in consumer choice and negatively, as in consumer society. But—to quote Williams, “the predominance of the capitalist model ensured its widespread and often overwhelming extension to such fields as politics, education and health.” For the most part, to consume is now a very good and admirable thing.

·         Our current confusion about matters of class reflects the confused origins of the words we use to describe the various classes. Lower class originally referred to the lowest ranking in a hierarchical society in which those above were inherently better humans. Middle class, on the other hand, referred from the beginning of its usage only to economic matters and described those in society with middling incomes—not the wealthy and not the poor. Building on the original meaning of the lower classes as inferior beings, the rightwing constantly uses language that delegitimizes the poor, making them seem undeserving of aid and at fault for their condition. This constant undercutting of the claims for social and economic justice for the lower class helps to form a wedge between the middle and lower classes, and influences many in the middle class to align with the wealthy, who have been picking their pockets for centuries, and certainly during the past 35 years. As Williams shows, the centuries-old strategy of the ruling elite to divide and conquer is baked into the language.

Unfortunately, Keywords has gotten the kind of play in the news media reserved for academic studies that prove that public schools do a better job of educating students than private schools do or provide precise details on how wind energy could provide all of our energy needs. In other words, Williams’ masterpiece has been virtually ignored by the mainstream news media. I routinely read book reviews in the following publications: New York Review of Books, Nation, New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, Atlantic, Foreign Affairs and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The only one of these periodicals to review Keywords, and the only reason I know about the book, is Nation magazine. A Google News search revealed that Philosophy Now, The Guardian and Purple Revolver also reviewed Keywords, a paltry number compared to the hundreds of reviews of David McCullough’s latest inspirational biography (of the Wright Brothers) and of David Brooks’ right-wing sociology, The Road to Character to be found online.

Our mass media—controlled by a handful of companies which represent the ruling elite (another word Williams covers)—naturally censor thought that does not jibe with the beliefs of their owners. The mass media allows some dissent, but not much. The media does a lot to keep false notions such as creationism, low-tax policies and deregulation alive in everyone’s minds. Meanwhile, embedded in the structure of the language are the ideological assumptions that keep the ultra-wealthy in control. Keywords is an essential book for understanding the underlying or hidden ideology that dominates the English language and therefore our thought processes.

Implementing progressive agenda would do a lot to end inequality & grow the economy

By Marc Jampole

My thanks go out to Rich Kelley, a marketing consultant for Jewish Currents, who has shown me where to find the 13-point progressive plan for America that New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio was promoting in Washington. 

He sent me links to two places: 1) C-SPAN’s rebroadcastof the speech, at the end of which you can see a scroll down of a chart on core board with all 13 points; and 2) the Progressive Agenda website, which proposes 14 points and includes an online petition to sign. De Blasio’s speech was definitely related to the website, as both used the same headline and logo to introduce the agenda. Moreover, the 13 points De Blasio makes are all on the Progressive Agenda list.

As I pointed out the day after De Blasio’s speech in Washington, D.C., the mainstream news media covered only extraneous aspects of the very good Mayor’s proposals: Did it piss off people in NYC who would prefer he stayed at home? Would it affect his relationship with Hillary Clinton? Was he stealing the center of attention from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders? Not one media outlet followed by Google News published the 13 points.

That doesn’t exonerate De Blasio and the organizers of the Progressive Agenda website for not placing a news release with all 13 points on a website somewhere and for not connecting De Blasio’s speech with the broader initiative on the website. Not having the same number of points is sloppy, to be sure, but worse yet, it shows uncoordinated activity and thus diminishes a broad-based movement into a series of disparate actors and actions. Let’s hope, however, that mere sloppiness led to the fact that we learn nothing about the organizers or major funders of the Progressive Agenda anywhere on the website. Just because recent court decisions makes it legal to hide contributions, doesn’t mean it’s right. Progressives must not only proffer a program to help the 99% that 35 years of economic and taxation policies has left behind. We must make certain the progressive program also be based on facts and presented with the openness that facilitates democracy.

Those quibbles aside, I heartily endorse the Progressive Agenda, and urge OpEdge readers to sign its online petition.

Whoever created the agenda divides it into three sections, as follows:

Lift the Floor for Working People

1.       Raise the federal minimum wage, so that it reaches $15/hour, while indexing it to inflation.

2.       Reform the National Labor Relations Act, to enhance workers’ right to organize and rebuild the middle class.

3.       Pass comprehensive immigration reform to grow the economy and protect against exploitation of low-wage workers.

4.       Oppose trade deals that hand more power to corporations at the expense of American jobs, workers’ rights, and the environment.

5.       Invest in schools, not jails -- and give a second chance to those coming home from prison. This point is the one not on De Blasio’s list.

Support Working Families

6.       Pass national paid sick leave.

7.       Pass national paid family leave.

8.       Make Pre-K, after-school programs and childcare universal.

9.       Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit and protect and expand Social Security.

10.    Allow students to refinance student loan debt to take advantage of lower interest rates, and support debt-free college.

Tax Fairness

11.    Close the carried interest loophole.

12.    End tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.

13.    Implement the “Buffett Rule” so millionaires pay their fair share.

14.    Close the CEO tax loophole that allows corporations to take advantage of “performance pay” write-offs.

The agenda is a good start, but it’s missing a few items:

·         Remove the ceiling on income assessed for the Social Security tax and make all income and bonuses subject to the tax.

·         Increase direct support of public schools and universities to decrease class size in elementary schools, increase resources for middle and senior high schools and lower the cost to attend college.

·         Expand cheap and free public vocational training.

·         Close down all charter schools that do not pay their teachers the same salary as the prevailing public school wage and whose employees are not represented by the same union representing the teachers in the public school.

·         Place a tariff on all goods and services from other countries equal to the difference in the cost of labor and environmental and safety costs between the United States and the exporter.

·         Fund a massive infrastructure program that repairs our existing roads, bridges and inter-city trains and expands mass transit within and between cities using the latest advances in alternative fuel technologies.

The organizers could also add a section on actions that would make our political system more small-d democratic and inclusive, including rolling back all the restrictive voting laws recently passed whenever Republicans have controlled both houses of a state legislature; passing laws that would lessen the importance of money and mitigate the impact of the Citizens United decision; and limiting the number of media outlets any company can own in any region and in total and making companies divest themselves of media properties to meet the new restriction.

But that doesn’t mean the Progressive Agenda is not a good plan. It’s a very good plan that we should all support by signing the petition and telling all candidates in writing that we won’t vote for them unless they support the Progressive Agenda.

By killing Boston Marathon bomber, we stoop to his level of barbarism & depravity

By Marc Jampole

The jury that sentenced Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death had a choice. They could have imprisoned Tsarnaev for life. But these 12 supposedly civilized men and women choice to do unto the Boston Marathon bomber what he had done unto others.

I wonder whether any of the 12 have ever killed another human being before—from a plane, at sniper’s distance, or up close. I wonder whether they would have all voted to put Tsarnaev to death if they had to pull the trigger or push the button that ends his life.

It’s so much easier to vote “yes,” almost as easy as pulling the toggle that kills a dozen enemy soldiers in a video game.

Killing is killing, no matter what.

Even if the death penalty served as a deterrent, it would still be wrong on moral and ethical grounds. But most studies conclude that the death penalty does not serve as a deterrent. It seems that at the moment of pulling the trigger, planting the bomb, applying the poison, lighting the fire, pushing the accelerator to the floor or someone off the roof—at the moment of committing a capital crime, perpetrators don’t consider or discount the possible consequence.

This essay is not the place to discuss the morality of war, but I think we can all agree that lots of soldiers come home from battle with deep psychological wounds that heal slowly and leave ugly scars. We call it post-traumatic stress disorder, but we could just as well call it the “killing” disease, because having to kill another person disgusts and shames normal people so much that it makes them ill. Psychopaths and sociopaths are different. Maybe killing other human beings is

necessary in war, and maybe not, but it is never necessary in peace, which makes it always wrong.

It makes me wonder whether members of a jury that brings in a death sentence suffer the same cold night sweats, panic attacks, inability to concentrate, sudden rages and other symptoms of the soldier returned from the killing fields.

Killing is killing, no matter what.

Most other nations of the world have abolished the death penalty, 140 according to Amnesty International. The United States is one of a mere 22 countries that held executions in 2013. But then again, we also incarcerate one quarter of the Earth’s prisoners, making us the world’s largest jailor, and perhaps it’s bloodiest, too. Both the left and right are making noise about ending the system of “mass incarceration” that has made America the land of the jailed. Part of this movement to make the criminal justice system fairer, more efficient and less costly should be ending capital punishment once and for all. It’s time we returned to the circle of civilized nations.

Meanwhile, we should understand that one death is almost as bad as six, or 60. Like all juries that vote unanimously to kill a fellow human being—even one as reprehensible as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—the Boston marathon bomber jury has broken no law. In fact, it has enforced one. But it doing so, these 12 citizens have brought new shame to the United States and all Americans.

Steer Left with Sanders

With the entry of Sen. Bernie Sanders in the race for the Democratic nomination for president, it’s time for progressive populists to show their game.

Sanders, 73, is a democratic socialist who has run independent campaigns as he won elections to serve eight years as mayor of Burlington, Vt., 16 years as Vermont’s at-large member of Congress, where he founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus in 1991, and two winning campaigns for the US Senate, where he has served since 2007. In his campaign for president, he will have to capitalize the “D” while his opponents at the center and the right will focus on the “S”, but Sanders won re-election in 2012 with 71% of the vote in a state that still has a lot of hardscrabble conservatives, so being a socialist hasn’t been a bar to his popularity thus far. Sanders has succeeded by translating political and economic issue to languages he can share with blue-collar workers over the kitchen table. He’s not a communist — an important distinction — but he thinks we could take after democratic socialist countries in Scandinavia, such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

While the conventional wisdom is that “socialist” is still a political slur in the US, six years of Republicans calling Barack Obama a socialist have removed much of the sting from that label, and that GOP hyperbole has left youngsters thinking that socialism must not be that big a deal. If it’s socialist to fight for American manufacturing jobs, to put more Americans to work by investing in roads, bridges rail lines and other infrastructure improvements, to make public colleges and universities free, to make health care a right and protect Social Security, Medicare and the Veterans Administration from threatened cuts by Republicans — and even expand those benefits with a restored progressive tax system that soaks the rich — public opinion polls show those socialist policies Sanders promotes are supported in most cases by two-thirds of Americans.

Sanders also has reintroduced legislation to break up the nation’s biggest banks, saying, “If an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.” He notes that the largest banks are now 80% bigger than they were before the financial crisis in 2008, making them an even bigger threat to the economy today.

Bankers are confident that they can smother Sanders’ bill in the Republican Congress, but Kevin Cirilli reports in The Hill(May 12) that financial industry leaders are still concerned that Sanders’ rhetoric might impact Hillary Clinton and cause her to “pander to the far left.”

In fact, Bernie’s platform is nothing radical. He is channelling the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal — another program that plutocrats derided as socialism in the 1930s. But that was the sort of socialism that provided relief for millions of unemployed, giving them jobs on public works projects, helping farms and businesses survive, rebuild and eventually thrive, with organized labor empowered to look after the interests of industrial workers when the economic royalists would pay them starvation wages if they could get away with it.

The New Deal set the stage after World War II for the growth of a middle class that was the envy of the world until the plutocrats simply could not stand the broad-based prosperity any more. They put up Ronald Reagan to break up the unions in the 1980s and then eliminated trade barriers in the 1990s so the industrialists could move their factories to Third World nations that allow starvation wages and don’t bother manufacturers with pesky regulations.

Sanders has tapped a deep vein of frustration among progressive Democrats who have watched the party move toward the right over the past 30 years. He raised $3 million in his first four days as a candidate and he promises to build a progressive grassroots campaign to win the nomination.

Sanders will need to run an insurgent campaign because he won’t have the money to flood the airwaves with ads, and neither he nor other progressives can expect any favors from the corporate news media in getting a fair hearing of their agenda. (That is one reason you should support publications such as The Progressive Populist, and get your friends and family members to subscribe too!) But it also is important that President Obama’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission in February affirmed the principle of net neutrality on the Internet, so corporate Internet service providers cannot throttle independent voices who get the word out on websites, podcasts and other “social media.” Internet service providers and trade groups have sued in federal court challenging the FCC’s net neutrality rule.

It is true that federal campaign finance rules have been grotesquely deformed by the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, whose Citizens United decision in 2010 struck down the limits on organizations accepting corporate money for electioneering, and whose McCutcheon decision in 2014 struck down aggregate limits on campaign contributions by wealthy contributors. That allows wealthy industrialists such as the Koch Brothers to raise and spend billions of dollars — much of it unaccountable — to try to elect their anointed ones to the White House and Congress in the next cycle. Democrats might as well make a virtue of their poverty and embrace a real progressive agenda such as the ones that are being proposed by Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Don’t complain that we’ve lost our democracy. People still get to vote. (Though whether your vote gets counted can get problematic.) Get to work on taking democracy back. Bernie’s campaign is as good a vehicle as any.

On the other hand, try not to say anything in the primary campaign that you might need to walk back in the general election. In his announcement, Sanders noted that he has never run a negative campaign and he doesn’t plan to start now. The facts should suffice, but he is not operating under the illusion that a progressive “spoiler” campaign that throws the election to the Republicans would do working people any good.

We know some of our readers have no use for Hillary Clinton, but if she manages to overcome Bernie’s challenge, we would vote for her in the general election. Not only has she embraced some progressive principles as she rolls out her agenda; her choice of Joseph Stiglitz as her economic adviser is very encouraging to progressives. We still don’t anticipate she would be much tougher on Wall Street than the Obama administration has been, but Stiglitz has proposed sensible moves, such as raising taxes on capital gains and a push to make corporations less focused on short-term quarterly returns, that we wholeheartedly support, and Clinton is expected to embrace those reforms. She also might remind the bankers who are miffed at the populist talk coming from the Democrats that if Wall Street didn’t like the Dodd-Frank financial reforms in 2010 after they had contributed millions to the campaigns of President Obama and congressional Democrats, they really won’t like what she might do in 2017 if they place all their bets on the wrong team.

Anyway, we believe that progressives will have little choice but to embrace the Democratic ticket if for no other reason than the next president almost certainly will set the future of the Supreme Court.

The high court has done enough damage with Anthony Kennedy providing the swing vote on a 5-4 bench. The next president might get to appoint three or four justices, which could turn the court around, or it could cement a right-wing majority for a generation. You don’t want those justices named by a president who is approved by the Koch Brothers and you don’t want those nominees reviewed by a Senate that is ruled by Mitch McConnell.

In the meantime, if you want the Democratic Party to embrace progressive populist positions and scare Wall Street bankers, support Bernie Sanders for president. See berniesanders.com. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2015

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Selections from the June 1, 2015 issue

COVER/Bill Curry
Sanders can win by building a movement 

EDITORIAL
Steer left with Sanders

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Don’t depend on Asia to put food on the table

DISPATCHES
Dem filibuster prompts GOP concessions on trade bill;
‘Meet the Press’ has trouble remembering Bernie Sanders;
US subsidizes huge oil companies;
NSA reform bill falls short;
Amtrak wreck kills 8, Congress argues over railroad funding;
10 fierce Senate races shaping up;
FBI broke its own rules in tracking anti-pipeline activists;
Verizon-AOL merger 'makes no sense':
Rand Paul blames black parents in Baltimore, won't comment on his son's DUI ...

DAVID NIOSE
The eye-opening potential of Sanders candidacy

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Why Baltimore is burning

JOAN WALSH
The era of (Bill) Clinton liberalism is over

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Medicaid: The patient’s dilemma

SAM URETSKY
Predestined to vote Republican

JOHN YOUNG
GOP’s contraceptive stance: More abortions

WAYNE O’LEARY
The roots of inequality

JOHN BUELL
Trading away democracy

BOB BURNETT
Vote no on Armageddon

DON ROLLINS
Labor in search of a champion

FR. DONNELL KIRCHNER
What will Pope Francis tell Congress?

SETH SANDRONSKY
California’s two-tier economy

JASON STANFORD
We are all Baltimore

ROB PATTERSON
Who’s still rocking after all these years

POPULIST PICKS
Van Morrison; Boz Scaggs; Nellie McKay

and more ...

Warren & De Blasio tell us how to improve economy & society, while Christie offers plan for ultra-wealthy

By Marc Jampole

We’ve seen two agendas for America’s future released within a 24-hour period: the new contract for America by New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren (in order of size of population represented), which they presented in Washington, D.C., and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s plan to grow the economy and raise incomes, which he sketched in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.

These two plans could not be more different in tone, underlying assumptions, recommendations or targeted constituencies. They also differ in terms of the underlying factual basis of their proposals.

In Christie’s case, there is almost no factual basis to believe what he wants to do will kick-start economic growth and raise incomes. Basically he advocates more of what has choked the country for 35 years. Christie wants to reduce taxes on the wealthy and on corporations; simplify taxes in a revenue neutral way (which is Republican speak for wanting to continue to starve the government of needed funds); reduce government regulation; and base our national energy policy on exploration of fossil fuels.

Christie must have a super-tiny, itsy-bitsy, skinny-as-a-rail attention span, because what he’s proposing is the basic playbook that has led to the greatest transfer of wealth and income in world history: the flow of money from the poor and middle class to the wealthy in the United States since 1980.

Christie proffers the reality-defying idea that with lower taxes, businesses will invest more in growth and conduct more research & development. It hasn’t happened yet, and once more, it never happens. When government programs take money from the middle class and the poor and give it to the wealthy, all that happens is that the wealthy get richer and the overall economy weakens. That’s what has happened during the past three decades and it’s what happened during the Gilded Age in 19th century America, in the 17th century French ancien regime and in 16th century Spain under Phillip II. 

Christie does have one half of a good idea, which is to eliminate the payroll tax for employees under 21 and over 62, as a means to encourage employers to hire new workers and those near retirement to keep working. I call it half a good idea, because payroll taxes include both Social Security and Medicare. I would propose eliminating only the Social Security portion of the payroll tax for these age groups and only eliminating the employee’s side for those over 62, so the employer would keep paying for the experienced worker. Furthermore, to fund the loss of revenues to the Social Security Trust Fund, I would remove the cap on income assessed by the Social Security tax.

Other than this one pint-sized, skinny idea, Christie’s proposals help but one constituency, the ultra-wealthy, whose bank accounts are already bulging from federal and state government actions of the past three decades.

I would love to write that, unlike Good King Christie of Crony Capitalism, Warren and De Blasio are true patriots whose recommendations are based on facts and who don’t deal in the devious obfuscation like Christie and the other factotums of the ultrawealthy do. But I can’t say for sure since not one news media outlet—not one—printed the entire 13 points of De Blasio and Warren’s “Progressive Agenda,” preferring to focus on the absurdly irrelevant question: Is it appropriate for the Mayor to be travelling around the country instead of working at his job? (A question never asked of the globe-trotting Michael Bloomberg.)

Unfortunately, as of this writing, no progressive organization has yet put the plan online either, so we can’t completely blame the news media for not being able to find all 13 points. If De Blasio, Warren and other progressive are serious about pushing their program, they are going to have to reach out directly to people and not depend on a rightward looking mainstream media that prefers to reduce issues to personalities, faux pas and horse races. I’ll keep looking for a formal 13-point proposal and present an analysis if and when I find it.

What we do know about the “Progressive Agenda” sounds like it’s exactly what the doctor ordered for the U.S. economy:

·         Close the “carried interest” loophole in the tax code that enables hedge fund managers to avoid paying taxes on most of their income.

·         The “Buffett Rule,” named after America’s favorite billionaire, which would assess a minimum of 30% in federal income taxes on anyone who makes at least a million a year, about .3% of tax payers.

·         Increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour and indexing it to inflation.

·         Instituting universal pre-kindergarten.

·         Requiring employers to provide mandatory paid sick leave.

Taken as a whole, these plans take money from the wealthy and give it to the poor and the middle class, which reverses the trend since 1980. Let’s hope that the other eight proposals fronted by De Blasio and Warren also redistribute income downward, because that’s what this country needs.

I admire the political savvy exercised by De Blasio, Warren and Bernie Sanders to aggressively push the progressive agenda at this time. The earlier they get started, the more leftward they will be able to move Hillary Clinton. Just as important by moving her left early, the Democratic primaries will not become a divisive blood bath.

If Clinton is the Democratic nominee, progressives would be fools not to vote for her in November

By Marc Jampole

The past few days, I have been sharing excerpts from my lengthy Vox Populi article on Hillary Clinton’s probable positions on most of the issues likely to form the basis of the 2016 presidential campaign. Here is one final excerpt:

We can sum up Hillary Clinton’s probable platform in a few words: On social and domestic issues not involving unions, she will follow Elizabeth Warren’s lead, which should make progressives happy. On homeland security, foreign policy, military policy and trade policy, she will continue Obama’s initiatives in virtually every way, which is not such good news for the left. Taken as a unity, these stands make Hillary Clinton a centrist looking left, a contemporary version of Washington State’s long-time Senator, Henry “Scoop” Jackson.

It’s quite possible that a majority of Democratic voters are more progressive than Hillary, but Pew, Gallup and other polls suggest that a large majority of Democrats and independents taken together pretty much agree with Hillary on most things. Additionally, on domestic matters the gap between Hillary and the most left-leaning of the 2016 crew of Republican stalwarts is far greater than the difference between Hillary and the progressive edge of the Democratic Party, which I define as New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio.

Over the course of the next 18 months, I’m sure that Hillary Clinton will say many things that piss off progressives. She will particularly disappoint the left on issues related to unions, defense, national security and homeland security. But everything that every Republican running for president will say will piss off progressives—and frighten us, too.  

I didn’t write it in my Vox Populi article, but I feel strongly that it would be foolish for progressives to stay home in November or select a write-in candidate because of some antipathy to Hillary Clinton. The contrast between her views on Social Security, government programs for the poor, immigration, investment in infrastructure, taxation, gay marriage and abortion from those of every Republican is too vast for us to put our country at danger by not throwing our support behind Hillary, or just about any other Democratic candidate for that matter.

Hillary Clinton’s stand on issues makes her a centrist looking left

By Marc Jampole

As I mentioned yesterday, the progressive website Vox Populi has published four articles about Hillary Clinton’s campaign, including my analysis of her position on issues. 

In this excerpt from my Vox Populi article, I dig into her recent statements to erect what her platform will look like. I based most of this analysis on comments she has made since 2014 or comments she has made so many times that she would be hard-pressed to move very far from her past position. I depended to a large degree but not entirely on the very thoroughand accurate nonpartisan website, ontheissues.org, which breaks down how all the potential candidates for either major party’s nomination stand on a large number of issues.

Before presenting the detail, let me sum up what we can say about Hillary Clinton’s probable platform: on social and domestic issues not involving unions, she will follow Elizabeth Warren’s lead, which should make progressives happy. On homeland security, foreign policy, military policy and trade policy, she will continue Obama’s initiatives in virtually every way, which is not such good news for the left.

Now for the detail:

Economic Issues

·         Income/wealth inequality: She has commented numerous times on the need to recut the wealth and income pies so that less goes to the ultra-wealthy and more goes to everyone else, but she has suggested little that specifically addresses that issue.

·         Minimum Wage: Through the years, she has consistently been vociferous in her support of raising the minimum wage, but how high remains unclear since her last comment was in 2007.

·         Labor unions: She has no recent comments on whether she supports unions, but her stands on charter schools and trade agreements suggest she’s no lover of labor.

·         Taxation: She is on record many times of saying she believes that the wealthy are not paying their fair share in taxes.

·         Trade: Hillary is one of the most aggressive advocates for TPP and for lowering barriers for corporations to do business abroad.

Education

Hillary is a long-time supporter of charter schools and has said she wants to link teachers’ pay to performance, but do it by school and not by individual teacher. These sound like anti-union moves that do nothing to address the real problems facing public education: resource shortages and large class sizes.

Environmental

She is both for limiting emissions worldwide and for investment by wealthier nations to mitigate the effects of global warming on the most vulnerable nations.

Foreign Policy

Hillary will probably be a little quicker to send in troops and bombs than Obama was, but will have essentially the same policy. She tends to be hawkish on specific issues:

·         Israeli-Palestinian conflict: She is very concerned about the security of Israel, and doesn’t seem to put any priority on addressing the mistreatment of Palestinians or Palestinian rights.

·         Iran: Hillary was involved in arranging secret talks with Iran in 2012 and 2013, and has come out in favor of a negotiated agreement with Iran regarding its development of nuclear weapons.

·         Hillary pretty much agreed with the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the way the war was prosecuted thereafter, except for the torture, which she vehemently opposed.

·         Syria: She wanted to arm Syrian rebels.

·         Russia: One of her goals as Secretary of State was to achieve a permanent thaw in relations with Russia, but since the invasion of the Crimea, she has been as tough-talking as any mainstream American politician against Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin.

·         China: Hillary was influential in implementing the Obama Administration’s “pivot to Asia,” which has as its goals projection of American power in Asia and containment of China by the United States and its allies. Nothing that she has said or written lately suggests that she has changed her mind about continuing Obama’s hard line on China.

·         Military Technology: In her book, Hard Choices, Hillary defends the use of drones by the Obama Administration.

Gun Control

Hillary has been an outspoken supporter of expansion of the national firearms registry and on placing more controls on gun sales and who can buy and carry a gun.

Healthcare

We know she has long been in favor of universal coverage. We can expect that she will want to maintain and perhaps extend the Affordable Care Act.

Immigration

She supports immigration reform that helps immigrants, by which I think we can assume illegal immigrants, judging from her comments.

Safety Net

Hillary has always supported maintaining and extending aid to the poor and the elderly. Her stands are particularly significant in light of the frequent calls of all the potential Republican candidates for cutting benefits to the poor.

Security State

Her past positions do not bode well for civil libertarians. Hillary voted for the misbegotten Patriot Act and its renewal and disapproved of Edward Snowden’s actions.

Social Security

She opposes privatization and is in favor of raising the cap on how much earnings are taxed for Social Security purposes, which places her left of President Obama. She also stands in stark contrast to every Republican candidate, all of whom want to privatize Social Security and cut benefits.

Values Issues

She supports gay marriage and a woman’s right to control her own body, which again, contrasts with every Republican candidate. She wants to see how marijuana legalization works in Washington and Colorado and is skeptical of the relative lack of research on medical uses.

News media would still focus on irrelevant even if Hillary had issued a complete platform

By Marc Jampole

The progressive website Vox Populi asked me to write a complete analysis of Hillary Clinton’s positions on the entire range of issues which will—or should—dominate the presidential campaign.  You can find my complete article and three other articles about Hillary’s campaign at Vox Populi.

I wanted to share a few excerpts from this lengthy analysis on the OpEdge blog. Today’s excerpts speculate on why Hillary’s early campaign has largely avoided talking about the issues:

Hillary Clinton has herself to blame at least in part for the news media covering extraneous issues in the early stages of her campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. She has said hardly a word about her positions on the issues. There is nothing about her platform on either or her two campaign websites, hillaryclinton.com and readyforhillary.com, or on her Facebook page. In speeches, we get brief tidbits, but nothing substantive.

In a sense, Hillary is saying, “You know who I am and what my capabilities are,” and there is a certain logic to this approach. Let’s start with the reality of the situation: a number of serious constraints have always prevented presidents from veering from the basic direction in which the country is headed—the courts, the legislature and the continuing federal government that goes about its job of running things no matter who is the boss.

Thus, our presidential candidates can be—and usually are—evaluated not just in terms of their political and social stances, but also on their ability to manage the processes of government. And when it comes to the criteria that define an effective chief executive, there are few candidates in American history as qualified as Hillary, at least on paper:

·         High intelligence: How can anyone deny that Hillary is both highly gifted intellectually and a lifetime learner?

·         Past experience: Only the rabid right would call her time in the Senate and as Secretary of State anything other than successful.

·         Lack of hypocrisy: Hillary has never said one thing and then hypocritically did something else, for example, rail against the Affordable Care Act and then sign up for Obamacare, as Ted Cruz has done, or advocate against gays all the while trolling public bathrooms for same sex quickies, as Republican Senator Larry Craig did. 

·         She has a cross-cultural understanding of social cues, which means that she won’t embarrass herself by saying or doing the wrong thing, as Mitt Romney constantly did during the 2012 presidential campaign, e.g., when he publicly revealed a secret briefing that many had undergone over the decades but that everyone else who received it had the good sense to keep confidential; or when Romney broke the cardinal sin of retired Chief Executive Officers, which is not to criticize the new administration unless involved in a hostile takeover; Mitt criticized the London Olympics (unfairly, too, as it turned out), even though he was a past CEO of the Olympic games. Far from making these “bull in a china shop” mistakes, Hillary seems to enjoy tremendous respect among the people of the world and world leaders.

·         She is competent running an organization: Despite the increasingly incredulous claims of Republicans, Hillary seemed to have done a good job of running the State Department, even in the Benghazi disaster. There were media reports that her 2008 campaign was a mess, but I wonder if that was just exaggeration to win eyeballs and sell papers.

·         Science-based decision-making: Hillary has never said or written anything that tried to deny science. Contrast with the Republican candidates, announced and unannounced: all of them deny science in one way or another, regarding a wide variety of issues, including global warming, science teaching, women’s fertility issues and economics. I’m not saying Hillary is always right, but that she always reasons from the facts, and not from what she wants the facts to be.

By focusing on Hillary the person, I believe the campaign wants to communicate that Hillary is the most competent presidential candidate around, regardless of one’s political positions. They want us to encapsulate all the positive personality traits and management skills a president needs into one brand name, Hillary!

The subtext of focusing on Hillary the person (read: the celebrity) is the assumption that we all know what the former Secretary of State, U.S. Senator and First Lady stands for.

Not immediately presenting a complete platform thus postpones the inevitable intra-party clashes, e.g., between those who favor the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, such as Hillary herself, and those who worry that it gives corporations the right to sue countries; and between those who embrace charter schools, again like Hillary, and those who see them as subtle attempts to destroy public unions. Moreover, there can be little doubt that even if Hillary had opened with a full program, Republicans and the rightwing media would still be wallowing in a mud bath of hysterical accusations and bold-faced lies about her. The frenzied and rabid opposition to the Clintons consists primarily of accusations regarding their character flaws. Perhaps to battle this constant character assassination explains why the early campaign message is that Hillary is competent, ethical, caring, effective, flexible and...Well, you know…She’s Hillary!