Trump’s business techniques would cause a stock & bond market crash and depression

By Marc Jampole

One of the many things that Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand is that sometimes merely saying something can be hurtful.  The classic case is Trump’s outrageous lie months ago that he knew a child who had gotten autism because of a vaccination. It was a bold-faced lie, the telling of which in and of itself hurt other people, to wit, those children whose parents later used it as part of their case for denying them vaccinations.

Trump just said something else that should disqualify him as president. He said that he would finance his program on debt, and if the country couldn’t pay, he would negotiate new terms with lenders. If Trump were to make such a statement as president, the dollar would sink in value and interest rates would skyrocket. Lenders would be reluctant to loan money to the United States. Other countries would look for another currency to serve as the base of the global economy. The likely result would be a decline in the stock and bond markets, followed by a deep recession. Such a scenario would cause pain and suffering to millions of people.

All because countries and business all over the world have lost faith in the U.S. dollar. All because the president of the United States in a fit of rage, pique or frustration lost control of his emotions and threatened not to pay off our debts in full on a timely basis. 

I know that a large number of business operators, and in particular developers, send companies into bankruptcy as a way of life. They always walk away with some money, but the investors are left with losses. That’s the way Donald Trump has always operated, sending three real estate organizations into bankruptcy. We often see the litany of his failed businesses—Trump Airlines, Trump Steaks, Trump Mortgage, Trump Vodka, Trump Magazine, to many of which he merely provided his name. He walked away with licensing fees and the business failed, leaving employees and investors holding the bag. The New York Times analysis of how Trump destroyed the U.S. Football League by insisting that it compete head-on with the National Football League instead of fielding teams in the NFL off-season is an eye-opener. In failing, Trump University has attracted a number of lawsuits, and the evidence vetted in the news media suggests that Trump himself broke the law in overpromising what students would experience in classes. Other news reports have alluded to the low respect with which long-timers in the casino industry view Trump; they consider him a buffoon. It is true that Trump has found success on reality TV and as a brand licenser, but the foundation of both these accomplishments is the false premise that he is a good business person. Months ago, Forbes did an analysis that demonstrated that if Trump had passively invested the fortune he inherited from his father, his net worth would be twice what it is.

But even if it were good business advice to spend a lot of money, knowing that if things don’t work out you can always go into bankruptcy, it just doesn’t work for a country, and certainly not for a country whose economic well-being depends in large part to being the currency of choice around the globe.

When a company goes into bankruptcy, it will hurt creditors, and often hurts vendors, employees and customers as well. But it doesn’t have to hurt the chief executive officer and other executives. We know many instances of a CEO raiding and raping it, and then sending a company into bankruptcy. But what does a president get when a country defaults on its debt, at least in a democratic country with strong laws against political corruption?  We know what happens in kleptocracies such as Russia and the Ukraine. If we assume Trump is a rational human being, building an authoritarian kleptocracy makes perfect sense as an explanation for Trump’s comment about renegotiating with creditors if the United States couldn’t pay its debt. Of course some would say that there is little difference between what happens in Russia and the kind of crony capitalism Bush II practiced in the Middle East and tried to practice after Hurricane Katrina.

That Trump might enter into negotiations to revise bond terms is scary. The fact that he is willing to say it may be even scarier, because it suggests, once again, that the Donald will say anything and break any deal.

Trump has revised his stand on a number of issues, acts that many who voted for him may consider betrayals. He now is okay with transgendered people using the restroom of the sex with which they identify. He talked hard about tax cuts and put out a plan that gave massive tax cuts to the wealthy, but now he says taxes may rise for the wealthy and businesses. He was adamantly against raising the minimum wage in several debates. Now he says he wants to raise the minimum wage. I agree with his current stands on all these issues, but it must be pissing off all the Republicans who think otherwise and voted for him or now are boxed into supporting his candidacy. But these right-wingers should fear not. Donald Trump is like the weather in spring: He will probably change his mind again on any and all of these issues.

Trump is trumpeting his own duplicity and lack of a moral center as a major selling point. Everything is open for negotiation and everything is on the table, even a first-strike use of nuclear weapons. The horror at his pride at not having political ethics is exceeded only by the horror evoked by thinking about what dropping a nuclear weapon would do to its immediate victims and the Earth’s atmosphere.

Part of Trump’s inconsistency results from the off-the-cuff nature of his campaign and his speeches. He makes it up as he goes along, and then either spends copious words justifying what was a misstatement or changes his mind, sometimes in the next sentence. The fact that he doesn’t mind lying about the facts makes it easy for him to substantiate any statement he makes and therefore say anything that he wants to—at any given moment, for as long or as short a time as makes him feel good.

When we mix Trump’s political and ethical flexibility and his propensity to lie with his fomenting of violence, advocacy of hate politics and love of authoritarian solutions, we get fascism run by an erratic narcissist. It looks like and sounds like the democratic nation of Germany when Adolf Hitler took it over. It’s a good thing that unlike Hitler, Trump does not have the support of his own party.

America now has clear choice: the competent, experienced Hillary Clinton or a failed developer turned reality show celebrity

By Marc Jampole

The American people now have a clear choice for their next president. Do we select someone who is knowledgeable and informed about every issue or someone who knows nothing about many important domestic and foreign issues?

Do we want someone whose campaign is built around facts and the issues or someone whose campaign is built around insults and boasts?

Someone whom PolitiFact considered the most truthful of all the candidates or someone who lies in every speech and even vilely stooped to telling the odious lie that he knew a child who got autism from a vaccination?

Someone who has remained calm and restrained in the face of 25 years’ worth of false accusations or someone prone to fly off the handle and make outrageous statements?

Someone who has always stressed inclusiveness and spent decades working on behalf of minorities or someone who has fomented hate against immigrants and minorities?

Someone who has admitted when subsequent events or facts proved her wrong or someone who digs in and refuses to admit he’s been wrong or even made an inaccurate statement?

Someone who has spent decades working for the rights of women, or someone who constantly denigrates women and evaluates them solely on their sexual charms?

Someone who showed her commitment to traditional marriage by working things out with a philandering husband or someone who twice had public affairs while still married?

Do we want someone from the upper middle class who represents the American ideal of meritocracy by working hard and succeeding in every position she has had or someone who was born into wealth and by some accounts did worse in his business dealings than he would have passively investing the hundreds of millions he inherited? Someone who has always been a success or someone who sent three companies into bankruptcy, making money while investors lost millions?

Do we want someone whom virtually every foreign leader knows and respects or someone foreign governments fear as an irrational hothead and despise because of his insulting statements about Muslims and Hispanics?

As these comparisons of the character and experience of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump demonstrated, even people who believe that Hillary Clinton is too left wing or too right wing have plenty of reasons to vote for her.

Donald Trump is at best a narcissistic blowhard and at worst a deranged, self-centered lunatic. In either case, he is masterful at public relations and self-promotion, prone to lying, and inconsistent about his position on the issues—except for his odious stands on immigrants and his insistence with every other Republican candidate that we need to lower taxes even more on the wealthy. That many leaders in the Republican Party are beginning to embrace him instead of talking about running a third-party candidate only further solidifies the notion that they believe that the president doesn’t matter much, as long as he (or she, giving the GOP the benefit of the doubt) supports tax breaks for the wealthy and hates unions. After all, they have rallied behind an actor and liar before, although Ronald Reagan had at least been an ultra rightest for years and also had experience serving as head of a union and governor of a large state. Republicans who are lining up behind Trump believe that doing so they have the best chance of keeping control of the House and Senate and maintaining their dominance of state government. That belief may prove to be as wacky as Trump’s notion that one could round up 11 million people and ship them out of the country.

The Republicans share blame with the right wing media for getting the public used to believing lies and fantastical notions. The mass media also deserves criticism for creating the grounds for Donald Trump, as they have steadily turned elections into celebrity contests and reality shows by their focus on personalities, the race itself and miscues, and their inability or unwillingness to expose candidates and elected officials who lie about such matters as tax policy, the effectiveness of government programs, global warming, abortion, gun safety, unions and foreign policy. The Republicans also fomented the anger of those hurt worst by their policies and deflected that anger to minorities and our African-American president. It is those voters who are flocking to Donald Trump—along with the hardcore nativists and racists who have always made up about 10-15% of the population. Now the GOP is stuck with a demagogic, self-centered con man with barely controllable urges and a strong authoritarian streak.

But making certain that Donald Trump does not seize power is only the second best reason to vote for Hillary Clinton.

The best reason is that she is a competent and caring liberal who knows how to get things done. Given a majority in the Senate and the House—a very possible outcome if we get a large voter turnout in November—I believe that she will build on Barack Obama’s start in bringing the country back from the excesses of Reaganism. More about that in a few days. 

Editorial: Renew the Deal

Bernie Sanders has come a long way since he announced his plan to seek the Democratic nomination for president on the Capitol lawn on April 30, 2015. The Washington Post called him “an ex-hippie, septuagenarian socialist from the liberal reaches of Vermont who rails, in his thick Brooklyn accent, rumpled suit and frizzy pile of white hair, against the ‘billionaire class’ taking over the country.”

The consensus of the Washington pundit class at that time was that Sanders would be, at most, a speed bump for the Hillary Clinton juggernaut. The self-styled “democratic socialist” had been mayor of Burlington, Vt., then served 16 years in the House before he was elected to the Senate in 2006.

Sanders, who remained independent but caucused with the Dems, was not well-known.
Sanders has been criticized for running a progressive populist campaign that focused on economic issues such as income and wealth inequality, raising the minimum wage, pushing for universal healthcare, reducing the burden of student debt, making public colleges and universities tuition-free by taxing financial transactions, and expanding Social Security benefits by eliminating the cap on the payroll tax on income above $250,000. He also opposes most “free trade” agreements that move manufacturing jobs overseas and he supports legislation that would make it easier for workers to join or form labor unions. And he identified climate change as a national security issue.

Sanders struck a chord. His campaign raised $1.5 million from 35,000 donors in the first day after his announcement. Through March 2016, he had raised $182.2 million from more than seven million individual donations, as he rejected super PAC assistance. Clinton had raised $182.2 million for her own campaign, but she also raised money for the Hillary Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee with the Democratic National Committee and state parties, and she has super PACs working independently on her behalf.

Sanders admires Scandinavian social democracy but in a speech at Georgetown University last November, he traced democratic socialism back through President Lyndon B. Johnson to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who used government power to create jobs and lift Americans out of poverty. “I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a decent standard of living and that their incomes should go up, not down.” Sanders said. “I do believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America, companies that create jobs here, rather than companies that are shutting down in America and increasing their profits by exploiting low-wage labor abroad.”

Sanders is basically a New Dealer and his success in the Democratic primaries shows there is still a groundswell of support for progressive populist democracy in the United States. While Sanders faces diminishing chances of catching up with Clinton for the nomination after the Atlantic primaries on April 26, he should continue his campaign to complete the unfinished business of the New Deal.

As the US struggled to break out of the Great Depression in 1932, Roosevelt committed to government guarantees of social and economic rights for the working class. In a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Sept. 23, 1932, he sketched what would become the New Deal to put millions of Americans back to work.

In a key passage, FDR said, “As I see it, the task of government in its relation to business is to assist the development of an economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order. This is the common task of statesman and business man. It is the minimum requirement of a more permanently safe order of things.”

In his State of the Union speech to Congress Jan. 8, 1941, as the US watched the aggression of Axis nations in Europe and Asia, Roosevelt proposed four fundamental freedoms that people “everywhere in the world ought to enjoy.” They included freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

In what would be his last State of the Union speech on Jan. 11, 1944, with US military forces leading the Allied momentum against Germany and Japan, Roosevelt proposed a second Bill of Rights, an “Economic Bill of Rights,” which built upon the “Four Freedoms.”

“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made,” he said..

“In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all — regardless of station, race, or creed.”

“Among those are:

“The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

“The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

“The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

“The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

“The right of every family to a decent home;

“The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

“The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

“The right to a good education.

“All of these rights spell security,” he said. “And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

“America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.”

So, if anything, Sanders is in the mainstream of the New Deal spirit that dominated American politics until the right-wing coalition under Ronald Reagan set about to dismantle the government programs that assisted working families and small businesses.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the right’s attitude toward higher education. After World War II, university tuition was practically free in California and New York and tuition was low enough in most states — the average tuition at a four-year public university in 1965 was just $243, the Sanders campaign noted — that a student could work their way through college with summer jobs at minimum wage.

Reagan, who supported FDR when he was an actor, became a leader in the fight to turn back the New Deal in the 1960s. He attacked state support for higher education, first as governor of California, where he imposed tuition at California universities, and later as president, where he targeted higher education funding and ended up cutting Pell grants and excluded middle-class students from the program. He limited the grants to lower-income families, which made it easier for Congress to cut the program further. Reagan also cut low-interest student loans and restricted eligibility for them. He phased out Social Security survivors’ education benefits, which provided one-fifth of student aid in 1981. Republicans at the state level also reduced their commitment to keeping higher education affordable for the working class, and tuition and other college fees skyrocketed.

If Hillary Clinton wants to win over Sanders’ supporters, particularly his young supporters, and parents who are trying to help their children get a college education, she should discover her inner Roosevelt and adopt Sanders’ progressive populist position on restoring federal assistance for college students at all levels and helping graduates pay off their college debts.

Both Clinton and Sanders should compete over who can finally implement FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights. Dems should force Republicans to answer for making higher education unaffordable for many Americans. Give working people something to vote for. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2016

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Selections from the May 15, 2016 issue

COVER/Ari Rabin-Havt
GOP plan: Lie big, and never back down 

EDITORIAL
Renew the Deal

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

KIERAN CULLEN
From lab bench to copy desk

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Clean water regs flow from feds

DISPATCHES
Trump U fraud case could go to trial this fall;
Former Sanders staffers seek to change Congress;
Va. gov. restores ex cons’ rights;
N.C. voter suppression law could swing election;
Two-thirds of Kansas voter registrations held back;
Fast food industry skirts labor law with state assists;
Climate change emerges as wedge issue;
Maine gov. says drug users should die;
Colorado GOP loses top Senate challenger;
Kansas gov. justifies kicking 15,000 off food stamps;
Mo. Legislature rejects $8.3M Medicaid funds in war against Planned Parenthood;
FCC moves on Cahter-Time Warner-Bridge House cable merger;
50 donors provide 41% of super PAC money;
Obamacare has been effective, studies say ...

JILL RICHARDSON
That ‘natural’ label doesn’t mean much

ERIC BLUMBERG
Terrorist down the block

ROGER BYBEE
Pols ignore working class at their peril

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Missing the Socialist moment

DON ROLLINS
Hey Columbus: Stop, look and listen

WENONAH HAUTER
A call to action for people and the planet

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Media, pols, economists admit they were wrong

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
A memo to the 47%

SAM URETSKY
NY primary not as much fun as we hoped

WAYNE O’LEARY
Corporate America’s judicial firewall

JOHN BUELL
Superpredators revisited

JAMES A. HAUGHT8
Liberals are the future

JOHN YOUNG
National gun fetish is double-barrel menace

SETH SANDRONSKY
Alt work grows in US

MOVIES/Ed Rampell
Sketches of pain: Miles High

WILL DURST
21st Annual political animal awards

and more ...

Primaries are more democratic than caucuses; neither should allow independents to participate

By Marc Jampole

Someone took an online poll that finds that more than half of all Americans think that the primary system is rigged.

If the primaries are rigged, the fix favors rural counties and rural states, which tend to be more conservative. In that, our nominating process resembles our bicameral system—one house for direct representation from a relatively small population zone and one house for representation from a larger geographic region. Geographic regions with smaller populations (rural) have the same representation as those with larger populations (urban). Bicameral representation is built into the Constitution.

The biggest complaint about primaries is that independents in some states aren’t allowed to vote in the primaries of the various political parties. And why should they? If you want to vote, join the party. It doesn’t even cost any money. All you have to do is note your party allegiance when you register or reregister to vote. In many states, you can designate your political party online.

I think the states in which voters can cross over or independents can vote in either party are unfair, and have the potential for rigging, because independent voters who don’t give a hoot about the Party can change the final outcome. Each major party has had consistent positions for decades, although individual party members can differ as much as Bernie Sanders and Jim Webb do. Independents tend to warp the vote. That certainly happened this year in the states that allow independents to vote in primaries and crossover voting. In the case of the Republicans, the warping has been harmful, because it gave additional votes to a candidate who is far more liberal on social issues and far less globalist on trade issues than anyone else in the current GOP. By contrast, the independents who poured into Democratic primaries to vote for Bernie Sanders have helped the Democratic Party to emphasize and rededicate itself to what has been its progressive core since FDR.  

The question as to the fairness of the various ways to apportion delegates is complicated. Our electoral system suggests that states should award delegates on a winner take all basis, but apportioning them according to the percentage of the vote won seems fairer. The more important issue, I believe, is that every state apportion delegates the same way. I like the idea of giving from a third to half the delegates to the statewide winner and awarding the other delegates according to Congressional districts because it preserves the bicameral nature of our government (some by population, some by geography) and remains essentially democratic.

Caucuses favor candidates who can establish on the-ground campaigns that appeal directly to voters. The problem is that so few of the voters participate in caucuses, even in a good year. It surprises me that the very people who have been exploiting the limited democracy of caucuses, Sanders supporters, use increasing democracy as the primary reason to open primaries to independents. They seem to forget that caucuses are only open to party members. I have never liked caucuses because they are less democratic than primaries, and can easily be manipulated by a party faction, as Cruz has been able to do this election cycle.

The other controversial issue related to the nominating process is the existence of super delegates. Those who complain about super delegates say that they were never elected, nor have voters/caucus goers designated whom the super delegates should support. Now that’s inherently undemocratic.

But let’s take a look at the issue from the point of view of the party. Who defines the party and controls the party? Who raises money for the party? Who represents the party in our various elected bodies all over the country? It’s the super delegates. Many super delegates are elected officials. Don’t you think that every Democratic Senator should get a vote as a delegate at the Democratic convention?

At the beginning of the party system in the United States, there were no primaries. A small elite of rich folk and politicos got together and decided who should run. Then came conventions, caucuses and primaries, each an attempt to further democratize the process of selecting candidates. Thus, those who say super delegates make the convention less democratic are looking at what happens the wrong way. In point of fact, primaries make the conventions more democratic.

It is not every year that the super delegates coalesce around one candidate as quickly as the Democrats have done this year, but it’s not every year that a candidate has as impressive a resume or as extensive a political network as Hillary Clinton. Many of the super delegates have said that they are willing to change their minds if Sanders would win the popular vote. Of course that hasn’t happened, as Hillary has racked up more votes than all the Republican candidates combined and millions of more votes than Bernie.

Low voter turnout is a primary reason a narcissistic demagogue is closing in on the Republican nomination. Note that if the Republicans had more super delegates, it would be easier to stop Donald Trump. They serve as a balance against the momentary irrational actions of voters, in a similar way that selecting Senators by state and letting them serve six years serves as a balance to the more volatile House of Representatives. In the 1950s and 1960s, most progressives complained that the conservative Senate—representing a prior era—was holding the country back; for the past few years, we’re been relieved that the more liberal Senate—still representing a prior era—is around to prevent the right-wing house from sending the country into a deep depression.  In a certain sense, the super delegates perform the same function.  It’s another manifestation of the bicameral nature of American governance.

In the case of this year’s Democrats, the super delegates are not seeking to thwart a potentially disastrous candidate, but rather to support the one they think will be more successful pursuing the Party’s agenda, and who at the same time has received more votes despite spending less money than the other major candidate.

If I were king for a day, we would go to an all-primary system with clusters of six states taking turns going first, second and third over a 10-week primary season that starts in April. I would award one half of all delegates to statewide winners and another third by congressional district. One sixth of all state delegates would be super delegates, many of those designated by elected title, e.g., U.S. Senator, mayor of the largest city.

Back to reality, where we have a complicated, cobbled-together nominating process, but one that is transparent and to a large degree reflects the essential bicameral nature of the American political system. The rules in each state are readily available in plain English and often in other languages. It’s incumbent on the candidate and her-his staff to learn those rules. Instead of complaining about the rules, play the game. Only by winning will you have a chance to change the rules, and the only way to win is to play the rules.

Of course, this advice only applies to those lucky enough to have access to millions of dollars in campaign funds. To make the system more democratic, we would do better not to sweat the nominating process but instead to limit the funds that can be expended by candidates to open up the system to less well-heeled candidates.

People at our Seder were too busy enjoying the moment to take photos & that’s a good thing

By Marc Jampole

A very strange thing happened at our family Seder, which included 14 people ranging in age from 12 to 94.

No one took a photograph.

It’s not that the group is anti-technology. The five under 30 are all very social media savvy and four of the Baby Boomers routinely post photos of events on Facebook. My wife Kathy and I had discussed taking photos and posting them for other family members earlier in the day.

What happened?

We were enjoying the moment of being together so much that we forgot to make a record of the event.

Maybe we’ll regret it one day, but right now I feel pretty good about not only living fully in the moment, but also inhabiting the moment with other people about whom I care. This particular group of people comprises a complicated network of special relationships, some intergenerational, between cousins, uncles/aunts and nephews/nieces, parents and children. Moreover, many circumstances lent poignancy to the evening.

Take into account the overwhelming emotional wave that Jews ride when celebrating Passover—our holiday of freedom—and you can imagine how the moment of being together could captivate us to such a point that no one remembered to pull out the smartphone or electronic camera and snap a few.

The concept of memory is a complicated one. No matter how impressive one’s powers of visual, emotional, tactile and sensational memory may be, our memory distorts events. The further away an event is in time, the more likely we are to think of it in terms of words and images, and not what actually happened. Taking a photograph may help to freeze the memory—simplify it to nothing but the photo and/or a few random word images. The memory acquires gloss and is homogenized.   

The upside is that the simplification helps us remember, and makes us creatures with enduring consciousness, not just consciousness of now. On the other hand it distorts. St. Augustine hinted at this distortion when he wrote that there are only three types of time: ”the past in the present,” “the present in the present” and “the future in the present.” Proust wrote and now Karl Ove Knausgård is writing thousands of pages trying to recapture the past in a fictional form using nothing but words. Robert Caro has spent thousands of words describing just the external life of Lyndon Baines Johnson and he hasn’t even started writing about Viet Nam yet! On a less sophisticated level is the person who documents every meal and event with 10-12 photographs that she/he immediately posts on Facebook and Twitter.

The creation of the artificial constructs we aggregate and call memory can impinge on the actual event. Think of how the bridal party leaving the reception just when it’s beginning for two hours to take photographs disjoints contemporary weddings. Most of us have seen people at museums who go around snapping shots of every work of art and never seem to look at anything directly. Snapping photos of food or asking people to stop talking for a minute to pose intrude on the experience. It’s as if the recording of the memory becomes more important than the experience itself. We get to the point that the photo validates the event. Without the photo, nothing “real” has occurred.

The mass media reinforces this predilection to place memory over experience. Just think of how many advertisements for cruises, amusement parks, airlines, state tourist boards, sports teams and holiday gifts, food and decorations have as their basic message “make a memory” (as opposed to “experience something special”).

On the other hand…from the late ‘40s through the mid-‘60s an uncle who married into the other side of my family took silent super eight films of all family events. I remember my mother and father and all my aunts and uncles joking about him. His camera antics made him a buffoon in the eyes of much of the family. But what a difference a few decades make! Those few who survive cherish the electronic transcriptions of the filmed images, now set to sentimental piano music. It is haunting to see your deceased parents dancing and watch your father’s lips mumble counted steps, like you remember him doing.

Thus it may be worth the small sacrifice of the present entailed in picture-taking to facilitate the future’s memory of the past.

The question, then, is: Do we live in the present or do we live in the past? And let’s not forget about the time we may live in the future, anticipating what will happen after graduation, on vacation or next time one sees a beloved, or saving money, or denying oneself something in the present for something in the future? Augustine suggested we live in all three states of being simultaneously, formed by the past and moving towards the future, but all of life experienced only as now.

Will one of us someday feel sorry no photo was taken at the Seder last Friday? I bet several of us have already noted it with some regret. But I hope none of us feels bad about it. The lack of photo attests to the heightened experience we enjoyed. Would all of life be so joyful perhaps we would have no need to remember?

I grappled with some of these issues a few years back in a poem, still unpublished, titled “The Best of Times.” In reading it, keep in mind that the characters and the scene are pure fabrications of my lame imagination and based on no specific persons. Hopefully you recognize the “reality” of one or more of them in people you know, and more importantly relate to the situation and the way it reverberates both backwards and forwards in our mind’s time, which is really the only time that each of us knows:

THE BEST OF TIMES

Black-bean spare ribs, tangy cabbage salad

celebrate a high school graduation.

Silent dread invades me as I think

that this will be the final family time

for one of us: aunt and uncle in their eighties,

another uncle soon retiring from a stressful job,

sickly sister, secret addict, cousins overweight:

there are just too many here today

and a single marching time, always forward

into dark unknowns for all of us, one by one,

and all the ones who come after,

and all the ones who come after that.

Though one by one we die alone,

tonight we gnaw on bones together,

banter cherished stories heard before

and we want to hear again,

stories in stories of whistling past shadows,

swinging at the short end of a long rope,

kinfolk no one’s met in whorling waters,

huddled over steamy bowls of hope,

the best of times reduced to anecdote

or ancient bas-relief, tableaux emerging

from a plaster that is life itself, being lived,

every moment, even as it hardens into past.

Editorial: Play Hard But Nice, Dems

This is the time in the election cycle when partisans in a close race start to lose their minds, and the Democratic presidential race is leaking vitriol all over the place.

Some Bernie Sanders supporters are saying that they would have a hard time reconciling with Hillary Clinton if she wins the nomination, because of her ties with Wall Street, her support of military interventions as a senator and as secretary of state in the Obama administration and her taking contributions from corporate lobbyists.

Some Clinton supporters are saying Sanders doesn’t deserve to be the Democratic nominee because he’s too far left, his biography will be fodder for the right-wing scandal machine and he’s only been a Democrat since last November after a political career as an independent democratic socialist took him from the Burlington, Vt., mayor’s office during the 1980s to the House of Representatives in 1991 and then the Senate in 2007.

Some of Sanders’ more vigorous supporters have characterized Clinton’s orientation as right wing, but her record puts her more in the center-left. Clinton’s record in the Senate was more liberal than 70% of fellow Democrats, according to VoteView.com, and she was rated a “hard-core liberal” and barely more moderate than Sanders by OnTheIssues.com, Harry Enten noted at FiveThirtyEight.com. “There have been a few issues on which Hillary Clinton has taken more centrist positions. She, of course, voted for the Iraq War (she now says that was a mistake). Clinton has been mostly pro free trade” (although in the past year she has expressed opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership). And she has been against marijuana legalization, although she said she would consider the evidence gained from the use of medical marijuana in 23 states and in Washington, D.C., and legalized recreational marijuana in Colorado and Washington.

Patrick Caldwell noted at MotherJones.com that Sanders has been increasingly direct in attacks against Clinton’s past positions. But his own voting record shows he’s often voted for similar measures. At times he’s voted in favor of bills to keep the controversial detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, he voted for the controversial 1994 crime bill that increased penalties for repeat offenders and added funding to build more prisons, and he voted for the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 that established the 3-year and 10-year bans on allowing immigrants who overstayed their visa to return to the country.

Sanders has the strongest record with organized labor, voting 98% of the time with unions during his 25 years in Congress, according to the AFL-CIO legislative scorecard, but Clinton isn’t far behind with a 94% record with the labor federation during her eight years in the Senate.

On the Republican side, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has a 0% record on labor issues during his four years in the Senate, Ohio Gov. John Kasich had a 13% record with labor during 18 years in the US House. As governor Kasich resisted calls for right-to-work legislation but he signed into law a bill to restrict bargaining by public-employee unions in 2011. It was overturned by voters later that year.

Donald Trump has never served in public office but he has gained significant blue-collar support — including union members — with his denunciation of “free trade” deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and his proposals to slap tariffs on Chinese exports and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. The real-estate developer makes these promises despite his own outsourcing of Trump-branded clothing to factories in China and Mexico and his hotels that have resisted organizing efforts. Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas has refused to negotiate with the union that won a certification election in December. Trump also supports “right to work” laws that weaken labor’s ability to organize and collect dues and he has said that American “wages are too high.”

We are confident that progressive voters will recognize the chasm between the Democratic nominee — be it Clinton or Sanders — and the Republican nominee — whether it’s Trump, Cruz, Kasich or some other right-winger who the Establishment foists upon the Republican convention in July. With at least one seat on the Supreme Court already at stake, and several other sitting justices looking shaky, and the very real opportunity to put Democrats back into the majority in the Senate and a longshot chance to win back the House — this is no time for progressive voters to sit out the election.

In Wisconsin, 11 cities, villages and townships voted by overwhelming margins April 5 for proposals to amend the Constitution to declare that corporations are not people, that money is not speech, and that citizens (and their elected representatives) have a right to organize elections in which their votes matter more than billionaire dollars, John Nichols noted at TheNation.com. George Penn, a volunteer with Wisconsin United to Amend, said the results make it plain that “Wisconsin voters are starting to understand that our political system is broken and it needs to be reformed.”

In Washington, “Democracy Spring” protests sought to bring attention to corporate influence over elections and governance and the assault on voting rights. More than 400 activists were arrested April 11 when they brought their demonstration to the Capitol steps. More than 250 groups—ranging from the AFL-CIO to the NAACP to Common Cause to Public Citizen to the National Family Farming Coalition to the National Organization for Women and the Franciscan Action Network — planned to launch a “Democracy Awakening” mobilization the weekend of April 16-17.

“Almost every American agrees our democracy is seriously out of whack—that our elections and government are dominated by wealthy special interests. And yet Congress is doing nothing. So today we say no more,” said Democracy Spring’s lead organizer Kai Newkirk.

Putting our democracy back in the hands of the people is a worthy cause, and so is a constitutional amendment clarifying that corporations are not people, that money is not speech and that people have a right to organize elections, as well as a right to vote in those elections and to have their vote counted. But the quickest way to get there is to elect a Democratic president who will name progressive justices who will vote to overturn Citizens United, reinstate the Voting Rights Act and restore the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively. And we’ll need a Democratic Senate to confirm those nominees, which needs a net gain of at least four senators and a Democratic vice president to take the gavel away from Mitch McConnell. And while we’re at it, let’s take the gavel away from Paul Ryan before the teabaggers in the “Freedom Caucus” replace him.

If you think Sanders is the better Democratic nominee, and you live in the 16 states or three territories or the District of Columbia whose primaries or caucuses remain on the calendar, get out and support him. He trails Clinton by 219 pledged delegates going into the New York primary on April 16, but he will need to blow out Clinton by 60% or more in the remaining statest. The difficulty of catching up is illustrated in the results of the Wyoming caucuses, which Sanders won 56% to 44% on April 9. It’s the 17th state he’s won, but because of the proportional allocation of delegates he and Clinton still split the state’s 14 delegates evenly.

Sanders could make up that gap with “superdelegates,” 712 elected Democrats and party officials who currently favor Clinton by 469-31, with 212 holding back, according to the New York Times’ count, but those superdelegates could switch their allegiance. However, some rogue Sanders backers reportedly have mounted their own effort to contact superdelegates and persuade them to switch. Among those efforts, the Washington Post reported, is a website (superdelegatehitlist.com, which redirects to superdelegatelist.com) that provides phone numbers and addresses for superdelegates. Site creator Spencer Thayer, a Chicago activist, described the goal this way in an April 3 Twitter message: “So who wants to help start of a new website aimed at harassing Democratic Superdelegates?”

That is not the way to win friends and influence people. Play hard but play nice. Put a stopper on the vitriol. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2016

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Selections from the May 1, 2016 issue

COVER/Thomas Frank
How Dems created ‘Liberalism of the Rich’

EDITORIAL 
Play hard but nice, Dems

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

ERIC BLUMBERG 
Trump just bought the country club

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Let the sun shine on GMO foods, please

DISPATCHES
Treasury spanks corporate tax dodger;
North Carolina ‘bathroom law’ has broader implications;
‘Democracy Spring’ arises to protest plutocracy;
Senate races heat up;
Former coal baron sentenced;
Sanders did better in Colorado than reported, but no one told him;
Senate lets judge through logjam;
Obamacare reaches new lows;
Michigan governor is target of RICO lawsuit in Flint water crisis;
Drop in stamp prices puts more stress on Postal Service;
New Orleans justice system breaking down;
Wisconsin voter ID laws back in court after election day woes;
Farewell to Al Jazeera America ... 

ELIZABETH SHOGREN
Fracking linked to groundwater contamination

BOB BURNETT
Donald Trump channels Howard Beale

ROBERT BOROSAGE
Jobs report: moving up: with no way out

JOHN YOUNG
Beautiful day in Mr. Cruz’s (gated) neighborhood

ROGER BYBEE
Bernie’s big Wisconsin win adds momentum

MARK ANDERSON
Nominating candidate with integrity crazy

SARAH ANDERSON
Wall Street should pay a sales tax, too

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Wrong focus

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Long-term care insurance: Wall Street’s folly

SAM URETSKY
Ryan admits he was wrong. It’s a start

WAYNE O’LEARY
Attack of the ‘liberal’ economists

JOHN BUELL
Keep Trump’s hands off the nuclear trigger

DON ROLLINS
Donald Trump, the theologian

BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronksy
Fear is our forté

GENE NICHOL
Through the looking glass

MOVIES/Ed Rampell
‘Brainwashing’ explores right wing agitprop

DONALD KAUL
Trump’s America: outhouse on a hill

and more ...

Those in favor or torture should read Guantánamo Diary and imagine themselves in place of its author

By Marc Jampole

According to a study by the Pew Research Center a few years back, only about 24% of all Americans think that the authorities should never engage in torture, no matter the circumstances. That means that three out of four people think that torture is sometimes allowable. Every Republican candidate has come out in favor of torture as part of their warmongering, except Ted Cruz who, while pretending to be adamantly against torture, defines these acts of brutality against fellow human beings in such a way as to permit an extraordinary number of procedures that virtually everyone else would consider to be torture.

Most legitimate research demonstrates that torture does not work in extracting information from enemy personnel, but as with climate change and the minimum wage, those who support torture have purchased their own research that purports to show that torture works.

But as Guantánamo Diary graphically and brutally shows, the issue of our essential morality trumps any concerns for national security that sadists and the uninformed might invoke as a cause for torture.  Guantánamo Diary is the memoir of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a highly educated Mauritanian who ended up being tortured for months on end at GITMO despite our intelligence services having not one iota of evidence that he ever engaged in terrorism or helped terrorist organizations.

At the age of 19, Slahi went to Afghanistan for a few months to help Islamic guerillas fight against the communist government that the United States also opposed at that time. He later lived and worked in Germany and Canada before returning to Mauritania. After the 9/11 attacks, the United States arranged for the Mauritanian government to detain Slahi and then render him to Jordan, where he was tortured, and then sent to GITMO for more torture. At Guantánamo Slahi was subjected to isolation, temperature extremes, beatings, sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation. One time, his American captors—representing you, me and every other citizen of the United States—blindfolded him and took him out to sea for a mock execution. As long as he denied accusations that he recruited suicide bombers for Al Qaida, his captors ratcheted up the pain.  

After torturers used beatings and a forced diet of water to keep him awake for weeks, during which time he was interrogated and suffered other tortures on a daily basis, he finally confessed to crimes he did not commit and for which there was no shred of supporting evidence, circumstantial or otherwise. Prosecutors later refused to prosecute Slahi in 2003 because the government's case depended solely on his false confessions, which were inadmissible under both U.S and international law because they had come under torture.  In 2010, a federal judge ordered Slahi released, but an appeals court overruled and Slahi is still held at GITMO, although no longer being tortured.

Slahi’s descriptions of what his captors did to him are not for the light of heart. His words bring to life the excruciating pain that torture produces in a more evocative, immediate way than any movie or TV depiction of torture I have seen. His descriptions are so grievously harrowing, perhaps because I knew what Slahi suffered was real and that the torture inflicted on Arnold or Bruce Willis in movies is fake. Page after page describes hour after hour of beatings, sexual degradation, marathon interrogations and exposure to extreme cold or heat. Because we experience these physical torments through the eyes of an individual who is both a fine writer and legitimately religious, we also suffer the mental anguish felt by someone who is innocent of all charges.

Before allowing publication, the U.S. government blanked out much of Guantánamo Diary. Eight full pages in a row are blanked out at the height of the GITMO torture regime. Looking at page after page of thick black lines running horizontally from one edge of the paper to the other filled me with panic and fear, as my imagination provided all the punches, kicks, slaps, nakedness, ice cubes, blaring music, Billy clubs and excrement that the redaction concealed.

The basic argument of Guantánamo Diary is that “evil is as evil does.” Slahi’s experience in the U.S. torture gulag has caused him to consider the United States a force for evil, and not a bastion of freedom.  Reading the memoir filled me with the shame of someone who has committed mortal sins that she-he knows are wrong. I didn’t commit the sins, but I felt the guilt, because it was my country. It’s no wonder that our use of torture embarrassed the country in front of the world and sent a lot of young idealistic Muslims into the arms of ISIS.

Slahi’s story exemplifies why torture doesn’t work. People get so confused and so fearful of additional torment that they begin to lie and admit to acts they didn’t really commit. It also shows that it takes a certain brutal and barbaric turn of mind to engage in torture. It makes me wonder if Dick Cheney ever witnessed the infliction of waterboarding or beatings on an individual or if his sadism is only symbolic, consisting of words and images in his mind. Or did he—or his less intellectual president—believe the sanitized versions of torture we see in our violent entertainments? Senator John McCain did not, but then again he went through the real deal in Vietnam.

It is unfortunate that the Obama Administration decided to sweep our torture history under the rug, saying that no one would be prosecuted for planning or implementing the torture regime that took hold of GITMO, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and dozens of other U.S. military facilities across the globe. Of course, prosecution would have meant sending President George W. Bush, Vice President Cheney and a few dozen other government officials to jail for breaking U.S. and international laws.

Word to Ted Cruz: Read Guantánamo Diary.

Word to Donald Trump: Read Guantánamo Diary.

Word to anyone who thinks we should have the right to inflict agonizing pan on others: Read Guantánamo Diary.

If after reading this poignant but depressing memoir, you still believe in torture, then consider yourself outside the human race.

Mass media tries to portray Iraq war contractors as unsung heroes, not as beneficiaries of crony capitalism

By Marc Jampole

We really don’t know what Matt Sherman exactly did as a federal government contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite a long article about him in the Washington Post and a long interview on National Public Radio (NPR).

The Post tells us he advised four Iraqi interior ministers and later was part of a brigade that operated in Afghanistan. But the nitty-gritty is missing, and probably with reason. These media outlets want to focus on the man and his emotional state, both soldiering in a war zone and coming home without the fanfare, parades and social support network that members of the United States military often receive. The NPR interview by Rachel Martin focuses on “the sense of purpose” that Sherman felt in the war zone. But it avoids defining that sense of justice.  While both stories reference violence, because they focus on Sherman and his states of mind, they present a sanitized version of these conflicts.

The human interest angle also crowds out any discussion of why the U.S. Army felt the need to hire Sherman, who had previously worked for a large law firm. Since we get no sense of Sherman’s background or special skills, we are not in a position to evaluate whether one could expect to find his skill set among regular army personnel.

Both these two mainstream stories, appearing in the same week, avoid asking the two biggest questions about these disastrous wars: 1) Why did we fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was the fighting worth it? 2) Was the unprecedented use of military contractors the most effective way to wage war?

By focusing on Sherman’s individual sense of mission, without every defining what that mission entailed, both the Post and NPR assume and want the public to assume that the mission was important, critical, noble and appropriate.  By treating Sherman as an individual, and not part of an army of contractors, most working for large corporations, both the Post and NPR take it for granted that our massive dependence on military contractors was good policy. 

That military contractors played a larger role in fighting our recent wars than ever before is indisputable. For example, an estimated 100,000 military contractors worked directly for the U.S. military in Iraq in 2006, which marked a tenfold increase in the use of private contractors for military operations since Bush I fought the first Iraq war 13 years earlier. The last time a combatant nation in an American war outsourced so many military functions to non-soldiers was the Revolutionary War, when the losing side—the British—fortified their troops with foreign mercenaries, primarily from Germany.

We don’t call them mercenaries anymore, because that name evokes thoughts of people who are only in it for the money, and we’d rather believe that our current mercenaries have a sense of “mission” or “purpose.” But make no mistake about it. Virtually all civilians who signed military contracts—either as individual “experts” or as the executives of private corporations—made a lot more than they would have if they were in the army. Like all other private sources of public services, be it for prisons, education or data processing, the companies providing military services are working on a profit basis, whereas the Department of Defense is a non-profit venture that rewards its employees—soldiers—with stable employment and a true sense of mission to protect our country that is indoctrinated into soldiers almost on a daily basis. Moreover, news reports through the years document that private contractors were less likely to follow orders and procedures and more likely to use excessive violence than the regular army, which certainly laid the groundwork for civil war and the emergence of ISIS.

In analyzing the failure of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it’s pretty obvious that using more contractors than ever before was a failing strategy.

A failing strategy, to be sure, but the use of contractors may have been the very reason the war was fought. We know that the reasons the Bush II Administration gave all turned out to be false: There were no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with those responsible for the 9/11 attacks and in fact, had his own gripes against Al Qaida. It is easy to prove that “democracy building” had nothing to do with the Bush Administration’s war rationale. For one thing, no one in the administration gave “democracy building” as a reason for the war until after the world discovered that Bush, Cheney and their factotums were lying about WMD and the Hussein-Al Qaida connection. More importantly, if democracy building was the reason for going to war, then the administration would have planned to build a democracy after the invasion, which the subsequent chaos and the admission of key officials demonstrate was not the case.

Why did we go to war in Iraq then? The only explanation that makes sense—at the time and in retrospect—was that it created an enormous business opportunity for military contractors, most of which had contributed to the Bush II campaign and one of the largest of which had as it chief executive officer Dick Cheney before Cheney resigned to run for vice president.

None of this sorry history appears in either of these feel-good stories. What we get instead is the superficial story of one man’s struggle to return from a war zone. Always uplifting and a bit wistful, but in this case, it’s a whitewash of two wars that destroyed two countries, killed hundreds of thousands and cost the United States trillions of dollars, all to line the pockets of Bush II cronies. But that’s how government is supposed to work under the crony capitalism practiced by the 21st century Republican Party—and plenty in the Democratic Party as well.

Sarandon has been great progressive for years, so it surprises she hesitates to support best hope progressives have

By Marc Jampole

Susan Sarandon bases her well-publicized reluctance to support Hillary Clinton if she is the Democratic nominee on the fact that Hillary has taken so much money from corporate interests. Of course, that didn’t stop her from supporting Barack Obama twice.

Sarandon’s thought process exemplifies one of the many excuses that progressives and liberals have given as their reason they won’t vote for Hillary Clinton. Here’s my complete list:

·         They blame her for things her husband did when he was president or for her husband’s inappropriate behavior.

·         They do not allow her the opportunity to change her mind on issues based on new information or personal growth, e.g., stiff sentencing laws and the war in Iraq.

·         They judge her too hawkish on foreign policy without applying similar standards to Bernie Sanders.

·         They believe the right-wing nonsense about Clinton corruption and Benghazi that has been discredited multiple times.

·         They make her live by a double standard: It’s okay for other cabinet officials to use her-his personal email for government business and it’s alright for others to get obnoxious amounts of money for speeches, but it’s wrong when Hillary does it.

·         They apply a single issue to her, but not to other candidates, such as the acquaintance of mine who said he couldn’t vote for Hillary because of her stand in favor of capital punishment, but voted twice for Barack Obama, who also favors the death penalty. 

·         They call her part of the corrupt establishment, no different at heart than the Republicans when it comes to taking money from large corporations. This argument was used against Al Gore by Nader supporters in 2000 and led to the election of George W. Bush and his numerous disasters.

If these thought processes sound like excuses, there’s a good reason for it. They are. Much of what masquerades as Clinton criticism hides an antipathy for Hillary Clinton that I can’t quite understand.

I have no problem with progressives or liberals who are currently supporting Bernie Sanders. He is an attractive candidate with lots of good ideas. That people would prefer Sanders to Clinton is a perfectly reasonable position that I respect and encourage.

What isn’t reasonable are the one-third of Sanders supporters who proclaim they won’t vote for Hillary. Even less reasonable are the 10% of Sander’s loyalists who say they would rather vote for the unstable, racist misogynist Donald Trump.

It befuddles me why so many Democrats hate Hillary. A Southern Democrat who once ran for Congress recently told me that it’s because she made the unforgivable mistake of marrying “poor white trash.” I’m more inclined to believe that it’s easier for a progressive to find something fundamentally wrong with Hillary than it is to admit that he-she is not quite ready to have a woman serve as president. Whatever the reason, if we held every candidate to the high standards to which many hold Hillary Clinton, we would only be able to elect candidates who are related to a deity or received divine law on a mountaintop. I guess lifelong contemplation under a Bodhi tree might also qualify.

The simple argument for voting for Hillary is that she isn’t any of the Republicans. Remember all the Republican candidates—Trump, Cruz, Kasich and those waiting in the wings—want to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. All want to lower taxes drastically on the wealthy. All are against any minimum wage. All have militaristic foreign policies. All want to cut funding to Planned Parenthood. All would like to limit women’s access to abortion and birth control. All will select right-wingers for the Supreme Court. All want to loosen gun safety laws even more than they already have been in recent years. Of the two front-runners, one is mentally ill and has fascist tendencies and the other serves the ultra-religious right.

The subtler and more uplifting reason to vote for Hillary is that she is a true progressive on domestic issues, albeit one who is willing to compromise, and can therefore help progressives cash in on a golden opportunity. At the very least, Republicans are either going to field a very weak candidate—Trump or Cruz—with practically nonexistent coattails with which to drag along the rest of the ticket. An even more dire situation for the Republicans will be if either Trump or another Republican launches a third-party campaign. In either case, the Democrats are poised to take both the House and Senate. Both Sanders and Clinton list leftward of Obama. Both have served more time in government than Obama had before assuming the presidency and won’t make the rookie mistakes that Obama did that led to the sequester, the reluctance to assert executive privilege in regulations and the continuation of certain tax cuts for the wealthy.

The big difference between the two is that Sanders will want to get us mired in the political quicksand that would be the renewed argument in favor of single payer healthcare insurance, whereas Clinton will accept the jerry-rigged system we have and focus on other parts of the progressive agenda.

To prefer Sanders to Hillary Clinton at this point shows idealism and an admirable political purism. But not to get behind Hillary when she becomes the Democratic nominee merely manifests a political death wish. The differences between the two candidates are minor, while the gap between them and the most liberal of the current crop of Republicans—the madman Donald Trump—is as wide as wide can be.

    

No pecking order problem in Xarelto commercial: the aging white male is on top

By Marc Jampole

The Republicans keep sexualizing the fight for pecking order dominance in tasteless yet traditional ways. First came the vulgar insinuations regarding genital size, with its unspoken subtext that you had to have something to measure to qualify for president, or at least for the Republican nomination to America’s highest office.

More recently we have witnessed the dustup about the wives of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, in which both candidates reveal their deep-seated sexism. Somebody’s campaign suggested that the fact Trump’s wife had posed for nude photos somehow disqualified Trump from the presidency. Donald then compared his wife favorably to Ted’s, based solely on the Laddie Boy-Rat Pack definition of female attractiveness. Ted’s answer was to further commodify women in his counter comparison by defining his wife solely in terms of homemaker virtues. Sex toy or housewife? That’s pretty much the choice Donald and Ted are giving women.

This injection of sexuality into the fight for top dog is unseemly because it is so irrelevant to the tasks and responsibilities related to serving as president. Sexuality is, however, an important component of celebrity. Both the news media and the Republicans seem determined to wage the nomination battle based primarily on the criteria by which we judge celebrities.

The Republican race for top dog reminds me of the imaginary world created by a current television commercial in which there is no doubt who is at the alpha male, and in fact, no doubt as to the precise pecking order.  The civility, mutual admiration and joviality of this commercial contrasts sharply with the crass and tasteless accusations and assertions by the various Republican presidential hopefuls.

The commercial, for the anti-clotting drug Xarelto, depicts the Republican utopia—four prosperous and well-dressed guys playing golf on a beautiful course on a sunny day.  Except that these aren’t business owners or trust fund babies, they are three athletes and a comedian—all among the most celebrated in their highly competitive fields. The golf foursome includes golfing legend Arnold Palmer, basketball all-star Chris Bosh, stock car racer Brian Vickers and comedian Kevin Nealon.

Despite the fact that these are all extremely competitive guys used to fighting for everything they get (except for perhaps Nealon, who comes from wealth and is not in a field in which merit derives from winning something measurable), there is not even a hint of competition in the ad. In fact, the ad enforces a strict pecking order that each of the four men embraces openly and happily. The hierarchy has the comedian as low man on the totem pole, while the aging white male, Arnold Palmer, is the top dog, followed by Bosh the greatest athlete among the bunch and then Vickers.

In a single minute, the commercial packs a large number of visual and verbal cues that tell us that Arnie is the leader and hero and that this small society has a rigid hierarchy:

•  At the end of the commercial, the four sit together in a golf cart in pecking order, Palmer  closest to us, followed by Bosh, Vickers and Nealon.
•  Bosh passes a helmet behind his back to Vickers. Nealon says “Nice pass” in open admiration.
• Two practical jokes are played on Nealon, the non-athlete, one by Vickers, the least athletic of the athletes. It’s a jovial version of what happens on many teams—the weakest starter is frequently the “bad ass” to the non-starters, who represent the greatest threat to his/her status. Note that it is the non-athlete, who probably has the greatest verbal skills, to serve as the buffoon.
• Palmer appears to be giving Bosh advice, and when Bosh hits a good shot, Palmer compliments the basketball player, who beams like a little kid whom the coach has just complimented.
• As they drive in carts from one hole to the next, Palmer and Bosh drive in the head cart, followed by Vickers and Nealon.
• At the narrative denouement of the commercial, all eyes are on Palmer in open, almost cloying admiration, as he makes a putt.

The good will and friendly joking between the four men makes for a light-hearted commercial, but the hierarchy by which this micro-society rules itself manifests itself in every shot. We can describe this pecking order in three ways: 1) By money made; 2) By quality of the athlete; 3) By importance of the sport to American culture.

Yet, by any of these measures, except perhaps importance of the sport, the creators of the ad appear to break ranks by putting Arnold Palmer first.

But it makes perfect sense for everyone to be looking up to Palmer as the leader if we consider the Xarelto commercial as an idealized version of the traditional image of the Republican Party—rich and connected people who in their own minds got to the top by being better than others, with the richest, oldest white guy at the summit. No testosterone explosion. No bullying (except the mild twitting of the comic). No over-the-top statements.  Everyone knows his place, and it’s always a good place to be. It’s the kind of world the Republicans would love to install, although most would like the role of Palmer to go to someone other than “The Donald” or “Lyin’ Ted”.

Just like Republican utopia, the world of the Xarelto commercial is missing a lot of things. For example, we don’t learn about the awful side effects that have led to a large number of lawsuits against the makers of Xarelto. That kind of reminds me of the bad side effects of lowering taxes on the wealthy, making it harder to unionize and reducing environmental, health and safety regulations that Republicans never mention. The Xarelto world also exists without greens keepers, caddies, waiters and other members of the working class.

Finally, the Xarelto world also lacks women. I imagine they’re either getting a bikini wax or baking pies.

Editorial: Time to Reopen Cuba

President Obama went a long way toward dismantling the failed embargo of commerce with Cuba with his trip to the communist-governed island.

“I am here to bury the last remnants of the Cold War in the Americas. I am here to extend a hand of friendship to the Cuban people,” Obama said in an eloquent speech in Havana that was broadcast live to the island nation March 22.

Obama noted that there are still opponents to normalizing relations between the two nations. The key reason why he supports ending the 54-year-old embargo, he said, is because it isn’t working. “A policy of isolation designed for the Cold War made little sense in the 21st century,” Obama said. “The embargo was only hurting the Cuban people instead of helping them. And I’ve always believed in what Martin Luther King, Jr. called ‘the fierce urgency of now’ — we should not fear change, we should embrace it.”

“Creo en el pueblo cubano,” Obama said, Spanish for “I believe in the Cuban people.” But he also has to get Congress to believe.

Predictably, Republicans first criticized Obama’s decision to go to Cuba and then criticized his decision to remain in Cuba in the wake of the terrorist bombings in Brussels, but Obama was right to push back at the reactionaries. He noted that cutting short his trip would have played into the terrorists’ hands.

“It’s always a challenge when you have a terrorist attack anywhere in the world, particularly in this age of 24/7 news coverage,” Obama told ESPN at the top of the third inning in an historic baseball game in Havana between Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team March 22. “You want to be respectful and understand the gravity of the situation, but the whole premise of terrorism is to try to disrupt people’s ordinary lives.”

Acknowledging the calls to go back to the US or Brussels to lead, Obama shared what he called one of his proudest moments as president — when Boston Red Sox designated hitter David Ortiz told fans in a pre-game speech following the Boston marathon bombing: “This is our f***ing city and nobody is going to dictate our freedom. Stay strong.”

“Probably the only time America didn’t have a problem with somebody cursing on live TV was when he talked about Boston and how strong it was and wasn’t gonna be intimidated,” Obama said. “That is the kind of resilience and the kind of strength that we have to continually show in the face of these terrorists. They cannot defeat America.”

Hours after the game, in which Tampa Bay defeated Cuba 4-1, Politico noted that Donald Trump tweeted that Obama “should leave the baseball game in Cuba immediately & get home to Washington- where a #POTUS, under a serious emergency belongs!”

But Obama had departed the game long before the final out, traveling to his next stop in Argentina.

Cruz No Improvement Over Trump

After the attacks in Belgium, Ted Cruz said, “We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” He also reiterated his call to “carpet bomb ISIS into oblivion,” which 1) it would be a war crime and 2) could put a strain on our allies since it appears that the Brussels bombers were Belgian or French nationals.

Cruz’s blowhard reaction to the Brussels bombings showed that Republican leaders’ rallying around him in a desperate attempt to stop Donald Trump from getting the GOP nomination amounts to trading one dangerous charlatan for another. It probably is too late, anyway, since Trump picked up another 58 delegates from Arizona on March 22, giving him 738 of the 1,237 delegates he needs for the nomination with 18 states to go. Cruz got 20 from Utah, which left him with 463. John Kasich stands way back at 143.

Republicans should take a long look at Cruz’s radical concept of “religious liberty,” which does not necessarily extend to all Christians, much less non-Christian religions — or atheism.

John Fea of Religion News Service wrote in the Washington Post Feb. 4 that Trump appeals to evangelicals connected with the Christian prosperity movement, a form of evangelicalism that celebrates the accumulation of wealth as a sign of God’s blessing.

Cruz resonates with the evangelical culture warriors. He believes that he is engaged in a fight with the devil for the soul of the nation. It is only a matter of time before Cruz assumes the role of the Old Testament prophet Elijah and tries to cast down fire from heaven to destroy the “prophets of Baal” who oppose his campaign, Fea noted.

“Anyone who has watched Cruz on the stump knows that he often references the important role that his father, traveling evangelist Rafael Cruz, has played in his life,” Fea wrote. “During a 2012 sermon at New Beginnings Church in Bedford, Texas, Rafael Cruz described his son’s political campaign as a direct fulfillment of biblical prophecy.”

Rafael Cruz and Larry Huch, the pastor of New Beginnings, preach a brand of evangelical theology called Seven Mountains Dominionism. They believe Christians must take dominion over seven aspects of culture: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business and government.

Cruz is not interested in crafting new models of American pluralism to respond to the country’s ever-growing religious diversity. Rather, religious liberty is a code word for defending the right of Christians to continue to hold cultural authority and privilege, Fea wrote.

Cruz does not use the terms “dominionism” or “seven mountains” when he is campaigning, Fea wrote. But he has never publicly rejected these beliefs.

It’s hard to tell whether Trump or Cruz believe their own demagoguery, but it doesn’t speak well for either of them that we hope they’re fooling.

Bern On

Hillary Clinton has a commanding lead in the race for the Democratic nomination, but Bernie Sanders hasn’t given up, nor should he. On March 22, Sanders won two states, Idaho and Utah, while Clinton won Arizona. The corporate news media portrayed it as another good night for Clinton, because she won the biggest prize, Arizona, in a contest that was decided relatively early, but Sanders picked up 73 delegates that day, while Clinton got only 55. So Bernie won the night — though he didn’t get much credit because the Idaho and Utah caucus results came in after the late news and the Brussels bombing that same day was getting more coverage anyway.

A week earlier, Clinton was credited with sweeping the five states at play on March 15 (Politico called it “a five-state rout”). In fact Sanders effectively tied Clinton in Missouri; Clinton narrowly outpolled him 49.6% to 49.4% in the Show Me state but they split the state’s 68 delegates evenly.

In Illinois, Clinton won 50.5% to 48.7% and split the state’s delegates 76-73. Sanders did get drummed in Florida, North Carolina and Ohio, where Clinton won delegates by 136-67, 59-45 and 81-62, respectively, but Sanders was competitive in all three states, particularly among white men and younger voters. Clinton’s strength among white women and black and Latino voters helped her carry the day, according to CNN exit polls, but Sanders has shown he can attract Latino votes, getting 53% of Latinos in Nevada caucuses.

As of March 23, Clinton has won 18 states and two territories (Guam and Northern Mariana islands) and 1,223 pledged delegates, while Sanders has won 11 states plus Democrats Abroad, with 920 pledged delegates, the New York Times reported. The winner needs 2,383 delegates.

Some Democrats reportedly are pressuring Sanders to ease up on Clinton, but Bernie still has a longshot chance of catching up with Hillary. He can keep Clinton addressing progressive populist issues, which also pumps up the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. That could help elect Democrats to Congress and state legislatures in November. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2016

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Selections from the April 15, 2016 issue

COVER/Hal Crowther
The elephant’s graveyard 

EDITORIAL
Reopen Cuba; Cruz no improvement; Bern on

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Kasich calls in a few (million) favors

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Agribusiness fighting for unrestricted GMOs

DISPATCHES
Cruz turns to dereg godfather Gramm for financial advice;
McConnell: No new Supreme Court justice without NRA OK;
Alabama blocks local control on minimum wage;
Brussels bombing just one in series;
Court strikes down prison gerymandering;
Use a rain barrel, go to jail;
Climate scientist makes dire warning on sea level, superstorm;
Flint probe blames water crisis on state;
Public interest groups urge FCC to block Charter-Time Warner merger;
Trump got $2B in free media;
Obama gives Cuba taste of free press ....

JILL RICHARDSON
Eating in the dark

EMILY SCHWARTZ GRECO
The Humpty Dumpty party

N. GUNASEKARAN
Robots create ‘technological unemployment’

SETH SANDRONSKY
The rotten core

BOB BURNETT
White men! Go the the end of the line!

WENONAH HAUTER
Path being cleared for bird imports from China

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Driving women up the ladder

SAM URETSKY5
Prescription drug uses depend on who you ask

JOHN YOUNG 
Ronnie, Nancy and that gay conversion

WAYNE O’LEARY
Same old same old in Clinton land

JOHN BUELL
Neoliberalism and the ‘free markets’

MARK ANDERSON
Highway bill contains free trade superhighways

BILL JOHNSTON
Feeling the bern

ERIC BLUMBERG
Heaven can’t wait

RANDOLPH HOLHUT
Status quo is job 1 for corporate press

MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Last Tango in Kabul 

DONALD KAUL
What would Nancy say?

and more ...

One word to describe voters: not liberal, not conservative, not angry, but “apathetic”

By Marc Jampole

The real question about this year’s electorate is how large a part of it truly seeks a confrontational authoritarian as our next president?  How many people practice racism, condone violence and approve of torture? How large is the population with fascist tendencies?

In other words, what part of the American public has voted for Donald Trump?

Judging from the numbers in a recent Economist article titled “How non-voters blew it,” Trump has gathered relatively few supporters. In no state to hold a primary until now has more than 25% of Republican voters actually gone to the polls and cast a ballot. Even though Republican primary turnout is at its highest since Ronald Reagan swept into office in 1980, only about 17% of eligible Republicans have voted in the primaries so far. Trump has averaged about 38% of the vote, which translates into a little less than 6.5% of all registered Republicans. But Republicans represent only about 28% of all voters, probably a little more in the states already holding primaries. If we extrapolate these numbers across the country, we find that a mere 1.8% of all eligible voters support Donald Trump.

The one word to describe American voters in 2016, is the same one word we can use to describe them virtually every year. That word isn’t “angry” or “frustrated,” not “conservative” or “liberal.” The one word to describe American voters is “apathetic.”

Ted Cruz and John Kasich have gotten an even lower percentage of the total votes than the Donald. Hillary Clinton hasn’t gotten many more votes than Trump, as voter participation in Democratic primaries is down.  If we’re using votes to measure whether any candidate is engaging the public, the answer is that none of the candidates are winning in any state or across the country, not even Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. With such low voter turnouts, we can’t proclaim anyone who has won a primary a real “winner.”

The real winners in this election season so far are not even “none of the above,” since that outcome would require people to enter voting booths and actually write those words down.

No, the real winners are the fascists like Donald Trump and the oligarchs, who represent about one tenth of one percent of the country, like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson. Just as in the Germany of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the oligarchs and the fascists share many traits in common—power hungry, obsessional about control, well-funded, prone to lies and misrepresentations, ruthless.

I used to tell the kids on the Little League teams I managed that the only way to guarantee never losing is never to play. But in American politics, the people are losing by not playing. Only when the electorate stays home can fascists like Donald Trump win at the polls. Only when the electorate remains uninvolved can oligarchs manage the voting patterns of legislatures. Only when the electorate prefers ignorance can oligarchs and fascists get away with filling airwaves and bandwidth with their lies.