Saturday, August 30, 2014

Selections from the September 15, 2014 issue





DISPATCHES
Republicans stop talking about O’care in campaign ads;
Medicaid resistance hurts hospitals;
GOP beats teabaggers—but can they win the Senate?;
Party of Lincoln takes aim at black voters;
McConnell makes big promises to big donors if GOP takes Senate;
Top GOP Senate candidates praise Koch network;
Burger King flees US taxes;
Free Press seeks to block Comcast takeover of Time Warner;
Medical marijuana answers prescription painkiller epidemic;
Texas courts says it's OK for bosses to lie to workers;
Christie loses billions to Wall Street fleecers;
Still waiting for Voting Rights reinstatement ...

E. GRECO and W. COLLINS
Solar power gets hot, hot, hot

ROGER BYBEE
Scott Walker’s offshoring flip-flop

WENONAH HAUTER
Bureau of Land Management’s frackopoly

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Rich-poor newborn gap slowly closing







Monday, August 25, 2014

To New York progressives: Vote for Teachout in primary!

By Marc Jampole 

New York State could serve as a model of how progressives can move the right-of-Eisenhower Democratic Party back towards the left. Andrew Cuomo, New York’s version of Barack Obama, is running for reelection as governor of the Empire State. But first there’s the little matter of the September 9 primary in which Cuomo faces Zephyr Teachout, a very progressive professor of law at Fordham University.

Cuomo has essentially run the state of New York by looking rightward.  He put a cap on property taxes and wants to lower taxes for businesses. He blocked New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio’s attempt to raise taxes on the wealthy to fund pre-schools, preferring to take money from the existing state budget, which means other programs will do without. Cuomo is an ardent supporter of charter schools, a conservative initiative originated to bust teachers’ unions and has proven to underperform and undercut funding for public schools.  And like President Obama, Cuomo is too fast to make deals with Republicans that continue the disastrous economic policies of the past 30+ years.

Let’s not forget about the whiff of corruption now emanating from the Cuomo body politic. Cuomo empanelled a state commission to investigate corruption in government and then dismantled it when it started turning over the rocks of his administration. In the best case scenario, Cuomo is exercising too much power in an effort to subvert democracy. The worst case would involve a cover-up of the kind of unethical and often illegal crony capitalism that seems to plague Republican governors these days.

Cuomo does support gay marriage and tends to speak and vote progressive on most social issues, but so do virtually every Democrat and a growing number of Republicans nowadays. He did pass one of the toughest gun control laws in the country after the Newtown mass murders, for which he should be applauded.

Teachout has no chance of beating Cuomo in the primary, but every vote she gets should turn Cuomo’s head a little bit to the left. If Teachout could get more than 45% of the vote, it would send a strong message to Cuomo to shift leftward on economic issues.

Which is exactly what Cuomo doesn’t want to hear and doesn’t want to do. That’s why the Governor sued to keep Teachout off the ballot and then appealed when he lost. Even though he knows the odds are overwhelmingly in his favor, he does not want to have to listen to progressives. It would upset the corporate bankers who back him and who might up the ante if he decides to run for president of the United States.

The worst that can happen by voting for Teachout is that she wins, which will be very good for New York State and the nation. The Republican Rob Astorino, a former Catholic radio personality, is far too right-wing for New York State. While it’s probable that conservatives would pour tens of millions of dollars into a campaign against the relatively unknown Teachout, the Democrats also have a ton of money for whoever the candidate for governor of New York happens to be.  I’m confident any Democrat will beat Rob Astorino in New York State, especially if turnout is high. And it stands to reason that more Democrats would come out to vote for a face fresh than they would for the incumbent expected to steamroll Astorino.  In other words, if Teachout won the primary, she would also win the election.

What we have then is a win-win situation for progressives. By voting for Teachout in the Democratic primary, New York voters can send a message to Andrew Cuomo—and every Democrat considering a run for the presidency.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

America can learn a lot from the Ferguson situation, that is, if we’re willing to

By Marc Jampole 

The American public is relearning many lessons from the events in Ferguson following the shooting of an unarmed teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.  The three biggest takeaways from this tragedy and its aftermath are:
  1. We have gone way too far in militarizing our local police forces.
  2. There is still rampant institutional racism built into our policing and criminal justice system.
  3. The police and criminal justice system does itself and the people it is supposed to protect a disservice by never admitting a mistake.
The ramifications of these big picture dynamics affect more than the relationship between authorities and the citizens they protect. Going too far in militarizing our police, for example, results partially from the political cowardice and cronyism that led Congress to give every state a cut of the money we dedicated to fighting terrorism in the USA Patriot Act instead of focusing the money on those areas and systems most vulnerable to terrorist attack, i.e., New York, Washington, D.C. and our docks and harbors. Of course, the opportunity for American manufacturers to sell to local police forces with money supplied by the feds was too good for the crony capitalists who run our country to pass up. The result—local police everywhere now own all kinds of military equipment that they don’t need and, which, when used, only make a sensitive street situation more volatile. The number of SWAT team attacks has skyrocketed across the country, as have the number of SWAT invasions directed at the wrong address.  I’m thinking that the money spent on military-grade guns and vehicles might have been better spent in the recruitment and training of minority police officers and the introduction of less violent ways to confront suspects.

Ferguson is only the latest proof that minorities and the poor get treated badly by the criminal justice system across the country.  As Jeff Smith, a former Missouri state senator and professor of sociology at The New School, pointed out in a New York Times opinion piece, Ferguson does the same kind of racial profiling that the courts have made New York City stop doing.  In Ferguson last year, 86 percent of police stops, 92 percent of searches and 93 percent of arrests were of African-Americans, numbers which are way out line with the percentage of the total Ferguson population that they represent, which is about 62%. Even more damning is the fact that police officers were far less likely to find contraband on African-Americans, 22 percent of whom were carrying something illegal, compared to 34 percent of whites.   

It’s almost painful to see the Ferguson police chief try to justify the actions of his department. For example, instead of thanking the Governor for bringing in the Highway Patrol and National Guard and installing a charismatic African-American to be the face of the police response, Chief Tom Jackson prefers to complain about the insult to the Ferguson police that the switch in authorities and tactics represented.
Instead of admitting he was wrong to bring out the tanks, the Ferguson police chief released information meant to stain the reputation of the young man who was shot six times, including twice in the head. First it was news that the boy was a suspect in a robbery, which the officer who fired the shots was decent enough to admit he didn’t know when the confrontation occurred. Now we’ve learned that the boy—Michael Brown—had marijuana in his system. So what? It wouldn’t matter if he was a suspect in 30 armed robberies and they found traces of cocaine, heroin, Oxycontin and meth in his body. An experienced police office trained in protecting the public and probably in martial arts fired six bullets into his body. One or maybe two bullets and I—and the rest of the public—could understand the act as possibly, maybe necessary. But six??  The officer should get his due process, but the police department would advance the cause of better understanding between police and minorities by admitting its mistakes and stating that it will not support officers who behave brutally or illegally.

But closing ranks isn’t new for the criminal justice system. Several times a year we read of district attorneys who are opposed to new trials or the release of the unjustly imprisoned, or those who will fight tooth and nail to insist that a retarded or near retarded death row prisoner has a high enough IQ to qualify for the death penalty. We recently saw the union representing New York City police department cry that is was unfair to investigate the death of an innocent man from a police choke hold. The union also bemoaned the lack of solidarity of the teachers’ union to participate in a march against police brutality.  The union made itself look bad by not explicitly stating that it did not support the use of chokeholds, which is an illegal tactic for police in New York State.

People and organizations make mistakes. Organizations occasionally hire individuals who won’t follow the rules or make their own rules. When you admit your mistake and then fix it, you gain the respect of others. When you hunker down and defend your position even after it painfully clear you were wrong, others begin to disrespect you and question your authority. Now imagine decades of closing ranks and protecting bad decisions and rogue employees and you begin to understand why minority communities distrust our criminal justice system.

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Editorial: Still Cleaning Up After W


President Obama has sensibly resisted attempts to draw him into the civil war in Syria and to militarize confrontations with Iran and Russia, but former Vice President Dick Cheney, who personifies everything that’s wrong with American foreign policy, recently surfaced to accuse the President of projecting “weakness” abroad and “crippling” the US military.

In an Aug. 10 interview with radio host John Catsimatidis, Cheney said he traces “most” of the problems of Washington to the current administration. He cleared his nominal former boss, George W. Bush, of responsibility for the actions a decade ago that led to the series of bad choices Obama now faces. “They can’t blame George Bush any more,” Cheney said. Of Obama, he said, “I think he’s been a failure as a president. I think the scandals, with respect to the Veterans Administration, with respect to the IRS, these are bad situations.” But “even worse,” he said, are cuts in the military budget.

This is the sort of claptrap you get when you don’t prosecute war criminals, but it reflects the Republican party line.

First of all, the VA “scandal” was that Congresses under the Bush and Obama administrations didn’t appropriate enough money to take care of the wounded warriors returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. And the IRS “scandal” was that the tax agency had required politics-oriented groups on the left and the right to comply with the law, which limits political activity of organizations seeking non-profit and tax-exempt status.

As for the military cutbacks, that’s what you should get when you wind down two wars. And the cuts have been modest: defense and international security assistance still amounted to $643 billion, or 19% of the federal budget, for fiscal year 2013. The US still spends more than the next eight countries combined, according to 2013 figures compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (Runner-up China spends $188 billion on its military, Russia $87.8 billion and Saudi Arabia $67 billion, though the Saudi total also includes police.)

Anyway, Obama withdrew troops from Iraq in 2011 under the terms drawn up under Bush’s administration. The Bush hawks, who ran the Mideast into the ditch but all found employment in private industry and/or “think tanks” and have never been far from the TV chat show cameras, yelled bloody murder that Obama had let us down.

The mess in the Mideast shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, as it was predicted a decade ago. In a Jan. 16, 2003, column, Molly Ivins wrote, “I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20% Kurd, 20% Sunni and 60% Shi’ite. Can you say, ‘Horrible three-way civil war?’”

But Bill Kristol, right-wing ideologue and chairman of the Project for a New American Century, which promoted the string of regime changes in the Mideast that started with the fall of Saddam Hussein, in 2003 dismissed concerns that sectarian differences would be a serious problem. “On this issue of the Shia in Iraq, I think there’s been a certain amount of, frankly, a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular.”

In our March 1, 2003, editorial, “Inspect, Don’t Invade,” while UN inspectors were still in Iraq, we wrote, “We wish we could believe that invading Iraq would solve the problems. More likely the bombing of Baghdad and other parts of Iraq to clear the way for the invasion will kill tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi people, create hundreds of thousands of refugees, plunge the Middle East into chaos and expand the radical Islamic jihad against the western world.”

But Bush and Cheney bulled ahead anyway. US troops routed the Iraqi military and secured its oilfields but let the rest of the country go to hell. On March 31, 2003, Egypt’s then-President Hosni Mubarak said the US-led war on Iraq would produce “one hundred new bin Ladens,” driving more Muslims to anti-Western militancy. “When it is over, if it is over, this war will have horrible consequences,” Mubarak told Egyptian soldiers in the city of Suez, while hundreds of Arab volunteers were streaming to Iraq pledging to join in “martyrdom operations” against US and British forces

Lou Dubose noted in the Aug. 1 Washington Spectator that Peter Galbraith—a former US ambassador to Croatia and adviser to the government of Iraqi Kurdistan—in Jan. 11, 2007, testimony at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, described the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a foreign-policy catastrophe and the tragic and unjustifiable destruction of a country; the toxic politics of Nouri al-Maliki’s government; and the sectarian fault lines that effectively divided Iraq into three countries.

“The alternative to partition,” he said, “is a continued US-led effort at nation-building that has not worked for the last four years and, in my view, has no prospect for success. That, Mr. Chairman, is a formula for war without an end.”

Now forced nation-building of Iraq at US gunpoint is the option that Republicans are blasting Obama for not pursuing.

Even Hillary Clinton criticized President Obama’s foreign policy in an interview published Aug. 10 in The Atlantic. She said the failure to help build up a credible fighting force among the protesters against Assad in Syria “left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” She added, “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

“Don’t do stupid stuff” might not be an organizing principle, but it is a pretty good prime directive. And Obama has been smart, at least compared with what the Bushites did from 2001 to 2009 and what John McCain proposed to do. We have our criticisms of specific Obama policies, but if McCain (or Mitt Romney) had become president we might well be at war with Iran and/or Russia, arming Syrian rebel groups that turned out to have terrorist ties.

Hillary Needs a Challenger


One of our concerns with Hillary Clinton is the perception that she intends to pursue a centrist neoliberal course as the presumed Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

Progressives who want to move Clinton to the left had better come up with a candidate who can give Hillary a run for her money and perhaps nudge her to adopt a more populist tone.

Some progressives hold out hope that Sen. Elizabeth Warren will challenge Clinton, but we take her at her word that she has no plans to run for president. However, Sen. Bernie Sanders is considering a challenge for the Democratic nomination.

Sanders has said he respects the former Secretary of State, but cautioned against assuming that she will be the Democratic nominee before she’s even announced her candidacy.

In an interview with ABC’s Jeff Zeleny, Sanders said, “She has accomplished a lot of positive things in her career, but I’m not quite sure that the political process is one in which we anoint people ...

“What is her agenda? I don’t know, you don’t know. She hasn’t said,” Sanders noted.

Sanders said he does not “wake up every morning with a burning desire to be president of the United States,” but he reiterated his commitment to fight for political and economic equality as the US shifts toward “an oligarchic form of society in which a handful of billionaire families control not only the economy of this country ... I will do everything I can to prevent that from happening.”

If progressives want Sanders, or any other candidate, to run for president from the left, they need to show they can make it a credible race. “Look, it’s easy for me to give a good speech, and I give good speeches,” Sanders told Zeleny. “It is harder to put together a grassroots organization of hundreds of thousands of millions of people prepared to work hard and take on the enormous amounts of money that will be thrown against us.”

To encourage Sanders to run, contact Progressive Democrats of America at pdamerica.org or call 877-239-2093. — JMC

Note: this was edited Aug. 26 with corrected Russian military expenditures.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2014
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Selections from the September 1, 2014 issue














Friday, August 15, 2014

The world gets a tutorial on how to create wall-to-wall media coverage of the death of a celebrity

By Marc Jampole

The recent deaths of two well-known actors, Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall, dominated the news media this week, but in very predictable ways. The news media has got celebrating the life of a famous person down to a science. If the feeding frenzy on the dead bones of a troubled comic or a classy New York personality has been so thorough, it’s only because the media has done it many, many times before.

No reporter assigned to write a story about a celebrity death should have to scratch his or her head in frustration or confusion, wondering where to begin. There are so many models from which to select that most of the stories about dead celebrities seem to write themselves. Besides the basic obituary of the star, the media churns out story after story on the following topics:
  1. Analysis and appreciations of the celebrity’s body of work
  2. Reaction of the public
  3. Reaction of the star’s family
  4. Reaction of other celebrities
  5. Anecdotes and memories, primarily by other celebrities
  6. The funeral
  7. In-depth coverage of the reason the star died—e.g., suicide in middle age for Robin Williams
  8. The last moments or days in the star’s life
  9. The star’s significance in his or her field and to the larger society
  10. The lessons we can all learn from the star’s life or death
  11. Past scandals or high moments in the life/career of the star, e.g. Bacall & Bogie supporting the blacklisted actors, directors and technicians
  12. Unfinished work that the public may be able to see after the star’s death
  13. The star’s financial state
  14. The star’s will and who gets what
  15. The dispensation of the star’s real estate
  16. Any special tributes that cities or organizations are making, from moments of silence to all-star concerts for charity
  17. His or her past sex life
Eventually, the backlash starts. We’ve already started seeing it with Robin Williams. Suddenly there are stories questioning how the news media covered the death;  whether the celebrities who commented were self-serving or in good/bad taste; and  whether the celebrity’s significance really warranted all the coverage. The media like nothing better than to flagellate themselves—or should I say, other media. 

Input Robin Williams into Google News and you will find several versions of all of these generic story ideas; a search for Lauren Bacall and you’ll find at least one example of most of these concepts.

These media frenzies can go on for days, or in the case of someone of the stature of Michael Jackson, who died under suspicious circumstances, for weeks or months.

Some justify this intensive coverage of the death of a celebrity as part of the national mourning: the news media channels what everyone is feeling into a barrage of stories that give us all a good catharsis.

But the therapeutic value of mass media’s mass mourning begs a question: who is being glorified and beautified and why?  Why does the media go on for days about Robin Williams or Phillip Seymour Hoffman and give cursory attention to the deaths of Maya Anjelou or Gabriel Garcia Marquez?  What about scientists like Jancinto Convit or Andres Carrasco. Or Bill Dana, who flew the X-15 and other experimental aircraft or NASA engineer John Houbolt? Or how about Howard Baker, once the voice of conscience of the Republican Party? Why don’t we find out about their children, finances, real estate, deep secrets, life history, fears and significance?

If Robin William’s touched the lives of more people, it is not just because he starred in a few TV shows and movies. It’s also because the news media focuses much more on actors, singers, athletes and celebrities (people who are famous for being famous or for being rich) than they do on scientists, engineers, classical composers, elected officials (except presidents), scholars, jazz musicians and other high achievers.

The more significant question, though, is not who is being glorified, it’s why there is so much of it. I would be just as disappointed to see newspapers and the Internet stuffed with meaningless stories about a recently deceased great historian or scientist. In either case, the coverage is excessive because it drives out coverage of other, more important news. We get woefully inadequate coverage of local political campaigns and issues, much less than the news media gave us twenty or even ten years ago. Neither the New York Times nor Wall Street Journal seem to have enough space to do any stories on Democratic candidates this year, although I suspect a bias in favor the Republicans is part of the reason for ignoring Democratic primary races. We are painfully unaware of what is happening in many parts of the world.  The mass media has practically ignored studies that show that charter schools are ineffective, immigrants raise the wages of other workers, we could supply the entire world’s electricity needs with windmills right now, inequality of wealth is growing and raising taxes on the wealthy leads to economic growth.

In short, the coverage of important economic, social and political issues is sparse, and often one-sided. Instead of news, we get dead celebrity worship.  

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Have people in America & Great Britain gotten meaner, & if so, why?

By Marc Jampole

People have gotten meaner because they have no vested interest in worrying about their fellow human beings. That’s the conclusion of Tom Clark (with Anthony Heath) in Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump¸ a recent book that sifts through a slew of recent research and impressionistic interviews related to the effect of the Great Recession on the economy and the fabric of society in the United States and Great Britain.

Clark makes his argument through a series of assertions, each of which he proves with research and illustrates with a handful of conversations with people who suffered during the recession that ended a few years ago if you belonged to the upper 1% in income/wealth, but continues for everyone else:
1.      This last “great recession” essentially affected a small part of the population, although everyone outside the 1% has suffered from stagnant wages over the past 30 years.
2.      Those who suffered from the recession the most have tended not to recover.
3.      Unlike other recessions, it was easy to predict who would and would not be affected and not recover from the Great Recession: the poor, the underemployed, the undereducated, primarily minorities and the young.
4.      Compared to previous recessions since the Great Depression of the 1930’s, Anglo-Saxon governments did much less for those who suffered the worst effects of the Great Recession.
5.      The attitudes of the wealthy, middle class and working poor towards victims of the Great Recession were much less generous to victims of previous recessions. A blame-it-on-the-victim mentality replaced the former generosity displayed in surveys in former recessions about whether people liked government support of victims of economic dislocation.

Clark establishes these facts and then uses them to develop a grand synthesis which he thinks explains what he sees as a hard turn right in both the United States and Great Britain over the past 10 years: In former recessions, the impact was widespread and serendipitous, so people supported government intervention and support of victims out of self-interest: maybe they would need the help. But we could predict who the long-term and permanent victims of the Great Recession would be. The result: even though—or perhaps because—most everyone else has been struggling, they did not think they would need the government benefits and so did not support expansion of benefits. Additionally, more of the middle class and working poor grew to believe that large portions of those receiving benefits were “undeserving.” In a sense, 30 years of static wages and a slow erosion of buying power made everyone hunker down and get more selfish.

Clark’s argument resonates to a careful student of the history of healthcare reform. In Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar Struggle over Health Care Reform, Paul Starr points out that because most Americans already had health insurance through their employers, Medicare or Medicaid, they had no vested interest in seeing the healthcare law now called Obamacare pass, and in fact recognized that it would mean that they would pay more without getting more to help fund those getting coverage under the proposed new law. Republican Scott Brown, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts for what baseball people used to call “a cup of coffee,” expressed this attitude best when he said he liked the recently enacted healthcare law in Massachusetts but did not want the citizens he represented to pay for extending the Massachusetts model to the rest of the country, which Obamacare essentially did.

But although Clark makes a compelling case, I think he discounts the impact of the constant barrage of propaganda we have endured since the rise of Reaganism. We’ve had more than 30 years of the right using code words to demonize the poor and downtrodden, such as “welfare queens, “those people,” “the 47% who think they’re victims” and “urban culture problems.” We’ve had more than 30 years of the glorification of the free market and the nonsense that government always produces inferior solutions. For more than 30 years, we’ve been told that the ultra-rich worked hard for their money and deserve what they get, whereas those who fail have only themselves to blame. More than 30 years of media bashing of unions, teachers and public school workers. More than 30 years of hearing and reading the lie that giving food stamps, medical care and other aid to the poor makes them dependent on handouts and saps their self-reliance so that they prefer to sit on their duffs and do nothing all day. We’ve been told the lie that the only thing that hurts the economy more than giving money to poor people, who will spend it all and thereby create jobs, is to cut taxes on the wealthy. The news media has drummed into our minds that we have to pay down the debt, even if it means gutting social welfare benefits.

In short, some 30 years of brain-washing has made Americans—and evidently Brits, too—inured to the suffering of their fellow neighbors and has atomized our communities into millions of selfish individuals.

I am reluctant to recommend Hard Times as a read, because it’s written in an irritating combination of styles, taking the worst from both a jargon-laden academic style and the slang-and-case-history approach of pop sociology. What’s worse, it’s not even U.S. slang, but that of the foreign tongue known as British. The ideas are certainly worth assimilating and the book is relatively short, but still, if you’re a stickler for good writing, its style will infuriate even as its ideas captivate. 

Monday, August 11, 2014

Neither Israel nor United States can justify current bombing campaigns, but Hamas & ISIS are also wrong

By Marc Jampole

Someone on Facebook recently wondered why it’s okay for the United States to bomb the ISIS positions in Iraq but not okay for Israel to bomb the Gaza strip. By “okay,” I’m pretty sure she was asking why the mainstream news media and our political leaders applauded one and not the other. She was correct to observe that while there has been almost universal approval of Obama bombing Iraq (except for those who think he should be doing more!), the press and politicos have expressed mixed feelings about Israel’s actions.

In my mind, both the United States and Israel are pursuing the worst possible courses from both a moral and a political standpoint. Neither country will achieve the stated goals on its acts of violence.

The Iraq situation is much easier to analyze, for the simple reason that no U.S. lives are in harm’s way and no one has attacked our country.

We hear two main reasons to bomb: 1) ISIS is becoming a destabilizing force in the region after having carved out major territory for itself in both Syria and Iraq; 2) We owe it to Iraq, which is a kind of “we broke it so we have to fix it” argument.

This second argument often comes from Republicans and their supporters as part of their program of blaming the President for the situation since he authorized final withdrawal of American troops from Iraq a few years ago. It’s as short-sighted and self-serving as the argument that Obama caused the Great Recession.  Iraq has always been a glued-together country. Even in ancient times, the territory that was Iraq consisted of two and sometimes three national entities. Just as Yugoslavia fell apart as soon as strongman Tito died, so did Iraq splinter when the United States destroyed the strongman government of Sadam Hussein. The violent fractionalization of Iraq was predictable, and many people predicted it.  It has also been painfully obvious to anyone willing to look the facts straight in the face that the country would remain a seething pit of terrorism as long as United States troops remained in the country and that it would soon break apart soon after we left. That’s exactly what has happened.

All the U.S. bombing can do now is shore up a corrupt and weak regime that does not represent all its citizens.  It does not offer a permanent solution.  Instead, U.S. bombing slows down the inevitable process of the various factions in Iraq coming to terms with one another, either in a unified country or in a number of smaller countries. It’s not likely to be pretty and will probably be violent, but with the United States bombing, it is definitely going to be violent and will take a lot longer to achieve. It’s time for us to leave bad enough alone by not bombing or committing any military action in Iraq, while increasing our non-military support for a newly elected government of Iraq that would be willing not to play ethnic or religious favorites.  I’m not saying that ISIS is not a grave threat; what I’m saying is the U.S. position is too compromised from past actions in Iraq to help in the fight against ISIS. We should stay on the sidelines of the military battle, and instead increase humanitarian aid, call for and uphold an arms embargo in Iraq and Syria and coordinate with the United Nations on evacuation and diplomatic efforts.

Like the United States in Iraq, to a large degree Israel made its own untenable situation through years of harsh treatment of the Palestinians, brutal execution of wars and unwillingness to be flexible at the negotiating table. To be sure, Israel has not been alone in its unwillingness to confront the other side peaceably. Moreover, Hamas and its predecessors have conducted terrorist campaigns against Israeli citizens.

But Israel’s past harsh ways have never worked, unless the country’s real goals are to keep a population that it believes to be inherently inferior in a political and social structure akin to apartheid, no matter how much violence it takes. I do not believe this patently anti-Semitic characterization of Israel’s actions, which is why I can’t understand why Israel’s political and military leaders keep answering violence with an escalation of brutality. The numbers speak for themselves: 1,800 Palestinians dead since the latest conflict began, 70% of whom were civilians; fewer than 70 Israelis killed of whom only three were civilians.  No wonder the mainstream media is giving the Israeli attacks a mixed review. And it’s no wonder anti-Semitic acts have increased in Europe.  The contrast between 1,800 and 70 feeds the imaginations of anti-Semites everywhere. It makes Hamas even more recalcitrant and it encourages the funders of terrorism to give more money to their violent clients.

In short, the Israeli way to meet a slap with a sledgehammer has never worked and never will work. It would have been much better if Israel had reacted to the act that started the latest wave of violence—the kidnapping and killing of three boys—with a more studied, more nuanced approach.  First and foremost, it should have insisted on due process to find and punish the killers of the boys. By not bombing civilian targets, it would have won the admiration of many in the West for restraint and perhaps convinced the other side that it was willing to consider a peaceful solution to the Palestinian problem. Secondly, it might have considered using drones to target known terrorists in civilian areas or tried some surgical operations similar to when it dismantled a Syrian nuclear reactor years ago.

But instead of trying to think of new approaches, Israel and the United States have both decided to default to the unworkable. And so “business as usual” continues in Israeli and the occupied lands and returns to Iraq. It’s a bloody status quo that shows absolutely no signs of transforming into something better.  

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

NY Times reveals its conservative bias in its reporting of primary elections

By Marc Jampole

The New York Times management probably thinks the paper got a lot of progressive street cred by coming out in favor of the total legalization of marijuana. The Times has published a series of very long editorials that take apart every aspect of the subject and conclude that legalization is the right thing to do. I concur with the Times and am pleased it has come out so aggressively on this relatively minor social issue.

But that doesn’t change my mind about the electoral politics the Times news department subtle favors in its news coverage.  First of all, just because you support legalization of pot doesn’t mean you’re a progressive. Progressives do not have ownership of the legalize pot issue—libertarians are also in favor allowing recreational use of the devil weed.

More to the point, while the Times editorial page has been smoking, the news room has a chronic case of Tea Party conservatism when it comes to election coverage. The coverage of the primary results in Kansas and Michigan provides an excellent example of the way the Times has been reporting primaries since 2010: The article titled “Senator Beats Tea Party Challenger in Kansas” reports the results of three Kansas and two Michigan primaries—but only on the Republican side. The story follows the Times overarching narrative of the 2014 election, which is the same narrative the newspaper—and the rest of the mass media—foisted on the American public in 2010. The story is the bitter and dramatic battle for the soul of the Republican Party between ultra-rightwing Tea Partiers and the merely conservative traditional Republicans.

But what about the Democrats?

There is no national narrative about the Democratic Party, except an occasional mention of a candidate running away from Obamacare. No coverage of the races in which progressive candidates are facing centrist Democrats. In fact, no coverage of Democratic primaries at all!

It’s not just the New York Times, of course. A Google search comparing coverage of the Republican and Democratic primaries in Kansas and Michigan shows a decided bias in covering the doctrinal disputes between factions of the Republican Party, while ignoring anything that has to do with Democratic primaries or the Democrat’s process of selecting candidates:
·         Inputting “Chad Taylor,” who won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senator from Kansas, reveals 16,000 stories on Google News; do the same for the Republican nominee Pat Roberts (the incumbent) and it’s 30,300 stories.
·         In Michigan’s 11th district, a Google News search of Democratic nominee Bobby McKenzie yields 1,570 stories; a search for the Republican nominee Dave Trott yields 3,790, more than twice as many.

I searched Google News for all five races covered in the Times article and in each case there were many more stories in the national news about the Republican winning than about the Democrat (although in two of the cases, the Democrat ran unopposed).  Even more revealing is the fact that a majority of the stories I read focus on the Republican race, only mentioning the Democrat as the candidate whom the Republican will have to face in November.

Just as in 2010, casual perusers of newspapers and the Internet might come to the conclusion that no Democrats are running for any office come November. They certainly will learn a lot about the nuances that distinguish the hard right from the very hard right while culling almost nothing about what issues divide and unite the Democrats—who, BTW, are the larger party in terms of membership and total votes cast for both the presidential and Congressional races in 2012.

It’s as if the mass media are collectively writing the story of the election from the point of view of the Republican Party. Even though the New York Times and the rest of the national mainstream media will endorse Democrats, their news coverage in fact endorses the Republic Party by focusing primary election coverage almost exclusively on Republican races; providing extensive coverage of the Republican’s extreme element while ignoring the far left of the Democratic Party; and framing most national and international issues from the Republican playbook.   

Monday, August 4, 2014

Marketers are discovering a rapidly growing group of consumers: adults who want to remain children

By Marc Jampole 

The latest marketer to cash in on the trend of adults wanting to remain children is a museum.

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), that venerable icon to the natural sciences, is now offering special sleepover parties—for adults only.  That’s right, for a mere $375 a person ($325 for members), you can snuggle up in jammies in your sleeping bag on a cot provided by the museum under the enormous blue whale in the Hall of Ocean Life with 149 people you never met before. I don’t know if they’re serving cookies and milk or ‘Smores and hot chocolate, but I understand that lights out is about 1:42 am. BTW, the museum has offered sleepovers for families for about eight years.

Now, the adult meaning of sleepover is much different from when the term is applied to children. For adults, a sleepover means having sex, usually for the first time or early in a relationship. For kids through their late teens, by contrast, it means making popcorn, watching movies, talking through the night and having mom make pancakes or French toast in the morning.

Which do you think the American Natural History museum’s resembles? There is no way the museum trustees, the insurance companies or the police are going to allow condoned sex, nor do I think many adult couples who attend the sleepover are going to want to engage in conjugal relations in full sight and earshot of everyone else trying to sleep on a cot. There may be some hidden hanky-panky among the mastodons or in a bathroom stall, but the point of the AMNH sleepover is not sex. It is therefore not an adult sleepover, at least not in conventional or traditional terms.

What is it then? Well you get a chance to see the exhibits—just like a regular visit or a special event such as a singles night or members day. You get to hear guest lecturers-- just like a regular visit or a special event . You get the run of the place pretty much to yourself, which is not like the wall-to-wall masses of chattering humanity of a regular visit, but very much like a special museum event.

The only thing that differentiates the sleepover from other museum events then is the sleepover itself. The big sell point for an adult event is something for children.

In other words, a major American museum is appealing to those adults who want to do something from their childhood—have a sleepover.  The museum’s marketing department is trying to cash in on the growing number of adults who collect My Little Pony dolls, play with Legos, like to go to Disney theme parks, read comic books and juvenile fiction like Harry Potter or spend a lot of time playing shoot-‘em-up video games. And judging from the stories we see in the mass media, their number is growing by leaps and bounds. You can see just how much infantilization of American adults has progressed when  you peruse the growing number of movies dedicated to adults preserving the life they led as children: “Harold & Kumar” movies,  “Neighbors,” “The Internship,” “Old School,” “Big,” “Grandma’s Boy,” “Ted,” “The Wedding Crashers,” “Billy Madison,” “You, Me and Dupree,” “Dodgeball,””Step Brothers,” “The 40-year-old Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” all three “Hangovers,” the “Jackass” movies, “Bridesmaids,” “Hall Pass” and “Identity Thief” start the long list of movies that glorify not growing up.

Going to the museum is a pretty adult thing to do, unless it’s a children’s museum or the museum has decided to focus an exhibit on a child’s level of discourse. And keep in mind that the purpose of children’s museums or children’s exhibits is to guide children in learning how appreciate the adult experience that is museum-going. So how does a palace dedicated to the scientific education of all ages attract the fast-growing segment of adults who don’t want to grow up?  AMNH has come up with the brilliant solution by combining the very adult pleasure of looking at scientific specimens and analyzing information about the natural world with the child’s treat of having a sleepover.   

While we should all retain a child’s sense of wonder and curiosity, I believe that at a certain point, it’s time, as Saul of Tarsus said, to put away childish things. His full quote, according to the King James version of the Christian Bible is “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

The infantilization of American adults is a clear and present danger for representational democracy because adults who constantly participate in child-like activities are not practicing their adult thinking and emotional skills. I believe that mass marketers like infantilized adults because they make more docile and credulous consumers. But I for one would much rather have those who think like adults make decisions in the real world. 

Monday, July 28, 2014

Greedy, self-serving billionaire thinks buying yacht is act of charity

By Marc Jampole 
Dennis M. Jones is a billionaire who claims that the $34 million he paid for his new yacht was a form of charity since the yacht creates jobs in the manufacturing, maintenance, cleaning, furnishing, decorating, cooking, and serving industries.
Funny, that’s the very same self-serving rationale that society matron Cornelia Martin gave to justify an egregiously ostentatious masked ball in New York in 1897—in the middle of a depression—in which one wealthy woman came wearing today’s equivalent of $6.4 million in jewelry sewn into her dress. Thus reports Sven Beckert on the very first page of his The Monied Metropolis, his history of the concentration of wealth into the hands of New York financiers, manufacturers and merchants during the Gilded Age (1850-1896).  The Gilded Age ranks second among American epochs in the flow of wealth upwards to a handful of very wealthy people. First place, of course, goes to the current era, which started in about 1980 and which I like to call the Age of Reagan.
If you wondered why rich folk can so glibly come up with convoluted excuse for why it’s great for the government to follow policies that take money from the middle class and poor and give it to them, now you know: They’ve been laying down the same line for decades.
Let’s take a look at two scenarios for an alternative use of Mr. Johnson’s $34 million and the untold millions he pays every year for upkeep of his metal-and-fiberglass leviathan.
The first scenario is a fantasy socialist utopia in which hundreds of families enjoy a weekend or week owning the yacht. The government pays for the cost to maintain the yacht and succession of temporary owners. Living on the yacht is open to everyone. At least everyone who likes that sort of thing. I’ll take the three-week trip with luxury accommodations across the old Silk Road instead!
Now a second, realistic scenario: The government spends the additional $34 million it collects from Johnson on teacher salaries, thereby shrinking the size of classrooms and providing an environment that’s more conducive to learning.  Or maybe, the government could fund $34 million in research into Alzheimer’s disease or cancer. $34 million would repair a lot of highways and feed a lot of hungry children. What about spending $34 million to subsidize consumer purchase of solar heating equipment.
Every single one of these uses for $34 million creates jobs. More importantly, they all improve our society and future economy more than does buying and operating a yacht for the gratification of a single individual.
But it’s Mr. Jones’ money! will shout those like George Will and the Roberts court who place property rights about human rights and social needs.
Yes, but in any other decade since we enacted the 16th Amendment in 1913, Mr. Jones would be paying a higher rate on the taxes from both his income and investments.
Moreover, no matter how hard Mr. Jones worked, he did not really earn that money by himself. The pharmaceutical company he sold 14 years ago for $3.4 billion used roads, bridges, sewers, airports and pipelines built with government money, all protected from both local and foreign threats by government organizations. His employees were mostly educated in public schools. They all made a ton less money than he did—and does—and none benefited the way he did from the company sale.
I couldn’t find a biography of Jones, but it doesn’t matter for my argument. He earned a billion in only one of two ways: Either he was already rich and connected or he was born with a talent which he may have burnished but which he did nothing to create. Either way, luck had at least as much to do with it as hard work. I’m sure that there are servants, boat engine maintenance specialists and cooks who work just as hard. 
In other words, Mr. Jones owes a lot to society and to luck. I’m not saying he shouldn’t earn—and spend—more than other people. Nor am I proposing a ceiling on wages and wealth.
What I am saying is that we have to return taxes to their levels before 1980 as long as there is still widespread poverty in the world, schools are overcrowded, our infrastructure is rapidly deteriorating, global warming is exacting severe penalties in lost lives and wealth, and people still suffer from debilitating ailments.
If that means Mr. Jones couldn’t afford to spend $34 million to buy a yacht and then untold millions to operate it, so be it. Life can be tough for billionaires.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Editorial: Let the Kids In / Defund the Gangs



Reports that approximately 60,000 children have made the trek north from danger-plagued barrios in Central America to the Texas border have really brought out the blatherskites north of the Rio Grande.

US House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in June blamed the administration for the flood of children immigrants from Central America. “We’re seeing a humanitarian disaster, one of the administration’s own making,” he said. “The administration’s actions only serve to encourage more illegal crossings. It’s another situation that appears to have caught the administration flat-footed.”

The administration actually followed the requirements of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush. The law provides a process to consider asylum applications of young refugees from nations that are not contiguous to the United States — such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Xenophobic protesters in the United States claimed the Central American kids are not our responsibility but, in their defense, many of the protesters are imbeciles who are as unfamiliar with the history of US-Central American relations as they are with the history of Jesus Christ, who started out life as a refugee and who admonished His followers that they would be judged on how they treated the poor, the sick, prisoners and foreigners (see Matthew 25:31-46).

The children making the perilous journey north from Central America to the Texas border do not appear to be motivated by economic opportunity. They appear to be fleeing for their lives. They are running from gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha (a.k.a. MS-13) and Calle 18, who gave the kids the choice of submitting to the gangs or risking the dangers on the road to Texas, with dodgy smugglers, sex traffickers and corrupt officials along the way.

These children are not illegal immigrants. They are refugees from dysfunctional nations that US foreign policy helped to wreck. And the kids aren’t actually doing anything illegal. They cross the border into the USA, then they turn themselves in to the Border Patrol, seeking asylum. They are not much different from Cubans who, if they manage to set foot on the USA and claim they face persecution at home, usually are allowed to stay.

David Bacon notes at InTheseTimes.com that the tide of migration from Central America dates back to the wars that the US promoted in the 1980s, “in which we armed the forces, governments or contras, who were most opposed to progressive social change. Many hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans came to the US during the late 1970s and 80s, to say nothing of Guatemalans and Nicaraguans. Whole families migrated, but so did parts of families, leaving loved ones behind with the hope that some day they’d be reunited.”

As young people from Central America arrived in Los Angeles and other US cities in the 1980s and ‘90s, many were recruited into gangs. Among the gangs that developed in Los Angeles were MS-13 and Calle 18. When US law enforcement and immigration authorities deported the gang members back to their homelands, many of the young deportees were incarcerated almost as soon as they arrived; prisons became schools for gang recruitment.

The Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), signed in 2004, further uprooted farm workers and small business owners who were swamped by imports from the US, unsettled these nations’ workforces.

The children who made their way north this year are not gangbangers. Instead they have showed extraordinary courage in coming to the United States in the belief that they would find a safe refuge here. The least we can do is give them a hearing.

But Republican congressional leaders proposed an ex post facto bill that would take those legal procedures away from these Central American refugees, and the White House indicated the President might go along with it. Democrats should block this backward step. These refugees should be given humanitarian consideration under the 2008 law that was in effect when they entered the country.

While Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has ordered 1,000 Texas National Guard troops to deploy to the border, despite complaints from sheriffs along the border that the “help,” which will cost $12 million a month and pull the Guards away from their regular jobs, is not needed, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) eloquently defended the refugees and offered to provide temporary shelter for up to 1,000 of them, despite local protests. Patrick cited America’s history of giving “sanctuary to desperate children for centuries” and the “blight on our national reputation” when US authorities refused to accept Jewish children fleeing the Nazis in 1939. He added that his Christian faith “teaches that ‘if a stranger dwells with you in your land, you shall not mistreat him but rather love him as yourself’.” He added, “”The point is that this good nation is great when we open our doors and our hearts to needy children, and diminished when we don’t.”

We agree with Gov. Patrick. If we fulfill the faith that these kids have in the United States — and the parents who sent them north in the desperate hope that they’d find a refuge — we think they’ll be a credit to their new homeland, as succeeding generations of immigrants have proven, when given that opportunity.

Defund the Gangs


If the United States wants to improve conditions in Mexico and these Central American countries so these children might safely return, the first step should be to legalize marijuana to help defund the gangs and criminal cartels. The Washington Post reported in May that since 21 states legalized marijuana for medical use and Colorado and Washington state for recreational use, pot farmers in the Sinaloa region of Mexico have stopped planting marijuana due to a massive drop in wholesale prices, from $100 per kilo down to only $25. One farmer told the Post: “It’s not worth it anymore. I wish the Americans would stop with this legalization.”

Retired federal agent Terry Nelson, who worked to prevent drugs from crossing the southern border, told VICE News that before medical marijuana and state legalization in Washington and Colorado, about 10 million pounds of pot were grown in the US every year. But 40 million pounds came from Mexico, and marijuana accounts for as much as 40% of income for the drug cartels, which operate throughout Mexico and Central America.

While the DEA’s chief of operations, James Capra, told senators in January that legalization “scares us” and is “reckless and irresponsible,” former DEA intelligence specialist Sean Dunagan told VICE News that, although it’s too early to verify the numbers: “Anything to establish a regulated legal market will necessarily cut into those profits. And it won’t be a viable business for the Mexican cartels — the same way bootleggers disappeared after prohibition fell.”

Over the past four decades federal and state governments have poured over $1 trillion down the rathole that is the War on Drugs. The current cost is more than $51 billion per year, according to the Drug Policy Alliance. The number of people behind bars for drug law violations has grown from 41,000 in 1980 to more than half a million in 2011, with 406,000 in state prisons and local jails, the Sentencing Project reported. Money funneled into drug enforcement is diverted from addressing serious crime as well as health, education, social services and public safety programs. It is no coincidence that funding for higher education has dropped during the same period that the War on Drugs has sucked up those resources. A 2010 study by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron found that not only would the US save tremendous amounts of money were it to end drug prohibition, legalizing could bring in an additional $46.7 billion in yearly tax revenue.

And after years of denial by federal authorities that marijuana has any valid medical use, now that medical marijuana is legal, it is being used for a variety of recognized clinical applications, including relief of pain, nausea, glaucoma and movement disorders, as well as appetite stimulation for patients suffering from HIV/AIDS and dementia. Research indicates it also may have use in protecting against malignant tumors. And if it gives somebody a pleasant buzz as a side effect, well, that is an acceptable risk. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2014
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Selections from the August 15, 2014 issue














Thursday, July 24, 2014

Fill in the blank: Americans are living in the land of the____. My answer: guns

What comes first to mind when you think of the United States?

High standard of living? Beacon of representational democracy? The melting pot? Consumer society?  Fast food and blockbuster movies?

Land of the free? Home of the brave?

Not me.

When I think of the United States, the first image that comes to my mind is a gun.

We are a society awash in weaponry with an economy in large part based on weaponry.

Let’s start with the fact that we sell three quarters of all the arms exported around the world. That means of every dollar’s worth of bombs, tanks, jet fighters, ammo and machine guns sold around the world, 75 cents of it goes to a U.S. company. 

Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, the Congo and Israel are among the many countries receiving arms from the Unites States, often purchased with funds borrowed from the U.S. government.

It’s a good thing the mainstream media doesn’t give much attention to the harm that’s done from the guns we sell abroad. Based on the space given in the media recently to condemning Russia for giving or selling to Ukraine rebels a rocket that the rebels used to down a commercial jetliner, coverage of the people killed with U.S. weaponry would crowd out all other news every day of the week.

At more than $660 billion a year, we dedicate more money to military spending than the next nine largest military spenders combined. We spend more than three times as much as number two on the list, China, even though the population of China is more than four times what ours is.  Let’s do the math: The autocratic Chinese spend about $139 per person per year on their military. The United States spends about $2,032 per person.  (I’m using 2013 figures from the Stockholm International Peace Institute, which I first found in a Wikipedia article).

The United States thus bears the major responsibility for the flood of weapons that help national and regional problems turn violent all over the world.

The violence doesn’t stop at our borders. Our militarism abroad runs parallel to our dedication to guns at home. The United States has the largest number of privately held guns per capita of any nation, almost one per person. Just as with military spending and weapons exports, our private ownership of guns far surpasses that of any other country in the world. We have 97 private guns per 100 people; no other nation has as many as 60 guns per 100 people.

More guns lead to more deaths and injuries from gunfire in the United States than in any other industrialized countries. Only countries at war see more of their people killed and injured by guns than the United States does.

It seems as if we worship guns and gun ownership. State legislatures and dubious court decisions have loosened gun control laws over the past two decades. After every bloody mass murder, more states pass laws to make it easier to own and carry a gun than toughen gun laws. Every week, the media covers protests of gun owners who think their rights have been squeezed or want to assert new rights to tote guns: sometimes they march into a fast food joint, sometimes on a university campus.  Very few politicians—and virtually none in the South—will come out against gun control for fear that the gun lobby will pour money into the opponent’s campaign.

The funny thing is, our reverence for the weapon both inside and outside the boundaries of our country plays to a stridently vocal minority. Only about 40% of the population has a gun in the home. Many surveys show that the number of gun owners is falling—but that each owner has more guns in his or her possession.  Our gun sales abroad primarily benefit the gun-makers, who are delighted to get the subsidies that U.S. loans to support arms sales represent.

What we have then is a society dedicated to guns and an economy in which making and selling guns play an outsized role.   Instead of singing “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” we might more accurately end the “Star Spangled Banner” with “the land of the gun…and the home of the gun sale.”

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

A TV commercial subtly suggests cannibalism, another makes fun of those with disabilities

By Marc Jampole

Two commercials currently on TV are making me—and probably most other viewers—squirm with discomfort. Both are meant to be funny, but once explained, the logic behind the humor may turn stomachs.

The first is a spot for Lay’s potato chips that opens with an animated version of the classic Mr. Potato toy getting home from work. He can’t find his wife anywhere. He hear a strange crackle and then another. He follows the sounds until he sees his wife hiding in a room with a bag of Lay’s potato chips, munching away. She is suitably embarrassed at what amounts to an act of cannibalism, but the commercial explains that the chips are so delicious that they are irresistible. The last shot shows Mr. & Mrs. Potato Head snacking on the chips, both with a look of mischievous glee on their face—they know they are doing a naughty thing, but it just doesn’t matter.

The scene is reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece, “Weekend,” at the end of which the main female character sucks on a bone from a stew prepared by the revolutionary who has forcibly made her his concubine. “What is it we’re eating?” she asks, to which the punky gangster answers, “Your husband.” She has the last line of the movie: “Not bad…” and then keeps gnawing on the bone.

Eating another being of your own species is generally considered to be an abomination. Although the Potato Heads are not humans, they are stand-ins for humans with human emotions and aspirations, just like the various mice, ducks, rabbits, dogs, foxes, lions and other animals we have anthropomorphized since the beginning of recorded history. From Aesop and Wu Cheng’en to Orwell and Disney, authors have frequently used animals as stand-ins for humans in fairy tales, satires and children’s literature.

So when Mrs. Potato Head eats a potato, it’s an overt representation of cannibalism—humans eating other humans. 

The advertiser is trying to make fun of transgression, to diminish the guilt that many on a diet or watching their weight might feel in eating potato chips, which after all, are nutritionally worthless.  But behind the jokiness of a potato eating a potato chip stands more than the idea that it’s okay for humans to eat them. The implication in having a potato playing at human eating other potatoes is that we are allowed to do anything transgressive, even cannibalism—everything is okay, as long as it leads to our own pleasure.  The end-game of such thinking is that our sole moral compass should be our own desires.

Thus the Lay’s Potato Head commercial expresses an extreme form of the politics of selfishness, the Reaganistic dictate that everyone should be allowed to pursue his or her own best interests without the constraint of society. Like the image of the vampire living on the blood of humans or of the “Purge” series of movies in which people are allowed any violent action one night a year, the Potato Head family eating other potatoes that have first been dried, processed, bathed in chemicals, extruded and baked symbolizes and justifies what the 1% continues to do to the rest of the population.  

And it’s a happy message, too!  We don’t get the sense that it’s a “dog-eat-dog world in which you have to eat or be eaten.” No, Lay’s presents the gentle Reagan version: you can do anything you like to fill your selfish desires (no matter whom it hurts).

The kooky image of potatoes as cannibals may be funny, but I can’t imagine anyone is laughing at the Direct TV series of commercials that present human beings as string puppets who trip over furniture and get caught in ceiling fans.

To sell the fact that Direct TV—a satellite television service—can operate without wires, these commercials start by depicting a normal-looking character complaining about wires in the entertainment system or expressing delight that he has Direct TV and therefore can go wireless. At this point in the several versions of the spot I have seen, we are introduced to another member of the family who is a string puppet. As the normal character stammers about how wireless is okay for people but not when it comes to TV, the string puppet bounces around, hands and fingers flapping, shoulders hunching together and legs and knees dangling, until it trips or gets hung up in the fan or something that is supposed to be funny happens. But it’s only funny if one enjoys the cruel humor of slapstick and if one forgets that the stringed puppet is supposed to be part of the family—in other words a real human being with a challenging disability.

Direct TV has a long history of commercials that make fun of its audience, such as the idiot who fails to inherit a mansion, yacht and major stock portfolio but cries for glee because his rich deceased relative has willed him the Direct TV package. But the string people in these new Direct TV spots are not buffoons, not stupid, not venial, not pompous or supercilious. No, the trait that the spot exploits for humor is that they are disabled.

The commercial tries to extract humor out of mocking people with disabilities. No wonder everyone with whom I have watched this spot has turned away with a disgusted expression.

Nothing connects these two commercials except the bad taste which led to their conception and broadcast.  The Direct TV commercial has no political or social subtext to it—it’s a juvenile effort to make a joke at the expense of people with physical challenges. The Mr. Potato Head cannibalism commercial, however, seems to offer a fable about the relationship between the haves and the have-nots, or in this case—those who eat and those who are eaten. The fabulist is interested in selling products and making consumers feel good about the process of consumption, even when it is transgressive.  Some may call it an overturning of traditional morality. I call it business as usual in a post-industrial consumer society. 

Monday, July 21, 2014

George Mason professor tries to play Washington Generals to Thomas Piketty’s Harlem Globetrotters

By Marc Jampole

Another transparently deceptive article on wealth inequality by George Mason economics professor Tyler Cowen has me wondering if Cowen has decided to play Washington Generals to Thomas Piketty’s Harlem Globetrotters.

The Harlem Globetrotters is an exhibition basketball team known for its entertaining feats of dribbling, passing and scoring, often to a catchy version of the 1920’s jazz standard “Sweet Georgia Brown.” The Globetrotters have rarely lost, thanks to the fact that they usually play the Washington Generals, an exhibition team put together for the sole purpose of serving the Globetrotters’ on-court foil.

Over the past several months, Cowen has published a number of articles that have tried to refute the main premise of Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, which is that inequality of wealth and income is growing in the world. His obviously fallacious reasoning makes me wonder if Cowen decided to play Washington General as his contribution to disseminating Piketty’s important theories. Just as the Generals’ weak defense have allowed such stars as Wilt Chamberlain, Connie Hawkins, Meadowlark Lemon and Curly Neal to wow spectators, so Cowen’s weak and typically devious arguments have made Piketty look good (as if the spot-on and factually-scrupulous Piketty needed any help!) 

First Cowen made a feeble attempt in Foreign Affairs to prove that wealth doesn’t tend to concentrate.  Instead of looking at the class of the wealthy, Cowen zeroed in on wealthy individuals, pointing out that old fortunes like the Rockefellers and the Astors get diluted over time. If he had instead looked at the wealthy as a class, Cowen would see that Piketty is right to conclude that inequality has increased because the numbers say it.  Call this flaw in reasoning a failure to think in terms of class.  

Cowen is at it again in a Sunday New York Times business article in which he claims that even though inequality is rising in many countries, it is easing globally. Cowen presents no statistics to prove the point, but gives a bunch of reasons why it must be true. Most of his reasons turn out to be trends that do act against greater inequality, but do not change the overall flow of wealth away from the poor and middle class and to the wealthy.  Yes, Cowen is right to say that international trade has improved the standard of living in developing countries, but the fact that there are more middle class people in China and fewer in the United States does not address the question of whether inequality is growing or not. 

In Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty provides statistics that demonstrate that the wealthiest are grabbing a greater share of the wealth and income pie than they used to in every single country of the world.  The most extreme difference in wealth and income between the top one percent and everyone else is currently in the United States. So the fact that there has been some movement up the economic ladder for some people in some non-western countries does not mitigate the overall picture of growing inequality in the world.

Cowen makes the same logical flaw in his New York Times piece as he does in the Foreign Affairs article: instead of looking at the totality of the statistics he looks at individual subsets from which he draws a generalized conclusion. In a metaphorical sense, Cowen’s reasoning is similar to a 2-3 zone defense with slow guards, which makes a basketball team vulnerable to both the three-point shot and drives to the basket. In other words, the careful reader or anyone who has read Piketty’s book observes Cowen trip himself up with his own words.

But the mainstream media loves deceptive arguments and outrageous statements if they support the free market or advocate against higher taxes. That explains why his mostly nonsense articles have found favor in The New Republic, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Newsweek, Wilson Quarterly, Foreign Affairs and New York Times.  In fact, three years ago Business Week declared Cowen to be “America’s hottest economist.” That’s kind of like the newsletter of the corporation that owns the Washington Generals declaring the team the “best professional basketball team” of the century.

Except, of course, for all the others.



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