Wednesday, June 18, 2014

As Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis shows, governments have waged war instead of helping citizens for centuries

By Marc Jampole

Global Crisis by British historian Geoffrey Parker presents the 17th century as a case history of the devastation that climate change can wreck upon human societies. 

The 1600s experienced an enormous number of droughts, lengthy winters, floods, major earthquakes and other extreme weather phenomena resulting from what scientists and historians call “The Little Ice Age.” The Little Ice Age hit human societies hard, leading to famines, plagues and other disasters in all the continents, which put pressure on the still forming nation states throughout the world to go to war to gain or protect their resources. An enormous number of civil wars also broke out, as nobles and/or peasants resisted higher taxes and confiscation of grain and land. The world population was much less in 1680 than it had been in 1600, with some regions losing perhaps a third of their population.

Parker isn’t saying that the sudden cooling of the earth in the 17th century caused all the mayhem of the period, but that sudden climate change combined with and exacerbated political instability to push the world into general disaster and decline. I’m only about a third through this 700+ page tome, but I’m already convinced that Parker gives us a roadmap to our future if we don’t slow down global warming: resource shortages, natural disasters and population displacements could plunge most of the world into a living hell of poverty, warfare, epidemics, famine and environmental degradation. 

The topic of today’s OpEdge article is not, however, Global Crisis, but one paragraph on page 34 of the book.  The topic of the paragraph is what Parker calls “indirect” or “opportunity” costs, which refers to the lost opportunity to spend money on something because you have already spent the money on something else. In the paragraph in question, Parker refers to the many positive initiatives that 17th-century governments did not pursue because they had already spent so much fighting wars:
·         Philip IV of Spain, who spent £30 million to finance foreign wars between 1618 and 1648, claimed that he didn’t have the funds to set up a national banking system.
·         Charles I of Great Britain, whose wars between 1625 and 1630 cost £6 million, decided he could not afford to create public granaries for famine relief.
·         After Manchu raiders broke through the Great Wall in 1629, the emperor’s drastic reductions in non-defense spending included closure of one-third of all postal stations.

Parker suggests that these examples represent the tip of an iceberg of societal needs that went unfilled in the 17th because rulers were raising armies to grab or defend land.

La plus ça change, as the French say: The more things change, the more they remain the same.  The United States currently spends more than $680 billion a year on the formal military budget, or about 19% of all federal government spending and 28% of estimated tax revenue. That’s more than we spend on education, highways and bridges, research, job creation, safety inspectors, agencies such as the Center for Disease Control and the Federal Drug Administration and all other discretionary goods and services.  This enormous number—enough to build 340,000 new houses a year at $200,000 a pop or to cut the annual college tuition build by $10,000 for about 6 million people—does not include what we spend to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which for some reason Congress and the Bush II Administration decided to keep out of budgetary and deficit discussions. 

By itself, the United States military budget accounts for 40% of global arms spending with a budget from 6-7 times that of China.

No wonder are roads are full of pot holes. No wonder federal aid to higher education has been slashed. No wonder our space exploration program is winding down instead of ratcheting up. No wonder there are more outbreaks of food poisoning and food recalls, which safety inspections help to prevent.

I’m not saying that we should do without military expenditures, but I’m fairly confident that if we swore off hegemonic foreign invasions, cut our nuclear force (which could destroy life as we know it on Earth many times over), cut research on new military weapons and significantly reduced our current armed forces, that we would be able to invest our tax revenues in more productive means.

Of course the dirty little non-secret of a capitalist system with few restraints on the market is that it needs war and military spending to provide enough jobs.  Of course, this dirty little secret has its own dirty little secret, which is that we would not harm a flourishing economy with a small military budget—but we would make a tremendous shift in wealth from military suppliers to suppliers of alternative energy and environmental protection equipment, social programs, highway builders and engineers and other segments of the economy that do not have quote as much lobbying clout as the military-industrial complex. 

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Jump Street: once again, a movie character portrayed as intelligent is uncoordinated and socially inept

By Marc Jampole 

With “22 Jump Street” one of the most popular movies of the summer, it is instructive to remember how the two bros of this cop bromance met in “21 Jump Street,” the first of the Jump movies.

The Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum characters knew each other in high school, but only as acquaintances. Seven years later at the police academy, Channing—a handsome and tall stud who dominates the physical training—notices that klutzy Jonah earned a 100% on a written exam which Channing flunked. The two become best buds—Jonah’s character helping Channing’s to raise his written test scores to a “C,” while under Channing’s tutelage, Jonah improves his conditioning enough to pass the physical exams, even though he still is more uncoordinated than you would ever want a police officer to be.

Once again in a mass entertainment, a highly intelligent character is presented as physically inferior—out of shape, weak, poorly coordinated, slow.

But it gets worse. We also learn that Jonah’s character is also socially inept: the girl he wants to take to the prom rejects him.

So yes, once again mass entertainment creates the myth that if you’re smart, you are likely unattractive to the opposite sex.  We get this myth big-banged into us  in television shows, movies, cartoons and commercials. It seems as if only the superhuman freaks like Ironman can be smart and sexy.

Of course, real life is different. While there are some smart people who flat line after doing one sit-up or sit shyly and stiffly in a corner at parties, there are many others who play competitive athletics and have an active social life. When I see the highly intelligent portrayed as social pariahs or weaklings, I think of the top 25 chess players at the national chess tournaments in my son’s grade when he was playing youth chess. Among the top 4-6 players, there were kids who looked as pale as a white sheet and were either soft and blubbery or very thin—these were the kids who studied chess three or more hours a day, every day. But most of the top-ranked boys (since mostly boys played chess back then) in the country were like my son: muscled and always moving with an athletic grace. And why not—these extremely intelligent kids were usually involved in one or more sports. Another example would be astronauts: these men and women have very high intelligences and are athletically gifted; no one has reported that an astronaut ever had a hard time getting a date.

Since it’s mostly very smart people who write, direct and produce movies and TV shows, why do they insist on insulting themselves by telling what amounts to a big lie? My own theory is that the makers of our mass entertainments reflect the views of the people who pay the piper—the very wealthy, who rightfully sense that a true meritocracy would result in their losing their money and position. They also see that computerization has dramatically decreased the number of good jobs around; by denigrating the intelligent, they may hope to discourage the poor from striving in school, thus reducing competition for their offspring.  Both today and in the past, religious figures have denigrated intelligence as inferior to unquestioning faith. The application of intelligence generally involves questioning, and one thing that the sellers of goods and services don’t want is for us to ask questions in the marketplace. Thus, in many ways, promoting intelligence and scholarly activity as a social value upsets the status quo of American consumerism.

Interestingly enough, the Jump movies manifest not only the traditional disdain of intellectuals in American society, but also represent an alarming social trend: the infantilization of adults. More and more adults are maintaining their entertainment habits of childhood, playing with My Little Pony dolls or Legos, reading comic books and Harry Potter novels and spending vacations at theme parks. Many movies in recent years have glorified the life of adults—especially adult men—who remain children and teenagers. 

Add the Jump series to entertainment in which men behave as boys.  The cops are adults who go undercover in a high school and pretend to be average teenagers. In other words, they have formal permission from authorities to behave as children, despite being adults. Their job is to be “not grown up.” The Jump movies therefore show another way for adults to remain kids and retain the predilections and habits of their teen years. 

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Editorial: Let's Clear the Air


President Obama rightly took the initiative in imposing limits on carbon pollution from power plants. Fossil fuel producers are screaming bloody murder, but the consensus of climate scientists is clear: Immediate action is needed to reduce carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere as we attempt to throttle down on global warming.

Using authority under the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency on June 2 unveiled regulations that offer the states flexibility to get to the goal of cutting carbon pollution from power plants by 30% by 2030, compared with 2005.

In coal country, the new rules are seen as job killers and Obama is vilified for conducting a “war on coal” that threatens coal-mining families.

Paul Krugman noted in the New York Times that the Chamber of Commerce has predicted the cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions will be more than $50 billion a year between now and 2030. That almost certainly is overstated and it’s supposed to sound like a big deal. But Krugman noted that the US has a $17 trillion economy, which will grow over time. “So what the Chamber of Commerce is actually saying is that we can take dramatic steps on climate — steps that would transform international negotiations, setting the stage for global action — while reducing our incomes by only one-fifth of 1%. That’s cheap!”

He also noted that the chamber’s estimate of costs per household — $200 per year — would be a fraction of 1% of the average American household income of more than $70,000 a year, which also is going to rise over time.

“One more useful comparison: The Pentagon has warned that global warming and its consequences pose a significant threat to national security. (Republicans in the House responded with a legislative amendment that would forbid the military from even thinking about the issue.) Currently, we’re spending $600 billion a year on defense. Is it really extravagant to spend another 8% of that budget to reduce a serious threat?”

Krugman also has noted that back in the 1980s conservatives claimed that any attempt to limit acid rain would have devastating economic effects. “In reality, the cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide was highly successful at minimal cost. The Northeastern states have had a cap-and-trade arrangement for carbon since 2009, and so far have seen emissions drop sharply while their economies grew faster than the rest of the country. Environmentalism is not the enemy of economic growth.”

At this point, Krugman noted, coal mining accounts for only 1/16th of 1% of overall US employment. “Shutting down the whole industry would eliminate fewer jobs than America lost in an average week during the Great Recession of 2007-9,” he wrote.

“Or put it this way: the real war on coal, or at least on coal workers, took place a generation ago, waged not by liberal environmentalists but by the coal industry itself. And the coal workers lost.”

Employment in coal mines already has been reduced by coal companies, along with the tops of Appalachian mountains. Automation enabled by strip mines, which take the tops off the mountains and fill in the valleys below, has reduced the number of jobs from 177,848 workers in 1984, when 3,496 mines produced 895 million tons of coal, to about 88,000 jobs at 1,300 mines that produced more than one million tons in 2012.

Ironically, an EPA crackdown on mountaintop removal in 2009 — which the industry complained was the first shot of Obama’s war on coal — actually forced coal companies to return to more labor-intensive underground mining and put more miners back to work. Jobs increased from an average of 76,470 jobs under George W. Bush to an average of 88,152 under Obama, according to an analysis by Appalachian Voices.

West Virginia was the nation’s second leading producer of coal, and the leader in coal mining jobs, with an average of 22,626 under Obama, up from 17,976 under Bush.

Kentucky was the nation’s third leading producer of coal, and ranked second in coal mining jobs, with an average of 17,168 under Obama, compared with 15,826 under Bush, an increase of 8.5%.

It doesn’t make much sense to sacrifice the environment simply to keep coal mines open. And Central Appalachia’s coal appears to be running out, as many of the thick, easy-to-mine seams have been harvested. The US Energy Information Administration estimates that coal production in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia will soon be half of what it was in 2008, plunging from 234 million tons to 112 million tons in 2015, Brad Plumer reported at WashingtonPost.com in November 2013.

Another big problem for Appalachia’s coal industry is competition from cheaper, low-sulfur coal from the West, particularly from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. Wyoming is the nation’s leading coal-producing state, producing 388 million tons of coal nearly 40% of the nation’s coal production, from 18 mines that employed more than 6,500 miners in 2013.

Coal producers also face competition from cheap natural gas from shale fracking as well as renewable energy sources.

Emily Atkins noted at ThinkProgress.org (June 6) that the Chamber of Commerce report is based on a much more aggressive policy than the one the EPA proposed, and it fails to account for new jobs that would be created in the clean energy sector.

The EPA has projected that the coal extraction industry would lose as many as 14,300 jobs from 2017 to 2020 as a result of the new rule. However, EPA said renewable energy construction could increase by up to 19,100 jobs over the same time period. The EPA also estimated that up to 112,000 jobs would be created solely by the energy efficiency sector in 2025. There already are more jobs in the renewable energy sector, which created 78,600 green jobs in 46 states in 2013, according to Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2). Solar energy employs nearly 143,000 total workers, as solar workers installed 4,751 megawatts of new solar photovoltaic capacity, good for roughly 29% of all new US electrical capacity.

Uncertainty over the federal Production Tax Credit slowed wind energy development, and 8,500 jobs created in 2013 were down from 12,600 in 2012, but the wind industry still employs 80,700.

There is substantial reason to believe that replacing more coal-fired plants with renewable energy will result in a net job gain, Atkins noted. Multiple studies over the last 10 years — from EPI to the University of California at Berkeley — show that the renewable energy sector generates more jobs per megawatt of power installed, per unit of energy produced, and per dollar of investment than the fossil fuel-based energy sector.

In terms of solar energy, a 2004 Berkeley study showed that every $1 million of investment in the solar industry generates 5.65 person-years of employment over ten years, while $1 million invested in the coal industry generates only 3.96 person-years of employment over the same time period. For the wind industry, $1 million in investment equals 5.7 person-years of employment, the study showed.

Congress should take steps to help workers who already have been displaced from their jobs in coal mines and other industries and help them to transition to renewable energy or other industries. Extension of long-term unemployment benefits would be a good first step. The Department of Labor recently announced it would award $7.5 million to help Kentuckians who used to work in the coal industry find new jobs.

More can be done to address job displacement, but people in coal country should stop denying that transition is inevitable. And depicting the Obama administration as the enemy of coal country is neither helpful nor very smart politically. We might add that Kentucky could use a Democratic senator such as Alison Lundergan Grimes to represent the state’s interests at the White House, since neither Sen. Mitch McConnell nor Sen. Rand Paul have been able to play well with the Obama administration. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2014
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Selections from the July 1-15, 2014 issue


COVER/Sam Stein
Eric Cantor wasn’t right enough?

EDITORIAL
Let’s clear the air with carbon regs

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

DON ROLLINS
GOP picks up Florida’s check this time

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Organic ‘standards’ isn’t enough

DISPATCHES
Cantor upset may be nail in coffin of immigration reform;
Texas Republicans adopt immigration bashing platform;
Prog congressional candidates win;
Cal’s ‘top two’ primary eliminates 3rd party rivals;
Repubs block student loan refinancing plan;
Dems propose Social Security expansion;
GOP to GI's: We'll get to you maybe;
Nixon aide confirms campaign scuttled Viet peace talks in 1968...

JOHN YOUNG
Obama: True champion of the planet

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Money corrupts in many ways

BOB BURNETT
Racism: What’s the problem?

WENONAH HAUTER
Fracked gas exports without restrictions

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Obamacare will insure felons

SAM URETSKY
Red states need Medicaid patch

WAYNE O’LEARY
Schizophrenic Democrats

JOHN BUELL
Economic lessons from the boys of summer

GENE NICHOL
On being a white people’s party

N. GUNASEKARAN
21st century India in the making?

SETH SANDRONSKY
Labor and the AT&T-DirecTV merger

ROB PATTERSON
Neil deGrasse Tyson gets around ‘Cosmos’

POPULIST PICKS
‘Hunted’; ‘Rad Gumbo’; ‘Party Girl’


and more ...

Monday, June 9, 2014

Latest bad idea from right-wing economists: cure wealth inequality with more policies that make us unequal

By Marc Jampole

Now that conservatives and their academic factotums realize that they can no longer deny that we have become a world in which inequality is growing, they are beginning to fight a rear-guard action by declaring that the way to reverse the trend of greater inequality is to promote the very policies that created it.

In a Wall Street Journal article titled “The Blue-State Path to Inequality,” Stephen Moore, chief economist of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and Richard Vedder, an economics professor at Ohio University, compare the inequality of income in red states and blue states and finds that there is a greater spread in the blue states, which they aver without proving have greater social safety nets. 

Moore and Vedder cook up a stew of bad math and faulty logic to try to prove their point.  Their reasoning is so laughably inept that I think I’ll refer to them as the “Keystone Profs,” in honor of the Keystone Cops, a fictional crew of incompetent police officers from the silent movie era.

Let’s start with the bad math. To demonstrate that inequality of income is greater in the blue states, the Keystone Profs use the Gini coefficient, a single number cooked up by an Italian statistician Corrado Gini more than a century ago.  The Gini coefficient takes a set of raw data and tries to turn it into a single number that can be compared to similar sets of raw data of other populations; the lower the Gini the less inequality of income exists in the population being measured. 

The problem is that the Gini coefficient is highly inaccurate. One of the first things that Thomas Picketty does in his Capital in the 21st Century is to discredit the Gini coefficient as a viable tool for measuring wealth inequality.  Even the Keystone Profs admit there are many flaws in the Gini coefficient.

We cannot assume the Gini coefficient sorts out the states accurately. The differences in Gini coefficients in the red and blue states the article references are slight; all are in the .400s. For example, the difference between red state Texas (.477) and blue state California (.482) is slight—certainly within the margin of error of a Gini coefficient comparison.  We cannot depend on a Gini ranking of the states to reflect reality. Yet the Keystone Profs persist in using it.

But even if we accept the flawed Gini coefficient as our tool for measuring inequality of income, Moore and Vedder’s argument doesn’t hold water for two reasons. First of all, they assume that the wider social welfare net in blue states causes inequality when in fact social welfare programs are a response to inequality.  Large inequality of wealth developed earlier in the blue states, which industrialized and urbanized first and include those two big-wealth magnets, New York City and California. While the wealthy and ultra wealthy live everywhere, no one can deny that more of them make their money or end up living in New York City and the state of California.  The large 19th and early 20th century fortunes were made in or transferred to New York and Chicago. Today’s high income professions are focused in New York and California—entertainment, banking, high tech. New York and California have always spawned multimillionaires at a higher rate than other states. No wonder blue states communities recognized the problem of inequality earlier than red states and have done more about it.

But while the blue states do more than red states to foster equality of income and wealth, it isn’t much more on the world’s scale. All states are providing less support to public school and university education than 30 years ago and all have put the lid on or cut property and state income taxes. All have suffered from lower federal taxes, a federal policy that has been anti-union or neutral for more than three decades and the decline in local jobs generated by the federal government.

The bigger mistake, then, is to limit the comparisons between blue and red states. That’s like reciting the alphabet from C to E. 

There isn’t that great a difference in what blue and red states do to counteract the tendency of free market capitalism to create wide inequalities of wealth when compared to what governments do in western Europe and Japan, which take more taxes from the wealthy and provide better educational, healthcare and retirement benefits to everyone.  While wealth and income inequality have grown in western Europe and Japan (see Picketty’s book for a great analysis) over the last 35 years, the populations of these countries still enjoy more income and wealth equality than we do in the United States. By excluding western Europe and Japan in the discussion, the Keystone Profs cook the books.

Vedder and Moore follow Picketty in saying that economic growth removes inequality, but they advocate policies that are not pro-growth, but pro-corporation. They assume that unions, minimum wages and high income taxes are bad for economic growth when in fact the economic history of not just the Unites States but the entire world proves that high taxes on the wealthy and high incomes for workers lead to high growth because more of the wealth circulates to people who will spend it as opposed to accumulating it in overvalued assets, which is what the ultra-wealthy do with all of the extra wealth they have from lower taxes. 

And all you Wall Street Journal subscribers in the audience thought it was the fish bones that stank so putridly when you entered the kitchen this morning. No, it was the newspaper you wrapped them in!

Saturday, May 31, 2014

Selective Outrage on VA


There is bipartisan outrage over charges that veterans seeking health care at Veterans Health Administration clinics were forced to wait much longer than two weeks to be seen by physicians — and in some cases the delays may have been several months, all while some VA executives were collecting cash bonuses for their performance.

Timothy Noah of MSNBC reported May 24 that wait times for appointments may have been falsified at the Phoenix VA hospital and the department was investigating whether long wait times contributed to the deaths of 40 veterans at that facility. Similar complaints have been heard about other VA facilities. As Noah wrote, “This is a ghastly problem involving potentially criminal behavior.”

But, Noah added, while VA wait times for appointments are bad, private-sector wait times aren’t much better.

Conservatives have claimed that the scandal proves that the VA was never the model for excellence (and, by implication, the argument for socialized medicine) claimed by liberals like Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein and others, including Noah. “But the VA scandal does not raise questions about the quality of VA care, which continues to rank highly; it raises questions about the availability of VA care,” Noah added.

“To conclude from the VA scandal that VA hospital care was poor would be like concluding from Harvard’s 6% admission rate that Harvard did a lousy job educating students,” Noah noted. “The difference, of course, is that Harvard isn’t supposed to admit everybody, whereas the VA is supposed to book appointments for already-qualified veterans within 14 days. It isn’t doing that. News stories about the Phoenix VA and some other bad actors indicate the wait can be many months, but an internal VA estimate — one based on ‘hard’ time stamps and therefore less vulnerable to manipulation than the records allegedly falsified — puts the average wait at about 21 days.” (On May 28, acting Inspector General Richard J. Griffin said in an interim report that the average wait for a first appointment at the Phoenix hospital was 115 days and “inappropriate scheduling practices are systemic throughout” the nationwide VA health care system. The inspector general has not determined whether any veteran died as a result of delayed appointments and treatment.)

While directly comparable data for the private sector are unavailable, a recent survey of wait times to see private physicians found the average wait time for a Medicare or Medicaid patient to see a private specialist in 2013 was 18.5 days. Noah added that in Boston, which has a high concentration of top-quality private-sector hospitals, the average wait time was 45.4 days.

Republicans led the call for VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to resign before the department’s inspector general completed his review of the complaints. Some Democrats running for re-election also called for Shinseki’s resignation after release of the IG report. (This was published before Shinseki resigned Friday.)

Many of those same Republican senators who are critical of the VA backlog blocked a bill on Feb. 27 that would have improved veterans’ access to health care among other things but under Senate rules needed 60 votes to proceed. Only two Republicans, Sens. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), joined 54 Democrats and independents in voting for the $24 billion veterans benefits bill, despite endorsement by every major veterans organization, as 41 Republicans voted against it.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee, who had sponsored the bill, said he would introduce another bill to increase accountability at the Department of Veterans Affairs and make another attempt to improve VA health care, education, job training and other benefits.

"In recent years, as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 1.5 million more veterans have entered the VA health care system,” Sanders said in a press release. “Congress must do everything possible to make certain that the VA has the financial resources and administrative accountability to provide the high-quality health care and timely access to care that our veterans earned and deserve.”

The new accountability measure that Sanders will introduce would grant VA secretaries the power to remove senior executives because of poor job performance, his office said. Under current law, officials in what the federal government calls the Senior Executive Service may be dismissed or demoted, with rare exception, only for misconduct.

Unlike a bill that the House passed May 22, the Sanders measure would avoid politicization of the VA by preventing any new administration from discharging hundreds of high-level civil servants without due process for political reasons.

If Republicans are outraged at the VA’s delay of health benefits for veterans, they also ought to share their concerns with Republican governors and legislators who are preventing the coverage of a quarter-million veterans who don’t qualify for VA care but could get care under the Affordable Care Act.

Ezra Klein of Vox.com added, “It’s a relief to see so much outrage over poor access to government-provided health-care benefits. But it would be nice to see bipartisan outrage extend to another unfolding health-care scandal in this country: the 4.8 million people living under the poverty line who are eligible for Medicaid but won’t get it because their state has refused Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

“As appalling as the wait times are for VA care, the people living in states that refused the Medicaid expansion aren’t just waiting too long for care. They’re not getting it at all. They’re going completely uninsured when federal law grants them comprehensive coverage. Many of these people will get sick and find they can’t afford treatment and some of them will die. Many of the victims here, by the way, are also veterans.”

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that more than 7.5 million uninsured adults would be eligible for Medicaid but live in one of the 24 states that have refused the expansion. Of that group, 4.8 million who live below the poverty line would be ineligible for subsidies in the insurance exchanges. So they’re out of luck. And so are 258,600 uninsured veterans who the Urban Institute estimates would be eligible for Medicaid if their states accepted the expansion.

In Texas, for example, Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act would provide 1,727,000 working-poor Texans with comprehensive health insurance, including 48,900 veterans. Without the medical care, which the federal government would pay for, as many as 3,000 uninsured Texans are expected to die, health-care experts at the Harvard Medical School and City University of New York have estimated. (The study found that as many as 17,000 people could die of premature and avoidable deaths in the 24 states that have rejected Medicaid expansion. Likewise, in Florida, Medicaid would cover 1,212,000 working poor, including 41,200 veterans, and 2,200 could die. In Georgia, Medicaid would cover 599,000 working poor, including 24,900 veterans, and 1,100 could die. In North Carolina, 511,000 working poor, including 23,300 veterans, and 1,100 could die. All state officials have to do is accept the federal money. Other states whose Republican leaders are intent on denying medical care to their working poor, including veterans, include Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennesse, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. (Pennsylvania hasn’t moved forward yet, but its officials are negotiating with the Obama administration to do so.)

Republican who claims to be “pro-veteran” and “pro-life” but votes to deny VA benefits in Congress or Medicaid expansion at the state level is a hypocrite who is more to blame for the denial of health care and avoidable deaths of veterans than Eric Shinseki is on his worst day.

Republicans ought to be ashamed, but that notion seems quaint nowadays. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2014
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Selections from the June 15, 2014 issue














Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Another proof that it’s time to raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy

By Marc Jampole

The number 400,000 has taken on a new significance. It’s a big number, and when you add a dollar sign in front of it, it looms even larger. 

As it turns out, only about the top one percent of all individual or joint tax filers report adjusted income of $400,000—the actual number to make the top one percent of income earners is $388,905, but $400 K is close enough. 

What I find so fascinating about the number 400,000 is that it is also what you get if you take four percent of the median annual salary of CEOs of the companies on the S&P list of the 500 most frequently traded large publicly owned American corporations.  What that means is that if you put the salaries and bonuses of the heads of a very representative sample of the largest companies in American in a list from top to bottom, the halfway point will be $10.5 million in income in 2013. By the way, the 0.5 in this number means $500,000!

Keep in mind that some make much more, for example, Nabors Industries’ Anthony Petrello, who grabbed $68.3 million in 2013.

In other words, these five hundred (mostly) men and women make so much money that four percent of their mean salary is more than what more than 99% of the rest of us make. BTW, my numbers for CEO salaries come from a recent survey by Associated Press/Equilar of CEOs of the companies in the Standard & Poor 500.

And what do these CEOs do to earn all that money (which doesn’t include expense accounts and other perquisites of their exalted offices)?

Let’s start with what they don’t do. They all have one or more assistants that do their scheduling and keep their lives in order. There may be a president working under them and there will certainly be executive vice presidents and senior vice presidents for all of the various departments.  These companies have an average of 44,000 employees who do the actual work of creating and selling the products and services.  An S&P 500 CEO on average makes 257 times what the average employee makes, a tremendous increase from even five years ago when these corporate titans made a mere 181 times what their average employees make.

We know CEOs make major corporate decisions, but they have the help of the board of directors. We know that they are the face of the company, but when they speak in public, they have gotten their facts and figures from their company’s financial people and engineers and they have gotten their words from their PR folk. CEO’s do have the grave responsibility of meeting with elected officials, other corporate leaders, investment bankers and other powerful and/or rich people.

Sarcasm aside, there is no way to justify these salaries, which are significantly higher both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the average worker’s wages in the rest of the developed world. CEOs in Europe and Japan make less money and pay more in taxes. While CEOs are very talented, they aren’t so talented as to be unique—a Pascal, Einstein or Hawking is as rare among CEOS as they are among scientists, if not rarer. There are thousands of other people just about as talented who would be happy to take their jobs for third or a quarter of the money. Or less. The proof that scarcity of talent is not the cause of the outsized salaries is that the European and Japanese business leaders make so much less on average than American CEOs when compared to their workers.

As a society, we can’t really control how a corporation decides to spend its money, as long as it does so legally. But we can raise taxes on these outsized salaries. And it makes sense to do so, not only as a matter of fairness, but to return the level of government service to what it used to be in the days when governments fixed potholes, funded many more large science projects and provided high-quality public colleges at a low cost.  We can also raise the minimum wages, which would force these modern oligarchs to pay all of their employees more.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Study proves with numbers that politicians tend to vote for what rich people want

A new study makes the amazing discovery that politicians usually vote conscience—unfortunately it’s the conscience of the rich people who contribute the most to their campaigns. 

In an article titled “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens,” Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern analyze 1,779 American opinion studies between 1981 and 2002 that included the income level of the survey participants. Gilens and Page also looked at the policies advocated by the largest 25 lobbying groups in the country and the ten industries spending the most on lobbying.  The two professors then compared what these various groups wanted and what actually passed in legislatures.

Here are some results reported in The Economist¸ the only mass media outlet to report on the study as of this writing: 
·         When lots of wealthy people (more than 80%) liked a policy, it went into effect 45% of the time.
·         When very few wealthy people (fewer than 20%) supported a policy, it went into effect 18% of the time.
·         Whether very few of a vast majority of people with average income wanted a policy did not matter: policies passed 30% of the time in either case.
·         Interest groups representing the non-wealthy such as unions have little or no impact on what policies our elected officials support, vote on and implement.

I imagine if Gilens and Page crunched the numbers since 2010 they’d find that politicians are doing the bidding of the wealthy and ignoring everyone else even more than they used to.  It was in 2010, of course, when the Supreme Court freed corporate interests to spend whatever they liked on campaigns in the Citizens United decision.

Campaign spending and the effects of the Citizens United and the more recent McCutcheon v. FEC have remained a major trend of news coverage since the first laws limiting spending passed in the 1970s.

Isn’t it a bit odd then that only one major media outlet (a smaller one at that) has covered this major new study? Odder still that a Google New search revealed a mere 58 articles in total among the tens of thousands of media in the Google News universe?  Wouldn’t you think that the media would pick up this story faster than you can say “Picketty picked a peck of pickled Paretos”?

Contributing to campaigns and lobbying are only two of five ways that business interests and the wealthy control the policy decisions in the United States. Control of the mass media through ownership is another. We also can’t forget a fourth way that the wealthy get their way: funding political and economic research, again with their large war chests of accumulated capital.

The final way that the rich gain the ear of our elected officials is by running for office themselves.  The Center for Responsive Politics has found that slightly more than half of all members of Congress are millionaires.  Since the birth of the Republic, rich folk have always had an inside track whenever they decide to run for office. Michael Bloomberg, Carly Fiorentina, John Huntsman, John Edwards, Meg Whitman and Mitt Romney are only the latest generation of the ultra-wealthy to throw their hats in the ring for elected office. Gores, Kennedys, Roosevelts, Harrimans, Danforths, Rockefellers and Ross Perot come to mind without an Internet search.

Because of the impact of these other factors, it’s impossible to conclude how much funding candidates and lobbying contribute to the stranglehold the wealthy and especially the very wealthy have on the American political decision-making process. 

It will therefore take more than just new campaign finance limitations to move from a one-dollar-one-vote to a one-person-one-vote model. We will also need to reinstitute laws that prevent concentration of media ownership in a few hands.  Passing laws that make campaigns, lobbying organizations and think tanks liable for the factual lies they tell will also help. But, of course, corporate interests are trying to get the state laws that do exist about campaign lying to be declared unconstitutional.  

Sexually explicit TV star replaces stolid man of honor as American Airlines’ ideal traveler

Over the past three weeks, I have found the same eight-page slick mostly black-and-white advertising brochure for American Airlines inserted in one or other of my daily newspapers—The New York Times and Wall Street Journal—at least six times. This extended advertisement for American’s rebranded first class international service demonstrates how the image of the upscale consumer has changed over the past 60 years.

The cover depicts Gregory Peck, a film star active from 1944 into the 1980s, nattily dressed in a business suit, looking up towards the sky. His hands are in his pocket as he looks thoughtfully at a great expanse of sky. The top of a pencil thin pin striped handkerchief shows at the top of his coat breast pocket. In a blurry background we see the wing of an American airplane. A small headline reads, “In 1953, we invented transcontinental service.”

Turn the page and we see a two-page spread that shows an entire jet and actor Neil Patrick Harris dressed just as nattily as Peck and still as a businessman, walking inside the terminal. The headline is bigger, “Today, we reinvent it.”

What follows are two more photo spreads. In both, Neil is on the left page inside a plane and actress Julianna Margulies is on the right page, also in a plane. The two thespians are each alone and engaged in activities that reflect the headline of each page: Service. Comfort. Connectivity. Luxury. Julianna looks stunning, dressed in classic simplicity in what could be business wear or a cocktail dress. The photo is black and white, but if it were in color, her dress would still be black, I assure you.

The last page shows the tail of an American jet in full color with the headline “The legend is back.” In fact, the tail is the dominant visual image throughout the eight pages, getting into three photos, as many as Neil Patrick Harris.

American’s image of the luxury traveler sure has changed! From Gregory Peck to Neil Patrick Harris (with an assist from Julianna Margulies).

Already by 1953, Gregory Peck was typecast as the mythic American straight arrow—a little stiff and formal, honest and forthright, sincere, always following the rules, no nonsense, dedicated to principles. He had established this stereotype in such films as “The Yearling,” “Spellbound,” “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Captain Horatio Hornblower” and “The Gunfighter.” He even played the ruthless and devious King David as an earnest school boy in “David and Bathsheba.” This stolid, straight-shooting image of Peck developed long before “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit,” “On the Beach” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” American Airlines uses Peck’s persona to represent its image of its customers in 1953—the idealistic American off to conquer the world for democracy (and capitalism).


And what does Neil Patrick Harris represent?  For the past 10 years, his resume consists primarily of playing the same exact role in both a long-running sit com and three Harold and Kumar movies: that of a raunchy and immoral stud who will bed any woman and whose only interest in women is their bodies and sexuality. Whether playing it straight or satirizing, he is the quintessential cool-as-Sinatra laddie boy with emotions suspended in early adolescence, down to the interest in style and consumer toys and the inability to engage the opposite sex except in games of sexual conquest.  Ironically, all the time that he has played the role of an insufferable heterosexual lothario, in real life Harris has been a completely out-of-the-closet gay. He is currently playing the lead role in the revival of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” a Broadway musical about a transgendered rock star.

Whether approving or disapproving of Harris or the characters he plays, no one can doubt that he represents an amoral or polymorphic sexual adventurism. 

Julianna Margulies also represents sexual freedom in a backhanded way, since she is best known for two roles on TV—in “ER” and “The Good Wife”—in which she played a beautiful and talented woman whose man sleeps around and otherwise embarrasses her. Perhaps the secret narrative of the eight-page ad is that she is running away from these sorrows, but still looks like ten million bucks.

The overt message is obvious: The ideal international traveler is still rich and stylish, but now he can also be a she, and in both cases, their travel abroad is sexy and sensual. The self-sacrificing idealist has been replaced by the fun-loving sybarite.

But beneath the surface commercial message lies an ugly anti-feminist narrative. The mythic contemporary man in the ad is a spiffy philanderer (whose real-life alter ego excludes women as potential sexual partners); the mythic contemporary woman is an alluring victim of philandering.  The cultural references which viewers conjure in seeing these two actors does not paint a pretty picture for women. No matter how accomplished, wealthy or beautiful they are, American Airlines seems to be saying that at heart women are just pieces of tail.  

Friday, May 23, 2014

U.S. history is studded with presidential dynasties from day one

By Marc Jampole

Whenever the news media begins to stir about Jeb Bush running for president, a pundit or two does some verbal hand-wringing about the ruinous state of our democracy if the wife of one former president ran against the brother/son of two other presidents.

There are certainly many reasons to fret often about the weakening of democracy in the 21st century: the massive increase in election spending by the ultra-wealthy; the demise of trade unions; the prevalence of lying in public discourse, suborned by the mainstream media; and the refusal of politicians to follow the expressed will of the American people on matters such as taxes on the wealthy (we want them higher) and unemployment compensation (we want it extended). 

But the fact that relatives of presidents may be running for our highest office is not a manifestation or a cause of a diminishment in our democratic traditions. Presidential dynasties have been a major part of presidential politics since the birth of the Republic. Most Americans living a full life since 1800 have experienced two presidents who were closely related.

Let’s do the math:
1.      34 years rolled by between the time father John Adams, our second president, (president 1797-1801) took office and his son John Quincy Adams (1825-1829) left office.
Ø  12 years passed before William Henry Harrison was inaugurated.
2.      52 years rolled by between the time grandfather William Henry Harrison (1841) took office and his grandson Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893) left office.
Ø  8 years passed before Theodore Roosevelt was inaugurated.
3.      44 years rolled by between the time cousin Theodore Roosevelt took office and his cousin Franklin Roosevelt died in office.
Ø  44 more years passed before George H.W. Bush was inaugurated.
4.      20 years rolled by between the time father George H.W. Bush took office and his son George W. Bush left office.

If Jeb is elected in 2016 and serves eight years, the Bush presidential dynasty will have lasted 36 years. If Hillary is elected and serves two full terms, the Clinton presidential dynasty would have lasted 32 years, with zero time between dynasties.

This catalogue of presidential dynasties leaves out the dozens of other national political dynasties that have always dominated national politics: the Cabots, Dirksons/Bakers, Gores, Hydes, Kennedys, Lehmans, Macks, Madisons, Marshalls, Masons, Rockefellers, Schuylers, Tafts,  Talmadges, Wadsworths, Walkers—the list is not endless, but could go on for pages.

It looks to me as if dynastic families have always played a major role in American politics. Nothing has changed.

I’m not saying that presidential dynasties are good for the country. All things being equal, I would prefer if people got by on their talents, not their names. But the fact that a Bush may run against a Clinton does not symbolize the bankruptcy of American democracy. Rather it serves as an example of how tightly a narrow sliver of the wealthy and the connected has always controlled our politics.  We can exemplify that fact by taking a look at the backgrounds of the 10 men and one woman involved in this discussion of presidents who were related to other presidents or might be in the future.  The Adams, Harrisons, Roosevelts, Bushes and Hillary Rodham all came from privileged and connected backgrounds, all had every opportunity to succeed handed to them on a silver platter.  All, of course, except Bill Clinton, who truly did fulfill the quintessential American myth that anyone can grow up to be President, assuming he or she has talent and drive. 

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Christie shows once again that Republican Party is no friend to the working class

By Marc Jampole

No one likes to play pension politics more than the Republicans.  For example, over the past few years, Republican politicians and their fellow travelers have accusedpublic workers of receiving overly generous pensions as a means to drive a wedge between them and the rest of the middle class. Rather than cause the banks that manipulated Detroit into bankruptcy with bad credit swap deals to lose their truly onerous profit, the overseers of the Motor City—appointed by Republican Governor Rick Snyder—are taking money from retired Detroit workers. 

Republicans use pension politics not only to hurt unions, but to harm government operations.  Under Bush, the Republican Congress saddled the Post Office, a quasi-governmental organization, with onerous pension fund payments that have forced it to raise postage rates and cut operations. The Post Office’s private competitors—FedEx, UPS and DHL—don’t have to set aside anywhere as much money for their pension plans.

The latest Republican to play the pension politics game is New Jersey’s bully in residence, Governor Chris Christie, who intends to balance this year’s state budget by not paying $2.43 billion into New Jersey’sailing public pension system over the next two years.  

In not making these payments, Christie reneges on a deal he made with public unions a few years back. Christie’s pension overhaul shifted more costs to public workers, raised their retirement age to 65, and froze yearly cost-of-living adjustments. In exchange, Christie and lawmakers agreed to make bigger payments each year to the pension fund to repair the financial damage of years of former administrations paying nothing into the system.

When announcing his dead-beating of New Jersey public workers, Christie tried to make himself into a hero of the day by declaring passionately that he refused to cut funds for Medicaid and schools.  Of course, Medicaid and support of public schools are two other issues on which the Republicans and many Democrats also play games.  After years of advocating cuts to social service programs, Christie came off looking like what he is—a a very big hypocrite!

What Christie didn’t say is that New Jersey, like most other states and the federal government, has purposely starved itself over the past three decades by lowering the tax burden, especially on the businesses and the wealthy.  This fiscal anorexia is the true cause of the budget shortfall that New Jersey faces.

Instead of weakening the already damaged finances of state pensions, Christie could curtail tax breaks for corporations. He could call for the repeal of the massive tax breaks and other incentives to businesses he signed into law late last year, which will cost the state millions of dollars.  One article two years ago computed the value of Christie’s corporate handouts at that point to be $1.57 billion. If New Jersey reneged on those corporate giveaways, it would leave New Jersey with a $1.03 billion shortfall on pensions, which a rise in taxes of about $382 a year for two years (but probably moving forward as well) on the approximately 1.35 million New Jerseyites making more than $75,000 a year. 

But making businesses and the relatively well-off pay their fair share is not part of the Republican play book. At least since Ronald Reagan gained influence, Republicans have been dedicated to cutting taxes ever more on the wealthy and businesses while shrinking the services that government offers to everyone—from support of public schools and universities to funding for libraries, roads and the indigent.  It’s now been more than 30 years since wealth and income started flowing from the poor and middle class to the wealthy and especially the ultra-wealthy. By refusing to fund pensions for public employees and ratcheting up giveaways to businesses, Christie is merely going with the flow, just floating along a rising tide which is lifting the oversized yachts of the rich while sinking everybody else.  

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Editorial: Keep the Internet Open


The Federal Communications Commission is considering a controversial proposal that would allow major Internet service providers, such as Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T and Verizon, to charge content providers higher rates for faster transmission speeds — effectively ending the government’s commitment to “net neutrality” which offers everybody the same access to the Internet.

The commission should classify broadband as a telecommunications common carrier, which would allow it to continue to prohibit companies from engaging in unjust or unreasonable discrimination. Phone and cable companies as well as their many supporters in Congress oppose that option, and they appear to have moved FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, a former cable TV executive, in that direction.

If the FCC allows ISPs to show preference to favored corporate content providers, effectively creating a fast lane for them and a slow lane for the rest of us [as it started the process on May 15], the commission also should clear the way for community broadband networks that would compete with the private carriers who already too often provide substandard service.

At the prompting of the big cable and phone companies, legislators in 20 states have enacted laws limiting cities and towns from building their own broadband networks that would compete with for-profit Internet service providers, and new restrictions have been proposed in Kansas and Utah. Wheeler has said he intends for the commission to exercise its authority to preempt state laws that ban competition from community broadband networks.

Speaking at the Cable Show industry conference April 30, Wheeler said, “[F]or many parts of the communications sector, there hasn’t been as much competition as consumers and innovation deserve. Given the high fixed costs and consequent scale economies, this isn’t especially surprising. But that makes it all the more important that we knock down public and private barriers to competition and avoid erecting new ones. It is equally important that we encourage competition wherever it is possible.

“One place where it may be possible is municipally owned or authorized broadband systems. I understand that the experience with community broadband is mixed, that there have been both successes and failures. But if municipal governments — the same ones that granted cable franchises — want to pursue it, they shouldn’t be inhibited by state laws. I have said before, that I believe the FCC has the power — and I intend to exercise that power — to preempt state laws that ban competition from community broadband,” Wheeler said, as reported by Jon Brodkin at ArsTechnica.com.

A panel of the US Court of Appeals for D.C. in January ruled that the FCC could enforce net neutrality rules under the Telecommunications Act of 1995, but only if the ISPs were classified as common carriers, not information services, as they were designated in 2005 by George W. Bush’s FCC. Judge Laurence Silberman, who dissented from his fellow judges in the 2-1 decision, wrote that the FCC does have authority under the law to take “measures that promote competition in the local telecommunications market or other regulating methods that remove barriers to infrastructure investment.” In a footnote, Silberman wrote that “[a]n example of a paradigmatic barrier to infrastructure investment would be state laws that prohibit municipalities from creating their own broadband infrastructure to compete against private companies.”

Many smaller and mid-sized cities have had difficulty getting their local phone or cable companies to provide broadband service — at least until the communities started building their own community networks. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration reported in May 2013 that almost 100% of urban residents have access to download speeds of at least 6 megabits per second (Mbps), which is suitable for email and other basic Internet service, but only 82% of rural communities can access those speeds. And while almost 88% of urban residents have access to speeds of 25 Mbps, which is more suitable for video streaming and other advanced uses, only 41% of rural residents have the same access. Many Americans lack even basic 3 Mbps broadband.

Edward Wyatt reported in the New York Times Dec. 29, 2013, that the United States is falling dangerously behind other nations in offering high-speed, affordable broadband service to businesses and consumers. The average Internet speed in Riga, Latvia, is at least two and a half times that of San Antonio, Texas, according to Ookla, a research firm that measures broadband speeds around the globe. That means downloading a two-hour movie takes, on average, 35 minutes in San Antonio, and 13 in Riga. And the cost of Riga’s service is about one-fourth that of San Antonio.

Ironically, San Antonio’s city-owned electric utility has installed fiber-optic cable that is used by city officials and could provide low-cost broadband services for the city’s residents, but Texas law prohibits the city from providing the service.

However, Wyatt noted that at least three American cities have such superfast broadband that if they were ranked against foreign countries, Bristol, Va., Chattanooga, Tenn., and Lafayette, La., would rank in the top 10. And those three cities built municipal fiber-optic networks that can operate just as fast as the swiftest connections in Hong Kong, Seoul and Tokyo.

David Morris, co-founder of the Institute for Local Self Reliance, said publicly owned telecommunications networks offer lower prices and higher speeds than such giants as Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner. “It is instructive that the first gigabit network was built not by a private company but by Chattanooga, a muni network. Today 40 cities in 13 states have locally owned gigabit networks.”

According to the Institute, more than 400 towns and cities across America have installed or are planning broadband networks.

Among the states that have imposed significant obstacles to communities owning their broadband networks, Morris noted that Nebraska, Nevada, Texas and Missouri have enacted outright bans. Virginia prohibits a city from offering TV unless it can cash flow the first year. Utah prohibits public broadband networks from selling any retail services.

To persuade legislators to inhibit or prohibit muni networks, Morris noted, telecom lobbyists offer two arguments. First they contend that government cannot effectively run a telecom network. When it becomes impossible to ignore the growing empirical evidence to the contrary, they shift gears and pitch without shame an entirely contradictory argument: Cities have an unfair advantage.

“That was the argument Time Warner used in North Carolina after the cities of Wilson and Salisbury successfully demonstrated their telecom competences. It was a bizarre thesis. Time Warner had 15 million subscribers and revenues of $18 billion at the time. Salisbury had 1,000 subscribers and a total municipal budget of $34 million. Nevertheless, North Carolina legislators dutifully voted to effectively prohibit other cities from replicating Salisbury and Wilson’s successful ventures.”

Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, in an op-ed for the New York Times (April 28) noted that her hometown, Santa Monica, Calif., has shifted from paying expensive leases on private communications lines to using its own fiber network, called City Net. Businesses in Santa Monica pay City Net a third of what a private operator would charge and the city government has made millions leasing out its fiber resources at reasonable rates to other providers.

“American cities need fast, cheap, ubiquitous, open fiber networks, and every city has the tools at its disposal to get these networks built. But there are powerful and well-funded incumbents who will fight any mayor brave enough to consider the idea. If you’re furious about your cable bill and worried about net neutrality, go tell city hall,” she wrote.

Legislators should get out of the way of communities that want to provide affordable broadband service and the FCC should encourage competition and keep the Internet open to all. — JMC

(See also "Don't Let Net Neutrality Become Another Broken Promise" by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship.)

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2014
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Friday, May 16, 2014

NH town should fire police commissioner who called the President the N-word

By Marc Jampole

Everyone has the right to exercise free speech, except when they are serving as a representative of an organization. As an organizational representative, what you say should hew to the standards and beliefs of the organization.

It’s amazing how many times public language controversies hinge on whether the individual who made the statement was representing him or herself or an organization.  At essence, representing the organization was at the heart of the “Duck Dynasty” and Donald Sterling controversies.  AMC thought Phil Robertson, star of reality show “Duck Dynasty,” was representing the network when he made sexist and then racist statements. If Donald Sterling didn’t represent a professional basketball team, his vilely racist comments would not have made such news.  The National Basketball Association recognized that as an owner Sterling always represented the league and therefore fined him and is trying to force him to sell his team.

Representing the organization is also the case with Wolfeboro, New Hampshire police commissioner Robert Copeland who called President Obama a“nigger.” 

For at least the last 150 years, virtually everyone who speaks English has regarded “nigger” as a term of disparagement, similar to “kike,” “dago” or “frog.”

Some defenders of the use of the term “nigger” point out that calling a white from the rural south a “cracker” is the same thing.  Since one is supposedly “allowed,” why not the other?

This view neglects the historical fact of slavery and the legal and institutional racism that poisoned much of the United States for more than a century after the demise of slavery and still affects the country in negative ways. “Niggers” were chattel that could be sold.  “Niggers” had no control over their own lives.  “Niggers” suffered the physical pains and humiliation of whippings, forced separation of families and rape. “Niggers” were considered genetically and morally inferior creatures who couldn’t take care of themselves, who shunned work and didn’t know how to handle money. “Niggers” were less than human. “Niggers” could be easily fooled since they had the emotions of children. “Niggers” deserve to live in poverty since they don’t know how to work hard. 
That’s what most whites meant when they used the N-word from about 1800 onwards.

Everyone knows that the word “nigger” reflects all these meanings, which makes it a more scurrilous and damaging phrase than other ethnic insults, at least in the United States.  

Even the Afro-American men who use the term with each other as a kind of endearment know that it’s a horrible insult.  Male-bonding often devolves to gentle competitive sparring. I don’t know how many times I have called my male cousins “assholes” or “bozos” to their face, and none got mad, because they knew that my diminishment of them was a form of affection—or perhaps a replacement of the affection that American men are not supposed to display to other men.  The very fact that the word “nigger” is especially harmful and disgusting makes it an ideal choice for male-bonding between Afro-American men.  It doesn’t make the word acceptable in any other context, and certainly not acceptable for whites to use because when whites say “nigger,” it carries all its historical baggage.

Barack Obama is a smooth-talking city slicker who had an outstanding career as a scholar and elected official, and has excelled at everything he ever tried (except being a progressive president).  He shares not a trait with the composite “nigger” that people evoke when they use that word. To call Obama a “nigger” can only be understood as an insult. When Copeland refused to apologize, he said that the President “meets and exceeds my criteria for such.”  He could not have possibly meant anything other than the vilest of insults.

Now Copeland is entitled to his opinion about the President and African-Americans in general, and he has the right to express it.

But he doesn’t have the right to express it as a representative of Wolfeboro.

The simple fact of the matter is that when you are an elected or an appointed official, you pretty much sign on to representing your jurisdiction on a 24/7 basis. Once you become a mayor, Congressperson, police commissioner or judge, you de facto give up some right of speech. So whereas you might be entitled to your opinion and to use language that is inherently insulting, exercising that right will conflict with your public duties and with the image that your jurisdiction wants to maintain. 

Executives of corporations face a similar constraint: if the news media discovered that a chief executive officer of a Fortune 500 company said “nigger” during a private dinner party, he would be unable to hide behind his right to free speech. The board of directors would summarily fire her/him. And they would be right to do it.

While no decision has been made yet, I’m guessing that the Wolfeboro township commissioners are going to end up firing Copeland or asking him to resign. They will have no choice. Otherwise, they will be tarred with the same racist brush that has rightfully dirtied their police commissioner. Now that kind of institutional racism might fly in the rural south, but probably not in New England. 
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