Ayn Rand Institute factotum tries to convince us Wal-Mart pays its employees enough

By Marc Jampole

Right-wing factotum Doug Altner, an analyst with the Ayn Rand Institute, poses a provocative question in a Forbes article: If Wal-Mart is such a crappy place to work, why do 1.4 million Americans work there and many more want to? 

It’s the type of question that extreme free-marketers love to ask, because it assumes that we really have a free market in which every market participant has equal rights and equal clout. 

Altner forgets that the poor and the uneducated have very few options.  That 10,000 people apply for 300 openings when a new Wal-Mart opens says less about the attractiveness of the company and more about the lack of jobs, especially for young people who don’t have diplomas from one of the top 300 or so colleges. In many rural areas, Wal-Mart’s entrance into the marketplace destroyed many local and regional retailers who paid their employees more in wages and benefits. Wal-Mart does pay marginally more money than burger-flipping, but that does not mean that it pays a decent wage.

Altner gives three reasons why he thinks people clamor to work for Wal-Mart:

1.  The work is not physically straining. 
What Altner writes is that “Many entry-level Walmart jobs consist of comparatively safe and non-strenuous work such as stocking shelves, working cash registers, and changing price labels.” Altner goes on to mention that these jobs pay more than other entry-level jobs that require few skills. What he doesn’t say is that other non-strenuous jobs pay much more money. I can’t remember the last time I worked up a sweat writing an article or meeting with a client. I do remember that an attorney and a company president with whom I recently met both looked absolutely exhausted—they had just come from a racquetball game at 10:00 a.m. on a week day! Sarcasm aside, the fact that work is not physically exhausting shouldn’t justify paying less than a living wage.

2.  Wal-Mart provides entry to myriad career opportunities. 
Altner points out that Wal-Mart tends to promote from within and that three-quarters of its store managers started as hourly workers (Altner uses the Wal-Mart euphemism and calls them “associates.”). I’m not sure how Altner earned a PhD in industrial engineering, because he certainly forgot to do the math. Counting 1.3 million employees and about 5,000 Wal-Marts and Sam’s Clubs across the 50 states, a new hire at Wal-Mart has less than three-tenths of one percent chance of becoming a store manager.  But the 1.3 million number is the wrong one to use, since 70% of all Wal-Mart employees quit within a year, a stunning indicator of employee dissatisfaction which Altner neglects to mention.  If we consider the competition for 75% of store manager jobs to be everyone hired in a 12-month period, then the statistical probability of becoming a store manager is significantly less than two-tenths of a percent. But the real odds of getting a job are assuredly even less than this number, since the company does not turn over all store manager jobs within a year. Maybe the competition for store manager jobs includes everyone hired by Wal-Mart in a six-year period (less than 6/100ths of a percent) or even a 10 year period (less than 4/100ths of a percent).  I’m guessing that if you consider everyone who draws a salary playing for all the major and minor leagues of baseball, basketball, soccer, hockey, race car driving, golf, tennis and every other professional sport, the chance of becoming a professional athlete is probably as great as starting as a Wal-Mart entry level employee and becoming a store manager. In other words, the opportunity is there, but it’s far-off and very unlikely.

The article does not miss a beat in defending Wal-Mart. For example, the one example of an hourly worker who made it to the top is a woman named by Fortune Magazine as one of the 50 most powerful women of 2006. I’m sure that offers consolation and hope to the many Wal-Mart female employees who are suing the company for wage discrimination and a hostile work environment. He doesn’t say it, but Altner selects this woman as his example to fight the negative publicity Wal-Mart continues to get for its treatment of women.

3.  Others are waiting for the Wal-Mart jobs.

Altner declares that Wal-Mart can get away with paying low wages, so why should it pay higher wages. He complains that critics think Wal-Mart should pay more, “regardless of whether he has the skills or experience to justify such a wage, regardless of whether he is a model employee or a slouch, regardless of how many other individuals are willing and able to do his job for less, regardless of whether raising wages will be good for the company’s bottom line. In effect, their premise is that $12+ per hour wages shouldn’t have to be earned or justified; they should be dispensed like handouts.”  He forgets that it is Wal-Mart that is getting a handout because so many of its employees rely on government assistance programs to supplement their low wages.

Altner is really making a case for no minimum wage and, in fact, no government regulation.  He can’t really believe that Wal-Mart offers a great deal if 70% of employees quit within a year, unless he postulates that all 70% are “slouches.”  The fact that others are waiting in line to take the jobs is no excuse for paying less. Many attorneys are clamoring for high-priced jobs at corporate law firms. I get dozens of resumes a month from people clamoring for a job at a public relations agency. These are high-paying jobs that stay high-paying despite the fact that lots of people want them.

For decades, Wal-Mart has taken advantage of the economic climate. It thrives by exploiting the fact that the minimum wage has lost its buying power through inflation and is much lower than it should be; the fact that the current laws allow corporations to play games with part-time work to limit benefits; the fact that there are far fewer jobs than there are people seeking them.  In this sense, they are bottom feeders who take advantage of the poor and uneducated.

The heart of Ayn Rand’s philosophy is selfishness. In its discussion of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, the Ayn Rand Institute website writes, “Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.”

I disagree entirely. All of our sustenance and pleasure—our necessities like food and shelter and our joys like music and sports—come through our interactions with society.  We owe society—for roads and bridges, our electrical grids, our safety, our markets, our cultural norms and standards, our base of knowledge and all our goods and services. No one can live outside society or without other people. As a society, we owe everyone, and in this I mean everyone in the world, food, shelter, education, health care and a chance to better themselves.

As individuals, we manifest what we owe society by following its rules and regulations. For the good of the whole, we impede people’s rights to adulterate food or use inaccurate weights and measures. And we also impede people’s right to take advantage of the downtrodden. That’s what the minimum wage is all about.

If Wal-Mart (and many other employers) did not operate always and only on the principles of pure selfishness, there would be no need to unionize or to raise the minimum wage. But they don’t, so society and its members have every right to foster unionization and to set a minimum wage. 

We are living in a particularly harsh time now, mainly because for too long we have let those like Doug Altner and other Randers set the tone of the political debate. We hear too much about the rights and prerogatives of corporations and rich folk and too little about the family of humans and how interconnected we all are.

Dunkin’ Donuts adds both extra sugar and salt to new hot chocolate-flavored concoction

By Marc Jampole

The amazing thing about the diversity of manufactured food offerings in food stores and restaurants is the degree to which the proliferation of new food products leaves everything tasting the same: half salty and half sweet.

For one thing, there’s the sauce inflation at national chains for what is called “casual dining.”  You know, Applebee's, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Outback.  The fad now is to cook meat with one sauce, glaze or other covering and then pour both a cheese or cheese product and another sauce over the entire entree.  For example, Olive Garden has its Steak Gorgonzola Alfredo and Pizza Fritters Napoli. Applebee’s has its Fiesta Lime Chicken and Four-cheese Macaroni and Cheese with Honey Pepper Chicken Tenders. And check out the description of this sweet and salty delicacy from Outback: wood-fire grilled chicken breast topped with sautéed chicken with mushrooms, crisp bacon, melted Monterey Jack and cheddar and honey mustard sauce. The combinations of meats, sauces and spices always leave these dishes with both a salty and a sweet taste, sometimes with or without a slightly hot favor, depending upon whether or not it is “spicy.” There is no other taste and no subtlety of taste or aroma.

Forget about the added calories from the cheese and multiple sauces for the moment. Just think what happens when you put salt and sugar on everything—it all comes out tasting the same.  Now I know that we only taste salt, sweet, sour, bitter and umami (meat flavor), but with the varied smells of food, it really is possible to create a myriad of taste combination. It seems as if all American food manufacturers want to do is make us taste only salt and sugar.

The latest salt-and-sugar concoction—at least as far as I can tell with my limited TV viewing and total abstinence from processed food and national chain restaurant offerings—is Dunkin’ Donuts’ (DD) “salted caramel hot chocolate.”

Caramel is the smoky sugary flavor you get when you melt sugar at a low heat. There is always some sugar or other sweetener in all chocolate, but adding caramel pumps another jolt of sugar—or whatever sweetener DD uses—into the drink. Plus there’s the salty part: who wants to drink something salty anyhow? Salty food make you want to drink something—I’ve found water is best to quench a salted thirst. So the effect of drinking DD’s salted caramel hot chocolate drink is to make you want to drink something else. A Dunkin’ coffee anyone?

The small version of this beverage product runs 220 calories and the extra large version comes in at 550 calories, which is approximately one-quarter of what nutritional experts tell us the average adult male should eat in an entire day.  While looking at the list of ingredients, keep in mind that the ingredients are always listed in order of quantity—the first item is used the most in the food product, the second item second most, etc.

Here are the ingredients in salted caramel hot chocolate: Water, Salted Caramel Flavored Hot Chocolate Powder {Sugar, Non Dairy Creamer [Partially Hydrogenated Coconut Oil, Corn Syrup Solids, Sodium Caseinate (a milk derivative), Dipotassium Phosphate, Sugar, Mono and Diglycerides, Sodium Silicoaluminate, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Soy Lecithin, Artificial Flavor and Artificial Color (Annatto and Turmeric)], Nonfat Dry Milk, Cocoa processed with alkali, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Salt, Cellulose Gum, Silicon Dioxide, Sodium Citrate}.   

The first thing to note is that what we have is a packet of dry chemicals that DD stirs into hot water. Some of the chemicals derive from processing plants or animals; others are completely artificial, in that the starting point wasn’t a food that grows such as sugar or cocoa. Also note that cocoa is probably the fifth most used product in the dry mixture, behind non-dairy creamer, which in and of itself has seven chemical parts, including corn syrup and even more sugar.  I write “probably,” because of all the stuff in the non-dairy creamer. Note, too, that there is more non-dairy creamer than nonfat dry milk. Thank goodness there is less salt than cocoa in this brew.

Don’t think that drinking one, or even five, of this beverage comprised of sugar, chemicals and salt will count towards the daily dark chocolate dose that keeps away heart disease. In fact, a DD salted caramel is one of the unhealthiest things you can put in your body.  Drinking one defiles the body much as dumping radioactive wastes defiles a wooded area or wetlands.

Don’t think that the sauces, glazes, cheese products and drizzles at national casual dining chains are any different. Dig deep into the ingredients of most of these concoctions and you’ll find a lot of chemicals, a lot of corn syrup and sugar and a lot of artificial flavors.

Of course, with all the potential carcinogens and all those unneeded empty calories come that simultaneous hit of both sugar and salt which the food manufacturing industry has trained us to crave.

Pro-nuclear journalists nuke mainstream news media; fall-out is wasted time in addressing global warming.

By Marc Jampole

In the past week, both Eduardo Porter, a left-leaning columnist from the New York Times and Hendrik Hertzberg, a centrist-looking-left columnist at the New Yorker have advocated nuclear power as the necessary bridge to solar and wind power.

Both writers use the same arguments: We can’t produce enough energy—by which they mean electricity—by solar and wind, so we need nuclear to replace carbon-spewing coal and oil if we are to address global warming in time.  Porter and Hertzberg make two assumptions: 1)  we must wait for the market to develop for solar and wind as opposed to making massive government investment to create the market; and 2) the only viable solutions involve central generation of electricity controlled by large companies and the decentralized solutions such as mini-generators in neighborhoods and solar panels for heating space and water are unacceptable.

But using nuclear energy to produce electricity strikes a bargain with a devil as pernicious to the earth as global warming. The safety problems with nuclear power are numerous and well documented. Briefly, a major accident spewing significant radiation has occurred somewhere in the world about every 10 years since the 1950’s, including Chalk River, Kyshtym, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, to name some of the more notorious accidents.

There is also the issue of storage. The United States still hasn’t found a permanent place to store nuclear wastes, so it sits at the plants or in temporary locations smoldering  and spewing radioactivity.  The half life of some nuclear waste is 25,000 years, which means that in 25,000 years half of the radioactivity will have dissipated. That’s more than twice the length of time that humans have had civilizations with written records and agriculture. How many people can speak the languages humans spoke 25,000 years ago? When I think of storage of nuclear waste, I always imagine future intelligent life discovering cavernous vaults with strange hieroglyphics on them, wondering what the symbols mean and eager to break open the vault and see what is inside. They drill through only to let the radioactivity escape and poison them and those in nearby settlements.

By spending money on building more plants for the nuclear generation of electricity we deny resources that could make solar viable. Instead of the private sector investing in nuclear, why can’t the government increases taxes on the private sector’s use of coal and oil and use the funds to buy solar-based batteries, solar roof panels for heating federal buildings and other existing solar products? Making solar and wind more competitive does not have to involve only making them cheaper; it can also involve making coal and oil more expensive by raising taxes or withdrawing current tax breaks. The government could also give greater tax breaks for developing wind mills and solar plants. It could pass a law that makes it harder for rich folk to pursue lawsuits because their view of the Atlantic is impeded by a windmill. 

Why waste precious public and private resources in nuclear energy? Let’s go right to what must be the energy of the future—solar and wind.

Editorial: Swindlers Get Reprieve

Conservatives are betting big on the failure of the Affordable Care Act. They seem to think that if they can sabotage the health reforms, not only will it cause the general collapse of liberalism, but they also hope that health care in the United States will revert to the corrupt old system that allowed insurance companies to deny coverage to people with chronic health problems, cancel policies of people as soon as they were diagnosed with expensive illnesses, sell junk policies with little practical coverage for the unwary, and distribute excessive profits to their shareholders.

We aren’t going back. As of Jan. 1, regardless of whether the Obama administration ever gets HealthCare.gov glitch-free, millions of working poor people will start getting coverage through Medicaid. Millions of others will start getting subsidies to pay for private insurance through the federal marketplace. Those insurance policies will have to meet minimum standards for the first time. Insurance companies no longer will be able to deny coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Annual and lifetime limits on coverage will be outlawed. And profits will be limited.

Progressives should frame the insurance reforms that are contained in the Affordable Care Act as the last chance for insurance companies to show they can provide health coverage without swindling their customers. But those bad habits are hard for insurance companies to give up.

The reforms will be rough for some — particularly for those in the middle class who buy their own individual insurance policies but whose income is too great to qualify for subsidies. Some of them have junk policies that seem like a good deal until they actually get sick; others might have gotten relatively good, inexpensive coverage because they had a good health history, but even those able-bodied middle-classers probably won’t have to look far to find a friend or relative who has been going for years without health care because they have a pre-existing condition or they just never could afford the insurance premiums.

Insurance companies have been sending out letters to several million of their customers telling them that they have to cancel their plans because of the Affordable Care Act. In many cases, the letters try to steer the customers to higher-cost plans, and because HealthCare.gov has been balky and the customers might not know they can get the information by phone, they might not know they could get a better deal from the federal healthcare marketplace — particularly if they earn less than four times the federal poverty rate (that would be $45,960 for a single person or $94,000 for a family of four) and qualify for a subsidy..

Enough people are howling about rate shock that President Obama was forced to concede that insurance companies should be allowed to continue selling junk insurance policies to existing customers for one more year, to make good on his promise that “If you like your health plan, you can keep your health care plan.” At least under Obama’s terms the insurance companies are required to notify customers of their options under the Affordable Care Act.

That wasn’t good enough for Republicans who want to dismantle the ACA by any means they can. So the House, on a 261-157 vote that included 39 panicked Democrats siding with the Republicans and four Republicans siding with the rest of the Dems, passed the Swindlers’ Relief Act, sponsored by Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) on Nov. 15. The bill would allow insurers to maintain existing substandard policies but also would let them offer those plans to new customers, which would undermine the new system, and would exempt the insurance companies from some of the consumer protections.

If the insurance mandate fails to provide a financially viable private insurance market, the next step for Congress should be passage of the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act (HR 676, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich.), which would simply expand Medicare to cover everybody.

Passage of that bill will remain a long shot, even if Dems regain the House majority and neuter the Senate filibuster, but single-payer advocates can pick up the slack at the state level. The Affordable Care Act provides for “state innovation waivers” to be granted beginning in 2017, allowing states to implement creative plans they believe would work best for them. With this in mind, organized single-payer movements have taken root in Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, New York, California, Oregon and Vermont. Vermont passed a law in 2011 setting the state on the party toward its own single-payer program.

Canada moved to a single-payer health care program starting at the provincial level with Saskatchewan in 1946. The United States might have to get the momentum going at the state level too.

In the meantime, enrollment in healthcare plans is surging in many states. In California, where only 31,000 people enrolled in October, nearly twice as many had enrolled in the first two weeks of November, the Los Angeles Times reported Nov. 19. Several other states, including Connecticut and Kentucky, were outpacing their enrollment estimates. In Minnesota, enrollment in the second half of October ran at triple the rate of the first half, officials told the Times. Washington state also was on track to easily exceed its October enrollment figure.

The 36 states that depend on the federal website, many of whose Republican state officials declined to build their own exchanges, lagged far behind, but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported in mid-November that HealthCare.gov was working for 90% of users who have tried to sign up. The agency has sent out 275,000 emails to people who had started to create accounts but couldn’t get through the process. As of mid-November, more than 50,000 people had selected an insurance plan — up from 27,000 in the entire month of October, the New York Times reported Nov. 19.

Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos.com Nov. 19 that many people are likely still in window-shopping mode. Enrollments should pick up even more — both on the state sites and the federal site — in the last week or two before the Dec. 15 deadline for insurance to be in place on Jan. 1. Then it will pick up again in February and March before the final deadline. The experience implementing Massachusetts health reform provides the best model for enrollment patterns, and in the first four months of enrollment just about one-fifth of the uninsured population enrolled.

“The people will come. They’re not freaked out over what most people perceive as inevitable: a problematic new government program. They’re not abandoning support for the program in droves. They’re not calling for an end to the program. They’re patient enough to give it time to work, even if Republicans and the traditional media are not.”

States found it easier to enroll low-wage residents in the expanded Medicaid programs. Under the law, the federal government picks up nearly the entire cost of that expansion for the first several years. That wasn’t a good enough deal to convince Republican leaders in 26 states to give five million working poor a break, but in the other half of states, nearly 400,000 new people already qualified for Medicaid coverage in October. In Oregon, whose marketplace has had problems, the state reported that it signed up 70,000 new people for Medicaid.

Meanwhile, in Texas, where Rick Perry has failed in 15 years as lieutenant governor and governor to take any action to address the health-care crisis for the one-quarter of Texans who are uninsured, not only has Perry denied Medicaid expansion to cover one million working poor Texans who are uninsured; his heir-apparent, Attorney General Greg Abbott, has moved to prevent “navigators,” many of whom work for non-profit organizations, from helping potential customers find the insurance plan and federal subsidy that’s right for them.

Next year, when the benefits of “Obamacare” become apparent to all Americans, we hope Democrats can make the Republicans pay for their hostility to working people. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2013

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Selections from the December 15, 2013 issue

COVER/David Dayen
Elizabeth Warren’s populist insurgency

EDITORIAL
Swindlers get reprieve

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
A pastor swears to God

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Secrecy about GMO food breeds rumors

DISPATCHES
Millions could lose jobless benefits;
Repubs love Batkid, but they'd deny him health coverage;
USPS back in black with asterisk;
Voters want Social Security expanded;
Cocaine congressman voted for drug tests for food stamps;
Canadian mining co. sues Costa Rica over regs;
Docs upset with stingy healthcare pay;
NLRB targets Walmart labor practices;Middle class disappearing despite economic recovery;
Wisconsin GOP pushes end to weekend voting;
Sanders eyes presidential run;
Few counties condemn more defendant wrongfully ...

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Bread, circuses and Obamacare

BOB BURNETT
US energy policy: A bridge to nowhere

MARK ENGLER
End illegal spying: Don’t shoot the whistleblower

NORMAN SOLOMON
How Diane Feinstein is betraying civil liberties

WENONAH HAUTER
Stop secret trade deals

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Health care glitches: A historical perspective

SAM URETSKY
All generic drugs are not the same

WAYNE O’LEARY
President Obama nominates a liberal (really)

JOHN BUELL
Scholarship and economic crisis

N. GUNASEKARAN
South Asian elites keep people divided

BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Freedom then and now

ROB PATTERSON
Corporate music steers clear of politics

POPULIST PICKS
Good ol’ Freda; Making Monkees; Ali’s Greatest

What do Wal-Mart and Arne Duncan have in common? Neither understands that it’s all about the wages

By Marc Jampole

Two stories floating around the news media lately both make me want to shake the principal actors and yell in their faces, “Raise wages and you’ll solve the problem.”

The first story involves Wal-Mart’s latest embarrassment—employees in its Canton, Ohio store organized a Thanksgiving food drive for fellow workers.  This act of charity—by and for employees only—begged the question that pundits, labor leaders, left-leaning actors and supporters of the minimum wage are all asking: Does Wal-Mart pay its employees too little money?

The Canton food drive for Wal-Mart employees came on the heels of a report by Demos, the liberal think tank, that if Wal-Mart had not engaged in a stock buy-back program in recent years, it would have had the money to raise employee salaries by $5.83 an hour and kept the same profit.  My only problem with the survey is that it doesn’t attack the profit margin, which is pretty fat for Wal-Mart and could be reduced to pay employees a living wage.

At this point, Wal-Mart’s treatment of its employees has achieved near mythic notoriety in the mainstream and the left-leaning media. The food drive is merely this week’s “Wal-Mart doesn’t pay its employees enough” story. I’m sure many others are as tired as I am of shouting at the paper, TV, radio or computer screen, “Just do the decent thing and raise their salaries to $15 an hour!”

Perhaps not so many people were yelling at  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan the other day when he announced a new public  relations campaign by the Department of Education to get more kids to consider careers as school teachers. Other sponsors include the Advertising Council, Microsoft, State Farm Insurance, Teach for America, the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions and several other educational groups. The problem the campaign addresses is that the Baby Boom generation of teachers is beginning to retire and many predict teacher shortages in the future.

If Arne Duncan doesn’t know it, maybe his friends at Microsoft and the multinational advertising agencies involved in the Advertising Council could tell him that it’s a simple matter to attract more—and more competent—people to a job or career. Just offer more money.

I suspect that Duncan is not entirely serious about attracting more people to the teaching profession, given his continued support of charter schools. From day one, the goal of the charter school movement has been to hammer down salaries of teachers by destroying public school unions.  We know that the big money funding the charter school movement doesn’t really care about quality education. Otherwise they would have pulled the plug on charter schools years ago, given that on average charter schools underperform public schools.

The equation is simple:

1. Charter schools pay less
2. Thus, charter schools drive down teachers’ salaries
3. Lower teacher salaries decrease interest in becoming a teacher.

If this esteemed group of government entities, companies and nonprofit organizations really wanted to build the next generation of school teachers, it would be bankrolling a campaign to make union organizing easier and to set high federal wage standards for all school teachers, public and private.

Both these stories come down to people with power scratching their heads and wondering what to do when the answer is standing right in front of them like a large cold and hungry elephant shivering and trumpeting loudly. PAY THEM MORE! It may mean taking a little less in profits, which are currently exorbitant. Or it may mean raising taxes. Doesn’t matter—those with jobs should make enough money to feed their families, and the professionals to whom we entrust our children should not have their decent wages reduced but instead be raised to the same rate at which we pay lawyers, accountants and other professionals. Pay teachers as much as we pay neurosurgeons and top PR execs, and we’ll have more people interested in the profession. 

In our adulation of the dead JFK, let’s not forget almost every myth about him is false

By Marc Jampole

In the tsunami of stories about the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, no one yet has observed that JFK was one of the first and finest examples of manipulation of the mass media to elect a major candidate.

In 1956, Kennedy was a back-bench Senator known for little else than being the son of a rich man and the right-wing alternative to a moderate Tennessean as Adlai Stevenson’s running mate. Then his family launched an incessant public relations program based on the question, “Can a Catholic be elected president?” It seemed as if every month some national magazine or prestigious newspaper was asking the question and answering mostly in the affirmative.  In launching this PR campaign, the Kennedy family had one very large advantage: the family business was the largest advertiser in the mass media in the 1950s. 

After the first debate with Richard Nixon, the Kennedy PR machine shifted into fifth gear to focus the media conversation not on what was said, but on how they said it and what they looked like.  It was certainly the first time that issues—real or fabricated—took a back seat to style in discussing a major election. Likeability, that ineffable essence that the media later told us Bush II had and Al Gore did not, became a factor and the news media made sure we liked JFK a lot more than we did RMN. Of course, they had some help from Tricky Dick himself!

Fifty years after his assassination, the Kennedy legend is mostly built on myths, the most significant and mendacious of which is that he was a liberal or a progressive. Kennedy came from a dark past: His father sympathized with the Nazis. His younger brother was a lawyer for Joseph McCarthy.

As president, Kennedy tended to favor the right-wing. He called for decreasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations and for an increase in military spending. The two fiascos of his Administration—the Bay of Pigs invasion and the assassination of the head of the South Vietnamese government—were both examples of American imperialism and militarism.  Both decisions came back to haunt our country for years, like the equally foolish decision to invade Iraq decades later.

In retrospect, Kennedy’s civil rights record was shabby. Yes he was hobbled by his inability to manage Congress, but reviews of his administration’s actions in such books as Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters suggest that Kennedy was always looking for an excuse to declare failure in Democratic attempts to pass civil rights legislation.  Other books suggest that in finally passing civil rights and anti-poverty legislation, violence at the marches and riots in the inner cities moved Congress and the American people far more than did fulfilling the legacy of a martyred president.

Although Kennedy was born 30 years too early to be part of the Baby Boom generation, the fact that he was America’s youngest president when the Baby Boomers were reaching their teens did make it easy for Kennedy to become a symbol of a new, younger America. His public lifestyle and his rhetoric did seem to symbolize that youthful time, but his political actions did not represent youthful rebellion and idealism, but rather immature adventurism in foreign affairs and a middle-aged willingness to live with the status quo in everything else.

Part of the Kennedy myth is his personal glamour and elegance—but it was the glamour of rich folks spending their money on expensive stuff. The glamour was also part of the Kennedy PR machine, as exemplified by the first lady’s televised tour of the White House. I do, however, appreciate the fact that until Obama, Kennedy was our last president to cherish urban and urbane values. Between these two, all our presidents have wanted to be seen flipping sausages at a barbecue pit or chopping wood.

I do not believe someone’s personal life should enter into an accounting of his or her public legacy. I don’t care one way or another that Kennedy is reported to have bedded dozens if not hundreds of women. It has nothing to do with his ability to perform as president or his public legacy, unless the sex were not consensual or there were something else he did that indicated poor judgment or unacceptable behavior—underage women, hypocritically advocating celibacy while whoring around, sexual harassment or rape, for example. That Kennedy once forced a White House intern with whom he was having an affair to publicly felate a Secret Service agent does not speak well of the man.  

It probably helps Kennedy’s legacy that no president has died in office since he did. I remember many older family members telling me how heart broken they were when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in office. It occurred 18 years before Kennedy was assassinated and 22 years after Warren G. Harding died in office. It’s now been 50 years and, thank goodness, no one has supplanted Kennedy as “the president I remember dying in office.”  The violence of the assassination heightens the sadness and sense of tragedy surrounding Kennedy, as well it should.  That there are so many photographs and moving images of Kennedy makes it easy for even those born long after him to know him, or at least know his myths.

The persistent rumors of a conspiracy to assassinate JFK also contribute to his high visibility. In fact, most of the Kennedy myth has little to do with the public man. Just think of the ways that his life and death are being covered these past few weeks:

• The details of the assassination
• The conspiracy theories
• His wealth and glamour
• His sex life (helped by the fact that one of his paramours was a third-rate actress who had a habit of bedding famous and powerful men and after her death became another mass media martyr)
• The excitement of the New Frontier
• The sad fact that he didn’t have time to work on his political agenda.

Of course, there are a few stories of substance as well, mostly discussions of whether Kennedy would have escalated the war in Viet Nam. Typically, left-wingers say no and right-wingers say yes. In this case, the right is most certainly closer to the truth, based on all of Kennedy’s actions as president.

Like most public myths, Kennedy is a vessel into which we can pour whatever beliefs we want. Some see him as right-wing, left-wing, cold warrior, dove, hawk, symbol of a more optimistic time, glamour god, sex symbol, sex pervert, leader of youth, friend to minorities, whatever you want.

My take on Kennedy is that he was a rich guy whose family spent a lot of money helping him obtain an office for which he was less than qualified.  His politics reflected the views of large corporations of his time, from lowering taxes on the wealthy to pursuing an aggressive imperialism throughout the world (For more on how large corporations controlled Kennedy, read G. William Domhoff’s recent The Myth of Liberal Ascendancy). He basically cared about power and his social class.  That he is beloved as one of our greatest presidents of all time is just another proof of the power of rich folk to manipulate the news media.

How often does mass media exhort public to imitate people who aren’t rich?

By Marc Jampole

We’re seeing a very rare media trend this fall. Story after story in the style, living, home and even business sections of newspapers and websites are advising people to imitate individuals who aren’t famous and don’t earn a lot of money, maybe $30,000 to $57,000 a year.

The envied group we’re supposed to imitate consists of professional shoppers. At least that’s the conclusion I draw from typing “Black Friday shopping tips” in the Google search box.  Of the 1.24 million results that come up, the first few pages are filled with articles that are going to teach us how to “shop like a pro,” by which the writers must mean a professional shopper, those low-paid gofers of party planners, marketing departments and rich folk.

Here is a sampling of articles in which we can learn how to “shop like a pro”:

• “How to Shop on Black Friday Like a Pro” lays out three steps and three tips for shopping like a pro the day after Thanksgiving.  Unfortunately, the writer and editor are less than pros and make a number of irritating syntactical errors, such as writing “your” instead of “you’re.”
• “Shop Black Friday Like a Pro” starts with the premise that the readers—like the writer—love to shop for the Holidays.
• “12 tips for shopping Black Friday like a pro” is a graduate seminar in how to shop during the Holidays. The last tip however, places a dark cloud on the whole process (I write “process,” since when there are 12 steps, there must be a “process“): “Plan a nice brunch or other social gathering at the end of your trip, so you’ll have something to look forward to.” Wait a second. If, as the article claims earlier, you are so excited about shopping that you “are already salivating,” why do you need something to which to look forward? Maybe professional shoppers are supposed to end their work days with a snack, kind of like reverse carbo-loading. I guess I was too busy taking humanities and science courses in college and I missed the “advanced professional shopping” seminars.  
• “5 Steps to Shopping Black Friday Like a Pro” advises people to have a Holiday shopping strategy. 
• “Black Friday Survival Guide – How to Shop Like a Pro” compares Black Friday to the Superbowl, but warns that on the “potentially dangerous and stressful day” you better learn how to shop like a pro.  Football serves as the appropriate analogy for the grim picture of waiting on line, running towards products and pushing and shoving painted by the author.
• “3 Ways to Shop Black Friday Like a Pro” boils it down to the essentials of planning your route and coordinating with friends, so that one of you shops for certain items while the other looks for other things. 

Those who aren’t satisfied merely to achieve a professional status, though, may prefer “How to win Black Friday 2013: Tips from a master.”  The article never tells what it means to win, but if there are three things I know about 21st century America it’s:

1. We like to shop
2. Winning is fun
3. We like to aspire to the pinnacle, such as the pinnacle of shopping professionalism, that exalted point at which others laud you as a “master.”

The “shop like a pro” theme doesn’t exhaust the ways in which writers are giving us advice for Black Friday. You can find tips, ways, lessons, strategies, tactics and ideas in any quantity you like: 3, 5, 7, 10, 12 or 20. There are even 10 issues worth discussing in the eternal debate between shopping in person on Black Friday and online on Cyber Monday. Don’t worry—there are advantages to each.  That’s the great thing about America—you’re doing okay, as long as you’re shopping.

Interestingly enough, no one mentions products much in their advice on shopping. There are occasional references to tablets and video games, but mostly the products don’t matter—it’s all about the act of buying.

Traditionalists shouldn’t beware just yet. My Google News search of “Thanksgiving” yielded 158 million stories, as opposed to a mere 136 million for “Black Friday.” If we measure significance by number of Google hits, Thanksgiving is still the top Holiday of the last week of November.  There are many how-to-articles for Thanksgiving, too—how to roast a turkey, how to make a turducken, how to make gravy, how to plan a vegetarian Thanksgiving, how to address family disputes, how to decorate in a festive way.  It all seems to mundane and old-fashioned, though, compared to the thrilling rapture of pulling a credit card out of a wallet and handing it to a cashier.

But give it time. Black Friday is relatively new as a holiday.  It is still developing its traditions and its history. In the future, perhaps, certain food will become associated with Black Friday, like Mexican food with the Superbowl (My money is on hot turkey tacos). People will start telling stories of Black Friday the way they remember it in the good old days. The year Mom wrestled a PlayStation away from a 400-pound man. The year we roasted turkey on the portable grill in the Wal-Mart parking lot. And sooner  or later, someone is going to figure out that like most other American holidays, the best way to celebrate Black Friday is to buy something for someone and give it to them. Yes, I can see the glorious day—glorious for retailers—when people exchange presents for Black Friday. And at that point, we’ll have to create a new holiday—the one on which we shop for Black Friday presents.

Nation’s Michelle Goldberg nails GOP for denying poverty exists

by Marc Jampole

 

Michelle Goldberg puts a lot of facts together to reach her perceptive conclusions about Republican attitudes on American poverty in “Poverty Denialism,” in the latest Nation. 

Goldberg quotes the usual suspects—FOX commentators, Bobby Jindal, Tea Party Congressmen—to demonstrate that the GOP denies poverty exists, and instead proposes that there are only a bunch of people who could work if they wanted to but prefer to sit at home getting fat on government handouts.

The article points out that the Republicans could blame President Obama for poverty, if they wanted to. But to do so would be to admit that poverty exists and require them to present a plan to deal with it. Goldberg recalls that Nixon, Kemp and even Bush II proposed initiatives to address poverty.  All the current Republicans want to do now is cut, cut, cut.  I urge you to read Goldberg’s article.

The sheer meanness in the attitudes of most Republicans is dazzling. They are willing to watch their fellow citizens starve so that taxes on the wealthy and corporations can remain low and go even lower.  It’s not even good economics, since the poor will spend all the money the government gives to them and thereby fuel the economy and create more jobs, whereas the wealthy recipients of GOP largess are just going to save it. But these Republicans don’t really care about creating new jobs or strengthening the economy. They want theirs. Thus they ignore the poor except to cut their food stamp benefits by 7% and to make it harder for them to get public assistance, or to make clever and cruel comments about their laziness.  

The current Republican neglect and mocking of poverty represents the height of selfishness. But it only makes sense: Selfishness goes hand-in-glove with a materialistic culture in which the mass media and TV commercials tell you to indulge yourself all the time.

Of course the same people who fund the GOP mostly control or own the companies that are advertising and producing our entertainment. It’s up to the American people to reject this selfish thinking and elect representatives who want to make sure that everyone in the country eats at night, can access needed medical care and has a chance to attend a quality school, As humans in a wealthy society, we have both a right to these basics and the responsibility to make sure that everyone has them. Republicans once knew it, but the current bunch seems to have forgotten.

Rollout and communications snafus don’t invalidate good of Affordable Care Act

By Marc Jampole

So far, the rollout of the health exchanges—the heart of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—has reminded me of the incompetence associated with the Bush II Administration. The interesting part of the Obama Administration's bungling of the rollout is that the mistakes have not been made now in the heat of the moment, but months ago when Barack Obama and his inner circle had time to think about it.

Waiting until the Supreme Court affirmed the ACA to begin writing the software and setting up the website was at the very least overly cautious. I would be among the ones who would call it gutless, because it was not in the best interest of the United States and its citizens to wait and the money saved would really have been a drop in the bucket in the current deficit.  Far better it would have been if the Administration had given the tech folks the time to do more extensive testing of the system. We should note, however, that as with many large websites of private sector companies, it’s very possible that the health exchange website would have still encountered problems even with extra time.

It’s a shame, because the state exchanges are mostly working and it’s primarily the people in the Republican-controlled states who have to wait until the federal website is fixed to sign up for health insurance.  Those are the same states in which the poor eligible for Medicaid coverage under the ACA won’t get coverage because their governors rejected the federally funded expansion of Medicaid in their states.

Perhaps more interesting to me is the mistake in messaging that the President made when it comes to the relatively small number of people who are losing their existing policies.  

First the facts: ACA sets new standards for health insurance plans. Setting standards has been a government function since at least the Sumerians. It is the government that tells us how much an ounce must weigh and how much fat and extenders you can throw in and still call it “lean ground beef.” All indications are that in writing both the laws and the regulations, large health insurers had input into developing the new standards. The policies held by the 3 million who will have to change do not meet the basic standards established in the ACA. Many are lousy policies, not worth the paper upon which they’re printed.

What the President said—months ago—was that no one will lose their policies. What he should have said was that less than one percent of people would have to change policies because their policies were below the new standard.  This more truthful statement would have set the bar of expectations at the appropriate level. Many of those who have to change policies would still be angry and frustrated, especially if they lived in Republican-controlled states and couldn’t get through on the federal website. But the President’s misstatement would not have provoked a scandal in the news media, nor would the rest of the public be up in arms.

Setting the expectations of the audience is one of the basic principles of communications. The operating theory is the idea of “relative deprivation,” which basically states that people get angrier at being deprived of something than at never having had it. Contrast the positive reaction if you promise someone $80 and you give her $90 to the negative reaction if you promise someone $110 and you give her $100 for doing the same job. The public was led to believe that no one would lose their policies and now feels the frustrations of relative deprivation.

When I conduct seminars on communications, I advise my students—mostly executives and professionals—to set the audience’s expectations at the very beginning of the interaction. For example, before you open the floor to questions at a meeting of many people, always say that individuals will have the chance to ask only one question and one quick follow-up question until everyone has had a chance to pose questions. Without setting that expectation, if someone tries to grab control of the meeting by barraging you with questions and long comments, the audience may think you’re trying to suppress discussion when you try to stop him. But if you have set expectations, when the demagogue tries to take control, the audience will be on your side and shout out, “Give someone else a turn.” I’ve seen both scenarios play out multiple times.

In a sense, the website snafu is also a failure to meet expectations. When an organization announces a website is up and running, the expectation is that it will work.   

I’m fairly confident that the website will get fixed and that the health exchanges, new standards and other features of the new law will lead to many more Americans being covered by good health insurance plans, an improvement in the nation’s health and a decline in the cost of medical care. The Affordable Care Act will work, but it’s unfortunate that before it does, the Administration has to learn some basic lessons in setting expectations…and meeting them.

Jewelry ads pop up - a sign that America’s favorite holiday—Black Friday—is fast approaching

By Marc Jampole

On the side of the highway into Pittsburgh today I passed a billboard for Orr’s, a regional jewelry chain and it reminded me that we are about to be inundated with ads cajoling us to buy bits of rocks embedded in metal and other functionless baubles.

The Orr’s billboard is mostly white with black lettering focused on the words, “Stephen Webster,” who, a quick trip to the Internet told me, is a British jewelry designer. On the right is a highly stylized photograph of a nearly bald woman with her head and neck twisted upwards almost in the elongated style of the Italian Mannerist painter Pontormo. The only colors on the page are the jewels in the rings and earrings she wears. But the figure is so much like the background white that all people in passing cars can really digest are the words “Stephen Webster.” 

The unspoken message that Orr’s assumes we will get is that Stephen Webster is the equivalent of Cadillac or Apple, a premium brand. But I didn’t know it, nor did the other person in the car, nor did anyone in my office, nor does anyone except those interested in jewelry or perhaps design in general.  Thus, what Orr’s is selling is not the “Stephen Webster” brand, but the fact that Orr’s has the brands.  A quick trip to the Orr’s website confirms this analysis: the home page features a long horizontal billboard space in which ads for Stephen Webster, Henri Daussi, Roberto Coin, Cartier (the only one I recognized) and Marco Bicego rotated in succession.

The Orr’s basic marketing message—We have the best brands—got me thinking of other approaches that jewelry stores take to selling what are essentially luxury and to my mind frivolous products with arbitrary value.

We are starting to be bombarded by TV ads by Jared, a national chain which primarily places its stores in malls. For years, Jared has used the line, “He went to Jared.” The line is whispered as lascivious gossip between neighbors, screamed to best friends and sisters, intoned seriously by admiring but envious buddies. The context is always other people and their reactions. Whether you label the operative behavior as “Keeping up with the Joneses” or “If you got it, flaunt it,” the message that Jared is trying to make is come to Jared to make sure your friends and neighbors respect, honor, envy and like you.

Thorsten Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class” seems to be the operating theory here. For Veblen, the leisure class engages in conspicuous consumption for the sole purpose of making individual distinctions based on financial wealth.  You show you are worth something by buying your spouse “diamonds as big as horse turds,” as my father used to put it. In this case, you make sure that everyone knows you are prosperous by going to Jared.

Jared has been using the slogan for years, so it must be working. But around even longer and working even better, I think, is the slogan of another national chain, Kay's. Their line, sung in commercials after the presentation of a ring, earrings, bracelet or watch leads to an embrace, is “Every kiss begins with Kay.”

The reason I like the Kay’s approach—selling sex—is because it comes closer to the reason that most jewelry (other than graduation watches and sweet 16 charm bracelets) is purchased: to give to a beloved to symbolize a sexual relationship. Yes, some people want to make sure that they have the top quality, whatever that means, and have been trained to associate brands with quality. But they aren’t buying jewelry to get a brand. And yes, keeping up with or surpassing the Joneses is a big motivation to many people when they purchase jewelry, but it’s only a secondary motivation. No one buys an engagement ring to please the family (although he or she may have proposed because of family or societal pressure). They buy the ring or the earrings or whatever for the loved one. They may select one item over another because they know it’s better than what the Joneses have, but only after the decision to buy has been made.

The causal connection between giving someone jewelry and engaging in sexual relations is strongly rooted in our society precisely for the reasons that Veblen details. It is a form of display that is supposed to make the wearer more attractive and more of a status symbol for the giver. The exchange of rings symbolizes marriage, which is a public construct and the traditionally sanctioned locus for sexual relations. We give a ring to mark the engagement, as well, and for key anniversaries. We are brainwashed that other types of jewelry are the go-to gift for the spouse.

In a real sense, jewelry commoditizes romantic relationships, which means it turns romance into something that can be bought and sold.  Instead of buying conjugal rights, you buy the symbol and give that to the object of affection.  In the world of symbols and hidden meanings by which our society lives, every kiss does (or can) begin with the presentation of jewelry. Kay’s hits the bull’s eye.

Editorial: Whose Credibility Gap?

Did President Obama tell a whopper when he told voters in 2012, “If you like your health plan, you can keep your health care plan”?

The White House clearly knew that some people would lose their health plan, and even though the combination of state-run healthcare exchanges and tax subsidies would offer most a better deal, some insurance customers inevitably would be upset. So the President should have included a disclaimer that “you can keep your insurance unless it is a junk policy that does not meet minimum standards for meaningful coverage of hospitalization or chronic health problems. In that case, no, you won’t be able to let the insurance company swindle you any more.”

A good example of the disclaimered class is Donna Barrette, a 57-year-old Florida real estate agent who was paying $54 a month for Blue Cross insurance. She was upset when she got a letter that her plan would be cancelled as of Jan. 1, 2014. Blue Cross offered a replacement plan at $591 a month, which she said was unaffordable at her salary of $30,000. CBS News depicted her as a typical case of “Obama taking my insurance away.” But other reporters found that Barette could get cheaper plans on the state healthcare exchange, with tax credits paying for nearly $320 a month. And Barrette’s old plan was no bargain, paying only $50 per doctor visit, charging her for tests that can run into hundreds of dollars, $15 per prescription, which barely covers generic drugs, and nothing at all for hospitalization, putting her coverage squarely in the “junk policy” category.

Nancy Metcalf of Consumer Reports found that Humana’s Direct Silver 4600/6300 plan, available in Florida at a cost to Barrette of $165 per month, pays for preventive services, the first $500 of diagnostic lab tests and x-rays per year and 100% of expenses after she spends $6,300.

When Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic told Barrette about her options, she said she would jump at it. “With my age, things can happen. I don’t want to have bills that could make me bankrupt. I don’t want to lose my house.” She added, “Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise.”

Republicans have little room to complain about President Obama’s stretching the truth after the GOP has spent the last four years lying about the Affordable Care Act.

Catharine Richert of Minnesota Public Radio in September listed the “Top 5 myths about ‘Obamacare’ that refuse to die.”

The top myth was that the law creates “death panels.” Former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey (R) on July 16, 2009 falsely claimed that the House health care reform bill would “require” end-of-life counseling for seniors to “tell them how to end their life sooner.” Conservative media repeated that claim until Sarah Palin on Aug. 7, 2009, claimed that “my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.”

PolitiFact examined both claims and on Aug. 8, 2009 rated them “Pants on Fire!” “The truth is that the health bill allows Medicare, for the first time, to pay for doctors’ appointments for patients to discuss living wills and other end-of-life issues with their physicians. These types of appointments are completely optional, and AARP supports the measure.” (The claim that ACA included “death panels” was rated by PolitiFact as “Life of the Year” for 2009.)

Those are clearly the facts, but that hasn’t stopped conservative commentators from claiming that Obamacare includes death panels every time a committee meets that is affiliated with Medicare or other health care programs.

The second myth is that the law represents a government takeover of healthcare. What the ACA did was to establish standards for what a health insurance policy must cover, so that patients would not find out after being diagnosed with a serious illness that their insurance didn’t cover it, or that the coverage was severely limited. The law created an online marketplace where consumers and small businesses can shop for health plans — most of them offered by private corporations.

The third myth — that you won’t be able to keep your doctor or your current insurance — is where Obama ran into trouble when he assured Americans that “If you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance.”

For the 87.5% of Americans who get their insurance through their employer or the government, their insurance shouldn’t change, unless employers decide to change the coverage they offer. Nothing in the law requires changes, as long as the policy meets minimum standards.

Richert also noted that if you’re buying insurance through one of the new exchanges, it’s possible you won’t be able to find a plan that includes your current physician. But that’s largely a function of the provider networks insurers choose.

The fourth myth is that ACA covers unauthorized immigrants and abortions. The ACA bars unauthorized immigrants from purchasing insurance through the exchanges, and they cannot obtain Medicare or non-emergency Medicaid coverage. They can get care at the emergency room, but that’s no different from how things already work.

As for abortion coverage, federal funds still can’t be used to cover abortions unless it is a case of rape, incest or the mother’s life is in danger. Insurance companies will retain their current ability to sell plans that cover abortions, Richert wrote, but for people who qualify for federal subsidies, the law includes a mechanism to make sure that aid isn’t used to pay for abortion coverage.

The fifth myth is that the ACA is a “job killer.” Richert noted that claim is based on a mischaracterization of a Congressional Budget Office report that predicted upwards of 800,000 people, who keep their jobs mainly for the health care coverage, would leave the workforce because they would be able to find affordable insurance through the state insurance exchanges. Some of them will be older workers who choose to retire earlier than they otherwise would — which would free jobs for younger people who are looking for work. Some workers will be able to leave their corporate jobs to pursue their own entrepreneurial ambitions. And the National Federation of Independent Business, which has fought the health reform law, recently reported that 7% of its members who now offer insurance plan to drop it, but 13% of those who don’t currently offer insurance plan to add it.

There also have been projections that, with an estimated 32 million Americans gaining health insurance that they would not otherwise have, that increase in demand for services will require hundreds of thousands of new jobs in health care and insurance industries.

So while Obama may have stumbled out of bounds with his promise that people could keep their insurance policies, Republican critics of the Affordable Care Act have repeatedly hit low blows, mischaracterizing the health reform law with a reprehensible disregard for the truth.

Even now, Republicans at the state level have refused to let the working poor get Medicaid coverage for which the federal government is paying nearly the entire cost. They refused to participate in development of the healthcare exchanges and they are even harassing “navigators” who help guide people through their options on the exchanges. In Congress, the Republican-dominated House refused Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ request for funds to help implement the program after 36 states ducked their duties. They shut down the government in an attempt to defund the law. And now they are calling Sebelius to their committees so they can complain about the glitchy website.

As the benefits of the Affordable Care Act become recognizable, we think the American people will be more forgiving of President Obama and Secretary Sebelius than they will be of the Republicans who tried to obstruct its passage and then sabotaged its implementation at the state and federal level. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2013

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Selections from the December 1, 2013 issue

COVER/Michael Lind
The tea party is an anti-populist elite tool

EDITORIAL
Whose credibility gap?

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Kicking the poor to the curb

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Be concerned about food sovereignty

DISPATCHES
Dems: why not expand Social Security?;
CBS botches Benghazi report;
Dems' 3 big wins;
Dems gave Christie a pass;
McAuliffe’s progressive campaign;
JFK assassination: still unsolved;
Kinky candidate for Texas ag post;
Food stamp cuts bring hardship for holidays;
Infrastructure spending collapse;
Wendy Davis helps rival vote in Texas;
Brazil spies on us, too;
Portlanders arrested for protesting P.O. privatization;
Backroom budget deal vs. small-town America;
Blood cancer downwind of Alberta's tar sands operations;
Limbaugh's lie meter ...

BOB BURNETT
Politics of hate

GENE NICHOL
Hapless Pat McCrory

DON ROLLINS
Duke Energy cashes in with no-nuke plan

WENONAH HAUTER
Keep corporate poultry out of your house

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Low T: Disease, the gold mine

SAM URETSKY
Exceptional times

WAYNE O’LEARY
Stupid is as stupid does

JOHN BUELL
Political monsters, inner demons

BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Globalize this

ROB PATTERSON
Finales don’t mean the end for actors

POPULIST PICKS
Chuck Berry; ‘Just Visiting’; ‘Masters of Sex’

and more ...

Off-year elections show it’s good to be friends of the Clintons and have lots of money

By Marc Jampole

There were not many races with national significance in the 2013 election, but there are several lessons we can learn from the three races that received the most news coverage—left-winger Bill DeBlasio’s historic landslide victory for Mayor of New York, moderate Republican Chris Christie’s mere landslide re-election as Governor of New Jersey and conservative Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s two-point win as Governor of Virginia over a Tea Party poster boy.

Lesson # 1: People are tired of the Tea Party

As the many mainstream reporters touting Chris Christie for President have pointed out, the Tea Party candidate lost in a Southern state, whereas the Non-Tea flavored Republican won in a Northern state. The Tea Party candidate also lost a bitter battle to a less radically conservative Republican in a special election for Congress in Alabama. Most people either suffered or know someone who suffered because of the sequester or the government shutdown. Most now realize that the Tea Party has little to offer to anyone except the one percenters, who will benefit from tax cuts and less government regulation.

Lesson #2: People didn’t care that much about Obamacare’s rollout problems

Everyone is rightfully pissed off that the website for the federal healthcare exchange isn’t working right. But they’re more pissed about the government shutdown, the sequester, the enormously inequitable distribution of wealth in the United States and continued high unemployment and they blame Republicans for all that. Any Republican candidate thinking he or she would get an anti-Obamacare bounce must have swallowed the entire pitcher of Kool-Aid. They certainly ignored the recent study that showed that many more Americans either like the Affordable Care Act or want to strengthen it than those who want to end or weaken it.

Lesson #3: It helps to be FOHAB or FOBAH

Friend of Hillary & Bill or Friend of Bill & Hillary—which is it? Maybe we should just write FOTC and leave it at that. However you name the phenomenon, it’s interesting to note that two of the three winners in the major races have close ties to the Clintons. The Clintons endorsed DeBlasio and spent time campaigning for their former fundraiser Terry McAuliffe. These results substantiate what many are saying: that Hillary Clinton is the overwhelming favorite to be elected as our next president, assuming that she runs.

Lesson #4: Money wins

In all three of the major races (and the Alabama Congressional race), the candidate who raised and spent the most money won the contest. Just like all the recent presidential elections. Progressive who may be overjoyed that McAuliffe and DeBlasio won and not all that upset that Christie won should nonetheless be alarmed at the continuation of the trend of money trumping every other factor.

Lesson #5: The crony capitalists won

In crony capitalism one function of government is to procure federal contracts and other favorable treatment for the supporters of the winning candidates. Both McAuliffe and Christie qualify as practitioners of crony capitalism. It was McAuliffe who auctioned off nights at the White House for campaign contributions, whereas Christie has a reputation for dealing state contracts to and getting favorable rulings for his pals and contributors. Thank goodness that DeBlasio—left wing superhero that he appears to be right now—has no reputation for engaging in the practices of crony capitalism.

Both McAuliffe and Christie are part of the current corrupt political system that favors big-money contributors and organized industries. McAuliffe is a centrist and Christie is slightly right of center but willing to move left in practical matters such as natural disasters and recessions. While Bill DeBlasio offers the hope of a political culture that seeks the best interests of all our citizens, it remains to be seen if he will carry out his promises. If he does—if he manages to build housing for the middle and lower class, raise taxes on the wealthy to support universal preschool, negotiate contracts that give city union workers decent raises, end racist police practices, improve mass transit in the outer boroughs—if he makes New York a more livable and more progressive place, then the results of the 2013 election will reverberate for decades. Otherwise, it will be remembered as another election in which money and influence won.