Leadership

Slogans

Aug 25

At the National Speakers Association convention earlier this year, Bruce Terkel delivered a powerful keynote presentation on marketing. During that speech he explained that President Obama’s 2008 slogan “Yes we can” was the second best marketing slogan ever. It is positive, it is inclusive and it is enabling. Sadly, Republicans utilize a different slogan strategy.

Tom Coburn (R–OK), Ted Kruz (R-AZ), Michele Bachmann (R-Mars) and a bunch more Republicans want President Obama impeached. They offer no high crimes or misdemeanors of which they think he is guilty. They just want the sentence carried out without bothering with an indictment or conviction. Their slogan seems to be, “Say anything to marginalize him.”

Paul Ryan continues to promote his Republican budget – only it isn’t a budget. It is a plan to privatize nearly all of government. This is just another example of Republicans putting lipstick on a pig and telling us it isn’t a pig, like the original Patriot Act that actually was unpatriotic and like Operation Iraqi Freedom that didn’t free the Iraqis but did chain us to perpetual war. Their sleight-of-hand slogan is, “Fooling you with a lying label.”

I wrote here recently that the Republicans got nuthin’ because they propose nothing that will benefit America or Americans, other than the billionaires to whom they are indentured. They lambasted President Obama at every opportunity regarding a budget. Then Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Tanning Salon) presented the 2010 Republican budget that had no numbers in the entire document other than page numbers. (Accounting note: If there are no numbers, it can’t be a budget.) On the infrequent occasions that congress does manage to pass legislation to make things better, like the Dodd-Frank bill, Republicans immediately start the process to dismantle it piece by piece. This slogan is obvious: “Whatever it is, we’re against it even if we used to be for it.”

The House did pass a farm bill. It gives Big Agri-Business multi-billions of dollars. That same bill eliminates support for food stamps. One in six American children lives in poverty – it is double that number for people of color – and The House intends to take the food out of the mouths of those kids. The slogan: “Starvation makes children more self-reliant.”

Two of three poling places in North Carolina are being closed, leaving local college students with obstacles nearly impossible to overcome in order to vote. A pregnant woman in Kansas, victim of a brutal rape, cannot do anything about it. The school teachers in Wisconsin, who have sacrificed pay over and over in exchange for the promise of an adequate pension when they retire, are now having their pensions stolen from them. None of that is an accident.

The Republicans are so bereft of offerings that they are putting the majority of their effort into stopping Americans from voting in order to win elections and cram through legislation to produce results like the examples above. If they can’t stop people from voting, they use district gerrymandering to make votes inconsequential. For example, Texas is 45% white but the Republican controlled state legislature has ensured that 70% of the districts are white Republican, thus marginalizing people of color.

Perhaps this kind of Constitutional blasphemy has not permeated your world yet. Just understand this: it will. Right now they are coming after people of color, poor people, first time voters, the elderly and the infirmed. After that it will be another group, then another, because a power hungry minority will never have enough control to satisfy themselves. Look to history and you will see the repeated story of incremental loss of rights concurrent with the rise of totalitarianism. That is what voter suppression accomplishes, so “Coup by disenfranchisement” is the Republican slogan.

“You know, I would have at least some respect for the Republicans who pass these laws if they would just come clean and admit they are trying to keep everyone but old white guys from voting like it used to be in the good old days. But instead, they make up stuff.”

Gaylard French of Waxahachie, TX
The Dallas Morning News
Letters to the Editor, August 18, 2013

We can sit back and pretend that our country is not being stolen from us, but sooner or later we’re going to have a very bad day. The Republican slogan for that is, to quote Dick Cheney, “So?”

Bruce Terkel was asked the obvious question by a member of the audience at the close of his keynote to the National Speakers Association convention. “If ‘Yes we can’ is the second best marketing slogan ever, what is the best one?” Terkel didn’t miss a beat, replying, “See your doctor for an erection lasting longer than four hours.”

Are we that easy to manipulate – with just a slogan?

The RNC Has . . .

Aug 04

Izzy Santa, RNC Hispanic Communications Director as seen on MSNBC Weekends with Alex Witt, July 27, 2013.

Here is a shortened and pretty accurate transcription of dialogue:

Witt: The president indicated that there are Republicans who agree with him in private. Is that true?

Santa: The President’s programs have failed and Democrats are abandoning him.

Witt: In talking about Obamacare, the President said that the Republicans can’t just be against; they have to be for something. What are the Republicans for?

Santa: Obamacare has failed.

Witt: How do you think the President’s immigration plan will work for Hispanics?

Santa: The President’s immigration plan is a complete failure. (Ed. Note: There is no plan in place yet, so nothing has failed except the passage of the bill. It is bottled up in the Republican controlled House.)

Witt: Another question.

Santa: Attack Obama, blah, blah, blah.

Here are the observed RNC Rules, as consistently obeyed by Michael Steele when he was RNC chairman, Rience Pribus, current RNC chairman and Izzy Santa:

Always attack President Obama and Democrats.
Never answer a question or offer anything creative, new, constructive.
Always attack President Obama and Democrats.

Memo to RNC: That’s all ya got? Ya got nuthin’.

Morale, Knees and Common Elements

Jul 28

I was on a United Airlines flight from Chicago to San Diego and somewhere over the Rockies I just couldn’t sit any longer, so I took a stroll to the galley at the back of the plane. Half-squats, twisting and tugging this way and that restored circulation, and I felt considerably better.

This happened about a year after the first United Airlines bankruptcy filing, so after my physical contortions I struck up a conversation with a flight attendant. I asked about morale, now that all the employees had taken a 20% blow to their wallets. She rolled her eyes and said, “Not good.”

She continued, telling me that the CEO had just taken a multimillion dollar bonus, while none of the employees had received back pay, nor restoration of pay rates, both of which had been promised. That pretty much killed any “we’re in this together” spirit. Employee give-a-damn level was down here, she reported, with an ankle level gesture and a glare that could laser cut her CEO’s investment statements.

I travel quiet a bit, delivering workshops and keynote presentations all over the United States and Canada, so I have the opportunity for lots of, shall we say, airplane adventures. Some are influenced by airline employees whom I encounter directly, like that flight attendant. Some of those adventures are influenced by airline employees whom I will never meet but whose work products affect me on every flight.

For example, when I cannot get a preferred seat as a perk of my frequent flyer status, I sit in aluminum tube steerage. I’m not a big guy, but I do want half of the elbow rests and 100% of my seat width. Both of those are compromised when a 370 pound seatmate shows up. Fully 15% of my seat back is occupied by his shoulder and the armrest has disappeared into a sea of flesh. I have lots of stories about trips with interesting seatmates. They encompass all the senses and are not uniformly pleasant.

It is well known that we Americans are an overweight bunch. So, while the FAA standard human being weighs 170 pounds, that number is exactly that – a standard – meaning some people weigh lots more than that. The seat designers know that, but they engineer the seating in their planes as though we all weigh 170 pounds, which gets me buried by my over-sized seatmate. The designers also engineer leg room as though we were all no taller than 5’8″, which makes my greatest fear of flying that the guy sitting in front of me will recline his seat back and smash my knees. Memo to commercial airliner design people: Some of us are taller than your standard and some of us are wider and that impacts lots of people.

Here is the connection between flight attendants’ low morale, portly seatmates and the knee crushing machine: These conditions continue because we tolerate them. The flight attendants continue to work for less and the flying public continues to reward the airlines for stuffing us into insufficient space. That is to say, corporate management does what it does because it can.

It is exactly the same with our government and our politics. The NSA is snooping on you and will continue to do so because you allow it. Congress acts as though confrontation and stagnation were virtues. They do that because we tolerate their behavior by electing those who create the confrontation and stagnation. The NRA strong-arms congress and everything is voted as they like and not as you like. That happens because we elected the fools who would do that and we will continue to get exactly the same kinds of results as long as we tolerate it.

“The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity,” advises Harlan Ellison. We have to be smarter than the people who do the things we don’t want them to do and strong enough to stop tolerating their behavior.

Bankruptcy

Jul 14

No, not that kind.

This is about political bankruptcy. It is about a Republican Party that doesn’t make decisions based on fact and, in fact, ignores fact and instead creates fatuous fantasies. It is a party that brought us a president who doesn’t read, who ignores facts and who makes decisions based on gut hunches. No, I didn’t make that up. It is what President George W. Bush told us about the way he makes decisions. And, yes, he had the “football” and could have pushed the button to send nuclear missiles to annihilate millions based solely on his “gut hunch.”

This is a party that is legally bankrupt, as it seeks to institutionalize discrimination with a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. This is a party that is legally bankrupt as state house after state house finds diabolical ways to prohibit from voting American citizens who are not white or who are poor.

This is a party that is morally bankrupt, as it chants the same mantra year after year, that it is all about jobs, jobs, jobs, but every opportunity to stimulate job growth has been filibustered by Republicans on the floor of the Senate or voted down by the Republican dominated House. Okay, there was one bill – the veterans jobs legislation – but the Republicans had to be shamed into passing it.

But let’s be fair. The Democrats took over in 2009 and have steadfastly refused to prosecute Wall Street bankers who defrauded the public with their swamp of mortgage derivatives. The same Justice Department has refused to prosecute bankers for their millions of fraudulent home mortgage foreclosures. This is the same Democratic Party that refused to create legislation to prevent another round of “too big to fail” and, guess what, once again the banks are too big to fail.

This is the Democratic administration that has refused to prosecute the prior administration for its blatant lawbreaking by torturing prisoners and for illegal detention. And it is the same party and administration that has expanded the war in Afghanistan, a war that plainly cannot be won. History would have told President Bush that fact before he commanded an invasion, but he would have had to have read a history book to know that.

This is a war with ever-morphing goals, no strategy for success, with a continuing supply of dead bodies and an economic cost that will eventually reach $4 to 6 trillion dollars. And this is a war that President Obama has continued and expanded, notwithstanding his pledge to end American military involvement by the end of next year. How many more dead Americans will we have created between now and then? Would you like to be the last soldier or marine to die for that unholy cause?

The far righties hold dear a deep distrust of government. They are right to do that, because they continue to champion and elect untrustworthy legislators.

The far lefties are never happy because government continues to eviscerate the values and rights they hold dear. But they sit on their recliners on election day or fail to jump through the hoops necessary to register to vote or they just drop out entirely and complain loudly.

We get the government we deserve – or do we deserve the government we get? Either way, we’ll continue to get what we are getting now until we require better. Until then, you can expect a government in the pocket of corporations and fabulously wealthy people who crave money and power above all else. They are the ones who pull the strings of the Marionette America and bringing to us our national bankruptcy. We are the ones who tolerate that.

Other Than Your Mother

Mar 13

President Obama laid out offers to curb government spending two years ago by declaring that he is open to discussions around cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, much to the dismay of most Democrats and to left-of-center Americans of all colors. The programs have been on the table, yet Republicans have been complaining since then that the President has not offered a single spending cut. John Boehner, speaking out of the far right side of his mouth, has repeatedly declared this to be so, as has Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. Weren’t they in those very same negotiating meetings that they both attended at the White House?

Their denials of reality are a mini-example of the Republican Big Lie strategy. They repeat a falsehood enough times that people begin to believe that it is true. Even the rank and file Republicans in congress have come to believe that the “no spending cuts on the table” lie is true. Many of them have not heard directly from their leaders about the doings in those negotiating meetings with the President and apparently they don’t read newspapers or watch the news on TV, either.

That does not change reality, though, and if you live in a fact-based world where 2 + 2 = 4 and up and down are not the same things, you’ll recognize the Big Lie for what it is. Boehner and McConnell protestations notwithstanding, President Obama really did lay two big ones on the table two years ago.

Related to that is a recent comment by failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who said, “What we’ve seen is a – the president out campaigning to the American people, doing rallies around the country, flying around the country and berating Republicans and blaming and pointing.”

That’s an update of the attempt to diminish Obama by John McCain and Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign. They blasted him for giving great speeches at big rallies. That is what Saxby Chambliss (R. GA) did to Max Cleland (D, GA, Ret.), when he questioned Cleland’s patriotism during the 2002 senate campaign. Cleland lost both legs and an arm in Viet Nam, while Chambliss was getting deferments from military service and partying in civilian life, but that didn’t stop Chambliss from his dishonest attacks.

Similar to Chambliss, George W. Bush attacked the patriotism of John McCain during the 2000 Republican primary and that of John Kerry in the 2004 general election. I guess he is sensitive over the cushy fun he had flying jets around Texas and doing a lot of drinking with his buddies while those other guys were out risking their lives for their country.

The ploy is to attack a rival’s strength, to diminish his advantages by accusation. That is what Romney, McCain, Chambliss and Bush did and it is exactly what Republican leaders and other Republican mouthpieces have been doing to President Obama all along. Now Obama is making his case to the American people and is succeeding, so the congressional Republican mouthpieces are attacking him, accusing him of failure and saying that he should be in DC schmoozing them, the same people who deny reality.

Obama, they say, should be having Republicans over to the White House for movie night. He should be phoning them directly, each and every one of them, so that they feel important. Then they wouldn’t claim that they don’t know about the budget cuts he’s placed on the table because they would have heard about them directly from the President. But President Obama did not reached out to each and every one of them personally and their feelings were hurt.

But now he’s taken them out to dinner at a nice restaurant. They feel special. Now they’re all puffed up with self-importance.

Well, here’s a news flash for Republican legislators: Other than your mother, nobody cares if your feelings were hurt. We didn’t send you to Washington so that you would be stroked and told how important you are or so that you would be patted on the head and made to feel special. We hired you to do a job and that job does not include paralyzing the United States of America and it does not include undermining international trust in our country. Get over yourself. We’re not here for you – you’re there for us.

Are your feelings hurt? Do you feel like you haven’t received enough special attention? We don’t care. Not a bit. Come to think of it, your mother likes her Medicare and she probably doesn’t care, either.

O’ That Darned Long Term Reality

Dec 02

Nice election, but what if the real prize isn’t won? What if we have to do something more or we’re all screwed?

Look, it’s a fairly simple thing. George Will explained it years ago in clear terms, saying that we want about $300 billion per year more in services than we’re willing to pay for. Even 70% of self-proclaimed, hair-on-fire Tea Partiers want low taxes, our budget balanced, our debt reduced, Washington made irrelevant except for national defense and, oh, by the way, they want their Social Security and Medicare, too. Sadly, most of us are similarly wired.

We’ve been doing that kind of free lunch fantasizing for decades and have the national debt to prove it. While there always have been huge spenders and creators of enormous debt in Washington, we can attempt to point the finger of blame in any direction we like and it will always be a divining rod that points to us, because we as a society voted for the people who legislated the debt.

Now that debt is causing otherwise (sometimes) sensible people to suggest crazy things. It’s time for a national “get real” conversation about priorities and perhaps that is what is starting in DC. But we have to do more than hope that’s happening, which means that we all have to participate.

America needs a tax system that is congruent with what we decide to spend. Given that historically we’ve had top rates as high as 90% and still grew as a nation, a few points over the current marginal rate aren’t going to kill the golden goose and, really, they won’t make a dent in the lifestyles of the richest 2%.

Comment for the richest 2%: Please stop trying to sell the fiction that you’re the job creators and that trickle-down economics is anything other than a fraud. And tell your legislative buddies to do the same. The rest of us are tired of your 30-year attempt to manipulate us with those fictions.

We really don’t need to spend more on national defense than the next 17 countries (some say all the rest of the world) combined. The Cold War is over and we don’t need to prevent a Soviet invasion of Europe. WW II has been over for 47 years and we don’t need to prevent a Japanese invasion of anywhere. The people in the Pentagon don’t want the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that they have refused every time they were asked, so congress can stop authorizing still more billions for it. You get the idea – we have to stop defending against threats that no longer exist and buying toys we don’t need. That’s just a starting short list for pruning our absurd national defense budget.

That “get real” conversation has to include our willingness to shift our national priorities from lots of guns to a reasonable consumption of butter. And as unrealistic as we Americans can be, we need to recognize that there are a few things we must do – these are not optional.

We absolutely have to encourage, support and advance education. Were we to follow through with the outrageous cuts that have already been made and make the other proposed cuts to our education system, we would be metaphorically eating our seed corn. We would be ensuring that we will be unable to compete in a world that is increasingly better educated than us, sentencing our young to a dismal future. And enough already with the bashing of teachers and teachers unions. It’s way past time to stop looking for a boogeyman and instead construct an education system that serves our young for generations to come.

We cannot let our infrastructure continue to deteriorate. If you have doubts about such a statement, check with Minneapolis residents about the importance of maintaining bridges for our interstate highways. All of the survivors and all the loved ones of those who died as a result of the I-35W bridge collapse a few years ago wish that we had done a better job of upkeep. You’ll wish the same if a bridge collapses near or on you, like one did on the Fourth of July this year in Northbrook, IL, killing a couple in their car beneath the bridge.

Here’s another way to look at our infrastructure: We can’t afford the 25% loss of electricity traveling through our grid. We need to build a smart, efficient way to transmit electricity. It’s a national priority if you’re going to be able to plug in your electric car, your computer, your blender, your cell phone, your lights, your dishwasher and everything else that runs on electricity and have them work at an acceptable power cost. And it’s critical to have that smart grid if we are to shift away from fossil fuels and stop hard boiling the planet.

About the global warming denial thing – the flat-Earthers need to get a handle on reality, because if we don’t do what is necessary to counter that global threat, we can kiss good-bye all of our cities along every seashore and much of our arable farm land.

Memo to those who want to curtail, cut, eviscerate, bend, fold and mutilate Social Security and Medicare: We as a society are going to pay those costs one way or another. If we kill Medicare we’ll take our seniors away from practitioners who would provide early treatment for seniors’ ailments. Instead we will send them directly to the emergency room. That way we will provide healthcare in the most expensive and least effective method on the planet. In addition, lots of those seniors will die much younger than they would have had Medicare continued to be available. Think: Pulling the plug on Granny. Social Security cuts will produce parallel results. If you want America to save money, forget about abandoning those programs.

Final question about Social Security and Medicare: Why are the richest people in America contributing $43 million to lobby against those programs? Crank your brainpower on that and get back to me with an answer that is sensible for America. Yeah, right.

All of those issues require our thinking beyond the near horizon. The upcoming sequester business is the foolishness of trimming a budget with a meat cleaver. We have to stop focusing on the short-term stuff that tweaks our current senses and instead we must do our best to imitate reasonable adult behavior and plan for our future, as this petition and this petition call on us to do.

Get real, America. Demand grown-up behavior from your legislators. Tell them to leave their tantrums behind them and start having the conversation about the future of America and do it on an adult level. Tell them you require them to make good choices for tomorrow, because it most assuredly will come. The only question is whether we’ll be ready for it.

Making Sense

Oct 14

So much is ethically wrong and even economically nonsensical. I fight every day to keep my thinking out of the weeds, hoping to see the bigger picture and very occasionally I succeed. There are so many battles in this seemingly disappearing experiment in democracy and so many people are suffering with little relief in sight, even for the lofty ideals to which we say we aspire. Here are some examples of that.

Nicholas Kristof has a compelling piece in the New York Times about health and health care and the decisions we make. Economically, it makes little sense to pay over a half a million dollars to treat disease instead of just the few dollars that are required for routine screenings. Ethically, it makes no sense to let our citizens suffer and die because of economically driven poor choices (no medical insurance) or because of a profound lack of resources that prohibits routine health care. The system that makes that necessary is entirely about the greed of those whose hands are on the rudder

The second half of the 1960’s was an era of radical change and it was played out in part in drug experimentation. That flamboyant display of anti-establishment nose-thumbing resulted in draconian laws and mandatory sentencing like the “three strikes” rule that sent our young to prison for having a joint. The establishment surely showed its muscle by trashing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans for their youthful dalliances. It also cost billions of dollars to prosecute and incarcerate the offenders, forcing our legal establishment to divert limited resources away from nabbing the really bad guys. What do you think about the ethics and economics of that?

On November 6 voters in Washington, Colorado and Oregon will vote on whether to legalize recreational marijuana. That is far less odd, given the historical record, than that today’s establishment folks are in favor of legalization. And even that is less odd than that the illegal suppliers of pot are against legalization because it will slash their profits. Timothy Egan’s piece details this, and at root it’s all about simple human greed.

It is said that money is the root of all evil, but I don’t think that’s quite right. It is simply the tool we use for our human instincts to focus first and foremost on ourselves, to do what we see as in our own best interests. Frequently, human interpretations of that self-interest are quite short-sighted. No, it’s actually nearly always short-sighted, and it leads us down a path of self-destruction. Even the super-educated, self-protected wealthy 1% aren’t immune and they and we are sowing the seeds of our own demise because of our shortsightedness. Chrystia Freeland has written a compelling article about this and Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s book Why Nations Fail gives even greater clarity.

Self-destruction is ethically absurd and economically nonsensical, yet our leaders – at least the people we so often promote and elect – seem welded to taking us down that path. They lie to us by telling us that a voucher system isn’t a voucher system, that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, that (baby boomers will get this) we have to stop the scourge of Communism right there in Viet Nam so that we don’t have to fight them in Kansas, that we were winning that war, that Romney will cut taxes 20% but that his scheme won’t be a $5 trillion deficit, that the rich people are the job creators and the list goes on and on. To understand why they say such things, obey Deep Throat’s dictum: “Follow the money.” Yet so many of us believe the lies (or, at least, we don’t challenge them), largely because we are focused on our own concerns, just trying to make life work. But that is short-sighted and ultimately does ethical and economic damage to ourselves.

We’re not going to change human nature; each of us will continue to do what we perceive to be in our own best interests. What we can do is to look up now and then, get out of the weeds and recognized that tomorrow will come. And when it does, we will live in the consequences of today’s decisions.

What are the ethics and economics you want? Look up. See that tomorrow is on its way and that we do not have to continue on a path of craziness. Then speak up. If you don’t make your voice heard, people who want a very different America from the America you want will be heard, because they will be the only ones talking.

National Despair

Jul 28

There’s no point in waving arms, getting red in the face and snapping at the annoying tweaks that are sent only to distract and manipulate us. If we’re to understand what is behind our national despair we need to focus on the core issue that keeps us stuck in a morass of helplessness and prevents us from the exceptionalism we’re capable of creating.

Perhaps you believe that doing the right thing is the right thing to do. If so, this may fit for you:

I despair over the paralysis of America caused by the people who are supposed to be our leaders but who, instead, feather their own nest and ensure that their system is self-sustaining, much to the detriment of the rest of us.

I despair over the abdication of the regulatory muscle that could have prevented the banking-driven recession that has hurt so many Americans and has undermined the American brand throughout the world.

I despair over the abdication of the rule of law, like claiming that torture isn’t torture, like leading us into an unprovoked war and, every bit as damaging, by the near-complete failure of Congress and the press to do their jobs to prevent all that.

I despair over the public hatred and lies that are repeated by those in leadership positions and by ordinary, angry Americans as well, spreading the venom that has come to be tolerated and even believed by a distracted public.

I despair over angry young men who take handguns, rifles and automatic weapons to movie theaters and schools and kill innocents randomly, this while the NRA tells us that guns don’t kill and that assault weapons with 100 round drums must be legal and, by all means, let’s have 34 round magazines for those Glock semi-automatics.

I despair when the meteorologists tell us that we can expect this year’s drought to be repeated for years to come and, at the same time, people we’ve elected to be our leaders blatantly lie to us and declare that global warming doesn’t exist.

I despair when a congressman or senator shouts bigoted remarks at others and, worse, when those remarks aren’t rebuked by colleagues, the press and the public.

It’s true that we’ve always had haters and liars and that we’ve always had leaders who have twisted the truth because it serves them (and not America) well. We have always had fools and bullies.

But it seems that the American train has jumped the track over the past 30 years, that dishonesty has become the purpose and dysfunction the goal. For example, Ronald Reagan told us this about the Panama Canal: “We bought it, we paid for it, we built it and we intend to keep it!” That was a huge applause line, right up until the day he gave it away.

George H.W. Bush told us over and over, “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Then he raised taxes.

Bill Clinton told us, “I did not have sex with that woman – Ms. Lewinski,” but, well, you know.

Now Mitt Romney is twisting himself every way imaginable to tell us that he’s always been against all those things he was always for.

And these are our leaders.

In any relationship, each has a part in the situation, so ultimately, it boils down to what we – you and I, our neighbors, your goofy brother-in-law, the retired couple down the street and everyone who works at the businesses in your town – have agreed to settle for. We have let self-serving dishonesty penetrate our leadership as we simply went about our lives with myopic focus. The lack of public integrity is so common now that we barely lift an eyebrow when we hear the next whopper. It’s what we expect. And that is the real poison of despair.

There is a glimmer of hope, though, that holds promise for us. We can cure our national despair and it is so simple, so easy and so obvious. We have the power to change everything and it is in our hands right now.

All we have to do is to stop settling. All we have to do is to stop tolerating the intolerable. All we have to do is to demand truth and call out the liars.

It’s time.

The Common Wisdom

Mar 10

We all know that the country is center-right. Perhaps it’s there as a result of a pendulum swing from the socially farther left pendulum of the 60’s and the politicians and pundits now like to tell us we’re center-right almost as throw-away line. Or maybe people just keep saying that and have done so for such a long time that we’ve come to believe it, but repetition doesn’t make the claim accurate. Take a look at just a few issues before us.

Jobs – About 306 million of we 307 million Americans want the government to take energetic action to ramp up the economy and create jobs. The noise from the far right is the only thing that is making it seem like there is huge opposition to that. As a nation, we are left of center now on jobs.

Voting rights – Americans believe overwhelmingly that all of us over the age of 18, with the possible exception of convicted felons, should vote. That’s pretty much smack dab in the center, not center-right. On the other hand, there are Republican strategists who have openly stated that the only people they want to vote are those who will vote Republican.

In the 2010 election many states voted far right legislators into office and they have enacted laws they have fraudulently proclaimed are to protect us from a blight of voting fraud. The thing is that voting fraud almost never happens – not even in Chicago. These laws serve solely as an obstacle to voting for young people, the elderly, the poor and those in minorities who tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Let’s see, righty R’s preventing D’s from voting. Hmmm.

Immigration – Most of us believe that if people do something wrong that they should bear the consequences. And most of us believe that children of illegal immigrants, born in this country and who have broken no laws should not bear those consequences. Righties don’t want to pass the Dream Act and they are completely out of step with the majority of Americans. The R’s continue to oppose it because they’re afraid they’ll get “primaried” in the next election by a fanatic on the lunatic right fringe. That keeps them disconnected from everyone but the aforementioned lunatic right fringe.

This issue is complex, but as a nation we’re pretty much in the center.

Taxes on the wealthy – Depending on the week and the poll, anywhere between 62 – 80% of Americans favor increased taxes on the rich. Only the righties who signed Grover Norquist’s pledge to never raise taxes, along with some already wealthy people are opposed to that. That is to say, the country is center-left on this issue.

Contraception – Do you really need an explanation about this? Even 98% of Catholic women have used some form of birth control and only some fundamentalist righties have a problem with it. It’s just that a few of them have very loud voices. We Americans are far left in favor of contraception.

Women’s choice – The majority of Americans continue to be pro-choice, although by a smaller margin now than in past decades. In part that’s because of the loss of institutional memory of how things used to be before Roe v. Wade. It wasn’t pretty. We are center-left on this.

Global warming – It’s not just all the environmental scientists; most Americans believe that the Earth is getting warmer and that mankind’s activities like burning fossil fuels is contributing to it. The only question is why anyone denies that. To find the answer, follow the money. It’s way on the right. (Ref: “And another thing” below)

Social Security & Medicare – These are the two most popular programs ever created by the federal government and America is far left on them. Only the righties want to abolish or privatize them.

Note to budget hawk absolutist righties: We made a contract with the American people, who pre-paid for these services and we must keep our word. I know you’ll understand that.

Education – The righties want to abolish the Department of Education at both the federal and state levels. They are starving schools of funds, so teachers, administrators and janitors are being laid off. School maintenance and improvement projects are being halted and the disparity between the education of our poor children and the rich kids who get to go to elite schools continues to widen. Our children are suffering, their future becomes bleaker every day we fail them and we are putting the future of America in peril.

Americans don’t like this. They want their children to be educated and think public education is a very good thing. The righties are completely out of sync with America on this. This country is way left on education.

Healthcare – Most Americans want the government to do more to fix it. All that is standing in the way is the resistance borne of the hundreds of billions of dollars being collected every year by the medical insurance companies, big pharma, big hospitals and a few others. We’ve tried letting the market fix this. That has resulted in our having the most expensive healthcare in the world, while at the same time we’re getting just middling results. Only the far righties with megaphones attached to their faces think that continuing to let the free market work is the solution. We want affordable healthcare and are at least center-left on this issue.

The list can go on until sunrise. Those saying that we are a center-right nation have either bought into the Big Lie or think they will benefit by making you believe it.

It turns out that the common wisdom isn’t so common, nor is it so very wise after all.

—————————————————————————–

And another thing . . .

Have you seen the TV commercials with the pleasant looking blonde lady in a black pants suit talking about American energy? She tells us how plentiful it is and all we have to do is go get it. As an example, she walks across a map of the lower 48 and tells us about, ” . . . tapping Canadian oil sands for U.S. consumers.” Sounds great.

Except the plan for the Canadian oil sands crude is to transport that heaviest, dirtiest crude oil with the greatest global warming footprint via the XL Pipeline to our gulf coast for exporting to other nations. I need for them to explain once again how that stuff is for U.S. consumers because I’m not seeing how exporting it makes it for us.

One last comment: That ad and the others like it are sponsored by the American Petroleum Industry, the promotional organization of Big Oil. Just so you know.

“We move through life like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.” – William Landay

O’ See Can You Say?

Jan 21

Scratch any neo-con and you’ll instantly hear the vision: “We want small government, low taxes and the government out of our lives.” Clear, crisp and compelling.

Scratch a progressive and you’ll hear paragraphs of theory and a rant that will make your eyes cross and will hurt your brain. And the message will change with each progressive you listen to, leaving you confused and reaching for something solid on which to steady yourself.

The righties have been selling their message consistently at least since Richard Nixon. He wanted to discredit the press – he called them the “eastern liberal press.” They were the people he saw through his paranoia as always attacking him. So, he had his felon vice-president Spiro T. Agnew call them “nattering nabobs of negativity” and Agnew used that moniker over and over. It didn’t matter whether people knew what a nabob was, because the message that the press can’t be trusted got through. And it is continuing to get through.

The attack on the press (now the “media”) has most recently and shrilly been blared through the snarling lips of Sarah Palin, who calls the press the “lamestream media,” which is odd, since she is a regular on Fox News, making her part of the “lamestream media.”

The press used to be called the Fourth Estate. It was seen as a de facto check on government and was trusted to do that job. Not so much any more, though, after 44 years of being slimed by the self-appointed Republican attack machine.

Ronald Reagan was up front in selling distrust of government. He told us that the nine most feared words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” He played into people’s stereotyped attitudes and frustrations and got himself elected as the head of the government, strangely doing this by denouncing government.

He told us he was for small government, low taxes and the government out of our lives. Then he set about massively increasing government, raising taxes twelve times and building national debt that surpassed all other presidents combined. Yet strangely, he’s still remembered as the president who was for small government and low taxes. That disconnect can be traced to neo-cons selling the Reagan image (not the substance) consistently for twenty-four years, so that few Americans hear the lie and realize that the Republicans are largely responsible for the terrible economic situation in which Americans find themselves and their country today.

At the most recent Republican primary debate one of the candidates used the post office as an example of government failure and illustrative of how we don’t want government running our healthcare. The South Carolina Republican audience loved it, even though the post office is a model of low cost mail delivery that consistently produces excellent results. It was fiscally solvent until the Republicans required it to fully fund the pensions of workers not yet born. Furthermore, the government runs Medicare and nobody on Medicare – not a single person – will say they don’t like it. Still, the image of government bungling and inefficiency sells to an already jaded public.

The point is that the Republicans have had great success in keeping their hands on power by selling a clear, crisp and compelling vision in a clear, crisp and compelling way. And they have done that while pursuing exactly the opposite of what they promise. To be sure, that dichotomy is not solely the province of Republicans; however, what is most important to learn is the excellence of their messaging. It sells. It gets votes. It wins elections.

People have chuckled for decades over Will Rogers’ declaration, “I’m not a member of an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” Somehow, that isn’t quite as funny today, when America is desperate for organization around a clear, crisp and compelling vision that is worthy of us and doesn’t pander to extremists.

We’re struggling through the largely fact-free world of politics with little but lies and distortion to be seen. It’s time the progressives got it together to produce a clear, crisp and compelling message to go along with a clear and vibrant strategy. The best products don’t always win, but the best marketing does.

Previous 1 … 33 34 35 36 Next Scroll to top

JaxPolitix

Disambiguation from the political and social musings of Jack Altschuler