Year: 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hullabaloo around the exchange of one U.S. serviceman for five Taliban prisoners kept for years at the Guantanamo prison on the island of Cuba has grown beyond the point of a tremendous echo that is so loud it swallows itself.

But lost in the numerous condemnations and defenses of the Obama Administration’s actions and the rescued soldier’s character is the fact that the Obama Administration may have learned lessons from its past failures to follow due process in the so-called war on terrorism. In the past, Obama’s operatives saw no problem shredding the concept of due process by using drones to assassinate an American citizen suspected of terrorist activities. Obama’s soldiers also failed to follow the law when they killed Osama bin Laden instead of taking him into custody and putting him on trial.  If we consider gathering evidence as part of due process, then the National Security Agency (NSA) has been denying millions of Americans due process since Obama took the oath of office (and before that, of course!).

Instead of condemning Bowe Bergdahl for desertion by letting the Taliban keep him, the Obama Administration assumed he was innocent and did what it was supposed to do—get our soldiers out. With Bergdahl home, the Army can now decide whether there is enough evidence of desertion to order a court martial trial.

Those who are angry that we made the deal because Bergdahl is or may be a deserter are just wrong. Following the law is always a good thing and we should all be delighted that Obama Administration followed the legal concept of due process in deciding to make the deal.

Whether Obama broke the law by not telling Congress of the completion of the deal ahead of time is another story. A Wall Street Journal editorial said Obama was within his rights not to tell Congress. A New York Times editorial disagreed. I tend to side with the Times’ view, but understand the President’s frustration with Congress at this point. The Republicans have been so quick to put barriers in the way of conducting the nation’s business, I can see why the Administration was tempted to interpret its past discussions with Congress on this exchange of prisoners to have been sufficient. After all, it wasn’t as if we were bombing Cambodia or selling arms to Iran.

Those who are angry with the president for not telling Congress are thus making a mountain out of a mole hill.

The third objection to the trade—that we gave away too much for too little—is absolutely bogus. As David Brooks and distinguished anti-death penalty attorney, Marshall Dayan, have both pointed out, Israel has been known to trade hundreds of Palestinians for one Israeli soldier.

The implication behind saying “we gave away too much” is that each soldier is an asset and not a human being who is part of our community. It’s akin to saying that a favorite baseball team gave us too much when it traded five players for one. It’s all about what you get and what you give up, even if an American life is at stake. I reject this attitude.

But even if we accept this anti-humanistic view and judge the situation with a cold, business-like attitude, the statement “we gave away too much” is ridiculous. The five Taliban fighters exchanged for Bergdahl had all been incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay for years. If we are to extrapolate from past reports about Guantanamo, these men have probably undergone the most punitive and harsh kind of treatment. They may all be useless in battle, mere shells of what they had once been. They could all be broken men by now.  If we assume that Bergdahl went through similar horrors, then the trade could result in one nothing for five nothings.

Those who are saying the president gave away too much are therefore just wrong.

But as with everything good and bad that happens in the Unites States since January 2009, the far right turns it into a failure that shows Obama’s incompetence and his so-called “socialist” predilections. If anything, the Bergdahl controversy demonstrates that large numbers of Americans have a double standard for presidents—a higher one for African-Americans.

For years, I saw this ugly trend play out on a local level in Pittsburgh several times: Hire an African-American for a high visibility position with a large community organization and then start attacking everything he or she does and hold the person to a much higher standard than would be required of a “good old boy.” In one case, after firing a prominent African-American from a critical position in public education, a board of education of a local school district hired a white who proposed a very similar program of school cuts and closures that the African-American had. Of course, the white was praised and the plan implemented.

Obama has clearly been a disappointment as president, but his administration does not deserve the pile-on it has gotten for many things, including health reform, Benghazi, the Ukraine and Bergdahl.  Let’s blame him for his real mistakes like obtrusive NSA spying and caving into the Republicans about the sequester, but not for his successes or for doing things that every other president would have done in the same situation.

I have another book review in Jewish Currents, this one about David Landau’s extensive biography of Ariel Sharon, known for both his brutal prosecution of war against the Palestinians and his unilateral decision in 2005 to dismantle Israeli settlements and withdraw from occupied territory. For the complete review and some other very interesting articles in Jewish Currents, visit the website.

Here are some excerpts from my article:

Napoleon once said that he needed ten thousand new soldiers a month to wage his wars. What he meant was that he knew that ten thousand of his own troops would die every month. He was stating what every war-time general understands: You can’t fight a war without causing a lot of death and destruction to both losers and winners. Throughout history, virtually all war-time generals have been willing to shed a lot of blood, both the eminently successful ones like Scipio Africanus, Ulysses S. Grant, and Georgy Zhukov, and the failures like Robert E. Lee and Luigi Cadorna.

To call Ariel Sharon a bloodthirsty butcher, then, merely states the obvious. Of course he was: he commanded in war time. In Arik, his new biography of Ariel Sharon, David Landau demonstrates a painful awareness that a savage inhumanity comes with the job description for military leaders like “Arik, King of the Jews” as many Israelis proclaimed Sharon after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. But Landau, former editor-in-chief of Haaretz, also strives to make clear that for many of the years before he became prime minister Sharon was not a decision-maker in the inner sanctum, but only an instrument who followed orders as effectively and ruthlessly as possible. Whenever Sharon wrought too much death and destruction, his hands were slapped, but he was protected and always held in reserve for the next dirty job.

For example, David Ben-Gurion and his cadre of young advisors expected and then fretted little about the many civilian deaths incurred when Sharon’s troops raided Jordanian villages in the early 1950s. In the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, it was again someone else’s vision and policy — Menachem Begin’s — that Sharon pursued with a brutal disregard for civilian life.

Make no mistake about it, Sharon always advocated a take-no-prisoners approach to war. He sought to inflict the maximum pain possible on the enemy, was not squeamish about sacrificing soldiers to attain a goal, and thought little of protecting civilians. Take his use of bulldozers and grenades to drive out terrorists in Gaza in the early ’70s. Landau reports he cleaned out an entire Bedouin community in one day.

It was, however, Sharon’s ruthlessness and persistence that won the 1973 war when his troops took the beachhead at which the Israeli military could cross over from the Sinai onto the mainland of Egypt. He did it with cunning and aggressiveness; as Landau describes his approach, “Surprise the enemy, throw him off balance, come at him from an unexpected angle, attack, attack, attack.”

Sharon always got the dirty jobs: As Minister of Defense, he cleared the Sinai of settlers to comply with the peace treaty with Egypt. He later said this was a mistake, but Landau believes it served as Sharon’s model for the more significant forced evacuations of Jewish settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank in 2005.

Another dirty job: Sharon held various cabinet posts for twenty years, but whatever the job title, he was always in charge of settlements.

Through Landau’s book, five recurring themes emerge:

1. As a general, Sharon always went further than ordered. In Lebanon, for example, he went into West Beirut without the knowledge or explicit permission of the cabinet. Landau acknowledges, however, that Sharon’s overreaching was usually implicit in the actual orders given him, so that Israeli leaders knew or could surmise that he might march further, take more prisoners or let his soldiers behave more brutally than commanded in the official orders.

2. Sharon was prone to lie about what he had done and why. For example, as the new head of infantry training, he lied about why he missed a regularly scheduled meeting, and it was only through the intervention of Ben Gurion that he was allowed to stay in the army.

3. Sharon was usually a disruptive force, screaming and insulting others. When he disagreed with policy, he usually went public with his dissent.

4. As portrayed by Landau, Sharon was always ambitious for a higher rank and more power, never willing to “wait his turn,” and often used threats and lies to climb the ladder.

5. A succession of governments followed the pattern of punishing Sharon for overstepping his authority or creating too much bloodshed, then bringing him back for the next dirty job.

Landau quotes Shimon Peres’ belief that it was Sharon who broke the 1984 Labor-Likud deadlock by negotiating the terms by which the two parties could form a government. In return, Sharon was named Minister of Industry and Trade. During the time that Labor controlled this “unity” government, he created the 6-4 edge by always voting with Labor.

Sharon’s gradual rehabilitation and transformation is the overarching storyline in Arik. After his resignation as defense minister in the wake of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, he gradually grew from hothead to wise man. His public persona as prime minister was of a kind and comforting grandfather, revered and loved with “an aura of mature unflappability and gravitas,” as Landau puts it. Sharon himself encapsulated his approach in his slogan, “Restraint is strength.”

Landau lends drama and a sense of inevitability to the false turns and disappointments that led to Sharon’s 2005 decision to unilaterally withdraw and dismantle settlements, the stated goal of which was to set the stage for a two-state solution. According to Landau, Sharon showed signs of understanding the necessity of a two-state solution to preserve a democratic Jewish state years before he became prime minister by being the only general in 1970 who voted to support the Palestinians in their efforts to overturn King Hussein.

Because his focus is on Sharon’s role in events, Landau occasionally assumes that readers know the basic facts and sometimes leaves out important detail.

Landau also fails to explore the militarization of Israeli society and politics. Modern Israel is a nation in which military men have always held a goodly share of the cabinet posts and mostly guided policy. He does present the post-1967 Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as less capable and heroic than we in the United States generally think of them. They blundered often after 1967, for example in the lead-up to the Yom Kippur War and in their early reaction to the second intifada, in which they apparently ignored the lessons of the first.

But Landau eschews any discussion of how militarization has affected larger society and the economy. For example, he notes that Sharon appointed Netanyahu as minister of finance and gave him the job of improving the economy by cutting government benefits, but while Landau discloses that one goal of the cuts was to compel the ultra-religious and Arab women to get jobs, he never recognizes that the heavy military burden was one of the major causes of the sluggish economy.

We are so used to depicting the Jewish culture as peaceful, and imagining Jews as victims, that we forget that a strain of militarism runs through Jewish history. Three times in its ancient and/or mythical history, Jewish generals have waged wars of conquest: the original conquest of Canaan; the war by David using the troops of Israel’s enemies to dethrone King Saul; and the civil war in which the ultra-religious under the Maccabees wrested control of ancient Israel. (One could build a case that the revolt against British authority after World War II marked a fourth such war of conquest.)  Many Jews look to Jewish religious documents to justify these wars, and the justification has always reduced to the same idea: God gave the land of Israel to the Jews. Archeology has demonstrated, however, that the justifications were mostly written after the wars ended. After all, the histories of wars are usually written by the winners.

Being in a constant state of siege transforms even the most inherently humanistic of societies, and modern Israel has faced constant warfare since its inception as a democratic homeland for the Jews. Defenders of the state have always made a moral distinction between Israelis and the enemy, taking the high ground by virtue of religious texts, Israel’s existence as a democracy, and an almost smug belief in the moral essence of Jewish society and leadership. Uncritical defenders trust that this moral essence prevents Israel from waging anything other than a “just war.”

The Israel Defense Force (IDF) proclaimed this moral high ground with its ”Purity of Arms” principle, one of the ten values of IDF’s basic doctrine: “The soldier shall make use of his weaponry and power only for the fulfillment of the mission and solely to the extent required; he will maintain his humanity even in combat. The soldier shall not employ his weaponry and power in order to harm non-combatants or prisoners of war, and shall do all he can to avoid harming their lives, body, honor and property.” But even a cursory readings of Arik will unearth enough incidents of civilian casualties, “collateral damage,” and outright brutality to put the lie to the “Purity of Arms” concept. Just as the principle of American exceptionalism has been used to justify the moral right of the U.S. to wage wars of aggression, so has the Israeli government and society bolstered its continued preference for violence over negotiation with a Jewish version of exceptionalism. It’s easy for a nation at war for more than seventy years, with a near-universal military draft and career soldiers dominating government, to delude itself about its conduct during wars, but the acts speak for themselves.

Sharon’s career before assuming the office of prime minister reminds me of the character of Li Kui in the classic Chinese war novel, The Water Margin. Li Kui, or the Black Whirlwind, is the most violent and vicious of the hundred and eight heroes who band together to defeat the imperial Chinese army, which has fallen into corrupt hands. Impetuous, bloodthirsty and untrustworthy, Li Kui is always kept out of the inner circle of decision-making, but when the band needs a particularly bloody or untidy piece of work accomplished, they turn to him. His violent and bombastically antisocial ways are often set in contrast to the group’s charismatic leader, the venerable and intellectual Song Jiang, who has a global view of the struggle for justice. The novel presents Li Kui as a kind of alter ego to Song Jiang, the flip side of the same coin.

Perhaps the saddest recent development in Israel is that a stroke prevented Ariel Sharon from fully shedding the persona of a Jewish Li Kui and becoming the wise and far-seeing Song Jiang — a figure so tragically missing in contemporary Israel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some results reported in The Economist, the only mass media outlet to report on the study as of this writing:

• When lots of wealthy people (more than 80%) liked a policy, it went into effect 45% of the time.
• When very few wealthy people (fewer than 20%) supported a policy, it went into effect 18% of the time.
• Whether very few of a vast majority of people with average income wanted a policy did not matter: policies passed 30% of the time in either case.
• Interest groups representing the non-wealthy such as unions have little or no impact on what policies our elected officials support, vote on and implement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s what most whites meant when they used the N-word from about 1800 onwards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Across the country, colleges are holding graduation ceremonies for hundreds of thousands of graduates. But what used to be called the graduation season is rapidly gaining a new name: commencement speaker cancellation season.

This year in particular there seems to be a large number of high profile commencement speakers who have backed out or have been disinvited after campus protests. Former Bush II Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was forced out as Rutgers’ commencement speaker. International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde withdrew from speaking at Smith College after protests.  Former University of California-Berkeley Chancellor, Robert J. Birgeneau, withdrew from speaking at Haverford after protesters wanted him to apologize for having campus police use batons against Occupy protesters. Brandeis University reversed its decision to award Islamic feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree, after previously announcing it would do so, after protests by right-wing Moslems over her criticism of their religion.  Even Michelle Obama changed her mind about going to a Kansas high school graduation after right-wingers protested.

In three of these cases, progressive protesters forced out conservative speakers. In the two other examples, religious radicals forced out moderates who they mistakenly labeled as extremists.

Taken together, these commencement speaker cancellations involve a series of laudable and not-so-laudable actions.  In all examples, we should admire the protesters for exercising their right to make their opinions known.

But we should be disappointed in and ashamed of the institutions and the prominent individuals who backed down. Protests would have made for messy commencements, which are usually drawn out affairs that involve a lot of sophisticated choreography to move thousands of graduates on to and off the stage in a short amount of time. But so what, life is messy and democracy is messy.  By backing down or backing out, the individuals and institutions demonstrated a lack of respect for public discourse.

While we can admire organizations such as the New York Public Library that back down when it turns out their plans are not in the public’s best interests, giving a speaker a platform is never an occasion for backing down. Instead, the institutions could expand the venue—for example, getting another speaker to balance the controversial speaker or creating a special forum to discuss the controversies during commencement week.  The colleges could even give the protesters 10 minutes at the ceremonies to make their points.

To the degree that the speakers themselves made the decision to withdraw, they should be ashamed of themselves. They took the actions that made them controversial. They should own what they did or repudiate it. They should not run away from a spotlight that they themselves created.

For some of the educational institutions in question, backing down from the original plan marks their second mistake. Their first was to invite the speaker in the first place.

Let’s start with Birgeneau: To invite an obscure university administrator known for one action only is an open endorsement of that action. Haverford officials were stating that they thought it was right to beat up peaceful Occupy protesters. No wonder faculty and staff mobilized against the decision to ask Birgeneau to speak.

The case of Condoleezza is also easy: Commencement speakers are supposed to send graduates off on the journey that will be the rest of their lives with hopeful advice that spurs their enthusiasms and aspirations. The commencement speaker thus carries a certain moral authority.  How can anyone who was associated with the decision to create a world-wide network of torture facilities be considered a moral authority? Rice, Cheney, Bush II, Rumsfeld, John Yoo, David Addington and anyone else who was involved in deciding to pursue torture as an instrument of war should be American pariahs. No university invited Joseph McCarthy or Roy Cohn to speak after their disgrace and none should invite these international criminals, either.

Some would argue that Christine Lagarde is also a war criminal by virtue of her activities as head of the IMF. I would agree that many IMF actions have hurt people while protecting the interests of banks. It’s a political argument between left and right.  Lagarde’s politics do not in and of themselves forfeit her the moral right to be a commencement speaker, as the actions of Condoleezza Rice and Robert Birgeneau do.

The case of Brandeis University is the trickiest. On the surface, there is nothing morally objectionable in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s actions and statements. She has fought for years against female genital mutilation and formed an organization, the AHA Foundation, whose mission is to work “to protect and reinforce the basic rights and freedoms of women and girls, including security and control of their own bodies, access to an education, the ability to work outside the home and control their own income, freedom of expression and association, and the myriad other basic civil rights defined under the laws of Western democracies and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” The fact that she is a fellow of the ultra-conservative American Enterprise Institute is troubling, but I can see why any mainstream organization would want to demonstrate its commitment to human rights by awarding Ali an honorary degree.

Except that Brandeis is not any mainstream organization. It is a Jewish organization giving an award to a woman who is disrupting Islam. Yes, we should support her disruptions, just as we support the disruptions that pro-choice and supporters of LGBT marriage make to the Christian and Catholic religious institutions and belief.  But when Brandeis does it, it carries stark and obvious symbolism, because it’s as if a Jewish organization is taunting Islamists, purposely getting their goat.  It plays into the myths that many right-wing Moslems have about Jews.

Someone—actually a lot of people—at Brandeis must have known that giving an honorary degree to Ali would piss off the Islamic right wing, which makes the withdrawal of the degree particularly obnoxious and cowardly. If you are going to stir the pot, don’t wimp out, which is what Brandeis has done.