Thursday, June 30, 2016
James Zogby: My Role with the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee
My Role With the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee
I wasn't going to write about this subject, but something happened yesterday over lunch that prompted me to reconsider.
I was having a peaceful meal with my wife when two men sat down in the next booth. In loud voices they began to discuss the state of the presidential contest. At one point, the gentleman directly behind me said, "and Sanders picked that Cornel West and that guy who's the head of the Arab League who has it in for Israel...".
That did it. I spun around and said, in a polite but firm voice, "I'm that guy. I'm not the head of the Arab League and I'm asking you to change the subject now." Shocked, the man responded "you're him!" and began asking me questions. I cut him off making it clear that I was having lunch and wasn't interested in pursuing the matter. They promptly changed the subject, as I had requested. After we finished eating, I turned to the two men and explained who I was and why I found the crude description of me to be so aggravating.
In some ways I fault The Washington Post and other mainstream news outlets for having unleashed the mini-firestorm that followed my recent appointment to the Democratic Party's platform drafting committee. When I first heard from DNC Chair
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz that I was to be named to the committee, I held my breath, fully expecting an attack from the usual collection of far-right, anti-Arab, and hardline pro-Israel groups. Sure enough, they didn't disappoint. I was called "a professional Israel-hater", "a defender of terrorism", "Bernie's Svengali", and it was claimed (falsely) that I had "accused Israel of committing a Holocaust".
This, unfortunately, is what I have learned to expect from that crowd. What, however, I found most troubling was the first headline that appeared in The Washington Post announcing "Sanders picks pro-Palestinian activist for Democratic platform committee". With this, the die was cast. Other major newspapers and media outlets followed suit framing the entire discussion of the platform and my appointment around Israel/Palestine—culminating in a call I received yesterday, right after lunch, from a journalist who asked if he was right in assuming that Bernie had appointed me as his hatchet man on this Israel.
I am, of course, a strong supporter of Palestinian rights, so is Bernie Sanders, and so, according to a recent Gallup poll, are a majority of Democrats. But the crude effort to reduce Sanders' entire campaign and my entire life's work to an effort to "get Israel" betrays an unsettling anti-Arab bias and a bizarre obsession to which I must respond. It does damage to Sanders, to me, and to our nation's ability to have an honest conversation about a critical issue of importance.
By focusing exclusively on Israel and ignoring all of the other concerns that Sanders has brought to this year's presidential campaign, the press does a grave disservice to his efforts to elevate the issues of universal health care, free college tuition, raising the minimum wage, investing in clean energy, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, and making Wall Street pay its fair share in taxes. This is a not so subtle attempt to demean the man and dismiss his candidacy as marginal.
The same is true for me. In response to the question from the editorial writer as to why Bernie may have appointed me, I recited a bit of my resume. To be sure, I am the proud founder of a number Arab American organizations, but I have also served on the DNC for 23 years. I have been on the DNC Executive Committee for the past 15 years; co-Chaired the DNC Resolutions Committee for the past 10; and have chaired the party's Ethnic Council since 2009. I served as Ethnic Outreach Advisor to both the Gore 2000 and the Obama 2008 Campaigns. And President Obama has twice appointed me to two-year terms on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
When the mainstream media and the far-right groups converge in turning my entire life's work into a one-dimensional caricature—"pro-Palestinian activist"—they are not complimenting me. They are setting me up. Make no mistake, I am proud of my advocacy for Palestinian rights, but given the political climate in which we live, such crude reductionism lays the predicate for political exclusion, violence, and threats of violence. Over the years, Arab Americans have suffered from all of these challenges to our rights. I know. I've been there.
When I spoke in favor of a two-state solution in 1988, before this position became fashionable, I was told by Democratic Party leaders "you'll never have a place in this party again". Following that year's convention, Michael Dukakis rejected the endorsement of our Arab American Democratic Federation saying "it was too controversial". When, in 1990, Ron Brown, then Chair of the DNC, came to speak at an Arab American event I was hosting (becoming the first party chair to attend an Arab American event), he told me that he was threatened with a loss of financial support "if you even go into the room with those people".
And then there is the violence. The first time I received a death threat was 1970. My office was fire-bombed in 1980 and after 9/11 three men went to jail for threatening my life and the lives of my children. In every instance, the perpetrators claimed to be striking out for reasons to do with my ethnicity and/or Israel. Now, in the wake of the announcement of my platform committee assignment, the hate mail (but, thank God, no threats) has started up again.
Even beyond this danger, by silencing my community and marginalizing us because we might dare to advocate for Palestinians, there is the damage that this hysteria does to our national discourse. For example, I have been denounced for criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but my writings on this subject are not unlike those written by Israelis and some in the American Jewish community. At issue, it appears, is not what we are saying, but that we are the ones saying it. We are accused of "singling Israel out", while in reality it is our critics who are singling out this issue as the only one we cannot discuss.
In addition to all of the other critical issues Bernie Sanders has raised, he has done our nation and the cause of peace a service by bringing the matter of Israel/Palestine into the national debate. It belongs there and deserves to be discussed on its merits, without rancor and without fear. I am proud that Sanders has demonstrated the courage to do this and I am confident that if we work together on the platform committee with openness and mutual respect we can forge a new consensus that reflects the will of the majority of Democrats on all of the critical issues facing our country—including the way forward to articulating the principles that would help us achieve a just and lasting solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Dr. James J. Zogby is the author of Arab Voices (Palgrave Macmillan, October 2010) and the founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI), a Washington, D.C.-based organization which serves as the political and policy research arm of the Arab American community.
Harpers Ferry, WV
Geoffrey Jacques: What We Talk about when we talk about socialism
What We Talk About When We Talk About Socialism
A satisfactory answer to the question "What is Socialism?" is harder to find than might seem the case at first glance. One reason for this is that the movement has always toggled between the burden of Utopia and the urgency of the fight for justice. This has been true since its earliest days, when Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrenched the "socialist" label from the ancient network of counterculture communities and coops they called "Utopian" and then pinned the adjective "scientific" to their own project.
Other than the phrases "to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy" that we find in the Communist Manifesto, we have very little from Marx and his early followers about how the socialist dream would be realized. The new society didn't seem to look that much different to Marx than it had to the traditional Utopians, with the distinction between them consisting of squabbles about the means to achieve the goal. For Marx and Engels, socialism would come when "all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation." It would be, they wrote, "an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."
Let's remember that in college Marx was educated in German Idealist philosophy. He seemed to think the proletariat as "the ruling class" would usher in an order governed by reason in Hegel's sense, and by Kant's categorical imperative. This would all take place in a polity that resembles Friedrich Schiller's "Aesthetic State," where "man encounters man" only "as an object of free play." It's a society in which, to again quote Schiller, "to grant freedom by means of freedom is the fundamental law" (italics in the original). Marx's idea of renovating the division of labor, expressed in The German Ideology [1] as "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic" is not that radically different from Utopia as it has been imagined since Plato's day. When Marx saw what he took to be a real life manifestation of his ideas, in the Paris Commune of the spring of 1871, his account reminded me of descriptions of New England town meetings or of some militant union or movement meetings where the community itself made consequential decisions regarding the allocation of power and resources.
Socialists generally subscribe to the idea that the good society is one in which everybody is actively and decisively involved in allocating power and resources in the cause of advancing the common good. They want a society where the equivalent recognition of difference allows social distinctions between persons to be valued rather than subject to discrimination and the imposition of pariah status. It's a place where each person is motivated by selflessness in a community where people cultivate a state of creative leisure we can associate with the term "living aesthetically," and where each and all are materially rewarded in a way that advances equality.
All of this would also take place in a culture that prizes personal material modesty over decadent wastefulness. W. E. B. Du Bois, in a 1930 Howard University commencement speech, summed up this latter point. "We cannot all be wealthy," he said. "We should not all be wealthy." In an ideal society, he added, "no person should have an income which he does not personally need; nor wield a power solely for his own whim." Just as Du Bois was speaking, the ideology of wealth had generated a worldwide depression and the collapse of capitalist civilization, and war fever was preparing the greatest outbreak of barbarism the world had ever seen. Against this, Du Bois proposed "a simple healthy life on limited income" as "the only responsible ideal of civilized folk."
Socialism's hopeful and problematic past
For a long time one's attitude toward the Bolshevik version of the good society was a thick red marker that placed you in one or another corner of the socialist movement. Feelings among the Communist-led project's sympathizers ranged, but few believed the societies created by the Bolshevik Revolution-inspired movement were perfect. Many saw the police state aspects of these societies as a temporary thing. Meanwhile, governments inspired by Marx and Lenin had gained widespread respect for even attempting what every banker and industrialist knew in his heart was contrary to human nature.
Many of those socialists would today say, about the legacy of Bolshevism in power, that whatever good the Communist-led governments accomplished (a point that itself still generates heated debate), they ended up botching the thing pretty badly. There are lots of reasons for this, and it's an easy enough game to speculate on what went wrong. One explanation I like is that Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin all thought the criminal ethos and the acts that necessarily follow from it could be controlled and put to utilitarian use by the revolutionary party and state.
In a 1920 polemic against Karl Kautsky, Lenin defended this proposition. Kautsky was the leading Marxist theoretician of his age. He co-wrote the 1891 Erfurt Program of the German Social Democratic Party, which provoked a comment from Engels that I will refer to in a moment. Lenin focused on the idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." This was an invention of Marx and Engels, but it had increasingly come to be seen - since at least the Erfurt Program - as inappropriate to the task of "winning the battle of democracy." Lenin, however, used this notion to defend the repressive aspects of the Soviet state. He took what had been a waning concept in socialist circles, reshaped it, and turned it into his own.
"The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat," he wrote [2] in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1920), is "power won and maintained by the violence of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie." Lenin's focus on violence alarmed many of the old-line socialists who felt he included them in his definition of "the bourgeoisie." But it was the words that follow that really set the stage for subsequent history. The "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat," Lenin claimed, was not just violence, but "power unrestricted by any laws" (emphasis added). That opened the gates to the road to perdition.
It also had two other consequences. It helped cement the split between old-line socialists and the newer Communist movement. There also emerged a kind of split personality among members of the latter group, who, while defending democracy at home, often found themselves with the difficult job of also defending - in the name of "proletarian internationalism" - a Bolshevik-led government when it committed some lawless act. I've often wondered if anybody told the Bolsheviks how the revolutionaries at Philadelphia in 1783, who decided to compromise with the criminal slave power tyranny in their own midst, almost wrecked the fragile Republic they'd created, leaving a legacy that threatens its stability to this day. The Bolsheviks' compromise with the ethos of criminality was a foundational corruption that gravely wounded the socialist dream.
In addition, Communists in power didn't believe in autonomy for civil society institutions. They also didn't believe in the separation of powers. After a violent confrontation between the workers and the Workers' State in Germany in 1953, Bertolt Brecht commented, in his poem "The Solution," on the workers having acted contrary to the revolutionaries' expectations. "Would it not be easier," he asked, "for the government/To dissolve the people/And elect another?" Even now, a quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the role of workers' uprisings in ending the Bolshevik version of the socialist dream is little remarked on by those of us who were part of the movement that Lenin's followers started.
During the Cold War, something else seems to have happened to "labor-management relations," just as the old, smoky industrial society was transitioning into a sleeker, more automated model. Management styles seemed to have had little to do with the essence of the labor-capital relationship itself, hence the workers' strikes against socialism. We still used the terms "capitalist" and "socialist" to describe groups of countries, and "Communist and Workers' Parties" to describe the ruling parties in the latter group, but the "two systems," as they were called, grew to look remarkably alike, and the similarities between them did not go unnoticed. Some intellectuals talked about "convergence" of the two systems, and Herbert Marcuse, the most astute observer of this phenomenon, used the term "advanced industrial civilization" to describe the whole reality. The most peculiar thing was that "advanced industrial civilization" had produced alienated workers and elite managers everywhere while at the same time becoming remarkably collectivized, with the public authority ("the state") regularly intervening in economic matters as umpire, owner, or super-manager. It made no difference what flag pins the managers in the front office wore in their lapels.
This all called into question the nature of "real, existing" socialism. Was it a "separate" system from capitalism, or just a type of industrial society whose modes of meritocratic social mobility and forms of popular political and economic participation and decision-making looked strange from the point of view of those who favored liberal representative democracy? In the end, these questions were rendered moot by the collapse of the Communist-led governments in Europe, and by the reinstitution of modified forms of private property in the means of production and exchange, accompanied by the muting of revolutionary ideology and rhetoric by China and other Bolshevik-inspired countries. These changes threw socialists of all schools into a state of confusion, but it did not remove the fundamental questions or the basic problems that dogged the movement.
Rethinking "class consciousness"
Socialists today still see ourselves as "change agents" (to borrow a term from academia), who work hard to improve society in the here-and-now, hoping this will help the "vast association" of wage earners figure out how to wield power. However, it's still maddeningly difficult for us to describe the new society and how to get there. For one thing, today's capitalism is not our great grandparents' capitalism. To illustrate the point, take The Jungle, the 1906 novel by Upton Sinclair. This is probably the most important socialist and working class novel ever published in this country. The Jungle depicted what was, in 1906, the normal world, and correcting it was often seen as edging around the border between the impossible and the possible. Yet here's the difference. Today we see those same conditions as a violation of norms. Then there are the aspirations of Jurgis Rudkis, the novel's protagonist. Does he just want "socialism," or does he want a better life? And if he wants the latter, does that mean he wants to remain a "worker"? At the heart of these questions lies the conundrum of socialist identity.
Some one hundred years ago, Lenin tried to sever the questions, "what is socialism," and "what does the worker want," from each other. Focusing on the latter question, he argued, was "economism," For him, the only revolutionary form of class consciousness was "socialist" consciousness. Lenin refused to put the "economism" question first. But what if he had? If we try to reunite these two questions and put the "economism" question first, the answer might surprise us. That's because if the wage earners want to raise themselves to the position of the ruling class, only to spend their days raising cattle, hunting, fishing, and criticizing, maybe it means that the working class wants to become something other than a "working class." Maybe the working class wants to liquidate itself as a class, to liquidate classes as such, and to turn the whole of society into a kind of middle class Utopia.
Marx, Lenin, and their followers might have agreed with the first two points, while scoffing at the third one. The "middle class," for them, was a phantom or an anachronism, subject to chronic insecurity, instability, and ever-deepening impoverishment. Marx and Engels called it "a relic of the sixteenth century." Yet despite cyclical changes in fortune, there is evidence to support the idea that the "middle class society," in terms of individual self-image, personal taste, and material conditions of life, increasingly describes a widespread popular idea of the hoped-for good society.
Such a goal seems at the core of the trade union movement's program. The writings of Marx and Engels even have some inklings of this idea. As they pointed out, among the bourgeoisie's revolutionary qualities is its tendency to replace human labor with machine labor while reducing the amount of human labor time necessary to the production and reproduction processes. We see this today in worldwide advances in technology and communications, in fluctuating and even shrinking labor force participation rates, and in the global trend toward part time, contingent labor.
Some analysts argue that soon the vast majority of people will be unnecessary to the labor process, as machines will do most jobs, or as the idea of work itself will be increasingly defined by its relationship to machines. What this does to our thinking about the difference between "trade union consciousness" and "socialist consciousness" in this context is interesting. Lenin argued that "socialist" consciousness couldn't come from within the trade union movement itself, but had to be brought to the movement from "outside," from a kind of revolutionary intelligentsia. Many socialists disagreed with him at the time, and their critique continues to resonate. Today's trade unions are among the major sources of advanced social consciousness, sometimes relatively, and sometimes absolutely. That's primarily due to nearly two centuries of socialist agitation and education within them; and because the changes in society's organic composition mean that the wage-earning classes include large contingents of highly educated persons whose sophisticated formal learning makes their labor power necessary to today's economy.
What does society do, then, in a world where "work" as we have known it has "disappeared"? (I'm borrowing that phrase from William Julius Wilson [3].) Well, the "disappearance" of work won't stop individual humans from contributing to the general welfare. Today we still think of the relationship between work and reward in antiquated ways, but our thinking has to catch up with our material conditions. That means we have to rethink what "work" is, and demand that we get paid for it; but to do that, we need to think more deeply about questions related to political power.
How we might talk about socialism now
If the "middle class Utopia" I'm discussing here already exists in embryo beneath the surface of contemporary economic and political life, it can only be fully realized in a society that takes so-called "liberal" democracy as its basis, and grows from there. In this regard, I'm reminded of what Engels told the German Social Democrats in 1891 [4]: "If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic." To see the wage-earning class winning "the battle of democracy" means taking the forms of political participation available in the democratic republic seriously.
This is a special problem for socialists in the United States, who, for much of the movement's existence, have delegated winning power through "electoral" politics - the most legitimate form of politics in our society - to others. Yet as Engels so astutely pointed out, vying for power is the road to power, not perennial protest alone. What is contradictory about this situation is that the main trends within the socialist movement - those rooted in the historic Second and Third Internationals - long ago abandoned reliance on the military-insurrectionary model of social change in favor of a civil insurrectionary and democratic one. This path has long been on their books.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the legendary labor organizer who served as chair of the Communist Party USA in the early 1960s, testified to this fact [5] at her 1952 Smith Act trial. She defended the CPUSA as a "legitimate political party" by narrating its electoral history, including her own 1942 campaign for Congress, where she received 50,000 votes. Yet only in 2016 has a self-proclaimed socialist emerged as a main contender for the most important office of power in the land.
Why this has been the case is not all that clear. The electoral history of the socialist movement in this country has been marred by illegal suppression from officeholders belonging to liberal, pro-capitalist parties, and this engendered and reinforced a deep distrust in the possibilities available at the ballot box. But this alone doesn't explain things. Communists, for example, long considered themselves a different kind of political party, an "activist" party. Socialists of all stripes have often been energetic workers in progressive electoral coalitions.
Yet despite some significant successes, socialist attitudes toward running in elections in their own name ranged from ambivalence to downplaying the importance of elections a path to power, preferring, instead, to see them as educational tools. "We are a party of a new type in that we are not before the people just to capture their votes," Gurley Flynn also told the court. "We are politically active the year round." Besides, socialism often attracted those who were marginal to the status of "citizen" in our country - and for a long time, to be a worker meant you were, effectively, not a citizen. The socialists responded to this problem by building unions and mass voluntary associations, winning elections within these institutions and wielding power and influence through them. This included registering workers to vote and mobilizing them through labor's earliest political action committees. One result of all this was that many of these organizations and institutions became the primary targets of government repression during the McCarthy era.
Yet socialists still believe that deepening the democratic governance over the political sphere, and achieving it over the economic sphere, may be all that stands between civilization and barbarism. Notice, here, that I have been using the word "governance" instead of the word "state." I am mindful that winning the battle of democracy will mostly be fought within the boundaries of single countries. I am also mindful that it can't be won one country at a time. How do we manage democratic governance over global entities in a way that is democratic, effective, beneficial, and peaceful? This is a question for which today's struggles and activists worldwide are urgently seeking an answer, and from the looks of things, this will become one of the fundamental social questions of the current century.
One could say, then, that globalization itself is forcing socialists to return to first principles, as no important social struggle today can be limited to national or even regional borders. Yet gaining social control over the economic life of society - achieving socialism, in a word - requires not only that we know that the democratic republic is the staging ground for such change. It also requires that we recognize that the evidence of the future we want is visible and "invading" our present, to borrow a term from C. L. R. James, in forms that exist in the current conditions of our social life.
Geoffrey Jacques is a poet and critic who has published essays on the visual arts, literature, music, and social issues. His most recent books are Just For a Thrill (Wayne State University Press, 2005), a collection of poetry, and A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). He served as a Daily World correspondent in Detroit and New York from 1978-1984. He is currently a culture moderator at Portside. He lives in Southern California.
Harpers Ferry, WV
RE: [CCDS Members] Clinton’s Tech Policy Targets Young Entrepreneurs
This kind of talk by any of 'us' is surprising!!! – goes on often "... the only instance (97-98) in 40 years where there was a significant bump in median family income (and wages or salaries)."
Too many people got left out as usual. Prices rose as wages rose.
Norma
From: Members [mailto:members-bounces+normaha=pacbell.net@lists.cc-ds.org] On Behalf Of John Case Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2016 5:48 AM To: Socialist Economics <socialist-economics@googlegroups.com>; CCDS-Members <members@lists.cc-ds.org>; jcase4218.lightanddark@blogger.com Subject: [CCDS Members] Clinton's Tech Policy Targets Young Entrepreneurs
I will not be surprised if this is the true and principle Clinton structural economic strategy to address inequality: turn more places into Silicon Valleys. It's the strategy, or opportunity, that Bill Clinton exploited in the mid nineties that propelled the tech boom, and the only instance (97-98) in 40 years where there was a significant bump in median family income (and wages or salaries).
I certainly agree that such a strategy can be an important component. But I think its the WRONG focus to put at the TOP of the to-do list. MInimum wage, major infrastructure spending, collective bargaining expansion, big payoffs in the form of cash, new jobs and/or training for displaced workers from globalization and climate change adjustment impacts --- all these things are on top of revisiting the 90s tech boom on MY to-do LIST.
Hillary Clinton's technology policy initiative, released on Tuesday, is a list maker's dream, a parade of specific proposals covering a spectrum of issues. But its overriding theme is that technology should be an engine of equality rather than elitism.
The goal, the summary document declares, is "to create the jobs of the future on Main Street."
Mrs. Clinton's agenda includes having the federal government step in to help fill a finance gap, as banks have cut their loans to small businesses and venture capital funding is concentrated in a few regions, led by Silicon Valley.
Her plan calls for "supporting incubators, accelerators, mentoring and training for 50,000 entrepreneurs in underserved areas," and increasing funding for several existing programs that offer tax credits and financing for community development and small businesses.
"This is a pragmatic plan that could help leverage what happens in Silicon Valley so that there's innovation and job growth throughout the country," said Karen Kornbluh, former United States ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, who is an adviser to the Clinton campaign.
The Clinton program also links start-ups with the student loan crisis. Under her plan, young entrepreneurs could defer payments on their federal student loans for up to three years. The relief might also apply to the early employees of start-ups, like the first 10 or 20 workers, according to the plan.
The deferred payment plan, the campaign document states, could mean that "millions of young Americans" would not have to pay interest or principal on their loans "as they work through the critical start-up phase of new enterprises."
It is clearly a nod to young voters, who overwhelmingly supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries.
The Clinton plan offers a liberal immigration initiative that has long been a favorite of technology executives and venture capitalists: automatically issuing permanent resident status to people who earn graduate degrees in science, engineering and mathematics from accredited universities.
The Clinton program also would dedicate additional funding and resources to Obama administration policies in areas like building broadband networks in rural areas, encouraging computer science education for elementary and high school students, and job training in technology fields.
Skeptics questioned spending to "double down" on programs that have not yet proved effective.
"No one seems to be evaluating these programs," said Thomas Lenard, president of the Technology Policy Institute, a nonprofit research foundation.
Jeffrey Eisenach, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning policy research group, said, "This isn't a technology plan, it's a government spending plan."
But other technology policy experts were impressed by the Clinton campaign document as a whole.
"She's got a technology and innovation agenda, and this suggests it would be a strong focus in a Clinton presidency," said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonprofit policy research group. "That in itself is a message."
John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV
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Wednesday, June 29, 2016
Jesse Jackson: What Hillary Clinton should learn from Brexit [feedly]
Brexit - the stunning British vote to leave the European Union - is a clear and dramatic rebuke of the country's political and economic elites. A majority voted to leave even though the heads of the United Kingdom's two major parties, more than a thousand corporate and bank CEOs, legions of economists, the leaders of Europe and the United States, and the heads of the international financial organizations all warned of dire consequences if they did not vote to remain.
For Americans, one question is whether this result has implications for the 2016 presidential campaign. Political sea changes tend to cross national boundaries. Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 tracked the rise of Margaret Thatcher to power in Great Britain. Bill Clinton's New Democrats were mirrored by Tony Blair's New Labour Party. So does Brexit presage the rise of Donald Trump in the United States?
The Leave campaign slogan - "Take back control" - is mirrored by Trump's "Make America great again." The same economic insecurities, the sense of the system being rigged, the racial fears and the anger at immigrants that fueled the Leave campaign have elevated Trump's candidacy. Like Trump, the Leave campaign expressed its scorn for experts and politicians. Like Trump, the campaign told a clear story to voters about how they got in the fix they are in, and who is to blame.
In Britain, the vote divided along the lines of education, class and age. The better educated, more affluent and younger voted to stay. The less educated, less affluent and older voted to get out. Those campaigning to leave made appeals based on sovereignty, race and nativism. They campaigned against unaccountable bureaucrats and disdainful elites who rigged the system against working people. What surprised pollsters was the strong turnout by non-college educated, older working people, who lined up to register their discontent.
There is a clear warning here for Hillary Clinton. She is the quintessential establishment candidate, having been in Washington for the last 25 years. She has presented herself as a continuation of the Obama years. Her experience and expertise are universally acknowledged. But she is the candidate of the status quo at a time when people are looking for change.
Our political and economic elites tend to be in denial. They profit from globalization, take pride in the exercise of American power abroad, live in affluent communities, and often are closer to their international peers than to their poorer neighbors. They don't see the America that has been ravaged by our ruinous trade policies. They avoid the killing streets of our impoverished urban neighborhoods. They were shaken by the Great Recession but largely have recovered. They don't see that most Americans have lost ground over the course of this century. They simply don't understand the scope of their failure to make this system work for working people - for the majority of Americans.
The Brexit vote showed that it is not enough to scorn the lies, exaggerations and divisive racial appeals of a demagogue. The Remain vote in Britain was explicitly a status quo vote - the EU isn't great, it seemed to say, but it is what we've got and our elites and experts say change would be catastrophic. But when people feel that the elites have failed them, that the system has been rigged to favor the few, that things are getting worse, not better, the invocation of authority in defense of the status quo loses force. People want to know what you will do to make things better. You've got to be able to tell a more convincing story that explains how we got where we are, who is to blame and what can be done about it. This is a lesson that Clinton surely understands.
The Brexit vote also reveals the comparative strength of the Democratic coalition here in the United States. Young people in Britain voted overwhelmingly against leaving; young people here will not vote for Trump. Minorities and immigrants - a much smaller portion of the population in Britain - voted against leaving; minorities here will not vote for Trump's racist politics. The question is only whether the young and minorities will turn out in large numbers or whether, uninspired, they will stay home in large numbers. Turning them out also requires a campaign that gives them hope for a change, not simply a promise of more of the same.
Brexit is a warning. There will be a reckoning. A divisive demagogue like Trump can profit in such times, but the politics of inclusion can beat the politics of division - but only by offering people a new deal that gives them hope.
Rev. Jesse Jackson is the founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. He was a leader in the civil rights movement alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and was twice a candidate for President of the United States.
This article originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times. It is reprinted here with the permission of Rainbow PUSH.
Photo: British Prime Minister David Cameron meets with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in London in 2012. (U.S. Embassy in the United Kingdom)
-- via my feedly newsfeed
Clinton’s Tech Policy Targets Young Entrepreneurs
Hillary Clinton's technology policy initiative, released on Tuesday, is a list maker's dream, a parade of specific proposals covering a spectrum of issues. But its overriding theme is that technology should be an engine of equality rather than elitism.
The goal, the summary document declares, is "to create the jobs of the future on Main Street."
Mrs. Clinton's agenda includes having the federal government step in to help fill a finance gap, as banks have cut their loans to small businesses and venture capital funding is concentrated in a few regions, led by Silicon Valley.
Her plan calls for "supporting incubators, accelerators, mentoring and training for 50,000 entrepreneurs in underserved areas," and increasing funding for several existing programs that offer tax credits and financing for community development and small businesses.
"This is a pragmatic plan that could help leverage what happens in Silicon Valley so that there's innovation and job growth throughout the country," said Karen Kornbluh, former United States ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, who is an adviser to the Clinton campaign.
The Clinton program also links start-ups with the student loan crisis. Under her plan, young entrepreneurs could defer payments on their federal student loans for up to three years. The relief might also apply to the early employees of start-ups, like the first 10 or 20 workers, according to the plan.
The deferred payment plan, the campaign document states, could mean that "millions of young Americans" would not have to pay interest or principal on their loans "as they work through the critical start-up phase of new enterprises."
It is clearly a nod to young voters, who overwhelmingly supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries.
The Clinton plan offers a liberal immigration initiative that has long been a favorite of technology executives and venture capitalists: automatically issuing permanent resident status to people who earn graduate degrees in science, engineering and mathematics from accredited universities.
The Clinton program also would dedicate additional funding and resources to Obama administration policies in areas like building broadband networks in rural areas, encouraging computer science education for elementary and high school students, and job training in technology fields.
Skeptics questioned spending to "double down" on programs that have not yet proved effective.
"No one seems to be evaluating these programs," said Thomas Lenard, president of the Technology Policy Institute, a nonprofit research foundation.
Jeffrey Eisenach, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning policy research group, said, "This isn't a technology plan, it's a government spending plan."
But other technology policy experts were impressed by the Clinton campaign document as a whole.
"She's got a technology and innovation agenda, and this suggests it would be a strong focus in a Clinton presidency," said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonprofit policy research group. "That in itself is a message."
Harpers Ferry, WV