Someone posed this question on a discussion group, with a particular emphasis on which candidate would be better for innovation. This was my response:
One of the few promises Trump is likely to keep is to withdraw federal government support for innovation in the energy sector–the place that’s likely to be among the most job-creating new industries in the next two decades. Trump will deliberately choke off innovation in this very innovative sector. That will be bad for business.
Offshore oil platform. Photo by Freddie Hinajosa
Trump will be seen as untrustable by all other countries. That will be bad for business.
Trump has a record of skipping out on what he owes small businesses, then bragging about how he cheated them. That will be bad for business. I’ve been speaking and writing about business ethics as a key to success since 2002, and he is completely devoid of ethics.
Trump has made it abundantly clear that his policies will favor billionaires over others. That will help a few at the top, but overall, be bad for business.
Trumps bullying/name calling, thin skin, bad temper, open racism, mocking of those he perceives as enemies, etc. are the opposite of good management. Having that as a role model in the top management job in the country will not only be bad for business but could easily start wars.
I’m not real happy with Hillary Clinton as a candidate, but I’m in general agreement with the direction she would take the country–other than my worry that she will lead us into unnecessary wars. She at least is smart, stable, and caring. Her ethics are shaky and her tendency toward nontransparency worries me. But at least she HAS a moral compass even if it doesn’t point true north–and (I believe) a genuine desire to make the world better.
In other years, I might vote third-party. I’ve done it before. But this year, I want Trump’s margin of defeat to be so enormous that he never shows his face in politics again. A Trump presidency would be a disaster, not just for business, but for everyone who loves democracy, innovation, morality, or merit-based success. Trump represents the worst of American society: a racist, sexist, authoritarian bully. A liar and a cheat. A man who is only about himself and has no higher calling. A man who thinks his material wealth gives him the right to stomp on others. A man who panders to fear and has no vision. A man who doesn’t “play well with others.”
Mind you, I share your distrust of electronic voting machines without paper backup. Yes, they can be manipulated. They likely were in 2000 and 2004.
Caricature of Donald Trump by DonkeyHotey, Creative Commons License: https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/5471912349/sizes/m/in/photostream/
But you will lose because you underestimate the decency of the American people. Your views AND your tactics are so repugnant that you even got ME to vote for Hillary Clinton—not because I’m so in love with her (actually, I have lots of issues with her), but because I want your margin of defeat to be so “yuge” that it dwarfs the margins of even Goldwater in 1964 and McGovern in 1972. I’ve voted third-party before, and there’s a third-party candidate this year that I could feel somewhat comfortable voting for.
You will lose because of your racism…your misogyny…your constant bullying and name calling…your attempts to shame people for being disabled, losing a son who defended our country, surviving years of torture and horrible conditions as a POW who stood true to his beliefs…your untrustable temper…your veiled threats of violence…your refusal to disclose your finances, which the New York Times called “a maze of debts and opaque ties…your 40-year history of cheating small business owners, lying, and showing your contempt for others.
You will lose, by a landslide, because you do not speak for the American people. The American people are better than you—and we deserve better leadership than you offer.
I got an email this morning from Labor for Bernie, urging me to sign up to continue the movement. My wife saw a note from Bernie himself, on Facebook. Both urged us to join the ongoing movement by signing up at OurRevolution.com.
So I clicked over. And this is what I saw:
Landing page of OurRevolution.com
It’s designed like a classic marketer’s landing page with only two options: sign up or send money. Except that a classic marketer’s landing page describes the project it’s selling—sometimes, in great detail. This time—not a clue about what this organization is going to stand for.
I’m a strong Bernie supporter. I love that he was able to bring a progressive agenda into mainstream US politics—after watching so many fail before, from Jesse Jackson to Howard Dean to Dennis Kucinich. But I’m not signing.
Too many times, I’ve seen organizations co-opt supporters by turning out to stand for something other than they pretended, going back to the Socialist Workers Party’s attempt to co-opt the Vietnam peace movement when I was a teenager. Here, I don’t even see a pretense. I see nothing about what this organization will stand for, what tactics it will use, etc.
Even for Sanders, I don’t write a blank check. Not financially, and not in my commitment to an organization whose tenets I can’t describe. Even for Bernie, I won’t sign blind.
The two big messages of the Democratic Convention were Hope and Inclusion. Hope, of course, was one of the two themes (along with Change) that propelled Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008.
I have plenty of issues with both Obama and with Hillary Clinton—but government is supposed to be bipartisan, not spoil-sport-losers-blocking everything. The Democrats even allowed George W. Bush to govern, despite his awful, destructive policies from which the country is still recovering. That Obama has been able to get anything done in this climate (and as those two links above prove, he’s done quite a bit) is remarkable. That the Republican Party has thwarted the will of the people over and over again these 8 years is shameful.
Obama also has a tendency to “roll over and play dead” unnecessarily. To name one example, that he gave up so easily on filling the Supreme Court vacancy caused by Scalia’s death is shocking—and very bad precedent. As a former community organizer, Obama should have had a clue about how to break he deadlock—keep the apparatus that twice elected him president active, to deluge Republican legislators with calls and letters supporting particular pieces of Obama’s agenda—to keep people involved and motivated while at the same time disassembling Republican intransigence, making its revelry in being “The Party of No” politically difficult. Obama could have organized a backlash in the 2010 election and accumulated massive majorities in both houses. But he let his eager champions wither on the vine.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders
Inclusion may not be as powerful as hope, but it’s a very strong meme nonetheless. This year’s Republican candidate openly embraces hostility to inclusion—attacking Mexicans and Muslims along with immigrants in general, mocking disabled people, and even attacking the patriotism of decorated war hero Senator John McCain. So it’s a good move for Hillary Clinton to reclaim the emotional territory she gave up to both Sanders and Trump during primary season—and in this case, I do think it’s genuine. The first night of the convention, especially, was all about outreach to those who’ve felt disenfranchised (including the millions of supporters of Bernie Sanders). Clinton’s good dose of Policy Wonk may also be the antidote to Trump’s sketchy sound-bite promises about how he would govern.
The themes of inclusion, hope, and competence were in tremendous contrast with the Republican Convention, whose dominant message was fear—expressed in xenophobia. The other message of the Republicans was “we don’t have to give a crap about people we can beat up”–a big rallying point for those who agree, but a big push-away for anyone who might be a potential victim–and that’s a LOT of people. This is essentially the message of fascism, and it scares me to see it coming out of the mouth (and Twitter feed) of a nominated major-party candidate for President.
And this is why I will vote for Hillary even though my own politics are closer to Jill Stein’s, and even though I live in a state that will vote Democratic no matter what. I am not thrilled about voting for Hillary, but I will vote for her. I consider Trump the greatest threat to democracy and liberty in my lifetime. His repeated use of Hitlerian memes is very troubling. And I think very deliberate. I want Trump’s margin of defeat to be so “YUGE” that we never see his ugly politics again.
Looking at the election as a whole, I’d bet that Trump, a master marketer for decades, has studied NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming—an extremely powerful approach to getting inside people’s minds through the use of deep psychological triggers) and is far better at getting his (loathsome) message across than Clinton is. The Republicans have been using sound bites that appear to be based in NLP techniques for over 30 years, but Trump has taken it much deeper. Clinton, by contrast, is an old-school politician who hasn’t quite figured out the 21st-century shift in marketing from push to interactive. And Sanders has probably not studied marketing but he’s a natural. His brand is wrapped in an integrity that neither party nominee can offer—and he has a long background in (and deep understanding of) community organizing as well as electoral politics. When he started as a politician, Vermont was not exactly a progressive hotspot. I believe he helped create the climate where his state is now among the bluest in the nation.
Interestingly, all three are around the same age, spanning from Clinton’s 68 to Sanders’ 74 (Trump just turned 70)—yet the oldest, Sanders, had the strongest appeal to youth. And the younger candidates, from O’Malley to Rubio, were all eliminated months ago.
In other years, I would probably vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. I voted for Nader twice. I love what Stein says. And I live in Massachusetts, where my electoral votes will go to Clinton no matter what I do—which is why I was able to vote for Nader.
But not this year. I feel in my heart that every vote for Green is one more invitation for Trump or someone similar to come back and try again. I want the margin of victory to be so large that we never have this breed of politics in a national election in our lifetimes–an utter and total repudiation. I also utterly dread the idea that Trump could appoint perhaps three more Clarence Thomases. And I note that the country just barely survived the wreck of the far more moderate George W. Bush’s eight stolen years in office. This one must be too definitive to steal.
Not that I’m calling George W. Bush a moderate. He and his henchmen (should I say puppeteers?) were extremists as we understood the term, until Palin and Cruz and Huckabee et al. came along and redefined it. But even they did not wallow in blatant racism. Even they did not have the chutzpah to openly cheat people in numerous business ventures. Even they knew better to openly make denigrating comments about women while bringing forward their misogynist laws. Even they refrained from attacking John McCain because he was taken captive in Vietnam.
I was just in Canada. Everyone wanted to talk about Trump and how scared they were of him. Literally, strangers would hear our American accents and come up to talk with us. If this country turns fascist, I want to say that I at least voted to block it. I can’t find motivation to work on Hillary’s campaign, but that much I can do.
I feel that Hillary Clinton, underneath it all, has a good heart. She actually does care about people. Yes, she is a flawed candidate. She will be a militarist, pro-Wall Street president, ’tis true. She has shown poor judgment on several occasions. She lacks the charisma and outsider status of both Bernie and Trump. Her ethics are sketchy. But Trump has no ethics at all. And a President Trump would be a living reminder that Hitler came to power originally in an election.
It is very disturbing to me that a thin-skinned bully who has made it abundantly clear he cares only about himself and his own money and power could secure the nomination, even among a group of looney-birds so extreme that Jeb Bush seemed like the moderate (he’s not). If Trump wins, it really raises a deeper question for me than how will we survive his presidency and what do we do if he refuses to step down when his term is over. It raises this: do I want to live in an America that would elect this monster?
I watched three inspiring hours of the convention last night, including Bernie’s speech as well as those of Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Warren, and various members of Congress, Latinos, blacks, people with disabilities, and a gay NBA star, usually right after they played a clip of Trump bashing that constituency. It brought home a point that Trump seems to utterly miss and Hillary really gets: that our diversity is a key part of our strength as a nation. It was very effective in showing the vast contrast between Hillary and Trump and made many of the right noises about a progressive agenda, noting over and over again that this year’s platform embraces much of the Sanders agenda.
It made me feel much better about my decision months ago that I would vote for her if she is the nominee, and sparked my decision today to publicly endorse Hillary Clinton.
Muhammad Ai probably wore boxing gloves like these. Photo by Wojciech Ner.
He was also a man of deep principle, foregoing his career for three years after refusing to fight in Vietnam.
This is what he said about that choice:
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.
Agree or disagree with him , you knew where he stood.
Ali was also a humanitarian and philanthropist, using his fortune—a fortune amassed not through inherited wealth and speculative business ventures, but by coming up out of poverty and putting himself in the ring to be slugged again and again by some of the strongest people in the world—for social good.
Of course, it helps that he inherited a fortune from his father, a large-scale NYC landlord whose racist policies were so bad that Woody Guthrie (his tenant, briefly) wrote scathing songs about him. Trump’s own record includes lots of failure—including four bankruptcies. It’s hard to imagine him getting rich if he hadn’t had the springboard of his father’s wealth. And he brags about using bankruptcy as a tool to screw the public to further his personal fortune. This quote is on the same 2011 ABC news report on the bankruptcies:
I’ve used the laws of this country to pare debt. … We’ll have the company. We’ll throw it into a chapter. We’ll negotiate with the banks. We’ll make a fantastic deal. You know, it’s like on ‘The Apprentice.’ It’s not personal. It’s just business.
Results for search for “trump university scam” from Washington Post, CNN, Wikipedia, and National Review
This is the continuation of a long history of unethical business dealings, as this story in US News and World Report notes.
As it happens, I’ve heard both Muhammad Ali and Donald Trump speak in person—Ali at an Aretha Franklin concert in Harlem, in 1971, and Trump delivering the keynote for a conference where I was also speaking, in 2004. Ali’s speech left me feeling empowered. Trump’s left me feeling I’d been slimed by an exhibitionist in a public place.
This bullying, thin-skinned, name-calling racist and sexist who brags about how he gets rich on the backs of others has no grasp of the issues, and apparently no ethics. He doesn’t belong in the White House.
Caricature of Donald Trump by DonkeyHotey, Creative Commons License: https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/5471912349/sizes/m/in/photostream/
Although I’m a strong Bernie supporter, I disagree with the article’s sanctimonious tone. Sometimes, you do have to suck it up and vote the lesser evil. I personally think this is one of those times. After California, Bernie has to accept that he made a really good run, but it’s over. He got farther than pretty much anyone thought he would, and I’m glad.
I’ve voted third-party before, and might do so again. But not this time. Yes, even though we’re faced with two secretive people, each with a history of serious ethics breaches, I will vote for the Democrat this time.
Clinton will be reasonably good on domestic policy (and will recognize that the Left brought her to power) if elected. As a consistent war hawk who can’t see any fault in Israel’s ultra-right-wing government, she’ll be horrible on foreign policy, which ought to be her strong suit–and especially bad on the Middle East. I predict another war during her term. She’ll be middling-poor on energy policy. These are issues that mean a great deal to me.
But she will appoint decent people, including to the Supreme Court. She’ll be socially liberal on a number of issues, and will likely do some good for poor people as long as it doesn’t bother her bankster friends. Ordinary people’s lives are likely to get better under her administration, as they did under Obama.
And most of all, voting for Hillary is the best thing we can do to prevent President Trump.
Trump and his very scary supporters smell like fascism to me. A Trump presidency will very quickly displace GWB (who I used to refer to as His Imperial Delusional Majesty) as the worst president in history. Trump will be far worse on energy, on poverty, on international relations (where he really doesn’t have a clue), on immigration, on minority rights, women’s rights, and almost every other issue you could name. He might be slightly less willing to go to war than Hillary, but when he does, it will be much uglier. And his response to international incidents will be belligerent enough that other people will start wars with us and he won’t have a choice.
And his thugs will roam the streets, enforcing their brand of nativism, attacking people who don’t look or think like them.
If the US had proportional representation, instant runoff voting, or any of the other reforms we’ve been working for over the decades, we’d have a choice. But in a faceoff between a no-ethics/me-first bullying fascist and an ethically challenged secrecy-loving corporate neolib, to not recognize the very real difference is slitting our own throats.
I want Trump’s margin of defeat to be so crushing that his movement goes away for 20 or 30 years. For that, I’m willing to hold my nose and vote for Hillary. This time.
Orlando was merely the latest chapter in a bloody saga of a country that allows pretty much anyone to get not just a gun but a military assault weapon capable of killing large numbers of people in moments.
One of the great failures of the Obama administration is the failure to push through any meaningful gun legislation in the wake of Newtown and all the other horrible massacres. What is wrong with our country that we can watch first graders mowed down by a madman with an assault rifle–a weapon whose only purpose is to destroy the maximum number of human lives in the shortest possible time–and we still have not reinstated the assault weapon ban. We still have not closed the loopholes around background checks, so any idiot with a history of mental health problems can get his or her fingers around the trigger.
These are not hunting rifles. These are not self-protection handguns. They exist only to inflict misery. In this country, you need to prove you’re qualified to cut hair or to drive a car. Why is it so easy to get a death machine like an assault rifle? And more fundamentally, why do we expect parents to automatically know how to parent? I wonder how much violence could be avoided if we provided free training in parenting skills to pregnant and newly parenting couples.
Let’s stop the madness! Let’s get sensible gun legislation into place.
Bernie Sanders said two things worth noting the other day, at the same event. When asked at a Town Hall meeting how to convince Bernie supporters to vote for Hillary if she’s the nominee, he responded, “it is “incumbent on her” to win over his supporters. Specifically, he pointed out that he doesn’t exercise control over his supporters and nor should he, and that many have a deep suspicion of a candidate with such close ties to Wall Street. He even gave her a road map: endorse his Medicare-for-ALL healthcare plan.
At the same event, he announced that he would do “everything in my power to keep the Republicans out of the White House.”
She still does not get that Bernie is not a politician in charge of a machine in the old style of politics. He finds himself at the forefront of a people’s movement that he does not control. Bernie can endorse and I’m sure will endorse Hillary if she is a nominee, but that doesn’t mean he is able to overcome his supporters’ massive and justified skepticism of her belief systems and her actions. Once again, he has spoken the truth; she does have to win them over.
And Hillary needs these people. Independents and left-leaning Democrats will be major factors in November. If they stay home, we get whichever monster emerges from the Republican convention. If they show up, we get a Democrat.
I have serious issues with Hillary Clinton, and particularly her foreign policy. I worry that she’s too much of a war-hawk and way too comfortable with the worst excesses of Israel’s ultra-right government. I don’t love her cluelessness about people’s movements and her coziness with Wall Street. And while she’s obviously extremely smart, she’s done some really dumb things over and over again. I don’t expect any significant progressive shift under a Hillary Clinton administration.
In the past, including in 2000, I’ve voted 3rd party. Of course, I have the luxury of living in a state where my vote doesn’t count anyway. Knowing that Massachusetts was safely Democratic made it easy to vote my conscience and cast my vote for Nader.
Yet, if she’s the nominee, I will hold my nose and vote for her. The prospect of either a Trump or Cruz presidency is so distasteful that I want the margins of victory to be enormous; this year, I want to be counted in that victory margin, and not pushed off to the side with a Green Party vote that nobody pays any attention to. Under Clinton, I would expect some attention to economic policies that help poor people—as a sop to Sanders supporters, if nothing else—and some good stuff on women’s issues. I would expect excellent Supreme Court nominees.
And, unfortunately, I would expect once again to be out in the streets with thousands of others, doing my best to keep us from being sucked into whatever war HRC would get us into.
All my life, I’ve heard about the authoritarian Chinese government micromanaging every aspect of everyone’s lives, the government’s total control over career options, and of course, the “reeducation” of intellectuals and destruction of cultural resources during the Cultural Revolution.Getting a visa was a major and expensive hassle that had to be set up weeks ahead, and there was no way to get a business visa without an invitation from someone.
The other obvious difference was the way China blocks many key Internet sites, including all Google sites, Facebook, and Twitter. LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Bing do work, however.
And yet, during our brief visit, the society felt very open. While there are plenty of cops and security guards (including community volunteers who have almost identical uniforms to the police but with the addition of bright red armbands), most whom we saw were not obviously armed and seemed for the most part to be a force for peace, not repression. We’d often see cops joking around with passers-by or chatting amicably with each other. And mobility was almost totally unrestricted, other than at paid attractions. As visitors, we felt no police presence singling us out, had no “minders,” and we were unrestricted even when we went to meet a young couple that a friend of ours had met through Couchsurfing.
Even when our entire group of 26 struck up a conversation with a red-robed Tibetan monk (in the government’s eyes, a potential dissident) who happened to walk through Tiananmen Square with a stylish female companion, there was no feeling of being watched. Since I briefly had a Tibetan housemate and know how to say hello in Tibetan, I even greeted him in his own language. His face lit up—but he got frustrated and disappointed when he tried to answer back and realized that was the only Tibetan I knew. (China claims Tibet and has often consideredorganized Tibetan Buddhism a hostile force; the Tibetans see themselves as an occupied nation, and govern the religious aspects from exile in India.) He spoke fluent Chinese, so our tour director interpreted for us. He posed for selfies with all those in our group who wanted one and was with us for about ten minutes. Plenty of cops were on the plaza, and none took the least interest in this interchange.
I’ve seen photos of China in the 60s and 70s with Chairman Mao’s picture everywhere, providing a Big Brother is Watching motif. We saw exactly two pictures of Mao, other than on the 1 yuan bill: a giant portrait on Tiananmen Gate into Forbidden City,
A guard stands near the Gate of Heavenly Peace and its giant picture of Mao. Photo by D. Dina Friedman.
and a modest poster in a random store window. We did not knowingly see a single picture of current Chairman Xi. Our tour director told us that the Cultural Revolution is definitely considered a mistake, and that the current government rates Mao “70 percent good and 30 percent bad.” He confirmed my suspicion that the prosecution of the “Gang of Four” (Mao’s widow and three comrades) a few years after Mao’s death was as much about repudiating Mao as anything else.
I noted only these very minor incidents:
An officer on Tiananmen spun rapidly in an about-face when a tourist tried to take his picture; the cop Dina managed to catch in the picture shown here suspected he’d been photographed and glared at her, but made no attempt to engage.
An annoying beggar outside the Shanghai Museum was told firmly to go elsewhere and leave our group alone.
I was told to put my camera away after taking a photo of an ad inside a subway station—but I was not asked to delete the photo.
Street crime seemed to be nonexistent. The only threats I felt to my safety had to do with driving patterns, and particularly the very challenging lane-by-lane crawl across a completely uncontrolled eight-lane rotary to get between our hotel in Xian and the subway entrance one block away. Wasn’t too thrilled about silent electric mopeds sneaking up on both sides of what I’d thought was a one-way bike lane either.
Quite frankly, St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2002 (long afterthe collapse of the Soviet Union) as well as New York and Washington post-9/11 have felt far more invasive. It is, however, the first country I’ve ever visited that routinely x-rays all bags belonging to subway passengers before allowing them to board.
Our tour director, who had been at the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, even told us that when someone steps out of line on social media, all that happens is eventually the dissident’s account is closed. However, in the aftermath of 1989, friends of his were jailed.
Still, every resident of China we discussed it (a limited number) with felt oppressed by the government. One family we met with is actually arranging to relocate to Canada. So obviously, there’s more repression than meets the eye.
Shel Horowitz’s latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, shows how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—using the power of the profit motive.
