Madeleine Korbel Albright was nominated to be the first woman Secretary of State by President William Jefferson Clinton on December 5, 1996, confirmed by the U.S. Senate on January 22, 1997, and sworn in the next day. She served in the position for four years and ended her service on January 20, 2001.

Albright was born Marie Jean “Madlenka” Korbel on May 15, 1937, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Her father, Josef, was a member of the Czechoslovak Foreign Service and served as press attaché in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and later became Ambassador to Yugoslavia. After the communist coup in 1948, the family immigrated to Denver, Colorado. Albright Americanized her name to Madeleine, became a U.S. citizen in 1957, and earned a B.A. in political science with honors from Wellesley College in 1959. She earned the Ph.D. in Public Law and Government at Columbia University in 1976.

Albright served as chief legislative assistant to Senator Edmund Muskie (D-Me) from 1976 to 1978. From 1978 to 1981, she served as a staff member in the White House under President Jimmy Carter and on the National Security Council under National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.

In 1982 she was appointed Research Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and Director of its Women in Foreign Service Program. In 1993 she was appointed Ambassador to the United Nations by President Clinton and served in the position until her appointment as Secretary of State in 1996.

As Secretary of State, Albright promoted the expansion of NATO eastward into the former Soviet bloc nations and the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons from the former Soviet republics to rogue nations, successfully pressed for military intervention under NATO auspices during the humanitarian crisis in Kosovo in 1999, supported the expansion of free-mark     et democratization and the creation of civil societies in the developing world, favored the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on Global Climate Change, and furthered the normalization of relations with Vietnam.

Office of the Historian         https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/albright-madeleine-korbel

We can thank the late economic justice warrior for her groundbreaking contribution in showing that “positive thinking” is part of a whitewashing of economic inequality.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Although the late Barbara Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, which chronicled the real-life impacts of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, she made an equally great contribution to economic justice with her subsequent book exposing the cult of positive thinking.

Ehrenreich, who passed away on September 1, 2022, at age 81, had started her professional life with a PhD in cell biology. She didn’t relegate her journalism to mere facts. She delved as deep as she could—to a microscopic level—to make sense of the world. We concluded from Nickel and Dimed that people were not making it in America. But we realized through her book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America that the economy was proceeding unimpeded by this fact because we were putting a smiley face on inequality.

The Great Recession began in 2007. Two years later, in 2009, Ehrenreich published Bright-Sided. Two years after that, in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests began in New York’s Zuccotti Park and spread throughout the country. OWS participants called damning attention to the stark economic split between the haves and the have-nots, in this case the wealthiest “1 percent” of Americans and the rest of us—the “99 percent.” There was no putting a smiley face on the economy in that moment.

It was during this period that I had the honor of interviewing Ehrenreich. She explained that “there is a whole industry in the United States that got an investment in this idea that if you just think positively, if you expect everything to turn out alright, if you’re optimistic and cheerful and upbeat, everything will be alright.”

Ehrenreich, who survived cancer, said she began her investigation into the ideology of positive thinking when she had breast cancer, roughly six years before Bright-Sided was published. That’s when she realized what a uniquely American phenomenon it was to put a positive spin on everything, even cancer.

When she looked for online support groups of other women struggling with cancer, what she found was, “constant exhortations to be positive about the disease, to be cheerful and optimistic.” Such an approach obscures the central question of, “why do we have an epidemic of breast cancer?” she said.

She applied that idea to how positive thinking was obscuring questions of economic inequality. And she found that there was an entire industry built up to assure financially struggling Americans that their poverty stemmed from their own negative thinking and that they could turn things around if they simply visualized wealth, embraced a can-do attitude about their bleak futures and willed money to flow into their lives. Central to this industry are “the coaches, the motivational speakers, the inspirational posters to put up on the office walls,” and more, said Ehrenreich.

She also connected the rise of the American megachurch to the rising cult of the positive-thinkers. “The megachurches are not about Christianity. The megachurches are about how you can prosper because God wants you to be rich,” she said.

Joel Osteen, the pastor of a Houston-based megachurch, is perhaps one of the best-known leaders of the so-called prosperity gospel. In one of his sermons—conveniently posted online as a slick YouTube video to reach a maximum audience—Osteen claims that according to “the scripture,” “the wealth of the ungodly is laid up for the righteous,” and that “it will be transferred into the hands of the righteous.” His congregants may be tempted to imagine bank transfers from wealthy atheists magically pouring into their accounts.

Osteen has been the beneficiary of serious wealth transfers from his own congregants into his pockets, so much so that he can afford to live in a $10 million mansion. There’s no conundrum here, for Osteen is living proof to his followers that the power of positive thinking works.

Ehrenreich pointed out that the whole point of these churches is to create a positive experience for their congregants and to project a notion of exciting possibilities. The megachurch phenomenon is centered on “the idea that the church should not be disturbing. You don’t want to have a negative message at church. So that’s why you won’t even find a cross on the wall.”

Perhaps this is because the image of a bloodied, half-naked Jesus Christ nailed by his hands and feet to a wooden cross is just too painful to bear and might detract from dreams of future Ferraris and private jets. “What a downer that would be!” exclaimed Ehrenreich.

Where did the cult of positive thinking originate? “American corporate culture is saturated with this positive thinking ideology,” especially in the 1990s and 2000s, said Ehrenreich. “It grew because corporations needed a way to manage downsizing, which really began in the 1980s.”

Businesses that laid off masses of employees had a message that Ehrenreich encapsulated as, “you’re getting eliminated… but it’s really an opportunity for you. It’s a great thing; you’ve got to look at this positively. Don’t complain, don’t be a whiner, you’re not a victim, etc.”

Such sentiments percolated into the mainstream. Americans internalized the idea that losing one’s job has got to be a sign that something better is coming along and that “everything happens for a reason.” The alternative is to blame one’s employer, or even the design of the U.S. economy. And that would be dangerous to Wall Street and corporate America.

Another purpose of fostering positive thinking among those who are laid off is, as per Ehrenreich, “to extract more work from those who survive layoffs.” Indeed, we have an ugly culture of overwork in the U.S., with corporate employees having normalized the idea that they need to work insanely late hours, work on the weekends, and take on exhaustive amounts of responsibilities. After all, those who remain employed, unlike their laid-off former colleagues, ought to feel lucky to have a job—more positive thinking.

There may be a breaking point now, one that Ehrenreich thankfully lived to see, as a newer set of phenomena began emerging since the COVID-19 pandemic began. They include the “great resignation,” a term for masses of Americans quitting thankless jobs. And, more recently, “quiet quitting,” which is a new name for an older union-led idea of “work to rule” as workers are starting to only put in the hours they are paid to work and no more. How novel!

We owe Ehrenreich a debt of gratitude for shining a light not only on the perversity of the U.S. economic system but also on the gauzy veil of positive thinking that obscures the obscenity. Ehrenreich may not have lived to see her ideas of economic justice be fully realized. But, as she once told the New Yorker, “The idea is not that we will win in our own lifetimes and that’s the measure of us but that we will die trying.”

Author:  Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute.

Howard was a constant champion for bi inclusion in early LGBTQ+ activism. Without her, pride as we know it wouldn't exist.

Brenda Howard wore a bright pink button that perhaps said it all: “Bi, Poly, Switch — I know what I want.”

A ferocious and radical activist, Howard, who was bisexual, vehemently supported and participated in the antiwar and feminist movements, as well as the Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists’ Alliance (she was the chair for several years). And Howard never went quietly. “Though she was humble, she could be loud when needed,” wrote bi activist and author Tom Limoncelli. Friends with many inside the Stonewall Inn the night of the uprising, Howard created a one-month Stonewall anniversary rally in July 1969. Then, one year after Stonewall, she and a committee planned Gay Pride Week and the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade. Often called “The Mother of Pride,” Howard’s week and parade evolved into the annual New York City Pride march and Pride celebrations we now know around the world.

To assemble the parade and the first gay pride week, Howard and the committee met at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the first gay and lesbian bookstore in America, at 15 Christopher Street. With the bookstore’s mailing list, they got word out about the parade. Committee member L. Craig Schoonmaker suggested the word “Pride” for the event. “A lot of people were very repressed, they were conflicted internally, and didn’t know how to come out and be proud. That’s how the movement was most useful, because they thought, ‘Maybe I should be proud,’” Schoonmaker said in 2015.

The parade was scheduled for June 28, 1970. At first, only a relative few showed up for the parade’s 2 PM start time, set to travel 51 blocks, from Greenwich Village to Central Park. Police, there to protect the marchers, had to urge those who did show up to begin at ten after two. As if waiting to see if others would go first, people first trickled into the parade and then showed up in droves, growing louder and louder, eventually forming a thousands-strong mass of people 20 blocks long.It was, to say the least, a success.

“[If] you needed some kind of help organizing some type of protest or something in social justice?” said Larry Nelson, Howard’s partner from 2000 until her death in 2005, who also gave her that aforementioned button. “All you had to do was call her and she’ll just say when and where.”

“She was an in-your-face activist,” Nelson said in 2014. “She fought for anyone who had their rights trampled on.”

Throughout her lifetime, Howard was unapologetic about her sexuality, which included kink and polyamory, and worked for decades to increase understanding and visibility related to them. She also worked as a phone sex operator in the 1980s, praised by her boss Lisa Verruso for “how much fun Brenda had with phone fantasy. She was able to voice what people wanted,” and was “always up for something creative.” Howard co-chaired the leather contingent of the Second National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights in 1987. That year she also founded the New York Area Bisexual Network (NYABN), which sought to establish community and visibility for bisexual people in the New York area, and still exists today.

“For decades she was the voice on the [NYABN] recorded message that would tell bi people in NYC where events were happening,” Limoncelli wrote. “She returned thousands of messages left on the line.” In this and so many other ways, Howard created space for people maligned both within and outside the LGBTQ+ community to connect with others.

Howard was arrested while participating in her activist work multiple times. Her friend Marla Stevens remembered one particular jail time fondly. In 1991, Howard was protesting with ACT-UP in Atlanta because a lesbian staffer in the state attorney general’s office was fired due to Georgia’s sodomy laws. Stevens and Howard were thrown in jail, later “reading steamy novels aloud to the assembled grrlz and being as much of a pain in the rear as possible so they'd not want to hold us any longer than absolutely necessary,” Stevens wrote.

As a pioneer in the movement to advance bisexual inclusion, Howard was part of the delegation that worked to get “Bi” added to the title of the 1993 March on Washington so it would become “March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights.” Beforehand, the march had only focused on gay and lesbian rights. Decrying the many myths surrounding bisexuality, pushing it into the spotlight, and rallying for its support in ongoing queer narratives was a strong part of Howard’s activism, though she also campaigned heavily for LGBTQ+ rights in general, as well as women’s rights, national healthcare, equal treatment for people of color, and rights for those affected by AIDS. “She was an in-your-face activist,” Nelson said in 2014. “She fought for anyone who had their rights trampled on.”

Howard passed away from colon cancer in 2005 — during Pride on June 28, 2005, to be exact, the 36th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. Nelson survived her and made a video to honor her longstanding bisexual pride. “Beside the fact that we were together and I am straight,” Nelson’s video said, “I know if she was alive, she would be here holding a sign saying ‘I’m #stillbisexual,’ so I will hold one up for her,” which he does. She was never ‘confused’ about her sexual identity, he goes on to say, and wanted others to acknowledge that she and those like her knew themselves, and that their sexuality was and should be seen as legitimate.

The year Howard passed, the Queens, New York branch of PFLAG initiated an award in her honor. Now in its 14th year, the “Brenda Howard Award” recognizes “an individual or organization that best exemplifies the vision, principals and community service exemplified by the late LGBT rights activist Brenda Howard and who serves as a positive and visible role model for the Bisexual Community.” At the time of its creation, it became the first award given by a major U.S. LGBTQ+ organization that was named after an out bisexual person.

Bi erasure is still all too often a problem faced by the LGBTQ+ community. But it’s important to remember because of people like Howard,“The Mother of Pride” herself, that a Pride celebration even exists.

By Elyssa Goodman: "them" newsletter