These are the kinds of autumns when Reno Domenico thrives. As usual, he’s busy with his Kyiv-based Sterling Business School, which offers an online master’s of business administration and other educational training. But more urgently, since this is a year divisible by four, it means that a U.S. presidential election is ahead – this time on Nov 6.
These are the kinds of autumns when Reno Domenico thrives. As usual, he’s busy with his Kyiv-based Sterling Business School, which offers an online master’s of business administration and other educational training. But more urgently, since this is a year divisible by four, it means that a U.S. presidential election is ahead – this time on Nov 6.
While far from the United States, Domenico – president of Democrats Abroad Ukraine – is working to drum up support for his party’s nominee, Barack Obama, with the same gusto that a 13-year-old Domenico brought for his hero, John F. Kennedy, in the 1960 campaign.
At the time, it took independence of thought and some courage for a teenage Domenico to go against his Republican father, who made a living as a tailor, in the family’s enclave of Italian immigrants in New Jersey. But his father, as it turns out, didn’t mind and didn’t particularly like Kennedy’s Republican challenger, Richard M. Nixon.
“He made it clear to me that the important thing was to be involved,” Domenico said.
Domenico carries this conviction with him today. In Ukraine, he promotes votefromabroad.org to corral Ukraine’s expatriate Americans (even Republican ones) into casting their absentee ballots. He also took up the case for the president’s re-election in a debate against American Republican Brian Mefford on Oct. 10 sponsored by the Kyiv Post.
A former New Jersey high school teacher and administrator, Domenico got hooked on the former Soviet Union, particularly Ukraine, while organizing at least 25 student exchange trips starting in 1989 and ending in 2006.
In 1971, he got his first teaching job in Camden, New Jersey, at a time when the city was gripped by corruption and industrial decline. He got involved. “Out of my experience in Camden, I became very political,” Domenico said.
Nationality: American.
Age: 65.
Position: President and CEO of Sterling Business School in Kyiv.
Length of time in Ukraine: Since 2006.
Tips for succeeding in Ukraine:“Be tenacious and determined. It’s not easy here, but it’s not easy anywhere.”
One battle he joined was with Campbell’s Soup, which maintains its corporate headquarters in Camden but had long before sent manufacturing jobs abroad to low-wage, non-union places. His activism led him in 1983 to serve a stint as Camden’s Democratic Party chairperson.
Despite his Sterling Business School’s official partnership with Rowan University in Camden, his two houses in the U.S. and his regular trips home, Domenico has no plans to leave Ukraine.
“The United States is still the greatest country and it’s still my home,” he said. “But I enjoy the lifestyle in Ukraine and Ukrainians don’t have as many hang-ups as Americans.”
One of the biggest problems in the United States, Domenico said, is that “Americans believe in the quick fix.” The world has changed, he says. America can no longer dominate everything as it did after World War II and through much of the Cold War. Now it must play a role in helping global prosperity because “a world full of poor people is a dangerous world.”
Somehow he ties together his support for Obama and his love for Ukraine.
Just as Franklin D. Roosevelt saved capitalism during the Great Depression, Obama saved the financial system in America after the global recession of 2008, Domenico said. Electing Republican candidate Mitt Romney is tantamount to “turning the nation over to the people who caused the problem and who drove the economy off the cliff with experimental financial transactions that don’t have real value,” he said. Equality of opportunity, a social safety net and a progressive taxation system are high on Domenico’s social priorities.
But he fears that the United States, like Ukraine, “is becoming an oligarchy. It’s not a good system. No economic activity in Ukraine takes place unless an oligarch decides to start it. And that’s where we’re headed in the USA.”
Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner can be reached at [email protected].
