Month: June 2010

Vampire is the perfect symbol for late-stage Age of Reagan in which politics of selfishness dominates all society.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I didn’t see it coming, but now that it’s here, it makes perfect sense.  I’m talking about the new vampire craze that has invaded popular fiction and movies, especially but not only for teenagers and young adults. 

The vampire—that human creature who stays alive by sucking the blood of other humans—is the perfect image for an age when selfishness reigns as the underlying ideology.  I call it the Age of Reagan because it was under Ronald Reagan’s leadership that the country began its turn towards selfishness.  Reagan expressed it best with his oft-told joke with the punch line, “I don’t have to run faster than the bear, just faster than you.” 

The idea of every person for him/herself alone is the basis of current free market economic theory.  It also serves as a major ideological underpinning of consumer journalism, advertising and even movies and TV entertainment.  Over the last year, I’ve written about how the politics of selfishness has guided advertising campaigns, survey methodologies, political statements, movies and consumer journalism.  I’ve been meaning to do some other small studies in this area.  For example, it seems that an inordinate number of ads are based on selfishness, for example, all the TV commercials in which cartoonish buffoons or savvy “chicks” hide the cereal, candy bar or pizza bread sticks from loved ones or friends.  And doesn’t it seem that situation comedies today teem with completely selfish and self-centered characters.  In fact, selfishness seems to be one of the central core themes of comedy today.  

Let’s get to the vampires now.  As is well documented in hundreds of studies, since about 1980 there has been a net transfer of wealth up the economic ladder from poor and middle class to wealthy.  Here are some of the most salient facts, all taken from William Domhoff’s studies:

  • The top 1% now owns 34% of all the wealth in the United States (last available recent numbers), compared to only 20.5% in 1979, for a gain of almost 69% in the past 30 years!
  • Income of the top 1% was only 12.8% of total income in 1982 and today  it’s about 21.3%—a gain of two-thirds!
  • The chief executive officers and presidents of companies now make many more times the money than their average full-time worker does.  In 1980, CEOs made about 42 times what the average worked was paid; the latest numbers are 344 to 1!  By the way, in Europe, it’s only 25 to 1.

I think it’s reasonable to say that all ideology and philosophy aside, the past 30 years that have been dominated by Ronald Reagan’s political and economic ideas have seen the rich taking more of the pie and leaving less for everyone else.  The rich have gotten richer to some extent by taking it from others.  One of the most profoundly dramatic and startling images of such a transfer of wealth is to call it blood-sucking.

We see and hear examples of symbolic blood-sucking every day: sub-prime mortgage sellers and consumer finance companies getting unsavvy consumers into bad deals; company layoffs followed by announcements of massive salaries to their CEOs;  warranties at exorbitant prices for equipment that never goes bad; parents gaming the process for getting into college by essentially using money to hoist their children above others who can’t afford SAT tutors, special summer camps and professional writers to compose admissions essays.  Kids and young adults (and everyone else for that matter) see all this selfishness and channel it into what appeals to them in their entertainment. 

It’s very hard not to be influenced by the ideology of an age, especially when it is pounded into you by the news media and mass culture on a daily basis.  A dominant ideology infects everything, including our entertainment.  What could be more natural to a teen raised today than to be fascinated by people who survive and thrive by drinking the blood of others?  To my mind, vampirism is the perfect literary symbol of our current selfish society.  I expect vampires to be a major and dominant image in mass culture for several more years.

The new war on public workers is just the latest phase in the right’s jihad against unions.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

In an article titled “War on Public Workers” in this week’s Nation, Amy Traub connects a lot of recent blips on the news media screen to draw a picture of what she accurately calls a new class war against government employees. 

Traub does an excellent job of citing some of the usual suspects such as Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, the editor of U.S. News & World Report, the Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot, the Heritage Foundation and Reason Magazine and their calls for cutting the salaries and pensions of state workers or loosening the stranglehold that public unions supposedly have on state and local governments. 

Traub demonstrates that, as she says, “the lavish lifestyle of public workers is a myth,” but notes that by “attacking public workers, they can demonize ‘big labor’ and ‘big government’ at the same time, while deflecting attention from the more logical target of Middle America’s rage: the irresponsible Wall Street traders, whose risky, high-profit business practices brought down the economy, and the lax regulators who let them get away with it.”

We all get angry when we hear executives get hundreds of millions, destroy the company and the employees end up with partial or no pensions.  In the case of public employees, the people getting rich, or richer, because of underfunding pension needs are those who have paid less in taxes over the years.  Now that’s all of us, but remember that tax cuts everywhere during the last 30 years have primarily helped the wealthy.

Several days after Traub’s article appeared, Roger Lowenstein made the “let’s go after the public unions” argument in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine.  His topic is the pension funding shortfall faced by an alarming number of states and municipalities.  He admits that shortfall is the fault of the employers—in this case, government—for overestimating how much money the pension fund investments would make and underestimating how much they would have to put into the funds every year to keep them solvent.  Yet Lowenstein wants the workers to pay the price of the employers’ folly.  For example, he says: “…legislatures need to push the boundaries of reform. That will mean challenging the unions and their political might.” 

And now the front page of this morning’s Times holds a story by Steven Greenberg about four elected Democrats, two in New Jersey and one each in California and New York, who are trying or talking about trying to reduce the pensions, benefits or salaries of public unions.  The story is pretty much an encomium to the personal courage these politicians are supposedly showing.  The article quotes Gary N. Chaison, a professor at Clark University, saying that some Democrats now consider it a “badge of honor” to fight the unions. 

But quoting Chaison is an example of expert selection to prove a point.  Chaison’s thin body of academic work focuses on what happens when unions merge, yet, as his Wikipedia article points out, he is frequently quoted in the news media because he always says something pessimistic about the future of unions.  In other words, he says what the writers and editors want readers and viewers to know.  

I wanted to put Traub’s discussion of the class war of wealthy right-wing interests against public workers into the 30-year war that the right wing has waged against unions in general, starting as so many of these Conservative movements have done, with Ronald Reagan.  Although once president of a union, as a politician and elected official, Reagan did all he could to make it more difficult for unions to organize and to shrink the power of unions in politics and the economy. 

Here are some high points in the 30-year history of anti-unionism by the Republican Party, certain businesses and the right wing chatter-pros at think tanks, academic journals, business associations and the wing-nut media:

  • Reagan’s breaking of the air traffic controller’s union.
  • Reagan’s reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board and other regulatory agencies, which then began to make decisions and promulgate new regulations that made it harder for unions to organize.
  • The charter school movement, which while declaring itself a movement to return control to parents really has had the breaking of teachers’ unions as its primary goal from the very beginning.
  • The news media’s war on baseball since free agency and the ascension of the strong players’ union.  Notice how year in and year out, football (with its very weak union) can do no wrong, whereas everything even a little negative about baseball gets blown out of proportion.  For example, the media has never made a fuss about the ubiquitous presence of steroids and other performance enhancers in football, while crucifying baseball in general and every baseball player ever discovered to have taken performance enhancing drugs. 
  • The decision of the Obama Administration, unlike the Clinton Administration after 12 years of Republican rule, not to roll back 8 years of Bush II’s phase of the war on unions.  His Secretary of State, for example, embraces charter schools.  

The war on public workers so vividly described by Traub, is the latest chapter in the wider war on the union movement.

The question, of course, is why the right-wing is so obsessed with crushing unions?  The ideological pureness of unregulated free market thinking aside, I think its part of the bigger 30-year class war declared by Reagan and his followers against anyone who isn’t wealthy.  One thing that virtually every item on Reagan’s domestic agenda had in common was that they all tended to transfer wealth up the economic ladder from poor and middle class to the wealthy.  Think of it—lower taxes, smaller government, more government services performed by private contractors, fewer unionized workers.  Whatever other impact each may have had, they all took and still take money from the poor and middle class and give it to the wealthy.

Why does the U.S. keep getting into wars with no real objective, or an objective that’s just pie-in-the-sky?

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Thomas Friedman hit the nail directly on the head yesterday in his regular New York Times column, when he wrote:

“…when taking America surging deeper into war in Afghanistan, President Obama has to be able to answer the most simple questions at a gut level: Do our interests merit such an escalation and do I have the allies to achieve victory? President Obama never had good answers for these questions, but he went ahead anyway. The ugly truth is that no one in the Obama White House wanted this Afghan surge. The only reason they proceeded was because no one knew how to get out of it — or had the courage to pull the plug. That is not a sufficient reason to take the country deeper into war in the most inhospitable terrain in the world.”

No one knew how to get out of it.  The unstated assumption that I think most of us would share is that no one knew how to leave Afghanistan without getting bludgeoned by the right wing media that now sets the terms of debate in the mainstream news media.  Right-wingers would shout out their typical litany of incendiary catch-phrases: Weak on defense!  Couldn’t do what was needed! Put America’s security at risk!  In fact I think the reason that President Obama escalated the Afghanistan War was so he wouldn’t take heat for drawing down Iraqi troops.  Escalate in Afghanistan while leaving Iraq was his plan even as a candidate.  And I believe his plan was a typical Clintonian triangulation to defend in advance against right wing criticism. (BTW, the firing of McChrystal probably won’t raise the ire of the wing-nuts because President Obama replaced him with their sweet little darling, General David Petraus.)

But I think it’s just a little too easy to attribute the Administration’s hesitation to pull its stakes from a sinkhole of an unwinnable war to fear that it would take a scorching from the right.  Remember, our president takes a scorching from the right whatever he does, because Rush, Sean, Glenn, Anne and the others are subjective partisans who just don’t like the man. 

Let’s go back to the war which served as dress pattern for our current Iraq-Afghan fiasco: Viet Nam.  I’m currently in the middle of reading John Prados’ masterful new history, Viet Nam: History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975.  Prados describes in accurate detail how Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson all had innumerable opportunities to pull out of Viet Nam.  Each time the rational evidence suggested that we had nothing to gain by remaining and that remaining would necessitate committing more money and more soldiers to Viet Nam.  And in each case, all three presidents forged ahead, sometimes after making noises about pulling out. 

During the 10-year period between 1954 and 1964 in which three successive U.S. presidents decided again and again to escalate our presence to Viet Nam, the right wing was at its low point in American politics.  The McCarthy era had scared a lot of average middle class folk, elected officials and even corporate executives.  The country was rapidly moving to the left on a wide range of social issues such as civil rights, women’s rights and nuclear disarmament.  Additionally, the media was much smaller and far from 24/7 since there was neither cable TV nor Internet nor cell phones.  And while there were many Republican newspapers, a lot of these were progressive Republicans, sometimes called Rockefeller Republicans.  Yes, the core of what would become the new Republican party of whites living in the sunbelt and the rural and suburban north was coalescing, but the various groups in the Republican party Ronald Regan built had not connected and they did not have any powerful news media on their side to shout out their views.

Here’s my point: In an environment ideal for pulling out without suffering any political consequences, Eisenhower did not, Kennedy did not, and Johnson did not.  More than 50,000 Americans died, we wasted a lot of money and lost the respect of the world. (The differences in Iraq and Afghanistan are that the war started sooner and that it has killed fewer of our side while wasting more money.)

Now some would call it a collective hubris, an inability of our country to admit we are ever wrong.  But in the case of Viet Nam, for the longest time, maybe 8 years, that admission could have come in the dark shadow of the public’s lack of awareness about the war.  In the case of our current wars, President Obama had a mandate to repudiate the policies of the Bush Administration and the opportunity to say, it was his war and it was a mistake, so we’re pulling out with all diligent speed.

The similarity I see is the great role that companies that receive military contracts play in the politics of the United States.  Although one was perhaps the most big-hearted and caring President we have ever had and the other the archetype of the uncaring and mean business operator, LBJ and Dick Cheney share one thing in common—both were beholden financially to Halliburton, although in Johnson’s day it was called Brown & Root.  For a full discussion of LBJ’s ties to Cheney’s future employer, check out Robert Caro’s definitive biography of LBJ.

Add to the military contractors multinational businesses that have always relied on U.S. governments to use our military to protect their interests, agricultural companies, airplane manufacturers, mining and metals companies and weapons makers.

President Dwight Eisenhower called it the military-industrial complex.  But even though he warned us about it in his farewell address to the nation in 1961, Eisenhower really didn’t feel he could do much to stop its natural flow, and the result was Viet Nam.

Doesn’t that sound a lot like our current president?  Doesn’t Obama seem keenly aware of our problems, including but not limited to the disasters we have created with our military adventurism, but he believes he is limited in what he can do, so he triangulates again and again. 

Leadership style is another thing Eisenhower and Obama have in common: both set a broad goal and then watch Congress hash it out.  Both prefer to lead by finding and then reinforcing the consensus.

I have read people compare Barack Obama at various times to FDR, Lincoln and Jimmy Carter, but to me, he’s looking a lot like Ike, but without the advantages of a post-war boom and a strong Senate Majority Leader named LBJ.

How an inequitable distribution of salaries leads to gaming the educational system by parents and colleges.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Two articles in yesterday’s New York Times reveal how attempts to “game the system” have corrupted both college and the process of getting into college. 

On page one of The New York Times, Catherine Rampell tells us of 10 law schools which recently have uniformly added additional points to every student’s grade point average.  For example, Loyola Law School in L.A. is giving all recent students a boost of one-third of a point.  The goal, to state the obvious, is to make the graduates more attractive in the job market.

But it’s clearly a corruption of the system that has grave ramifications in the real world.  Let’s start with what lawyers do.  The core task of the lawyer is to construct an argument or contract based on documents and articles that he or she has analyzed. Sometimes if you’re a litigator, you have to make an oral presentation of what you’ve done.  That sounds just like school work.  In other words, how you do in school really does predict how you are going to do as a lawyer.  Furthermore, because of uniform bar standards, the courses and curricula of most law schools are very, very similar, meaning that an A from Loyola is pretty much comparable to an A at Michigan, that is, if everyone is playing by the same rules and grading the same way.

By the way, not every profession or job is as linked to performance in school as the legal profession is (or engineering, to name another one).  In fact, to excel in school requires only a handful of the many diverse skills and natural talents that people can possess.  More on this point after looking at the other article in yesterday’s Times.

In the local section, Sharon Otterman reports that the New York City Department of Education is thinking about changing how it tests for its gifted programs because so many parents are gaming the test by putting their kids through extensive preparation.

I wonder what these parents think they accomplish by pushing their kids beyond their natural capabilities instead of understanding those capabilities and nurturing the real talent that I believe that every child possesses.  Trying to game the system to help your child advance academically has been going on for about two decades now, and every year it seems to trickle down to more families.  They’re called “helicopter parents” and are the ones who hire consultants to get their kids into the “right” kindergartens, hold their kids back a year, have their kids take one course in summer school to have a lighter load during the high school year, put their kids through rigorous SAT training and hire people to write their kids’ college application form essays.

What will these children do when they are adults in the real world left to their own devices, at least those that don’t go into the family business or have trust fund money? (And if they are set up for life, why bother in the first place?)

Why are both colleges and parents corrupting the system for what they think is the benefit of the young people in their care?  It comes down to the pursuit of money and respect, but then again, in America, all we respect is money, so it comes down to the Benjamins (and the Grants and Jacksons, and even the Washingtons!)

Start with the thought process of the helicopter parent: If I can get Emma into a good kindergarten, she’ll go to a good elementary school, get into a gifted high school, attend an Ivy League college and get a job at a major law, finance, publishing, architecture, accounting, PR or consulting firm and have an enormous income, or maybe make the connections to get in on the ground floor of a major business venture or do her residency in a top-flight teaching hospital.  In any case, she’ll have a big fat salary. Which mostly won’t happen if Little Emma becomes a school teacher, physical therapist, electrician, appliance repair person, computer or design technician, social worker or a plumber.  These professions, some of which do require someone to get a good education, are all interesting and needed by society, but in today’s world they don’t pay all that much money, making more parents want to push their kids into high-paying professions. 

In other words, if the differences in salaries between professionals, business owners and executives and everyone else weren’t so great in the United States, then parents and schools would not feel the need to act in a corrupt and dishonorable manner.  The parents, children and schools contributing to this corruption believe, and wrongly I think, that the purpose of college is nothing more than to purchase a certification that enables you to get the job you want. 

The article on law schools raising GPAs mention that other universities are paying students to take non-paid internships in the public and nonprofit sector, while others are paying law firms to try out their students.  Both seem admirably practical and can be roughly construed as kinds of “work-study” aid.  Both help their students get a leg up in the job market without doing anything to lower academic standards.  Bravo to these schools for trying to help students in an ethical and fair manner.

Tony Hayward set to enter the galaxy of mythic archetypes as a cross between Bozo the Clown and Henry Clay Frick

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I think virtually everyone outside the Joe Barton family would agree that Tony Hayward has failed as the operational leader of BP during the devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. 

From the media reports, it seems as if “Wayward Hayward” eats three square meals of “fillet of foot” every day.  Watching Mr. BP commit faux pas after faux pas for weeks on end has left me wondering if “foot in mouth disease” is fatal.  When I close my eyes and slowly chant the words “Tony Hayward,” I now get a vivid image—almost an hallucination—of Clarabelle honking the horn of a tricycle too small for him, scurrying herky-jerky among tightly packed rigs in an oil field.

All joking aside, from the standpoint of a public relations professional, Hayward has failed miserably as a corporate spokesperson because he did not represent the company in much of what he said.

Let’s start with some basic PR theory.  In the current world of easy litigation and clashing special interest groups, one of the primary job responsibilities of chief executive officers is to represent the company.  If the CEO does it well, like Lee Iacocca, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell, it can help a company enormously. 

Representing the company means talking to the news media and appearing at public meetings.  CEOs of even mid-sized companies generally have a communications staff which has as one of its key responsibilities making sure that the CEO has all the facts in hand he or she needs to represent the company to the news media or public.  The CEO is not a sales executive, but always has sales numbers.  The CEO is not a HR person, but always knows how many people the company just laid off or hired.  The CEO doesn’t do research, but knows what the next products to be commercialized are.  The CEO knows all this because other company employees tell the PR department, which churns it into easy-to-understand bullet points.

When a CEO speaks in a crisis situation, he represents the company, not himself.  But too often with the news media, and especially in front of Congress, Hayward answers were clearly from him and about him, and not from and about the company that pays him millions a year to be its most visible leader.  Time and time again, he would plead ignorance about matters that someone at BP surely knew something about.  He would say he didn’t know about the engineering, instead of saying “My engineers in the field are telling me….”  It made him look stupid and made BP look stupid for putting him in charge.

We may never know why the BP PR mavens and mavenesses advised BP and Hayward to keep it personal, but it may have been a trick to avoid revealing a lot of damaging information.  As it is, most news media have reported that BP cut corners to drill the well that burst.  There have also been reports that BP took shortcuts that led to two other less damaging accidents within the past few years. Even BP’s fellow oil companies ran a bus over it a few dozen times when it came to the subject of safety precautions for deep water drilling.  In short, it’s very possible that BP knows more but that what it knows is very damaging, and so it decided that the best way not to reveal what it knows was to pretend that Hayward was speaking for himself and just didn’t and doesn’t know enough.

It was a mistake, but I bet BP’s lawyers figured that the less it said, the less likely it would be sued, and that it was going to get a slew of bad publicity no matter what it said.  No excuse to throw gasoline on a fire, if you ask me.

Classic PR theory dictates that in a crisis, an organization tells everyone what went wrong as soon as possible and tell what it’s doing to fix it and why it won’t happen again. That often means firing the people who made the mistakes, and BP probably should have fired the people who took the shortcuts drilling the well and then announce a new set of standards to avoid the chance of a repeat.  Of course, it’s too early to say, but in BP’s case, that might have meant firing most of the senior management team.

To find out who rules America and how they do it, go to William Domhoff’s WhoRulesAmerica.net website.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I made a slight factual error in yesterday’s blog.  I said that Sweden has a more equitable distribution of wealth than both the UK and the United States.  I should have checked it out first on Professor G. William Domhoff’s website, WhoRulesAmerica.net.

In a recently updated article titled “Wealth, Income, and Power,” that’s on his website, Professor Domhoff presents a table comparing the percentage of wealth held by the wealthiest 10% of the population in various western countries.  It turns out I was half right:  in the United States, the wealthiest 10% own 69.8% of all wealth, whereas in Sweden, it’s 58.6% and in the UK it’s 56%.  So Sweden has a far more equitable distribution of wealth than the U.S., but a slightly less equitable distribution than in the U.K.

BTW, I highly recommend both the WhoRulesAmerica.net website and Professor Domhoff’s two masterpieces, Who Rules America (which has been updated since the original 1967 edition) and The Powers That Be.  For more than 40 years, Domhoff has studied who has power in the United States, why they have it and how they use it.  He combines key social insight with the most advanced techniques for gathering and analyzing data.

Although Professor Domhoff wouldn’t know me from Adam, I have been his disciple since I first ran into his books in the Printer’s Ink bookstore in Palo Alto, California in the early 80s.  Both Who Rules America and The Powers That Be appear on my list of 15 books (actually 14 books and one article) that I give to all young professionals who go to work for me and recommend to students when I lecture at universities.  I have used Domhoff’s “policy formation process” chart to help me advise clients who want to influence public opinion about an issue.  This model of how powerful people effect change in a post-industrial representative democracy has also helped me to understand many of the moves made by influential individuals, religious groups, politicians, business associations, think tanks and the other entities seeking to control or influence our complex society.  For example, I’ve referenced the model and Domhoff in blog entries twice over the last year.

I usually fact-check every assertion of fact I make in my blog entries.  The one time I didn’t, I should have.  But in a way, I’m glad, because it gave me an excuse to speak about William Domhoff and his very important research and ideas.

And mentioning Professor Domhoff gives me the excuse to present my entire list of 14 books and one article that I would recommend to any student of public relations or mass communications, or to anyone who wants to understand the process of communicating for organizations in civil and sometimes not so civil society:

  1. “Politics & the English Language”/George Orwell
  2. Ars Poetica/Horace
  3. Course in General Lingustics/Ferdinand La Saussure
  4. Manufacturing Consent/Noam Chomsky & Edward Hermann
  5. Poetics/Aristotle
  6. Propaganda/Bernard Taithe & Tim Thornton, ed.
  7. Social History of Art/Arnold Hauser
  8. The Elements of Style/William Strunk, Jr. & E.B. White
  9. The Lonely Crowd/David Riesman
  10. The Power Elite/C. Wright Mills
  11. The Powers That Be/William Domhoff
  12. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions/Thomas Kuhn
  13. The Theory of the Leisure Class/Thorsten Veblen
  14. Who Rules America Now/William Domhoff
  15. Working/Studs Terkel

A new award named after the condiment that the Reagan Administration said was a serving of vegetables.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

When BP Chairperson Carl-Henric Svanberg earlier this week used the term “small people” to describe, I think, the average person without wealth, social standing or political connections, he was most certainly misspeaking. 

We can’t look into his mind, but there is no doubt that whatever his true feelings are, as the titular head of a large multinational company, Li’l Carl’s official position would always be to show respect to all victims of the devastating oil spill that his company’s sloppy cost-cutting caused.  It’s possible that Li’l Carl, a native Swede, was translating an expression from Swedish that does not have the taunt of an insult that “small people” does.  On the other hand, as my life partner Kathy points out, the very concept of “small people” seems less likely to be part of the Swedish ideology than the British or American, since Sweden has a flatter social hierarchy and a more equitable distribution of wealth.

Li’l Carl made a verbal error, no doubt, but what about those people and institutions who purposely misspeak, with the goal of misleading or enforcing their own reality on both the English language and everyone else?  Sometimes they expropriate a term and misapply it, and sometimes they make up a new combination of words.

Here are some recent examples:

  • In May of this year, Spirit Airlines announced that it is now installing seats that can’t move backward or forward on some of its aircraft.  Spirit describes these new seats with less legroom than ever, as “pre-reclined.”  The use of the term “pre-reclined” is supposed to communicate that instead of taking something away from the passenger, Spirit is adding a new service—they recline the seats for you before you even step on board.  Of course, no one is buying it.  People still say they’re thinking about buying a “used car,” decades after luxury auto makers introduced the term “pre-owned.”  In the same way, all Spirit has done is call attention to its latest cost-cutting move.
  • In a sermon delivered this past Good Friday, Raniero Cantalamessa, the official preacher of the papal household, equated the criticism over the priest sex abuse scandal with anti-Semitism.  Of course it is, Father Cantalamessa, but only if it’s a sin to be Jewish.  The good father was trying to say that the sex abuse scandal has been blown out of proportion, much as some unstated harmless peccadilloes of the Jews are blown out of proportion by anti-Semites.  Two problems: 1) Jews do nothing wrong merely by being Jewish, whereas abusing children sexually is inherently wrong; 2) The comparison is based on the false and unstated notion that there are some things inherently wrong with Jews.
  • In March, former Texas Congressman Dick Armey called the founders of Jamestown “socialists” and said that’s why the town failed.  Sure thing, Dick, I understand that socialism is also why the 1962 Mets lost so many games.  Armey is completely wrong: as many historians point out, at the time, Jamestown was purely a business venture based on the principles of early industrial capitalism.  But for Armey, anything that is bad and fails is by definition socialist.   
  • Also in March, The New York Times reported that Wahoo, a seafood restaurant in Islamorada, Florida, claims to serve only local fish.  When confronted by the fact that a lot of its fish comes from Viet Nam and elsewhere, the owner said that it’s local because he buys from a local distributor.  
  • Finally, my personal favorite, from the June 12 issue of The Economist: in an article on what’s wrong and right about America’s right-wing, the writer describes Mitt Romney as a “self-made multi-millionaire.”  First of all, it’s probably not true, as his father was a successful businessman who served as head of a large multi-national corporation.  While I don’t know for a fact, I think it’s a pretty fair guess that Mitt started out with a few million to his name.  But beyond the error in fact is the false impression that the Economist is trying to create.  We are ideologically programmed, almost from first grade, to admire the self-made person like Andrew Carnegie who started in poverty with no social connections and rose to riches and fame.  The Economist wants to extend that admiration to Mitt, but it’s a rank distortion, because even though Romney made hundreds of millions through the purchase and sales of corporate assets, he is in no way, shape or form “self-made.”

Beginning this December or January, I am going to make a special award to the most absurd bending of language of the prior year.  I’m calling it The Ketchup Awards, in honor of the condiment that the Reagan administration declared a vegetable for the purpose of evaluating the nutritional value of the federal school lunch program.  In a special blog or maybe two, I will list at least 10 finalists and make three awards:  3rd Place gets One Dollop; 2nd Place Two Dollops; and the grand prize winner will get The Full Squeeze.

If you would like to nominate someone for the first annual Ketchup Awards, just post it in a comment on one of my blog entries or email your nomination to ketchupawards@gmail.com.  Please include the phrase and the person or organization who said it in your nomination.  No need for any links, but keep in mind that we will have to verify the facts and a link will make this task a little easier.

The real alternative to small government and low taxes is a more equitable distribution of wealth, Part II.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Yesterday I think I pretty much demolished the ideas that less government is always better and that the private sector can always do things better than government can.  Today, I want to tackle the companion idea that lower taxes are always better.

We currently have historically lower taxes and historically higher debt than at any time since before World War II.  As we have lowered taxes, we have nevertheless kept spending and paid for it by borrowing money.  What would have happened if instead of borrowing that money, we had kept taxes high or not lowered them as much?

To answer this question we have to know two things: who pays the taxes and who lends the money, because the first flow of money will go from those who loaned it to the government to those whose taxes were thereby lowered.

The wealthiest families and individuals and bigger businesses are the ones whose taxes have been lowered the most over the 30-year rein of Reaganism.   That’s just the facts. 

Moreover in theory, lowering taxes alomost always gives more money to the wealthy than to others.  Here’s why: the higher taxes go, the more of total taxes the wealthy should always theoretically pay.  Even when tax rates are flat, the wealthy pay more because they earn and have more.  As we all know, rates are progressive, which means that the more you make, the higher the tax rate.  For example, the highest tax rate before Reagan pushed through his first tax cut was 70% and now it’s 35%.  It is theoretically possible that we could have a tax system in which rates were so regressive (the more you make, the lower the percentage of your income you pay) that the wealthy paid less when taxes were raised, but it would probably first take the installation of a dictatorship.

It’s clear that with the lowering of taxes, in what actually has happened since 1980 and in theory, rich people get the biggest break, which means they have the most extra money to spend.

Now who are the lucky souls who fund the debt that the government floats instead of collecting taxes?  I call them lucky because when they loan the federal government money, they are making the single safest investment that has ever existed in the entire recorded history of humankind: the U.S. Treasury bond!

Why it’s the very same people who got the most extra money from lowered taxes—the wealthy—who buy the bonds.  Sure, people in the middle class and the poor may have a couple of government bonds, but the wealthy own the preponderance of T-bills and other government investments not held by China and other foreign countries.  In other words, under low-tax regimes, instead of wealthy people giving taxes to the government, the government ends up creating safe investment havens for the wealthy, and in the recent past, foreign countries as well.

And who pays the interest?  Future generations do, as interest to the bondholders, which means that the same tax base in future years will not be able to cover as many goods and services for the common good.  If a low-tax regime persists, and remember that except for the boom Clinton years we have had a low-tax regime since 1980, a pernicious double helix is created, as the increase in debt and the decrease in government effectiveness both spiral into a societal dance of death.  It happened in 16th century Spain and if we don’t raise taxes soon, it will happen here.

The rich primarily get the investment income, whereas all of us pay it out, so when we lower taxes and fund the government by borrowing money as Reagan and both Bushes did and, unfortunately, Obama now is still doing, we are making another net transfer of wealth up the economic ladder, this time from the poor and middle classes to the wealthy.

The greatest folly in all of this, of course, is that so much of the current federal deficit was directly caused by the military adventurism of the last 30 years, and specifically the sheer disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’m not saying that governments should never borrow money and instead fund all operations with taxes.  For example, municipal bonds earmarked to build needed schools and highways make a lot of sense, just as it makes a lot of sense when a business borrows money to build a new factory or improve its computer systems.  And just as some businesses have working lines of capital to provide them with the cash flow they always need, perhaps government also needs a ready source of funds that makes more sense to fund by borrowing instead of taxing.

What I am saying, though, is that when you hear conservatives talk about keeping taxes low or lowering them still more, they are advocating that we create investment opportunities that lead to a mass transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy.

The real alternative to small government and low taxes is a more equitable distribution of wealth, Part I.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The two constants that unify the Republican party and the right-wing since the ascension of Reaganism in the late 70’s are the calls for lower taxes and less government.  These are the two pillars of the right that unify the wing-nuts, the Christian right, the libertarians and the dwindling number of what used to be called “Main Street Republicans” or “Rockefeller Republicans” (most of whom have fled to the Democratic party, driving that political party rightward).

The pull of these two ideas is obvious:  On the surface when there is less government and lower taxes people have more freedom and more money. 

Over the next few blog entries, I want to take a look at what the alternative is to less government and lower taxes.  I think at the end of the day, we’ll find that less government and lower taxes do not lead to more wealth, but instead, to a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the extremely wealthy.

Let’s start with less government, not as a to-die-for philosophical concept, but as an option to address problems and challenges.  Are public schools better or private/charter schools?  Should governments or private businesses run prisons?  How much should our military do in the war and how much should it job out to consultants such as Blackwater and KBR? Should we regulate industries or let them set their own standards?

One of our leading beliefs over the past 30 years embedded in virtually every media story about business and economics is that the private sector can accomplish any task much more efficiently and with a higher-quality solution than government can.  Comedians joke about government workers and journalists assume the private sector always is the first choice.  Both Republicans and Democrats rail against big government when running for office.

But if businesses were inherently so superior to governmental bodies, why would it be the case that 56% of all new business fail within four years? By contrast, the number of municipalities that have ever gone bankrupt in the United States is infinitesimally low. 

Some will immediately realize that one main reason for the low rate of government failure is that it is easier for a stable government to raise taxes or borrow money than it is for an unstable business to find financing to continue operations, but that is exactly one of the advantages of having government address broad social needs like building and repairing roads, protecting our communities, educating our young or providing health care to the elderly and poor.  A government, while it must bend to the will of the people, can think and act long term and therefore not break under the momentary pressures of the marketplace.

Let’s go beyond philosophy now and look at performance:

  • Virtually all studies on charter school performance demonstrate that charter schools almost always fail to improve student performance and often worsen it.  Here is one of many examples: a recent Stanford University study found that the math performance of 46% of charter schools is indistinguishable from public schools, 17% had substantially higher scores and 37% of charter schools had substantially lower scores than their public school equivalents.
  • The privatization of our prisons over the past 25 years has been a festering scandal of prisoner abuse and fraud.
  • Did you prefer how our wars went when we used relatively few contractors as in World War I and II, or now that we’re making massive use of military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan?  
  • When the government loans money to students for college and career training, the terms are significantly better than when the private sector was allowed to do so between the early 90’s and this year. 
  • We all hear jokes about trying to interact with government workers, and I can honestly say that every call I have ever made to a government agency that didn’t know me already was an extremely frustrating experience.  But why don’t you spend the afternoon trying to talk with your cable system provider, telephone service provider, a company that sold you your computer, the electrical power company and one airline, and then tell me that the private sector is any better.

So let’s look at what happens every single time a private for-profit company does something that government can do or traditionally has done: Whether for schools, prisons, or cooking and delivering meals to soldiers, the private company makes (or sets its budget with the intention to make) profit for its key executives and shareholders. 

Now it’s a simple fact that low level government workers, many of whom are unionized, typically make more money than their peers in the private sector, most of whom aren’t unionized, whereas private sector presidents, officers and senior management make far more than department heads and other civil service executives.  

Some government contracting makes sense, e.g., to manufacture tents for soldiers or provide a special social service to an “at-risk” population.  In fact, some very successful government programs; for example, Medicare and Medicaid are really public-private partnerships in which government uses private insurance companies for claims processing and quality control.

But whether successful like Medicare benefit management companies or a sheer failure like privatized schools, prisons and war-making, when the government awards a contract out instead of doing it with its own resources, it is taking money from lower paid employees, who tend to be middle class, and giving it to executives and investors, who tend to be wealthy.

In the case of education, lower-paid nonunionized charter school teachers replace higher-paid unionized teachers.  The idea that this transfer of wealth from workers to management will increase student performance goes completely against the grain of basic U.S. thought.  Remember, an ideological tenet we hold especially dear is that people who make more money generally do a better job than those who make less money in any given field.  If it works for attorneys, marketing executives, athletes, movie stars, architects, engineers, physicians, accountants, business leaders and other professionals, why doesn’t it work for school teachers?  Shouldn’t the basic economic flow of money in charter schools from school teacher to executive by definition produce a decline in performance? Of course it should, and the statistics prove it does.

So whenever politicians are making a case for smaller government that involves one of the basic goods and services that have traditionally been a task of democratic governments in the U.S. or Western Europe, part of that case always involves a massive transfer of wealth up the economic food chain, typically from the middle class to wealthy.

Tomorrow I’ll look at that other sacred cow of conservatives: lower taxes.

Here’s more proof that the news media are actively facilitating those who want to question global warming.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

This week has brought more proof that the news media, taken either as a large group of individual media or a much smaller group of large media conglomerates, are actively facilitating those who want to question global warming.

Stanford Research Institute’s Political Psychology Group, under the direction of the estimable Professor Jon Krosnick, released a study on either Wednesday or Thursday that shows that 74% of all Americans believe the Earth has been warming over the past 100 years and 75% believe that humans have been substantially responsible for the new heat.  An overwhelming 86% want the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution businesses emit.  The survey polled 1,000 people.

In both the news release about the study that was released on Thursday and the Op/Ed piece by Professor Krosnick the day before in the New York Times, the Professor analyzes other studies by CNN, Gallop and Pew that have, on the surface, shown greater public doubt on global warming.  Professor Krosnick demonstrates that these studies asked indirect or confusing questions.  For example, Gallup asked “Thinking about what is said in the news, in your view, is the seriousness of global warming generally exaggerated, generally correct or is it generally underestimated?,” which is a question about media reporting not about beliefs in global warming.

How did reporting on this study fare in the news media?  If we count the release of the study as the day the Times article appeared, then on the second day the survey had 22 hits on Goggle News and the third day (today) had 37 hits.  If we count the distribution of the news release as the first day of the announcement, then the second day’s total was 37.

Let’s compare this coverage to the release of the George Mason University study that 50% of TV weather personalities don’t believe global warming.  You know, TV weather personalities, half of whom have never studied weather, the other half of whom are meteorologists who are not required to study climatology.  I’ve talked about this survey twice before, on March 30, 2010 and two days later.  This survey had second day Google News totals of 96 and third day totals of 108.   The news media actually perverted the goals of the study, which were to measure a barrier to communicating to the public effectively about global warming issues.

So depending on how you jigger the numbers, the news media have given from 259% to 290% more coverage to the misunderstood survey from the much smaller and lower ranked George Mason than it has given to the clear and precise survey by the much more prestigious Stanford University.  No offense to George Mason, but facts are facts.

Why do the news media persist in overplaying the statements of disbelievers in global warming and underplaying the statements of proponents?  Why is it even an issue?  Global warming is a fact.  The real issue is what countries, businesses and each of us individually is going to do about it. 

Some might say that my Google News results are skewered by the large right-wing news media led by Rush, Sean and Glen, but even if you remove these wing-nuts from the numbers, there still seems to be extensive coverage of “if it exists” in what is considered the “mainstream” news media.  Moreover, when you consider the small number of media owners nowadays and the way the main stream media cover the right-wing media as a story in and of itself, I’m beginning to believe that it may no longer be accurate to make a distinction between right-wing and mainstream media.

By keeping up the discussion on whether global warming exists, the news media slow down consideration of how to respond.  I’m sure many readers will remember how long the cigarette industry tried to stonewall the undeniable proofs that smoking or chewing tobacco products causes cancer.  I don’t remember the news media being quite so accommodating to the tobacco industry once the facts were in.  But then again, as much as the tobacco companies advertised and lobbied, the oil companies, electrical utilities and large manufacturing, metal extraction and chemical industries do more.