Instead of making banks and businesses act ethically, Roger Lowenstein tells consumers that they don’t have to.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

In “The Way We Live” column of this week’s New York Times Magazine, Roger Lowenstein notes that about 10.7 million families owe more on their houses than the homes are currently worth.  He advises those people to do what any smart bank or business would do, which is to walk away from the loan and the house. 

The article is really quite canny in how it demonstrates that the amorality of business should rule the actions of the individual. He tries to dispose of the ethical constraints that prevent people from walking away from a bad debt, e.g., it debases the character of the borrower and it depresses the prices of the other houses in the neighborhood, by questioning why homeowners should have these feelings in the real world of commerce.   He gives many examples of businesses walking away from commitments through default and bankruptcy.  He also gives the example of a baseball team not signing a new contract with a big star as an example of why loyalty should not be considered a virtue in the world of business (although in this case, there is no contract!).

Of course, Lowenstein forgets that many loans are worth more than the asset that served as the reason for borrowing the money.  Every time a business or an individual buys a car, airplane, copy machine, computer or any other type of equipment, the value of the item declines immediately and precipitously, and to typically far below the funds borrowed. 

But instead of comparing a home to these loans, Lowenstein wants to turn the average homeowner into a sophisticated multinational corporation that makes all decisions based solely on improving the bottom line.

Roger, I have an idea:  Instead of asking homeowners to act more like amoral businesses, why don’t you instead call for new regulations that would bring some ethics into business actions? 

Roger would not even think of this approach because behind his article is the ideological message that underpins much writing about both economics and personal business: the idea that regulation of business is always wrong and that the marketplace will solve all our problems if we just get government and society out of the way.  Laissez faire means do what you want, and by giving homeowners permission to do what they want, he keeps that option open for the banks securitized and sold bad loans, big companies that walk away from communities to lower their cost structure or hedge fund managers who open new funds “rather than try to earn back their investors’ lost capital” (from the actual article).

But I wonder, if we all play by the rules of the big, do the small have any chance at all?

Corn Refiners Fight Myth that Sugar is More Natural

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The Corn Refiners Association (CRA) has been running ads on prime time TV in which one mother begins to chide another about serving a fruit drink with corn syrup and the other mother rattles off a few confident assertions that the drink is natural and that corn syrup is a natural product made from natural corn.  The other mother stands corrected and takes a swig.  The ad ends with a call-to-action to find out more by going to sweetsurprise.com.  The CRA is not mentioned in the narration although I’m sure a teeny-tiny version of its logo is somewhere on the ad.

When I saw the commercial I mistakenly thought that whoever sponsored it was telling another big lie by trying to make us believe that sweetened drinks have attributes of organic or health foods, when in fact, they provide little nutrition and lots of empty calories.  

I hate big lies so I was angry.

That is, until I got to the website.  Now I’m just amused. 

The CRA is not trying to say that corn syrup is an organic or healthy food; merely that corn syrup was as natural, tasty and nutritional as cane sugar.  And of course it is, which is about like saying the 2009 Detroit Lions played football as well as the 2009 Kansas City Chiefs did.

It was at that point that I remembered that many makers of processed food products were touting cane sugar as a natural ingredient which is to lay claim to be healthier for you.  In fact, a number of products have changed their formulations and replaced other sweeteners with cane sugar and advanced the claim that they were now a “natural product.”

Of course saying that using cane sugar makes a product healthier is a lot like touting that the low fat content of a processed food is good for dieting, even though the only factor that figures into weight loss is calorie consumption (if you ate only fat but limited yourself to 1,500 calories a day of it, you would likely drop a few pounds a week).

The broader issue goes beyond cane sugar and corn syrup.  Both are always bad in beverages, and the processed food which contains either or both is typically not as good for you as making something from scratch, or eating something that has not been processed.  Experts and studies often list processed food and calorie-laden drinks as two of the causes of the obesity challenge we currently face in the U.S. and much of Europe.

So in this case, the pot is telling the truth when it says that it’s as black as the kettle.

How to use facts and logical thinking to create the big lie

Posted on by Marc Jampole

In an opinion piece that filled half of the New York Times’ Op/Ed page on New Year’s Day, Denis Dutton demonstrates how you can use a logical presentation of accurate facts to create, or in this case, support a lie.  

The premise of “It’s Always the End of the World as We Know It,” is that mankind has always fabricated potential or probable holocausts and apocalypses.  He begins with an extended history of Y2K, which as many will remember, was the fear of an informational meltdown when masses of computers malfunctioned on January 1, 2000 because the original code built into them only accommodated two digits for the year, not the four that are required to distinguish 2010 from 1910.

Dutton does a credible job, first of demonstrating that reality did not bear out the Y2K hypothesis, and then of connecting it to the apocalyptic visions of various religions.  He jaunts nicely and logically through a quick analysis of why people love to fear disasters, with but one small mention warning of his true goal, which is to disprove the theory of global warming.

(Note to my fellow detail freaks: That small mention fits well into the context of his argument, which at the point of the mention is quite accurate and appropriate.  Here is that little mention: “Religions from Zoroastrianism to Judaism to Christianity to U.F.O. cults have been built around notions of sin and the world’s end.  The Y2K threat resonated with those ideas. Human beings have constructed an enormous, wasteful, unnatural civilization, filled with sin — or, worse in some minds, pollution and environmental waste.  Suppose it turned out that a couple of zeros inadvertently left off old computer codes brought crashing down the very civilization computers helped to create.  Cosmic justice!”)

So after 700 reasoned words on how Y2K exemplified the propensity of humans to create imaginary threats of imminent mass destruction, Dutton comes out of his climate change denying closet in the very last paragraph:

“This applies, in my view, to the towering seas, storms, droughts and mass extinctions of popular climate catastrophism.  Such entertaining visions owe less to scientific climatology than to eschatology, and that familiar sense that modernity and its wasteful comforts are bringing us closer to a biblical day of judgment.  As that headline put it for Y2K, predictions of the end of the world are often intertwined with condemnations of human “folly, greed and denial.”  Repent and recycle!”

If you’re not reading carefully, as most of us don’t, you could easily let this quiet slide from reason to deception go by unnoticed and find yourself agreeing with his conclusion, which expresses after all, our fondest dream, that global warming does not lead to worldwide suffering.

But if we analyze the article for a minute, we can see two big problems with his logic:

  1. Just because the reasoning leading up to the conclusion is correct does not mean the conclusion is correct. 
  2. He compares Y2K, which was a hypothesis, with global warming/climate change, which is a scientific theory.  A hypothesis is an idea of what could be true but maybe not, a kind of starting point for running controlled experiments. But when scientists start calling something a theory, they pretty much have gathered a preponderance of evidence to substantiate the idea.

The real question perhaps is why the New York Times decided to publish Dutton’s piece.  Would it publish a piece of philosophical rhetoric that concluded that the earth was flat or that the sun revolved around the earth?  Would it print an article on sociology that suddenly at the end proposed that flies regenerated spontaneously from dung?

Sometimes the public stature of the writer compels a newspaper or magazine to publish an article.  But the Times mini-bio describes Dutton as a professor of philosophy at a university in New Zealand.  His Wikipedia biography describes him as “an academic, web entrepreneur and libertarian media commentator/activist. “  In other words, he is neither Henry Kissinger, who might get a free pass onto virtually any publication’s Op/Ed page, or the chair of a Fortune 500 company who might be allowed to give her distorted view of a business news story which directly concerned her company.

By accepting the validity of the climate change deniers on this level of discourse — an Op/Ed column by a little known expert in another field — the Times does as much of a disservice to the U.S. public and our public discourse as it did by publishing the misleading evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq without first substantiating it.

The best way to pay me for my blog is to read it.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Several people have recently posted comments that wonder why I’m not getting paid for my posts.  I do appreciate their concern and their desire to put a financial value on my blogging.

In the United States, of course, the natural assumption is that people do most things for money.  In fact, as I’ve noted in previous blogs, money has to a great extent replaced all other means to determine if something or someone is successful, worthwhile or artistic. 

In the case of my blog, though, I do it for the pleasure of organizing and writing down by thoughts plus the joy of sharing with my readers.  I have had a very successful advertising business for more than 20 years now and I’ve made a lot of money.  Instead of trying to make more of the green, I feel happier spending some of my free time on this blogging adventure.  In addition, eventually many of my posts will end up in books I am slowly writing on communications theory and propaganda in a free society.

But for the time being, I am gratified that I have picked up so many followers in these first five months of blogging.  The knowledge that people are reading my material is all the reward I need.   

Having said that, I can suggest something to readers who absolutely feel as if they really do want to “pay” for reading my blog.  You could always pick up a copy of my book of poetry, Music from Words, either from the publisher, www.belldaybooks.com, or from many online bookstores, including www.amazon.com.  You can also buy it in almost any bookstore, but you’ll probably have to have the store order it from the warehouse.  If you don’t read poetry, you could always give it to someone you know who does, or an English student you know.

That’s it for the commercial.

Best wishes to all my readers for a creative and insightful 2010. 

Calling a thing by a name that it’s not to make the name sound better.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

On the front page of the business section in today’s New York Times, David Leonhardt builds his column around a propaganda technique that is really a baroque twist to an old-fashioned rhetorical device.  That is, unless you think Leonhardt really doesn’t know the meaning of a simple word we all use.

Leonhardt wants to show that rationing of medical care can be a good thing, but the example around which his article is built, Richmond, Virginia, is not about rationing, even though he says it is.  What Richmond, Virginia did was to cut the supply of hospital beds.  Leonhardt is either a) obtuse or b) manipulative (I select “b”) in calling the decline in beds an example of rationing, when in fact there has been no limiting of access to hospital beds in Richmond.

Here’s exactly what David the Lionhearted says:

“Since 1996, the Richmond area has lost more than 600 of its hospital beds, mostly because of state regulations on capacity. Several hospitals have closed, and others have shrunk. In 1996, the region had 4.8 hospital beds for every 1,000 residents. Today, it has about three. Hospital care has been, in a word, rationed.”

Later Leonhardt demonstrates that care has not suffered in Richmond.

Now here are the definitions of “to ration” that my favorite online resource, Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary, gives:

“1 : to supply with rations : put on rations  2 a : to distribute as rations : allot in rations  b : to distribute or divide (as commodities in short supply) in an equitable manner or so as to achieve a particular object (as maximum production of particular items) — compare DIRECT CONTROL c : to use or indulge in sparingly synonym see APPORTION”

There’s nothing in there about cutting supply, only about cutting access.  Richmond had an oversupply, which it reduced, with no impact on the health care of its residents.  We have a lot to learn from the positive steps Richmond took to reduce oversupply, but it teaches us nothing at all about rationing.

My guess is that David Leonhardt believes that one day we may have to resort to real rationing, which means limiting access to health care.  So he tries to sneak one by us by labeling something as rationing that everyone will think is a great thing but unfortunately is not rationing.

The old rhetorical trick is to call a negative thing by a positive name to make the thing sound better.  The baroque twist that David the Lionhearted makes is to call a positive thing by a negative name to make the name you call it sound better. 

How the news media helped to spread the lies of this passing decade.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Yesterday I characterized the last decade as “The Lying Zeroes” because so much of the activity of government, business, other institutions and individuals either created lies or was based on lies.

The news media turned out to be a primary vehicle for spreading lies, and in stating this I am including the Internet, all websites, blogs and chat rooms, as part of the news media.  In fact, the most obvious reason for the rapid spreading of lies during “The Lying Zeroes” is the enormous growth of Internet news media, with its currently very low entry fee for becoming a carrier of information to the public.  Websites, chat rooms, blogs, social networking pages and now tweets are ways to spread lies.

But the news media’s contributions to “The Lying Zeroes” go beyond technology.  Here are some other woeful media trends that helped to create or communicate lies:

  • The consolidation of media so that the ownership of mass media outlets is in fewer hands, leading to fewer editorial voices, especially on talk radio, now dominated by right-wingers who lie (not all right-wingers do) and who over the past 10 years have replaced a far wider set of opinions voiced by local radio personalities.
  • Getting too cozy with government sources, which led to Judith Miller’s false reports in The New York Times about weapons of mass destruction and the misleading reporting from the Iraqi war front.
  • Not fact-checking government sources, which allowed Dick Cheney and others to keep spreading false reports of Iraqi involvement with Al Qaeda.
  • The “Matt Drudge” technique, which involves quoting another news source on assertions that turn out to be false so that you can tell the story you want to tell without first actually checking facts.
  • The use of balanced reporting to conflate the factual statements of one group with the unfactual statements of other groups, as in the recent healthcare debate or most public issues involving science.
  • The shrinking of mass media.  With fewer reporters out there, more are relying on government statements, the reports of others and news releases for their information.
  • Continued lower standards related to the truth content in commercials, not just by politicians but by a huge range of charlatans offering hair growth, greater virility, a way out of pressing debt problems, magic cures and unbelievable investments.

There is nothing we can or should do about the proliferation of media, and therefore lying, on the Internet, except to maybe establish more organizations to serve as Internet “truth sheriffs.”  But the established mass media really should clean up its act by raising the standards of its reporting and demanding that its advertisers tell the truth.

Let’s name the passing decade after something a lot of people did well: lie about stuff.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

A lot of the punditerazzi in print, broadcast and online news media have been trying to brand the decade that is about to close with something akin to the “Swinging Sixties,” “The Me Decade,” “The Roaring Twenties” or “The Gay Nineties.”

So far, the most accurate name has come from Paul Krugman in his column in yesterday’s New York Times.  He calls the “Aughts” the “Decade of Zero”, as in zero growth in the stock market, in real estate prices, in the salary of the average worker and in the number of weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq.   

Krugman has a great point, and the fact that zero also refers to the number in the decade place of the years creates a very clever pun.

But I’m going to propose another moniker for the first 10 years of the 21st century: “The Decade of the Big Lie” or perhaps, “The Lying Decade.”  (“The Lying Aughties” doesn’t sound quite right, but I’m open.) 

What characterizes our decade more than the lies that elected officials, business leaders and other prominent people told us or that we as a society told each other? 

Here is an off-the-cuff partial list of the many lies upon which our lives rested and in some cases depended in “The Lying Decade.”  First, some very big lies our government told us:

  • There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
  • Iraq supported Al Qaeda
  • Everything is under control in New Orleans (just after Katrina hit)
  • We can achieve a victory in Iraq
  • We can achieve a victory in Afghanistan.

Here are some lies that individuals and organizations told us that lodged themselves into the belief systems of many people:

  • Waterboarding is not torture
  • John Kerry was not a hero in Viet Nam (“the “Swift Boat” lie)
  • Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac forced bankers to make bad loans
  • It’s Obama’s recession
  • Global warming does not exist
  • The “Tea Party” drew a million people to its Washington march
  • Obama was not born in the U.S.A.

Let’s not forget frauds, which are collections of lies, including the 2000 voter fraud in Florida, Enron, Bernie Madoff and the other Ponzi schemers and the frauds of the pious politicians who turned out to be philanderers or engaged in the very behavior they were condemning.

Finally, here are some lies that it seemed most people believed and which motivated irrational actions by elected officials, businesses and individuals:

  • The private sector always gets the job done better than the public sector: which doesn’t take into account the private sector’s very bad and expensive performance in wartime, during the Katrina emergency and in administering private jails.
  • Technology companies have introduced a new era of endless gains in the stock market: which of course lead to the dot.com bust.
  • Real estate values will keep going up so you can buy a house and flip it or keep taking out bigger loans so you can live higher on the hog: we know how this one turned out.
  • Taxes are always a bad thing and we pay too many taxes in the United States: but our “to much” is lower than any other industrialized country and unfortunately not enough to pay for better schools, fixed highways, better and more mass transit, research into alternative technologies and other basic technologies and a guarantee of the basic rights that all people deserve in a wealthy society such as basic health care.

The sad thing is that so many institutions and individuals acted on these lies and by acting created our sad situation: fighting two unwinnable wars, a crumbling infrastructure, enormous unemployment and underemployment, a quarter of all homeowners owing more than the value of their homes.

The more I think about, the more I’m convinced that we are living in the great age of the big lie, but I really do like Krugman’s idea.  I know, let’s merge the two and call this dying decade “The Lying Zeroes,” which has the benefit of also referring to a number of our leaders during the period.

Mike & Mike replacements take a cheap shot at Michael Vick for ratings and Yahoo! follows along like a–dare I say it–lapdog.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Twice this morning on ESPN radio, I heard Erik Kuselias and Mark Schlereth, today’s vacation replacements for Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic, try to foment anger against Michael Vick for receiving this year’s Ed Block Courage Award from the Philadelphia Eagles, on a unanimous vote by his teammates I understand.  Kuselias and Schlereth couldn’t understand how someone who had murdered dogs or made them fight could be given an award for courage.  They averred that it sullied the awards of the other recipients, as each NFL team votes for a winner every year.  They were livid that about one third of the listeners had emailed in supported Vick.

Instead of seeing the baiting of Vick by these disk jockeys for what it was, an attempt to boost website chatroom traffic and thereby increase ad revenues, Yahoo! decided to follow ESPN into the gutter.  By early this afternoon EST, the lead story on Yahoo!’s home page was an Op/Ed by someone named Chris Chase who said that the Eagles sullied the award by giving to someone who served time for an act of extreme cowardice.  

The crimes that Vick committed makes for an interesting discussion, because it’s an example of a cultural more becoming an enforced law.  As came out in the coverage of Vick’s trial, there has been a long-standing tradition of fighting dogs in certain southern enclaves.  We know that Vietnamese eat dogs, which proved to be a problem throughout the 70’s in San Francisco.  I remember the local media almost weekly wrote about dogs getting free of leashes in Golden Gate Park and never returning.  I’m condoning neither the fighting nor the eating of dog; in fact I find both disgusting.  I’m just pointing out that there are cultural differences and in this one case, our legal system does not accommodate the differences.

But whatever the nature of the crime, how can anyone deny that it takes courage for someone who has been a pampered and coddled star since at least the age of 12 to go through two years of hard jail time.  Jails are not very nice places, not even limited security jails.  Those “country club” prisons of movie mythology—they don’t really exist.

In short, Erik, Mark, Chris and any other pious busybody who still has a grudge against Vick for his brutal treatment of dogs:

 He did the crime AND he did the time.

In this country, that means that he’s free to go on with his life.  Instead of tacking cheap shots about giving an award for courage to a reformed criminal who has put his life back together, why don’t you do your job and talk about sports?

The Glenn Beck Machine Manufactures a Christmas Story for Children

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The cover of The Christmas Sweater lists Glenn Beck as the sole author.  It’s only when you get to the second title page that you see that this children’s book is adapted by Chris Schoebinger from an original story by Glenn Beck with Kevin Balfe and Jason Wright.

The story is a dramaless tale of a boy around 10 who wants to get a bike for Christmas until he has a dream in which he gets a sweater that unleashes a wave of family love.  When he wakes up, he wants the sweater more than the bike. Of course he gets both.  Seeming to orchestrate both the dream and Christmas day is a grandfather who resembles a very buff Santa Claus.

A curious thing about the book is that this blissful, happy family Christmas is completely devoid of any religious element.  We never even see the top of the Christmas tree, which would likely have a nativity star on it.  Everything for this possession-rich white rural or suburban family revolves around the material.  The two symbols in the story are the sweater whose warmth becomes a metaphor for the warmth of family life, which in this story is something that is received, not given: the boy receives the emotion by getting a gift not by giving one.  The other symbol is a candy cane which the author (authors, manufacturers??) uses to suggest in an oblique way that grandpa knew he was inside the boy’s dream.

The illustration style and other design elements are fairly standard:  finely drawn but airbrushed realism in bright contrasting colors; a nice selection of points-of-views for the illustrations.  Little paragraphs on each page covering the “white space” of the illustration.  All pretty standard for hard-cover children’s books.

The book looks like a piece of fabricated art, that is a work of art or entertainment that is put together by a committee for the sole purpose of creating a product to sell (as opposed to being the passionate response to life that real art is supposed to be, whether it’s a movie by Fellini or a children’s story by Ezra Jack Keats.)

Most examples of fabricated art nowadays come from the world of movies and popular music. 

Here are some of the traits of fabricated art that we can see in The Christmas Sweater:

  • Multiple authors or a muddied authorship situation in which you don’t really know who did what.  The promotional material may say “Glenn Beck,” but in the book no one is listed as the writer, although we have an adapter.  And we have no idea if the two people who figured out the original story took stenography while Beck spun out details or if Beck sipped tea while they pieced the story together from little snippets of images and plotlines from other books.
  • The work extends a brand and depends on the brand, which certainly is the case with The Christmas Sweater.
  • The work pulls together elements of its art form in a way that is purely imitative as opposed to breathing new life into these old forms.  Fabricated art will not create original content, but instead throws out stock characters.  It will tell you something that seems as if you heard it before.  In The Christmas Sweater, some of stock Christmas story elements used without even the injection of a new twist include wanting a bike, an older guy who could really be Santa Claus and a prance through the snow.
  • There is a sense of great distancing between the audience and the story, as if we’re looking in from the outside as opposed to being in the middle of the action.  In the case of The Christmas Sweater, the distancing is created through the sketchiness of the vignettes which constitute the plot, the lack of any emotional dynamic in the characters and the creation of symbols that do not really refer to anything.

The back cover notes that The Christmas Sweater is a best-selling novel.  That means that children and families everywhere are reading this lifeless artificial book product instead of A Christmas Carol, ’Twas the Night Before Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, My First Christmas and other classics.  I guess that’s similar to eating fruit rolls and drinking corn syrup-rich fruit drinks instead of eating a piece of fruit.

What do Pleistocene hunters have to do with poker anyway? Absolutely nothing, Mr. McManus.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I wanted a light read for a few days, so I picked up James McManus’ Cowboys Full expecting a history of poker.  But little did I know that first I would have to submit to a painfully twisted Darwinian fairy tale in which the writer attempts to show how his version of standard modern behavior in complex society began in prehistoric days and/or our genetic code. 

Let’s let McManus speak for himself:

Our urge to compete and take chances developed along the following lines.  Pleistocene hunters risked life and limb for the best opportunities to slaughter ferocious but protein-rich animals.  The closer they got with a chipped-stone spearhead to a scared, angry buffalo, the more likely they were to be trampled or gored, but the better chance they had of actually killing the beast.  Courage and aggressiveness counted.  Hanging back from the fray may have helped a risk-averse male survive the day’s hunt, but it wouldn’t have served him well otherwise.  Hunters who took down fresh meat were lionized within the tribe.  They received larger portions of protein and more opportunities to mate with nubile females.  Meanwhile, the females were competing among themselves-painting their faces, displaying their breasts and genitalia-for the chance to mate with the best food providers.  Once copulation took place, protection became even more vital to the families who might become pregnant, so the sexual bounty was even more lavish for the hunters-turned-warriors who killed the most enemy tribesmen.  By this means and others, a taste for bold risk taking was efficiently bred into our species.  Perhaps the most obvious example today occurs when the prettiest cheerleader dates the star of the varsity team.

When constructing these Darwinian fantasies or fairy tales, in virtually every case the behavior that the writer wants to validate is part of the package of traditional Victorian values.  In the past few months I’ve pointed a number of examples of Darwinian fairy tales, all of which uphold traditional ideas about men and women; for example, see the blogs for November 17 and September 1.

In the McManus book, he is trying to connect good hunters getting the best women in the caveman days with varsity stars getting the prettiest cheerleaders today. 

But it’s all made up out of the very thinnest of air; maybe it’s made of phlogiston, that imaginary stuff in the air that Lavoisier proved did not exist.  It does not even exist in popular mythology much:  The classic movie plot is for the cheerleader to start with the star and then mature to the point that she ends up with the dancer, singer, political activist or hood.  And as I remember reality, the prettiest cheerleader usually dated a college man. 

My point is that McManus is trying to impose a personal observation on us as social reality and uses a fairy tale he either mistakenly or cynically calls scientific to do so.  The fact that this excursion into Darwinian fairy-telling was extraneous to the rest of the book, which is supposed to be about poker, makes it all the more irritating.   Let’s hope he takes it out of the paperback edition.

Every time I critique a Darwinian fairy tale, I make sure I write that I believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution, I just don’t buy into these elaborate explanations based on little or no evidence.