Category: Social & Political Issues

Again a writer uses accurate facts to propose something that isn’t true.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Over the weekend, Yahoo’s home page linked to an article titled “The Middle Class in America is Radically Shrinking.  Here Are the Stats to Prove It.” on Yahoo! Finance. 

The article originally appeared in “The Business Insider,” and was written by Michael Snyder, editor of a website called theeconomiccollapseblog.com, which builds a case for a coming economic meltdown while selling survivalist paraphernalia.  The menu bar selections on Snyder’s website include Gold Coins, Silver Coins, Emergency Food and Water Filters, all leading to portals with links to articles and a display of products for sale, gold at Gold Coins, silver at Silver Coins, et. al.

The article lists 22 statistics that demonstrate that the middle class is shrinking.  While none of the stats cited references, I am fairly confident that all 22 are correct, as I have seen many of these facts before, for example at the Who Rules America website.

Some of Snyder’s stats:

  • 82 percent of U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
  • The top 1% of U.S. households owns nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
  • Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

All well and good, until we come to Snyder’s conclusion, which is to blame the growing inequities in wealth in the United States on globalization and free trade.  For example, Snyder writes that “It turns out that they didn’t tell us that the ’global economy’ would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.”

There’s one big problem, though: other Western-style industrialized nations have not seen the same growing inequality.  The economies in Germany, France and the other EU democracies are saddled with the same high labor costs and safety regulations, yet there has not been the same pulling apart of incomes, not the same gutting of the middle classes, not the same transfer of wealth upwards that we have seen over the past 30 years in the United States.  Even Japan, which has suffered through two decades of stagflation, still has less wealth concentrated at the top than the United States does.

Why is that?

Unlike these other democracies, the United States has been on an active program to redistribute wealth upwards over the past 30 years.  I’ve written about this trend before, but here are some examples of actions that our nation has taken that move money upwards:

  • A series of tax cuts, the most substantial of which being those of Bush II, have significantly decreased what the wealthy pay while giving only token cuts to the middle class and poor.
  • The outsourcing of government functions to private sector companies, whose executives tend to make more money than public-sector executives and whose lower level employees tend to make less money than public workers.
  • The gutting of our safety net for the poor.
  • The uptick in anti-union activity, such as the hammering of the air traffic controllers union, the reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board, the charter school movement (which seeks to substitute low-paid nonunion teachers for higher-paid unionized ones), and the current war on the salaries of public sector employees.  Remember that unionization creates middle class jobs, especially for blue and pink collar workers.

None of these things have happened in Japan or Western Europe.  Looking at the pay of CEOs you can see clearly why there is a greater inequality of wealth in the United States than in any other industrialized nation.  These particular numbers come from a PBS special of a few years:

Nation CEO Pay Compared To Average Worker
Japan 11 times as great
Germany 12  “              “
France 15 “              “
Italy 20  “              “
Canada 20  “              “
Britain 22  “              “
United States 475!!  “          “

By the way, in 1960, the average CEO in the United States made a mere 45 times what the average worker did.

All of these other nations are among the wealthiest in the world.  All have willingly globalized their economies.  All pay higher wages and have higher safety standards than third-world competitors.  But it is only in the United States that there has been a significant redistribution of wealth upwards from the middle class and the poor.

Snyder got his facts right about the U.S. becoming a nation of rich and poor, but his explanation that globalization is the sole cause does not hold water.

FYI, the first time I wrote about the U.S. becoming a nation of rich and poor was in five-part TV news miniseries called “To Have and Have Not,” which I did while a television news reporter in 1982 for “Business Today,”  a now-defunct national business news show.

A great new idea that’s decades old, Breitbart gets off easy, food writer tastes the Tea-aid.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Here’s one day in the life of this observer of mass media:

Yesterday afternoon: Read the latest issue of Nation magazine to find a wonderful article in which Christian Parenti proposes that the Obama Administration kickstart the move to cleaner energy sources by orienting government purchases towards the clean and green.  Parenti lists electrical vehicles, efficient buildings, paper, cleaning supplies and a slew of other products that the Obama Administration could buy green and thereby give a much needed boost to their industries.  Parenti points out that government purchases are what funded early microprocessor development by being the first major customer.   

Parenti has a great idea.  The sad thing is, Barry Commoner proposed the same thing in the 1970’s; Commoner demonstrated that if the military bought photovoltaic (solar) batteries for the field it would make solar competitive as a source for generating electricity. 

Why didn’t we do anything then, and why isn’t Parenti’s idea being discussed in the mainstream media today?  The answer I believe lies in an incident from the early 50’s. Energy advisors presented President Harry Truman (my choice as worst president of all time for ordering the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) with two white papers: the first proposed the government support development of solar energy, which would have created a decentralized electrical grid and an industry dominated at least at first by lots of small companies.  The second paper proposed government support of the development of nuclear energy, which by definition would lead to a highly centralized grid and relatively few companies, most of which were already in existence and big donors to political campaigns.  Needless to say, Scary Harry picked nuclear.  And that federal preference for “big” energy remains to this day.

Back to the life of a blogger on mass media—at various intervals yesterday evening and this morning, I checked out what various media outlets were saying about the Sherrod flap.  That’s the African-American woman who earnestly told an audience that she had overcome her former racist attitudes only to be fired when right-wing rich boy blogger, Andrew Breitbart, used only a piece of her comment to make her look like a racist.  While I won’t question the newsworthiness of Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack apologizing for jumping the gun before the facts were in, I am very curious as to why the mainstream news media has not lambasted Breitbart for using the classic Nazi propaganda technique of editing a statement to make it sound as if the speaker is saying something entirely different.  In the National Public radio version this morning, for example, Breitbart fades entirely out of the picture.

It is despicable to use the editing technique Breitbart did to make a case or provide an example.  Just a few months ago, The New Yorker did a tediously long encomium on Breitbart and his growing influence.  I would hope that after the Sherrod incident, the mainstream media will now ignore Breitbart.  He has lost what little intellectual credibility he ever had.   

The early morning sun was coming up and I was sipping my second cup of tea when I ran across this opening to an article titled “This Tea Tastes Like My Yard” by Michael Tortorello in the Home section of the New York Times.  Pay careful attention to the last sentence, which I have bolded:

The first Tea Party got one thing right: drinking tea is un-American. Camellia sinensis, the common tea shrub, will survive in most warm, humid climates. But tea plantations never took root in American soil.

The evils of Asian tea and British customs duties may not top the Tea Party platform these days. But the Glenn Becks of the 1770s were compelled to invent their version of freedom fries — a drink they called liberty tea.

Who were “the Glen Becks of the 1770’s?”  Let’s see now, whom do we remember from the Boston tea Party and whose image do we therefore conjure on reading the phrase?—Why it’s John Adams, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Rush, some of the group of wealthy and connected white males who declared independence and wrote our constitution.  We have long called them “our founding fathers.” 

In other words, in an article about making tea from garden herbs, Tortorello finds time to propose that Glen Beck is akin to the great thinkers who shaped our governmental system.

Laughable, except that an accumulation of these sly references in the mass media gives credibility to Beck’s ignorant, mendacious and manipulative statements.  

I consider these three observations as representative pieces in the daily mosaic of information bombarding us.  That the news media have so far let Breitbart off the hook for his cheap propaganda trick and a Times food writer is using another cheap propaganda trick to promote Glen Beck are discouraging developments.  But it would be truly disastrous if Parenti’s article and ideas do not get a hearing beyond Nation’s readership.

We won’t know the true power or meaning of the Tea Party movement until the November midterm elections.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

In a blog entry of February 28, I said that the mainstream media was paying too much attention to the Tea Party movement.  I stated rather bluntly that at that point, the impact of the Tea Party was zero.  This statement came before the primaries in which Tea Party candidates have tended to do ill against other Republicans running for office.

Earlier this week, Carville-Greenberg released an in-depth study of Tea Party adherents that pretty much substantiates my view that the Tea Party has had little if any impact, which I now want to amend to say, no impact of its own.  I’ll explain that caveat later.   

The Carville-Greenberg study is very interesting and worth looking at.  Here, though, are the findings that support my contention that the Tea Party has had no impact of its own:

  • 89% of Tea Partiers lean towards the Republican party.
  • Only 5% of Teas report having voted for Barack Obama.
  • Total Tea adherents are 25% of voters and 10% of those who give to political parties or attend rallies.

In other words, no matter what pundits might be saying, the Tea Party is not made up swing voters, but of people who were always going to vote Republican and never going to vote for Obama or most other Democrats.  So where’s the impact? 

Some might say that the Tea Partiers have moved the country right.  It is true that they have moved the Republican Party right by helping more right-wing candidates win.  But in the general election, the more right-wing candidate may not have the advantage in a battle for the swing voters who decide many elections.

While recent polls show dissatisfaction with President Obama, I believe our deteriorating economic conditions, and not an upswell in Tea Party adherents, has been the primary reason for the decline of the President’s ratings.  Again, the Tea Partiers never liked our President and so none of their votes changed in the recent surveys. 

The biggest impact of the Tea Party so far derives not in itself or its members but in its symbolic value to the mainstream news media, which from the beginning has given the Tea Party movement outsized coverage and exaggerated its influence.  In the infancy of the Tea Party movement, the mainstream media republished unsubstantiated and absurd overestimates of attendance at a ragtag Tea march in Washington, D.C.  In the recent primaries, the media gave outsized coverage to Republican races with Tea-tied candidates while in many cases ignoring the Democratic primary races.  Mainstream reporters essentially hushed up the verbal miscues of Rand Paul and Sharron Angle until after the primaries.  The result of placing the spotlight on the extreme right 25% of the country to the detriment of coverage of other parts of the political spectrum has been to move the debate right-ward on virtually all the issues under discussion in the media.

At the end of the day, we won’t know what the real impact of the Tea Party movement is until November.  Carville-Greenberg says that 94% of Tea Partiers are certain to vote, certainly a higher percentage than will vote among the core 25% that affiliate strongly with the Democratic Party.  But what’s new about that?  The core Republican constituency has always been more likely to vote than the Democratic core.  Elections have therefore usually turned on two dynamics:

  • Who captures the independents
  • Will the Democrats get their supporters to vote.

I’m predicting that the extreme positions of Tea Party candidates will drive centrists to Democratic candidates and compel many who would have stayed home to come to the polls to vote against the right-wing extremists. 

That doesn’t mean the Democrats will necessarily prevail and maintain control of both houses of Congress.  The most important issue remains the economy.  If I were the Democrats I would do two things: 1) Make sure that the Administration was pouring all discretionary money into job creation and help for the unemployed; 2) Before putting together any advertising budget for fall campaigns, make certain enough money is set aside to have lots of vans and drivers to haul voters on election days to the polls from every senior center, community center, YMCA, university and public library in every urban area across the country.

Ross Douthat blames racist views of some rural whites on the admissions practices of eight elite colleges.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

In his opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times, Ross Douthat blames the racist and anti-immigrant views of some rural whites on the admissions policies of eight elite colleges.

In a masterpiece of specious reasoning and selective fact reporting, Harvard-educated Douthat declares that Pat Buchanan was right when he said that the American elite discriminate against white Christians.  Adding “rural” and “poor” to white Christians, Douthat then blames this discrimination for fomenting the attitudes of many rural whites.  With such scorn from the elite, it’s no wonder that the disenfranchised whites believe, as Douthat writes, “that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants…”

The linchpin of his argument is a conservative blogger’s analysis of a book-length study two Princeton sociologists did last year of the admissions systems of eight elite (read: Ivy) colleges.  According to the blogger, downscale, rural and working class whites needed higher SAT scores and grades to get into these exclusive colleges than minorities.

I could probably write a long chapter in a book on the errors in reasoning and outright deceptions that Douthat employs in this one Op/Ed piece.  Here’s a few “quick hits”:

  • Eight schools do not the ruling elite make.  Douthat uses these eight schools to represent the entire ruling class, much as some sports reporters once liked to use Roger Clemens and Rafael Palmiero to represent all major league baseball players.
  • Douthat keeps harping on the need for elite institutions to admit more rural students set to become farmers (to keep them from becoming gun-toting paranoids, he seems to suggest), but don’t these kids go to agricultural colleges?  Before pointing the finger Ross, check out the website or viewbook!  There are no agricultural departments at the eight elite schools of the survey.  Douthat should take a look at the “public Ivies” and see how many rural kids are going to their elite and rigorous ag schools like UC-Davis, Wisconsin and Washington (and others).
  • Douthat conveniently forgets to mention the studies that show that legacies get a bigger break than either African-Americans or athletes do in college admissions, that is that legacies have on average the lowest grades and SAT scores of any studied group.  A legacy, don’t forget, is someone who gets admitted because mom and dad and maybe granddad and greatgramps went to the college in question and have been giving it a lot of money for a long time.  Why doesn’t Douthat rail about the many places taken from deserving poor whites and given to legacies at Harvard and Princeton (and others) each year?

Why would the failure of elite schools to admit enough of the cream of the crop of the rural and working class white nation turn the larger population of all poor and rural whites against minorities and immigrants?  Elite educational institutions have always educated and been a special interest of the ruling wealthy elites, who have always been and remain to this day overwhelmingly white.  I think poor whites and rural whites know these facts.  Follow me carefully here: I didn’t accuse poor whites of racist views, Douthat did and excused them as well because not enough of them get into elite colleges.  The reasoning doesn’t stand up, since not getting into elite colleges for whatever reason, should turn poor whites against rich whites and not poor blacks.  That is, of course, until Douthat and his brethren get in the way and help these people connect their outrage to minorities and immigrants.

Tea’d-up Republicans spout falsehoods and absurdities through mouths full of shoe.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Here’s a multiple choice question that would fit into any SAT or GRE test:

Which one of these verbal miscues does not belong?

  1. Sarah Palin confuses the California city of Eureka with Eureka College in Illinois.
  2. David Vitter, Senator from Louisiana running for reelection, suggests that an appropriate group should go to court over the false accusation that President Obama has refused to produce a birth certificate.
  3. Tom Corbett, Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, says that large numbers of people have refused to return to jobs because they prefer to remain on unemployment.
  4. Sharron Angle, Tea Republican candidate for Senator from Nevada against Harry Reid, reasons that rape and incest are part of god’s plan as part of her opposition to all abortion rights.  
  5. Rand Paul, Tea Republican candidate for Senator from Kentucky, says that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a bad thing.

It’s Sarah Palin’s nonsense that doesn’t belong for two reasons, one nonessential and one very important for understanding how right-wing candidates use the news media. The nonessential first: Sarah’s the only one not running for office.

Now for the profound difference: All Sarah did was to make another one of her factual misstatements, demonstrating once again that she is a “know-nothing.”  The others all make inaccurate or inflammatory statements that are myths believed by their hardcore ultra-right constituency, e.g., there are people, goaded by the Vitters and Becks of the world, who inaccurately believe that President Obama was not born in the United States and there is a hardcore group of people who think that a 12-year-old girl raped by her father should not have access to an abortion. 

To most people and to the mainstream news media, these are shocking views.  The news media likes to report on them, but definitely tilts the coverage towards those who condemn these outrageous statements. 

But the core loves these messages because they believe them, even (or perhaps especially) those that are racist or dismissive of the poor and those who have lost jobs and homes in the recession.

I don’t believe the approach of playing to the basest instincts of the hardcore right-wing works, and so far, the facts back me up.  We know that after their remarks, Paul and Angle both dropped precipitously in the polls.  Corbett has already backtracked on his harsh comments on the unemployed after a hailstorm of criticism across the state of Pennsylvania.  And let’s not forget that Virginia Senator George Allen Jr. snatched defeat from the jaws of reelection victory by calling someone from the Indian subcontinent who questioned him at an event a “macaca.”

When politicians make these outrageously racist or in other ways absurd statements, it produces two negative effects:

  • It turns “centrists” against the candidate and makes them reconsider the other side.
  • It awakens some part of the eligible voters from the other side who were not previously likely to vote.  This second effect is particularly dangerous to the T-R’s (Tea Republicans) because the big lesson of the 2008 and 2009 elections was that when groups who vote in low numbers such as minorities and people under 30 have a reason to vote as they did for Barack Obama in 2008 then the Democrats prevail.    But when these voters stay home, as they did when Martha Coakley ran to replace Ted Kennedy in the Senate, then the Democrat loses.

Another example of the news media turning discussions of important issues into a fight between personalities.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I know I’m not the first to point out the proclivity of the mass media to turn discussions of important issues into fights between people.  Instead of discussing the issues in a rational way or seeking to sift the truth from the obfuscation, the media prefers to focus attention on polls, slips-of-the-tongue, gotcha’s, false accusations and personal matters.

But could they trivialize the important issue of preserving and strengthening Social Security?  From the viewpoint of this left-leaning liberal, the current Social Security battle is between those who want to tweak what is a very financially strong system to make it stronger versus those who want to address the federal deficit by having the federal government default on the loans it has borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund.

But New York Times reporter, Robert Pear has found a way to turn it into a battle between two personalities, Stephen C. Goss, Social Security’s chief actuary who has worked for the Social Security Administration (SSA) for 37 years, and Michael J. Astrue, the Bush II-appointed Social Security Commissioner.

Keep in mind that the news impetus for his article in this past Sunday’s Times is the fact that two Congressional committees begin hearings on Social Security this week.  In the article, Pear raises none of the issues that may be under discussion at these hearings.

Instead, Pear’s lengthy article:

  • Quotes a number of Democratic Senators and Congresspeople on how great an actuary Goss is and the need for the Chief Actuary to be independent
  • Details examples of past tensions between the two men, all about power struggles and bad performance reviews
  • Reprints a “nice-nice” comment from SSA’s spokesperson.

But nowhere in the article is there any discussion of what opinions these men hold.  Let me repeat: But nowhere in the article is there any discussion of what opinions these men hold.

The entire article boils down to a personality squabble, and not the important policy differences that must exist between a man who has worked all his life to keep Social Security solvent and a political appointment by an avowed enemy of Social Security.

Pear is able to share an example of an actuary and a political appointee clashing over an issue, but its six years old and concerns a different actuary, the one whom a Bush II administration official threatened to fire if he provided Democrats with his cost estimates for the new prescription drug benefit.

Despite an easy-to-access public record, Pear is unable or unwilling to come up with the substantive differences between the men and talks only of the struggle itself.  I spent about 30 seconds on the Internet to discover in the recent past Goss has said such things as Social Security is solvent for at least 25 years and that in its projections, Social Security could comfortably raise the estimated rate of return for the money it loans the federal government.  Another quick search revealed that since becoming Commissioner Astrue has rarely missed an opportunity to say something negative about the future of Social Security.  For example, when the first baby boomer applied for Social Security, he said, “We are already feeling enormous pressure from baby boomers being in their peak disability years …”  

Now why would Pear not discuss the issues from the point of view of these apparent adversaries and instead of  focusing on the fact of their disagreement alone?  It’s hard to come to any other conclusion other than the obvious:  Pear wants to move the story of Social Security away from issues and to the same old dreary personality battles that pock election and legislative coverage.

It’s called trivialization of the news and if there were an award for it, I would certainly nominate this article for 2010.

Columnist shows us how to indoctrinate children in the ideology of spendthrift consumerism.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I want to begin with a big bravo to Robert Reich and Nation Magazine for the special July 19/26 double issue on the growing inequality of wealth in the United States and how it is ruining the nation economically, a subject that I have dealt with extensively in this blog lately, including on June 14 and June 15.  I urge all my readers to get a copy of this issue of The Nation, which besides an essay by Reich, includes articles by Dean Baker, Jeff Mandrick, Katherine Newman & David Pedula, Orlando Patterson and Matt Yglesias.  Anyone with a little extra cash should consider subscribing to The Nation, which consistently serves as an accurate and thought-provoking alternative to mainstream and right-wing media.

Speaking of wealth, last Saturday’s New York Times had another exercise in indoctrination masquerading as an advice article, this one by Ron Lieber in his regular column, “Your Money.”

Lieber attempts to answer the question, “Daddy, are we rich?” and other queries that children and teens sometimes ask about the family financial situation.  I want to look at three ways that Lieber subtly infuses his article with the mindless consumerist, keep-up-with-the-Jones values that have so many Americans jonesing on commercial transactions as the only source of satisfaction and the primary means of interacting with the world. 

Lieber’s first trick is one I have written about often: selection of experts.  Lieber quotes four experts, all financial consultants. 

But wait a second.  When a child asks a money question, one of two dynamics is in play:

  • An opportunity to transmit basic family values, which may differ a little, a lot or not at all from the prevailing values of society and the community in which the family lives

OR

  • The necessity to deal with a family trauma (loss of job, for example).

It seems to me that a financial consultant has no standing as an expert in these situations.  Lieber should have instead asked those experts who could provide some help dealing with the emotional issues that really frame most complicated questions asked by children, in other words, a child or family psychologist. 

Child and family psychologists have both the training and the experience to advise parents on how to speak to children about difficult or complicated subjects.  Financial consultants might help in training children about financial matters, e.g., the importance of saving or why not paying off a credit card at the end of the month leads to spending more than you need to on the things you buy.  But the putative subject was not financial education, but communication on how financial issues affect the family.  That’s a job for a psychologist. 

Another of Lieber’s propaganda maneuvers involves his choice of examples, which all assume completely consumerist values.  Here are some examples, after each of which I will provide some interpretive comment in all caps:

  • “My wife handled it better, noting that if we had spent money on a second home, our daughter wouldn’t have been able to go to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival this year or on a beach vacation.”  BUT WHATEVER WE DO, IT WILL INVOLVE CONSUMPTION.
  • “They may just be worried about running out of money or wondering why you don’t live in a mansion.”  THE ONE EXAMPLE OF A CHILD ASKING WHY THE FAMILY HAS MORE THAN A HOMELESS PERSON IS BURIED AT THE END OF THE ARTICLE (SEE BELOW).
  • “…says he believes that most questions about salary spring from the schoolyard. ‘There is so much comparison going on there…Who is best looking? Who is most popular? And money just plugs right into that system.  Who has the richest parents?’”  THAT’S ONLY IF THE PARENTS HAVE EITHER TRAINED THE TEEN TO BUY INTO CONSUMERIST JONESING OR ALLOWED IT TO HAPPEN BY JUST GOING ALONG.
  • “This may not work as well for teenagers, who care mostly about whether they have as much stuff as their friends.” AGAIN, IF THAT’S HOW THE TEEN HAS BEEN RAISED.  

Lieber does consider voluntary simplicity (although he doesn’t call it that), the way of life in which you live on less and don’t consider buying things and experiences as the sole goal of life and the sole way of measuring and manifesting all emotions.  But he begins this alternative only in the last one-eighth of the article. 

This placement is the third way that Lieber enforces consumerist values.  By mentioning the one example of a family that embraced voluntary simplicity by selling their large house and buying a smaller one, Lieber moves the article slightly towards having some balance, but only if you read to the end.  In the case of the print edition, that means going to another page; online it means scrolling all the way down the page, in some cases after linking from the first paragraph tease to the full story.  And the one example of voluntary simplicity comes after the section on how to tell kids that they will have to do without something they are used to having because the family has to cut back since “mom lost her job.” 

The theory of montage states that the order in which you place information will color how it is perceived so much that this ordering creates a meaning beyond the information itself.  By placing the one example of non-consumer values after advice on what a consumer might say to children when the money runs low, the writer creates the hidden implication that there is a causal relationship between the two that in fact does not have to exist in the real world.

By using these three rhetorical tricks—selection of experts, coloring of quotes and positioning of information—Lieber is able to reinforce the prevailing value system that has sent so many Americans down the road to financial ruin and is taxing the Earth’s resources.

A news story about the expiration of tax cuts becomes a platform for the usual right-wing cant.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Myths take root as belief only after constant repetition over years.  In the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s we believed that government could solve many problems, often with the help of the private sector.  Anti-tax sentiment was low, and school districts had no problem raising taxes if need be to support quality public schools.  In the 70’s, majorities were against capital punishment and in favor of stricter gun control laws. 

All that has changed (and to my mind, for the worse), but it took years of hammering home some basic messages to turn the public on each of these positions, years of engraining these messages into the minds of the public. 

To state the obvious, one of the major vehicles for indoctrinating the public is the mass media.  Yesterday’s lead story running under the masthead on page one of the Pittsburgh/Greensburg Tribune-Review is a casebook example of how reporters color stories so that what is presented as objective using the tools of objective reporting is really a piece of propaganda.

The headline mouths a distortion: “Americans may be slammed by shocking tax hike.” Now when Congress passed tax cuts and tax breaks in 2001 and 2003, it wrote into the law that these cuts and breaks would expire after 2010.  To call the expiration of these temporary measures a tax hike is a misnomer.

BTW, I do not question that the expiration of these measures will shock many taxpayers when it hits their pay stubs, because many Americans just don’t routinely follow the news media or keep up with law changes that affect them. 

The writer builds his article on three types of information:

  • Details of the temporary measures that will expire, such as child tax credits,  capital gains tax reductions and the temporary phase out of the inheritance tax (which The writer calls the “death tax,” even though it is not a tax on the act of dying but on the estates of only the very wealthiest citizens once they have died).
  • Quotes from experts at think tanks and associations.  The experts give factual statements with no analysis, but all of them are associated with think tanks that are known to be right wing.  By virtue of having their experts state part of the factual basis of the article, the right-wing think tanks gain credibility.  In a sense, by disengaging them from their typical biased opinion or distorted analysis, the writer “mainstreams” them.
  • Other quotes from other people that begin in the bottom two-thirds of the article.  It is in these quotes that the writer presents virtually all of the right-wing’s decades-old talking points, even when they don’t make sense. 

This chart presents the quotes in caps and small and what the major message is in caps:

Quote/Person Message
“I’m surprised…Obama’s plan was not to raise taxes. He’s said many things and done the opposite.”/Local citizen  THE DEMOCRAT (Obama) IS BAD
“We’re already overwhelmingly overtaxed.”/Small business owner  TAXES ARE TOO HIGH
“Tax breaks are not the problem and should be frozen in place….The rate of spending today is out of control…It’s unsustainable and … it’s going to bankrupt the country.”/Prominent business executive  THE GOVERNMENT SPENDS TOO MUCH
“Someone needs to announce where we’re going and how we’re going to get there…People won’t like to hear it, but they’re better off hearing it rather than speculating.”/Political economist GOVERNMENT (the someone) IS NOT DOING ITS JOB

The writer could have just as easily taken a leftist approach and quoted some experts talking about the need to close the deficit while funding important government programs, or experts saying that we have historically low taxes for any industrialized country after about 1900.  Or, he could have taken an even-handed approach and centered the discussion on what experts are saying about specific tax cuts set to expire, alternating the view of those in favor of extending the temporary cuts and those against it.

My point is that every day now for years, we have been bombarded by these right-wing ideas, not just in the wing-nut media, but in the mainstream news media as well.  Even when the media gets the facts right, as this article mostly does, the underlying assumptions that are conveyed are the same talking points that Ronald Reagan had on the note cards at which he kept glancing in his debates with President Carter in the 1980 presidential election.

The constant beating of these messages into all of us has moved this country to the right.  Sadly, this movement has been correlated with a disintegration of our strong fiscal position, a net transfer of wealth up the economic ladder, a decline in our basic infrastructure, an erosion of civil liberties and a loss of esteem in the rest of the world.

Parade reveals what July 4th means to its publishers: an opportunity to promote mindless celebrity culture.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

There’s no question that Parade, the largest circulation publication in the United States, is going to put July 4th front and center in an issue stuffed into newspapers for Independence Day delivery and use it as a platform for mouthing the most depoliticized platitudes about honoring our country.

But what Parade did this year is quite surprising, because its coverage of the country’s birth by declaration is so devoid of traditional patriotic and militaristic homilies that it transforms the holiday into a mere summer diversion.

The cover and three of the four articles in the issue dated July 4th are about Independence Day.  The cover features two pre-teen girls dressed in the kind of flag costumes and body paint that would have had right-wingers yelling ”damn commie hippy” back in the 60’s when I was their age.  The three articles are 1) a story about a town that has had an Independence Day parade since 1785; 2) an encomium to safe fireworks; and 3) a page of blurbs by famous people on “What July 4th Means to Me….”  The point of the other long article in the issue is to glorify immigrants who came from Ireland in an earlier age. 

Notice that in the July 4th features there is nothing substantive on our founders, nothing on sacrifice for country, shared values, the long road to freedom that started in 1776 and is ongoing, or even the current arguments about the relevancy of the ideas of the late 17th century to today’s post-Industrial society.  

I want to pay particular attention to the article titled “What July 4th Means to Me…” The secondary headline limits what the celebrities say to “Celebrities share their favorite holiday memories.”

And that’s just about all they do:  Seven actors, all of whom have their photo showing and an imageless Buzz Aldrin (second human to walk on the moon) tell us what they used to do on July 4th as kids.  All but three give nothing but memories of a celebration that could be for any summer holiday, or even just a summer family picnic.  The five whose published statements make it seem as if they believe July 4th is just that three-day holiday that kicks off the sunshine season include four actors in faddish hot entertainments directed at teens and young adults, two from “The Twilight Saga,” one from “Glee” and one from “Gossip Girl;” the other is the aging actress Doris Roberts who has played supporting roles in situation comedies for decades.

The three celebrities who in their memories provide at least some comment on what the holiday means beyond “fun in the sun” represent left, center and right political views, but in ways that either conceal the opinion or drain it of all controversy.  Interestingly enough, the three tepid views are presented in a diagonal, from lower right for the “right-wing” view to upper left for the “left-wing” view, with the centrist in the middle:

  • Buzz Aldrin (lower right), astronaut, ends his memory of fireworks with “Our country is a guardian of liberty and freedom,” a vaguely militaristic and slightly right-wing statement because it is one of the excuses we always use when going to war, even a war over resources or geopolitical maneuvering.
  • Jimmy Smits (center), actor, mentions that “Dad and mom were very mindful of passing down the fact that coming to this country was an opportunity…”  It’s certainly a pro-immigration statement, but like the story on discovering Irish roots, non-threatening since Jimmy’s family comes from Puerto Rico, a long-time U.S. possession whose residents are considered citizens.  Virtually everyone living in the United States is the descendant of immigrants, and I think the centrist view is that’s okay, as long as your family has been here awhile.
  • Josh Brolin (upper left), actor, references A People’s History of the United States, lefty Howard Zinn’s wonderful history of the U.S. from the perspective or the poor, minorities and women. “It made me feel a sense of patriotism…” Brolin gushes.  Well done, Josh, to bring this important historian’s most accessible work to the millions who peruse Parade.  It is the only moment of real content in Parade’s coverage of the 4th.  As a statement from the left, however, it is as innocuous and as easy-to-miss as what Smits and Aldrin said, so plays into one of the ideological messages in the subtext.

What then does Parade communicate in the ideological subtext of this article and its broader coverage of the 2010 version of its July 4th coverage?  Two ideas, I think:

One of Parade’s hidden messages is that the only truly newsworthy celebrities are (white) actors.  It’s amazing that not even an athlete or pop musician makes the list, although I imagine that Kevin McHale of “Glee” does something musical.  What if instead of all these actors, the celebrity list included one or two elected officials (or the first lady or even Michelle’s mom), a scientist or two, a chief executive officer of a technology company, a classical or jazz musician and a popular literary writer such as Don DeLillo or Michael Chabon?  Maybe even add an unknown like someone who just won a “teacher of the year” award.  The selection of experts to use is one of the most important ideologically-tinged decisions that any writer or editor makes.  Parade could have made the statement that great novelists, scientists, economists and elected officials are celebrities to revere and follow.  Instead it chose to state that only the opinions of mass culture actors are important.

Parade’s second hidden message is that the current purpose of the July 4th holiday is neither to commemorate, celebrate nor debate shared values, but to have a good time at a barbecue and see a parade and some cool fireworks.  We have no way of knowing everything the celebrities said to Parade’s writer(s); the only statements that make the story describe the fun that was had by all.  

None of the articles focus on things you can buy on and for the holiday, so Parade doesn’t wallow explicitly in mindless consumption.  But its message nevertheless supports the mindless consumer culture by focusing on hedonistic fun that somehow gains undefined higher meaning because it occurs collectively in the family or community.  All meaning is once again embodied entirely in the hedonistic fun—in other words, in consumption and consumption alone.    

In the past, Parade has taken the patriotic or issues route in its celebration of Independence Day.  For example, I remember one cover from more than 10 years ago in which then-First Lady Hillary Clinton earnestly and proudly saluted a flag with two fine upstanding white young people.  That this year’s coverage is so devoid of real content only reflects the current news media trend towards triviality and away from serving as a forum for discussing issues or increasing knowledge.  Someone might argue that at least there isn’t any war-mongering or militaristic propaganda, but in a real sense, all Parade has done has been to replace one set of myths and manipulations with another.

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.