Category: Social & Political Issues

The top economic story of the early week was the wonderful (sic) news of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) that “more than 80% of top economists believe that the recession that started almost two years ago is finally over.  But most don’t expect meaningful improvement in jobs, credit or housing for months to come.”

The 35 of 43 economists giving the economy a thumbs-up made their pronouncements based on a prediction of 3% growth in the U.S. economy in the 3rd quarter.

Now if there is no improvement in jobs, credit remains tight and the housing market continues to stagnate, then who really cares if the recession is over or not.  It seems to me that Sarkozy is right: we are measuring the wrong things.  I want the economists to say a recession is over when jobs are growing, not the collective wealth as measured in GNP.  Until jobs grow and the suffering of millions of unemployed ends then the economists might as well be saying that the sky is green.

I wondered the other day how the media would spin the news that our President won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The answer was what I suspected it would be, but didn’t state in my post of October 9: In its effort to even-handedly present two sides of an inconsequential question—does President Obama deserve the Peace Prize—the news media has missed the point of this year’s award: President Obama won it for not being Bush, for being the president at the moment the U.S. has begun to slough off the bloody and short-sided unilateral bullying and the lawless abandonment of international law of the Bush years.

I don’t think I really have to prove my point that the media has focused on “Does he or doesn’t he (deserve it)?” But here goes:

• Associated Press: GOP mocks Obama’s peace prize, Russians praise it
• Los Angeles Times: Nobel Peace Prize may weigh heavily on Obama
• San Francisco Chronicle: After Nobel, what’s next for Obama – sainthood?
• Detroit Free Press: SNL mocks Obama’s peace prize win
• Toronto Star: Obama’s portfolio is empty
• The Age: Reward actions before rhetoric

And over at the New York Times, besides its even-handed article about the does-he-or-doesn’t-he controversy on Saturday and a number of Op/Ed pieces, we heard on Sunday from that broken record called Maureen Dowd who once again used a news story or trend as a springboard for bashing the Clintons.  She presented her view on the does-he-or-doesn’t-he controversy within an imaginary dialogue in which President Clinton expresses enraged envy that President Obama won the award and he didn’t.   She just completely makes it up.

For those who care, here are some other recent Clinton-bashings by Ms. One-Trick-Pony:

• Let the Big Dog Run
• Men Behaving Madly
• The Devil Wears Crocs
• Where the Wild Thing Is
• Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?

And what side do I support in the “does he or doesn’t he” non-controversy?: The Nobel committee told us why they did it and why Obama, as the symbol of the U.S.A., deserves the award.  In this instance, not being Bush is quite a lot, and enough.

I like Barack Obama.  I voted for him for president.  I like his domestic agenda for the most part. I like the empathy he expresses for the downtrodden.  I applaud the initiatives he has undertaken that won him the Nobel Prize for Peace, just announced a few hours ago, even as I am sorely disappointed that he has not yet taken all of our troops out of the sinkholes called Iraq and Afghanistan. 

I therefore hope that no one will now take it as an insult of our president when I write that President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George Bush!

Just read from the committee’s announcement: “The Norwegian Nobel Committee lauded the change in global mood wrought by Obama’s calls for peace and cooperation but recognized initiatives that have yet to bear fruit: reducing the world stock of nuclear arms, easing American conflicts with Muslim nations and strengthening the U.S. role in combating climate change.” 

Or from the Associated Press story: “The Nobel committee praised Obama’s creation of ‘a new climate in international politics’ and said he had returned multilateral diplomacy and institutions like the U.N. to the center of the world stage.”

 It’s not too hard to read between those lines.

While the Associated Press mentions that the award could be seen as a “slap” at Bush, it only did so in the ninth paragraph, after a quote from Lech Walesa (which is a sure signal that the important parts of the story have already been told!).

I’ll be interested to see if the news media and commentators spend much time on the “He’s not Bush” angle.  I’m also eager to learn the reactions of Rush, Glen and the rest of the lying right-wing crowd.

The back page of the first section of yesterday’s New York Times had one of the most cynical, manipulative ads I have ever seen.  From The Center for Consumer Freedom, the headline reads in ultra big letters: YOU ARE TOO STUPID, with junk or junky food standing in for several letters:

• A donut standing in for the O of YOU
• A slice of pepperoni pizza for the A of ARE
• A cheeseburger followed by the bird’s eye view of a can of soda—circle of aluminum with tab—for the two O’s of TOO
• A chocolate chip cookie eaten into the shape of a U and an ice cream cone with a scoop of chocolate for the U and I of STUPID.

The ad continued: “(YOU ARE TOO STUPID) …to make good personal decisions about food and beverages.  The New York Department of Health/Hype has used your tax dollars to launch an advertising campaign to demonize soda.”

The ad goes on to rage against food cops, closing with, “It’s your food.  It’s your drink.  It’s your freedom,” and then sends you to ConsumerFreedom.com. 

Oh yes, there’s a lovely photo of a family of four at the table, in shape and as white as can be, about to dig into a big pizza in an unidentifiable location that has restaurant lighting.  All have extra large sodas by their side.

This ad is about as slimy as it gets.  It disregards the fact that bad nutrition, overeating and the obesity that they cause have been tied to a vast range of ailments and an enormous increase in health care costs.  The ad lauds the importance of choice as overriding all other concerns the way that any organization does that is trying to avoid regulation or taxation of its product or service.  It’s same the tactic tobacco companies took in attacking ”no smoking” ordinances, even injecting an almost mystical desire for freedom into their advertising, especially to women.  Could automobile makers have once raged against stoplights or mandatory automobile insurance?

Worst of all, like the promulgators of the “brother’s myth” and creationism, this ad tells people lies that they want to hear.  

And if lies and distortions are ice, then this ad is just the tip of a giant iceberg called The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF).

The CCF mission statement says that it’s “a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting personal responsibility and protecting consumer choices.” 

On its home page, we see links to articles and “studies,” all in one way or another communicating that people can eat or drink whatever they damn please and it’s nobody’s business and besides, it’s all healthy for them, which is why government regulation is bad.  Some examples:

• A section on obesity attempts to prove that being morbidly overweight is not bad for your health, including a white paper that supposedly refutes Center for Disease Control mortality statistics.  This is for real! I did not make it up.
• A home page article refutes the “bad publicity” that high fructose corn syrup has gotten for adding empty calories to virtually all processed foods.
• Another home page article reviews a recent book that attacks locavores, which is a movement dedicated to improving the quality of food consumed while using less energy by stressing the eating of locally-grown fresh foods.
• A part of the Food & Drink section focuses on the benefits of genetically modified food. 

Lurking within virtually every article on the CCF website is the ideological subtext that a corporation would never sell you anything that was bad for you.

Who would contribute to an organization that is the nutritional and health equivalent of those that fight the idea that our globe is warming because of human activity?  I don’t know because there is no information about the organization, its board of directors or its executive director.  The boilerplate in news releases and other material gives only a hint of who is behind this outrage:

“The Center for Consumer Freedom is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization supported by restaurants, food companies, and individual consumers together to promote personal responsibility and protect consumer choices.”

My response to a comment that my good friend Paul Sheldon made about my September 10 entry on GQ led me into some interesting waters, so I thought I would just make it today’s blog entry. 

Paul writes, “GQ is basically a fashion magazine and ‘read’ for the ads, not for the text.  I always heard that GQ stood for GayQueer, but that redirection does not change your basic premise (I agree).”

My response: Although I think some studies show that a higher percentage of gay men than straight men are interested in fashion it would still be wrong to dub a fashion magazine as “gay,” unless of course, the magazine’s stated audience were gay men (or the wider GLBT market); GQ has never done so.  Plenty of straight men, sometimes called metrosexuals, have a keen interest in high fashion style. 

In short, the remark is mildly homophobic.  I know Paul well and he definitely is not a homophobe, and in fact supports freedom of expression and lifestyle pursuit for all groups (except perhaps warmongers, if I can put words into Paul’s mouth).  I just feel I have to point it out, and hope that if I ever write anything even mildly homophobic, racist or sexist, that someone points it out to me.  

And yet, by interjecting the topic of a sub-group into the discussion of the “fashion as weltanschauung,” Paul makes me think a little more deeply about the pervasive issue of the use of the news media to commoditize the pursuit of happiness.

In fact, there are a large number of lifestyles for which there are magazines that indoctrinate men (and women) into the idea that by purchasing a certain set of products and services, you will be living this lifestyle and thereby achieve either general happiness or the sexual pleasure you seek.  Let’s see, there’s…country, motorcycle, grunge, several varieties of Christian lifestyles, sports, tech geek, fitness.  And let’s not forget Disney! 

So it’s not just what you choose that defines your existence and your relationship to others and to objects, it’s also what your attitude is to the all-encompassing cultural imperative to consume as the primary or only way to express or pursue your choices. 

By the way, I think the deep recession has affected U.S. consumption patterns far less than what the media is reporting.  Even with the cutbacks, those with jobs or abundant assets are still spending at levels that seem fantastically regal by even the elevated standards of western Europe.  To say that there has been a real turn in the attitude of Americans towards consumption since the recession began is a bit of ideological subtext meant to make us feel good and virtuous for our profligate ways.

I think that we proved to the world today that Pittsburgh authorities know how to impose marshal law, at least when given four months notice.

Law enforcement officers from as far away as Chicago and Phoenix have certainly locked down downtown Pittsburgh these last two days.  Many streets are blockaded and groups of soldiers and police officers mill in groups in the street or by barriers. The only vehicles one can see are law enforcement trucks and vans.  We saw police parading down one street on stately horses, and even a K-9 car, K-9 meaning it contains a police dog.

Razor wire twists around the tops of certain fences on the outskirts of the downtown. Very few businesses are opened, and many storefronts are boarded up in fear of an imaginary horde of protestors.  Other than law enforcement, the streets are practically deserted, although there are small clusters of people who have come downtown to try to get a glimpse of G-20 activity, plus the employees of the few business such as Jampole Communications that decided not to be intimidated by the G-20 or the possibility of marchers.

I looked for but was unable to find any marches or rallies. There were demonstrations in Lawrenceville and elsewhere that I only saw on TV: a couple of police confrontations, around 70 arrests, a dozen or so windows broken, primarily at facilities of large corporations or banks.  The size of those demonstrations—400 to 500 marchers at most at any one time —and the very minor damage inflicted convinces me of three things:

1. It was a good idea to deploy as many law enforcement officers as the city did.
2. The City and police should have approved more permits for marches and demonstrations, and maybe all of them.
3. It was not necessary to lock down downtown Pittsburgh.

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of Pittsburgh’s G-20 experience is the financing.  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that the G-20 will bring $35 million in additional revenues into the city at a cost of $19 million for security and to stage the G-20 show.  Other sources are paying $14 million, leaving Pittsburgh with a bill for $5 million.  Now the area may be ahead, but not by $30 million, because we have to subtract the as-yet uncounted business losses from closing down the main business district, plus the other losses from the many fearful organizations and school districts that closed down outside the downtown area.

The other problem with the $30 million number is that it goes into the coffers of hotels, caterers, airlines, and other businesses, but the $5 million comes from the already overburdened Pittsburgh coffers.  What a perverse inversion of the economic development objective that these convocations of leaders have had since the medieval French fair.  Once the king selected a location for the fair, the royal coffers underwrote a complete sprucing up of the town where the fair was to be held, because after all, a king could not visit a seedy city.  The mayors would vie for the right to hold the fair because it represented a substantial injection of capital into the city.  I thought that that was supposed to be a salutary side effect when the G-20 comes to town.

In a blog entry last week I anticipated the argument of someone opposed to gun control when I pointed out that stiffer gun control laws would most likely have prevented virtually all of the recent spate of mass murders.  In doing so, I mistakenly used an old saw of the gun lobby that “when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”

I should have used the new and improved, and slightly scarier version, to whit, “if more people carried guns, then mass murderer X would have been stopped or caused less harm.” After each of the mass murders over the past few years, we have heard many versions of this idea.

Let me get this straight:  Someone is able to become a mass murderer because we have loose gun laws that allow virtually anyone to buy as many guns as he or she likes, and also let people carry guns, sometimes concealed and sometimes in the open.  Now instead of tightening up these gun laws to prevent these nuts from getting weapons as easily as they now can, we are supposed to encourage people to carry loaded guns to use if someone should try to pistol-whip them.   In other words, instead of trying to stop violence, we should encourage the use of it to combat violence.  Which of these approaches will lead to more people dead, I wonder?

Since the Obama administration first announced several months back that the G-20 was going to meet in Pittsburgh on September 24-25, the town has been in a frenzy of anxiety.  City, state and federal government are intent on turning the downtown where the G-20 leaders will meet into a military zone and the specter of becoming another “Seattle” has led a very large number of businesses, school districts, universities, museums and other organizations to close their doors for the two days.  Many of those closing are not in or near the downtown G-20 zone, and in fact, some are in the distant suburbs.  The news media daily reports the terrified reactions of much of the area.

Instead of embracing the G-20 as a coup for the region, people and organizations are behaving as if they are frightened not just by their shadow, but by democracy itself.

Of course, the code word for bad riots by unruly and anarchistic demonstrators at an international event, the brand as it were, is Seattle in 1999.  But when you look at the reports, what you find is that:

• Media had to retract original reports of widespread violence by demonstrators.
• The City of Seattle ended up having to pay damages to demonstrators who were wrongly arrested.
• The report by the Seattle City Council a few years later essentially said that what happened in Seattle taught the city not to overreact to demonstrators.

In other words, the fear of Pittsburgh becoming another Seattle during the G-20 isn’t much of a fear at all.

I believe that the G-20 have a right to meet and should be protected, but that the demonstrators also have rights. It seems that virtually all the groups that want to demonstrate are interested in making their points and not in inciting violence.  The peaceful confluence of the G-20 leaders and the demonstrators can only have a beneficial impact on our open and free society. 

With that in mind, here’s my view of how the major players are handling the G-20:

Law Enforcement: Bringing in extra troops, cordoning off the downtown, restricting and placing patrols around the area are all necessary.  We do have to protect the many world leaders coming to Pittsburgh and I applaud law enforcement authorities for what looks like a good plan. 

The City:  By denying permits to protest, the city has it absolutely wrong. The city should have approved as many of the requests for permits as feasible and then worked with the protesters and with enforcement officials to keep things peaceful. Appropriately trained law enforcement officers know how to maintain crowd order without overreacting. 

Organizations:  Every organization that canceled its activities and closed its offices for the two days should be ashamed for giving in to baseless and irrational fears and misperceptions about demonstrations and demonstrators.  Instead of running from the G-20 experience, Pittsburghers should embrace it. Instead of an exercise in paranoia, we should have made the G-20 a celebration of freedom.