Category: Uncategorized

Adults read the New York Times.

While the Times does not release readership demographics segmented by age, it lets potential advertisers know that the median age of its readers is 52, meaning that exactly half of all readers are older than 52. By the way, that’s about 15 years older than the U.S. median age of 37.1.  The Times also tells us that 60% of its readers have gone to college. Very few children age 12 or under are academically gifted enough to handle college and among those 12 year olds who can do college work, a miniscule number have parents who insensitive enough to send them.

We can assume that any advertiser in the New York Times understands these demographics and is seeking to convince adults to buy its products or services. A full-page ad in the Times does not target children.

That makes the Oreo ad on the back page of the front section of today’s New York Times perhaps the most overt example ever of infantilization of American adults, the process by which American retailers and the mass media encourage adults to retain their immature or juvenile hobbies and entertainment habits of their childhood.

Oreo is the bakery product created by squeezing a thick sugar-water paste that Nabisco, its maker, calls “creme” between two round chocolate cookies.  For decades it has been one of the most, if not the most popular packaged cookie in the United States, and certainly the most advertised.

Today, Oreo spent tens of thousands of dollars to give New York Times readers a multi-panel cartoon version of a music video that can be found at its website. The video visualizes a peppy children’s song with animation, language and colors associated with pre-school education to re-imagine three tales: the three pigs plus generalized myths about vampires and great white sharks. Each story—and each verse of the song, which is sung with the child-like and child-loving joy of Raffi or Sherry Lewis—starts with the phrase “I wonder if I gave an Oreo to…”: first to the big bad wolf, then to a vampire and then to a shark. In all cases, the harmless-looking villains share the Oreo with their intended victims (pigs, a girl and baby seals) and everyone becomes friends.

Every element of style in sound, visuals or language in the video has been used before and almost always to communicate specifically to children. The same can be said for the print ad—every visual and language detail tells us that the ad is meant for children. The ad comes with a child’s mentality. It presents the colorful and happy world we often present to children. The primitive illustrations with the varying size of letters define a convention of children’s book design.  The basic idea—Oreos can make nasty people behave in a friendly manner—has the magical simplicity of a preschool child’s reasoning. There is no attempt to speak through the child to the parent. The ad simply speaks to children, mostly those under the age of eight.

But the audience who will see the ad in the Times is overwhelmingly adult. Oreos must think that this puerile approach will appeal to adults.

Oreos has broadcast series of TV commercials appealing to adults over the past few years.  In one, a father and son eat Oreos in the traditional way of licking the “creme” before devouring the cookies.  The TV spot may appeal to nostalgia for childhood—eat Oreos just like you used to as a kid—but it does so in an adult way: connect with your child by eating one of your favorite treats from childhood.  In another Oreo ad for adults, two slacker-looking 20-something males in a lifeboat on the ocean argue about the proper way to eat an Oreo. Humor for both children and adults can turn on the incongruous, but the situation is sophisticated enough to qualify as for adults.

By contrast, the “I wonder if I gave an Oreo…” print ad and online video treat the audience as children.  Publishing the print ad in adult media therefore infantilizes adults because it assumes that adults will respond to the same simple stimuli that attracts preschoolers.  If we assume that Nabisco has the best market research available, there must be a body of information that says that this approach will work. Nabisco is speaking to adults as if they were children because its marketing executives think we are children and respond to children’s entertainment.

I can just imagine that it’s bedtime and the chief executive officer of Nabisco brings me and my significant other a plate of Oreos and big glasses of milk.  We crunch on the cookies and sip from our plastic cups, while he gently reads us a bedtime story about the three pigs. No huffing and puffing, though, which is a good thing, since now I won’t have a nightmare about wolves (or vampires).  They really are our friends, at least as long as we keep feeding them Oreos.  I wonder if eating Oreos can reverse global warming?

Nighty-night.

Ideological imperatives shine through most strongly in the details that marketers or writers select to adorn the basic idea or narrative of a piece of communications.

That’s a mighty fancy statement. What it means is that be it a TV show, print ad, news feature or charity solicitation, the creator of a piece for the mass media selects details to exemplify or underscore the main message. These details often contain unproven ideological assumptions or widespread societal beliefs which convey a hidden message, which is often more important or compelling than the main one. For years, I have called these hidden messages “ideological subtext.”

We can see the insidious affect of ideological subtext in a current marketing campaign for The March of Dimes called “I’m born to.” Now I have nothing against the March of Dimes. It is a wonderful organization that has raised a lot of money to fight childhood diseases, first polio, and for decades now prevention of birth defects and infant mortality. I can say nothing bad about the organization or its mission.

But this latest campaign, built around the phrase, “Every baby is born to do something great. Help them to be born strong and healthy,” uses details to express the following hidden message: The most admirable thing to be is a performance celebrity.

Most people will first see the campaign as bus shelter boards or other printed enticements to visit the imbornto.com website.  The bus shelter board I saw shows two toddlers: the boy is banging a drum while the girl is in a ballet dress. The website has no other photos of children emulating adults professions—no one with a stethoscope, microscope, fire hat, teacher’s long ruler, jack hammer or plumber’s wrench.

“Doing something great” is reduced to entertainers who perform, i.e., celebrities. Some may say it’s cute, but telling kids that they should strive for celebrity status occurs on almost a daily basis in the news media.

The theme line for the campaign says “Every baby is born to do something great,” which is just not true, unless we redefine “greatness” to mean to be good at a job, kind to others and an active member of society.

But that’s not the definition that the March of Dimes gives us in the images. The images tell us that greatness resides only in performance celebrity. That’s also the definition of greatness we get in lists of daily or monthly birthdays published by many periodicals. It’s the definition we get when we peruse articles built on childhood memories of holidays or favorite recipes. It’s the list we get in marketing blurbs that mention famous alumni of schools. Or when the news media asks non-political famous people their opinion on key social issues.  Or when a TV news reporter wants to report on a rare disease.

There’s something a little disturbing about the words “Every baby is born to do something great,” even if the definition of greatness is not assumed to be “achieving celebrity status.” Not every child can be great, even if we expand the definition of greatness to include scientific, athletic, literary, business and social achievements. In fact, in the current epoch in which upward mobility has slowed almost to a standstill, college costs have skyrocketed, public schools have been gutted of enrichment programs, rich parents actively spend exorbitant amounts of money to con the system and entry level opportunities often come down to “who you know”—in today’s world there is perhaps less chance of a disadvantaged talented person achieving greatness in any field than at any other time in American history. In other words, not only can’t every baby achieve greatness, but most babies have no shot at greatness.

At least the March of Dimes wants all children to be healthy and it is doing a lot to attain that lofty goal.  No one should punish it for expressing ideological assumptions that run ubiquitous today. But you can contribute to the March of Dimes outside of its “I’m born to” campaign and make a point of telling the organization that you didn’t like the campaign because it subtly endorses the idea that all children should strive to be celebrities.

 

 

Behind Coke’s international marketing campaign to insinuate that the beverages it sells are part of a healthy lifestyle lurks the hidden message that Coke doesn’t care what you drink—as long as it’s a Coke product.

That’s not how the company puts it. What Coke says, in a full-page ad in many national (and probably international) print media yesterday, was “At Coca-Cola we believe active lifestyles lead to happier lives. That’s why we are committed to awareness around choice and movement, to help people make the most informed decisions for themselves and their families.”

Now let’s take all the squeamishness out of this soggy statement; change into explicit language the indirect references to the now worldwide epidemic of obesity and to the myth that exercise is a magic elixir; and dismantle the buzz words like “awareness” and “informed decisions.”  In other words, let’s translate the message directly into common sense English. Keep in mind that the following is my rough translation of what Coke is saying: “We know that many of our products contribute to obesity, so we offer other products. We’re putting some of the enormous profit we’re making into exercise programs that are linked with our brand names in hopes that people will think that because they are exercising more they don’t have to cut down on calories to lose weight.  The important thing is that no matter what people drink that they buy a Coke product.”

(I hate using the word product to apply to food because the word “product” suggests unnatural processing, but in Coke’s case it mostly makes sense.)

Instead of its usual collage of happy people drinking Coke, the print ad is a red background with the outline of an original Coca-Cola bottle and the text reversed out in white. The print ad may represent a landmark in advertising because it’s the first time (or the first time I have seen) that a Coke or Pepsi ad is devoid of photographs of happy people. Of course the website to which the full-page ads send viewers, comingtogether.com, more than makes up for the lack of smiling faces and Coke-filled bellies in the print ad.

After the code-phrase encrusted first paragraph of the ad, Coke lays out its four commitments:

1. Sell “low- or no-calorie beverage options” in every market.
2. Support physical activity programs, again in every market
3. Label its products with nutritional information.
4. Not advertise to children under 12.

There is something deceptive about all four of these commitments:

1. The commitment to sell “low- or no-calorie” beverage options (the basic idea that we can drink what we want as long as it’s a Coke product) assumes that these “low or no” drinks are healthy.  In fact, studies have shown that some types of artificial sweeteners may cause cancer and that drinks with artificial sweeteners give people a greater appetite and so contribute to increased calorie intact and therefore to weight gain and obesity. Coke also sells a line of energy drinks, which studies are now showing are bad for you. Coke also sells juice products loaded with either sugar or artificial sweeteners. That leaves us with Coke’s 100% real juice and water offerings. The problem with the juices is that they are a calorie-rich substitute for fruit; it is healthier to eat an orange than to drink the equivalent amount of orange juice.  The only truly healthy product Coke sells is Dasani water, which Coke has admitted is nothing but tap water.  Instead of dividing its product line into calorie and low/no-calories, Coke could divide it into products that are unhealthy and products that are healthy, but substitutes for food/drink that would be healthier or less expensive.

2. Coke’s support of physical activity programs across the globe is merely a form of marketing. They brand all the fitness programs they sponsor with their name and therefore benefit from the perceived enhancement of their brand through its association with these programs. Coke is then able to advertise its commitment to physical exercise which suggests a commitment to good health; and advertise it they do—on TV, in print, on the Internet and through elaborate social media campaigns.  Finally, the support of physical activities (combined with similar moves by makers of other unhealthy comestibles) contributes to the myth that increasing physical activity is equal to good nutrition and reduced calories when trying to lose weight.

3. Coke provides on its labels only the information required by government regulation.

4. Coke may not place ads on “SpongeBob Squarepants” or whatever Princess tripe Disney is currently purveying, but children also watch Superbowls, basketball playoffs and other sporting events.  Coke’s responsible marketing commitment evidently doesn’t extend to sports.

In other words, these commitments to social responsibility merely repackage Coke’s marketing, advertising and product development strategies in terms that try to make it seem as if Coke actually does care about the communities it serves.  The question is, is it fooling anyone?

Let’s end this screed against Coke’s deceptive new social responsibility marketing campaign by returning to the first words of the first paragraph of the all-words full-page ad: “At Coca-Cola we believe active lifestyles lead to happier lives.” Happiness, that’s what Coke is selling. Like all the hawkers of products that we really don’t need or which are not good for us, besides the product the company is also always selling the idea that happiness is achieved through buying something.

Consumerism: It’s the real magic elixir that cures all ills.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition on fashion, Punk: Chaos to Couture, raises a basic question about the modus operandi under which the MET and other museums operate: is the museum a place to contemplate or to be titillated?

For contemplation of the influence of the punk style on high fashion is impossible in this installation, which unfolds as a noisy maze of blinking lights set to an aural wall of the crude clashes and pulsations of punk rock. Each room seems like a different movie version of not a punk gathering, but a psychedelic party of the 1960’s. Viewers parade down narrow passageways which turn back on themselves and see dress after dress hanging on mannequins with overblown punk-like wigs that look more like dust mops teased into a chaotic but freestanding mess. The display of fashion wear is broken up with large screen videos of punk-looking men playing musical instruments.  I can only assume they are former punk rock stars.

Because the display rooms are narrow and unidirectional, the light pulsations so incessant and the walls all textured or covered with imagery, walking through the exhibit seems like a trip through an elaborate “fright night” at an amusement park. Instead of a new ghost or goblin suddenly appearing, it’s a new but still raucous beat or a new combination of bright colors.  If you like the music, it’s an easy five to twenty minutes of floating among phenomena of a former youth culture.

But it was impossible to study that youth culture, or that culture’s effect on designers of expensive clothes for rich folk.  The best you could get was a sensation or two before your sensations were numbed by the totality of sensations coming at you at one time.

The exhibit will attract the fan of amusement parks like Universal Studios or Epcot Center, but what does it have to do with the mission of the museum or even that of its notable costume department?  That mission, by the way, is “to collect, preserve, study, exhibit, and stimulate appreciation for and advance knowledge of works of art that collectively represent the broadest spectrum of human achievement at the highest level of quality, all in the service of the public and in accordance with the highest professional standards.”

While the Punk: Chaos to Couture exhibition collects and preserves period costume (which may or may not represent “human achievement at the highest level of quality”), it does not give us any way to appreciate it except through crude titillation.  What small nuggets of knowledge found in the exhibition, such as the influence of graffiti or of the “do-it-yourself” aesthetic, are completely overwhelmed by the sensory overload.

This exhibit could mark another watershed in the dumbing down of America. It’s one thing for both the history and the science museums in a provincial capital such as Pittsburgh to focus on sports. It’s quite another for the flagship museum of the cultural center of the United States, if not the world, to create an exhibition in which it is impossible to engage with the artifacts on display in any intellectual or even any sensual way. (I can only wonder what the Roman poet Horace would have said; he was the one who postulated that all great art must educate as well as amuse.)

We have not even considered the question of cost. To erect this collection entailed far more than arranging bricolage in displays and hanging clothes on mannequins. The textured walls, music rights, over-teased wigs and elaborate AV and acoustical system must have driven up costs. But then again, the MET enjoyed the sponsorship of a fashion design house and a major publisher.

What is so interesting about the exhibit is that it’s as false as the fashion it portrays.  The punk mentality was one of crude, do-it-yourself grunginess. Yet fashion designers imitated it to produce expensive goods for a very exclusive clientele that basically lived in luxury, so that punk haute couture is really a form of slumming, a favored pastime of the ruling elite for millennia. In a similar way, the elaborate walls and halls of the Punk: Chaos to Couture exhibition are meant to bring the punk mentality alive. Instead they come off as a homogenized scrubbing away of the grit and with it the meaning behind the grit, leaving behind a few empty gestures—style without substance.

When taken together, four current news stories depict the massive grift that American education has been running on the American public for the past decade or so.

Let’s start with what on the surface appears to be good news for college graduates: they’re the ones getting jobs. College grads are the only employment group to have gained net jobs over the past five or so years. Unemployment among college graduates is much lower than among those without a degree. The most recent unemployment rate for college graduates ages 25 and older was only 3.9%; 7.4% for those with a high school degree.

But what kind of jobs are out there for college graduates? News stories about another trend tell a disappointing story. Most of the new jobs created since the great recession began have been low-paying. Nearly 40 % of the 1.7 million jobs gained since the so-called recovery began have been in 3 low-wage sectors: food services, retail, and what is called employment services and means office clerks.

In other words, college graduates have been taking low-paying jobs. That goes a long way to explaining the mounting debt incurred by graduating students. Some would say that it’s a classic bait-and-switch when colleges offer expensive degrees knowing that many if not most of the students will get jobs that won’t allow them to pay off their loans. Kids think they’ll write TV ads and they end up penning short articles for Internet news services at $25 a pop. They think they’ll be television news reporters and they end up as administrative assistants in the sales department of a local radio station. They think they’ll get a position with a corporate law firm and they end up doing contract legal grunt work at $25 an hour.  Or what about the kids with degrees who are hauling garbage, driving taxis, filing papers and staffing call centers? It’s tough to pay off $100,000 in college loans on the pay you get at any of these jobs.

Those who hold colleges blameless for the low pay in so many professions should consider one more trend: Study after study shows that enormous numbers of kids get accepted to colleges needing remedial work. For example, a study of scores on the ACT test shows that 48% of all high school graduates need remedial work in science.  Other studies reveal that half of all students in California need remedial help in English and math and 40% in Colorado. One impetus for increasing online college courses is to inexpensively address the issue of kids arriving on campus without the basic skills to do college work.

My question—no, my accusation—is: Why do colleges accept students who aren’t ready to do the work?

By accepting and enrolling students who need remedial work, colleges participate in a vast and growing fraud on American families. Wouldn’t the kids not ready for college be better off in community colleges working on their English and math skills? Or in a state-sponsored vocational program that trains people for one specific career?  I do not believe that any accredited 4-year college should be permitted to accept students who need remedial work before they can tackle real college, nor should any 4-year college or university offer remedial courses. It’s immoral to take money for higher education and deliver high school courses.

Now I’m all for universities establishing special extensions to offer high school grads the opportunity to improve their basic skills enough to be able to take college courses, but if and only if they charge traditional community college prices.

Encouraging kids who don’t really belong in college to take another route will solve half the problem, as it will ease the national college debt burden.  But that still doesn’t address the fact that so many jobs pay so little nowadays. To solve the problem will take what it has always taken: Greater unionization. An increase in the minimum wage. Taxing the rich to pay for better public education and non-college training.

 

 

It’s the American Way, or perhaps I should write, the American Process: create a new ritual to display a human emotion and then develop a range of products and services to help people express the emotion.

But now that we’ve run out of major emotions, like love for mother, father or significant other, we’re moved on to the trivial. Evidently asking someone to the prom has become a big deal. Young bucks are outdoing themselves in constructing elaborate asks—making fortune cookies with “ask” messages, creating flash mobs or appearing at the young lady’s front door in a giant teddy bear costume. One parochial high school is running a “best ask” contest.

The New York Times article in which I discovered this trend pays close attention to the consumer aspects of the phenomenon, detailing how “romantic events” companies and “etiquette coaches” are jumping on the trend. Since real holidays such as Christmas have devolved into a potlatch of spending, it makes sense that manufactured holidays or life events would quickly become commoditized into a series of goods and services—it’s another opportunity to meet an emotional need by spending money.

A few things strike me as interesting about the development of the elaborate prom “ask.”  The Times article and all the thousands of other stories about asking someone to go to the prom that are in the news media this week all assume that it is the boy who asks the girl. Not only could I find no reference to a gay individual asking someone to a prom, there was not one mention of a girl asking a boy. Shocking, but perhaps just to me, since in the late 1960’s I was asked to go to my prom by a girl.

Surely, some girl somewhere in the country asked a boy in a cute enough way to make the evening news this year.  Yes, there was one: a heart-warming story about a girl who asked a boy with autism to the prom as an act of kindness.  Admirable and maybe worth a human-interest feature in the evening news, but the hidden message about normal expectations is pernicious. My take is that the editors and writers who specialize in prom-type stuff are always striving to confirm a set of traditional values, including the “boy asks girl” principle, which is a corollary to the principle that “boy decides.”

Beyond the covert sexism in the reporting of the cute “prom ask” trend, there is the essence of the event—the anxiety that many teenage boys and girls feel when asking someone for a date. Of course, it’s not just teenagers who when dialing the phone suffer a deep fear of rejection even as they feel an exhilaration considering the possibilities. It’s typical for American companies to create anxieties or needs and then fill them with products and services. The “prom ask” is ready-made, since the anxiety always existed. Retailers, consultants and trend-setters just needed to channel that anxiety into a situation that required making purchases.

With or without the “prom ask” ritual, the prom gets too much attention nowadays: dresses have gotten too expensive and prom night has flowered into a series of rituals like the after-prom party, the hotel stay and events the following day, each of which raise the cost of participation.  The prom has come to exemplify Thorsten Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption, which means the spending on luxury goods and services to demonstrate social status.

The prom has also become a stage for acting out social issues, as each year the news media uncovers stories about segregated proms, prom dress restrictions, anti-proms, use of social media in prom planning and the cost of proms.

In total, some 13.4 million stories popped up when searching for “prom” on Google News; “prom ask” yielded 49,700 of them. A search for “global warming” yielded 76,700 stories; “college loans” yielded 1.3 million; “Plan B,” which refers to FDA plans to allow the over-the-counter sale of Plan B birth control to prom queens and any other girl aged 15 or older, yielded 21,7000 stories.  In other words, in the narrow slice of time covered in any standard Google News search, more media outlets cared about how teens ask other teens to go to a dance than about a breaking news story related to sexual freedom for teenage girls.

Of course, there are so many possible ways for the mass media to cover proms: asks, dresses, corsages, decorations, social issues. But read closely:  virtually all the stories soon reduce to discussions of shopping for goods and services.

Over the past 24 hours, the mass media has devoted tons of paper, billions of bytes and miles of videotape to commemorating a very small step in the progress towards emancipation of a minority group representing from 2.5%-10% of the population. The media has trumpeted the opinions of elected officials, political and sports pundits, sports stars and the man-and-woman in the street, virtually all supportive of current professional basketball player Jason Collins coming out of the closet.

Meanwhile, the news media has practically ignored yesterday’s Supreme Court decision that confirmed the right of any state to restrict access to public files, a decision that takes a fairly significant step backwards when it comes to freedom of speech, open government and civil rights for everyone.  In the decision, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the Commonwealth of Virginia to prohibit nonresidents from applying for state information under its freedom of information law. That means that Virginia and any other state can deny nonresidents access to public files.

The chasmic difference in the amount of coverage of these two legitimate news stories is truly stunning. My morning search of Google News revealed 85.9 million stories mentioning Jason Collins. A mere 10 mention the Supreme Court case, McBurney v. Young. That’s ten—five plus five or five times two—the number of fingers and thumbs on both hands. In fact, total mentions of the U.S. Supreme Court in Google News for literally hundreds of different issues and cases comprised a mere 33.6 million stories.

It is easy to understand why we have placed too much importance on the one act of a sports figure publicly revealing his sexuality.  It’s a feel good story to most Americans and it confirms the current mainstream view of the country as open and tolerant. At the same time, the Collins leaves the closet story gives the intolerant right-wing another wrong around which to rally its dwindling troops.

It is also easy to figure out why the Supreme Court decision drew so little coverage. The many small but significant attacks on civil rights since 9/11 seem to get short shrift in the mass media all the time, unless the right to bear arms or publicly proclaim a Christian faith is at issue.

Moreover, while many news organizations filed briefs in favor of the two separate people who sued Virginia, the Supreme Court’s decision doesn’t really affect the mainstream news media.  Virginia’s law makes an exception for newspapers and magazines with readers in Virginia and for TV and radio stations that broadcast there. The big national media and the networks can still tap Virginia’s shrove of public information. It’s just the little media and individuals who can’t.

My conclusion: when it comes to unscrewing the lid off the public information vault in Virginia, size matters.

For those still wondering who benefits from the government intervention into the economy, I refer you to the case of Apple.

Apple management wants to shore up its recently plunging stock by increasing the dividend and instituting a stock buy-back program.  Higher dividends tend to raise stock prices, as do stock buy-backs. Apple has plenty of cash, so why not? As of 18 months ago, the computer and gadget behemoth had some $76.2 billion cash on hand, more than the federal government had at that time.

Except that the cash-rich and debt-free Apple is borrowing money to pay investors and buy its own stock. And why would it do a thing like that?

The federal government has forced interest rates to historic lows, so Apple can raise the money cheaply. But, you may inquire, wouldn’t it be cheaper still if Apple spent some of its golden horde?  The problem is that much of that money is overseas and before Apple can spend it to shore up its stock price, it must repatriate it, which means paying taxes.

Thus the net effect of a loophole in the tax laws for big multinational corporations and the Federal Reserve Board’s constant pressure to keep interest rates low is to give Apple a chance to have its cake and eat it, too: to pay off investors, yet to keep the money overseas and probably earning a good rate of return in a mix of high-yield bonds of foreign governments.  Keep in mind that Apple, like many multinationals, may have earned some of that money in the U.S. and through legal accounting stratagems transferred the earnings to its foreign entities, thus shielding the earnings from U.S. taxes.

The pretext for keeping interest rates low is to stimulate investment in job-creating businesses. That’s also the excuse that large corporations are giving for wanting to have a tax holiday from repatriated foreign earnings. They don’t mention that last time there was a tax holiday on foreign earnings in 2005, most of the money went to buy back stock and pay off executives.

Large companies seem to prefer to line the pockets of their owners and executives over investing in jobs, which in all likelihood reflects their collective belief that there is no additional market demand that would require expansion.

The government could create that demand by closing the loophole that allows companies to shield earnings by realizing them in foreign ventures. The additional tax revenues could be used to support the victims of our economic travails since the real estate bubble burst in 2007-2008. It could be used to invest in research to commercialize alternative energy like wind and solar. It could build mass transit systems or rebuild roads, bridges and government buildings. It could decrease the size of classes in elementary schools. Any or all of these government actions would pump money into the economy and give large corporations a reason to invest as opposed to sitting on their money. Of course with a stronger economy would come higher interest rates, and then Apple couldn’t borrow money to pump up its stock.

Let’s face it: The goal and end result of virtually all government intervention into the economy is to help a handful of large multinational corporations and investment banks. It’s called socialism for the large and wealthy and it works just fine in the United States—for about one percent of the population.

If anyone deserves the death penalty, it’s Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving brother of the Chechen-American pair who planted the bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.  Three dead. Hundreds injured, some with limbs ripped out by shrapnel.  A shoot-out which produced another death and injury. Possible plans to inflict more damage on the innocent.

This guy deserves to die.

But we don’t deserve to kill him.

We’re better than that. We’re a civilized society.  We have incarcerated and will try Mr. Tsarnaev because he acted violently and took the lives of others. But by taking his life, even after a proper trial, we are resorting to his level, playing his game, using his rules.  When we take his life, he wins. His values ascend.  If we kill the killer, we become the killer.

There are many arguments against the death penalty:

• Juries make too many mistakes, and you can’t take back an execution.
• No studies show that the death penalty serves as a deterrent to crime.
• To ensure fair treatment, the cost of execution is now far higher than the cost to maintain the prisoner for life.
• There is an inherent bias against minorities and the poor in the implementation of death penalty sentences in the United States.
• No other industrialized nation retains the death penalty.

But as far I’m concerned, all these arguments fall to the wayside when compared to the simple fact that by not executing the killer, we assert our humanity and our belief in the sanctity of human life.

Our need to deny the ethos of the killer becomes poignantly clear in the case of the mass murderer or terrorist. Their crimes are heinous and it’s impossible to imagine anything redeeming about their lives.  They certainly do not deserve to live.

Yes, we want to kill Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, but let’s instead lock him up until the day he dies and show that we know a better way.

The Wall Street Journal is always quick to ignore the wrongs to the many to protect the rights of the few—in this case the few being Internet merchants located in New Hampshire, a state without sales tax, who would have to collect sales tax on items sold to people living in other states, while those undeserving New Hampshire brick-and-mortar wholesalers would not have to collect taxes for in-store purchases by tourists just traveling through. To ensure that this unfair situation doesn’t come to pass, a Journal article wants us to urge our Senators to defeat the latest attempt to make Internet merchants collect sales tax.

The Journal forgets that in the current situation, Internet merchants have a tremendous advantage over brick-and-mortar stores because they don’t have to collect local sales tax, either for the jurisdiction in which they have their official “office,” or in the jurisdiction of the buyer. The new bill, as so many like it that have gone down to defeat in recent years, would level the playing field between Internet and brick-and-mortar businesses when it comes to taxation. It would end a subtle regressive element of the current situation—rich folk are more likely to buy on the Internet and so less likely to pay sales tax.  And it would increase much needed state revenues in virtually every state.

The Wall Street Journal is not the only big player pushing to defeat a bill that would require Internet merchants to collect sales tax. Over the weekend, John Donohoe, the Chief Executive Officer of eBay, sent email missives to millions of eBay users asking them to oppose the legislation.

As usual when defending the business prerogatives of the few, both eBay and the Journal hide behind the patriotic flag of small business. Both want a bill that exempts small businesses. In Donohoe’s case, that means firms with fewer than 50 employees and less than $10 million in sales.

• Donohoe appeals directly to eBay sellers: “This legislation treats you and big multi-billion dollar online retailers—such as Amazon—exactly the same.  Those fighting for this change refuse to acknowledge that the burden on businesses like yours is far greater than for a big national retailer.”
• The Journal sees a conspiracy against small business: “So big business and big government are uniting to pursue their mutual interest in sticking it to the little guy. Any Internet seller with more than $1 million in annual sales would be forced to serve all of the nation’s tax collectors.”

The argument is built on the fiction that the burden of collecting and paying sales tax is greater on the small business than a large enterprise. Can’t you just visualize thousands of plucky Internet merchants in their home offices slaving away with ballpoint pen at hundreds of tax forms, then licking the stamps and envelopes to mail hundreds of different checks each month to different state and local taxing officials?

Didn’t these people ever hear of automated software or third-party payment services such as PayPal?  Did the opponents to collecting sales tax in a consistent manner ever think that maybe the vendors who have automated Internet purchases will also quickly develop software that handles everything involved in collecting and transmitting sales tax to the various taxing bodies—that is, if the software doesn’t already exist.  The technology can’t possibly be very hard to develop, considering that industry has already developed software that helps the little Internet merchant sell thousands of items with constantly changing prices and specifications, just like small brick-and-mortar merchants do.

I certainly believe that the little guy should be protected from the predatory practices of large corporations.  But that’s not what this proposed new law is about. It’s about raising revenues in a fair and equitable manner.