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Parade Magazine just came out with this year’s edition of “What People Earn,” which catalogues the jobs and earnings of about 80 people across the country.

Surveying a mere 80 people doesn’t provide statistical certainty that the results reflect realty. In fact, the 80 people could be said to people an imaginary Parade universe, which we can otherwise call the alternative world of work that Parade wants us to see it. Some readers think I cover Parade too much, but it is the most well-read magazine in the country by virtue of it being included as part of the Sunday issue of virtually all daily newspapers. In its quiet way, Parade is one of the most influential arbiters of values and mores in the mass media.

So how does Parade’s survey do when it comes to reflecting the real world?

Not well.

For example, about 60% of the people surveyed by Parade make under $75,000 a year, whereas in the real world about 88% of people earn $75,000 or less according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In Parade’s world, the most common way to earn $75,000-$125,000 a year is to work for the government in some specialist or managerial capacity. I couldn’t find easy statistics on what percentage of people earning from $75,000-$125,000 work for local, state or federal government, but I can’t imagine that it’s anywhere near the 55% of all employees in this salary segment that we see in Parade’s alternative world of work. Could the subliminal effect of seeing all these well-paid government workers be to make the lower wage earners think that government workers are unfairly paid? Now wouldn’t that play right into the right-wing program to foster resentment against unionized government workers.

Surely the less moneyed readers couldn’t resent any of the nine people in the survey who make more than one million dollars a year. None of the million-dollar earners, by the way, earn less than $8.0 million.

Why no resentment? Because they are all celebrities—athletes or entertainers.  Typically, we admire celebrities and only resent what they earn in comparative terms—(as is: LeBron James doesn’t deserve to make more than Tom Brady, for example).

Among the million-dollar earners on Parade’s list there is not a single CEO of a big company, nor any professional investor or investment banker, nor any very successful physician or attorney.   By contrast, the Parade survey lists only owners and executives of businesses as earning between $125,000 and $1.0 million, and all of these earn considerably less than $500,000.  It seems to me that the message here is that business owners and executives don’t make outsized amounts of money—they only make a little bit more than the average Jane and Joe.

Parade’s alternative world of work, then, is a meritocracy in which to reach the top you have to have a lot of talent in some very specific areas—athletics, singing, dancing, performing.  While Parade’s world is primarily rich and poor/lower middle class, there is actually a higher number of people in the middle and upper ends of middle class income levels in Parade’ s world than in actual life. The Parade world also seems somewhat fairer than the real world because there are no bosses making millions and tens of millions of dollars a year while their employees work for almost nothing. There are no investment bankers manipulating the finances of companies to skim off profit while workers lose ground to inflation. The only business owners we see are close to being regular and hard-working guys and gals.

All we have at the top of Parade’s alternative world of work are the mythical gods and goddesses who the mass media erect as role models showing us how we should live our lives, the alpha and omega of our value system—the celebrity.

Was anyone shocked to learn today’s news that while corporate profits have made a recovery, jobs and incomes have not? Shouldn’t we be used to these jobless recoveries by now?

The last two recoveries before this tepid one did not see large increases in jobs.  It could be that economic bubbles hide excess labor that flourishing companies start to carry, so when the bubble bursts, millions of jobs go away permanently.

At each recession, businesses have learned how to make do with fewer workers. And as each year passes, the inequality-creating policies of low taxes on the wealthy, privatization of government services, union-busting and a low minimum wage have continued to erode the incomes and buying power of all but the top one or five percent of incomes.

This elixir of policies allows wealth to accumulate at the top and enables the owners of productive means to grab everyone’s share of a growing economy.

It used to be that when the economic pie grew, everyone’s slice got a little bigger. Now only the portion allotted by owners to themselves is growing.

The sequester is one small step in the squeezing of everyone else for the benefit of the rich. Congress and the President have decided that they no longer want to borrow money to pay for jobs and services that taxes used to finance before the Bush II tax cuts for the wealthy. Rather than raise taxes to pre-Bush levels  to pay for these jobs and services, we are cutting them out. Meanwhile, the rich continue to count their tax savings.

The current trend can only go so far, however. Who will buy things if only the rich have money? Either enough businesses will realize that they need middle class customers to survive or we’ll have a 30’s-like depression and social protest movements will reach a level that scares the ruling elite into economic policies that produce a flatter income and wealth chart.

In the mean time, however, millions of people are going to suffer. And by suffer, I don’t mean not being able to buy the latest generation of smartphones or having to go to junior college for two years. I mean not having enough to eat or having a text book in  high school classes and not having a library opened nearby. I’m talking about not being able to afford a doctor or medicine.  I’m talking about homelessness and living on the edge and off the Internet grid.

Meanwhile the wealthy will eat cake—flourless chocolate, judging from the dessert trends in expensive restaurants nowadays.

February’s crisis of the month is the looming “sequester,” which will automatically make deep cuts in government programs unless Congress gets its act together and passes an alternative fiscal plan by March 1.

As usual when it comes to money issues, Democrats and Republicans are at an impasse on how to avoid the sequester. Democrats want to replace it with a mix of tax increases and program cuts. Republicans want government services such as air traffic controller staffs, food stamps and health programs for children to take the brunt of program cuts, with no cut to military spending and no increase in taxes.

Both sides have it wrong. If the concern is to help the economy recover, we should raise taxes on the wealthy and not cut any programs.  The government will spend every penny it gets, which will pump up the economy. True enough, poor people and much of the middle class support the economy by spending most of the money that they don’t pay in taxes on goods and services. History demonstrates, however, that the wealthy will invest much of their tax savings in ways that do not help the economy, for example in stocks on the secondary market (which means the company that originally issued the stock gets nothing) and overpriced art work.  That’s why we should raise taxes on the wealthy only.

I agree with Paul Krugman, who in many of his New York Times articles over the past months has made the case that addressing the deficit can wait until the country has stabilized the economy. But if we do want to address the deficit right now, we should do it by addressing the two reasons why it is too large: war-time military spending and the Bush II reduction of taxes on the wealthy.  That means raising taxes and cutting the military, but not other programs.

When thinking about cuts in government spending, ask yourself these questions:

1. Would you rather see children in the United States have enough to eat or the U.S. stay in the senseless, objectiveless war in Afghanistan?
2. Would you rather repair bridges and put decent mass transit into our mid-sized cities or continue developing drone technology?
3. Would you rather see us work on green energies or develop that new-fangled aircraft that Congress is insisting be built even though our military leaders say we don’t need it?
4. Would you rather cut our nuclear program (which can destroy all known civilization many times over) or cut air traffic controllers and slow down the takeoff and landing of all flights across the country.

I vote for children with full bellies, bridges that don’t fall down, research that addresses global warming (as opposed to research that kills people) and getting to my destination on time.

That’s why I advocate that we replace the sequester with a mix of tax increases and cuts only in military spending.

 

The family of Joe Paterno engaged in a media blitz this week in an effort to convince people that the Penn State sexual abuse report by ex-FBI director Louis Freeh was inaccurate when it said that Joe-Pa was part of the cover-up.  First the family released its own report, titled “Critique of the Freeh Report: The Rush to Injustice Regarding Joe Paterno,” which lambasts the Freeh report and its accusations against the venerated Penn State football coach. Next, Paterno family members signed themselves up for as many media television and radio talk shows as they could. I heard Jay Paterno several times and found him to be articulate, very sympathetic and earnest about what he called the facts. For a few days, Paterno once again was one of the two or three news stories dominating media coverage.

All in all, the Paternos and their attorneys and public relations counselors did a stellar job of implementing their PR plan.  From the technical standpoint of controlling the media and articulating a set of messages, it was a flawless execution of strategy.

Too bad they didn’t think through the strategy first, because it was wrong.

First of all, it was wrong from the ethical standpoint. The Paternos created another news cycle of stories, thereby inflicting another cycle of pain on the dozens of damaged boys and men victimized by the monster Sandusky.

Let’s assume, though, we’re talking about a business decision only, and not an ethical one. A business decision focuses solely on what’s best for the business (and not the collateral damage that might be inflicted on others). In this case the business is the Joe Paterno legacy and the money that the Paterno family can make from it. From the business standpoint, it was a terrible decision, ranking among the worst since the chairman of BP pretended not to have facts about a disastrous oil spill that as head of the company he should have had or when the chairman of Mylan Inc. claimed that a Federal Drug Administration (FDA) investigation was completed even after the FDA said it wasn’t.

It was just plain stupid for the Paternos to think that releasing an obviously partisan report would move people to exonerate Paterno. If the Paternos had engaged me as their PR counsel, I would have told them to shut up and do nothing for the time being because whatever they said would only make people believe more ardently what they currently believe about the scandal. We won’t know for certain until someone does a legitimate survey, but early reaction in the media suggests that the Paterno plan did fail:  While ardent Paterno supporters have rallied behind the report, those convinced by the Freeh report are criticizing the Paternos, although always with a great deal of respect.

It’s something I call the “mirror” effect, when the new facts or new point of view do nothing but convince people of what they already believed. The new information in a sense holds a mirror up to the people consuming the information. What people see in the mirror is themselves—or to be more specific, their point of view.

Unless the Paternos’ report had showed that Freeh lied or neglected to include exonerating facts, it was bound to have a mirror effect on the public. Too much has already been written and opined on the subject.  Media saturation has already cast in stone both the facts and the way that most people are reacting.

Not only did the Paternos’ PR campaign probably not convince anyone  (or convinced very few) of Joe-Pa’s innocence, it created an additional news cycle, so for one more time, the news media preoccupied itself with the horrible scandal. That can’t help Joe-Pa’s reputation or Penn State’s (even if we forget about the victims).

In any crisis situation, we look for a key fact that pretty much sums up the argument the client wants to make. For example, years ago we had to close down a large factory in a small town and expected trouble from elected officials and problems with the workers. As it turned out, if all the employees of the division had worked for free during the prior two years, the company would have still lost money. That was the key fact we told everyone, and what could have been harsh criticism disappeared. Everyone had the common sense to understand that the business was just not viable.

In the Penn State child abuse situation, the key fact is the conversation that Joe-Pa had with his assistant Mike McQueary in which McQueary told the head coach he caught Sandusky with a boy in the showers. Paterno kicked the matter to the administration and then neglected to follow-up aggressively to see what was being done.

No matter how hard the Paterno family tries, they can’t get away from that key fact, which establishes that Joe-Pa was culpable.  But that key fact also limits the extent of Paterno’s culpability. No matter what the truth really was, his guilt is tied to the one act (really several acts bundled into one) of not following up on the McQueary accusation.

As time goes by, the public is going to remember fewer of the details of the Sandusky scandal. Paterno’s involvement, tied up as it is in the one action, will seem less terrible, especially when compared to Sandusky’s and perhaps several high-ranking Penn State administrators.  Over time, the football-loving public would weigh Joe-Pa’s legendary reputation and won-loss record against this one (terrible) mistake. Paterno would (and probably still will) end up to be revered as a great, if flawed man. That may not help the current Paterno business franchise today, but nothing can help the current reputation of Joe Paterno except time.

The impatient and seemingly insensitive Paterno family would have been better off letting the sleeping dog lie.

This week’s Parade magazine, in the Sunday issue of virtually every daily newspaper across the country, dedicated its cover and feature story to Products of the Year, which is an annual award given to new consumer products.

Supposedly the American people vote on these awards, but in fact, the final voters comprise 50,000 shoppers across the country, making the awards more of a survey than anything else. This year, 26 companies were honored in a variety of categories, e.g., food, beverages, personal care and household care. Parade found six trends in the products that won Product of the Year awards:

1. We’re nostalgic, meaning we (the American people as incarnated in the 50,000 fortunate survey participants) like reintroduction of old products.

2. We want no-hassle healthy food.

3. We’re spending more time outside.

4. People are interested in products for menopause

5. We see the value in green, meaning we want environmentally friendly products and packaging.

6. We’re sensitive about our mouths. In other words, there are a lot of new products for our mouths that the 50,000 liked.

As the Parade article notes, these are the awards that marketing mangers want because they can proudly display them on product labels. An award for the industry, perhaps, but our corrupt fascination with the process of process of buying—grand sacrament of the religion of consumerism—convinced Parade editors to make the centerpiece of one of its 52 issues.  But then again, most music, movies and televisions shows are carefully crafted (sometimes with the help of computers) products meant to be consumed as entertainment, and we seem to have an unending thirst for Grammies, Emmys, Oscars and dozens of other imitator awards that have popped over the past few decades.

And thus Parade asks us to stand proudly with the product manager of the 26 winners. Except for one thing: A trip through the instructions for nominating a new product for the prestigious award reveals that finalists have to make a payment of $7,000 and winners are expected to fork over $63,000 for the rights to use the Product of the Year logo. In mentioning these payments, the Products of the Year organization reminds us that “Considering that all Finalists receive the results of the nation’s largest study on innovation (an $80,000 value) and all Winners are included in the PR campaign (over $3Million of media exposure), entering for your chance to win the nation’s vote is, to put it bluntly, a no-brainer.” Rarely has the naked sell about a naked sell been so overtly—well—naked.

Let’s say that there are four finalists for each winner (we never find out), that’s a total kitty of about $2.33 million for the Product of the Year organization, unless it is getting some bucks from Parade; it wouldn’t surprise me which way the funds were flowing on this scam.

How can these people promise a $3.0 million PR campaign when their gross may be as little as $2.3 million? Don’t lose any sleep—these guys will make their car payments. When PR people say, “$3.0 million in media exposure, they usually mean the equivalent of placing $3.0 million in advertising which: 1) isn’t a lot; and 2) you can get with a $50,000 PR program with ease. As it seems these folks have done.

That this kind of organization prays on the ego needs of marketing managers and large companies is not surprising. Even if they have to pay for it, these large companies can smugly trot these awards out to Boards of Directors, securities analysts and shareholders. Perhaps the award can get them more shelf space in supermarkets and other retail outlets, a growing challenge for consumer goods companies.  They can also tell their customers, but why the consumer should care is beyond me.

And what do these companies do about the consumers who go to the Products of the Year website and see that it’s 100% dedicated to selling consumer companies on making an application for a pay-for-play PR opportunity. It seems to matter little that many people know the award is a pay-for-play that is little more than a survey by an entrepreneurial marketing company.

Pretty soon we’ll be able to have an entire calendar of holidays that are totally focused on shopping. Including those holidays created to sell more consumer products, we have a pretty full calendar:

• Product of the Year celebration
• Mother’s Day
• Father’s Day
• Back-to-School Saturday
• Black Friday Eve (AKA Thanksgiving)
• Black Friday
• Small Business Saturday
• Cyber Monday
• Super Saturday
• Day After Christmas

That’s 10 holidays dedicated to shopping, which aren’t quite as many days as the Catholics dedicate to saints, but remember that the American religion of consumerism is only about a century old. Give us time.

One of my Twitter followers asked a rhetorical question on Twitter and the OpEdge blogsite in response to my recent blog on drones being used to kill American citizens.

The question: Terrorism = war? If so, drone kill is ok.

My response is that even if terrorism is war, that definition in itself doesn’t make it legal or moral to use drones in civilian populations or to hunt down U.S. citizens.

Terrorism is a type of warfare that takes advantage of one of the loopholes in conventional warfare in the 21st century: Don’t attack civilians if you can avoid it and don’t invade countries that are not parties to the dispute. By operating while concealed in civilian populations, often in peaceful countries, terrorists take advantage of these humane rules. It makes it harder to seek out a battle terrorists. On the other hand, a terrorist army is so small that the long-term damage it can do is much less than an army with an air force and bombs. If you don’t believe me, then ask the Iraqi people.

My point, which I may have not made as clearly as I could have the other day, is that drones are okay on the legitimate battle field but not to hunt people in civilian settings.  And drones are never okay against a U.S. citizen. Now if that citizen is in an airplane attacking a U.S. ally and we shoot him or her down, that’s fine. But by virtue of singling out the U.S. citizen in a non-battlefield environment, we have changed the context from hot warfare to peacetime (or wartime) crime. And when we’re talking about crime, we’re talking about due process.

My opinion may or may not have a firm basis in international law. That doesn’t matter to me. I know what’s right and fair, and hunting down U.S. citizens instead of capturing them and bringing them to trial is neither right nor fair. I‘m not willing to pervert our way of life to take out a terrorist.  It lowers us to their level—makes us no better than they are. Besides, it’s not needed: we were winning the war against Al Qaida before we started using drones.

 

 

The very fact that Bruce Willis has a say in the public controversy about gun control demonstrates once again that the United States suffers from the advanced stages of celebriosis, defined as excessive brain damage from focusing too much on the lives and thoughts of celebrities.

What pro-gun die-hard Willis said earlier this week is a classic in one special rhetorical device used by both sides to defend not changing a bad situation: the slippery slope.

Without using the expression, “slippery slope,” Willis caught the essence of its silliness with his statement: “I think that you can’t start to pick apart anything out of the Bill of Rights without thinking that it’s all going to become undone…If you take one out or change one law, then why wouldn’t they take all your rights away from you?”

And why will that happen of necessity? Just because we want to run people through background checks before they buy guns, how does that lead to taking away the right to assemble or the right not to have to house soldiers (3rd amendment)? With the “slippery slope” metaphor, the first act is like taking a step off a very icy hill. The exhilaration of the moment makes you lose balance and slide all the way down the hill, into tyranny, communism, lawlessness or whatever the bête noir du jour.

The slippery slope is a fanciful absurdity that’s different from taking something to its extreme because the argument for the slippery slope states that we will slide of necessity by taking that first step. Obviously it’s just not so.

The classic slippery slope was actually a line of dominos, representing countries in Asia, all set to fall to the communists if the first one, South Viet Nam, did.  The sheer philosophical necessity of all the dominos falling once Viet Nam did haunted a generation of U.S. government officials, leading to a war of unparallel brutality and suffering. But when we lost Viet Nam, most of the other dominos stayed standing—and in fact in recent decades Viet Nam has moved into capitalist circles. There was no domino effect and there is no slippery slope.

In the interest of balance, one article quoting Willis’ inanities included the opposing views of someone equally as qualified to speak publicly on the issue of gun control—since he too has used plenty of fake guns in Hollywood shoot-em-ups. It was good old slurry-voiced Rocky, AKA Sylvester Stallone, who supports a ban on assault weapons, saying “I know people get (upset) and go, ‘They’re going to take away the assault weapon.’ Who needs an assault weapon? Like really, unless you’re carrying out an assault. You can’t hunt with it. Who’s going to attack your house, a (expletive) army?”

Maybe that’s the problem? Maybe Bruce is confusing his filmic chimeras in which an eff-ing army could attack his house with the real world? Maybe Bruce has taken a few too many punches in his movie roles? It’s good to see that Rocky hasn’t.

For about 10 years, I have been embarrassed for my country because our leaders condoned and committed torture, and even dreamed up fanciful legal justifications. Perhaps the most odious of the legal arguments made by the Bush II administration for sticking someone’s head under water until near drowning and hanging them cold and naked by their arms for hours was that if the President ordered it, it could not by definition be illegal.

Now we see this justification used again, and this time by the administration of Barack Obama.  I am not only embarrassed for my country, but personally ashamed since I voted for the guy—twice.

But mostly I’m angry.

Obama’s legal team is essentially saying that it’s okay to murder a U.S. citizen if the president says it’s okay. What about due process? That’s a nicety that gets lost because the assumption is that we’re talking about terrorists in other countries whom we intend to take out with a clean drone hit.

Of course, that’s today. Tomorrow it could be in our own country. Or it could be with a bullet or strangulation. Or maybe an auto accident that kills a few innocent bystanders.  Of course, that’s all slippery slope speculation, except for those familiar with the secret history of the CIA and U.S. military. I advise readers to review the deaths of Allende or Diem. It’s not a matter of one thing leading to another, it’s a matter of publicly acknowledging something the U.S. government has done for decades, only now saying that it’s legal.

The drone makes it impossible to deny American involvement in state ordered assassination. At least until other nations get a hold of drone technology, which they will.

I have nothing against the U.S. use of drones, but only against legitimate enemies enrolled in real armies during real battles. Drones on real battlefields make a lot of sense. The problem is that all you can do with a drone is kill. If they figure out the robotics to capture and transport the accused to a military base, drones would become a wonderful tool for terrorists.

But U.S. citizens and non-combatants of all nationalities all deserve the due process that is denied someone by a drone killing. They deserve due process, but more importantly, so do the American people.

Whether by drone or bullet, killing a U.S. citizen without first giving that person a trial is illegal and un-American.  The President should take some time off from pandering to gun enthusiasts with target practice photo ops and look deep into his heart and ask himself if he really wants to be remembered with Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon and Bush II as perpetrators of illegal state violence.

The Pollyannas and Panglosses among us like to look back at past instances of the automation of production or service-delivery as proof that the economy adjusts and people find newer, better-paying and more fulfilling jobs. A recent example is Catherine Rampell’s article in yesterday’s New York Times “Sunday Review” section titled “Raging (Again) Against the Robots.”

In her rambling, Rampell trots out the usual fictional suspects: The Golem, Capek’s R.U.R., Kurt Vonnegut’s Piano Player. To these literary manifestations of the fear of robots, she adds cursory mentions of the agricultural and software revolutions. A flippant approach to this mostly fictional material trivializes the problems caused by automation.

While it is true that people eventually did get better jobs after farming was mechanized, the argument is absurd that warnings against automation in the past proved false and therefore the current warnings will not pan out either. History does not repeat the past in the same way all the time. Just because something worked out in the past doesn’t mean it will work out again.

There are many differences between automating farming and manufacturing in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the current automating of engineering, medical, retail and teaching jobs in the early part of the 21st century:

• The jobs replaced in the industrial revolution were tedious and back-breaking physical labor. The current wave of machines replaces primarily “brain” jobs filled by middle class professionals and paraprofessionals.
• There were few limits in the world markets in the 19th century, so jobs were created by expanding markets. Now there are many limits to market expansion, including increased competition from other countries and the limits to growth imposed by the dual impact of climate disruption and resource scarcity.
• The historical means to absorb excess labor no longer exists. The citizens of western democracy and many totalitarian regimes such as China and Iran will no longer tolerate a high number of war casualties. There are few habitable wildernesses like the American West to which excess populations can move.

There is also the question: does this new technology increase the quality of life or does it merely make the process cheaper? Exhibit #1 against the mindless implementation of technology is the rush to on-line university classes.  In how many ways is a live class better? The ability to interact spontaneously off on fruitful tangents. The greater need to pay attention. The greater difficulty in cheating.  It also keeps more teachers working.

We’ve discovered that we can take technology too far in many realms, even farming, which, with the return to small, local farms and the increase in organic farming, has seen some reverse substitution of human labor and thought power for technology in recent decades.

We also have to ask ourselves what we can do to help the workers affected by the current wave of automation. Their jobs are never coming back, and to a large extent the jobs being created in our slowly gathering economic recovery are low-paying.

Either more people are going to fall out of the middle class and into poverty or we are going to have to take a look at how we split the profits resulting from the increased productivity of knowledge-based processes such as teaching, engineering and health care.  It starts with raising the minimum wage, which leads to higher wages at all levels. Instead of trying to destroy teachers unions with charter schools and pension givebacks, our public policies should foster increased unionization of other knowledge workers, since unions raise the incomes of workers. We should also start thinking seriously about lowering the hours considered full-time for a job to 30 a week without a decrease in gross pay.

The other alternative is to face a U.S. economy in which virtually everyone is poor except for a handful of rich people and a sprinkling of middle class and upper middle class professionals.