NY Times floats the balloon of state bankruptcies to rip off workers of hard-earned pensions.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The lead story on the front page of today’s New York Times floats the idea that states enter bankruptcy as a means to avoid paying retired state workers the pensions that the states promised them.  Currently, states are not permitted to seek bankruptcy protection from their creditors. 

As is usual for Times articles that float inherently absurd trial balloons such as invading Iran, breaking up the Euro or privatizing Social Security, the publication takes a squeamish approach to the topic that avoids naming names. 

Take the headline for example, “A Path is Sought for States To Escape Debt Burdens.”  This cowardly use of the passive tense, “a path is sought,” enables the headline writer to avoid telling us who is seeking this seismic change in our laws. It’s a classic use of the passive tense to avoid attribution, which by the way, is a significant and often necessary arrow in the rhetorical quiver of both attorneys and accountants.    

The entire article distances real people from the proposed law change.  Some examples:

  • “Policy makers are working behind the scenes…”
  • “…fear of destabilizing municipal bond markets…has proponents in Congress going about their work on tiptoes…”
  • “…and no member of Congress has stepped forward…”

The writer, Mary Williams Walsh, makes it explicitly clear what’s really going on: the article is part of a campaign to intimidate public unions: “Still, discussions about something as far-reaching as bankruptcy could give governors and others more leverage in bargaining with unionized public workers.”

As the article points out, the idea of a state going into a traditional bankruptcy will have a hard time gaining traction unless the powers-that-be can figure out a way to stop paying pensions but keep paying interest on state bonds.  A bankruptcy under current law would force the bankrupt state to stop paying the bond interest, and that of course would hurt rich people, the major benefactors of any move to cut or end the pensions promised to state workers.

Why do I say that?  Let’s review how we got to this situation: For years, states negotiated contracts that promised state workers pensions in the future in lieu of current salary.  The states all decided to underfund these pensions rather than raise taxes to a sustainable level; some of the strategies that gave lawmakers the intellectual cover to underfund included floating bonds and using overly rosy projections of future stock market performance in their investment models.

If the states had decided to fund the pensions appropriately on a sustainable basis, they would have had to raise taxes and likely gone to a progressive tax, which means charging people with more income a higher rate (like the federal tax system does).  The choice to underfunding therefore saved middle class and poor people a little money, but it saved rich people lots of money.

Now it’s time to pay the piper and, instead of raising taxes, lawmakers everywhere are declaring war on public workers and their pensions. The mainstream chattering class is supporting this effort by attempting to make public workers into enemies of other middle and working class people.  It’s classic Marxist theory: divide the classes.

As I’ve demonstrated several times in OpEdge, it’s all part of the 30-year class war that the rich have waged against the middle class and poor.  A major part of that war has been the destruction of unions, which raise the income of all workers (because employers have to remain wage competitive—at least when we have near to full employment or the work requires a skill).

So by hurting the pensions of unionized public workers, the wealthy get a break in two ways:  Fewer taxes to pay and lower wages for their employees.

The fly in the ointment, again, is the fact that one of the things that the wealthy tend to do with all that extra money they have is to invest in tax-free and up-to-now extremely safe municipal and state bonds.  So the idea of state bankruptcies will sink into the deep sea of other outlandish ideas unless lawmakers figure out a way to pass a bill that enables states to walk away from their obligation to workers without requiring them to walk away from their obligation to investors.

Mythmaking at its best: We hollow the contents out of MLK, then turn him into a “Smokey Bear” of volunteerism.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Once we have established an individual or event as an American myth, marketers, the news media, politicians and others slowly hollow out the person or event of its content, so that it can come to represent anything—and everything.

I analyzed how the hollowed-out myth can be used as a symbol of anything when the new Robin Hood movie came out about six months ago.   The original Robin Hood was a kind of medieval version of an autocratic socialist, with the King replacing the state.  Hollowed out by frequent mutation, the Robin Hood myth bends to the will of the makers of the new movie, who reform Robin into a proto-Tea partier. 

But how do we hollow out the myth in the first place?  Let’s take the example of Martin Luther King, certainly our greatest civil rights leader, although those who make a claim for Malcolm X are entitled to their opinions.  We currently celebrate his day without really knowing what he stood for.  We know that he stands for civil rights, but civil rights means different things to different people. If you check out what politicians and writers have said about King these past few days, you’ll see most refer to his legend without defining it or attempt to morph that legend into the beliefs of the speaker or writer.  That’s the great thing about big empty words such as civil rights.  They can contain so many ideas!

This expatiation on myth-making leads to my encounter with the mainstream news media celebration of MLK Day this year: a short quiz titled “Martin Luther King Day: How much do you know about MLK? Take our quiz.”

This Christian Science Monitor online quiz comes one question at a time online and each question is immediately answered, which means that to learn what all 10 questions are or complete the multiple-choice survey you have to click through 20 screens, which gives you 20 chances to see (and click-through to) all of the advertising on each of these 20 pages. Very irritating, but hey, without the ads, there wouldn’t be a survey!  And then we wouldn’t know how much we do and do not know about Dr. King.

We’ll be more user-friendly and give you all 10 questions, sometimes with the wording slightly different.  Each question comes with four possible answers:

  1. Where was he raised?
  2. Why did Attorney general Robert Kennedy order MLK’s phones tapped in 1963?
  3. What early event established MLK as an important civil rights leader?
  4. MLK earned his doctorate from Boston University in what field?
  5. What action by MLK angered President Johnson?
  6. MLK served as leader of what organization?
  7. Which of the four listed awards did MLK not receive?
  8. The name of MLK’s final speech?
  9. True or False: Malcolm X teamed up with MLK to organize the March on Washington in 1963?
  10. When was MLK Day declared a federal holiday?

Even with the answer to these questions, one knows very little about what MLK believed in, except that it had to do with civil rights. The last question, “When was MLK Day declared a federal holiday?,” is merely the most extreme example of the irrelevance of all the questions and their one-fact answers to who Dr. King was and what he believed in.

We can infer a little extraneous information from the answers, e.g., that King may have been in contact with communists (question 2) and that it was under President Ronald Reagan that his birthday became a federal holiday (question 10).  In other words, while we learn nothing of his beliefs, we do get subtle reinforcement of right-wing cant.

In our minds, the factoids that Christian Science Monitor presents as knowledge about Dr. King come to replace the ideas that made MLK one of the greatest of 20th-century Americans.  Let’s recall some of them:

  • A complete belief in non-violence as the most appropriate way to change society; Dr. King was profoundly Gandhi’s most important disciple.
  • An understanding that overcoming the great divide between rich and poor (which shrank in the 60s and early 70s and has been increasing ever since) is at least as important as overcoming racism; the two in fact are closely intertwined as social objectives.
  • A belief that the government should intervene to improve social ills, to equitably distribute wealth and to manage the economy.
  • An opposition to all warfare.
  • A belief that it was a central mission of organized religions to advocate and work to end the illnesses and inequities of the world.

We do come away from the survey knowing that Dr. King was important and deserves to be honored.  But the price tag for allowing Dr.  King into the pantheon of Great Americans is to homogenize his beliefs. 

Making MLK a day for volunteering also distorts the good Dr. King’s views.  While spending the day collecting for the poor, performing a charity show, reading to the elderly, cleaning up city parks and doing all the other things that people did yesterday are all admirable, this volunteering relates only in the most nebulous of ways to the hundreds of thousands of volunteers whom King enraptured and engaged 50 and 60 years ago.  Those volunteers did two things and two things only: Walk for peace and justice and sit for peace and justice.  Just as the news and marketing media transform King the social revolutionary into a nebulous civil rights leader, so volunteering for social action morphs into volunteering in ways that attend to social ills without addressing how to cure them.  King becomes a fatherly figure who reminds us to help out others, a kind of Smokey the Bear of volunteerism.

Why is the American Legion spending money to lobby for harsher treatment of illegal immigrants?

Posted on by Marc Jampole

It seems as if no matter what time of day it is, whenever I turn on my local ESPN AM radio station, I hear an ad from the American Legion chiding us about the dangers illegal immigration poses to our economy and society.  The stern announcer imbues each word with ominous notes of fear, as he lists the supposed ills caused by undocumented immigrants.  The call to action, issued with an authoritarian sense of urgency, sends us online to an American Legion report which details its plan for curtailing illegal immigration. 

There is a back story to the report touted by the radio ad.  The report originally appeared in 2004 containing a number of truly scurrilous assertions about immigrants and immigration, such as “non-citizens make up 30% of the American prison population” and “more Americans are killed by undocumented aliens than die in the Iraq War.”  Several people noted these factual misstatements, in particular Sonia Scherr of the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

Thankfully, the American Legion has sanitized the version of the report mentioned in the ad and currently available online.  The result, of course, is that its case against undocumented immigrants is now very weak, built mostly on unbacked assertions, old statistics and irrelevant tidbits of information. 

The economic assertions in the American Legion report are nothing more than myths and falsehoods.  Take it’s claim that our economy suffers from illegal immigration. A few months back, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco released a study that uses advanced statistical analysis to measure the short and long-term impact of immigration, both undocumented and legal, on jobs, wages, productivity and business investment in the United States over the past few decades.  The results of this extensive quantitative analysis support the contention that immigrants are good for the economy:

  • Immigration has no impact on the employment of U.S.-born workers.  In other words, immigrants do not take jobs away from “real Americans.”
  • When immigration increases, the wages of the average U.S. worker increases a little; in fact the study estimates that the gain in wages from additional immigration between 1990 and 2007 was about 20-25% of the total real increase in average annual income per worker.
  • The productivity of the entire economy also improves as a result of increased immigration.

In reading the sanitized American Legion report, my view of the American Legion shifted a little.  I have always thought of the group as similar to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an organization that has been hijacked by its right-wing to support causes that either don’t matter to its members or are not in the best interests of a majority of its members. 

But right there on the first of more than 20 pages of harsh recommendations to stem the flow of undocumented aliens into the country and make life miserable for those undocumented aliens now in the country, right there in the first bullet of Step One, the American Legion inserts a shill for jobs for its members: “Hire and train a sufficient number of U.S. Border Patrol agents to meet assigned objectives.  It is the American Legion position that employment preference be afforded former members of the U.S. Armed Forces.”    How’s that for tying a political agenda to an economic one!

My own view of immigration and undocumented immigrants is diametrically opposed to that of the American Legion.  I would propose amnesty for current undocumenteds (and their families) who hold jobs and pay taxes into our system and I would increase opportunities for legal immigration at all levels, especially from Mexico.  Additionally, I would tax foreign imports from countries that do not hew to our labor rates and environmental standards.  My assumption is that these countries would much rather give the money to their workers and their companies than to the U.S. government, and so gradually wage rates from exporting countries would equalize at our higher level and there would be less incentive for the workers to immigrate to the U.S.  As with most of my views, the net effect would be to transfer money down the economic ladder, from the wealthy and very wealthy to the middle and working classes of several countries, including our own.

Apart from the difference of opinion I have with the organization, I dislike the American Legion’s manipulative use of fear tactics in the ads.  Fear is a great motivator, but to instill it in a population without reason is a frequent tool of demagogues and authoritarian regimes.

The American Legion evidently has the money to mount a full-fledged national radio advertising campaign to express uninformed opinions about immigration.  I’m thinking that it would serve its members better if that money went to further enlightening the public and Congress on post-traumatic stress disorder, the need for job training programs for vets and the challenges facing caregivers of disabled vets.    

In interpreting the mass murder in Tucson, the chattering classes point us in the wrong direction, as usual.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Legal immigrants in upstate New York taking a class to help them prepare for the test to become U.S. citizens…

Senior citizens in rural North Carolina in the middle of an exercise class at a rehab center…  

A loving extended family celebrating a housewarming in Santa Clara, California…

32 students at a major university in Virginia…

What do all these people have in common with Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords plus U.S. District Judge John Roll and the five other innocent people slaughtered this past weekend in Tucson?

All have been gunned down in mass murders by mentally unstable individuals over the past few years. And that’s just a partial list.

And how do the news media  and politicians react to this latest demonstration that it’s too easy for nuts to get guns in America nowadays?

Most media and many politicians are blaming the overheated rhetoric in the political environment today.  Some media that have blamed violent words for this violent deed include CNN, CBS, The Washington Post,  The New York Times and the Associated Press. Now while it’s true that Sarah Palin, Carl Paladino and others have used inherently violent weapons analogies in their speeches and comments, I believe that by focusing on “words” instead of “actions” our politicians and columnists are silent about the real problem. 

Words did not shoot and kill these people and the many more victims of mass murders over the past few years.  Nuts with easy access to guns killed them.   And while most reporters seem to assiduously refrain from telling if the shooters got their guns legally, we know that many of them did. 

And even if they did not get the guns legally, they had them because of the ease with which anyone can buy a gun in the United States.  Over the past 10 years, many state legislatures have loosened guns laws, always the most permissive in the industrialized world (which goes a long way to explaining why the rate of violent crime is so much higher in the U.S. than virtually all other democratic industrialized nations).

Make no mistake about it: our gun laws are too liberal in every area: requirements and testing for gun ownership; identification needed to purchase a gun; waiting period before purchase; number of guns allowed; number of ways that guns can be purchased; types of guns permitted to be owned; places where guns can be carried; recertification requirements.  In all these areas, we should add new restrictions.  The result would be fewer guns in the street and fewer guns in the hands of irresponsible and mentally unstable people.

Those who spout the hoary and false adage that “when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns” ignore the large number of deaths from friendly fire that occur each year.  One study reveals that a gun in the home is four times more likely to be used in an unintentional shooting than to be used to injure or kill in self-defense.

The millions of responsible hunters, some of them friends of mine, should willingly submit to the hassle of greater regulations and limits to protect society, just as all of us submit to the hassle of greater airport security and the requirement to get and renew a driver’s license and hold automobile insurance.

Focusing on the violence of language as the cause for the latest mass shooting is a convenient way to ignore the real problem, to be sure.  Toning down language is also an implicit part of any “healing process,” and after a mass murder, especially of prominent people, society in general wants to heal.  For these reasons, it’s understandable why so many are connecting this latest mass violence to heightened political rhetoric.

But if, in addition to or instead of healing, you want to prevent more mass murders by nuts with guns, you’ll start clamoring for stronger gun control laws.  You’ll write all your elected officials supporting gun control.  You’ll donate to organizations and associations fighting to strengthen gun controls.  And you’ll support candidates vocally in favor of more control and vote against candidates who want to loosen controls even more.

This latest mass murder really shook up our household because, as usual, it was so senseless.  It made me think of Yoshimatsu’s “While an Angel Falls into a Doze…,” a wonderfully moving musical evocation of a momentary rent in the fabric of existence that makes everyone and everything seem to drip with sorrow.  A poem I wrote more than 25 years ago that appeared in the last issue of Yawp! in 2003 tried to express that idea, too.  Here it is:

AN ANGEL PASSES OVER

Villains and heroes die often, in many ways,

in text, in song, in film and theatre.

 

On monuments to war, innocents and soldiers

die together, their causes dying with them.

 

Presidents and martyrs die one time each year,

while every night the news displays the incoherent death

 

of many, some by name, some by implication,

all dying twice, once at six, once in recap.

 

A friend may die on several days each week,

another every time a certain song is heard.

 

A favorite aunt will die in prayer.

A brother dies in every mirror.

 

A father’s death occurs in boozy dream,

while in a trembling moment after sleep,

 

a mother dies, again and again.  A wife, a child,

who can count the times they die each day?

 

in shrieking brake, in distant slam,

with every ringing phone, on every turning page.

 

The rain falls twice upon this pall of earth,

once so hard, droplets bounce

 

from bricks, from cars, from glass,

flicker candle-like, and fall a second time.

Maybe if the media ignores this survey long enough, the opinions of Americans will just go away.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

About six months ago, I defined 15 specific propaganda techniques routinely used by the mainstream news media to distort the coverage of news.  Staring in my face—or perhaps hiding in plain sight is a more appropriate phrase—all this time has been a 16th technique. 

The newly identified technique is the complete disregard of a fact, incident, study or opinion. 

We’ve discussed instances of the news media ignoring studies or events with some frequency over the past 18 months. Here’s the latest example:  On Monday, January 3, “60 Minutes” and Vanity Fair released the results of a survey they conducted together that revealed that 61% of all Americans think that we should solve our budget deficit problem by taxing the wealthy.  Cutting military spending was the next most popular solution for closing the gap between how much our government spends and how much it collects, but it clocked in with a mere 20% support among Americans.

A Google News search reveals that as of today a mere 36 news media and blogs had covered the survey, although it was 44 when I checked yesterday.  Among those who did not cover this story are The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

Let’s take a look at how this compares to Google News numbers on the Internet media, including newspapers, broadcast news and blogs, coverage of other feature news today.   By feature news, I mean stories that the news media are under no obligation to carry.  They are obligated to cover hard news, which would include election results or a marriage involving British royalty. 

I’ll let my dear readers serve as judges as to how many of these stories are more important than knowing that most people want to address a pressing economic problem by taxing the wealthy.  In considering your response, remember that most of the publicity and talk of closing the deficit involves cutting programs and benefits.  Also remember that what the media discusses extensively in stories and blogs typically is a key determinant in the decision-making process in Congress and the Executive branch of government:

  • 1,711 stories on the winning of a lottery.
  • 1,566 stories on a trade fair for computer manufacturers.
  • 2,395 stories on a college football bowl game.
  • 2,277 stories on the pretrial hearing of Michael Jackson’s physician.
  • 244 stories on Kellie Pickler (who???) getting married.

Maybe those who control the mass media think that if they ignore the study and hammer us with right-wing cant that the opinions of the American people will change…or perhaps just go away.

They give us fast food and circuses.  And after a while, we see so many circuses that we think that only the clowns and acrobats matter. 

 

Leftovers from the New Year’s weekend: slipping in the propaganda and guess who turns to pay-for-play?

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The New York Times rang in the New Year by trying to connect a few statements in a paragraph and create a greater meaning that runs counter to reality.  It was buried on the page A3 continuation of the first page story, “Boomers Hit Another Milestone of Self-Absorption: Turning 65.”

Read the following paragraph very carefully while thinking of two men, John Kerry (the war hero who came back and led opposition to the war) and Dick Cheney (who used three exemptions to avoid service while calling for others to make the supreme sacrifice):

“…the never-ending celebration of the hippie contingent of boomers tends to overshadow the Young Americans for Freedom contingent. After all, while some boomers were trying to “levitate” the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War, other boomers were fighting in that war.”

Note how the YAFers morph into those who fought in the Viet Nam war, when in fact, as Mr. Cheney exemplifies, that was not always the case.  Also note how once again, anti-Viet Nam protesters are slurred by equating them completely with “hippies,” those free-spirited devotees of recreational drugs and free love in the mythology of the right.  In fact, the anti-War movement comprised a mix of types, including hippies, feminists, buttoned-down professors, pacifists, business students and business people, minorities, housewives, parents and former soldiers.

Now let’s turn to the ostensible New Year’s resolution of Parade, perhaps the most well-read periodical in North America by virtue of its insertion into the Sunday coupon page of a preponderance of Sunday newspapers. 

Parade’s New Year’s resolution: We will make more money by prostituting our magazine to advertisers.

It’s called pay-for-play and it’s when a magazine offers to run a story on a company or its products if the company buys an ad or a series of ads.  The most common and crude of the pay-for-plays has the ad facing the story, so that everyone knows that the company paid for the story.  A classier variation, one that I believe Parade followed in its January 2, 2011 edition, is to have the ad someplace else in the magazine.

The ad is a full-page color ad for the Queen Latifah collection of lipsticks by Cover Girl on the third page.  The article included the cover and a story on Queen Latifah’s advice on New Year’s resolutions that starts on page 10 and spills onto parts of five other pages.  Now I don’t know for a fact that Cover Girl paid specifically for an ad and a cover story, but judging on my 26 years of experience in public relations and advertising, I would say it’s almost a dead lock certainty that a pay-for-play agreement was arranged between the two parties.

The pay-for-play typically characterizes a lower form of journalism, certainly lower than what we traditionally expect from either Parade or a reputable daily newspaper. I’ve been reading Parade for some 50 years, and I am fairly certain that the Latifah ad-and-article represents the very first time that it has so blatantly favored an advertiser.

It symbolizes a new low for one of the most influential arbiters of mass culture in America.

OpEdge gives out the first (and maybe last) annual Ketchup Awards for misapplication of labels.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Words or phrases often acquire values that most people or a specific group of people find attractive or dislike.  When the word or phrase is associated with a number of sharply distinguishing values it enters the lexicon of labels and brands.  One of the tricks of propaganda and marketing is to label an idea, product or service with a word or phrase, which, by implication, imbues the product or service with the values associated with it. 

The result of this process can lead to some of the most devious statements ever perpetrated on the public, as when Ronald Reagan’s Department of Agriculture tried to get ketchup relabeled as a vegetable for the purpose of the federal school lunch program.  By making ketchup a “vegetable,” the hard-hearted Reaganites thought they could cut the school lunch program.  On a “values” level, it meant the transformation of ketchup from something you could easily avoid if you wanted to lose a few pounds to something considered important for all diets.

It is in the spirit of Reagan’s ketchup gambit—or against that spirit, perhaps I should say—that OpEdge announced the creation of the Ketchup Awards earlier in the year.  The Ketchup Awards honor the most egregiously deceptive bending of language, and in particular in the application of labels. 

You know, like the restaurant that says the fish is local because it buys from a local distributor of fish caught thousands of miles away.

Or the prominent priest who compared the bad press the Catholic Church has suffered because of its abuse of children to what Jews have suffered through the centuries from anti-Semites.

I asked for nominations three times, but only received one, from a gentleman named Paul Anater.  I added Paul’s to the 11 mislabelings I nominated and then selected five finalists.  Because I didn’t get many responses, I may not continue to give the award, although I will continue to collect examples of deception by mislabeling and share them with OpEdge readers.

Here then are the Five 2010 Ketchup Award Winners, in reverse order to build the suspense…

Fifth Place: Quality Withdrawal

The Girl Scouts issued a quality withdrawal in February when batches of the Lemon Chalet Crème cookies its girls were selling started tasting funny because the oils in them were decomposing rapidly.  Trying to pretend that it was related to a quality initiative and not a full-fledged recall of low-quality cookies stank worse than the cookies themselves because deviousness in communications is not a good role model for young girls.

Fourth Place: Class Warfare

We’re not talking about the 30-year class war that has led to a redistribution of wealth up the ladder from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy by means of low taxation, union-busting and privatization.  No we’re talking about the use of class warfare by two mainstream print columnists last August, Los Angeles Times’ Tony Petruno and New York Times’ Ron Lieber, to describe the new battle between those who have great public pensions which our politicians forgot to fund and the rest of us with lousy pensions because we’ve worked in the private sector. These reporters want to divide and conquer two parts of the same social class that should work together (and in the Western Europe of lifetime medical, unemployment and other benefits they do work together). 

Third Place: The Jamestown Socialists

Dick Armey always starts with the premise that anything bad in society must result from socialism and that the fount of all good is free-market capitalism.  No wonder then that in March this Armey of one Dick called the early example of industrial capitalism we know as Jamestown an example of socialism.  It failed, and therefore it must be socialistic, as were, we can presume, the 1962 Mets and the bridge that collapsed in the Minneapolis area a few years back.

Second Place: Vessels of Opportunity

In June, Paul Anater pointed out that BP’s program to employ Louisiana fishing and shrimp boats—put out of business at least on a temporary basis by BP’s reckless oil spill—was called Vessels of Opportunity.  The opportunity for these vessels was temporary work as oil skimmers.  We can suppose that BP executives sincerely believe that when a door closes—such as the destruction of your livelihood by an oil spill—a window really does open.

Grand Ketchup Award Prize Winner: The Self-Made Multi-Millionaire

It is the American tradition to admire the self-made millionaire and to look slightly askance at the achievements of someone born with a silver iPhone in his or her hand tricked out with every app and a packed address book.  And so when The Economist was doing one of its many encomiums to Mitt Romney, whose father was both a Governor and a multi-millionaire car-company CEO, the writers described Mitt as a self-made multi-millionaire, hoping that the self-made part would make the multi part admirable or more admirable.  Despite the fact that Mittman was born on third base, The Economist wants us to think he hit a triple.  We are ideologically programmed, almost from first grade, to admire the self-made person like Andrew Carnegie who started in poverty with no social connections and rose to riches and fame.  The Economist wants to extend that admiration to Mittman, but it’s a rank distortion, because even though Romney made hundreds of millions through the purchase and sales of corporate assets, he is in no way, shape or form “self-made.”

That’s it for the 2010 Ketchup Awards.

Why does Subway persist in telling the old lie about how to lose weight?

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Christmas is over and we’re rolling towards the New Year, which means that once again Subway, the fast-food sandwich chain, is running one of the most deceptive television commercials of the past several years.

The background music—The 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky—drives the commercial.  That’s the light classical piece in which the drums sound like cannon fire.  While the lead-up to this highly recognizable moment of explosion plays, we see four or five people getting ready to bite away at a hamburger piled high with sauce, cheese and condiments.  The people represent a variety of types.  As we see a close-up shot of one of the heroes of the commercial chomping down on the big, bad and greasy burger, the cannons start to explode…and so do the people.  We see a succession of buttons popping off the pants of the eaters.  Then we see one person break a chair and another break a bed, all to Tchaikovsky’s battlefield-like explosions.  The actors are a bit chunky but not obese, yet the implication is clear: the fast-food burgers caused the person to gain weight, which has led to the destruction of clothes and furniture.

The tone of the commercial suddenly changes as a narrator starts to tell us that if it’s time to lose some of those unwanted pounds that people should try two Subway sandwiches, both of which have both cheese and meat and one of which has bacon.

And why are these sandwiches great for losing weight?  Subway’s narrator gives us the reason: because they only have seven grams of fat each.

And therein lies the deception.

Cutting down on the fat you eat has nothing to do with weight loss.  Now there are other reasons to cut down on fat—including avoiding heart disease, diabetes and possibly several types of cancer.

But Subway does not talk about anything but losing weight.  And losing weight involves consuming fewer calories than what you burn to live.  In other words, you could eat nothing but fat and lose weight if the number of calories you eat is less than what your body is using.  For example, I’ve read in many places that a typical male adult should consume 2,200 to 2,600 calories a day.  If an adult male eats only 1,500-1,800 calories of fat a day, he can thus lose from one to two pounds a week.  And if an adult male eats nothing but lettuce and blueberries but chows down 3,000-3,500 calories of these very healthy foods per day, he’ll blimp up in no time.

I didn’t even bother trying to find out what the calorie count is for these Subway sandwiches, because it does not matter to my analysis.  If you say that adding peanut butter to your fuel tank will help a car get better mileage, you’re lying.  If you say that toppling Sadam Hussein will hurt al–Qaeda, you’re lying. 

And when Subway says you can lose weight eating these sandwiches because of low fat content, it is lying.  The music and the good-natured humor of the buttons popping make it a very entertaining lie, but it’s a lie nonetheless, one that many purveyors of processed foods and restaurant cuisine tell often. 

I want to close by wishing all OpEdge readers and their families a joyous, creative and prosperous 2011!  See you next year.

One lesson from the Tang Dynasty: the wealthy always find a way to control things.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I’ve been reading an excellent history of the Tang Dynasty, which ruled most of China from 618-907, during which time China experienced a Renaissance in literature and the arts, especially poetry.  It’s China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty by Mark Edward Lewis.  

Many books pad their pages past the direct subject to one degree or another.  For example, one writer will relate her factual tale with her reaction to it, another will reference the rock music and movie stars popular at the time.  Lewis’s padding adds richness to his story.  He projects the narrative both backward to the dynasties before the Tang and forward to the dynasties afterwards, especially the Song and Ming.  The result is a wonderful encapsulation of all of Chinese history, which of course gives an added level of meaning to the story of the Tang.

What I love about reading history is the many parallels I find to our current society and situation.  I have written before, for example, about the similarities between the United States in the post-War era and Spain in the 16th century under Phillip II.

Here’s the most interesting parallel between Tang and our current society that I’ve come across so far:  It was during the 300-year reign of the Tang that examination replaced coming from a wealthy family as the primary means of attaining a good government job.  We could call it the ascendancy of the meritocracy and it sounds a little like what happened in the United States beginning with establishment of the civil service in the 1880s.  The SAT and other standardized tests have in many ways become a similar gateway to a promising career that the examination system was in Imperial China.

And yet by the end of the Tang, virtually all the good government jobs were filled by the children of the wealthy.  How did it happen that a meritocracy developed that resulted in rewarding the rich rather than the inherently talented?  Lewis says (pages 203-204) that:

  • The wealthy were more able than others to spend a lot of money preparing their children for the exams. 
  • The exams were given only in the expensive and often faraway capitals, which put a financial burden on the poor students and their families, but not on the wealthy.
  • The little public education that existed in China eroded with the growth of the importance of the examination.  Convenient for the wealthy, who were also starting to pay fewer taxes, we learn elsewhere in the book
  • Many of the examiners knew the families of the wealthy applicants taking the exams.  Let’s call it the Imperial Chinese version of being a legacy at an Ivy League university.

Sounds familiar.  I imagine all the nicely situated but not super-wealthy Tang-era  families churning with anxiety as they tried to keep up with the wealthy in preparing their children for the examinations and ingratiating themselves with the examiners.  Do you think the mothers compared the benefits of the various private tutors over tea at the local Qĭ-Jiă (Star-buck in Chinese according to one online dictionary)? Do you suppose that among the voluminous output of poetry during the Tang there were guides to studying for the examination?

A.P. headline writer decides to take an unfair pot shot at President Obama for his so-called “entourage.”

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The Associated Press, which supplies virtually all of the national and international news to thousands of newspapers across the country, published an article early this morning about the upcoming winter vacation to Hawaii that President Obama and his family have planned.  The article is a well-written feature account of Obama’s childhood in Hawaii and how the residents react to having the President in their midst for a few days every year.

It’s not necessarily my kind of story.   I find that feel-good articles abut the personal lives of our elected officials invest them with some of the attributes of royalty, which is, after all, what we fought against in the Revolutionary War.  But for such a story, this one is okay.

Except for the headline, which attempts to turn the article against the President by the use of one word: “entourage.”

Here’s the headline:

Obama, family, entourage expected soon in Kailua

But the story is entirely about the President, his family and the residents of the island. The article has not one reference to the staff or security people who will accompany the President on his trip, so why is a word referring to them in the headline?  When you read the story, you realize that the more appropriate headline would have been “Obama and family expected soon in Kailua.”  But the headline writer added the word “entourage” and the editor stuck with it.

Nitpicking, you may say.  But is it?

I went back over the use of the word “entourage” in news stories about presidents over the past five years and in every other case I found that the news story is about the groups of people serving presidents of various countries, including of the United States.  Additionally, most but not all of the uses of “entourage” attach at least a little negative connotation to the word, either a questioning of its cost, size or honesty.

Here are some examples:

Now why would the headline writer (who is usually a different person than the writer of the article) want to use “entourage” in a headline when the story is not about the “entourage?”

My answer: to make the president look bad.

Many words carry with them mythic associations that can change over time.  In the case of entourage, there are three layers of mythic association, two quite recent, that make its use at least slightly pejorative, no matter the context. 

  1. Merriam Webster’s defines entourage as “one’s attendants or subordinates,” which strongly implies that royalty is involved.  Entourage has always had a slightly negative nuance of hangers-on, people who serve the ego of or attach themselves to “modern royalty” such as boxers, basketball players or rock stars.
  2. Since the ascent of the TV show, entourage has acquired a new meaning, “a group of young men who hang around all day smoking dope and talking about their dreams.”  I would assert that at this juncture in time, this meaning is the primary one for a large number of Americans.  Of course, we don’t ever like our President taking a toke, and we don’t want to think of his advisors as a bunch of loose-end guys with whom he’s been hanging since elementary school.
  3. A few months back, Michelle Bachman in another of her seemingly endless stream of highly exaggerated numbers (some would call them “big lies”), used the word “entourage” to impute the size and cost of the security people and staff members going with the President to India.  When attached to the President, “entourage” has now become a code word on the far right that suggests that: 1) Obama’s election came because of his “celebrity” not his qualifications, 2) more than other Presidents, President Obama has tried to increase the imperial trappings of the presidency. 

Three meanings, and all negative when applied to the President.  And yet the story had nothing to do with Obama’s staff.   A headline writer and editor of a primary media source for most Americans went out of their way to put a little anti-Obama message into the headline, which is the most-read and sometimes the only read part of all articles.