By Marc Jampole
Richard Berman is the kind of unethical public relations
executive who gives the PR profession a bad name. His métier is to use
right-wing money to establish and operate so-called think tanks that spew out
spurious and misleading position papers, opinion articles and reports that
support his clients’ positions on issues.
His Employment Policies Institute (EPI), for example, works
diligently against raising the minimum wage, health care mandates for employers
and mandatory sick leave. Berman tries to hide both the fact that his think
tanks are propaganda machines and the names of his clients. This deception often works, as he provides
fodder for Fox News, the Wall Street
Journal, Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing media.
Berman and EPI hit a new low in a full-page article in the New York Times that takes the form of an
open memo to President Obama about the 600 economists that the President cited as
favoring raising the minimum wage. The
memo essentially repeats quotes from or about (we’re never sure) eight of the
600 economists that suggest that they are Marxists or anti-American. The first six are identified as Marxists,
where as the seventh makes the mistake of criticizing U.S. foreign policy and
the eighth questions the official account of 9/11. A legend at the bottom of
the ad says, “Many of the 600 economists
you rely on are radical researchers or full-time employees working at
union-backed organizations.”
Calling opponents communists, Marxists or socialists is an
old trick of the right wing that predates Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy,
who provoked the country into a massive witch hunt against so-called communists
and fellow travelers in the late 1940s and early 1950s with lies about
identifying huge numbers of communists working in government positions.
McCarthy’s red baiting resulted in large numbers of teachers, film
professionals, lawyers and others losing their jobs because at one time or
another they had joined or went to meetings of left-wing organizations. It took a lawyer for the U.S. Army to jolt
the country out of this “red terror” with his comment that McCarthy had lost
all sense of shame by accusing the army of harboring communists.
The ad is odiously misleading on many levels. Let’s start
with the simple fact that there is nothing wrong with having socialist or
Marxist leanings. It doesn’t mean that you are anti-democratic or
anti-American. It also doesn’t mean that your economic research or analysis is
suspect. Samuel Bowles, Immanuel Wallerstein, Richard Wolff and David Gordon are
all well-known 20th-century Marxist economists or economic theorists who have
published viable research.
But even if you accept that Marxist economics is not a
viable alternative to classical economic theory, the ad still smells like
yesterday’s tilapia. For one thing, there’s the conflation of “radical
researcher” and “union-backed groups.” Both radicals and unions are thrown into
the same grouping. The not-so-hidden message is that there is something radical
and inherently bad about labor unions.
Moreover, there is the use of the word “many” to describe
the numbers of suspect economists on the list.
Why can’t Berman’s group give us an exact number? They found eight to
smear, but that’s 1.33% of the 600. Take them off the list and there are still
592 economists who support raising the minimum wage. The ad is able to
stipulate 45% as the exact percentage of those economists not labor specialists
who support the minimum wage increase, leading me to believe that if there were
many more than eight who had Marxist leanings, the ad would have used that
number.
The ad’s implied accusation, of course, is that anyone who is
on the left, has ever criticized U.S. policy or works for a union will “cook
the books” in their research. All we have here is repellent name-calling, and
is often the case, the name-callers are guilty of the crimes they accuse others
of committing. Reputable academics have frequently found EPI’s research to be
misleading or based on skewed or cherry-picked data.
What’s most interesting about Berman‘s pot pointing out the
dirt smudges on the leftists’ kettles is that the people the ad implies are
distorting their research all freely and openly admit the names of their
organizations or political sympathies. Berman and his clients hide behind
several layers of organizations.
This
smear ad reflects the desperation felt by the right-wing and corporations. Theyknow that the current minimum wage must increase by 47% for it to have the samepurchasing power as it did in 1968. They know that a good part of the increased profit margins and profits that
corporations enjoy compared to 30 and 40 years ago comes from squeezing down
the salaries of all workers by suppressing adjustments to the minimum wage for
inflation, killing unions and privatizing government jobs. They know that once
the minimum wage goes up, they’ll have to give raises to other employees. They
like the current arrangement in which a growing part of the income pie goes to
owners and executives and a shrinking share goes to employees. They can see
that people are fed up with the gutting of the middle class and ready to
embrace a higher minimum wage. They understand that a higher minimum wage is
probably inevitable.
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