Graphic by Kevin Kreneck
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Richard Berman, right-wing PR hack, tries “red baiting” proponents of raising minimum wage
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.
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
As demise of Mt. Gox shows, anyone investing in bitcoins is a fool
By Marc Jampole
Money has always been based on faith, even when it was
theoretically convertible to gold or another precious metal. Throughout
history, governments and economies have sometimes used gold, silver or copper
as money, putting their faith in the value of these metals to others. But
sometimes they have also used beads or shells or anything that can be counted,
stored and transported without deterioration. It would be unwise, for example,
to use raspberries as currency, because they spoil so quickly.
A better name for money is “currency,” because the word
contains a definition of what money does—allows objects and services to flow
without encumbrance between people and organizations. The current of these
goods and services—their exchange from person to person—would be much harder if
there weren’t some easy thing to count, handle and transfer to serve as a
medium of exchange. I can’t negotiate with the supermarket, dry cleaner and bus
driver to have them take something I’ve written in return for groceries,
cleaning services and in-town transportation. They will take my money, though,
and fortunately other companies will pay me the same to write articles,
commercials, brochures, blog entries and websites. Multiply my situation millions upon millions
of times and you’ll see how much we as a society depend on having currency.
Money is the lowest common denominator of exchange value.
Currency creates value relationships between different
items. A loaf of bread may cost three dollars and a ticket to a first-run movie
may cost twelve dollars, meaning that theoretically a movie ticket is worth
four loaves of bread, except during a famine when four tickets to the movie
might not even be tradable for a single slice of bread.
In using money, we engage in an act of faith—faith that what
we accept will have just about the same value when we want to spend it. Usually governments issue currency and our
faith in the currency reflects are faith in the government and the economy it
controls.
Having more than one kind of currency issued by more than
one source by definition creates a value relationship between the different currencies,
similar to the value relation between all products and services. Any value relationship
is subject to change. For example, the euro, which serves as currency for 23
countries, may be worth $1.40 one month and $1.25 another. Political and
economic events and decisions can affect the relationship between two
currencies, just as it can affect the relationship between specific goods and
services.
Without money, it’s impossible to conceive of any kind of
complex economy. And yet only our collective faith in any specific type of
money will enable us—society—to use it. If we didn’t believe that it would be
accepted as exchange value by others, it would have no value to anyone.
Which is why anyone who invested even one dime in bitcoins
was and is a fool.
The Bitcoin system is a computer-controlled private network
consisting of s series of private enterprises that have agreed to follow the
same protocols for “printing,” distributing and setting the value of bitcoins.
The bitcoins exist entirely as numbers in accounts; there are no physical
versions such as coins and paper bills. You can’t go to a bank and get a few
bitcoins. Like all currencies, bitcoin value floats and is determined on the
open market. If you bought one bitcoin a year ago, it’s worth more today—that
is, unless you were holding it at Mt. Gox, which just went under. In that case,
you may have lost everything. If an American bank fails, the money in your
account is insured (up to $250,000 per person per bank). No such protection exists
for those holding their bitcoins at Mt. Gox.
I fail to see any advantage of using bitcoins over euros,
dollars, yuan or other currencies. All of these currencies are subject to
failure—except that individual institutions and businesses fail much, much more
frequently than governments do. Dollars
are backed by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government and euros are
backed by the full faith and credit of the EU. What backs bitcoins? The full
faith and credit of the Bitcoin system? What’s that?
Other than currency failure, there is another drawback to
bitcoins: Organizations and individuals have to agree to accept payment in
bitcoins, whereas they all accept the currency of the country in which they do
business. Only if and when a significant number of organizations begin
recognizing bitcoins as currency will it have a true exchange value. But the rampant
speculation that makes bitcoin’s exchange value jerk up and down dramatically serves
as an impediment for corporations to accept them as payment. Who wants to
accept a bitcoin worth $579 the moment you sell your product knowing it may
only be worth $400 in a week? That’s speculation, which, by the way, is a
polite way of saying “gambling.” That’s what buying bitcoins has been from the
start—nothing but a gamble.
Some may argue that one could use the bitcoin to hedge
against a decline in all world currencies.
What they’re really saying is that an artificial currency that exists only
as numbers in computers is a better hedge against a regional or worldwide
economic disaster than gold or silver—things that are finite (you can’t print
more gold) that you can hold, barter and use to make things.
People are attracted to the bitcoin concept because it
represents the pie-in-the-sky ultimate in privatization. Instead of using
government-issued currency, we’ll use private currency. But the bitcoin adds
nothing to make the economy, society or individual asset holders any richer or
safer. In fact, the unusual speculation in bitcoins makes it less safe as an investment.
It may go up significantly in value, but it’s just as likely to go down.
People like to speculate, especially rich folk who buy
paintings, baseball cards and vintage cars hoping they will increase is value.
But if you buy a Manet and suddenly the world hates Manets, you still have a
pretty picture. With bitcoins all you have is a bunch of numbers on the screen.
I’ll stick to dollars, euros and yuan—with an occasional
Swiss franc thrown in for balance.
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