OMG! sinks to new low in anti-intellectualism: celebs who never graduated from high school

by Marc Jampole

OMG!, Yahoo!’s online celebrity magazine, has commemorated the fact that third-rate actor Mark Wahlberg finally earned his G.E.D. by giving us a list of 11actors and models who never finished high school.   

The photo-story consists of a list that unfolds over 11 web pages (to make it easier for the reader to see all the ads). Each web page tells a celebrity’s “I quit high school” story. 

The tease to the story on Yahoo!’s home page is unethically misleading: “This list shows you don't need a diploma to make millions in show business.”  

The statement and the list itself play a deceptive fraud on readers, many of whom are impressionable teens and pre-teens to whom the celebrity mongers are selling a bill of goods about what constitutes success and value. While we can find celebrities and business titans, and even scientists who have not finished high school or college, they are rare and have become rarer over the last few decades.  Writing “You don’t need a diploma…” has the same ring of truth to it as “It will probably snow in January in Rochester,” while in fact the successful person without a high school diploma is a rarity.     

To drive home the deception in the article, I want to take a look at this odious list of celebs without diplomas from three perspectives:

1.      The list itself: Of the 11 celebs without diplomas, 4 come from families that are quite wealthy and well-connected, part of the 1%. Most people can’t ask mommy who is “in the biz” to call a business associate or pull a favor, so they might be well-served to get the diploma and the additional training that goes with it.

2.      The celeb lists they don’t give: Wikipedia lists 86 television and film actors that went to Yale, 68 who went to Harvard and 118 who went to UCLA.  That’s only three colleges and it only includes film and television.  If I had to bet on either a college graduate or a high school dropout making it in Hollywood or on Broadway, I’d go with the kid with more training, and the numbers agree with me.

3.      The list of non-celebs without high school diplomas: For every person who becomes a famous celebrity, there are thousands who try and fail.  

The article never points out the hard cold facts of economic failure for virtually anyone with no education or certification. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the average wage of a high school dropout is less than $20,000 a year. A high school graduate makes on average more than $27,000 a year. Someone with an associate degree makes about $36,000 and someone with a 4-year degree makes almost $47,000 a year on average. Kids with dreams of fame who don’t quite make it can always fall back on their education—but only if they have one.

And many kids have dreams of fame. There are at least a thousand colleges offering degrees in performing arts that graduate students every year, many of whom want to work in show business. Every city has at least one modeling school and we all know how many college teams there are for every major sport.  Even for those with talent and drive, the chance of celebrity success is slight.

The ideological subtext behind the article is an extreme form of anti-intellectualism, the premise that one doesn’t really need an education to succeed.  The news media feeds us this nonsense with some frequency, but the OMG! article is especially obnoxious because it suggests that kids won’t suffer if they drop out of high school and pursue stardom.

Opponents to minimum wage use illogical assumptions and imaginary anecdotes as their arguments

By Marc Jampole

I have rarely received as negative a reaction as when I lambasted Professor Thomas Sowell the other day for, among other things, his opposition to the minimum wage—any minimum wage. The number of negative comments rivaled what I received when I said that no comic book could be a mature work of art, as a novel or poem can.

In the case of the supporters of Marvel: The Avengers, who called me on my overly general statement about comic books, I admitted I went too far in a retraction a few days later.

But all I have to offer anyone who is opposed to a minimum wage is scorn and contempt. 

Their arguments are self-serving and typically built on imaginary anecdotes, as imaginary as Reagan’s welfare queens driving Cadillacs or Santorum’s poor people emotionally crippled by the worst kind of addiction, food stamp dependency.

Let’s start with the imaginary business owner who can’t afford to hire someone to sweep the floors at $7.25 an hour, so he does it himself or the floors stay dirty. For years, whenever anyone proposed raising the minimum wage, critics have painted a grim future of thousands of business owners sweeping floors or living with filth. The floor-sweeping business owner has taken its place as one of the classic figures of right-wing economic mythology.  The first time I heard this metaphor used as the primary argument to oppose the minimum wage was when I was in college making a minimum wage of $1.25 an hour from a part-time job on a Sear’s shipping dock.

My question, then and ever since, is how valuable is the time of the owner if he can afford to sweep the floors him/herself instead of looking at the books, coaching employees, visiting clients or supervising the sales floor, developing growth plans, negotiating with suppliers, serving on boards where he can spread good will about the company in the community, or any of the other high level jobs entailed in running any successful business?   In many businesses such as mine, when a highly ranked employee works an hour, he or she can create dozens and sometimes hundreds of hours of work for other employees. What owner would be foolish enough to waste time sweeping floors instead of creating this additional work?  And aren’t there usually other employees who could sweep those floors, freeing the boss to perform tasks more central to making money?

As to the case of a potential business that depends on a lot of employees but can only make a profit if these employees are paid $4 or $5 an hour—maybe the owner has to take less profit or raise prices; in other words: change the business model.

The idea behind the imaginary owner-sweeper is silly. No well-run business hires additional employees if it hasn’t first figured out how they will make money off of them, unless it’s a relative or a friend and the company is doing very well. 

There are many factors that determine the current market for every position, including marketplace conditions, the presence of a union at the company or in the industry and the imputed value of the skill base and experience of the employee (which means that in this society, companies are willing to pay more for senior sales executives than for entry-level welders). All the minimum wage does is to put a floor on the minimum value of all jobs, as a protection of individual workers.

Which brings us to the other imaginary anecdote, another classic: the young kid struggling to get out of poverty who just needs a chance, but can’t get it because the minimum wage prevents anyone from hiring him. There is no doubt that there are any number of desperate people who would work for less than the current minimum wage, including lots of illegal aliens and teenagers. And when a recession hits, their numbers proliferate.

Yes, out of desperation, these people will work for anything. But that doesn’t make it right. The minimum wage is society’s way of saying that every person is entitled to a minimum amount of compensation (and dignity) when they exchange their work for money.

Which brings us to the underlying economic theory behind opponents of the minimum wage, including Professor Sowell, a premise so abstract that the right-wing has yet to create an imaginary person to embody its meaning: the minimum wage distorts the marketplace.

Damn right it does, and that’s a good thing. It’s supposed to distort the market place. Here are some other distortions of the marketplace:

·         Using standard weights and measures

·         Laws concerning the enforcement of contracts

·         Regulations to ensure the safety of food products

·         State certifications before people can practice medicine or law or teach children

In fact, every rule or custom of society distorts the absolute free market. Some distortions are good, such as the use of standard weights and measures. Some are obviously bad, such as prohibition of alcohol in the first part of the 20th century.

Those who oppose something just because it distorts the marketplace don’t really oppose marketplace distortions, just the ones that hurt their interests or the interests of those who pay their salaries. The minimum wage raises the wages not just of minimum-wage employees but of all others, and so distorts by redistributing wealth from business owners to their employees.  When I look at economic realities—for example, the fact that most of the wealthy and near wealthy run, own or manage businesses and the fact that we have seen a widening split between what the wealthy make and own and what everyone else makes and owns—when I see these facts, I’m not so worried about the marketplace distortion that occurs because of the minimum wage. Even though I own a business, I would be delighted to see the marketplace distortion that would result if the minimum wage were raised to $10 or even $15.  

That distortion, by the way, is called economic equity.

Writer’s dream of retirement assumes that no one likes city living

By Marc Jampole

I was going to ignore the silly article by Tom Sightings titled “Dreams of the Ideal Retirement Home” in the latest U.S. News & World Report, but it hasn’t left the home and news pages of the major Internet news portals since it was first posted last Wednesday. With such media penetration, I feel as if I have to warn readers that the article is little more than propaganda against city life.

Sightings’ musings on retirement resemble all the real estate lists that appear in standard general news stalwarts like US. News, Forbes, Bloomberg News, the Associated Press and Reuters. The underlying ideological point of all these lists is to advocate for a non-urban life style, one dependent on cars and malls and in which the thought of going to a museum or serious play never crosses the mind, because we’re all so busy playing golf and camping out. (See OpEdge on April 11, 2012;  September 23, 2011; and March 9, 2010, for example.)

Sightings doesn’t create a list. Instead his article does a little collective wishing out loud for his readers. His article flits from one retirement idyll to another, including:

·         In the country

·         In a small house with a small yard in a small town (Sightings’ own retirement dream)

·         Beachfront, or at least near the sea

·         Golf communities

·         A home with access to parks

·         University towns (he mentions Newark DE, Athens GA and Tempe AZ).

He completes his musings with a discussion of some non-geographic attributes—age of home, size of home, proximity to an interstate or airport.

Nothing about living in the exciting cities of Manhattan, downtown Chicago or Boston, Washington or Philadelphia, with their museums, live theatre, top musical performances of all types, experimental arts, major libraries and non-chain restaurants and retail establishments.

Nothing about living in the many quaint and bustling neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, Seattle, Atlanta, New Orleans (those that are left) or Milwaukee.

It’s not just city life that the author ignores.  He also ignores those parameters of the decision on “where to live when retired” in which urban life excels, such as:

·         Extensive and dependable mass transit

·         Major healthcare facilities

·         Cultural activities

·         Infrastructure of services and social opportunities for senior citizens

What Sightings does is assume the superiority of the suburbs and rural areas, both when working and in retirement. 

Why this hate of the city? It’s a confluence of two trends, one deeply seated in American history and one a phenomenon originating the post-World War II era. The long-term trend is American distrust of “the other”—the immigrant, the foreigner, those of different color. Cities thrive on diversity, which by its nature forges all “others” into a mosaic of “all of us, each different” (that I personally find beautiful).

The other trend—in operation only since about 1945—is the synched messages of car companies, real estate developers and retail chains about the blandishments of suburban living: buy this new house, depend on cars and shop only in recognizable places that look like what you see everywhere else.

No one can say if Sightings buys into the ideology and doesn’t know that his piece is little more than propaganda against cities. But he does know that he’s fooling the readers about something: The article begins with his pulling weeds and dreaming of retirement, and ends with a collective sigh for all of us (including himself) who will have to get through another weekend of taking care of the yard. But the biography that follows the article mentions that he is already retired. He deceives us by saying in the article that he is dreaming of attaining a condition that he is already in.  The deception is purely rhetorical (as the bio admits the truth), but unnecessary. Sightings could have written the same article without the personalization.    

Thomas Sowell proved long ago that he has neither soul nor heart for the working class

By Marc Jampole

In his most recent column, which I saw in today’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Thomas Sowell patronizes the working class by imagining a group of educated people who look down on manual and semi-skilled labor. He characterizes Utopian intellectuals who “lament that many people work ‘just for money’” and want every job to be self-fulfilling, which Sowell says the Utopians say excludes janitors and fast food cashiers.  Sowell ends his article, titled “Meaningful Work,” by lambasting those who tell young people that certain jobs are “menial.”

Sowell, who has been touting rightwing causes as a senior fellow at the ultra-conservative Hoover Institute at Stanford for decades, pretends to be a friend of young people and the working class, protecting them from the hectoring of the elitist college police. 

Let’s forget about the fact that Sowell doesn’t name one of these elitists, although he alludes to an unnamed “internationally renowned scholar who recently said that what low-income people needed was ‘meaningful work.’” Nor does he cite any studies, e.g., of attitudes of educators, the wealthy or some other groups towards manual and semi-skilled labor.  It’s painfully clear that Sowell has created a straw man—I guess I should say, straw group—so that he can assert his pride in the working class.

When it comes time to actually do something for young people, minorities or the working class, whatever the proposal is, Sowell is ready to shoot it down. Money is the ultimate sign of respect in our society, so let’s take a look at how Sowell stands on issues that put more money into the pockets of manual and semi-skilled workers.

Sowell is against any kind of minimum wage, because he says it distorts the marketplace. Like a doting uncle, Sowell worries about the young people who lose job opportunities because employers can’t afford to hire people to do certain jobs.  It’s a bunch of malarkey. Employers make money on every employee, either directly or because doing the work frees a more valuable employee to make money directly.  Employers only hire workers they need, and when they need a worker, they hire one. The minimum wage makes sure that everyone gets paid fairly, no matter what the job or the age of the worker.

Sowell also despises unions, which catapulted millions of manual and semi-skilled laborers into the middle class for decades. It’s not a coincidence that as soon as union membership started to shrink, so did the real buying power of the average worker. Unions not only ensure high wages for union members (even college educated ones such as teachers and nurses), but they also put pressure to raise the salaries for all jobs at a company or in an industry, both management and nonunionized workers.   Again, like a good uncle, Dr. Sowell says he only has the best interest of workers in mind when he says that “unions are for unions.” Sowell shows only mock concern for employees, who he assumes can buy each other a better deal with the employer than each could if teamed with all her/his fellow employees. After all, it works for Alex Rodriguez and Kevin Durant. And I’m sure it worked for Sowell in his last contract negotiation, too.

In his article, Sowell says that people who lack skills can “take jobs for which they are currently qualified and then move up the ladder as they acquire more experience.” What ladder is he talking about? He’s a social scientist who is supposed to keep up with the literature.  Hasn’t he heard that a recent study demonstrated that it’s significantly harder in theUnited States to move up the economic ladder than in any other westernizedcountry, and it’s hardest to rise from the lowest rungs?

If Sowell were truly interested in young people, the uneducated or minorities, he would work to instill an attitude of respect towards all jobs and all kinds of labor. Now in America, that means supporting policies that increase the wages paid to the people who perform manual and semi-skilled labor.

Once again, whites losing ground economically prefer the candidate whose party is responsible

By Marc Jampole

You wouldn’t ask a fox to guard a henhouse. Nor would you ask a known thief to serve as treasurer for a charity. And you certainly wouldn’t have a child molester chaperone a two-week Cub Scout camping trip.

And yet the part of the white middle class that is free-falling towards poverty wants to put a former vulture capitalist in charge of the nation’s economy.

A Washington Post­-ABC poll released earlier this week found that white voters who are struggling financially or experiencing job loss believe that Mitt Romney will do more to advance their economic interests than President Obama will, by a landslide margin of 58% for Romney to 32% for Obama.

It’s just crazy to think that so many more people would trust Romney over any Democrat with their future economic well-being. Say what you will about President Obama’s economic track record as president, Mitt Romney has for decades displayed an enormous disregard for the economic interests of anyone but the super wealthy.

It starts with his profession, investment banker who specialized in buying companies, squeezing costs—often through layoffs—and taking enormous profits.  Bain Capital was never meant to be a job or a wealth creator, but rather a wealth transfer agent that would transfer the value of companies into its bank account.  Sometimes the companies Bain bought and sold thrived and often they went under. Didn’t matter.  Romney and his associates got theirs.

While Romney claims that while he was governor Massachusetts was a job creation machine, the Democrats have released reliable figures that show that Massachusetts was 47th in job creation during Mitt’s years in office, while state debt grew.  That sounds like a Republican, from Reagan to Bush II: slow job growth (or in Bush II’s case, job losses) with an increase in debt.

Now let’s take a look at Romney’s economic ideas:

• He wants to reduce taxes even more than the current low tax regime that has people with high incomes paying the lowest rates of at least the last 70 years. When rich people don’t pay taxes, they spend some of the extra money, but some gets hidden from the economy in investments that don’t produce jobs. But when the government gets the money, it either spends it or gives it to someone who is going to spend it. Spending money creates demand for goods and services which creates more jobs. Create enough jobs and the demand for labor grows and wages increase.  In a profound way, lowering taxes on the wealthy, as Bush II did, activates a transfer of wealth from middle class and poor people to the wealthy.
• He wants to make it harder for unions to organize, which means that there will be fewer good paying jobs around, since unionization tends to increase the wages not both of the unionized workers and of other employees at the same company and in the same industry.
• Romney wants to cut spending on programs that help the middle class and near poor and are making things bearable for the white middle class that has lost jobs. Unemployment, food stamps, health care—you name it, if it’s money that’s going directly to people, Romney doesn’t like it., except of course when it’s tax cuts giving more money to his fellow country-clubbers.

Whites who are struggling—or if you prefer, whites without a college education—have been voting against their economic best interests since the time of Nixon.  Nixon’s brilliant strategist Kevin Phillips developed what was called “The Southern Strategy.” (Phillips has since recanted and spent the rest of his career doing penance for developing this inherently racist and divisive approach to grabbing power by writing a series of books criticizing Republican economic policies).

The objective of the strategy was to pry southern states from the Democratic column by taking stands against busing to achieve integration, affirmative action and other steps to give African-Americans equal rights. The strategy also had Republicans making accusations that the government under Democrats gave away money and jobs to the undeserving (code for minorities).   That message resonated with whites who felt that giving minorities (and women) greater access to the workplace threatened their jobs and who were beginning to lose ground economically as the United States pursued policies that favored its multi-national corporations and banks over maintenance of a strong domestic manufacturing capability.  It was classic “divide and conquer” in which the ruling elite divided the middle class against itself.

Reagan refined the Southern Strategy by adding the white knight of the private sector and unrestrained free enterprise who would save the American people from the wasteful giveaways of the federal government. The coded language defined the undeserving who ended up with “our hard earned money” as minorities, thus playing on old racist myths while strengthening them.

After some 40 years of this brainwashing, it’s no wonder that a large part of the population resents the government and doesn’t realize that the so-called “undeserving” getting government benefits are for the most part very much like themselves—white, uneducated and either poor or struggling.  I can understand their frustration (but not the racism) and I also understand that a lack of education often denies them not just the training to succeed in a technologically driven economy, but also the tools to analyze in depth the absurd claims of right wing politicians.  It doesn’t help matters that there is a large right wing media feeding nonsense to the public and a mainstream media that looks to the right to define the issues on the political agenda.

The result is this grotesque situation in which the oppressed throw their support to a man who symbolizes the oppressors and their techniques of oppression.    

Teen magazine manufactures new holiday dedicated to shopping

By Marc Jampole

Anyone with doubts that the primary way in which Americans commemorate and celebrate is to shop should see all the proof they need in theannouncement that Teen Vogue magazineis organizing its own private holiday dedicated to shopping calledBack-to-School Saturday on this coming August 11.

The idea of Back-to-School Saturday is to fill the malls with teens and parents looking for sales bargains on clothes and school supplies.  Besides giving Americans another excuse to shop for bargains, it also gets us thinking about school as an opportunity to consume, as opposed to an opportunity to learn career and life skills, gain job certification or explore how to be a thinking and independent member of a free and diverse society.

By organizing Back-to-School Saturday, Teen Vogue (whose function is akin to a training bra for the full assault consumerism of its “big sister” Vogue) has taken the latest step in the evolution of the buying as celebration ideology:

1. We center traditional holidays such as Christmas around shopping.
2. We create new holidays like Mother’s Day as a pretext for shopping.
3. We see the emergence of unofficial grass roots holidays dedicated to shopping such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
4. Now we are creating holidays which have as their rationale nothing more than shopping.

Interestingly enough, Back-to-School Saturday also represents a tour de force of contemporary advertising promotions.  So far, the magazine’s ad reps have gotten major retailers like Staples, H&M, American Eagle Outfitters and Guess to offer sales, samples and coupons for the August 11 celebration; participating manufacturers include Proctor & Gamble.  Even non-readers of Teen Vogue will undoubtedly see a lot about the proposed new shopping holiday. All consumers visiting malls will see the signs and the news media will certainly give feature coverage to the day for at least one day.

But will it work, which means will it not only draw lots of people to malls on August 11, but also lead to increased sales of all back-to-school related items?

The marketing executives of the participating companies seem to think it will. The New York Times article about the big day quoted a chief executive of a retail chain as saying that consumers are “increasingly interested in event-based shopping.” 

That may be so, but to a large degree, sales on event days merely cannibalize sales that would occur on other days.  The premise appears to be that Americans are stupid enough to buy more—to overspend their budget—at these events.  I don’t think that premise is valid, and don’t think the corporations promoting this new holiday believe in it either. But coming early in the season, the sales represent cash into the businesses sooner, which means that they can pay their bills sooner and borrow less money.  So even if the new day leads to no more sales, retailers might still consider it a success.

There is also the image-building part of Back-to-School Saturday. The holiday reminds us that the school term is starting, and reinforces the idea that like all holidays, challenges, private celebrations and life passages, the most appropriate way to react is to buy something. The Back-to-School Saturday holiday thus turn the late summer rite of passage into a reason to buy for anyone in America who hasn’t already gotten the message that returning to school means buying new clothes, school supplies, computers and maybe a special incentive to motivate the kids, and even a special treat for mom or dad after suffering a houseful of kids during the day for the entire summer.  Instilling the buy mentality into teenage girls is particularly important because all studies show that even in the 21st century they will grow up to control most of American non-business spending.

So even if Back-to-School Saturday doesn’t lead to increased sales in the months of August and September, it will help in making certain that there are no competitors in the marketplace of ideas for the ideology of consumerism.

Now joining the Un-History channel is Non-Animal Planet with its feature on mermaids

By Marc Jampole

We’re used to the History Channel running pseudo-historical and non-historical shows. And the only thing it seems you can discover on the Discovery channel nowadays are fantasies and fiction.

Et tu, Animal Planet?

This past weekend, the cable channel built around accurate, if sometimes overly cloying or dramatic images and narratives about animals, took the plunge into pretend truth. It ran what it called a speculative documentary about the possibility that mermaids and mermen once existed, and in fact were hominid-tending apes that returned to the sea during a period of massive coastal flooding.

Mermaids: The Body Found unfolds as the typical documentary that most people associate with facts and factual presentations.  Think of Ken Burns, Fog of War and The Sorrow and the Pity.  For that matter, think of almost all of Animal Planet’s programming.  The film has all the techniques of the documentary. Excerpts from newscasts. Shaking video from amateurs. Expert interviews. Except it’s all fake: fake anchors, fake amateurs, fake experts.

As Ed Stockly of the Los Angeles Times pointed out, most fake documentaries are satires which use a variety of devices to wink “just fooling” to the audience. Stockly mentions several examples like Zelig and Spinal Tap, to which I want to add Luis Buñuel’s 1933 masterpiece of satire, Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread.). FYI, some of the most often employed “winking” techniques include exaggeration, patently absurd statements, music with comic tones, or putting words into the mouths of obvious fools.

 But Mermaids: The Body Found never winks. In interviews the filmmaker, Charlie Foley, has preferred to play it coy, with statements about “some interesting questions on whether mermaids might be plausible.”

I would like to be gentle with both Animal Planet and the film itself. After all, speculation about mermaids, unicorns and other fictional beasts is harmless fun. In theory, a fiction that unrolls like a documentary has no moral flaw in it, that is, as long as everyone knows it’s a fiction, a piece of speculation with no basis in reality.

That’s in theory. In the real world, the film minimizes the disclaimer almost out of existence. Moreover, the very fact that the documentary appears on Animal Planet gives it the air of truth.  Run the same show on the comedy channel between reruns of Harold & Kumar and Cheech & Chong and you could get a lot of laughs. Run it on Animal Planet and you are putting a lot of nonsense into the heads of a lot of viewers, many of whom are under age.

For the most part, the news media has accepted the documentary not as describing truth, but as describing a possibility for which evidence may exist; for example, see “Mermaids are real! At least that's what Mermaids:The Body Found wants us to think,” “’Mermaids:The Body Found’ Explores The Possibility Of Real Life Mermaids” and “’Mermaids: The Body Found’ stirs speculation that the sea creatures are real”

In this readiness to open a debate on the past existence of mermaids we find the most negative impact of Animal Planet running this fiction. We are living in an age in which lies parade as truth. How many pseudo-scientific documentaries and books are out there purporting to prove that the world is not getting warmer or that intelligent design ignited the universe and guides it through its evolution? How many politicians claim that raising taxes slows economic growth or that Social Security is in dire straits, even as study after study demonstrates otherwise?  Sending forth yet another fiction parading as truth makes it all the harder for people to learn how to ascertain truth.

With as many as 8.7 million species of animals on Earth, you would think that Animal Planet would have enough topics for many decades to come and wouldn’t have to resort to anti-scientific, anti-rational bunkum.

Is the mainstream moving left or just reacting to right-wingers behaving badly?

By Marc Jampole

The main stream seems to be taking a hard look at some of the more radical ideas of the right wing. Over the past week or so, we have seen a number of signs that the mainstream is beginning to push back against the constant bullying by the right-wing on such issues as women’s reproductive rights, tax policy, global warming and gun control:

• The latest Economist reports that the Heartland Institute, a think tank that promotes skepticism about global warming, lost an estimated $825,000 in contributions after it posted a billboard in which Unabomber Ted Kaczynski says ”I still believe in global warming. Do you?,” which followed the revelation that it had been planning on sending teaching materials denouncing global warming to American primary schools.  That sent PepsiCo, BB&T Bank, Eli Lily and other donors out the doors.
• Today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that 15 Pennsylvania state legislators have cut ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), joining hundreds of legislators nationwide and such large corporations as The Coca Cola Company, PepsiCo, McDonald’s Corp. and software giant Intuit.
• Over the weekend, Washington Post reported that an increasing number of Republicans running for Congress are declining to sign the Norquist pledge not to raise taxes. Of the 25 candidates this year promoted by the National Republican Congressional Committee as "Young Guns" and "Contenders" at least a third are saying they won’t sign the pledge.
• A few weeks back, when one of the wealthiest men in the world, Joe Ricketts, agreed to finance a scurrilous series of ads against President Obama built on the fact that he went to a church whose pastor made a number of outrageous statements, the outrage in the mainstream was immediate and thunderous.

With the exception of the repudiation of the tax pledge, these repudiations of the right all come after particularly obnoxious events: Ricketts really did want to go beyond the pale. ALEC is still suffering from its support of “Stand Your Ground” laws. The Heartland Institute has crossed the truth line often enough to begin to embarrass the more mainstream of its corporate masters. Add to these, Rush Limbaugh’s awful remarks, which led to him losing massive numbers of national and local sponsors, and the dipping of the Komen Foundation into the waters of the extreme right by temporarily defunding Planned Parenthood. (I can see why Republican candidates are starting to inch away from the no-tax pledge.  No matter who wins the presidential election, it is likely that part of the legislative deals after the election will be tax hikes.)

Because most of these instances of mainstreamers coming to their senses come as a reaction to truly obnoxious events, there is no telling if these are signs of a sea change in American politics, a movement by the mainstream back towards the progressivism of 1930-1976.  We do see the limits of the right-wing finally, but those limits have less to do with what is being advocated as it does with how it is advocated.  Call someone a slut and you’re going to lose your sponsors. Tell outright lies to children, and even purveyors of consumer illusions will desert you.

Latest Parade Magazine begs question: has eating replaced buying stuff as the way to celebrate in America

By Marc Jampole

Most of us have heard of twice baked potatoes and those who frequent Chinese restaurants often see twice cooked pork on the menu.  And home brewers sometime pride themselves on their twice fermented beer.

But today’s Parade Magazine one-ups all double-cooking by presenting a menu of delights that has been homogenized not once, not twice, but three times.  Let’s call it thrice-homogenized cuisine.

The basic starting ingredient in Parade’s recipe is Memorial Day.

In the past, Parade has often had special articles, sections and whole issues dedicated to Memorial Day. Today there was not a trace of the holiday, originally meant to honor the members of the United States armed forces who fell while fighting in the Civil War and long ago expanded to include American soldiers who died in any war (which thankfully leaves out the immoral traitors of the Confederacy who fought for slavery and against their own country).

What Parade did feature for its Memorial Day issue, on both its cover and the main story covering 3.33 of the 12 pages that did not have full-page ads, was an article about 12 foods they called “All-American classics.”

The largest of the several cover headlines gives a hint to how Parade’s editors cooked up the notion of an issue essentially dedicated to American food classics.  The headline reads: CELEBRATE SUMMER FOODS! 

The jump from Memorial Day to American food classics “Celebrate Summer Foods” is a simple matter of homogenizing three times. Each homogenization involves the reduction of a complex experience to a single attribute shared with other experiences:

1. Memorial Day is homogenized until it becomes not a holiday to honor fallen soldiers, but the beginning of summer.
2. Summer activities homogenize into eating summer foods.
3. Summer foods homogenize into American food classics.

Thus, Memorial Day serves as the unspoken rationale for an article that tells us the origin of and one great place to buy 12 food products that all originate in the United States.

Parade arranges its menu of American classics into four categories, as follows:

• Crispy: Corn dogs, fried clams, granola, cob salad (iceberg lettuce topped with lots meat, eggs and a creamy dressing)
• Creamy: Ice cream cones, California dip (dry soup mix stirred into sour cream), whoopee pie (two circles of chocolate cake with vanilla cream in between)
• Chewy: Hamburgers, chili dogs, saltwater taffy
• Cheesy:  Muffulettas (New Orleans cold cut sandwich), chimichangas (deep fried fritters).

As usual, Parade scraps any pretense of healthy eating from the start. The only real vegetables are the crudities you bathe with dip and use to line the iceberg lettuce. The only real fruit is the dried stuff you mix into the high-calorie granola.  Parade could have provided balance and supported the movement for better nutrition by substituting many healthier American dishes such as fruit or sweet potato pie, green bean casserole, collard greens, baked beans, clam chowder and pot roast with root vegetables.  I have saved for its own sentence the quintessentially healthy American dish, one that other than hamburgers and hotdogs symbolizes Memorial Day/summer picnics: corn on the cob!

Parade is probably the most widely-read publication in the United States by virtue of being a freebee found among the coupon offers and advertising circulars of most Sunday newspapers.  The Parade website has no reference to Memorial Day except for an article by Martha Stewart on her favorite Memorial Day recipes and another giving 20 recipes for a Memorial Day cookout. Looks to me that as far as Parade is concerned, all its readers want for Memorial Day is a good home-cooked meal.

Since beginning OpEdge almost three years ago, I have written often about the commoditization of all emotions and human interactions in contemporary America. To express anything, we buy.

I’m wondering now if food consumption—eating something—has replaced the economic consumption represented by buying something as the central way to express oneself, at least in groups.  Today’s Parade made me realize that we now reduce Memorial Day to a barbecue; that’s pretty much what July 4 is, too. My Mother’s Day blog built a case that the primary means to celebrate Mother’s Day is to bring her breakfast in bed (with a nice restaurant meal a close second).  We’ve always had Thanksgiving and the candy elements of Valentine’s Day and Halloween.  A few years back, the news media reported on the trend of every childhood activity, even a simple practice, to be accompanied by a snack.  Do we see reality reflected in situation comedies, in which a lot more of the action takes place over food nowadays? Compare “Big Bang Theory” and “2.5 Men” to “All in the Family” and “The Jeffersons” (or even to “Seinfeld” and its dependence on a local restaurant booth as a regular set.)  In the contemporary sit coms I cited, the actors spend much more time chowing down than in older sit coms.

At the end of the day Parade’s triple homogenization is based on the double consumption of raising food to the primary expression of celebration: you have to buy it to eat it, which means you are consuming twice, once as an economic entity and once as a celebrator.

Selections from the June 15, 2012 issue

COVER/William Lazonick
When execs abandoned the 99% 

EDITORIAL
Boot the billionaires

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Vote for less worst and hope for the best

DISPATCHES
Cory Booker gets starring role in Romney ad;
Obama smear funder demands baseball stadium subsidy;
Sanders: banks regulate Congress;
Banks bought Tea Party reps;
Sick Americans see health care problems;
GOP govs contradict Romney;
Unemployment rate comparisons;
Judge strikes down indefinite detentions;
Stein half-way to Green nomination;
Chamber to spend $50M on elections;
Who's checking who?
Nuke chief to step down;
Catholic institutions sue birth control rule ... 

DON ROLLINS
Methodists in search of their founder

ALLAN BRAWLEY
Adam Smith would be appalled

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Balancing budgets on backs of the poor

BOB BURNETT
The ‘Show Me the Money’ campaign

JOEL D. JOSEPH
America must protect its solar industry

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Robber barons enter health care

SAM URETSKY
Be careful what you vote for

JOHN BUELL
Inequality and economic crises

WAYNE O’LEARY
The cost of efficiency

SETH SANDRONSKY
Telecoms take hard line in union contracts

Fr. DONNELL KIRCHNER
Catholic vote: Does church favor one party?

ROB PATTERSON
Dreaming of special achievement in awards

POPULIST PICKS
American weed; Sex for sale

and more ...

What Facebook does in first few trading days is meaningless. Media coverage is a form of celebritiosis

By Marc Jampole

The major business news story this morning was the fact that Facebook fell four points or a little over 11% in its second day of trading.  It led the business pages of The New York Times and Yahoo!, Google and National Public Radio’s business news.  Here in western Pennsylvania, the political cartoonist Rob Rogers shows two kids doing their homework and their father shouting, “Why aren’t you on Facebook?...I bet your future on that stock.”  

All of this posturing and conjecturing about a complete non-event, a sure sign that the business media are suffering from celebritiosis, the disease that makes sufferers read gossip columnists, go to expensive restaurants in New York or Los Angeles looking for celebrities, and use the same brand of shampoo as their favorite athlete.

Here is the pattern that the prices of virtually all initial public offerings (IPO) of hot concept and techy companies follow:

1.      The day the stock opens it either goes higher, stays the same or declines.

2.      The stock goes down significantly in the three to five days immediately following the first day.

3.      Sometimes the stock starts to climb, sometimes it stays the same, sometimes it drops more, but…

4.      Within a time period of the first 3 to 6 weeks, the stock drifts down significantly. The reason I think this precipitous early decline occurs is that people who want to buy an IPO the first day have another form of celebritiosis, and so pay up for the stock.

Let’s compare the end of the first day of trading to a low point 3-6 weeks later for some prominent recent IPOs:

Stock	Opening Date & Close	Date & First Big Low
Groupon	11/4/11: $26.11	11/28/11: $15.24
LinkedIn	5/19/11: $94	7/20/11: $63.71
Angie’s List	11/17/11: $16.26	11/30/11: $11.56
Zynga	12/6/11: $9.50	1/9/12: $8.00

But there’s a fifth stage called everything after that in which some of the stocks do great and some fade into oblivion. Check out what happened to these four stocks and you’ll see that this early showing predicts nothing.

In other words, what a stock does in its first day doesn’t matter. It’s going to go down, after which anything can happen.

Thus, after one day of trading, all we can say about Facebook is that so far it’s behaving like every other stock and that means that the stock is probably going to lose a good part of its value in the short run, like every other IPO does. 

And none of that is any news.

Let’s face it. Facebook, like Apple (and Microsoft years ago), has become a celebrity company, the business version of Cher, Justin Bieber or Snooki.  There is no doubt about it: celebrity culture has invaded the business sections of our mainstream media. The business media also extensively covered Zuckerberg’s marriage.  It makes perfect sense that the Gossip and Celebrity sections of the newspaper cover the marriage of a young and glamorous billionaire. But the front page of the business section ? And a follow story on the pre-nup the next day?

One function of celebrity news is to distract us from real news, and we couldn’t find a better example than the Facebook IPO. Media focus on whether Facebook’s stock price would have a hot run over a short and meaningless time frame crowded out coverage of what’s happening to the Facebook IPO money: it’s making a lot of people rich, which is different from providing capital for expansion and job creation.  Some of the money will be invested in the business, but a good chunk of it just pays off Zuckerberg and his early investors and employees.

But that’s not where the money stream ends.  For making Zuckerberg and his associates enormously wealthy, those who buy the stock will only have to pay 15% capital gains tax on any money they make when they sell the stock, and if they lose money they get a tax deduction.  Moreover, the people who buy the stock from its first owners contribute nothing to either Facebook or its founders; yet they get the same tax break as the first purchaser of every share of public stock. Why do they get these tax breaks when no real jobs are created, certainly by the second buyers of the stock?

But the media never gets into these issues because it focuses on the triviality of the IPO’s stock price.    

The bogus stock price story not only squeezes out coverage of more interesting aspects of the IPO and Facebook’s financials, it also squeezes out other, more important stories.  Neither NPR nor The Times in the national hard copy edition covered the announcement that text book publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy. (The Times did have an article online on May 21.)  The bankruptcy was never a feature business story for either Yahoo! or Google news the dozen or so times I have checked since the Chapter 11 announcement came out. The reason I found out about it was because I read it in a small paragraph in the round-up column of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

It’s an interesting story because it’s a pre-packaged Chapter 11, meaning that before the filing, the publisher cut a deal with the creditors (the ones to whom the publisher owes money), who will get total ownership of the company in return for agreeing not to get paid for $3.1 billion they are owed.  Creditors go for this kind of refinancing as the only way to get their money back: if it keeps operating, Houghton Mifflin has a chance to make enough money to repay the new owners. If it went out of business, everyone would lose.

The $100 billion IPO of Facebook deserved the extensive coverage it got, but the second day coverage of Facebook’s stock price following an ordinary pattern was less important than a text book behemoth handing itself over to the banks and bondholders to whom it owes billions of dollars.  Zuckerberg’s marriage—that nonsense deserved zero coverage in the business pages.

Save 'The American Prospect'

While checking blogs, I noticed at TheNation.com a post, "Save The American Prospect" by Katrina vanden Heuvel, noting that The American Prospect might be forced to cease publication if it is unable to raise $500,000 by May 31.  As Katrina wrote:

"In this age of consolidation and conglomeratization, when Citizens United has unleashed tens of millions of dollars to excessively influence our politics through brutish and misleading ads, we need the Prospect’s truth-telling independent journalism more than ever. 

"Founded in 1990 by Robert Kuttner, Robert Reich and Paul Starr as a response to the intellectual ascendancy of conservatism in the 1980s, The American Prospect offers up intelligent liberalism, smart reporting and coverage of movements, progressive thought and policy. It also offers incisive reporting on labor and the progressive infrastructure—of which the Prospect has been an anchor."

The Prospect not only publishes a monthly magazine covering politics, culture and policy from a liberal perspective; it also has developed a robust website at prospect.org and blog at prospect.org/blog/vox-pop.  It has good people working for it and that work costs money. 


There are few enough publications on the left to offer a voice to progressive ideas, and we can't afford to lose any of them.  I join Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation in urging you to support our friends at The American Prospect. Here's how to help. — JMC.