Proctor & Gamble’s attempt to rebrand Metamucil will likely get mired in deep you-know-what

By Marc Jampole

In the world of marketing, the second hardest thing to do is to establish a brand. The hardest is to change the brand.

But that’s what Metamucil is trying to do with an integrated marketing campaign that includes placing ads that look like teases for articles on the Yahoo! homepage and airing television commercials starring Michael Strahan, former professional football star and morning talk show host.

In the TV spot, Strahan talks about the Meta effect, which for him means that he doesn’t get hungry between meals. He mouths the campaign’s slogan “See how one small change can lead to good things” and applies it exclusively to the challenge of not getting hungry between meals. The implication, of course, is that Metamucil will help you lose weight. (Is it time for a joke yet?—something like: “Yeah it will help you lose a lot of weight…and quickly!) 

When you hit the link in the Yahoo! “sponsored content” ad, it takes you to a web page with a photo of Strahan next to packages of Metamucil and a large circle within which we can read the entire branding message:  Experience the Meta effect. See how one small change can lead to good things.  

Below this billboard is another one with a headline in a circle “Make a Change with Meta” next to which is text: “Try Meta products and you might be inspired to” followed by a list of other small changes one could make to improve health, such as taking the stairs instead of the elevator or eating only half a muffin.  The billboard asserts that one small healthy choice often leads to another. The implication is that taking Metamucil can be the start of many small changes, which together will transform the individual.

Next come lists of the health benefits that three Metamucil products provide: the standard product, Metamucil bars and a new product, MetaBiotic. The three lists cover a wide range of benefits, including:

• Helps you feel less hungry
• Helps you maintain healthy blood sugar level
• Helps lower cholesterol and promote heart health
• Helps promote digestive health
• Maintains digestive balance
• Helps satisfy hunger as a healthy snack (the bar)

Anyone notice what’s missing?

Nowhere in any ad does Metamucil talk about the one thing that people know about it: It’s a laxative!

This lack of connection between Metamucil and what people already know about it dooms this rebranding campaign. 

Metamucil holds a firmly-established place in culture and our cultural vocabulary. (By cultural vocabulary I mean the cultural artifacts like entertainment, art, commercials and historical moments that virtually everyone in a culture recognizes and uses).  Metamucil will make just about everyone think of constipation, especially as it affects the elderly. If you don’t believe me, try googling “jokes about Metamucil.” I did, and here’s what I found in the first few pages of search results:

• Did you hear about the new Matzos? They’re made from Wheat and Metamucil. They’re called, “Let My People Go.”
• The 77-year-old senator John Glenn said this time in orbit, he's got more food choices—he can mix his Tang with Geritol or Metamucil.
• You know you’re old if your house catches fire and the first thing you grab is your Metamucil.
• Yo mama so old, she eats Metamucil for breakfast.
• A writer reviewing the movie, “The Expendables,” which stars a large number of aging action stars, states: “Judging by the reviews, the latest entry in the Metamucil Squad franchise is only good for laughs of the unintentional variety.”
• The 10 least popular Halloween handouts: # 3: Metamucil in a straw.
• You’re so old you sprinkle Metamucil on your Metamucil

When someone mentions Metamucil, virtually everyone cracks a smile and thinks of constipation, and particularly as that dreaded ailment affects the elderly. 

I understand the Metamucil strategy. By broadening the reasons to take Metamucil, Proctor & Gamble hopes to expand the market base and move more product more quickly (and maybe more easily). The problem is that the existing perception of Metamucil is strongly engrained in our culture.  I’m certain that many people when they see Michael Strahan talking about not getting hungry between meals make such jokes as “that’s because he’s too busy in the bathroom” or just exclaiming,” He’s full of it.” The many clever if scabrous ways that people can mock a nostrum for constipation are just too tempting.

Replacing one brand message with another is never easy. The classic example occurred decades ago when Anacin realized that its little pills had more painkilling ingredients than other over-the-counter remedies for minor aches and pains. It dumped millions in a pilot marketing program to tell one metropolitan area that it had more painkiller. And sales went up in the region—by about 17%. Unfortunately, the public already thought of a competitor’s product as having the most painkilling ingredients. Without spending any additional advertising dollars, the competitor increased sales by more than 30%. Anacin was able to make people care about painkilling strength, but unable to overcome the public’s prior perception of the brands.

And at least painkilling was what everyone always knew Anacin did. For decades, we’ve been told that Metamucil does one thing and one thing only—helps you go #2. We hear it in the commercials and we hear it in all the jokes.  Now we’re supposed to believe that Metamucil does a bunch of other stuff, and that probably isn’t going to happen, no matter how much P&G spends.

The makers of Metamucil may have been better off coming up with a new name for a new line of products that might have the same contents as Metamucil, but would not be tied to the meaning conveyed to most people by the word “Metamucil.” Meanwhile, P&G could have done maintenance advertising for the Metamucil line and tried to squeeze as much profit as it could out of the old brand—quickly and without much effort.

It wasn’t a natural law but human greed & disregard of suffering that led to today’s great inequality of wealth & income

By Marc Jampole

The past few days, OpEdge has been printing excerpts from the article I wrote on Thomas Piketty’ Capitalism in the 21st Century, which appeared in the most recent Jewish Currents. 

This final excerpt from the article discusses my criticism of Piketty’s postulation of r>g as a natural law that over time tends to create ever greater inequality in capitalist economies.

While Capitalism in the 21st Century is a delight to read and has many important insights, it is not without its faults. For one thing, Piketty says that r>g is a natural law, meaning it is not a theoretical construct but a law that describes an inevitable economic process.

There are two problems with this assertion. For one thing, Piketty’s history begins only in 1800; the obvious question is whether his rule applies before the Industrial Revolution. Is it possible that social breakdowns such as the French Revolution, the fall of the Tang and Song dynasties, and the decline of the Roman Empire came about because the rich had finally taken too much from the economy, i.e.,  r>g produced such a great disparity of wealth that the economy fell apart or people rebelled? Did catastrophic events such as the Black Plague or the Little Ice Age of the 17th century create instant resets that ameliorated wealth inequality? Barbara Tuchman reports in A Distant Mirror that after the Black Plague, the price of labor in Europe soared to a record high (still not surpassed in world history) because of a shortage of workers. All of this predates Piketty’s history and goes undiscussed.

A more significant flaw in Piketty’s postulation of a natural law is that it attributes growing inequality to blind forces inherent in capitalism and market economies. But the increase in inequality between 1970 and the present day ensued as a direct result of specific actions by groups of human beings. These actions included: shifting the tax burden away from the wealthy and placing it on the poor and middle class; union-busting policies by governments; allowing the minimum wage to lag behind inflation; privatization of government services and wealth throughout most of the world; lowering taxes while cutting government spending on education, retirement and social-welfare programs; and funding wars not through taxation, but through debt held primarily by the wealthy.

Real people — most of them in the pay of the wealthy and corporations — enacted these policies. They were not the result of some natural force, except the natural tendency of humans to think only of their own short-term interests and not in the long-term interests of the community.

Most quibbles about Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century are criticisms of Piketty’s unrealistic solution for reversing the trend to ever-greater inequality of wealth and income throughout the world. He proposes a worldwide annual tax on extreme wealth by all governments, plus a very steep, progressive worldwide income tax on top of current income taxes. Based on his analysis of past income tax rates, Piketty proposes that we could implement a marginal rate of 70 percent on income above $500,000 or a $1 million. The government would transfer this wealth back to the poor and middle class with government programs. Piketty says that unless all nations of the world agree to these taxes, the wealthy will transfer their income and wealth to those that don’t agree to the plan. It is, however, pie-in-the-sky thinking to imagine that all the countries in the world will get together and suddenly decide to play Robin Hood.

It might be more realistic to take the same kind of gradualist approach that the wealthy have taken since the mid-1970s to take a greater share of the wealth-and-income pie. The 90 percent could grab back a little at a time by gradually changing policies in the industrialized world. For example, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich proposed ten incremental changes we can make in the United States in a recent article by Robert Reich in The Nation (“10 Practical Steps to Reverse Growing Inequality”), including raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, unionizing low-wage workers, making the tax on Social Security and Medicare progressive, raising the estate tax, and eliminating big money from politics.

I also believe Piketty is wrong to view the diminishment of economic inequality as a primary goal of society, as wrong as those who propose freedom from government regulation as a goal. To my mind, we would be far better off if we instead based the constraints we put on the “free market” on the idea that all human beings deserve a minimum standard of living, which includes free health care and education, a living wage, a safe work place, an unpolluted environment, and a comfortable retirement.

Certainly, ensuring that we all enjoy these economic basics will require us to raise taxes on the wealthy. Where else will we get the funds to do it? But to hold shrinking inequality as a goal in and of itself doesn’t directly address the myriad problems we face. Martin Feldstein is right in his criticism of Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century when he says that the problem is not inequality but the persistence of poverty. Of course, as a defender of the interests of the ultra-wealthy, the solutions that Feldstein proposes will only lead to greater wealth and income inequality.

As I write in the article, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century is a formative and groundbreaking work that will be studied and cited by economists and will direct the political discourse in democratic countries for decades to come.  I highly recommend to all readers.

Comments of most right-wing critics of Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century suggest they haven’t read the whole book

By Marc Jampole

Here is another excerpt from my on essay on Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century. You can read the full article in the latest issue of Jewish Currents: 

A few years back, when government debt trumped all other macroeconomic concerns in the news media, a fairly shoddy economic study called This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, by economists Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, caught the attention of the news media because it concluded that countries with public debt greater than 90 percent of gross domestic product suffered measurably slower economic growth. Politicians and journalists throughout the world used this “new discovery” to bolster assertions that governments everywhere had to reduce debt instead of pumping money into the economy to create jobs. The problem was that Reinhart and Rogoff miscalculated in a number of places and even made counting errors. With their bad math corrected, no real correlation was found between levels of debt and economic growth.

The Occupy movement next grabbed the attention of the media, which began to devote significant time and space to the growing inequality of wealth and income in the United States and worldwide. That set the stage for Thomas Piketty’s left-leaning Capital in the Twenty-First Century to become the “hot book” of our day, a cause célèbre or bête noir, depending on the political views of whoever is commenting.

Summing up years of research by Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, and his frequent collaborator, UC-Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez, Capital in the Twenty-First Century presents a detailed history of how wealth and income have shifted in the developed world since 1800, and documents the dramatic increase in inequality of wealth and income over the past thirty-five years. Most significantly for the book’s notoriety, Piketty proposes a grand theory of inequality that proposes that in all but high-growth economies, wealth inequality will naturally increase because the return on capital tends always to exceed the rate of economic growth.

For a technical work jam-packed with economic theory, Capital in the Twenty-First Century has sold a tremendous number of copies. Left-leaning pundits and economists have supported Piketty’s research and findings while often disagreeing with his proposal on how to decrease wealth inequality throughout the world. The right and mainstream have had fits trying to disprove Piketty’s findings.

Most of their criticism crumbles under routine inspection. Daniel Shuchman and critics in The Economist, for example, have stated that Piketty’s analysis ignores ways in which wealth and income trickle down, such as through non-profit funding of community activities. These writers merely demonstrate that they haven’t read the book cover to cover, since Piketty addresses these issues extensively.

Tyler Cowan in Foreign Affairs and Martin Feldstein in the Wall Street Journal atomize wealth in a feeble attempt to prove that it doesn’t tend to concentrate. Each of these authors looks at wealthy individuals, pointing out that old fortunes like the Rockefellers’ and Astors’ get diluted over time. If they had instead looked at the wealthy as a class, they would see that Piketty is right to conclude that inequality has increased, even if the monogrammed initials on the cufflinks and bracelets have changed.

Feldstein and the Financial Times claim to have found errors in the data, but Piketty has refuted every one of their objections, in most cases by pointing out that the writer had not read the footnotes or charts that accounted for what they were calling mistakes. Unlike the dubious premise about debt and economic growth put forth by Reinhart and Rogoff, Piketty’s overall theory stands up to scrutiny.

When both supporters and detractors of Capital in the Twenty-First Century compare it to Karl Marx’ Capital, they demonstrate a lack of familiarity with Marx’ 1867 tome. Piketty neither recreates nor transforms Marx, who made a detailed, step-by-step analysis of capital, its origin, its uses, and its relationship to labor. Piketty devotes 577 pages (in a very easy-to-read translation by Arthur Goldhammer) to one sole aspect of capital: its tendency to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands.

Marx postulated that labor creates all surplus value from the exchange of money for a commodity. By contrast, Piketty accepts at the very beginning that both capital and labor contribute to the production and delivery of goods and services and focuses exclusively on the distribution of wealth and income. Marx slowly and carefully constructed an overarching economic theory, whereas Piketty tells a history.

Piketty has written one of the most important books of economics since World War II, but is’ not without its flaws. In tomorrow’s OpEdge, I’ll discuss them.

OpEdge gives extensive analysis of Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century in latest Jewish Currents

By Marc Jampole

Those few (and perhaps imaginary) souls who have been wondering why OpEdge has been relatively quiet about Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century can fret no more. I’ve been holding fire waiting for the publication of my extensive essay in Jewish Currents which analyzes and critiques Piketty, discusses its relationship to Marx’s Capital and dispenses with the book’s right-wing critics.  That’s the downside of writing for a quarterly publication: you find that you can’t respond to the hot topic immediately. On the other hand, I have the benefit of being able to put the uproar surrounding the initial appearance of Capital in the 21st Century into some perspective. 

I’m going to excerpt the article over the next three OpEdge columns, but I urge readers to delve into the full essay at Jewish Currents. In fact, even non-Jewish readers will find a number of fascinating articles in the latest issue. 

Let’s start with review of what Piketty wrote:

The grand outline of Piketty’s narrative is simple: At the beginning of the 19th century, there was a great inequality of wealth in Europe, but not in the U.S. American wealth began to concentrate during the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, when on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean manufacturing assets and financial instruments began to complement and then replace land as the primary types of capital. Unlike Marx, Piketty considers land a type of capital.

Piketty depicts the two World Wars as a kind of suicide of capital that led to the social welfare programs in Europe and the U.S. The height of wealth equality in both came during the high-growth decades after World War II, which the last thirty years of low growth have reversed, until inequality of wealth in the U.S. has now reached historic proportions.

The growth of a middle class that owns property, “the patrimonial middle class,” was the principal structural transformation in the distribution of wealth in developed countries in the 20th century, says Piketty. In 1900-1910, the middle class was almost as poor as the poor, while the top 10 percent owned 90 percent of all wealth (and the top 1 percent owned 50 percent of all wealth). Today, the middle class, which Piketty defines as the middle 40 percent of income and wealth, does much better than the poor, which he defines as the bottom 50 percent.

Piketty seeks to understand this history by reducing it to an equation, r>g, where r is the rate of return on capital and g is the growth rate of economic output. The premise of the equation — and of Piketty’s entire system — is that the rate of return on capital is virtually always greater than the growth in economic output. Over time, owners of capital tend to take more of the pie, leaving less for everyone else.

During high-growth eras, r>g does not matter, since a rising tide tends to lift all boats. But as he demonstrates, most of recorded history has seen very low rates of economic growth. It was almost nonexistent before the 1700s, if we take account of population growth, and was a meager 1 percent from about 1800 to the end of World War II.

Comparison of the upper decile (top 10 percent) and upper centile (top 1 percent) to everyone else reveals many insights about wealth inequality. For example, Piketty finds that one of the main reasons wealth inequality shrank so much in Europe between 1914-1945 was because the top centile continued to live a lifestyle requiring eighty to one hundred times the average income, even though the war, inflation and higher taxes were eating into their income and capital. The result: their heirs inherited smaller fortunes. The concentration of wealth in Europe never recovered from the shocks of 1914-1945, in which the upper decile’s share of wealth fell from 90 percent to 60-70 percent; it’s now 65 percent.

In the U.S., inequality of wealth was small in 1800, increased dramatically during the 19th century, saw a less steep decline in 1914-’45, and has soared since then to 70 percent for the top decile and 35 percent for the top centile.

Piketty finds two worldwide trends driving the slide towards greater wealth inequality since 1970:

1. Privatization of government wealth, which accounted for 10-25 percent of the increase in private worth in the eight leading Western economies and created oligarchs in all of the countries once part of the Eastern Bloc.
2. The preference of Western countries to borrow from and pay interest to the wealthy rather than funding government programs and war expenditures by raising taxes.

Some have argued that our meritocracy explains much of the growing inequality of income over the past forty-odd years, as those who add more value to the community and economy make significantly more money. While a believer in meritocracy, Piketty nonetheless concludes that “marginal productivity” (by which he means workers who are more highly skilled) explains only some of the growing wage inequality, not most of it. He proposes that “social norms” determine how much people make at various occupations and shape income inequality, and he does not buy into the myth promoted by both liberals and conservatives that the best way to increase workers’ share of wealth is to make them more productive through education. Most wage inequality, he says, results from decisions made by those who control the distribution of wealth and income, and since the Reagan presidency they have tended to give themselves more and their employees less. Piketty traces a transfer since 1970 of 15 percent of national income from the poorest 90 percent to the top decile, with the richest centile getting 60 percent of all income gain between 1977 and 2007 — resulting in a distribution of income in the U.S. today as unequal as at any time in recorded history

He calls the U.S. a “hypermeritocratic society,” but also expresses doubt that the society is truly a meritocracy. Like many progressives, he wonders whether the highest earners — mostly corporate heads, but also investment bankers, hedge fund managers, and elite athletes and entertainers — deserve such a large portion of the booty.  As he points out, executive pay did not skyrocket until marginal tax rates came down; the increase had nothing to do with the productivity of the executives.

Piketty further believes that the increase in inequality created the 2008 financial crisis: One consequence of greater inequality of income was a decrease in purchasing power in the middle and lower classes, he observes, which made it more likely that these households would take on debt. Unscrupulous banks took advantage by writing loans that fueled an unsustainable housing debt bubble.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century predicts a grim future if nothing is done to counteract growing inequality. Piketty conceives of a world in a not-too-distant time in which every country is run by an oligarchy of billionaires.

Throughout his book, Piketty entertains and educates us with gee-whiz facts and observations that explode many of the common myths we hear in the mainstream news media about the superiority of the unregulated free market, U.S. exceptionalism, and the nature of economic growth. Here are some of the many pearls of wisdom that Piketty shares:

• Wealth inequality within single generations is much greater than inequality between generations, although older people tend to have more money. In other words, intergenerational warfare has not replaced class warfare, as some pundits have proclaimed.
• The share of income of the highest centile is the same in developing countries as in rich countries. The highest share of income given to the top 1 percent is, of course, in the United States. So much for our bashing of oligarchs in other countries.
• In all known societies of all eras, the least wealthy half of the society has always owned virtually nothing.
• Before the French Revolution, the Catholic Church owned 7-8 percent of wealth of France, compared to the 6-7 percent of American wealth owned by nonprofit organizations today.

In tomorrow’s OpEdge column, we’ll take a look at the criticism aimed at Capitalism in the 21st Century by right-wing economists. 

Editorial: Rediscover Roosevelts

Ken Burns produced another excellent documentary series for PBS with his seven-part biography of the Roosevelt family which helped mold the government of the modern United States in the first half of the 20th century.

The series, "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History", was not without its flaws — the series focused more on the personal lives of Teddy, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (as the title implies), rather than the political environment they were operating in. I would have liked to see more on Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting efforts — and perhaps a nod to the Populist movement’s promotion of that issue in the 1890s — and organized labor’s role in helping to elect Franklin D. Roosevelt and support his New Deal, particularly passage of the National Labor Relations Act, which helped labor finally organize industries and provide the foundation for the middle class. The series also gave short shrift to the Four Freedoms (freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want and fear) that FDR articulated in his 1941 as the foundation of our democracy, and the Economic Bill of Rights that FDR proposed in his 1944.

“These were social-democratic initiatives that, as polls showed, an overwhelming majority of Americans wanted to carry out at war’s end, but that were determinedly blocked by conservatives, southern reactionaries, and corporate bosses,” Harvey J. Kaye, professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, wrote at TheDailyBeast.com (9/14).

“After nearly 40 years of concerted class war from above against the memory and legacy of the progressive Age of Roosevelt, we sorely need a history that would serve to remind us how, from the ’30s through the ’60s, Americans carried out an historic revolution that created the first-ever Middle Class nation and help us remember that we might do the same,” Kaye said.

We didn’t quite get that from the Burns series but, to be fair, he packed a lot into 14 hours, as he brought the Roosevelts back to life and shined a light on Eleanor’s role in advancing progressive initiatives at the White House — and also noted their faults, such as Teddy’s imperialism and both presidents’ failure to confront racism.

However, it was good to be reminded that a president not only could get elected, but could get re-elected while taking on the “economic royalists” and calling for things such as a right of workers to organize, small businesses to trade in a market free from unfair competition and domination by monopolies; the right to employment at a living wage that would provide food, clothing and recreation for families; the right to affordable housing, medical care, social security and a good education; and farmers’ rights to a fair income.

President Obama is no Roosevelt, though he led the nation through the most severe economic recession since the Great Depression. We give him more credit than many on the Left allow for getting the Affordable Care Act passed, even with its shortcomings. But Obama has been more inclined to seek compromise than to lead.

Lately, President Obama has disappointed immigration-reform advocates with his decision to delay executive action to provide relief for undocumented immigrants, at least until after the midterm election. But since Republican House Speaker John Boehner has refused to let the House act on the bipartisan immigration reform bill that was passed by the Senate, executive orders may be the only way we’ll see reform as long as the House leadership is intimidated by right-wing Teabaggers.

We recently listened to Ray Marshall, former secretary of labor under Jimmy Carter, talk about immigration. Marshall has been working on labor and immigration policy for more than 50 years, including his tenure on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, teaching economics and public affairs. Immigration reform protects all workers, he noted, since employers can and do take advantage of undocumented workers to keep wages low. Real wages for American workers, adjusted for inflation, are lower now than they were in 1970. “You can’t sustain a democracy with declining real wages very long,” he said.

“We need immigrants, but we need value-added immigration,” he said. “If immigrant workers complement your workers, it’s good. If they compete with native workers, they depress wages and displace them.”

He added, “You need the immigrants’ help to enforce the law.” That means that the Department of Labor should enforce the wage and hour law, and undocumented immigrants who complain to the Department of Labor should have protected status while their complaints are processed.

A majority of people support immigration reform, and that includes a majority of Republicans, he said, but the bill is hung up mainly over what happens to the 11.5 million undocumented aliens. A poll conducted for the Brookings Institute in June found 62% of all respondents believe we should legalize undocumented aliens and only 19% said we should deport them. Among the Tea Party, 37% said we should legalize them while 37% would identify and deport all immigrants who are in the US illegally. But 53% of all voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who opposes immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship.

Boehner knows if he brings it to the floor it will pass, and the President will sign it. But he won’t do it because the Tea Party would rebel.

“President Obama tried deporting 400,000 people but you never can satisfy them (Republicans),” Marshall said. “They say ‘There’s still 11.5 million’.”

Marshall recommended that the President do everything he can by executive order. “The President could order ICE to go after criminals instead of otherwise law-abiding immigrants,” he said.

He also noted that high-tech companies have suppressed wages by importing workers with H1B visas. “There’s no evidence of a genuine shortage of college-educated workers in the United States, nor is there a shortage of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math graduates, but the President has been hoodwinked by employers in high-tech industry into believing there is a shortage. But there is a high demand for indentured workers who are willing to work for lower wages,” since H1B visa workers can’t quit their job or they’ll be deported. “They prefer foreign workers for the job because they can’t complain.”

He proposes a foreign workers adjustment commission, with somebody in charge of immigration policy, preferably in the Department of Labor, since Homeland Security, which includes ICE, is mainly interested in enforcing laws.

He added, “We can make labor rights part of international trade agreements, but the World Trade Organization [which enforces the agreements] is run by people who want low wage standards.”

Chinese leaders understand better than Americans do the need for industrial strategy. In a meeting with them, he said, “They told me ‘We’re not after your low-wage jobs. We’re after your high-tech jobs.’” And they got a bunch of them.

The Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, passed in 1978, nominally requires the government and the Federal Reserve to pursue full employment, but many government economists never believed in full employment, and then-Fed Chairman Paul Volcker believed in massive unemployment, Marshall said.

The New Deal tested the power of full employment, and it saved the nation from the Great Depression and helped the Allies win World War II, the Navy vet noted. Two of the three US destroyers at the Battle of Midway were built by the WPA.

Full employment empowers workers, because it gives them bargaining power — which is why business leaders don’t like it.

Marshall also ridiculed the conservatives who push for more austerity in government spending, which he compared to a physician treating a sickness by bleeding the patient. “We tried Milton Friedman’s way and we got the Great Recession. If we hadn’t interceded it would have been another Great Depression.”

In conclusion, we hope President Obama discovers his inner Roosevelt — whichever Roosevelt is appropriate for the task. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2014

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Selections from the October 15, 2014 issue

COVER/Heather Digby Parton
Religious right’s warped icon: Mike Huckabee

EDITORIAL
Rediscover the Roosevelts

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

BILL CULLEN
Sen. Sanders checks political current in Iowa

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Making a difference where you can

DISPATCHES
Corporate ‘news’ largely ignores climate march;
Carbon tax gains backing;
GOP Senate could cripple Obama;
Obama fights tax 'inversions' with rules;
Obamacare critics lose another talking point;
No help for uninsured in 23 Republican states;
Republican women support pay inequity;
Sen. McCain voters to preserve 'worst decision ever';
Congress doesn't feel student debt pain;
Benghazi PAC seeks to mine attacks for political gains;
Secret GOP records reveal corporate donors;
Quarter of Americans open to secession


JOHN YOUNG
Yes, ACA has a tax — and hooray for that


BILL JOHNSTON
Dems should try organization

DON ROLLINS
The justice system fails (and could help) elders

WENONAH HAUTER
To save the climate, we need a ban on fracking

HEATHER SEGGEL
Housing trouble: Supply, demand, wage gap

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
The opioid challenge


SAM URETSKY
Taking care of big government


BOB BURNETT
What do Republicans want?

WAYNE O’LEARY
In search of a 21st century foreign policy

JOHN BUELL
Economic recovery should help workers

RANDOLPH T. HOLHUT
Saying no to war: Is it possible anymore?

PETER MATHEWS
How to reclaim the American Dream

SETH SANDRONSKY
Empowering parents?


ROB PATTERSON
The rise and fall of online civilization

POPULIST PICKS
New Year’s Eve; Lenin The Novel; Choice of Evil

JASON STANFORD
Time for GOP to deal with Gohmert


and more ...

Holder may have done some good things, but he also betrayed his country by not prosecuting torturers

By Marc Jampole

It’s fun to see the differences between the mainstream media’s coverage of Eric Holder’s resignation as U.S. Attorney General and that of the right-wing media. The mainstream is praising Holder, in particular for his department’s actions to protect voting rights, decision not to defend the federal law against same-sex marriage, supporting sentencing reform and going after corporate criminals. The right-wing media is glad to see him go, mostly for the same reasons.  I write “fun” and not “illuminating,” because we learn nothing new from how the various media are analyzing Holder’s impact. Most people could have predicted that the New York Times would basically like Holder, while the Wall Street Journal would hate him.

But in the battle to define Holder’s legacy, virtually all the news media are leaving out the disgraceful decision that Holder and his boss, President Barack Obama, made early in their first term: not to pursue criminal cases against the traitors who betrayed American ideals and broke U.S. laws by creating a global gulag of torture chambers. Obama, Holder and their coterie of advisors declared that the past was the past and that it was better for the country to move on.  True, the torture stopped (as far as we know), but those like Dick Cheney, John Yoo, Jay Bybee and David Addington were let off the hook with not even a slap on the wrist. 

Remember what these men ordered others to do: Pushed prisoners’ heads underwater until they were about to drown, pulled them up under and then plunged the heads into water again, multiple times. Made prisoners stand with their hands tied in an uncomfortable position for days on end.  Stripped and blindfolded prisoners. Set vicious dogs on them. Pushed lit cigarettes into their ears. Made them roll over excrement. Humiliated them by making them masturbate then taking photos of it.

Some of these prisoners were hard-boiled terrorists, but others were merely fellow travelers or completely innocent.  None of them received the due process that should be the right of anyone who goes through the U.S. judicial system, citizen or not. Of course, they never had the opportunity to go through the system, but instead were illegally dumped into torture chambers.

What did the torturers and everyone else learn from Holder and Obama’s refusal to prosecute the creators and implementers of the torture policy: That it’s okay to break whatever law and moral code that you like in the United States—as long as you are in power.

Whatever Holder’s legacy, refusing to prosecute the torturers is a blood-red stain on it that can never be expunged. Like Gerald Ford pardoning his former boss, Richard Nixon, it attempts to put a lid on a stinking cesspool which instead should have been drained and cleaned.   

Success of People’s Climate Change March depends on how media covers it

By Marc Jampole 

Like many of my friends, I’m excited about marching in the People’s Climate Change March this Sunday in New York City. Organizers are hoping it will be the largest demonstration in history in support of solutions to climate change. The march on Manhattan’s Upper West Side coincides with the start of the United Nations 2014 Climate Summit two days later. 

By the grace of good luck, the Peoples Climate Change March and the U.N. summit come on the heels of a new study that demonstrates what anyone with common sense should have always known: that weaning the world’s economy off carbon-based fuels will not wreck the economy. For years, intellectual factotums of the oil and electrical generation industries have insisted that replacing carbon-based fuels with solar and wind power would hurt the economy.  Their arguments didn’t take into account that designing, making and servicing solar and wind equipment created jobs or that using less oil, coal and natural gas saved money that companies and individuals could spend, creating jobs elsewhere in the economy.

I haven’t marched in a demonstration since 2008, so I’m psyched! I’m hoping that the turnout runs into the hundreds of thousands.

But be it the largest climate change demonstration or a bust, the success of the march will depend less on how many and who walks and more on the attitude of the news media. The news media will define how many people showed up, and their numbers often stray from reality. The news media will determine whether the march is forgotten three years later or goes down in history.

I first learned this lesson during the Viet Nam War era—my youth—when the news media underestimated the attendance at every antiwar demonstration in the early years of protest—before the media followed the country and started to oppose the war.

The 2010 election exemplifies how the new media can make or break a march. There were three marches and demonstrations on Independence Mall in Washington DC during the election season:

• March of Tea Party organized by and featuring Glen Beck
• March of progressives organized by unions
• March organized by Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and the Comedy Central which was also a demonstration for progressive causes.

Despite the fact that the most reputable estimator, the one used by CBS—AirPhotosLive—estimated all three demonstrations to have attracted 75,000-100,000, the two progressive demonstrations are lost to history already, while the Tea Party affair is mentioned in virtually all contemporary recounting of the 2010 election.

The mainstream media virtually ignored the union demonstration in the weeks before it occurred, whereas it orchestrated a build-up for the Tea Party demonstration more suited to the first inauguration of a president who won in a landslide.

An apt analogy, since some right-wing liars claimed that as many people attended the rally as made the scene at Barack Obama’s first inauguration—just less than 2.0 million, a number that injected new meaning into the expression, the big lie.

Aided and abetted by the right-wing media, mainstream newspapers tended to float a number of figures for the Tea Party demonstration—the favorite being 400,000. But never did a mainstream print publication claim any number above 100,000 without attributing to someone suspect—nor did most right-wing media for that matter. It was a mass example of the Matt Drudge effect, which occurs when instead of reporting something scurrilous and unprovable, a mainstream reporters says that someone with a poor record of reliability said it, someone like Matt Drudge or the late Andrew Breitbart.

It was the mainstream news media that overhyped the Tea Party’s 2010 Washington DC demonstration, the mainstream news media that irresponsibly misreported the numbers, the mainstream news media that ignored the demonstration of progressives organized by the unions and the mainstream’s leading pundits who have made the Tea Party march a major political milestone in 21st century politics.

As much as I wish for a large turnout at the Peoples Climate Change March on Sunday, I wish harder that recent studies, extreme weather and polar melting have convinced the ownership of the mainstream media to like the march and embrace the cause by reporting accurately. 

Photograph shows what American political spectrum would look like without right wing—and what it was 50 years ago

By Marc Jampole 

The 16th century Venetian painter Paolo Veronese might have painted a photograph in the New York Times, so rich it is in symbolic content. Veronese crowded his paintings with myths, symbolic objects, references to literature and visual connections to contemporary politics. Whether intentional or not, the Times photo on page A 20, by Michael Appleton, does the same.

The photo accompanies a story of a news conference about what the New York City area is doing now to coordinate responses to potential terrorist threats. The photo shows the four principle speakers in this order, right to left, as viewers see it:

• Republican Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie at the far right of the frame
• Jeh Johnson, homeland security secretary, at the podium doing the talking. Johnson is a political appointment, so he profoundly represents the views of President Obama
• Democratic Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo
• Democratic Mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio, with Elizabeth Warren one of the two most prominent progressive Democrats nationwide.

Christie, Johnson and Cuomo are bunched around the podium, with Christie a little closer to Johnson than Cuomo. De Blasio is way to the left (as the viewer sees it), the gap between him and Cuomo roughly twice what the combined gaps are between the other three.

In short, we see pretty much the spectrum of political opinion in America today, if we lop off the right-wing. Christie, Obama and Cuomo are centrists with not much difference between them, although Christie is to the right of the two Democrats on social issues. De Blasio, by contrast, is far to the left of the centrists.

There are a few symbolic subtleties in the photo. As he speaks, the Obama administration official Johnson stands as a centrist but is looking left, just as Obama acts as a centrist even if he sometimes talks like a progressive.  In a  similar manner, de Blasio is looking right, but with an uncomfortable expression on his face, perhaps expressing the lack of comfort he feels supporting centrist Democrats like Cuomo in the elections. Or perhaps he understands that in responding to the threat of terrorism, we’ve gone overboard on militarizing society and spying on the private lives of individuals.

To my mind the most powerful symbolic association comes from de Blasio’s position in front of an American flag. The good mayor covers a little of it, but a swatch with pieces of five stripes and 17 states is visible and seems almost to be waving. As a progressive I read into this image a statement—probably inadvertently made by the photographer—that de Blasio’s path is the best one for the United States. De Blasio stands for raising taxes on the wealthy; providing greater support to public education; policies that help unions and raise middle class incomes, like ending support of charter schools; government intervention to make housing more affordable; humanistic policing; protection of women’s reproductive rights; increased mass transit; equal rights for all minorities; gay marriage; and diversity in government.

Funny, the photo would have described the full political spectrum presented in the news media in the 1950s, 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s before Ronald Regan started mainstreaming wacko right-wing ideas.  I imagine it would be impossible to place most of the Republican and the Tea Party in the photo today unless it was about three times as long as it currently is.   

Editorial: Don’t Bite Terrorist Bait

One of the favorite words Republicans use to describe President Obama’s foreign policy is “feckless,” as if his refusal to rush US military forces into foreign conflicts to satisfy foreign-policy hawks makes him a weak leader.

We’re glad President Obama has taken the time to develop a strategy and build a broad coalition of potential allies — including Iran — who will help the US pursue the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also known as ISIL and the Islamic State) as the murderous gang that they are.

It’s depressing that a recent poll conducted for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal showed only 32% approval for President Obama’s foreign policy. Some 47% of Americans believe the US is less safe than it was before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And poll respondents favored Republican over Democrats as the party best able to handle foreign policy, by a 41-23 margin.

If the polls are to be believed, terrorism works. Joan Walsh noted that the single biggest factor behind the surge of fear is the videotaped beheadings of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. “In the NBC poll, 94% said they’d heard news of the beheadings, which is higher than any other news event polled in the last five years. They accomplished what they were intended to: make Americans feel vulnerable, angry and ready to fight. Mission accomplished, ISIS!”

But ISIS couldn’t succeed in drawing the US into another land war in Iraq without “useful fools” such as former Vice President Dick Cheney who, in a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill on Sept. 9, urged House Republicans to take a hard line in the fight against ISIS. The meeting was basically a GOP pep rally, and Cheney spent most of the time bashing “isolationists” and talking about how the Bush administration put the US in a position to “win” in Iraq.

In fact, there would be no opening for a militant Islamic extremist group to control large sections of Iraq and Syria and conduct ethnic cleansing of Shi’ite Muslims, Christians and other minorities if the Bush-Cheney administration had not invaded and dismantled the secular Ba’athist regime of Saddam Husseinbased on the trumped-up threat of weapons of mass destruction.

As the New York Times noted, “[Cheney] did not discuss the fact that many ISIS leaders were former Iraqi military officers who were imprisoned by American troops, nor did he dwell on the sectarian divisions and bloodletting since the 2003 American invasion.”

When President Obama was slow to arm the Syrian rebels as urged by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) last year, McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) encouraged the Saudi and Qatari governments to get the job done — and arms did move to Syrian rebel groups. “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar,” McCain told CNN’s Candy Crowley in January 2014. A month later, McCain said once again, at the Munich Security Conference, “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar, and for our Qatari friends.”

But the arms apparently didn’t just go to the Free Syrian Army, the “moderate” armed opposition in the country that is backed by the US, Turkey and Western allies. Shortly after McCain’s Munich comments, Steve Clemons noted at TheAtlantic.com (June 23), Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah relieved Bandar of his Syrian covert-action portfolio, which was transferred to Saudi Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. By mid-April, just two weeks after President Obama met with King Abdullah on March 28, Bandar also was removed from his position as head of Saudi intelligence.

It turned out that two of the factions fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad who received arms from Qatar and Saudi Arabia are Islamic extremist groups, Jabhat al-Nusra, which is affiliated with al Qaeda, and the ISIS which was expelled as too extreme for al Qaeda. Qatar’s military and economic largesse had made its way to Jabhat al-Nusra, Clemons was told. But ISIS was another matter. As one senior Qatari official told him, “ISIS has been a Saudi project.”

Clemons concluded, “John McCain’s desire to help rebel forces toss off a brutal dictator and fight for a more just and inclusive Syria is admirable. But as has been proven repeatedly in the Middle East, ousting strongmen doesn’t necessarily produce more favorable successor governments. Embracing figures like Bandar, who may have tried to achieve his objectives in Syria by building a monster, isn’t worth it.”

Thom Hartmann wrote, “This is history repeating itself in the worst possible way. Back in the 1980s, the CIA, the Saudis, and the Pakistanis worked together to fund the mujahideen in Afghanistan. The mujahideen were radical Islamists, but we thought it was worth it to support them because it was the Cold War and they were fighting the Soviets, who had invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

“Here in the US, the guy most responsible for getting us to support the mujahideen was a playboy Texas Congressman named Charlie Wilson, who, like John McCain, thought he was just trying to help people fight for ‘democracy.’ ...

“Whatever good intentions Charlie Wilson may have had, his plan backfired and it backfired badly. Our support for the mujahideen against the Soviets — just like our support for the Khmer Rouge against the Viet Cong and our support for the Contras against the Sandinistas — had a huge blowback effect. You see, one of the people who we and the Saudis armed back in the 1980s was a rich Saudi named Osama bin Laden, who, like a lot of Muslim radicals from all over the world, saw the fight against the Soviets as a chance to prove his worth as a holy warrior.

Hartmann concluded, “Bin Laden went on to form a group known as ‘The Base’ out of the remnants of his Saudi-backed mujahideen force. You probably know ‘The Base’ by its Arabic name: Al-Qaeda. The rest, as they say, is history.”

President Obama is taking a wiser course in providing airstrikes against ISIS forces; assistance to reliable moderate allies where they can be identified, such as the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Free Syrian Army and the reconstituted Iraqi army; counterterrorism intelligence and activities to prevent ISIS attacks; and humanitarian aid.

Obama vowed to wage “a steady, relentless effort” to wipe out ISIS. “Our objective is clear: we will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy,” he said. “I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are,” he said. “That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.”

He was clear that the United States would not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq, but at least 475 more military advisers will be sent in, pushing the total to about 1,700.

After the speech, John McCain blamed ISIS on Obama for withdrawing American troops from Iraq and his refusal to intervene in Syria. He said additional US special forces and advisers will be needed to direct precision air strikes, advise foreign partners on the ground and possibly conduct targeted operations against ISIS leadership.”

House Speaker John Boehner said “the president appears to view the effort against ISIL as an isolated counterterrorism campaign, rather than as what it must be: an all-out effort to destroy an enemy that has declared a holy war against America and the principles for which we stand.”

Our conclusion: Obama has plenty of feck. He has enough sense to deny ISIS the reinvasion of Iraq by American troops that the jihadis want. And he has an air force to supply cover for any native army that proves to be worth covering. And once again, thank goodness John McCain isn’t making the call. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2014

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Selections from the October 1, 2014 issue

COVER/Thomas Frank
The 1 Percent’s long con

EDITORIAL
Don’t bite terrorist bait

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Shame on Ralph Lauren, US Open

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Know details when working the polls

DISPATCHES 
Living wage works for SeaTac;
GOP nightmare: Obamacare is working;
Va. Gov. McAuliffe gets limited Medicaid expansion;
Obama beats Reagan on economic recovery but can’t get word out;
Dems can win on fighting for Social Security;
Ga. GOP'er complains about early black voters;
Senate Republicans block constitutional fix to 'Citizens United';
The race is on;
McCarthy breaks promise on closing Ex-Im bank;
House passes bill to halt EPA water rule;
Former coal mine foreman: 'Fired because I wouldn't contribute to GOP' ...

J. RENAUD and J. WESTBERG
Solid data emerges on people killed by officers

DON ROLLINS
Poverty of mind affects graduation rate

WENONAH HAUTER
Protect public lands from becoming private profit

MARK ANDERSON
Send money to Main Street, not Wall Street

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Battling Obamacare

SAM URETSKY
Tax cuts result in revenue shortfalls

WAYNE O’LEARY
Yes, Toto, we are in Kansas

JOHN BUELL
Public campaign finance reform: What’s at stake

JOHN YOUNG
‘Overkill’: Inexcusable term for policing

SETH SANDRONSKY
A world to win

ROB PATTERSON
Entertainment and responsibility

POPULIST PICKS
The Alamo; Labyrinth; Billy Connolly’s Rte 66

JASON STANFORD
Rick Perry loves the troops, hates feeding them

and more ...

Obama has other ways to address the ISIS threat than going to war

By Marc Jampole 

President Obama has decided that there is only one way to respond to ISIS, a pan-Islamic military organization that now controls parts of Iraq and Syria, and that’s the way the United States usually responds to foreign events that displease us: go to war.

Early reactions suggest that Congress and the American people are going to fall behind the president in lockstep, just like they did—at least at first--for both Iraqi wars, our  invasion of Grenada and the Viet Nam war.

So once again, we’re diving head first into a violent quagmire that will end up costing some U.S. lives, a lot of money and many lives of the people we claim to be helping.

The United States should have tried economic sanctions first.

The creation of a truly global economy and financial system over the past 30 years may have disappointed the economic hopes of all Americans but the very wealthiest, but it has made it much easier to fight aggressive behavior by states and other governing entities without picking up a weapon. What is happening in the Ukraine is a good example of the power of economic sanctions: Instead of continuing to grab pieces of the Ukraine, Russia has negotiated a treaty that seems to have ended the fighting and set the stage for a peaceful resolution of a situation far more complicated than what is depicted in the mainstream American media. Economic sanctions also brought Iran to the negotiating table to discuss its development of a nuclear capability, a step towards peace frowned upon only by Islam-haters among the right-wing.

The immediate response to my argument to apply economic sanctions is that ISIS is not a real state, but a terrorist organization that is trying to redraw the map in the Middle East; a map, BTW, that was gerrymandered after World War I by western powers.

But ISIS is as much a part of the new world economic order as Russia, Iran and China. We keep hearing in the mainstream news that the biggest advantage ISIS has over other terrorist organizations is that it has a lot of cash to buy weapons and maintain troops because of oil sales from the wells it controls. ISIS must be selling the oil to someone. The United States and our allies against ISIS—which should include most Middle Eastern and Western European countries—should be able to put enough pressure on whoever is buying ISIS oil to make them purchase elsewhere. We could also offer oil at cut-rate prices or other economic help to current ISIS customers. Without oil revenues, ISIS will quickly deteriorate into another gang of hoodlums.

We should also take into account that war always tends to destabilize any region. Just as overthrowing Sadam Hussein led to ISIS, the violent destruction of ISIS could lead to something much worse.

The Quaker lobbying group, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, has come up with some other actions we can take to defuse ISIS, including ceasing to ship arms to the Middle East, investing in humanitarian efforts to help the victims and developing forums for negotiation between the parties.  These all seem like sensible proposals.

I’m not saying that a combination of economic sanctions, cessation of arm sales, humanitarian relief and diplomacy will work, but we ought to at least give it a try. We know that invasion does not work and we know that bombing does not work. Why are we resorting to these tried-and-wanting solutions once again?

I urge everyone to write, phone or email their congressional representatives and U.S. senators and ask them to vote against funding military action against ISIS and for directing the president to use economic sanctions, humanitarian aid and diplomacy to address the threat of ISIS.

Art by Kevin Kreneck

When will economists & pundits stop telling lie that education will cure inequality of income?

By Marc Jampole

Eduardo Porter of the New York Times is the latest journalist to advocate that the way to narrow the gap between what the wealthiest and everyone else earns is through education.  It’s an absurdly ridiculous argument that depends on us believing that with a college diploma nonunionized burger flippers, garbage haulers, shelf stockers and medical orderlies will be able to command higher salaries.  

In an article titled “Equation is Simple: Education = Income,” Porter uses two sets of statistics to confuse and distract us about why the top 1% have seen their incomes rise precipitously in recent decades, while the incomes at every other economic level have stagnated or deteriorated. 

First Porter quotes some computations of Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economics professor and former chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor. Katz calculates that if the top 1% were taxed at the rates in effect in 1979, the government could split it up equally and give every family not in the top 1% the grand total of $7,102. Katz and Porter then contrast this $7,102 with the estimated $30,000 a year difference in wealth between what couples with two college graduates make and what families with two high school grads make. 

Porter and Katz think this contrast proves that education will address the growing inequality of income.  The reasoning sounds like something a group of died-in-the-wool right-wing first-year economics majors would cook up at 3:00 in the morning after smoking a few joints. While it’s true that education can turn the daughter of a janitor into a high-priced accountant, it couldn’t possibly qualify everyone for great-paying jobs because there aren’t that many great-paying jobs around today.

These economists who think greater education will push incomes up haven’t been looking at job trends. Most of the jobs lost in the Great Recession have been replaced by lower-paying ones. Those who predict job trends estimate that virtually all of the 20 job titles to gain the most employees over the next decade are low-paying.  It is true that many of the job titles likely to grow the most on a percentage basis are high-paying, but these job titles start with a small base: 20% of 100 engineers is a lot less than 2% of 10,000 cashiers.

If we educate everyone for higher paying jobs, what is likely to happen is that the wages for these jobs will fall, thanks to the law of supply and demand. In other words, what is proposed by Porter, Katz, Claudia Goldin, Robert Reich, economists at Standard & Poor’s and the rest of the army of scholars and pundits who have swallowed the “education ends income inequality” Kool-aid may actually end up creating more inequality.

The only way to foster greater equality of income is to implement laws and regulations that change the distribution of income. The actions are obvious, because they worked to create a more equal society roughly from 1935-1979:

• Increase the minimum wage
• Pass laws and regulations that make it easy for workers to unionize
• Use tax increases on the wealthy to provide services and support to the poor and lower the cost of higher education for the poor and the middle class
• End privatization of traditional government functions, since privatization generally leads to workers making less and management making more.
• Pass laws that place high tariffs on imported goods and services produced in countries that do not hew to our wage, safety and environmental regulations.  

The “education ends income inequality” canard is one of many falsehoods routinely perpetrated on the American economy and public by economists and economic writers. The theory that lowering taxes on the wealthy leads to the creation of more jobs has proven to be false. The theory that illegal immigrant workers lower the incomes of other workers has been proven false. The notion that unions get in the way of one-on-one negotiations between workers and employers is an absurdity, as is the idea that people are less likely to look for work the longer their unemployment insurance runs (despite the fact that unemployment compensation is a miniscule portion of their former salary).  Privatization of prisons, the military and schools (through the charter school movement) has proven to be disasters.

That free trade between nations improves the domestic economy is not quite a lie, as shown by a study cited by Harvard’s Dani Rodrik in The Globalization Paradox, his critique of globalization.  Rodrik quantifies both the amount of wealth distributed domestically and the added gain to the U.S. economy if all tariffs were removed on all imported and exported products and services. He finds that the for every additional dollar that would be created in the United States by a totally free global trade regime there would be $50 transferred from the pockets of some groups to the bank accounts of others, primarily from workers losing their jobs to the wealthy who own the means of production, distribution and finance.  In other words, free trade is great—for the wealthy only.

In fact, the one factor that unifies all the distortions and myths believed by most mainstream economists is that acting on each of the myths leads to greater inequality of wealth.  That makes economics as practiced throughout most of the United States more of a propaganda arm of the wealthy than it is a social science. 

A cornucopia of shlock: 72 pages of gifts related to White House you can buy from 2014 White House catalog

By Marc Jampole 

Two years ago I noted that it was September 28 when the first Christmas catalog arrived in my mail box. This year the first catalog showed its pages on September 4, stretching the holiday shopping season to one third of the year.

The winner of this year’s award for first Christmas catalog to arrive is the White House Catalog, 72 pages of tchatchkes that have some connection to the White House.  The catalog comes from the White House Historical Association (WHHA), which describes itself as a nonprofit educational association “for the purpose of enhancing the understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of the Executive Mansion.”

And in America, what better way to enjoy or appreciate anything than to buy something connected to it!

How WHHA can come up with 72 pages dense with commemorative products is an exemplar of 21st century merchandising. 

Let’s quickly dispose of the first few pages of the catalog, which display White House tree ornaments. Evidently every year since at least 1981, WHHA has designed and sold a unique tree ornament, typically dedicated to one of the presidents. This year’s is a model train elaborately chiseled with details in red, white and blue, dedicated to Warren G. Harding, who evidently loved trains. The past collection of Christmas ornaments and Christmas cards featuring the presidents or the White House take the catalog to 12 pages. The ornaments are clever and well-crafted.

But what about the other 60 pages? They are jam-packed with merchandising’s greatest hits. Let’s make two lists to illustrate:

LIST OF PRODUCTS Address book Book mark Calendar Candy bowl Coasters Decorative boxes Jewelry Jigsaw puzzle Letter opener Mug Napkins Note cards Pen Prints Scarves Ties Tote bag Tray Umbrella

WHITE HOUSE RELATED THEMES Green room Blue room Red room Medallions in Eisenhower’s china Cherry blossoms Scenes from White House neighborhood Artists’ views of the White House Eagles in White House decorations American Impressionism White House in 1914 White House Christmas tree lighting ceremony For children For business people

Evidently the White House Historical Association took these two lists and matched many products from column A with every theme in column B. For example, red room themed products include a letter opener, Limoges box, jigsaw puzzle, scarf and jewelry.  The cherry blossom themed items include a bookmark, note cards, puzzle, Limoges box and scarf. Scenes from White House neighborhood offers us coasters, cocktail napkins, a tote bag, placemats, jewelry and a puzzle. The Christmas tree ceremony theme brings us another two jigsaw puzzles, bookmark and prints.

Oh yes, WHHA does dedicate some pages to books and art work, mostly portraits of presidents but also scenes of the White House and other patriotic fare such as Norman Rockwell’s “Statue of Liberty.” But mostly we see a succession of themes applied to the standard mix of items people buy as gifts when they go on vacation: mugs, note cards, tote bags, scarves and puzzles.  There are even plush toy replicas of several presidential family pets.

It’s a merchandising plan that writes itself and makes the White House Historical Association Christmas catalog look no different in product mix from the catalogs of other museums, associations and nonprofit organizations.

What’s interesting is that other than the Christmas ornaments, the product category with the most items is the jigsaw puzzle. There are enough puzzles in the catalog to keep a family of four busy every evening for several years.

The ornaments are first rate, if you are into exotic Christmas ornaments, and several of the books go beyond encomiums of mealy patriotism.  But for the most part what we see here is a cornucopia of schlock, which is Yiddish for the bargain basement, the cheesy and the coarse.

But it represents something more American than apple pie or gas guzzling cars. It represents the transformation of emotion into the purchase of a product—any product. The WHHA puzzles, bookmarks, mugs and tote bags are perfect stocking stuffers or small gifts for the seventh or eighth night of Chanukah. You can give them to whomever’s name you drew out of the gift exchange hat at the office. When you visit Washington, D.C. you can do all your obligatory souvenir gift shopping at one of the association’s two shops.

These are the throwaway presents that clutter the tables and walls, but also the drawers, closets, attics, basements and garages of much of America. 

Although schlock they are, the relative worthlessness of the products is what gives them their special value, because it’s not the product that’s important, it’s the fact that a purchase was made.  It’s the fact that a relationship, emotion or holiday was celebrated by buying something and then giving it to someone.  Without the “buy” there is no emotional transaction. The advantage of cheap schlock is that it is so cheap and the reason it’s so cheap is because it is schlock. But as long as organizations make it, Americans keep buying it.