Consistent NCAA & Penn State decisions show that it’s always about the bucks

By Marc Jampole

The public argument over whether the NCAA was too harsh, too lenient or just right in punishing Penn State has replaced the argument over whether Penn State should have taken down or left up the statue of Joe Paterno.

What I find so remarkable in the unfolding of the Penn State sex abuse cover-up is the consistency in the decisions reached by both the NCAA and Penn State. They both held one value above all others.

If OpEdge was a TV or radio show, this moment is when we would hear a hard rock base line followed by a slightly spacey sounding male voice yelping a single word, ”Money!.....”

That the NCAA’s decision is all about the Benjamins, Grants, Jacksons, Lincolns and McKinleys is fairly obvious.

The NCAA’s actions constituted a stiff fine, but does not prevent Penn State from doing business in the future, as ending the football program would have. Cleaning out some 13 years of Paterno victories cost no one anything—except the pill of bitter pride for the players and coaches. Thanks to the good fortune of dying quickly and unexpectedly, Joe Paterno never suffered the torments of seeing 13 years of victories and the NCAA record snatched from him because of his own hubris.

The $60 million and loss of bowls and scholarships hampers Penn State, but a “death penalty” would have put thousands of people in Happy Valley out of work and led to a major depression in an area in which college sports, and particular football, is a major industry.

The Penn State decision was also about money. After the revelations that Joe Paterno knew that Sandusky was raping boys on campus and engaged in a cover-up of those horrifying facts, how could the statue of the former saint remain standing?

But why keep the name on the library? It’s simple: Joe Paterno raised the funds that built it, contributing several millions of his own to the project. When people give that kind of money to any charitable or educational institution, there is always a contract. I’m guessing that somewhere there’s a contract in which the name of the library is bestowed upon Paterno.  And if there’s no contract, there’s a letter of understanding, or public minutes, a mission statement or something in writing.

Where there’s something in writing, lawyers lurk, and we know what that would mean in the case of the Paterno Library: a long and very ugly law suit in which the public would learn once again of the special circumstances that might give PSU the right to change the name of the building.

In short, the statue is an amusement, but a library is real money.  Once a statue is gone, it’s easy to forget it was ever there. But you can’t tear down a library.

Those who dream of cowboy justice wake up to the reality of mass murder at the movies.

By Marc Jampole

Facing the facts on guns in American society completely demoralizes me, and no more so than when I have to view those facts through the prism of yet another mass murder committed by someone who legally purchased his weapons and ammunition.

Perhaps most depressing is the nature of the political discussion. The debate should center on the formulation of a mix of new gun control laws and regulations that could screen a nut like James Holmes, who killed 12 and injured nearly 60 during a midnight showing of a new Batman movie in an Aurora, Colorado theatre.

But the discussion in the news media is not about fixing the problem, but about the extreme unlikelihood that we will even consider stronger gun control laws.  At the root of every article about the inability of our political system to consider tighter gun control is the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the billions of dollars it has spent over the years to buy politicians and spew pro-gun propaganda to the public.

The NRA has achieved its goals. Compared to 20 years ago, more Americans currently support loosening our already sieve-like gun control laws. One of the weapons Holmes used was an assault rifle, which is essentially a light machine gun. The assault rifle is a weapon neither of the hunt nor of sport shooting, and yet a majority of Americans now support their legal sale. 

As with global warming, healthcare reform and tax policies, a large portion of Americans prefer to ignore the facts of gun violence in the United States. Here are some I pulled from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence:

• The firearm homicide rate in the U.S. is 19.5 times higher than rates in 22 other populous high-income countries combined, despite similar non-lethal crime and violence rates.
• Among 23 populous, high-income countries, 80% of all firearm deaths occurred in the United States.
• An estimated 41% of gun-related homicides and 94% of gun-related suicides would not occur under the same circumstances had no guns been present.
• A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used in a completed or attempted suicide than to be used in a self-defense shooting; 11 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault or homicide and four times more likely to be used in an unintentional shooting death or injury than to be used in a self-defense shooting.
• Every year there are only about 200 legally justified self-defense homicides by private citizens compared with more than 30,000 gun deaths.

In short, loose gun control laws in the United States sacrifice the lives of 30,000 people every year, all to shield from prosecution 200 people who killed others with guns while protecting themselves.

These facts are never part of the core discussion concerning gun violence. And yet we hear—and the news media publish—the yahoos who propose that if more people had guns, perhaps fewer people would have died in the Aurora movie theatre or other mass murders.

Let’s play out the nightmare of which these gun supporters dream.  You’re in the theatre and all of sudden the air is filled with smoke and gun shots.  So you pull out you gun and start shooting back in the direction you think it’s coming from. Someone on the other side of the theatre sees you fire your weapon and thinks you’re the shooter and starts aiming at you. Meanwhile, the hundreds of other people in the theatre now have gunfire coming at them from three, maybe even more, directions. I know that Will Smith survived the Mexican standoff at the end of Enemy of the State, but that was a movie.  Remember, all the other actors survived as well, because the bullets were fake. Not so in Aurora. More guns shooting would have lead to one thing only—more dead and more injured.

Considering that it was gun-loving Colorado, I want to thank the x number of gun owners who were packing that evening who decided not to draw their firearms.   

Gun control laws demonstrate the corruption of our current political system.  Any number of politicians would be delighted to support stronger gun laws, that is, if enough people would pony up both the small fortune they would lose from the NRA and the large fortune to match what the NRA will spend to defeat them. It’s all about money and getting elected.

Mitt's Mendacity Vol. XXVI

See the 26th installment of Mitt's Mendacity, compiled by Steve Benen of The Maddow Blog, featuring the top 26 lies told by Mitt Romney this past week. Includes links to the previous 25 weeks chronicling Mitt's Mendacity.

Travelers wants us to channel our inner dog for lower insurance rates & the pride that comes of obedience.

By Marc Jampole

To say it’s a dog’s life once described a dreary, harsh and probably impoverished condition. Nowadays we would probably use the term “dog’s life” to symbolize living in the lap(dog) of luxury. Spending on dogs and otherpets has tripled over the past 20 years. Stores for training, feeding and grooming dogs seem to be proliferating at a pandemic rate.

Dogs now serve as a major motif in television commercials for virtually every product, including beer, snack foods, automobiles and clothing. In these television spots, dogs can be symbols of family, of loyalty to the pack (if not to a spouse), of good-naturedness, of goofiness, and even of freedom. 

But it is the image of a mindlessly happy slave blindly following orders to which Travelers Insurance wants us to aspire in its new commercial for auto and other insurance. Among the traditional values associated with dogs, the Travelers ad favors blind obedience and easy trainability. 

The commercial focuses exclusively on a dog that does everything it’s supposed to do, and more. The visual narration unfolds in 9 vignettes of the same “good dog” being good.  Since it’s a commercial for auto insurance, it naturally takes place in a car-dependent suburban setting.

Here are the 9 vignettes:

1.      The dog covers a hole in which it has probably buried a bone.

2.      It pulls the sprinkler to the middle of the yard with its teeth.

3.      It wipes its front paws on a floor mat before entering the house.

4.      Its paw grabs a water bottle that its master has left on a table and places it in a trash bin.

5.      It drops a set of car keys from its teeth into the key tray by the door.

6.      It looks both ways before crossing the sidewalk, thereby avoiding a collision with a woman pushing a baby carriage.

7.      It tries to clean up spilt milk by dredging a cloth through the white puddle with its teeth.

8.      It puts its empty food bowl in the open dishwasher.

9.      It takes a bag of groceries in its teeth from the back of a mini-van and carries it inside the house.

The narration subtly twists each of these vignettes into a corresponding action that a human could, and should, take to be a better driver or get a better rate on car (and home) insurance. The phrases include, “safe driver,” “loyal driver,” “accident forgiveness,” “rewarded for good behavior,” “recognized for doing the right thing, ” “the good things you do, but maybe nobody notices,” and my favorite, “Travelers wants you to be good.”

The background music is a Speakeasy 20’s version of a song that goes “I’ve been good to you, yes I’ve been good….”

It made me want to sit up…

…and fetch a newspaper or bring a leash in my teeth to some human in hopes of getting a crunchy little ball of processed meat and meal, or perhaps a scratch behind the ear.  

No one can miss the metaphor: the dog is us, at least a better version of us which is rewarded for its goodness by lower automobile and home insurance rates.  The total identification between the dog and the ideal of human behavior plays out in the call to action: to visit to the goodbehavior.com website.

It’s one thing to say, “She has an elephant’s memory” or “He’s crazy like a fox,” but the Travelers “good dog” ad, which is part of a whole series of ads in which dogs symbolize humans, takes the analogy beyond the comparison of a single trait to an all-encompassing idealization of humans mindlessly doing the right thing.

That right thing is defined by Travelers not only as a set of driving behaviors, but a set of consumer behaviors as well: How else do we explain the presence of loyalty as one of the “good boy” behaviors proposed in the commercial, when loyalty has nothing to do with safe driving?  Product loyalty is, after all, the holy grail of marketers. A more encompassing view of what constitutes a “good boy” imbues the imagery, which resides in a world of suburban consumerism, replete with ranch-style home, gas-guzzling automobile, dish washer, plastic water bottle and other  disposable paraphernalia of suburban excess. To Travelers, to be a “good boy” requires that one not only drive safely, but to obey all the rules for good consumerism like customer loyalty and mindless acquisition . In another context, “the good dog” might morph to something savage such as the “good Nazi” or “good Soviet,” but Travelers has something a little less overtly violent in mind: just be a happy idiot.

The Big Squeeze

Click to enlarge image / Graphic by Kevin Kreneck

Not releasing past tax returns is an enormous PR blunder by Romney campaign.

By Marc Jampole

Mitt Romney continues to refuse to release his past tax returns, while insisting that there’s “nothing hidden in them.”

It’s an untenable position, since it begs the obvious question, “If there’s nothing hidden, why not release them?” 

The answer, of course, is that the returns will likely show the enormous amount of money he makes, how he makes it and how he uses sophisticated techniques to avoid paying taxes.  We won’t see anything illegal in Romney’s returns, but we will probably see how much he still earns from Bain and be able to connect some of those earnings in certain years to layoffs of companies that Bain bought and sold. It will also probably show a number of tax avoidance techniques using loopholes in the current tax laws, such as “carried interest” and tax shelters in foreign lands. The returns will reinforce the notion that Romney is a fat-cat one-percenter who should be paying more in taxes.

The returns will be bad news for the Romney campaign, which is precisely why he should have released them already. 

Get the bad news out early and all at once. That’s one of the truisms that I have learned from 25 years of developing and implementing crisis communications plans for companies in many industries and of many sizes, including three of the largest chapter 11 bankruptcies in history.   Letting the bad news fester can only lead to three things, all bad for the company or individual:

1.      The bad news stays in front of the pubic longer.

2.      The bad news leaks out slowly, so what was just one story becomes many stories over time.

3.      When the bad news breaks, it will be bigger than it would have otherwise been, because added to the news is the fact of the cover-up.  Take, for example, Penn State’s child abuse scandal.

Once bad news is out there, the company or individual can address it, either by telling the world why it won’t happen again or by asserting its side of the story.  The second approach would be the one for Romney to take. He is already advocating the positions that enable him to make and keep so much money. The fact that he does what he says is okay shouldn’t surprise anyone. But by refusing to release the returns, the Romney campaign keeps the issue in the news and gives the Obama campaign a symbolic cudgel with which to beat Romney again and again…and again.

I can understand Romney’s reluctance to release the returns before he had sewed up the nomination, given the complicated tango he danced with the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party, AKA the Tea Party.

But if Mitt had asked me, I would have made a strong recommendation to release the returns as soon as he had a majority of convention delegates in hand. Once out, he could have responded to the criticism by saying, "There’s nothing illegal in the returns, so it’s a closed matter. Let’s move on.”

Romney would still have to defend his economic positions, he would still be a poster child for the fat cats and he would still be open to charges that his only concerns are for the wealthy and that he doesn’t care about anyone else.  But he’ll have to defend those accusations no matter what.  With the returns out, he could spend his time trying to explain to the American people why he thinks his tax policies work to the benefit of everyone (FYI, they don’t.)

By not releasing the returns, he reinforces the idea that something nefarious is going on. He turns a simple matter into a cover-up. And that’s much worse than admitting what everyone knows already: that like other wealthy people, he makes a lot of money and knows how to use existing tax laws to minimize his tax burden.

Obama plan to let temporary Bush II tax cuts expire but keep cuts for others will help weak economy.

By Marc Jampole

We start with the fact that we have both a weak economy and a heavy debt burden.  It would be great to reduce the debt, but…

If we let the temporary tax cuts of the Bush II Administration taxes end, people will have less money to spend, so the economy will shrink.

If we cut government programs which pump money into the economy, people will have less money to spend, so the economy will shrink.

How then to pay off some of our enormous national debt? 

The key to my mind is to let the Bush II tax breaks expire on money that does not create jobs. Two examples:

·        Any investment in the secondary market, which means, the buying and selling of stocks and bonds that do not result in additional funds for job-creating corporations. When you buy an initial offering of stock, the money goes to the company, but from then on, buying or selling that stock does not create any jobs, only transfers wealth between buyers and sellers.

·        The purchase of fine art and those luxury items for which high quality but less expensive substitutes are available. For example, producing a pair of luxury blue jeans costs about the same in materials and labor (including marketing) as producing a pair of quality jeans you can buy in a department store. It’s not the profit, but the costs to produce and sell that create new jobs. The enormous profit that the luxury item commands represents an exchange of wealth between the wealthy person buying the jeans and the wealthy people who own the company, but no additional jobs.

My point is that the more money you make, the more of what you make gets put into assets that do not create jobs or create relatively few jobs for the money spent. Virtually everything that the poor and the near poor make goes right back into the economy, as does most of what the middle class makes. It is only the wealthy and near wealthy who can keep much of their money out of the job-producing economy.

That’s why President Obama is absolutely spot on to propose letting the Bush II cuts expire, but only on those with incomes of more than $250,000.  As the President said earlier this week, “These tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are also the tax cuts that are least likely to promote growth.”

As with any proposal to increase regulation or raise taxes on the wealthy or near wealthy, a major thrust of the Republican reaction is to invoke “small business.”  And as always, Democrats fall for it, hook, line and sinker and thereby let Republicans control the terms of the debate. This week, for example, there have been dueling versions of how many small business owners would have to start paying the additional taxes if the Bush II cuts expire for those earning more than $250,000: The President’s people say it’s a mere 3% who will have their taxes return to what they were before Bush II and Congress went “bat-Cantor crazy”; whereas the Republicans (purposely misunderstanding a detail of a non-partisan report) aver that it’s 50%. The very definition of small business is up for question: for Small Business Administration purposes, it covers businesses that have as many as 1,500employees and sell as much as $21.5 million a year. Sounds pretty big to me.

The entire small business argument is nothing more than a smoke screen. Whether one owns a small business, is a high-powered attorney, plays a professional sport or runs a public company, does it really matter how the money is earned? $250,000 is a lot of money to earn in one year, more than 98% of the population makes.  In our troubled time, it’s not too much to ask people to pay in taxes what they used to pay before the disastrous Bush II Administration. 

Gas Price Conspirators

Pete Kotz writes in Seattle Weekly about the forces in Wall Street and Washington who work to keep up the price of oil and gasoline at the pump.

16 museums dedicated to teaching creationism pockmark the American landscape.

By Marc Jampole

Secular humanist that I am, I couldn’t contain a squeaky chortle of glee when reading that the Creation Museum in a Kentucky suburb of Cincinnati is in financial distress. Attendance is down more than 30% from its opening year of 2007. It’s having trouble raising the $20 million it needs to build a giant Noah’s Ark theme park.

The Creation Museum uses interactive exhibits to brainwash children and uneducated adults to believe that the Earth was formed by a conscious deity about 6,000 years ago and that humans and dinosaurs once inhabited the same ecosystem at the same time.  The museum, whose theme line is “Prepare to believe,” was built by a ministry called Answers in Genesis, founded, like the Murdoch right-wing media empire, in Australia.

The museum blames the bad economy for the slowdown in business. Of course the museum operates with one hand tied behind its back, since no public school classes are allowed to send field trips there because it would run counter to the Supreme Court decision that keeps religion outside the classroom. Imagine how well the Creation Museum would be doing if could get on the public school field trip gravy train.

I’m wondering if the problem isn’t that it has to face brutal competition. I’m not talking about from Disney and Universal Studios, which are dedicated to the religion of consumerism. I mean competition from the other museums that want us to believe in an unscientific and false view of the physical world. After all, there are now 16 museums in the United States dedicated to the false notion ofcreationism, including:

·         Creation Museum – KY

·         7 Wonders Museum – WA

·         A Key Encounter Nature Theatre and Planetarium – FL

·         Akron Fossils and Science Center – OH

·         Creation Adventure Museum – FL

·         Creation Discovery Museum – FL

·         Creation Evidence Museum – TX

·         The Discovery Center – TX

·         Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum – MT

·         Grand River Museum – SD

·         Lost World Museum – NY

·         Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum – TX

·         Wyatt Archaeological Museum – TN

·         Camp Sunrise Museum – GA

·         Creation and Earth History Museum – CA

·         Museum of Earth History – TX

You’d think there would be plenty of paying customers for everyone, what with a recent Gallup poll showing that 46% of all Americans believe that a god created humans in their current form, while another 32% think that whatever the process of evolution, it got a good nudge from a deity. That’s an enormous target market.

The creationist museum is a very much a phenomenon of the South. Of the 16 museums dedicated to creationism, 11 are in the South, with 3 in attraction-rich Florida and 4 deep in the heart of all things conservative, Texas.

Yet, despite the fact that Gallup found only 15% of the population endorsing the scientific view that humans evolved with the intervention of a deity, museums that advocate Darwinism, such as the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (4 million visitors a year) and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh (1.3 million visitors a year), draw more people. No creationist museum comes close to these numbers. It’s probably because those damn yankees stole all the best dinosaur specimens. 

To believe that a god created us is harmless enough until it is used to defend pollution-causing activities or war. I also have no problem with building institutions full of pretty pictures and exhibits dedicated to religious contemplation and then charging people an entrance fee to see. Maybe it works a little better when the entry fees are voluntary donations, which has been the game for the Catholic Church for about 2,000 years.

What I find pernicious to the intellectual health of the collective body of the American people is to pass off this nature-centric religion as science, which is what all these museums attempt to do. In one way or another, they all use facts and what they call analysis to provide what they call scientific proof of the intervention of a god in the creation or development of human beings. To ask the “god” question is inherently unscientific (which is why calling the Higgs boson a “god particle” is so unfortunate). Science exists outside the world of gods, because it is based solely on observation and not a priori theories of existence. Science looks for consistent rules that exist through time and does not care who or what created the rules, just how they work.

Thus, it’s their pretentions to science that make these creation museums unethical. 

By rejecting state health insurance exchange, GOP governors increase the scope of federal government

By Marc Jampole

These past few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about my brother’s death at the age of 49.  When he fell from a ladder and smashed his brains on the concrete below, he was worth about $100.  Yet he got the finest, most high-tech treatment available by first class specialists who respected and maintained his life until it was hopeless, then cut out his useable parts for the living.

And it was all free.

The best medical treatment in the world for free—and he got it at the Charity Hospital in New Orleans, which was founded in 1736 and at one time was the second largest hospital in the country. It never reopened after Hurricane Katrina, most assuredly for political reasons.

My thoughts have turned to the wonderful care my brother received because of the announcement by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal that he wasacting for the entire state and rejecting key portions of the Affordable CareAct. How far has Louisiana fallen when it comes to taking care of its citizens!

Jindal has now been joined by his fellow right-wingideologue Florida Governor Richard Scott, who is also rejecting those portions of the new health care law over which the states have control.   

In the case of both of the provisions that Jindal and Scott have rejected, the governors are cutting off the noses of their constituencies to spite their own faces in a near paroxysm of ideological purity.

First, their refusal to construct state health insurance exchanges (HIX), which are state markets on which different insurance companies offer policies built on state-mandated standards to uninsured citizens of the state.  The Affordable Care Act gives every state the option to create an HIX, but the citizens of those states who decide not to create one will be able to buy insurance on the federal version. In other words, by blocking Louisiana and Florida HIXs, Jindal and Scott are directly leading to an increase in federal government intervention on a state level because people who would have bought insurance through a state HIX will now go to the federal HIX.  I guess their opposition to social service programs to help the needy supersedes their dedication to states’ rights.

Ideological purity will lead to a net transfer of money from the pockets of Louisianans and Floridians because their governors are also rejecting an increase in the Medicare program.

I get it that both would like to replace Medicare with either a voucher system or, alternatively, end all government support of health care for the elderly.  But let’s look at the facts on the ground: Medicare as it exists right now is being expanded to serve millions of new people.  All of this expansion will be completely financed on the short term by the federal government and mostly financed by the feds in the long run. For every dollar that a state puts into the expansion in the future, it will receive many, many dollars from the feds both now and later. All of this money will go to making their citizens healthier.  Moreover, the citizens of every state will have to pay taxes to support the Medicare expansion, whether or not they receive the benefits.  Thus, by refusing to participate, a state is making its citizens pay for the health care of the citizens of other states. 

In both refusals, the good governors are perversely working against their own cause. By not creating an HIX, they increase federal government control of the local health insurance market using federal not state standards. By turning down the Medicare expansion, they take money out of the pockets of their citizens and give it to the citizens of other states, a de facto tax increase with no benefit to those taxed—just the kind of thing about which Rick and Bobby like to pontificate.

Laughable on the level of ideas, but truly tragic when we think of the hundreds of thousands of people in these two states who will not get adequate health care because of these heartless ideologues.  It’s a sad day for both Louisiana and Florida.

Roberts did what he always does: support interests of big business, which likes the healthcare act

By Marc Jampole

I didn’t make a prediction in print on whether the Supreme Court would rule that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional or not, but I told several friends that I thought the vote would be 6-3 in favor of the law. I figured that Roberts always votes for the best interests of large corporations, and most large corporations like the new law because it takes a lot of the burden for paying the nation’s health insurance bill off their backs.  It thus made sense to me that Roberts would support the law’s constitutionality.

Roberts chose to justify his thumb up by reducing the many moving parts in the law to a net flow of money and then characterizing that flow as a “tax.” It was the same type of convoluted reasoning that the court has used in many bad rulings it has issued in recent years, such as Citizens United (which released a flood of corporate money into political waters), Bush V. Gore (which gave the 2000 election to the loser of the popular vote) and Knox v. Service Employees (which says that union members can opt out of providing financial support to political candidates).  In this case, Roberts twisted so that he could support the law without having to deal with states’ rights and other sacred rightwing principles.

President Obama gave the Republican Party some very good advice at the end of his lunch-time speech about the court’s decision when he said that it’s time to move on. Mitt Romney, John Boehner and Eric Cantor are all making inflammatory statements about repealing the law, but unless the fall election gives them both houses, repeal efforts will do nothing but keep the issue in the news and provide another distraction from solving real problems.

Although Romney has initially said that whoever wants to appeal this law should vote for him, I think he’ll lose if he focuses a good part of his campaign around repeal of the Affordable Care Act. A lot of Tea Partiers may hate the idea of government intervention in health care (except for Medicare, of course, which serves a large number of Tea Partiers), but these folk were going to vote for Romney anyhow.  They despise President Obama.

But consider the math. When a Tea Party enthusiast decides to vote for Romney because Mitt supports health care repeal, that’s one vote. The section of the law that keeps children on their parents’ policies until age 26 gets 3 votes: mother, father and adult child.

And that’s the Republicans’ dilemma. There is something for everyone to like in the new law: benefit extensions and protections for the insured, affordable insurance for the uninsured, new funding mechanisms for businesses, fewer noninsured to muck up the finances of hospitals and a lot of potential new customers for insurance companies.

Once Romney and the Republicans start messing with any of these new benefits, someone will get angry.  And if they start giving ground on any of these benefits, the true believing Tea Partiers will object. Of course, they could go radical—what I have started calling “bat-Cantor crazy”—and call for the repeal of Medicare and its replacement by a voucher system. I don’t think a lot of seniors are going to like that idea one bit.

In short, now that the Supremes have upheld the constitutionality of the new law, the Republicans have no short-term winning strategy on health care. For that reason, I think that the health care issue will fade away, as Republicans hammer on Obama and the Democrats for the sluggish performance of the economy and the persistence of high unemployment.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the issue dropped off the political agenda by the end of the summer.

Court backs clean air and science in ruling that EPA can regulate against global warming

By Marc Jampole

Whatever the Supreme Court  announces later this week related to the Affordable Care Act, another court in the land has made a landmark decision that will improve the health and well-being of everyone in the United States, if not the world.

A federal court has upheld a finding by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that man-made greenhouses gases pose a threat to public health that requires the EPA by law to impose limits on the emissions causing the danger. 

The unanimous decision rejected the arguments raised by the hacks hired by some (but not all) utilities, manufacturing companies and business associations. Those who brought the lawsuit against the EPA were trying to sell the old myth that the very idea that the Earth is warming is based on unreliable studies. Luckily, the judges could read and therefore understand with great clarity that the overwhelming preponderance of evidence supports the science of global warming.

As even The Wall Street Journal’s anti-EPA version of the news admits, there is little room in the decision for appeal, as the judges noted several times how strongly the law backed the EPA’s position.  Despite the great odds of winning, though, Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli of Virginia said the state plans to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Virginia was one of 14 states that sued to block the EPA rules; the list of other states that joined in the lawsuit against the best interests of their citizens reads like a roll call of Tea Party hotspots: Alaska, Nebraska, North Dakota and Texas, for example.  

That 15 states, including California, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York and Oregon, supported the EPA regulations underscores the deep divisions we have in the country right now. To a great extent, those divisions have occurred because one side insists on spewing out lies and questioning the validity of proven science.

In the case of global warming, there are two sets of lies: 1) that environmental regulations hurts the economy; 2) that the science of global warming is not yet proven.  The judges did not have to deal with the first set of lies. To the second, it answered with crushing clarity, exemplified by the most quoted part of the decision: “This is how science works. The EPA is not required to reprove the existence of the atom every time it approaches a scientific question.”   

We should celebrate this victory for everyone—since everyone has to breathe the air and many millions are suffering and will suffer from the severe economic dislocations that extreme weather and resource shortages are causing and will continue to cause.

But in this victory, let’s also look at the sober fact: The appeals court ruled that it was okay for the EPA to make its decisions based on scientific truth.  Opposed to this proposition were the politicians of 14 states and the lawyers of many companies and associations. Their efforts, backed by millions of dollars, slowed down implementation of anti-pollution regulations for some 5 years.

They also acted against the wishes of their constituencies, according to a 2012 study of the public’s attitudes on energy and theenvironment conducted by George Mason’s University’s Center for Climate Change Communications.  In a study that received absolutely zero publicity, George Mason researchers found that:

·         72 % of Americans think that addressing global warming should be a very high priority.

·         92 % of Americans think that developing sources of clean energy should be a very high priority.

·         83 % of Americans think that protecting the environment either improves economic growth and provides new jobs (58%) or has no effect on economic growth or jobs (25%).

Thus even with the law, the truth and the public on its side, the EPA still had to slog through 5 years of legal proceedings just to demonstrate that, indeed, the government can make a decision based on facts.

Values.com says that all of us can live our dreams, and uses as its example a fictional frog

By Marc Jampole

Four months ago I thought I dispensed with the Values.com website, a hodgepodge of feel-good slogans and stories, funded by billionaire Phillip Anschutz through The Foundation for a Better Life.

At that time I wrote about the following about the 88 values touted on Values.com:

These values can apply to anything. A dictatorship or state ruled by one party would be just as likely to list all these values as a representative democracy would. Virtually all these values (with the exception of “true beauty”) would come in handy in training an elite force to torture and engage in illegal assassinations. Many of these values would make a perfect substitute for “Arbeit Macht Frei,” which means “work makes you free” in German and was hung as a sign over the entrance of several Nazi concentration camps. Those in favor of a woman’s reproductive rights are equally able to find solace in contemplating these values as those who wish to restrict these rights.

The amorphous quality of these values…make the campaign for “values”…mere shills for maintaining the status quo, which as people are discovering is a fixed game in favor of those who already have money and power, a game which 95% of the population is currently losing badly.

At that time, I assumed that the Values.com advertising campaign would soon end.

But months later, Anschutz persists.

Strolling along Manhattan’s Upper West Side the other day I saw a billboard on the side of a bus shelter that consisted of a color photo (or drawing) of Kermit the Frog.

Here is the text, all very large:

Eats Flies.

Dates a Pig

Hollywood Star

LIVE YOUR DREAMS (in a box)

Pass It On

…followed by the Values.com website address.

When you go to the website, you can not only find the billboard, but an inspiring story. The story is not of how Kermit’s creator, Jim Henson, lived his dream. No, it’s about how the imaginary character, Kermit the Frog, has lived his dream, written in the inspirational style that has characterized American business fiction since the original Horatio Alger stories—not a hint of irony.

Here is the “values” lesson presented at theValues.com website about the Kermit story: “After all, if a Frog can accomplish so much, we can do something, too.”

Where do we start?

Most obviously, anyone can accomplish anything in fiction. A frog doesn’t have to go to college, and if it does, it will surely graduate whatever its level of effort, prior experience or natural capabilities, unless it’s a secondary character. But it’s Kermit, so he’ll pass and probably give the graduation speech, because it’s fiction and he’s a hero. Just as everyone is a hero/heroine of his/her own dream.

But how does comparing what you’ve been doing to what an imaginary animal does to succeed going to help you? You could point to lots of people—Jackie Robinson, Lyndon Johnson, Joe Biden, Lucille Clifton, Beverly Sills, Steve Jobs and Howie Long all come to mind—as people about whom one could say, if they could do it, you can too. But an imaginary frog?

More subtle is the subtext behind the “values” message to “live your dream.” What does “live your dream” mean? Get what you want.

What kind of a value is “get what you want?” Seek the power, money, possessions, friends and whatever else defines your dream—whatever it is.

That sounds like the politics of selfishness to me. I thought a “value” was supposed to link people to something beyond themselves, to their families, communities, nation, world, philosophies and political beliefs.

Most subtle are the details that define “living the dream” in the Kermit billboard: He’s a Hollywood star, a celebrity. Not a scientist, not a president of a major university, not a business titan, not even an athlete: a celebrity. Once again, when given the opportunity to promote an ideal to which to aspire, an American thought influencer resorts to the celebrity.

In one billboard, then, Values.com uses a conflation or false analogy to propose selfish pursuit as a positive value and defines that pursuit in terms of a primary symbol of consumerism (the celebrity). The overall impact of the Values.com website is to sell the current status quo, while the particulars of the advertising campaign built around “live your dream” provides key details of what the controllers of the website want our values and dreams to be.

Art experts refuse to stand up to forgeries and mislabeled art for fear of being sued

By Marc Jampole

An article in today’s New York Times details a very disturbing trend: curators, scholars and other art expertsare refusing to have an opinion on whether a work of art is genuine or not. By genuine, what the article and all the art experts quoted mean to say is that the art was created by the person to whom it is attributed, always a famous artist.

The reason that the art experts are afraid to do what their job is—analyze art and determine its authenticity—is that they are afraid of being sued by either a purchaser or a seller who learns that her Rodin is not really a Rodin. With paintings going for tens and sometimes hundreds of millions, a lot is at stake when someone says that a painting that was thought to be a Leonardo or a Matisse was really painted by someone else—a follower, a member of the school or even an out-and-out forgery. 

When lots of money is on the line, people often sue when they don’t get their way, so it makes sense that they would sue someone who can cost them money because of a studied opinion.

For example, the Times article includes a photo of some of 74 plasters attributed to Edgar Degas. Too quote the caption: “fearing lawsuits, scholars are afraid to declare them genuine or not.”

It may make sense to those who initiate these lawsuits, but that doesn’t change the highly suspect ethical position of the art expert who bites his tongue about his professional opinion. The lack of integrity of the art expert who lets pass a forgery or a mislabeled painting is, as the Romans used to say, “res ipso loquitur or “a thing that proves itself.” It’s similar to a stock analyst who won’t pan a stock because his company is selling it or the public relations executive who lets a company lie in a news release because it’s a large client. It’s just plain wrong. And it’s a betrayal of the trust that society puts in experts and other intellectuals. (The first to use the term “betrayal of the intellectuals,” was Julian Benda, who argued in 1927 that European intellectuals of the preceding hundred years often ceased to follow their professional dictates to reason dispassionately about political and military matters, instead becoming apologists for nationalism, warmongering and racism.) 

The most intriguing part of the story, though, is not what it says about yet another betrayal by intellectuals, but what it says about the power of branding.

Just think about it: Here is a beautiful work of art that delights or stuns or evokes some emotional and intellectual reaction that is both pleasurable and edifying.  Suddenly you learn that it’s not a Picasso and so it’s worth less money.  Or an absolute monstrosity of a drawing, just as “fugly” as you could imagine—but then you learn that John Chamberlain did it as a sketch for one of his metal sculptures and suddenly it gains in value. The value of the art work increases or decreases dramatically by attaching a name to or detaching a name from the work, whose essence remains the same. It’s like bottling tap water, giving it a name that evokes health or purity and selling it as special water, wait…they’ve been doing that for years!

When the name of the artist and his or her general style becomes a brand, the value of which inflates the price that people and museums are willing to pay for the work, people are really buying the name more than they are buying the work itself. As with Coke, Bill Blass or even Paul Newman’s salad dressing, the power of the brand is an integral part of the product. The brand on a product usually stands for a set of values with which the company wants to associate its products, or it enables the company to extend to other markets or other product types easily, because people know the brand. In the case of the name of an artist, the product doesn’t change, just the price people are willing to pay for it.

The power of branding in art is ultimately bad for society, for this reason: Rich folk trade this art between themselves or buy it and donate it to museums (often years later for a tax break on the current value which may be many times what was originally paid for the piece). All of this money is thereby kept out of the real economy. It doesn’t create jobs. It doesn’t help the economy grow. It’s just another proof that cutting taxes on the wealthy (as Bush II did twice and Romney wants to do again) doesn’t create more jobs than if the government had used the money to improve our roads, reduce the number of kids in public school classes or invest in advanced technologies.  We should end the tax deduction for giving art to museums or assess a very steep tax on all art purchases of more than $250,000. My solution would be to return to the taxation system of 1979, which will not only result in the wealthy having far less money to spend on frivolities such as signatures at the bottom of paintings, but also help to create a more equitable distribution of wealth.

Selections from the July 1-15, 2012 issue

COVER/Joan Walsh p. 1
Walker wins 1 for the plutocrats 

EDITORIAL p. 2
Battle against plutocracy

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR p. 4

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen p. 5
Going without Frankenfoods

DISPATCHES p. 5
New Orleans laments loss of daily newspaper;
Fox still tops in misinformation;
Economy-wrecking Texans back;
Open primary shakes up Cal politics;
‘Romneycare’ didn’t kill jobs, neither will ‘Obamacare’;
House Repubs call cops on coal critic;
Supreme Court rejects 'birther' argument again;
Obamacare helps 14.3M seniors with preventive benefits;
Health insurers will keep key Obamacare provisions;
Labor, allies mount voter rights campaign;
More heat than light in 'Fast and Furious' probe ...

BILL JOHNSTON p. 11
Occupy the Democratic Party

ROBERT WEISSMAN p. 11
Transparently secret Chamber

HAL CROWTHER p. 12
Cave dwellers of the Carolinas rise again

SAM URETSKY p. 15
User fees for the eRich
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas p. 15
Tsk-tsking of obesity

JOHN BUELL p. 16
Politics of heroism

WAYNE O’LEARY p. 16
Bad medicine

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet p. 16
Mitt tells students to fly a kite

JON R. PIKE p. 17
Fracking brings money, questions to N.D.
DONALD McCARTHY p. 20
Batman, the progressive superhero

DONALD ROLLINS p. 20
Woody Guthrie, troubled troubadour, at 100

BOOK/Seth Sandronsky p. 20
Urban revolution

ROB PATTERSON p. 21
Exceptional mythology needs dose of reality

POPULIST PICKS p. 21
Flatbush, Fenway and the Jews

and more ...