Bush League Lies, Labor Day and the World’s Best Chocolate

The President again praised the increase in worker productivity. This means that you do more work for the same money, if not less. Work more hours for the same money, if not less. That is what it means.

Why is this a point of pride? Some indication that the economy is better? Better for whom? For investors, surely. For management, whose bonuses go up as productivity goes up, even while they manage fewer workers per produced widget. This means they are getting paid, not only for firing people and instilling sufficient fear to force workers to take de facto pay cuts. It also means they are getting paid more for managing fewer people…which is to say they are making more for working less.

This is easily demonstrated by the increase in the ration between CEO pay and average worker pay, which has more or less doubled in the past decade. It was obscene before. But hey, a little obscenity is fine with me; I’m no prude. But now it is criminal. Except that beyond Martha Stewart and that poor fool Sam Waksal, it seems no one else will be doing the time for doing the various, well publicized crimes.

Why would the President keep repeating his well-spun untruths (Like productivity gain means the economy is recovering)? Because his own personal PR genius Carl Rove has figured out something interesting about media and the public. When you first introduce a lie, there is a flurry of opinion pieces and editorials picking it to pieces. The second time, likewise.

But after a while, and the canard that the U.S. economy is getting better is over a year old now, folks get tired of writing and reading the same well-reasoned editorials rebutting the big lies. So they stop calling them lies. And then, slowly, they become accepted.

The so-called lagging indicator of a recovering economy is not just the return of jobs (three million lost and counting), or the slow end of underemployment. It is also the return of the 40-hour week. It is also the return of non-debt financed consumer spending. Today a report indicated that there are more cars per household than drivers in the U.S. Why? Gee, how about because they were giving them away with 0% financing? And what is the implication of this glut of perfectly good, new cars littering the driveways of America?

I’ll tell you now and the experts will laugh at me…until next year this time when the economy is crashing because no one needs to buy new cars anymore for about five years. It will follow the same trend as the computer business did in 2000-now. Enough new machines were sold that are still powerful enough so that people could put off buying new ones. Like refrigerators. Who runs out to buy a refrigerator just because this year’s model is better? You buy only when your trusty fridge dies on you. So it has become with computers. So it is about to become with cars (a huge driver of the consumer driven economy).

So to paraphrase Arnold, “hear me now and remember this later.” The bump up in the economy in the last two quarters was driven by debt. By 0% down living. By mortgage refinancing that didn’t lower folks’ payments but let them pull cash out to buy things. More debt. By credit cards. More debt.

That’s why personal bankruptcies are at a high. And frankly, the books of most corporations are lousy with debt and their economic health, and what they can borrow, is based on their inflated valuations in the market (their stock prices).

And then there’s the war spending, the Federal debt. Not the $500 billion one we just heard about. That doesn’t include Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s probably another $150 billion a year.

And then there is another “productivity” issue that is a lie retold. Namely that somehow the outsourcing of the tech jobs, the sales (via phone) jobs, and even the middle management jobs that support the entire middle-class is harmless, or even a good thing. That makes this "recovery" unlike all the others before it. It is a terminally jobless recovery because they are never, ever coming back. Flash to the economists, bulletin to voters who still cast ballots to support free-trade capitalists. These jobs are never coming back.

On this Labor Day, it’s time to accept that we are seeing just the beginning of the end of the middle class in America. Investors will do fine (but I am talking about serious investors, not the rubes who think their 401(k) will hold them). The rich will employ foreigners in foreign lands to further expand their enterprises. The high-priced labor in America will vanish. The U.S. middle class will be forced to labor in direct competition with foreign labor.

Let’s consider just one clear example of the hypocrisy of the Bush economic plan. The free trade that ships U.S. jobs abroad permanently is on one side. Let the consumer buy at the best price cry the free marketers. Technology, the Internet, lets us do it and make it cheaper in India, or wherever. Fine.

At the same time, these phony free marketer apologists for the modern robber barons of industry fight any effort by Americans to take advantage of “free trade” and the Internet to create a level playing field. Specifically, they move heaven and earth on all the talk shows and Op-ed pages to prevent Americans from leveling their cost-of-living with their foreign labor competition.

The clearest case in point is the battle over importing drugs from Canada, where they cost about 20 percent of their U.S. price. There is no, repeat, no legitimate reason U.S. drugs cost more. There is no, repeat, no risk, danger or difference, if you get your drugs via the Internet from Canada.

The bogus excuse the drug industry puts forth is that these high prices are needed to fund research. The numbers (a billion dollars to bring a drug to market) are lies. Repeat, lies. These companies include in that cost their marketing costs. However they hide them, and they do in many ways, these costs accounted, last time I checked for about 80 percent of the total expense of bringing a drug to market.

If you doubt whether the drugs from Canada, or Europe, or wherever are more dangerous, etc., just check the medical literature. There is no evidence of drugs being safer in the U.S. than elsewhere. In fact, some drugs allowed by the FDA here are banned in Europe, because they are considered too dangerous.

But these lies from the robber-baron economists in league with the Bush free traders will be repeated over and over, until, because columnists grow tired of debunking them and readers weary of reading the same debunking repeatedly, they will become, by force of repetition alone, considered true.

Thus, ears filled with the lavish praise and subtle lies of a Presidential radio address, we enter into a Labor Day “celebration” of the American worker.

But heck, we believe our President’s analysis of the state of labor in the U.S. today, don’t we. We should. After all, “if you repeat a lie often enough, it will become the truth.” (Attributed to Joseph Geobbels)

But personally, I think he probably had read the following, from “The Crowd,” by father-of-sociology Gustave Le Bon (1895):

“It was Napoleon, I believe, who said that there is only one figure in rhetoric of serious importance, namely, repetition. The thing affirmed comes by repetition to fix itself in the mind in such a way that it is accepted in the end as a demonstrated truth.
The influence of repetition on crowds is comprehensible when the power is seen which it exercises on the most enlightened minds. This power is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in which the motives of our actions are forged. At the end of a certain time we have forgotten who is the author of the repeated assertion, and we finish by believing it. To this circumstance is due the astonishing power of advertisements. When we have read a hundred, a thousand, times that X's chocolate is the best, we imagine we have heard it said in many quarters, and we end by acquiring the certitude that such is the fact. When we have read a thousand times that Y's flour has cured the most illustrious persons of the most obstinate maladies, we are tempted at last to try it when suffering from an illness of a similar kind. If we always read in the same papers that A is an arrant scamp and B a most honest man we finish by being convinced that this is the truth, unless, indeed, we are given to reading another paper of the contrary opinion, in which the two qualifications are reversed. Affirmation and repetition are alone powerful enough to combat each other.
When an affirmation has been sufficiently repeated and there is unanimity in this repetition--as has occurred in the case of certain famous financial undertakings rich enough to purchase every assistance-- what is called a current of opinion is formed and the powerful mechanism of contagion intervenes. Ideas, sentiments, emotions, and beliefs possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes. This phenomenon is very natural, since it is observed even in animals when they are together in number. Should a horse in a stable take to biting his manger the other horses in the stable will imitate him. A panic that has seized on a few sheep will soon extend to the whole flock. In the case of men collected in a crowd all emotions are very rapidly contagious, which explains the suddenness of panics."



Think of those world famous chocolates that everyone knows are the best the next time the President moves his lips and repeats his boosterism for big business, his glorification of the false measurement we call “worker productivity,” and the rest of his economic folly.

And a happy Labor Day. ¶ 3:24 PM

  The Neo-Cashervatives

Those are the politicians that call themselves conservatives while they take cash to strip citizens and small investors to their shorts…all to fatten their coffers and make the fat cats fatter. They feed at the troughs…and are the lackeys…of the new robber barons.

Now they’re laughing at those fruits and nuts out in California! They’ve got no sense of the value of a dollar, they say. Just look at how they trashed their once-mighty economy. All those social programs. Like the giant chunk of the state budget devoted to building prisons because they’re all jammed due to mandatory sentencing and the “three-strikes” rule. But is that what crashed the California economy?

Simply put, no. Actually the economy is fine. Because the labor force finds a benefit to be there. The schools, the health care. The public education (half the budget). The worker protection. The low property taxes. In fact, things were going pretty well, and still are, according to a recent story in the Christian Science Monitor.

Reality check. The debt overhang from Enron and “cashervatives” in the pocket of big oil and big energy trashed the Californian economy.

That is documents long ago proved that Enron forced up California energy prices, according the New York Times. Sure it took advantage of bad deregulation mishandled by politicians. But so what? They were getting campaign contributions from big energy to deregulate in ways that made it easy to rig the market

Are you then surprised that big energy and “cashervatives” have trashed the federal economy? It’s hard to believe that the biggest surplus in history has turned into the biggest deficit in history, probably over half a trillion bucks.

And there hasn’t been a peep out of such stalwart “cashervatives” as Tom DeLay. Wait, he called it spending driven…an actual lie.

But the former exterminator’s bald-faced ploy actually it makes perfect sense. Who is going to bother actually looking at the Federal spending patterns to figure out if he’s just rewriting history or not?

DeLay learned how to rip off government coffers with the bait and switch market-manipulating energy game in California.

Now the Republicans are taking the DeLay approach to ripping off the Federal government by shifting the blame from the deregulation robber-baron cronies to “solving” the deregulation problem by unleashing a new round of government largesse…this time federal.

“The reason FirstEnergy may be getting a free pass is because the company enjoys a close relationship with President Bush,” reports Tyson Slocum on CorpWatch. “On June 30, FirstEnergy CEO and Chairman of the Board H. Peter Burg hosted a fundraiser with Vice President Dick Cheney near the company's headquarters that raised $600,000 for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. Held at the Hilton in Akron's upscale Fairlawn neighborhood, attendees ponied up $1,000 to eat shrimp and hear Cheney speak. For an additional $1,000, they could get their picture taken with the vice president.”

And FirstEnergy is another one of those smoking guns of funny money and Republican “cashervative” politicians. ”The company is very much a product of the deregulation of the utility market over the past several years” according to the World Socialist Web Site. “In 1999, Ohio passed legislation forcing FirstEnergy and other Ohio utilities to open their transmission networks to independent power producers.”

So castigating nutty Californians for their budgetary irresponsibility starts to look pretty shortsighted…at least in the dark streets of the deregulated Northeast media corridor. And while the media continues to be a step behind the cashervative guardians of fiscal responsibility, we can only wait and wonder what grid boondoggles will suddenly appear in the congressional energy bill to suck yet more money from taxpayers and consumers into the pockets of big energy. ¶ 4:56 PM

  Don’t Cry For Me, Art Cooper (Truth in Media)

The new GQ is hardly recognizable, according to Chicago Sun-Times’ Lewis Lazare. Too bad. Had to give way to market forces.

GQ for grownups getting punk'd, however, is beside the point. It did good journalism, but is only a tangential symptom of the decay into chaos that traditional media is now sliding heels-in-the-air into.

As I told “Lewie” just today via email in response to his missing the point and praising the newly redone teen-guy slick (into a category he dubbed “irreverent”): “That's ‘irrelevant, testosterone-charged laddie mags such as Stuff and Maxim,’ actually.

“As for these women’s-mags-for-guys masquerading as real magazines rather than cheesy shopper’s guides. No one gets news, or even gets informed about life, from Stuff or Maxim. Not their mission. Their mission is to come up with clever fart jokes to separate the ads.

“And I would suggest that your point about GQ being ‘livelier’ or deader for that matter, is also besides the point. There’s a new journalism goal in town: Let's not make advertisers...or readers...nervous. Let's give them what they want: Distraction from reality. A guide to striving. Manufactured desire.

“In fact, this distraction is the point and direction of all media these days, including your paper. Holdouts exist, but the news hole shrinks and objectivity...or just basic reporting...gives way to manufactured photo-ops, well-spun (from all directions) stories and the practical inability for a straight journalist to get a real story without getting fired, or severely punished, for the effort. You're there. Unless you're suffering from the Stockholm syndrome, you surely can come up with examples of the truth of what I say.

“This harmless lifestyle coverage encroaches and the business of journalism becomes business. Corporate monopolies own your place of business and instead of discussing that you discuss GQ and they tell you what a sharp column you wrote today. It's not your fault; everyone needs to make a living.”

Regarding whether new GQ child-editor Jimmy Nelson actually succeeds in being hip, consider his cover story: Johnny Knoxville of "Jackass" Fame. This show, which launched in 2000 already, has been a cult fave for some, a moronic must-skip for others. (It’s kinda one-note for my taste). And to cinch the ASME 2003 Cliché Award Nelson sent the writer and star by bus to Atlantic City. Lewie thinks that’s an original idea. I can only wonder what background, besides knowing nothing about magazine tropes, earned him the media beat.

I eagerly await Lewie’s reply. Should it ever come, I’ll append it here.

On a related media note, is the self-serving, ignorantly unreported Los Angeles Times piece by David Shaw. His lede? “Kevin Roderick is not your typical blogger. He is neither an ideologue nor an egomaniac. He's not noticeably partisan or terribly passionate. He doesn't have an agenda on his mind or a chip on his shoulder.”

This is particularly funny because, of course, Shaw is all of those things…except the passionate part. At least his writing lacks all life and passion.

Turns out this is a puff piece for a friend. It thus upholds the finest journalistic traditions of the L.A. Times, which has a long tradition of flaking for industry, oil, movie companies and the like.

Roderick has created a blog, L.A. Observed, to which Shaw decided to give lengthy props. What a shock! Roderick is an ex-LATimer who slaved at the Los Angeles paper of retail for 25 years. So payback is due.

The research done to back up the assertion that all bloggers are as described above appears to not include actually visiting anything resembling a range of these web sites. In fact, there appear to have been no visits, no statistics, and no research of any kind. Shaw doesn’t even mention someone in his own beat, whom Shaw doubtless relies on to crib from, Jim Romenesko. Romenesko, as we all know, is the media’s premier media commentator (and on whose blog Shaw’s story was duly noted). He was also one of the earliest adopters of the Web Log (blog) format.

In fact, Shaw’s attitude reveals the underlying, false assumption of the dead-tree press. Namely, that you have to have ads from grocery stores and get paid slave wages by giant corporate overlords to be a fair and objective journalist. To be paid to write, to have ads, to be dependent on some big company, in other words, is what makes you a real journalist. Guess Shaw would have thought of I.F. Stone as a newsletter amateur. And Tom Paine? A mere pamphleteer.

Shaw’s well known for taking too many words to say nothing at all. He wrote shorter this time…and said far less. ¶ 10:28 AM